A COVID Math Moment
This is a truly cataclysmic curve. This is worse than any of us ever imagined. The rolling 14 day average has never looked like this (screenshot is from The New York Times). The next catastrophe will be full hospital beds. The problem with exponential growth is it clobbers you before you even know you are in trouble.
The area I practice rural EM now has fully saturated the regional CoVid ICU and isolation floor bed capability, while the requirements for each skyrocket. It is going to get really ugly very soon!
Sorry to hear it. More evidence that everything should have been opened up in the hot months to diffuse this.
At my facility we are doing Covid testing for employers. We are seeing numerous people with very mild symptoms that start out as a cold symptom and a few days later develop loss of taste and smell. At that point they realize they probably have Covid and THEN start to quarantine. By then they have probably infected several family members or friends. No wonder the rates of infection are increasing.
Yep, the masking and the lockdowns did the trick, eh? Hey, let’s do it again!
So I guess all the mask mandates and destructive lockdowns didn’t work after all. But thank goodness we did … something.
Had we opened up everything in May and not dragged this out, we wouldn’t have spikes just as flu season is starting.
The problem with masks and lockdowns (the US has not yet instituted a lockdown), and social distancing and handwashing, etc is that people DON’T do it. At least not consistently.
First-order kinetics means that we’ve lost control of something. (The national debt follows first order kinetics, BTW). One can test for first-order kinetics simply by noting if the percentage increase of something remains fairly constant over time. I’m not sure from memory, but it’s not a bad idea to keep tabs on, for instance, percentage change per week, and if it remains constant, the infection is first-order and not controlled.
When people played around with the exponent of transmissibility, and saying it was 1.09 etc., that is simply another way of talking about first-order kinetics and whether something dwindles or expands. All things that are uncontrolled stop suddenly, to paraphrase Laurance J. Peter, he of the Peter Principle. Nuclear explosions stop suddenly when they run out of fuel, in nanoseconds. Just before that, they grow at first-order kinetics.
Intuitively, things that grow at 74% over 14 days are very nearly doubling every 14 days, or quadrupling every month. We’re at 163,000 active cases now. By the middle of December, that’s around 64,000 cases. About half of those, 44% need hospital beds; and about 2% of those die, presumably in the hospital. When we run out of hospital ICU beds, then floor beds, then nursing homes, we will treat COVID at home, hopefully retaining a concentrated oxygen supply for the hypoxic but conscious.
There’s some of the challenges. Two vaccines look promising; but they will produce cells that either die from making the new parasitic stalk antigen, will be destroyed eventually by the immune system; or like RNA viruses like HCV, (“a small, enveloped, single-stranded, positive-sense RNA virus” ) will slowly spatter out stalk antigens constantly until destroyed by chemotherapy. That’s what happens if everything works out WELL.
Otherwise, that 64,000 cases double and double until they reach 331 million, when either everyone left has mounted an immunity, or died. Then COVID-19 will stop very quickly.
Cheers and happy holidays.
I wonder if this could have been prevented? What if we could have the Covid deniers and antivaxers just get together and secede from the union and deal with the harsh truth of herd immunity?
Scott Atlas is appointed chief medical officer and they can put up first aid stations or field hospitals wherever they want. Let them find their own medical staff!
Not aware of any covid-deniers, Gary. Just Covid remedy skeptics. Me included. Hey, in Ohio, effective midnight tonight, we are on a curfew, 10PM-5 daily. WHAT??!!! WHAT THE F**K??? Because the politicians/medical bureaucrats had to do SOMETHING.
Exactly right. “We have no evidence that this will work, but we’re gonna do it.” Doctors giving politicians cover for these abuses have already harmed our society for more than this damn virus ever could. That’s not COVID denial, that’s just pointing out that there are even worse outcomes.