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Good Data on the Coronavirus

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As things have escalated quickly, I’ve found several resources that provide extremely valuable data and perspectives.

The first is this article on Medium by Tomas Pueyo. Everyone should read this, and he’s helpfully had it translated into 26 languages. It’s the single best synthesis I’ve seen of everything going on.

He starts with this summary:

When you’re done reading the article, this is what you’ll take away:
The coronavirus is coming to you.
It’s coming at an exponential speed: gradually, and then suddenly.
It’s a matter of days. Maybe a week or two.
When it does, your healthcare system will be overwhelmed.
Your fellow citizens will be treated in the hallways.
Exhausted healthcare workers will break down. Some will die.
They will have to decide which patient gets the oxygen and which one dies.
The only way to prevent this is social distancing today. Not tomorrow. Today.
That means keeping as many people home as possible, starting now.

The most eye opening chart is his timeline of events in Hubei:

Due to the lag between when people are infected, and when they are diagnosed, it’s very likely that the true number of cases in many parts of the US is as much as 10X what’s been reported:

The grey bars show the true daily coronavirus cases. The Chinese CDC found these by asking patients during the diagnostic when their symptoms started.

Crucially, these true cases weren’t known at the time. We can only figure them out looking backwards: The authorities don’t know that somebody just started having symptoms. They know when somebody goes to the doctor and gets diagnosed.

What this means is that the orange bars show you what authorities knew, and the grey ones what was really happening.

On January 21st, the number of new diagnosed cases (orange) is exploding: there are around 100 new cases. In reality, there were 1,500 new cases that day, growing exponentially. But the authorities didn’t know that. What they knew was that suddenly there were 100 new cases of this new illness.

Two days later, authorities shut down Wuhan. At that point, the number of diagnosed daily new cases was ~400. Note that number: they made a decision to close the city with just 400 new cases in a day. In reality, there were 2,500 new cases that day, but they didn’t know that.

Later he makes some comparisons:

Washington State is the US’s Wuhan.The number of cases there is growing exponentially. It’s currently at 140.

But something interesting happened early on. The death rate was through the roof. At some point, the state had 3 cases and one death.

We know from other places that the death rate of the coronavirus is anything between 0.5% and 5% (more on that later). How could the death rate be 33%?

It turned out that the virus had been spreading undetected for weeks. It’s not like there were only 3 cases. It’s that authorities only knew about 3, and one of them was dead because the more serious the condition, the more likely somebody is to be tested.

This is a bit like the orange and grey bars in China: Here they only knew about the orange bars (official cases) and they looked good: just 3. But in reality, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of true cases.

He then goes on to talk about how to contain it, and what will happen if we don’t. Read it.

“Social Distancing” has become the core containment strategy. Last week very few people had heard this phrase, now it’s everywhere. And the Washington Post has a simple and outstanding simulation illustrating how this works: Why outbreaks like coronavirus spread exponentially and show to “flatten the curve”.

It’s short, and uses several simplified hypothetical simulations to demonstrate how effective social distancing can be. Here’s an example:

Anyone who watches these simulations will likely understand why social distancing is so critical right now.

In terms of data, I’ve found the Johns Hopkins dashboard is the best source to track what’s going on in any area. They aggregate data from all over the world, updated hourly. I find it frustrating to read news articles to get the facts about what’s happening in MA, as they always have an angle, and are inevitably outdated soon after they are published. This dashboard is a simple way to check on an area.

Here’s what’s going on in MA as of right now:

Using some back of the envelope math, if the true infected count could be 10X what we know today (i.e., 1,380), and the death rate stays at 1-3%, we should expect 14-42 deaths in MA over the next few weeks, assuming containment starts now, and much worse if it doesn’t. I hope I’m wrong about that, but that’s what I take from what I’ve read.


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