Trent
I saw it again. The post on Facebook saying between 291,000 and 646,000 die each year from influenza-related illnesses. Meanwhile, the death rate for Coronavirus is just north of 13,000. (Since that meme came out, it’s climbed to 37,272.)
Alright people. Time to do math again.
First things first. Those are annual rates for the flu. The Coronavirus has been around for about six months. It’s just starting. Secondly, pandemics are exponential. Right now, the number of people dying from the disease is doubling every six days globally. Today, 3,700 people died from the disease. In six days, if nothing changes, 7,400 people will die. By April 12, 14,800 people will die daily. April 18? 29,600 (let’s round to 30,000 just to make it easier).
These are still relatively small numbers on the face of it. By April 30 (another two doublings), the death rate is 120,000. A day. May 6? 240,000. May 12 there are more people dying a day than our annual flu outbreak. 480,000. May 18? We’re at nearly a million people a day. That’s only a month and a half away.
People don’t easily think in terms of exponential growth. It’s called Exponential Growth Bias. It’s why we’re so bad at investing in our retirement funds or recognizing that things are about to get real bad real quick if we don’t do anything.
Of course, this is if nothing is happening. The good news is? Stuff is happening. China was able to bend the curve. So was South Korea. They did this by imposing draconian measures on the population, which is something that we (probably) won’t see here. It would be seen as a political land grab. But if there are enough gaps in the spread, the virus should start to slow in the next few weeks.
Let’s go back to our coronavirus vs the flu metaphor, and look at how contagious a flu is. If you get a flu, there’s a good chance you’re going to pass the flu on to another person. Indeed, statistical averages are that 1.3 people are infected. Which is pretty low. Part of that is due to how quickly you go from catching the virus to exhibiting symptoms, generally three or four days.
If someone gets the coronavirus, they usually pass it on to two to three people. This is partially due to how slow it takes for the symptoms to emerge, usually 14 days.
So basically, coronavirus is twice as infectious. Meaning that, if uncontrolled, twice to three times as many people would get it than get the flu.
Extrapolating data from China it is known that 80 percent of people who contract the Coronavirus will recover at home without treatment. That sounds good. Until you compare it to the flu, where 98 percent of people recover at home.
So, if you see five people at the clinic for the flu, you’re going to see 50 people for the coronavirus. If 100 people go to the hospital for the flu, you’re going to see 1000 people for the coronavirus. The math on this is not in our favour. Worse, of those, about five percent of the total people with coronavirus will need ventilation.
So let’s take and drop coronavirus in Tumbler Ridge, where the clinic is running at capacity. If I call to make an appointment, it’s usually three to five days before I can get in. But emergency people—say, someone who needs ventilation—take priority.
Tumbler Ridge has a population of about 2500. Of those, about 1500 would get the Coronavirus if we were doing nothing. Of those, 20 percent will require hospitalization. That’s 300 people. We have no hospital beds in Tumbler Ridge. So we have to send them off to Dawson Creek in our one ambulance, or more likely to Prince George, which is the primary site for treating COVID-19 patients. At a three hour round trip, we can move eight people a day to Dawson Creek. Prince George is…call it three people if the ambulance never stops moving. But Dawson only has 44 beds. Prince George has 219. If all those 300 cases strike at once, it means we overwhelm the largest hospital in the north. And if one of those people is one of our nurses, we have effectively cut our emergency service by a third.
If they had the flu and had to go to the hospital, they’d be out in four or five days. But the coronavirus, bless it’s pokey little heart, is just as slow to go away as it is to start. The average length a person needs to be in a hospital is 11 days.
Meanwhile back in Tumbler, we have 292 people who still require hospitalization. Of those, 15 need to be put on ventilators.
We have one.
Again, if those cases arrive all at once, we’re screwed. Completely overloaded. We become little Italy, where doctors have to do triage—basically prioritize who gets treatment based on need, and the worst off cases are let die. The whole social distancing thing? It’s not about you. It’s about the system that will come crashing down around us with an extra three percent pressure. About the people who need to go to the hospital with a heart attack or a broken leg who can’t even get in because there’s too many people with Coronavirus.
But…If we space those cases out across a year, if we only have 125 cases a month, only need to send 25 people out of town, only need to put one or two people on ventilation, the system might be able to handle it. We still have the same number of cases at the end, but spread out over a much longer time.
We might also be able to ramp up testing. Right now, people who don’t show the symptoms don’t think they’ve got the disease. But it takes 14 days for it to show, and a whack of people never even show signs of being sick, but are still infectious. Right now we’re self-isolating because you never know. But what if we could test everybody? Then you’d know, and be able to isolate the people that needed to be isolated and everyone else can go about their daily business.
Better yet, in a year, we might (again, might) have something resembling a vaccination. We might be able to inoculate against the virus so that the majority of people don’t need to go through it.
Back to the math. Of those 1500 people, three percent will die. Which doesn’t sound like a lot, but as you start to ramp it up across a population, the numbers get pretty terrifying. Three percent of 1500 is 45 people dead. That’s almost as many people as are currently buried in the Tumbler Ridge Cemetery. That would eat up the extra space they added to the cemetery pretty fast. Three percent of the Canadian population is Saskatchewan. Literally the population of the entire province. Three percent of the population worldwide is 228 million, which is Canada, plus about half the population of the states.
Of course, that’s not fair. We have already determined that 40 percent of the population probably won’t get the virus, so only 140 million dead people.
Canada’s population is only 37.6 million.
So you can see why people are worried.
Now, this is based on figures that are rapidly evolving, so the actual numbers could shift. As China has got the virus mostly under control and the last cases are moving through the system, they’re revising the number of people who died from coronavirus down to 1.4 percent. That still translates to nearly 70 million worldwide, or twice the population of Canada, but it’s better than 140 million.
And as we get better and better at handling it, fewer and fewer people will get the disease. And ironically, many of the people who have been saying “we have nothing to worry about,” won’t get the disease. The entire world will have moved to protect them, and they’ll make fun of the way it was blown all out of proportion.
We are all of us, says Joseph Fink, creator of Welcome to Nightvale, only as protected as the most vulnerable members of our society. We have to fight for them as we would fight for ourselves.
Because this? What’s happening? What you call a panic? It’s not about you. It’s about us. As a society. Not just people from Tumbler. Or BC, or Canada. But all of us. You don’t get to say “it’s okay, only the old people die,” or “It’s okay, only the brown people die,” or, “It’s okay, only people who wear Birkenstocks are affected.” It’s not okay. This is the whole reason we form into groups called families and towns and societies: to take care of each other. It is not just to benefit the rich or the strong or the ones with blonde hair and blue eyes. It’s for all of us. Every one. Not one left behind.
For those of you who like math, here’s a couple videos about exponential growth and disease.
