I do not celebrate this, but if people will learn from this not to turn scientific issues into political footballs, the whole world will be better off.
I would bet large amounts that it was here well before then. The big panic in China was when? December? Betting it started there in Oct/Nov... no way it stayed there that long.
Update from New Orleans: They are converting the convention center into a hospital to house the non-coronavirus cases to leave more room in hospitals for Coronavirus cases. This despite the fact that we have 6 major hospitals (2 academic ones) within 5 miles of my house.
Sorry but when this is all said and done the death toll is going to be way closer to Fever's numbers than the Imperial College Doomsday scenario.
if it had truly been here for months we would have had a NY or Italy style outbreak somewhere. Not to say there couldn’t have been a stray case or two that didn’t propagate, but given the infection rate and what happens when it really takes hold somewhere, I doubt the official version is too far from true. I think the virus was pretty accurately tracked.
It's not.... he adjusted his model after numerous other virologists pointed out the errors of his methods. UK has been on a Pseudo lock down for 2 days and that cuts the death toll by 90%.... Come on.
When we realize that most people don't get very sick it will become apparent that it was here before Jan 14....
First Trump says vents are not needed, now tweeting out the he is enacting the DPA to get more vents..... He is in a tweet storm right now. He must be watching CNBC. They are doing a report and then posting his tweet responses to the report.
Of course it is, the doomsday scenario is we didn't do anything to stop it, and we have taken steps to stop it. We aren't going to be anywhere near that 2.2 million Americans dead doomsday scenario.
The R0 is too high to really suggest that in any kind of scale. Sure, most people don't get that sick, but I tend to not buy the argument that tens of millions or hundreds of millions have already had this, which would be the case if it just spread completely unchecked for more than 2 months.
I agree that there are non-symptomatic people, maybe even in large numbers, but not really my point - the virus has a high transmission rate, and when it hits somewhere significantly it is noticeable. It has been that way everywhere it’s gone. So for it to have been here in any significant number we would have seen increased hospitalizations and at least some stress on the system, which we didn’t see until the reported cases turned up in Washington and death rates went up.
Classic self full-filling prophecy..... It's the end of the world if we don't shut it all down.... It turns out not NEARLY as bad as the WORST CASE scenario...… That must be because we shut some stuff down. It can't be because the Imperial MODEL was wrong!
Just catching up today....But how do we know that was false? We have relaxed the 4 paragraph rule for very specific Covid related posts.
The lower numbers were in the original model. See the sections under mitigation and suppression. imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf
I mentioned this before, but if people are looking for 'I told you so' afterwards, no one's going to have a case. If the illnesses and deaths don't get any worse, one side can say "See I told you it wouldn't be so bad." While the other can say "That's probably because we had so many precautions and lock down orders." And if the results are catastrophic, one side can says "See, I told you it was going to be bad." while the other can say "In other words, all those shut downs did no good. I told you!" And nobody will know for sure who was right. They'll just be convinced that they themselves were.
I think we can all agree, that will be the dilemma. It will take a long time to figure out what ended up being the reason the number stayed lower than expected. My assumption is it is a bit of both. Edit: @rivergator literally beat me by a minute. Well said.