ORIGINAL: BBfanboy
ORIGINAL: Lokasenna
ORIGINAL: BBfanboy
Surprising the Switzerland, Norway and Iran have such high infection rates per million population.
Too much heavy breathing from climbing mountains or just heavy testing?
Iran was notoriously... I'll just say careless.
Switzerland and Norway - what's the population density where people actually live? I.e., the average population density that a person there experiences? If it's high, I'd expect higher rates of infection than I would in, say, a rural US state.
Unless a lot of Chinese people go to Switzerland and Norway for skiing, I would not expect many visitors in the winter that would drive the infection rate per million so much higher than other countries. Switzerland probably can be explained by proximity to northern Italy, but Norway? How many visitors from high-risk areas does Norway get in the winter? And don't the mountains limit travel somewhat so geographic isolation is more prevalent?
So I wonder whether the virus is spreading faster there or if they are just very vigilant in their testing so they count more cases earlier than other countries on the chart.
What I mean is - the population density of these countries is a function of their total area. But practically speaking, don't they have lots of relatively high density areas while the rest of the country is low density? Like New York State and NYC - the state has a population density of 416.4 people per square mile, but nearly half of that comes from NYC alone. I guess what I was trying to say was: what proportion of the population is urban? Diseases spread faster in urban areas because people are closer.
Switzerland's urban population % is 73.80% (the USA as a whole is around 84% as currently measured but the definition has changed over the decades, most recently in the 1990s). Norway's urban population % is >80%.
Further, the USA urban population % can't be compared very well to other countries' urban population % because the nature of our "urban" areas is so different: we have massive sprawl, like literally no other country in the world. Our urban areas (in the national aggregate) are simply less dense than other countries' urban areas.
ORIGINAL: Canoerebel
Judging from what we're seeing elsewhere, especially Asia and the western Pacific, and now perhaps [but only perhaps!] in Italy, I don't expect to see numbers in the millions. As for numbers in the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, that's serious but not comparatively so. We routinely deal with far more for seasonal flu and more irregular epidemics and pandemics.
I'm sorry CR, but this is simply not true. It is the exact opposite: if 200K people die in the US from COVID-19, it will be more than 3x as many as the seasonal flu kills (if not more than 4x, if you break out the deaths from pneumonia from the flu + pneumonia line on the CDC website here: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm).
Note that the only single viral or bacterial disease that makes the top causes of deaths is the flu, which is an endemic disease. We don't really suffer from lethal epidemics or pandemics.
ORIGINAL: Canoerebel
Given the data we're seeing, the situation in Western Europe and in the USA should peak and then begin to taper off in March. Not in July or September.
It hasn't peaked in Italy yet (one day of fewer than expected cases can't be discounted as not noise). We're 9 days behind them in terms of the infection curve for number of cases. Other countries' (Germany, US, Switzerland) infection curves have, excepting only the UK, exactly followed the Italian curve. I see no reason not to expect the peak of the curve to occur until at least sometime in April, if not early May. In China, it took ~16 days since the number of confirmed cases reached 100 for the curve's downslope to begin and they instituted a much more draconian quarantine than we have (or will). So it will almost certainly take longer to reach the downslope here.
Optimism is great, and I'm generally an optimist, but everything we're seeing in terms of numbers doesn't look so rosy to the point of modifying previous expectations for more than a month's worth of serious impingement on day-to-day living. And the risk of worse is great enough that it seems more likely than not to be longer than that, as with these things you're entering the same realm as the Torino Scale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torino_scale
; Julia Child
