Here’s why corona virus is different, and it’s exponential growth. After 19 days:
At this point, Ebola was worse. But notice that uptick in the light blue coronavirus. Here’s what happened after 42 days:
This was when there were just under 1000 deaths. Now it’s over 3000. Exponentially more than Ebola, SARS, and MERS combined.
Here’s a look at just the infection rate, not the fatalities, compared to SARS.
Notice how the SARS curve (in blue) levels off logistically, while coronavirus continues its upward spread exponentially.
If you doubled $1 every day for a month, you’d have over $1,000,000,000.00 after 30 days. Nothing grows exponentially forever. Eventually, limiting resources, vaccines, preventive measures kick in and the curve starts to turn right to level off instead of continuing upward forever. So the flu, car accidents, heart disease, etc. may be killing more people at the moment, but they’ve leveled off logistically so we accept the 1000s of deaths because they remain in the thousands. It doesn’t grow.
But right now, the coronavirus spread isn’t showing signs of leveling off. While its fatality rate may be 2-3%, keep in mind that 2% of a billion is still 20 million people, similar to Spanish influenza in 1918. Also 20 thousand more times the deaths of the flu. Who knows where we’ll be a month from now? That’s why WHO and CDC are saying what they’re saying. They’ve seen no evidence of coronavirus leveling off. And they don’t have accurate evidence due to the shoddy public policies implemented by the various countries we’ve talked about. So that’s why there wasn’t a similar panic with SARS, MERS, swine flu, ebola, measles and anti-vaxxers, etc. and why people are flooding Costco to buy toilet paper and water. Wuhan in China already has a 24 hour curfew for at least two weeks.
Last Friday there were no U.S. casualties. Four days later there are 9. We just don’t know who has it, in part due to lack of test kits, but also due to lack of public education and awareness. In the U.S. there are 40,000 deaths each year by automobile, or over 100 per day. But that’s just it. Tomorrow there will be a 100, and next Tuesday 100. But it doesn’t double each day–100, 200, 400, 800–and so on. So we accept the 40 thousand deaths per year. But if that doubled every week? It’d wipe out the U.S. population in less than five months, and the world population a month later. However, that doesn’t happen because there aren’t that many cars and, eventually, drivers. But a virus knows no such limitations. We are at its mercy instead of it being at ours. Until some way to stop it is developed, e.g. a vaccine which is probably at least a year away, it will continue its exponential growth rate. Until that time, we can only wash our hands, avoid contact, and wait it out.
Back on topic, I bought my NTTD tickets yesterday for both the marathon and two other showings the next day, but that’s a month from now. 9 fatalities in the U.S. could well be 300,000 in a month. I’m wishfully thinking it won’t get that bad, but a case just popped up ten miles from where I live. Highly fatal diseases don’t spread this fast because patients die before spreading the disease, but less fatal diseases infect more people, and even at 2-3% lethality rate will be more deadly than ebola, SARS, and MERS combined. So that’s the difference,and hence, the panic.
I was getting very worried that this might happen.