Explain to me how this comparison makes sense.
In 3 weeks time, those probabilities might have changed.
My behaviour today should reflect probabilities today, and my behaviour in 3 weeks should reflect probabilities then.
My behaviour today has negligible impact on my chances in 3 weeks too.
Collective behaviour might effect collective probabilities in 3 weeks, but even that is relatively minimal considering the nature of exponentials.
In any case, Elon Musk doesn't speak for individual behavior, he controls a company of thousands of employees. That's already collective behavior.
That’s the thing that makes this analysis nonsensical. You are looking at the first 2 months of an exponential and treating it like a fixed rate. You should treat it as an exponential and extrapolate another 10 months with number of cases doubling every 4-6 days and then use that number as the deaths per year.
I’m honestly blown away that Musk is saying this.
- on 8 Apr US will be just under 1000 deaths. Scary, but that’s almost a month away - on 2 May, deaths will be ~15,000 - on 20 May, deaths will be ~125,000 - on 7 June, deaths will be ~1,000,000 - on 1 July, deaths will be ~16,000,000 - on 19 July, deaths will be ~128,000,000 - by end of 2020, deaths would be over 17,000 trillion if the US population was infinite and mitigating factors such as herd immunity didn’t kick in, but you get the general idea
This is all presuming the existing political/societal response and herd immunity not kicking in (which it won’t in the US until around the 200MM mark). Social distancing will lessen this massively, which is why it’s so important.