[graeme]

Actually it isn’t wrong. A 70% increase in an exponential gain leads to many multiples more cases.

You could halve the death rate in that scenario and still have 10x the number of deaths or more.

Run two exponential series: one at 1.1x, one at 1.7x. Start at 1,000 cases each. Death rate 1% for the first, 0.5% for the second. Assume doubling in a week. Check new cases and thus new deaths after eight weeks.

2143 new cases on week eight fir the second one, 21.4 deaths.

110,199 new cases on week eight for second one, resulting in 550.5 deaths.

20x worse. And unfortunately the new strain doesn’t seem to be less deadly, so it would be 40x worse if death rate the same.

[lazyjones]

You are wrong on principle because you stopped thinking after you calculated the death rate after week eight. The virus doesn't stop spreading in either of the hypothetical cases and the population is a finite number. Keep calculating!

Also, your numbers are arbitrarily picked. Why don't you pick 1.8x and 1% vs. 1.9x and 0.999%?

[graeme]

Because 1.1x is about the r pre-existing restrictions had most western societies at. And it’s estimated the new variant is 70% more transmissible.

>You are wrong on principle because you stopped thinking after you calculated the death rate after week eight. The virus doesn't stop spreading in either of the hypothetical cases and the population is a finite number. Keep calculating!

This only applies if the plan was to let literally everyone get infected. That wasn’t the plan. We have vaccines now. It should be possible to end things by the end of summer, so excess deaths now are needless deaths.

Also you’re ignoring speed. 200,000 hospitalizations in a week is much much worse than 200,000 in a year. Get too many people needing to be hospitalized at once and the death rate goes up because you can’t treat them as well. You also get more deaths from other conditions as hospitals can no longer serve cancer patients, heart attack victims past a certain point etc.

[lazyjones]

You keep introducing more variables and more arbitrary numbers, we won't get to agree on anything this way.

It's well known that harmless viruses exist, they infect a lot of people and kill nobody (or almost nobody). Claiming that more infectious = generally more lethal is just not based on facts. If Covid-19 mutates into a mostly harmless variant, we will easily treat the few more severe infections and nobody will die.

[graeme]

> You keep introducing more variables and more arbitrary numbers

These variables are the ones that are relevant to deaths and have been talked about since the beginning of the pandemic: hospital overwhelm, total percent of populace infected, etc

To refuse to deal with the complexities of the situation doesn’t make them go away. I didn’t introduce any factors apart from the common ones.

> It's well known that harmless viruses exist, they infect a lot of people and kill nobody (or almost nobody).

We’re not talking about those viruses though. Most viruses that we don’t have a vaccine for are either orders of magnitude less lethal or substantially less contagious.

> Claiming that more infectious = generally more lethal is just not based on facts.

I didn’t say that. I said that at the level of lethality coronavirus is at, an increase in contagiousness is worse than an increase in lethality. Very different claim.

> If Covid-19 mutates into a mostly harmless variant, we will easily treat the few more severe infections and nobody will die.

This would be true if it mutated into something maybe 100x less contagious. An entirely theoretical possibility. That’s how much more lethal covid is compared to stuff like the cold.