Tuesday, March 10, 2020

WHAT YOU AREN’T BEING TOLD


When IS the right time to panic?

I was going to wait to publish this information yet, but my concern has outpaced my caution. As many of my followers already know, I am a numbers guy. I am a Six Sigma Master Black Belt which means, for those of you who have never heard of Six Sigma, I live and breathe statistics (usually for production and quality improvement in industry.) I’ve done the stats on COVID-19, the coronavirus. It isn’t just ugly, it’s scary.

The data is for the United States of America and is there for anyone that has the patience to search for it. There are some basics that you will need to understand before I give you the numbers. This is the first thing you need to know is the attack rate or how rapidly the disease spreads. This is the article I found on that:

The attack rate or transmissibility (how rapidly the disease spreads) of a virus is indicated by its reproductive number (Ro, pronounced R-nought or r-zero), which represents the average number of people to which a single infected person will transmit the virus.
WHO's estimated (on Jan. 23) Ro to be between 1.4 and 2.5.
Other studies have estimated a Ro between 3.6 and 4.0, and between 2.24 to 3.58.
Preliminary studies had estimated Ro to be between 1.5 and 3.5.
An outbreak with a reproductive number of below 1 will gradually disappear.
For comparison, the Ro for the common flu is 1.3 and for SARS it was 2.0.

What I glean from this is the Ro is about 3.0. That is, on average, one person infects three others. My original calculations show if we reach a threshold between 5,000 and 6,000 infections, the virus will explode across the country at an almost unbelievable rate. The table below is a simple growth trend based on the cases tracked since the end of January. Between the 5k and 6k point we jump from hundreds of infections a day to thousands. If nothing is done very quickly, by this time next month we could be looking at almost a million people infected.

 DATE    INFECTED
3/8/20
538
3/9/20
696
3/10/20
900
3/11/20
1164
3/12/20
1505
3/13/20
1946
3/14/20
2517
3/15/20
3255
3/16/20
4210
3/17/20
5445
3/18/20
7042
3/19/20
9107
3/20/20
11777
3/21/20
15231
3/22/20
19698
3/23/20
25475
3/24/20
32946
3/25/20
42608
3/26/20
55104
3/27/20
71264
3/28/20
92164
3/29/20
119193
3/30/20
154148
3/31/20
199355
4/1/20
257820
4/2/20
333431
4/3/20
431216
4/4/20
557678
4/5/20
721228
4/6/20
932742

*For those who are wondering, these numbers do not include the people being offloaded from the latest cruise ship fiasco.

WHO estimates that approximately 3.5% of those infected are dying from COVID-19. That would be about 35,000 bodies if the number hits a million.

Okay, so that’s the good news.

I said before that the Ro is 3.0 but the table above is a simple growth chart that isn’t based on this transmission rate. The reason I used the growth rate is, if you use a straight geometric progression, the entire country shows to be infected within the next 15 days. I don’t believe that is realistic.

I stopped at one month because one million infected individuals will totally crash our healthcare system. There are just over one million hospital beds in the country at this time.
Self-quarantine is, frankly, not going to work unless there are repercussions for failure to comply. We have already seen people who were KNOWN to be exposed and self-quarantined go out into crowds (just read the news.) Even New York’s New Rochelle, where the National Guard has been called out to help enforce a quarantine, has said that they are NOT going to stop people from leaving. Here is where the real problem comes in and, yes, I am going to rant a little.

Our politicians are useless when it comes to this virus. The President’s ‘don’t worry, be happy’ attitude is nonsense. The Democrats have announced they have their own plan for dealing with the virus (instead of trying to work together, which borders on insanity.) Bernie wants any vaccine to be free for everyone (of course, that’s still at least A YEAR AWAY!) And Biden isn’t even talking about it.

What do we need to do? Immediate and mandatory quarantine for anyone that has had a known exposure with legal penalties for failure to or breaking said quarantine (how about, a minimum $75,000 fine in cash, payable to each person they expose?) Immediately shut down any and all gatherings. It isn’t going to matter if it’s ten people or a thousand people, exposure is exposure. Any business that can, must do work from home. Others need to somehow isolate their workers and constantly check for symptoms. I honestly don’t know the right threshold number of infected people to trigger it, but we need to start thinking about quarantining entire cities.

Let me tell you what I know is going to happen, “I need to go check on my boyfriend/girlfriend.” And the entire household is exposed. “I can’t sit at home, there’s too much important work I need to do.” And an entire office is exposed. “This test could make or break my getting into college.” And an entire school is exposed. “We’re out of bread, milk, tofu, etc.” And an entire store is exposed.

Human coughs and sneezes expel droplets that can travel as far as eight feet. Worse, they don’t simply travel in a stream, they spread out as they travel so it’s more like a cloud of microscopic droplets. We STILL don’t know exactly how long the coronavirus can live on a surface outside the body. That’s ridiculous since it’s a simple science experiment to find out. Some say nine days, others say more or less. What are we being told? Wash your hands with soap and water. Don’t touch your face (this is impossible, by-the-way.) Avoid shaking hands, kissing, physical contact, etc., etc., etc.

Let’s remember something, this virus is at least TWICE as contagious as the flu and a third more contagious than SARS. While it isn’t going to be practical in the long-term, isolation is the key.

You have no idea how much I pray that my numbers are completely wrong. Seriously, I pray that the growth rate is nothing like what I show. Still, unless something drastic is done, on or about the eighteenth of the month we will hit a critical threshold number of infections. If the percentages hold, more than two-thousand Americans will be dead and we will be looking at one of the most critical situations this country has faced since 1918.

KM

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