Italy extends lockdown amid hopes of turning corner

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52100153

by fspeech • 6 years ago

46 2 6 years ago

bbc.com

carlob• 6 years ago

I'm not an epidemiologist, but I have some background in Bayesian problems in biophysics.

Some back of the envelope math for Lombardy, the hardest hit region:

Total population ~ 10M

Total deaths (2020/3/30) = 4773

If one assumes an Infection Fatality Rate of 1% then we would have had 500k cases in the region about two weeks ago. Assuming a doubling of the cases every 5 days, this means that the current actual number of infections stands at 4M and it would take log2(10/4) = 1.3 new doublings to reach saturation: about a week.

Taking instead an IFR of 2% and doubling every 7 weeks, we'd have about 3 weeks left to herd immunity.

Of course one should take into account the fact that at some point this will stop behaving like an exponential and look more like a sigmoid, but herd immunity doesn't need 100% infection, so the orders of magnitude involved should be more or less the same.

This seems to be roughly consistent with what some more authoritative sources are saying for example [0] claims Italy is probably missing 95% of cases.

[0] https://cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/severity/global_cfr_e...

bestouff• 6 years ago

I think it's past time to introduce "IANAE".

Italy extends lockdown amid hopes of turning corner

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