Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7942650" data-attributes="member: 4937">The South Korea data set combined with other evidence like the doubling rate being between 6 and 7 days.What SK's low CFR actually proved was that they had found a very high percentage of the cases that were 'in the wild'. The chart in that article showing that the more testing you did the lower your CFR was almost a tautology. It proved something, but not what the people who created the chart understood it to prove. It proved only the obvious, that initial CFR will be lower the higher percentage of the cases you have documented.Think about the reverse situation. If you don't test widely, then the first cases that you'll notice are almost always anomalous deaths and severe cases requiring hospitalization. So without extensive testing, you'll almost certainly initially only document the worst cases, giving you a very high documented CFR simply because that's all you know about.And SK's low CFR combined with the high percentage of tests that they do that come back negative in SK proves that there are not a lot of carriers with mild cases. (Now there is some weirdness here with asymptomatic cases that could complicate this discussion, but lets for now ignore all that because it just ends up with a bunch of question marks around things we don't understand yet.)The other piece of information is the observed doubling number seems to be under uncontrolled conditions 6-7 days. If you see faster doubling than that,then it means your documentation is catching up to reality. If you see slower doubling, then it means you have some sort of quarantine that is slowing the rate of spread. However this very tightly constrains how many cases can exist after a certain period of time. Exponential series are very sensitive to the base number being raised to a power - in this case time.   Change base number even slightly and you get massive differences in results.The high R0 low mortality rate model you are describing was a popular model a lot of people believed in or hoped for early in the epidemic, but the things that have happened since make that model very unlikely. If the R0 was that high, we should be seeing even faster spread than we do. We should be finding all those mild cases.   And we just aren't.</blockquote>

Verification