[jtbayly]

I'd really like to see this discussed here. I've not seen anybody talking about this in the US. This is the guy behind the "highly-cited Imperial College London coronavirus model."

And this is a major revision. It drops estimated deaths in the UK from 500,000 to "20,000 or far fewer." It also estimates that the UK will not run out of ICU beds in the process.

The reason is that the transmissibility estimate has gone up, which implies that many more people have already had the virus than we realized. This, in turn, means that a much lower percentage are serious cases. It also means that we are much nearer to the peak than we thought.

Edited to add: He also credits the lockdown in the UK, but if you look at the previous model of how this plays out even with a complete lockdown, you see that the vast majority of the change must come from the change in estimate of transmissibility.

[jimhefferon]

> It also estimates that the UK will not run out of ICU beds in the process.

That'd be wonderful. But, doesn't that conflict with what we saw actually happen in Italy?

[thu2111]

Not exactly.

Italy has never run out of ICU beds. There have been sporadic and garbled reports of temporary shortages in Lombardy specifically, alleviated by patient transfers and ward conversions, and some of those reports were contradictory (e.g. doctors or mayors saying they were rationing care but other more senior healthcare leaders saying they weren't).

The UK had a hospital that hit capacity temporarily but it only lasted 12 hours before transfers reduced the pressure again.

We'll be seeing a lot of activity like that in the next weeks - reports that hospitals are full, then they stop being full as more capacity is added or patients are rebalanced onto other hospitals. The assumption of total ICU exhaustion seems to have been based on the assumption of uniform case growth everywhere which isn't happening, and perhaps also an inability to quickly add capacity.

[jtbayly]

Not necessarily. If transmissibility is high, you could be seeing close to the peak.

The data out of NY that makes me most suspicious of this new model is actually the 72% negative rate on tests. I would expect that to be a lot lower. But that's just a gut feeling.

[salmon30salmon]

Half of those 72% may have had it three weeks ago and are a-ok now. Without testing for antibodies, all we can say is they do not _currently actively have an infection._

[DanBC]

The tests have pretty high false negative rates. https://twitter.com/cynthiaccox/status/1242868006293843971/p...

[neaden]

It does indeed, or what we are seeing in New York. I'm very skeptical of this, though it would of course be great news if it was true. I can't help but have whiplash from the fact that the UK seems to have gone from an attitude of we're going to be fine, to we're all going to die, to now it's going to be fine again.

Edit: I think it is important to keep in mind that Italy's deaths per day are still going up. The growth has slowed and hopefully we are about to see the peak but it still hasn't come. Most western countries are on the same growth rate as Italy, there is no reason right now to think we won't see something similar happen all over the world.

[irchans]

The number of new case per day in Italy has stabilized at 5000 to 6000 per day.

   Date      Cases  New Cases
   March 10  9172   1797
   March 11  10149  977
   March 12  12462  2313
   March 13  15113  2651
   March 14  17660  2547
   March 15  21157  3497
   March 16  24747  3590
   March 17  27980  3233
   March 18  31506  3526
   March 19  35713  4207
   March 20  41035  5322
   March 21  47021  5986
   March 22  53578  6557
   March 23  59138  5560
   March 24  63927  4789
   March 25  69176  5249
   March 26  74386  5210

[neaden]

New cases isn't a good metric because of how testing can change. Deaths is more reliable metric to be used when prevalence is high, as it is in Italy and now the US.

[salmon30salmon]

And in the case of Italy, you would expect the new case rate to outpace itself for a long while as testing is ramped up, but even with increased testing the new case level is leveling off. This indicates an already infected populace that has since recovered.

[glofish]

deaths are not a reliable metric at all. old and sick people are far more susceptible.

[lutorm]

New York is close to getting there, too.

[sunkenvicar]

Florence Italy was home to Hug A Chinese National Day during the Chinese New Year when many Chinese people are allowed to travel globally.

Hopefully fewer visited the UK and even fewer had close contact with the locals.

[jimhefferon]

> Hug A Chinese National Day

A rational person can't possibly believe that this is the cause of their troubles, even if there were such a thing.

[sunkenvicar]

I agree it’s hard to believe such a thing existed and undoubtedly accelerated the spread of the Wuhan Virus. Many lives could have been saved if Italy embraced social distancing instead of virtue signalling.

