Coronavirus Math Looking Better than Yesterday

I really have to apologize. I made a little booboo while updating my coronavirus forecast yesterday. I came up with future figures which were somewhat disturbing, but today I corrected myself, and the estimate for late May was reduced by over 60%.

I’m still not saying you can rely on the equation, but at least it looks better.

Yesterday, the Italians dumped 27,000 unrecorded cases on us, all at once. I looked at their total in the morning. It was about 27,000. Three hours later, it was about 54,000. Obviously, the difference was due to error. It’s not like 27,000 people got sick instantly.

I put the new figures into my equation, but I also made the mistake of bumping the baseline date up. I figured the more recent the starting date was, the better the data would be.

This was wrong. The total on the recent starting date was artificially low because of the Italian fumble. A low starting figure gives you an equation the blows up faster.

I went back and did the math again using my original starting date, which is March 5. The farther back you go, the less impact Italy has on the figures. If they were artificially low all along, the error would be smaller farther back in the past, when Italy’s total numbers, though wrong, were too small to screw things up as much.

New figures:

3/22: 323,000 (actual figure this morning: ~311,000)
3/23: 348,723
3/24: 375,977
3/31: 636,679
4/4: 860,281
3/22 + 60: 29,552,653

No one wants to see 30 million people get this disease, but yesterday the number was about 80 million. And again, this is global, and the flu total this year was around 650,000,000, over a much shorter time. The flu did that in spite of our usual preparations and precautions. We didn’t see coronavirus coming, thanks to the Chinese. The flu had to overcome a big vaccination program which worked, and it still nailed 650,000,000 people and killed 80,000 Americans. No one has been vaccinated against coronavirus.

More news: they’re saying the death rate for healthy people is probably about 0.3%.

What about Italy’s crazy death rate? On Friday, the average age of an Italian killed by coronavirus was 78.5. AVERAGE.

A reader pointed me to a story which may also shed light. People are saying the Italians blew it by hospitalizing people instead of treating them at home. They did the opposite of social distancing. They put sick people in buildings full of other sick people. If this is the case, no wonder so many Italians died.

China is still flat, and people are going back to work.

If relatively tiny Italy is rivaling China in total infections, Italy is doing something very, very wrong. They don’t have a stronger strain of the virus. If they did, young people would be dying, and they aren’t. The weak link in the chain has to be human.

What about the Fusco family in New Jersey? They had a get-together, 7 got sick, and two died. Proof that we’re all going to die? No. The Fuscos are old and obese. Go look them up. There is a group photo of them. Some are very obese, and the thinnest one is merely somewhat obese. They look very bad, even in their pre-coronavirus photo. The youngest one is middle-aged. The two that died had “underlying health problems.” These are exactly the type of people you would expect to have wildly disproportionate bad fortune.

The data still stinks, probably, but look out your window. Do you see bodies lying in the yard? Is the real estate market glutted with the homes of victims? Is the government sending out makeshift morgues to refrigerate millions of corpses? Nope. That’s not happening even in Italy. Even if there is never a good prediction equation, there is still common sense, and we can see that coronavirus is not an extinction-level event.

Scientists are now talking about 0.3% as a reliable death rate, and they are still expecting people under 60 and healthy people to do much, much better.

I hope this makes people feel better.