Somebody Spilled Pasta Fagioli on the Data

Bad news for my coronavirus prediction equation: today, a whole bunch of new data flopped into the system all at once, and it really screws things up.

This morning, I looked at the infection total. Italy was up around 27,000 cases. I believe the total worldwide was around 276,000. This afternoon, two or three hours later, I looked again, and I saw about 54,000 in Italy and 300,000 for the world total. The death total in Italy doesn’t seem to have changed, however.

Don’t get the idea that 27,000 more Italians got sick over a couple of hours. Obviously, the data from Italy was screwed up, and someone changed it.

This has a big effect on the equation. In the near-term, it’s not all that bad. I see 396,365 cases as of the morning of March 22, and as of April 4, I see 1,208,499. The problem comes later. For about May 20, I have 79 million.

This is not all that far from the flu’s total for the year, which is around 650,000,000. Assuming a high death rate for coronavirus, it gives us a coronavirus death toll rivaling the flu’s. That’s worse than I previously thought, but not a plague, unless the yearly flu is a plague.

I can’t repeat this often enough: if the flu isn’t a catastrophe, neither is coronavirus. I don’t think many people are listening, however.

There is a figure people should be looking at. I found it on the web a few minutes ago: 78.5. This is the AVERAGE age of Italians killed by coronavirus. AVERAGE. We no longer have to ask why Italy has a high death rate. We have to ask, instead, why they are letting so many old people get exposed. It’s not that hard to make special precautions for a relatively small and easily identified group of people.

It seems fair to say that if people the world over focused on isolating the old, the fat, and the sick from the virus, the death rate would plummet. Young people are still far less likely to die.

One nice thing about the Italian revelation is that it cuts their death rate in half, on top of confirming that young people are much safer.

The question I have to ask myself is whether there is any point at all in trying to create an equation when the official figures are so unreliable. Maybe it’s better to just rely on common sense and continue comparing coronavirus to the flu. We may not have figures good enough to create equations, but they are probably good enough to tell an intelligent person that this is not a catastrophe.

Here’s an important thing to consider if you’re reading this. My equation goes infinite over time. There are no terms in it that predict how the disease will plateau and go away, as it definitely will. I’m just trying to predict how it will go while it’s spreading fast.

The most likely thing is that the infection rate will plateau in a short time, and then the number of total infections will go to nearly zero, as it does for the flu. So when the equation says 79 million people will have been infected by late May, it may be wildly pessimistic. We may start to plateau very soon. Maybe we’ll never break 5 million.

China continues to report virtually no new cases. I think this is solid information. The rest of the world is all over China for giving us this disease in the first place. If they hadn’t lied over and over, the epidemic would have been much more limited. I am reasonably sure they’re telling us what they know. I don’t think they could keep a lid on it after everything that has happened. I may be wrong, though.

Their initial efforts to contain the news only worked temporarily, so if they’re doing the same thing now, they shouldn’t expect better success. China isn’t bottled up like North Korea. Chinese people can call people around the world, and there are Youtubers who vlog from China.

I’ve been watching a vlogger calling himself Serpentza for a long time. He lived in China until recently, and he has many contacts there. Back when China was hiding the truth, he told the world coronavirus was a major epidemic. His last video is about the epidemic, and it appears to back up the notion that it is drying up in China.

If China’s news is true or anything close to true, we should see things get better around the world pretty quickly.

Here’s something I haven’t been considering: what if this becomes a disease that never goes away? Some illnesses are always with us, even though they’re not always common. They say people don’t develop lasting immunity to this bug, so you can have it more than once. To me, that’s scarier than the initial epidemic. If the disease kills a million people this year and then goes away, that’s bad, but it’s a minor thing in a world of nearly 8 billion people. If it comes back and kills hundreds of thousands every year from now on, it will be a big problem. Even though it would never be catastrophic, it would be a major continuing health issue, like, well, the flu.

It may help to remember that even the plague came and went. I doubt we’re looking at a future in which 5% of the population always has this disease.

I’m interested in seeing what happen with regard to T.B. Joshua’s prophecy. He says the epidemic will be gone by March 27. If we have 10 million cases a week from now, we will know to be careful about listening to him. If he’s right, people will have to ask themselves serious questions about the reality of God.

My best guess is that it will not be possible for me to come up with a really good prediction based on math, even if I use the right equation, because the data is just too flawed. Nonetheless, things still look very good when you look at the overall picture. Even if we don’t have really good figures, it seems fair to conclude that this epidemic is extremely unlikely to hit flu numbers.