Proof: https://www.westernjournal.com/italian-mayor-starts-hug-chin...

[sgt101]

>The reason is that the transmissibility estimate has gone up

citation please.

My understanding is that it's because of the policy intervention that his team advised.

[jtbayly]

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2238578-uk-has-enough-i...

[sgt101]

Ok - I read this :

"He said that expected increases in National Health Service capacity and ongoing restrictions to people’s movements make him “reasonably confident” the health service can cope when the predicted peak of the epidemic arrives in two or three weeks. UK deaths from the disease are now unlikely to exceed 20,000, he said, and could be much lower."

and

"This measure of how many other people a carrier usually infects is now believed to be just over three, he said, up from 2.5. “That adds more evidence to support the more intensive social distancing measures,” he said."

So the article says EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT YOU CLAIMED.

This is disinformation.

[guscost]

I've been mentioning this possibility here and getting in arguments over it for more than a week now. People don't have much of an appetite, it seems. My guess is that all the folks who were absolutely certain of a low R0 value and a high IFR, with 2% of the US population dying as a result, are not going to show up to acknowledge that they were wrong.

[glofish]

I always thought the Imperial model was ridiculously fatalistic, but this turnabout, and this quickly - that really surprised me.

[luckydata]

the new model reads like a bunch of politically motivated bullshit. The model is saying whatever the current Tory government needs it to say and seems divorced from what we can actually see on the ground.

[sjg007]

What’s the evidence for widespread transmission already?

[jtbayly]

I wish there was some. Again, it's based on the change in R0. From another article[0]:

"New data from the rest of Europe suggests that the outbreak is running faster than expected, said Ferguson. As a result, epidemiologists have revised their estimate of the reproduction number (R0) of the virus. This measure of how many other people a carrier usually infects is now believed to be just over three, he said, up from 2.5."

[0]: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2238578-uk-has-enough-i...

[sjg007]

An R0 of 3 is still catastrophic. It’s your whole nuclear family plus one. What was R0 before?

[downshun]

Can't help but ask the actuary question: are the covid19 deaths avoided worth the economic cost of the lockdown?

[glofish]

read what the report says:

[...] coronavirus will probably kill under 20,000 people in the U.K. — more than 1/2 of whom would have died by the end of the year in any case [because] they were so old and sick [...]

[lozaning]

Are you personally willing to die to get the DOW above 30K? If you're not it seems rude to ask others to.

[salmon30salmon]

It isn't about the Dow. It is about the restaurants that don't have cash-on-hand having to close. It is about the people who live paycheck-to-paycheck now having to decide how to spend their last twenty dollars with the only hope of relief being a measure that is still being debated. It is the factories that are shuttered.

The last thing this is about is the Dow.

[glofish]

it is ridiculous to equate this with the DOW when regular people with no investments are the ones the most severely affected

[pluto9]

You could make this argument about any potentially fatal disease. Are you willing to crash the economy to save the people who die of the flu every year? Probably not, right? Presumably because fewer people die of the flu.

It's an unpleasant reality, but it's a question of degree--how many lives are worth saving the world economy for everyone else? If your answer is "zero", then why should we not apply that standard to every other disease?

[downshun]

I'm more interested in how you calculated those numbers. Could you share? Thank you for your concern about my empathy.

[LeoNatan25]

Yes

[Proziam]

I want to agree with you, but I do have a concern about this point of view that I've yet to see addressed. Perhaps you or someone else can give some insight into your thinking.

What about the deaths caused by the wrecked economy?

Even putting things in simplistic terms, the 2008 crash is credited with 10,000 suicides. Following the chain of misery into homelessness, stress-induced illnesses, criminality (which leads to loss of life in multiple categories), and so forth leads me to question whether it is actually as black and white as people say it is.

Currently, we're on track to make this economic catastrophe bigger than the 2008 crash. I don't want to imagine what the fallout is going to look like in the future, but I already know a lot of people who are out of work and scared.

Mind you, I'm saying this as someone who has family in the 70+ high-risk category. I'm not oblivious to the value of human life. I am purely speculating about whether or not we're actually doing the right thing, and thinking about the consequences as thoroughly as we should.

[downshun]

http://paulgraham.com/say.html