Coronavirus math - we're days away from disaster
SMART PEOPLE, I NEED YOU TO ANALYZE MY MATH AND LOGIC, AND I PAID FOR THIS POST SO YOU WOULD.
I'm giving smart people a little time to tell me where I'm wrong, and then I'm making an effort to Share this as far as we can to get a voluntary national shutdown.
Look at this graph. The "R0" for this disease is 3, meaning the average person passes it to 3 others. Those 3 pass it to 9. This appears to happen every 4 days.
We didn't have testing, so we don't know where we are.
My view:
- Day 1 doesn't mean what you think. It isn't necessarily the first day we knew about the virus, because some of those people may have been contained
- Day 1 is where 1 person with the disease didn't practice "social distancing", and gave it to another. We have no idea when Day 1 was
- Massachusetts has 197 cases, and it's MUCH more , because they're only counting tested, proven people
- if you just look at Massachusetts, and apply this graph just to Massachusetts, we'd be at Day 19 or so. Note that any state could have its own Day 1 and numbers
- the number is much bigger, because that 197 is only tested, confirmed people.
- It's 25-50 times that value according to Dr. Marty Makary from Johns Hopkins University, putting us at Day 32-35
- the # of available beds, 4400, only applies only to Boston (35% avail capacity of 13,000 beds), but WBUR says the whole state only has 4000 avail hospital beds. Doesn't matter. We'd be off by a day or two.
- Day 37, we can handle everybody, if everything were perfect, and we had respirators, which is probably the limiting factor
- let's say people only need the bed for 4 days, and those 4400 beds open up
- Day 41, we have 11,810 needing hospitalization, 4400 get the available beds, and 7,400 people will be waiting outside hospitals
- Day 45, we have 31,029 waiting outside. You fill in the rest.
- FOUR DAYS makes a huge difference. ONE DAY makes a huge difference.
- Social distancing may save us a couple of days, but we started much too late
- Last Friday was 4 days ago, before St Patrick's Saturday, and the R0 multiplier went WAY up that day
Smart people, analyze this and comment.