Stinkypete, what’s your number on probability of millions dead?

I’m not sure what else to say about the conservative death rate estimates if you think 2% is the lower estimate.

Jjshabado you seem more interested in making nonsensical debates for the purpose of being right than fostering actual discussion. What the **** point are you trying to make? Just give your broad estimate on what you thinks gonna happen and then agree to disagree, holy **** lol

We get it, you think nothing bad can ever happen

Your arguments are basically predicated on the current death/infections ratio overestimating the true death rate, and the reported confirmed number of infections being an accurate estimate of the total infections. At least one of these things has to be false by a large margin. It's likely both are.

Over 2% are *currently* dead. It takes around 2 weeks to die after diagnosis. The current death count is roughly 100% of the confirmed infected count from just two weeks ago. If you take your naive approach to the math, it simply doesn't add up.

Projecting that the actual death rate in China will be around 0.2% implies that infections two weeks ago were underreported by a factor of roughly 50. Maybe that's the case, I don't know, seems unlikely. But if it is, this thing isn't stopping at 100M infected.

I made my point earlier. The arguments in this thread generally overestimate the severity for various reasons.

Stinkypete seemed to take great offence to that. I figured instead of getting ‘near lock’ or ‘very likely’ or whatever other vague statements I could get a number to at least compare that to TS. But cool, I’ll let it drop and let everyone get back to the doomsday circle jerk.

Oh, and of course there’s still tons of strawmannirg that I think this is just the flu (which by the way would still be extremely bad) or that I think nothing bad can happen here. Even though it’s completely clear that that’s not what I think.

Your argument is basically that everyone is underestimating the probability that this is a nothingburger by a huge factor. You're making strong statements about people being "overconfident" despite them not making specific claims, and use an insanely overly optimistic, naive view to justify that.

You can't claim superiority just because your estimates are so drastically underconfident that you can't even see that this is the deadliest epidemic China has seen since communism and that it's a strong favorite to turn into a pandemic on all continents.

Since we're nitpicking and pulling out the strawmen, I'll point out again that it would conservatively take 100 million in China to get to 2 million dead. In other words, a conservative estimate of 2% for the death rate in China. I also concede that it could be lower *if* cases are underdiagnosed/reported by some insane factor.

Later when I'm talking about the probability of reaching 100M infections being likely, that's worldwide. I don't think 2% is a lower bound on worldwide death rate at this point, though it's probably in the right ballpark for the average.

I appreciate your analysis jjshabado, people seem to be getting ahead of themselves and promoting this for their own interests and/or entertainment. Thank you for being levelheaded and not trying to stoke unreasoned fear in the minds of others

I'm curious what you guys who see this thing stopping at less than a few million infections see as the path to that? How do we stop/slow it down?

So far the only answer is mass quarantines for months on end that may or may not work, and from a trading perspective, that means best case, supply chains massively disrupted for an entire quarter.

Just for the record, on rereading this, it comes off much worse than I meant. I obviously don’t think anyone is enjoying what’s happening to people or wants the bad outcomes to happen. I just meant it more of a group of people reinforcing their shared opinion.

Scenes like this don't instill a lot of confidence in me that they really know how to stop this thing.

You'll enjoy this one then

https://twitter.com/Frolencewalters/...36454839320576

I don't mean to stick up for jj, who himself has acted like a douche in this thread, but pete, he asked you point blank for your probability on millions dead, and you just keep equivocating. Why are you so afraid to put a number on it? And Tooth does the same cowardly ****. He'll say something like, "there's a high probability the death rate is greater than 1%." So, does that "high probability" mean like .3 or like .9? You guys all just sound like a bunch of blowhards. Also, I have to laugh every time Tooth trots out the "Crematoriums are running 24/7" line. Hubei has 60 million people. That implies a death rate of like 900 a day. Coronavirus death have been around 70 a day for the past week. Imagine having to do like 8% more work each day—it's out of control!

I think the chance of a million dead globally before the end of 2020 is 1%. This outbreak has been going on for several weeks, and when you look at the number of deaths, it's barely more than linear over the past week. And infections have reached an inflection point and it's now less than linear. Weather is going to get warmer, which will likely slow infection rates.

I don’t know much about this stuff, but what the heck is the point of spraying the road??? I get like subway station railings, but how many people catch viruses off pavement?

