"Annelies Wilder-Smith, a professor of emerging infectious diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, thinks that the unwarranted comparisons with flu may have prevented many western governments from taking the rigorous action that is needed to contain Covid-19 now, while it’s still possible. “The short-term costs of containment look high,” she says, “But they’re much lower than the long-term costs of non-containment.”
This may be the most damning summary of the global and, espicially, USAian, response to this beast. We have grown so accustomed to taking short term views of pretty much everything that when lives require a longer horizon, it just cannot seem to break through.
In exponential growth curves, the inflection is where the curve changes from (roughly) horizontal-ish to (almost) vertical. That’s where we sit right now.
No, smulder is right. An inflection point is where the slope of the slope changes. Exponential growth curves don’t actually have one. The thing you’re describing depends on how you plot your axes.
Probably what they like about doctors is the (assumption) that they all have very big paychecks. That’s how we decide on human value now, how well compensated one is for their labor. It’s one of the reasons we have the president we have…
Absolutely not a mathematician here, to be clear. When I look at the growth curve on this thing, there is an area of the curve that pretty clearly transitions (over a certain range, so not a point, as such) from a more-or-less horizontal aspect to a close-to-vertical aspect. Is this an artifact of the graphing? Not being an ass, learning things is kinda my thing and if I am using a term improperly I want to get it right.
Perhaps “horrified” isn’t the right word, but I am quite dismayed to learn that there isn’t already daily testing of all Oval Office staff during a pandemic. The sort of thing I had just presumed the Secret Service would insist on as part of their basic mission. Like, how was that not part of their protocol decades ago?
And WHO has just (finally) declared this to be a global pandemic. And the administration has opted to classify the findings of the coronavirus commission. Sigh.
No, fair. I feel bad for being pedantic here, but if it’s useful I’d like to try explaining. So here are two graphs of the numbers I plotted, one showing all of them and one showing only the first 20 points with the axis scaled accordingly. You can see it looks like the exact same kind of bend, but it’s in a different place.
In other words, what the bend really shows is when you’ve started hitting a substantial portion of the amount you decided to plot. Does that help anything?
OK, understood. So not a real thing then? That is really interesting. I have heard that term used in relation to this graph often enough to have internalized it. I shall try to do better henceforth!
I think the question that matters is: How many people’s lives are saved by putting them on 100% oxygen? There’s two regimes: One where the number of cases of Coronavirus is low, and anyone who needs oxygen can get it. The other is where there’s far more people who need oxygen than there are medical beds and flowing nasal cannulas. I think the death rate will increase once we run out of capacity to put people on oxygen, but I’m not an expert.
So the number of confirmed cases in the U.S. saw a ten-fold increase between March 2 and March 10. Should we expect that trend to continue for the next few weeks? And, if so, doesn’t that mean we’re fucked?
Yes, when (if) we get to where the medical resources are tapped out the mortality rate goes up significantly. This will probably be regional (as in Lombardi in Italy, or Wuhan in China) rather than nation-wide, but with statistics suggesting that 15-20% of cases require some level of hospitalization, and 5-10 (roughly 1/2 of hospitalized patients) needing ICU level care, if that is not available the mortality rate will absolutely increase.
That is mostly an artifact of increasing testing. Truly, here, we don’t have a realistic idea of what the number is. Estimates run anywhere from 8-20 “actual” cases for every confirmed positive. The real number will be known much further down the road when serological testing can be done.
