by
Les May
I HAVE heard
the same story twice in the last two days, once repeated to me by a
friend and the other today
on
the US
Washington Journal
programme on C-SPAN.
Essentially
the complaint is that the dangers of the Covid19
pandemic is being exaggerated because the number of deaths so far in
the UK
and the US
is no more than would be expected from the effects of seasonal flu.
But
the people who make this argument betray a fundamental ignorance
about what is important here. It’s not the actual number of
infections
which is
important,
it’s the RATE
at which those numbers CHANGE.
If
this is known it is possible to approximately
predict
how many infections there will be at any time in the future unless
measures are taken to prevent this happening.
One
way of thinking about the rate of change is to find out how many days
it takes for the number of recorded
infections
to double. In
the UK this is estimated to be between 2 and 4 days. If we take a
mid-value of three days and assume we start when the number of
infections is 1000 then we can predict the number of infections in a
month’s time.
Day 3: 2000, Day 6: 4000, Day
9: 8000, Day 12: 16000, Day 15: 32000,
Day 18: 64000, Day 21: 128000,
Day 24: 256000, Day 24: 256000,
Day 27: 512000, Day 30:
1024000.
If
the time taken for the number of infections to double is 2 days it
would take three weeks for a million people to be infected; it the
time to double is
4 days it would take 6 weeks to reach a million recorded infections.
The
data from China suggest that the mortality rate for recorded
infections is about 4%. This translates into about 40,000
deaths
if we allow the number of recorded infections to reach 1
million.
Note that by recorded infections I mean medically diagnosed cases
and this
does not include the
unrecorded infections which result in self diagnosis.
Although
the government have been slow to implement the measures which could
help to prevent very large numbers of people being infected, they
have finally done so. We have a choice; we can either accept the
restrictions on how we conduct our lives for
the next few months or we can ignore
the advice we are given, adopt
a laissez-faire
attitude
and suffer the consequences.
I
have little doubt that if people continue to ignore the advice we
have been given the government will impose more stringent measures
which will be more intrusive and more restrictive than what
we are being asked to do at present.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?470430-2/washington-journal-news-headlines-viewer-calls
(at
22m
41s
on video)
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