Would love to see whatever information makes you so certain about that number.

Those are the official death toll numbers coming out of China and what the WHO is reporting. Are you like Tooth and believe you know more than the WHO, or that there's a conspiracy to report lower-than-true death totals? Feel free to give a sort of hand-wavy response where you don't actually make an identifiable take or give any specific numbers.

Are you sure about that?

Total Deaths
Jan 23: 25 (+16)
Jan 24: 41 (+15)
Jan 25: 56 (+24)
Jan 26: 80 (+26)
Jan 27: 106 (+27)
Jan 28: 133 (+37)
Jan 29: 170 (+43)
Jan 30: 213 (+46)
Jan 31: 259 (+45)
Feb 1: 304 (+58)
Feb 2: 362 (+64)
Feb 3: 426 (+66)
Feb 4: 492 (+73)
Feb 5: 565 (+78)
Feb 6: 638 (+73)
Feb 7: 724 (+86)
Feb 8: 813 (+89)

It would not take a conspiracy. Lack of diagnostic tools and medical facilities could cause this to happen too. I have spoken directly with a surgeon in Wuhan, and an epidemiologist, both said this is likely. Secondary sources support this. I do not know what it translates to in numbers.

Yes

I said the deaths from the past week were around seventy per day and a little higher than linear. The data you posted was the exact same data I was looking at, except you've added today's total which just came out: 89. The difference between 86 and 89 is exactly as I described: a little higher than linear. If it were 86 and 86, it would be linear. You're acting like your post refutes what I said when it's patently exactly what I described. The death rate is increasing, but barely. And if it follows the trend of the new cases, it will start decreasing and be sublinear.

It's very clear there's a testing bottleneck. We don't know how many people want to get tested and can't, or who won't leave their homes to get tested because if they just have a regular cold they don't want to catch something much worse. Reports also indicate that the test has a high false negative rate. They're clearly not reporting deaths for non-confirmed cases, and given how overburdened hospitals are, it's anyone's guess how many cases are officially diagnosed.

If China were being transparent they could report suspected coronavirus deaths, "viral pneumonia" deaths, etc. They could also provide full demographic data on both positive and negative tests, associated symptoms, etc.

Whether it's intentional underreporting or willful ignorance it doesn't matter. It's overwhelmingly likely the true numbers are significantly higher. If you want to be a conspiracy theorist you can throw in the possibility that they're overreporting deaths by a factor of 10 for funsies.

Sure, average around 70, but 86 is not around 70, and the data was out when you posted. Since we are accusing others of being hand wavy.

This is painfully obvious. I doubt anyone here disputes this. But it does not preclude other scenarios.

You are talking about an inflection point as if it is a foregone conclusion that the rate change will continue. Obv there are a range of scenarios. I have attempted to model 5 cases but I am not confident in my conclusions.

I would be interested to hear your thought process and working out, more so than a confident prediction of the probability of x or y.

I also asked a different surgeon (not in China) if he thinks the official numbers of infections are accurate. He said no. I said what is your upper bound? He said 5-10x the number of confirmed cases. Not endorsing this number nor implying that I am smarter than the WHO - but I do think it is not at all unreasonable to question the official stats.

Also official stats do not yet reflect the rate of spread in other countries due to the lag. We just had an English guy visit Singapore, contract the virus, then go to France and transmit to 5 others. Is it a freak outlier case? Or is this happening everywhere? We have no idea yet. Both situations would still look similar, so to your point about stating a specific probability, this seems fraught with error.

If you have done the math / analysis elsewhere to justify such a confident conclusion, please share it in this thread. So far nothing you have posted here justifies your stated level of confidence.

Testing is absolutely a bottleneck.

On 5 Feb it was reported they had a capacity of 4000 tests per day. Yesterday during a press announcement the Chinese CDC, or some other official health agency, announced they were up to 6000 tests per day. Either in Wuhan or maybe all of Hubei.

The WHO and Chinese numbers are undoubtedly under reported. Even if we assume they would be truthful, they simply don't have the capacity to know the real numbers.

We should have a much better idea of how this whole thing will play out in 7 - 10 days when we can start seeing how the disease spreads in western nations.

Did not know this, thank you. That takes a lot of the guessing out of it.