# Italian deaths / Italian cases = percentage dead [1]
2_978 / 35_713 = 0.0833870019
# USA population * percentage dead = USA death scenario [2]
329_414_824 * 0.0833870019 = 27_468_914
It's prob not gonna get that bad, but Italy didn't see a scenario where people would die at a rate over 8%. So there's a scenario. Don't panic, but also don't dismiss scenarios you'd rather not believe. Americans who get laid off lose access to cheap healthcare, and many as already don't have it. Lack of healthcare doesn't sound like a great a situation.
[1] Source: Coronavirus disease (COVID-2019) situation reports # 59 for March 19
So the 24% of the US population aged 0-18 is just as likely to die as the "confirmed" cases of COVID-19 in Italy? If anyone does anything but dismiss this stupid ass math, they should panic.
15 million in the US seems like a big stretch. But more than a million is plausible if no action is taken and people go about their everyday lives as usual.
Personally I think 2.2 million is extremely optimistic if we're talking about a worst case where no one reacts to mitigate the spread. But ultimately it seems like we agree that it would be really bad, whether it's 2M bad or 10M bad, so no need to argue about it really.
Agreed, because that's unthinkable, so lockdowns would be enacted instead. Without any measures taken to limit spread though, that would be the expected result.
Careful with those death rates, my guess is that they likely exclude a ton of mildly or asymptomatic patients who never got tested (skewing the death rate upwards).
Sure. And yes, Italy's population is more elderly as well. So I agree it's possible the death rate will be less than 5%. (Although I believe they're currently at ~8%, so we don't know that.) But those are the closest parallels we've seen so far as to what happens when a modern heathcare system gets overwhelmed by this, so they're the best estimates we have to work from.
And regardless, it would be very, very bad. If it's only 5M people instead of 15M, that's still catastrophic. Also while the hospitals are completely overwhelmed with COVID-19, people will die of other things that would normally be survivable.
And finally, we have an alternative: keep employing distancing and, where necessary, lockdown measures while scaling up testing. These lockdowns will get the cases under control, but they would flare back up as soon as they're ended. However, with the expanded testing, we can instead perform sufficient testing across the entire population to catch outbreaks before they start. With sufficient testing, things can go back to normal while remaining confident that we're not spreading the virus undetected and seeding a new outbreak. It needs to be orders of magnitude more than we have now, but it's entirely possible.
Surprised that I ended up in the red on that comment, yet not a single person has given me a paper where anyone says that 15 million is a possible worst case US death toll.
