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Comment by dtech | Hacker News Reader

When x trends to infinity, which is irrelevant in this case since you're limited by population numbers.

Feel free to plug in population numbers into an exponential growth function and watch the medical system get overwhelmed. This isn't about it collapsing - once a few thousand people have died preventable deaths and a bunch of medical staff quits because of PTSD, we'll stabilize. But at least in the ethical framework dominant in my cultural sphere, that's not really an acceptable path.

Remember that it's not an exponential.

The total number of cases is very similar to a logistic curve that initially can be approximated by an exponential, but later it stabilizes and it looks like a step.

The number of active cases / hospitalizations is similar to the derivative of the logistic curve that initially can be approximated by an exponential, after some time goes to zero. It looks like a bump.

A smaller hospitalization rate means that hopefully the bump is low enough to not saturate the hospitals.

More about some simple models: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidem...

The R value model is a doomsday sayers dream, because any increase automatically means exponential growth. Any growth, no matter how tiny, translates to scary graphs.

Of course exponential growth goes quickly. OPs argument was that the constant factor of hospitalization doesn't matter at all, which is ridiculous in the real world.

If you take an exponential growth of 1.5, quite a quickly spreading infection. And a hospitilization factor of 5% vs 0.05%:

day 20: 3.3k cases, 165 vs 1 hospitilization

day 25: 25k. 1.2k vs 13

day 30: 191k 9.5k vs 95

day 35: 1.5m 73k vs 728

day 40: 11m 550k vs 5528

So a 10M people country with ~5k. beds wouldn't have healthcare capacity due to the constant factor, while without they would be overwhelmed within a month.

What is your point? That any growth, no matter how tiny, translates to scary graphs?

Not just that, but after 2 years of pandemic you start having very few new people to infect effectively.

Having been infected with one strain of SARS-CoV-2 doesn't protect you from all other variants. It's not even clear that it protects you from reinfection with the same variant indefinitely.

I was infected with Delta 9 months after one of the initial strains. I was more or less as sick as I was the first time for a full two weeks.

That said, when I looked up studies on that the chances were about 1% for that to happen to me (at that time).

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