Math v. Hysteria

In case anyone is interested, I constructed a differential equation to see if I could predict the spread of coronavirus over the next couple of months.

Is the equation right? Search me. If testing keeps improving, we will pick up a lot more cases mild and asymptomatic cases, and that will throw everything off. Also, I may not know what I’m doing.

I’m using a differential equation that predicts two things: the growth of bacteria in a culture, and the half-life of a radioactive substance. I’m assuming the human race will work like bacteria, and the world will be our Petri dish. I can’t even guess what kind of sophisticated equations epidemiologists use, and I’m not going to look it up. This is mostly for entertainment, although the message that the epidemic is overhyped is correct.

I hope I did this right. I’ve forgotten a huge percentage of what I used to know.

Anyway, here are some figures for the global totals. Two are rounded off. Sorry I can’t make it display as a nice table.

March 5: 90,000
March 14: 150,000
March 17: 177,845
March 21: 223,173
March 28: 332,040
30 days from 3/5: 494,013
60 days from 3/5: 2,711,653
90 days from 3/5: 14,884,355

I may be wrong about April 4. I didn’t do the math for the date. It’s whatever day is 3 weeks after March 14.

They’re talking about a possible death rate of 1% now, so 90 days out, I predict 148,884 or fewer deaths. Call it 150,000.

As detection gets better, the death rate (ratio) should plummet, as should the severity of the symptoms of average infections. It won’t mean fewer people will be dying. It will just mean they’re more exceptional than we thought.

The 90,000 and 150,000 figures from this month are known, and they are approximate.

I would expect this amateur equation to work reasonably well while the disease is still spreading rapidly. During that time, the transmission function should be pretty uniform. As we approach saturation, the curve will start to drop, and it will eventually go to zero. Far as I know, the only thing that can really throw the projection off is bad initial data.

I don’t know how long it will take for infection rates to drop. Maybe there is a big population of low-hanging fruit out there, and they will pump up the numbers very badly at first. Maybe dirty people will get hit very fast, and the rest of us will frustrate the disease by not living like monkeys. If this is how it works, maybe the transmission rate will drop off in a month or two. It seems to work that way with the flu. The infection rate shoots up fast, and then it drops fast.

If I had death figures from a couple of weeks ago, I could do much better, because death figures are reliable. We know when people die. It’s usually obvious without a test. A death equation would be more useful, because death is what worries people. We’re not that concerned about getting the sniffles.

In any case, I would expect to see about 600,000,000 global flu cases by the end of this season, and given a 0.01% death rate, that means 600,000 deaths.

I am too lazy to check the actual number of global flu deaths per year, but it should be somewhere close to 600,000, so probably somewhere between 400,000 and 800,000. In any case, a lot, compared to coronavirus.

Guess what? I decided to check after all. The correct figure is 650,000, so maybe I’m not so stupid.

Tobacco kills 8,000,000 people per year, according to WHO.

No one should be happy about 150,000 coronavirus deaths, but it’s important to know the difference between an epidemic and a plague. We don’t have a plague. It’s also important to realize that the death rate for healthy young people is miniscule. Kids are nearly immune.

Africa is a problem for anyone trying to predict what will happen. Health care there is abominable, as is hygiene, so maybe coronavirus will go nuts there and blow up the curve, just as AIDS did.

I can’t tell you my prediction is right, but I can tell you that coronavirus won’t even begin to rival the flu in number of infections, and it is extremely unlikely to kill as many people.

I wonder if anti-vaxxers are flipping out. That would be hypocritical, wouldn’t it? If you willingly expose your family to a known deadly disease every year, you shouldn’t be too concerned about a rarer and much less deadly disease.

What’s going to happen to the companies that make toilet paper when this is over? No one except me will buy it for at least a year. I guess I’ll get some bargains. I wish someone would tell me why people are buying toilet paper. I don’t get it at all. What is the connection between a respiratory infection and using 20 times as much toilet paper as usual?

It will be interesting to see how close my predictions are to the truth. They may be wrong by a wide margin, but the flu, which is something we can count on, will still beat coronavirus. That, you can bank on.

Before I quit, a question: why isn’t anyone talking about the flat transmission rate in China? Coronavirus is now at a near-standstill there, so why shouldn’t the same thing happen everywhere else?