| > What do you need a randomized double blind study for? You're not sure the people on the ship died of COVID? Er, you're not trying to figure out how the ship victims already died, you're trying to predict how many other people might die of the same cause. To do that kind of thing well, you need a hypothesis, and then you need to test it properly. > As for adjustment factors, if you just adjusted for age, you'd get about 50% less mortality if the ship had the same age distribution as the country. You can't "just adjust for age" or "just adjust for" anything, you're going to miss something! That's why people do clinical trials. > I also don't see what the problem with a linear extrapolation is. Basically, an epidemic is not a linear system, so you can't model it with linear functions. Look into the "SIR model" for a standard way to do that kind of thing. I'm not trained in this field so I'd look for a medical/science forum if you have questions. https://mathworld.wolfram.com/SIRModel.html |
What would be the randomized double blind trial that you would run, and what information would it give us?
> Basically, an epidemic is not a linear system, so you can't model it with linear functions. Look into the "SIR model" for a standard way to do that kind of thing. I'm not trained in this field so I'd look for a medical/science forum if you have questions.
I'm familiar with the SIR model. What you'll find is that if R0>1, the SIR model converges to a state where S=1/R0, I=0, and R=1-1/R0. In this epidemic, R0 is approximately 2.5, of course depending on conditions. That means in the U.S. population, 60% will end in state R, which means 60% of people will get the virus. That's the 198 million number from above. It's actually a little worse than that because the SIR model doesn't have a "Dead" state, so more than 60% of the population has to get the virus in order for 60% of the end state population to have recovered.