Remember that one time @BillGates modeled a virus that spreads through the air with a similar transmission & mortality rate to COVID-19 on the TED stage?

and basically we’d need military response to avoid corona killing the population of California, having a global recession, and infecting 1.5b+ people?

So obviously I googled “what does Bill Gates think about all this” three weeks ago and there were a few financial articles.

I spent some of Super Tuesday in a bit of a research rabbit hole. I’m just going to call it now. I was right to be worried 3 weeks ago.

And clearly Bill has been busy running new models, which he’s now posted as of a day or two ago. Check it out: https://gatesnot.es/2I3joc3 

And now I’m not an expert here and all these numbers are probably loony, but with a 2.28 infection rate, a doubling time of 7 days, it’s an order of magnitude worse every month for the next... idk end of June?

We’re looking at 1m infected by the end of March and 10-20k dead?

And exponential numbers make no intuitive sense to people so this sounds totally insane, but assuming we don’t effectively cut transmission or fatality rates:

May 2nd the day of @TEDxCOS, 34m infected, half a million dead.

June 14th my birthday half a billion infected, 10m dead

And end of June we cross threshold of infected vs. have had it for wave 1, and up to 150m dead.

And that’s not counting this graph of the THREE WAVES the 1918 pandemic had over two years, which is absolutely insanely terrifying.

So like , um, wash your hands and don’t touch your face and hope I’m wrong about all of that and forgot to carry a zero or something and pray that our healthcare system is unexpectedly effective!?

If you want to terrify yourself further take any number you hear about corona and multiply it by 1.1

Just 1.1. Every. Day.

That 10% growth is essentially what happens every day with a 7-day doubling rate.

Couple upsetting corollaries:

1. If this happens this way it makes sense that virtually no one who knows anything about it is talking loudly about it now.

yikes that would cause a panic for sure and not help much. I wonder if it’ll hit the zeitgeist end of March or in June?

2. If it does happen this way, it’ll essentially *double* the number of people dying in the world each day over the next 90 days, overwhelming like, every process we have for people dying. Healthcare completely aside.

Nothing like it has happened in 100 years.

3. There’s not insignificant data suggesting mortality rates are closer to 3-4% - in a virus that spreads this fast, by air, in victims not showing symptoms, during a time in world history with global travel.

Black Death was 10%, ended up effectively killing half the world...

So it could be much much worse than I’ve projected here. Which might also explain the lack of predictions from people who know better. I’ll leave you with this:

I’ve heard a lot of people down play it and literally nobody talk about how bad it possibly could be worst case. So. Needed to run the numbers. Thanks for humoring me.

New things I just did very back of the napkin estimates for:

Corona cases become 10% of all US hospital visits in mid-March

50% of all hospital visits in April, people really freak out if they haven’t yet

...& the cause of 50%+ of global daily deaths from June till August

Some more just for my own sanity checks in coming days as we determine if we're beating or exceeding expected rates:

We should expect:
100k cases tomorrow
112,500 Thursday
125k Friday
~150k Sunday

and deaths:
3,300 Wed
~3500 Thurs
4,000 Friday
4,300 Saturday
4,800 Sunday

What will be (possibly) cool to see (or very awful) is if global information systems actually work for having people change behavior enough to stop spread. Seems to have worked in China for now? But what about waves and persistence? Do they have to stay on lockdown now for....?

Oh boy. My rough ~10x per month napkin math works out perfectly - 1 month ago to the day - Feb 4th we had 20k cases and 400 deaths.

https://www.vox.com/2020/2/4/21122072/china-coronavirus-healthcare

https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6

Also let’s please not have this thread go viral much at all, okay? Thanks internet. I just want this to be a quaint thing I look back at in April and go “well I’m glad that worst case scenario thread I made was unrealistic and ended up being way off!”

That said, for posterity I just want to drop here that this morning’s WHO report is the first official source I’ve seen to share a death rate over 3%, everyone else has pointed to China’s prelim study that was 1-2% ish.

Also worth noting that China’s population skews younger than the rest of the world.

So no one “officially” thought it could be worse than 1918 (2% death rate, 50m dead) until today, and it may be much worse than 4% as nations with older populations get it.

What people don’t talk about is that the world population was ~2 billion in 1918. Go ahead and ask siri what 50 million times 40 is. That’s how many people got infected.

So my prediction as a photographer who knows next to nothing about this but at least reviewed the data is...

When all is said and done a year or two or three from now the final strain winds down:

350m dead, 7b-8b have been infected at least once

We end up not being able to spin up antibodies fast enough, and it’s far worse than we are preparing for now.

And then *if we’re lucky* this is the last pandemic. We make gene-level live edits to all diseases going forward and we cure human disease with the research from this outrageous under-estimation.

Everyone alive today will know a few people who died from a strain of Corona 2020

Depending on global susceptibility, all of the other factors indicate that on the worst day (in June or July, or ~3 months after the next strain breaks out if there is one) 30-40% of the world will be infected it all at once, together. Tens of millions will die in a single week.

Seems to me like corona is the worst case scenario in modern history for essential all factors.

The only factor we control is “number of contacts per person” so let’s hope staying home will work and it doesn’t spread by sewage or stay alive on surfaces longer than a week.

China is the best case scenario here: young population, socially open to lockdowns for the greater good, big data well organized to tell you if you’ve been on transit with infected people, and immediate response because of SARS. They’re *still* overwhelmed.

I think our only way to avoid this outcome as a global culture is to lock borders, shut down flights and public transit, and stay inside for a week or three until those transmitting it aren’t infected anymore in every state that has even a single case right now.

Which sounds insane to me even as I say it, but containment is impossible a month from now.

And even if we did agree to that right now, doing that would break everything, and no one would agree to do it. Amazon, all grocery stores, etc would be screwed. But lives would be saved

Global capacity would just not sustain everyone staying in for a week. Yeah. But we’d save millions of lives.

So it’s this dual optimization curve of “when is it urgent enough to ask people to take the measures we need to take” and “when is it not too late for it to work”

Have so much respect for the people who know this right now and are trying to figure out what to do. Being in the history books about this is not going to be fun.

There’s no right answer other than “we should have globalized our economy differently for the last 100 years.”

The whole world needs a snow day. For the next 2 weeks. That’s how we get out of this.

I hate to put it in these terms but if you don’t have a vaccine by around the month it spreads to every country, everyone gets infected.

It’s like, just that simple. I’ve played a lot of plague. That’s my only qualification. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/plague-inc/id525818839

Really excited to hear experts start talking about all of this, and I better be wrong.

@threader_app compile