I take issue with the use of the word “well” in relation to the debacle in New York, past or current.
Taiwan; 0.3 deaths per million total, 1 death / 24 million in the last month
Australia 4 deaths per million total. 7 deaths / 25 million in the last month.
New York State: 1,550 deaths / million total. 5,000 deaths per 9 million in the last month. To compare to Taiwan or Australia it would be 12,000⁄25 million in the last month. Let the scale of that failure sink in.
New York’s current *daily* death rate (10/million) exceeds Australia’s total across the whole pandemic.
I see no evidence of herd immunity being a significant factor yet. I see no indication that things are under control.
Impact of the demonstrations.
I don’t know the numbers of people in the demonstrations, let’s say 100,000. Let’s say 3% get infected as a result. That would be 3,000, significantly more than the reported daily new cases of ca 1,000. However given a ratio of 10% for deaths to reported cases, it is evident that reported cases are massively understated, perhaps 10 fold. Even so 3,000/(10*1,000)= 30% is a significant increment on the daily case load. And the people infected in the demonstrations may be people who might not have been infected in more normal circumstances.
Mod note: I decided to move the second half of this comment to the Open Thread, because Zvi explicitly requested that comments should stay on-topic. Here is a link to the new comment.
Unfortunately, protests seem in many ways ideal for spreading the disease. They involve a large number of people in a relatively small area for an extended period of time. Even protests which were advertised as being socially distanced often do not end up that way. While many people wear masks, photos of protests make clear that many do not, and those that are are often using cloth masks that are significantly less effective than surgical or n95s in the face of repeated exposure. Additionally, protests often involve people shouting or chanting, which cause infectious droplets to be released from people’s mouths. Exposure to tear gas can apparently also increase susceptibility, as well as cramped indoor conditions for those arrested.
It’s hard to estimate how many new cases will be caused by the protests, because there doesn’t seem to be good statistics on the number of people at protests, so we can’t model the physical dynamics easily. A simple method would be to assume we have lost the benefits of the ban on large gatherings over the last week or so. On the one hand, this may be an over-estimate, because fortunately most people continue to socially distance, and protests take place mainly outside. On the other hand, protesters are actively seeking out (encouraging others to seek out) boisterous large gatherings in a way they were not pre-March, which could make things even worse. On net I suspect it may under-estimate the incremental spread, but given the paucity of other statistics we will use it as our central scenario.
If the r0 was around 0.9 before, this suggests the protests might have temporarily increased it to around 1.25, and hopefully it will quickly return to 0.9 after the protests end. Even if we assume no chain infections during the protest - so no-one who has been infected at a protest goes on to infect another protester—this means the next step in disease prevalence would be a 25% increase instead of a 10% decrease. Unfortunately the exponential nature of infection means this will have a large impact. If you assume around 1% of the US was infected previously, had we stayed on the previous r0=0.9 we would end up with around 9% more of the population infected from here on before the disease was fully suppressed. In contrast, with this one-time step-up in r0, we will see around 12.5% of the population infected from here—an additional 3.5% of the population.
Assuming an IFR of around 0.66%, that’s a change from around 190,000 deaths to more like 265,000. Protesters skew younger than average, suggesting that this IFR may be an over-estimate, but on the other hand, they are also disproportionately African American, who seem to be more susceptible to the disease, and the people they go on to infect will include older people.
I take issue with the use of the word “well” in relation to the debacle in New York, past or current.
Taiwan; 0.3 deaths per million total, 1 death / 24 million in the last month
Australia 4 deaths per million total. 7 deaths / 25 million in the last month.
New York State: 1,550 deaths / million total. 5,000 deaths per 9 million in the last month. To compare to Taiwan or Australia it would be 12,000⁄25 million in the last month. Let the scale of that failure sink in.
New York’s current *daily* death rate (10/million) exceeds Australia’s total across the whole pandemic.
I see no evidence of herd immunity being a significant factor yet. I see no indication that things are under control.
Impact of the demonstrations.
I don’t know the numbers of people in the demonstrations, let’s say 100,000. Let’s say 3% get infected as a result. That would be 3,000, significantly more than the reported daily new cases of ca 1,000. However given a ratio of 10% for deaths to reported cases, it is evident that reported cases are massively understated, perhaps 10 fold. Even so 3,000/(10*1,000)= 30% is a significant increment on the daily case load. And the people infected in the demonstrations may be people who might not have been infected in more normal circumstances.
[Rest of the comment moved to Open Thread]
Mod note: I decided to move the second half of this comment to the Open Thread, because Zvi explicitly requested that comments should stay on-topic. Here is a link to the new comment.
I attempted to produce a rough estimate of this here (excerpted below):