Covid-19 becomes a seasonal virus and kills olds and the morbidly obese pretty much indiscriminately.

Seems like most countries will follow the logistic "S"-shaped curve.



Begins with exponential increase, transitions to linear, ending with exponential decrease. From early data, it appears that each stage lasts 2-3 weeks. Italy might just be entering the final exponential decrease as it had 525 deaths yesterday, their lowest in over 2 weeks, meaning they could get below 100 per day in about 2 weeks if it conforms to the curve. They are at 16k deaths and hopefully might be able to keep it under 25k.

The US is about 2-3 weeks behind italy and still in the exponential growth stage. Overall, the US seems to be doing well outside of NYC metro area. The exponential growth for non-NYC seems to be lower than Western Europe. One reason for this is that the US is far less dense with cities built substantially different. Take Texas for instance - Houston, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio are essentially giant neighborhoods compared to NYC or most European cities. Everyone has a car, few take public transportation, and the only time you cross path with people is within a store.

NY has a current death rate (per million) of 40x that of Texas. This gap will close, but it's indicative of how different the two places are. NYC is super connected to the world and much denser.

All that said, I think under 40k deaths in the US is a strong possibility for all of 2020 and would be shocked to see numbers above 100k.

This discussion of west coast splitting off reminds me.

When I was a kid in N WI, there was talk of the "State of Superior". The idea (as I understood it) was that N MN, N WI, and the UP were being treated unfairly by those in the "big cities", and they were going to split off to form a new state. I don't know if it ever got any real traction, or was just nut jobs making bumper stickers.

there will be a vaccine and people will happily go back to everything as normal. Hopefully it puts an end to all the anti vax nonsense, but probably not, people think the earth is flat and wifi causes harm, so will probably actually jsut intensify it

Lots of restaurants don't reopen, and then eventually a bunch of new ones pop up to fill the void.

Tons more people work from home as people realize that there is no good reason for them not to be so demand it, and companies probably save money and are more efficient by allowing it. Which leads to much lighter rush hour traffic and as a result people are generally happier and less violent. However with fewer road rage incidents, someone who would have been killed isnt, and they give birth to a child that ends up ascending to power and is responsible for more deaths than any dictator for the last 200 years. The world is plunged into a bloody world war that eventually results in a nuclear battle and sends us back to the stone age. It takes centuries before we recover and the resulting mutations means humans have orange eyes and a small hand that grows out of the middle of their back.

You always said you wanted an extra hand around the house, and now it sounds as if you're complaining about it.

That was a cool story right up until the back hand.

It could end up being penis fingers instead, hard to tell with these things

corona viruses are what give us all flus and colds, right? we've never been able to have effective vaccines against colds or flus, so it's gonna be hard to have one against covid19, no?

It's pretty easy to make a vaccine against a specific strain of the flu. The problem is that there are a ton of them and they mutate a lot. Thus the need to get a flu shot every year for that year's predominant strain(s).

Colds are even worse.

COVID-19, well we're not sure yet, but it *seems* to be pretty stable. Once they get a good vaccine for it, it doesn't seem likely that we'll be playing whackamole with it. But it's early days yet.

There's a few problems here beside the fact that some people can't understand the concept that Covid-19 aka SARS-CoV-2 is not the flu. Since this is a prediction thread I'll predict that some people will never get that coronavirus is not the flu. Percentage of populating never understanding between 25-30 percent.


I'll also predict that if will take at least 3 years to come of with a vaccine that can be widely distributed. Trust I wish this could happen in a few weeks but science takes time.

At no time did I say that COVID-19 is the flu. I was responding to the question above about the theory of not being able to have effective vaccines against cold and flu.

I didn't respond to the "cornaviruses are what give us flus and colds" part, but for the record, flu is caused by influenza viruses, of which there are many, and colds are caused by various viruses, some of which are coronaviruses. (source, cdc.gov)

I apologize for misunderstanding. What's your prediction?

You haven't heard of the so-called epi curve?

I would say that the absence of data showing that it mutates (frequently enough to make vaccines a problem) doesn't mean much. Most Corona viruses do mutate enough, so it most likely does as well.

We might get lucky though.

There are some efforts to develop a universal vaccine for the disease-that-shall-not-be-mentioned that look promising in swine.* If those techniques work for humans, it seems reasonably likely that they would work for other diseases.

*source - some story I listened to on npr last weekend

I am not a microbiologist, but my sister is. What I gather from articles I've read and discussing them with her is that the particular coronavirus that causes COVID-19 *seems* to be pretty stable, not only not mutating much "in the wild," but also not showing the usual signs in the lab that highly mutable viruses show. As I said above, though, it is very early days yet, so I wouldn't count on that assessment.

Similarly, the virus *seems* to have a good "attachment point" for protected immune systems to "get at it," which is usually a good sign that a vaccine will be effective. Both of these are preliminary results, but they're positive signs.

I don't have a prediction, as the data just aren't there, so even the experts are doing little more than guessing at this point. When fivethirtyeight refuses to model something, you know that it isn't predictable. My gut feeling though, is that fatality rates will go down as the medical establishment stabilizes, shares best practices, and develops treatments for the symptoms.

My sister estimates about a year for a vaccine and thinks that there will be several tested all at once (instead of drug companies' usual practice of focusing on one approach and not even getting involved in a particular line if it looks like someone is going to beat them to market). She figures they'll rush to get them ready for human testing, but there's no real way to hurry that part. Then several vaccines will go through testing in parallel. It is likely that multiple vaccines will be approved, though if one outperforms the others maybe only one will be distributed.

Thanks for sharing Garick. I enjoyed reading your post.

I've seen media reports for at least three vaccines already entering the first human trial stage. Two in the US and one in China.

https://nextstrain.org/ncov

+1

Trump just did a 'The flu is nothing to....sneeze at' csi yeahhhh omfg what a madman.

They are still working on a vaccine for SARS which is a corona virus as well.

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I can't believe how dumb everyone is now. This won't follow the trajectory of Grimstarr's poker graph.

wonder if thats bags....altho the person writing it wasnt obviously drunk and there was no homophobia, so probably not.

(for those not aware, there is some conspiracy tard creating accounts to warn us about what is really going on)

It wasn't Sammy. Sammy did eat a fried rat in Vietnam once though.