1/n I see too many Orlandoans aren’t taking the pandemic seriously.🤦♂️ Here’s a reminder to be serious, now. A new study showed that 86% of infections never get diagnosed. “It’s the undocumented infections which are driving the spread of the outbreak.” geekwire.com/2020/scientist…
2/ If 86% are never diagnosed, that means only 14% are diagnosed. If the total number of diagnoses is N, then the total cases is N divided by 14%. Got example, today the US is reported to have 4,077 diagnosed cases. 4077/0.14 = 29,121 cases including undiagnosed ones. But also...
3/ there’s an ~11 day gap (9 to 13 days) between infection and diagnosis, since it takes a while for symptoms to show, and a few more days delay for testing and results, and the number of cases is increasing 33% per day. These 4,077 known cases were infected over 11 days ago,...
4/ ...and do the proportionately higher number 29,121 also includes only the ones infected 11 or more days ago. If we want to know the actual number who are infected right now, we have to multiply by 1.33 raised to the 11 power, i.e., another factor of 23. So...
5/ thus an estimate of the total infections in the US today is 670,000. That’s 1 of every 485 people. On average, every American knows 600 people (according to the study linked here). So on average, every American already knows someone with the disease! nytimes.com/2013/02/19/sci…
6/6 My immediate family includes 7 medical doctors, one biomedical researcher, and another healthcare worker (my wife) and we discuss these numbers. None of this is controversial. My sister-in-law, a surgeon, said to “assume YOU and EVERYONE has it, and act accordingly.”🙏
7/7 To summarize this estimate, as long as our neighbors fail to implement really strict social distancing, we can take the total diagnosed cases and multiply by 165 to get a better estimate of the total number of cases around us. This factor comes from [(1.33)^11]/(0.14)=165.
