/biz/ - Business & Finance

You of you fags are underestimating the impact of COVID-19.The biggest fallacy you fall into is not understanding the time latencies involved.

1. Exceptionally long incubation period 2-14 days, median ~4-7 days.
2. Many "asymptomatic" will eventually develop symptoms and part of the currently "mild cases" will develop into severe cases with a latency of one week on average.
4. The disease can progress without "apparent" symptoms such as cough. Seemingly healthy "asymptomatic" people have been shown to have lung damage because of COVID is new to the immune system and the response is slow. Damage can occur before symptoms kick in.
5. After detection, healing time 2 weeks in mild cases, severe/critical cases take 3 - 6 weeks. Time from first symptoms to death ranges from 2 to 8 weeks

Optimistic assumption:
>USA has been most of the severe cases during the past weeks and the number of cases back then represents the number of meaningful (severe) infections accurately and this pool represents the cases that eventually lead to death. The undetected cases that were mild or asymptomatic before were eventually detected if they developed severe symptoms. Aka currently there are no bunch of undetected corona deaths. And the number of deaths at time t is proportional to the cases in the history with a latency of x: Deaths(t) ~ cases(t-x). The proportion of asymptomatic or mild cases is irrelevant.

SUPER optimistic scenario:
>Avg time from symptoms to death 2 weeks. Confirmed cases in the US 2 weeks ago: 3k rounded up.
This means: current USA ~500 daily deaths are a representation of the infections from ~2 weeks ago. With same proportions, currently detected 120k infections will progress into 20k deaths in two weeks. Even if full lockdown is implemented tomorrow because this model is independent of the future case progression.

So, with all the optimistic assumptions, how does this simple model reflect to reality? See the image with Linear log-scale fit.