This thread was created on 3/8/2020, or approximately one million years ago in virus time. It’s getting pretty bloated now, and a lot of things that were high value at the time have been eclipsed by events, making karma not a very useful sorting tool. So I’m declaring this thread finished, and asking everyone to move over to the April Coronavirus Open Thread.
Interested in what happened in this thread? Here’s the timeless or not-yet-eclipsed highlights:
Scott Alexander comes up with Hammer and Dance 6 days before Tomas Pueyo
Spiracular on why SARS-Cov-2 is unlikely to be lab-created.
Twodocuments collating estimates of basic epidemiological parameters, in response to this thread
Discussion on whether the tuberculosis vaccine provides protection against COVID-19.
This ^...Another way to spot check the "100000 cases" estimate without knowing the Wuhan numbers is to consider that that would imply roughly 1e5 / (2^4) = 6250 cases 3 weeks ago (the typical delay between infection and death; assuming 6 day doubling time), which corresponds to 31-125 deaths by today for a case fatality rate in the interval of [0.005, 0.02]. That would be for Ohio alone. As of March 13, the US CDC is only reporting 36 deaths for the country as a whole (source; though reported as 47 deaths here) and Ohio is currently reporting 0 deaths (source). Not to say that this is a definitive argument against there being 100000 cases in Ohio, but it does suggest that this estimate wasn't based on current understanding of the virus and its spread.
This thread was created on 3/8/2020, or approximately one million years ago in virus time. It’s getting pretty bloated now, and a lot of things that were high value at the time have been eclipsed by events, making karma not a very useful sorting tool. So I’m declaring this thread finished, and asking everyone to move over to the April Coronavirus Open Thread.
Interested in what happened in this thread? Here’s the timeless or not-yet-eclipsed highlights: