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Comment by s9w | Hacker News Reader

Somethng else I wonder about all this: Let's look at Germany and say we have about 10000 new cases per day with the current measures, including unknown infections and some handwaving. That's a lot of days until you reach a significant portion of the polulation (~80 million).

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The calculation for Germany is as follows (from [1]):

- There are about 28k ICU beds in German

- Usual occupancy is 80%, expectation is that 50% can be reserved for Covid-19 patients by delaying elective medical actions

- This gives us 14k ICU beds to treat Covid-19 patients

- Estimate is that about 5% of all infected will require about 7 days of ICU treatment

- This tells us, we can at most have 2k new patients requiring ICU treatment per day

- Knowing that the 2k are only 5% of total cases, the number of infected the health care system can take care of is 40k/day.

Obviously this calculation will change with more precise information about the estimated numbers.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fx11Y4xjDwA (sorry, German only)

Well we would need 2000 days of those 2k days to even reach 50% infection of the total population. That is simply not possible to sustain with these extreme measures.

That’s exactly right. On the other side of the shutdown, you need to do proactive screening and quarantining people who came in contact with sick people to create the conditions where you can safely ease the shutdown.

Absent that, there’s not much point of the shutdown. I guess it buys time for medical professionals to retrain and gather supplies, which is crucial.

Everybody and their brother is working on finding treatments. You're right, but the quarantines are stalling for time, in the hope that we can knock something off that 5%/7 days hospitalization figure.

Currently, each infected person seems to infect 1.3 others. Italy has it down to 1.15 now.

So for Germany it's 10000 today, but 13000 tomorrow and so on. That's what exponential means.

Let's hope it slows down now with the social distancing measures.

you're right if one assumes a linear growth, but the reality is that it has an exponential growth. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kas0tIxDvrg for a short intro.

It only looks exponential at the beginning: https://voxeu.org/article/it-s-not-exponential-economist-s-v...

It certainly looks exponential until mitigation/suppression measures are put in place or you reach herd immunity. Guess which of the two will result in more deaths?

the problem with that approach is that treats everyone as equally susceptible

most likely those more susceptible get it first

it is not clear what percentage of the population would either not get it or if they do get not get noticeably affected

Virtually everyone is susceptible. This is a novel virus, spreading in a human population with virtually 0% immunity.

With an R_0 of 2.4, approximately 60% of the population can be expected to contract the virus within a few months, unless mitigation measures are taken.

I think Diamond Princess is a pretty good petri dish scenario for testing that hypothesis. In fact, although there are still some ongoing cases so the data is not finalized, you can normalize by passenger/crew age and reach a final infection fatality rate estimate for the whole population.

Here's a tip: it still comes out to be 5-10x higher than the seasonal flu.

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