Covid19 Speculation

I am not an authority.  Anyone who does speak with authority on this subject is lying. It is too new. The federal government just released a projection of 200,000 deaths. This is close to my own calculation. Given the federal governments history of guidance and information, perhaps I’m wrong. I’m getting the same order of magnitude without an engineering degree. The federal government did not show its work.

Presumptuous to call this a model, start with a 330,000,000 population in the United States. How many people will be exposed?  I am impressed with social distancing. Even if only half the states are sheltering in place, those states seem sincere. In Illinois, Pritzker has been good. It is difficult to make decisions with insufficient information. I doubt I would have his courage. Let’s say half the population becomes exposed.  This gives 165 million.

Of those exposed how many become infected?

 I’m hesitant to discuss the virus structure. My impression is that immune response is against the spike rather than the package within the cell. Once the package enters your cell, that cell is a goner. Neither your immune response nor the spike signature is consistent. I have little hope for vaccine, particularly now that Ebola research funding has been cancelled. Ebola vaccine took two decades to accomplish. The most promising research has been suppressed and the plug and chuggers don’t seem to understand the difficulty.

We know that severity and frequency of infection overwhelms immunity. This suggests a dialogue between your immune response and the spike signature. There is variation in immune response across generations, gender and locale. This variation would be determined by your immune history. If you have recovered with immunity, you should still use protective equipment when you reenter the fray. Conversely it is unlikely that a whiff will get you.

A simple estimate of infection is to take the number of tests against the reported sick. This has tremendous variance. Today I got near 20%. Whenever you need a WAG, 20% is as good as any. An engineer named Thomas Puyeo published Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now on medium.com. He argues based on illness duration that he can determine the true sick number from deaths. He gives a rule of thumb of 800 times deaths gives the true sick rate. Working backwards maybe you can get 16% for infected to those exposed.

Take 20% of 165 million and you get 33 million sick. 16% gives 26,400,000.

Take 1% of either number to get the dead.  I hope the federal government’s difference has more than a quibble of 16 to 20%. In either case you now have a sense of the order of magnitude and the underlying logic.

The 1% is a ratio of sick to dead. This has become the measure of health care effectiveness. It means we are doing enough testing and keeping enough people on ventilators to hover around 1%. Currently we are doing 2% so double the previous death estimates.

Take my bare bones, optimistic, easy to do calculation against world population of 7.8 billion gives 78 million dead.

Worst case estimate for the US, take 80% exposed, 20% infected and 5% dead gives 2,640,000 dead. That really owns the libs.

The even worst case is the virus mutating, nextstrain.org is sampling the variety. If the virus twitches more fatal it will burn out quickly, less fatal is less fatal. The fear is different population segments. We need testing outside the impact group and mapping of those strains. The Kansas 1918 virus had a W distribution. It was going down, then hit a different population segment and shot up, declined and shot up again. Expect nature to seek opportunity. Multiply worst case by three.

8 million dead raises the issue of social disruption. I don’t foresee extreme piercing, grunge and battle wagons. We may have dynasty failure, increased social mobility and innovation. Human population increases when stressed. The Thanos snap fails. Prosperity constrains human population. We will see population break the 10 billion mark, which was the hoped for limit.

More likely that distancing works. It is amazing how well people respond once they have information.  Testing gives people better information to base their behavior on. Paid days off gives them greater ability to act on that information.  Testing, paid days off and distancing is the only way to deal with the virus. Everything else is noise. It may have benefits but it doesn’t stop the virus. Distancing is the difference between thousands and millions.

There are no treatments. If they are doing a trial it is not an obvious treatment. Until they can empty a ward they don’t have a treatment. It is insulting to the doctors and nurses to imply that they enjoy their aching feet and are denying you a treatment. There is a 95% to 99% remission rate. This means that there will be all sorts of treatment success stories. You tried something and got better. China’s belief system is based on trying all sorts of treatments. They are total cowboys on this and they are not terrified of legal liability. If there was such a thing, they would have found it.

When I was a kid, mom broke the fever with whiskey. I knew someone who got drunk and walked in the cold, it worked for him. Mustard plaster, vapor rub, you can see why doctors hate patients. If you must try things, at least do something different. I haven’t seen any mention of HGH or gamma globulin.  Just because you got better, doesn’t mean it worked.

Anecdotally, flu therapies may aggravate Covid19. More doctors get sick. I thought this was because of greater exposure. Doctors are notorious for self-medicating.

Interest rates, Federal Reserve shenanigans, subsidies, none of these things have anything to do with the virus. I would starve rather than give Boeing money.

Some people are behaving foolishly. It occurs to me that this may be an effect of the virus. Toxoplasmosis and rabies influence behavior. Perhaps Covid19 encourages foolhardy antics and speech. Do these behaviors correlate with infection? It will be difficult to prove after the fact.

The grocery store demonstrates how dependent we were on restaurants. I guess everyone was dropping it at work or at the bar. It’s sad we only know how to cook pasta. It is becoming obvious that work is just an excuse to get away from the family.

There is a good paper on the origin of Covid19 The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2 in Nature.com.  You can tell they know what they are talking about because they call it SARS-COV-2. They tell us that this one isn’t something they would have whomped up, which sounds true. There isn’t enough work done to conclusively rule out someone’s idiot child but their take is that it gestated in people. This is in line with patient zero catching it in a toilet.  There is criticism of China’s slow initial response. Everyone but Merkel, the most beautiful woman in the world, has been guilty of that. Once the Central Committee realized it attacked elderly men, they changed course. The CDC is doing everything in its power to stop and frustrate testing. Everyone, except Merkel, was more scared of panic than virus. There were higher pneumonia deaths before people were aware of the virus.

A Chinese who was sick of our arrogant defamation gave it back by pointing out that we had a military athletic team in the area. The Kansas flu was passed from our troops so not entirely nonsense. What was surprising was our umbrage, seemed to touch a nerve, suspicious. Given our suppression of testing we have no right to accuse.

I am so encouraged that we took so many good lessons from HIV. Not. At least let us have new respect for the phrase:

-I don’t know.