Good afternoon, I’m still reporting on coronavirus – but hopefully not for much longer.
Nobel prize winning biophysicist Michael Levitt, who teaches structural biology at Stanford University, has become a media star in China for his predictions of wh…
Good afternoon, I’m still reporting on coronavirus – but hopefully not for much longer.
Nobel prize winning biophysicist Michael Levitt, who teaches structural biology at Stanford University, has become a media star in China for his predictions of when the coronavirus epidemic would peak in the country where it started.
He said when China’s increase hit 30% per day that means a doubling rate of 2.33 days - that was the peak. And sure enough, the number of new cases reported started to fall as of Feb. 7. One week later, the mortality rate started falling as well.
The U.S. is just getting there. On March 13, the U.S. saw a 28.6% increase, for a doubling rate of 2.45 days. Yesterday, the 14, the increase actually nudged down to 27.8, which nudged the doubling rate up to 2.52 days – and that’s good.
But the last 24 hours say a big jump in confirmed cases – up 35.8% - a doubling rate of 1.96 days – way more than China at its worst.
But this jump is probably NOT an actual increase in the rate of infection; this is an increase in testing starting to kick in.
Working against the exaggeration of the rate of increase will be the results of the numerous initiatives implemented by the Trump administration – social distancing, cancellation of major gatherings, etc.
So we are going to switch over to watching the number of U.S. deaths and active cases as more reliable predictors of when the U.S. epidemic has peaked.
We suspect we are at the peak right now – or at worst in the coming week, but this will be obscured by the vast increases in testing that are about to come online. Even though history has shown that tests are typically 98% negative, if you are talking about let’s guess 10 million tests in the next week, that’s an additional 200,000 cases, and that would completely skew the confirmed cases numbers we have been following.
So let’s look at Worldometer.info site.
Here is a graph of deaths around the world – nearly 6,000. Here is the age breakdown in deaths.
As you can see, over 25% of the deaths have occurred in ages 60 and older. So it seems to be heavily dependent on not just weakened immune systems, but the inability of immune systems to defend against a virus that is totally new – something never seen before. Ahem!
So here is what we think will be the most reliable numbers going forward to predict the peak in the U.S.
So in the U.S. there are 2929 active cases and only 10 of those are considered critical, and that’s with a total of 60 deaths nationwide.
So this week, with dramatically increased testing coming online, we should see a huge spike in Total cases, but let’s see if either of these other three factors increases as well. Depending on how they are counted, Active Cases may or may not increase along with Total cases, but it’s likely that deaths and total deaths will not, and when New Deaths goes to zero, we’ll know that the coronavirus so-called mepidemic is over.
I say so-called because compared to this year’s flu season, I don’t see the emergency here.
It is more viral than the flu – that is, it spreads 2-3 times faster than the flu.
The fatality rate was initially estimated at 3%, but until we get in good testing numbers, it could be that half of the school children in the U.S. have it, but their immune systems are easily dealing with it, so none of them report in. We just don’t have any accurate reading on this yet.
The one novel thing about this virus is its ability to infect people even if you didn’t know you were infected. That means those school children could pass it on to the parents and grandparents without having any way to know that they were doing that. That remains another mystery that has helped cause the panic about coronavirus.
In any case, we are now getting numbers in that will soon allow us to predict the peak, and unlike early rumors, coronavirus seems to not like the coming warm weather.
I think it’s likely that 30 days from now, we will see the wisdom of President Trump when he told the American people that 30 days from now we’ll all be wondering what all the fuss was about.
And much of this panic was clearly driven by the desperado media wanting something – anything to blame the President for.
But it looks like the brilliant team President Trump assembled to stop the coronavirus is going to boomerang this back at the desperados and Trump will come out of this looking like the competent boss that he is.
As the Bible puts it:
“As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people[a] should be kept alive, as they are today.”
Genesis 50:20
I’m still reporting from just outside the citadel of American freedom. Good Day.
