Knight Shift's post on Levitt's work was deleted, as was my reply, but both were relevant info, so I'm going to post the basics of it here. His general premise is that the coronavirus will likely not exceed a 20% infection rate assuming little interventions are taken (as was seen on the Diamond Princess, that floating viral laboratory), since he thinks many people simply won't get it, due possibly to natural immunity (we all don't get every viral infection).
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3800632,00.html
That would be great and far less than the doomsday scenarios we've seen other experts propose (and as Germany's Merkel was predicting), where 50-70% of the world would be infected without interventions. and if true would at least take the Armageddon scenarios off the table (those who predict 50-70% infection rates would translate to 1-2MM deaths in the US at 1% mortality rate), but would still make it possible that we'd see something far worse than the flu, if we took little action.
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/487489-worst-case-coronavirus-models-show-massive-us-toll
However, he did acknowledge that the situations in Italy, Europe and the US are of great concern (especially the US), at least in the short term, as per below.
The explosion of cases in Italy is worrying, Levitt said, but he estimates it is a result of a higher percentage of elderly people than in China, France, or Spain. “Furthermore, Italian culture is very warm, and Italians have a very rich social life. For these reasons, it is important to keep people apart and prevent sick people from coming into contact with healthy people.”
China did great work and managed to gain complete control of the virus, Levitt said. “Currently, I am most worried about the U.S. It must isolate as many people as possible to buy time for preparations. Otherwise, it can end up in a situation where 20,000 infected people will descend on the nearest hospital at the same time and the healthcare system will collapse.”
In thinking further about this, 20% of the US population is 60 million and if even only 1% died (and I've been saying the true rate is likely 0.5-1.0%, not the 2-5% we're seeing with incomplete data), that would be 600,000, which is the worst case number I've been saying for days (the flu kills 30-60K per year roughly and has a mortality rate of only 0.1% or 1/10th that of the coronavirus). I don't think anyone wants that outcome either and again the only way to prevent it, is aggressive testing and social distancing (much more than we've implemented so far).
It is interesting that even in the worst hit location so far, Wuhan, they've only seen 1% infection rates (maybe 100,000 out of 10MM) , due to the aggressive containment (tracking all infected people and quarantining them and contacts) and mitigation (social distancing, hand-washing, wearing masks, etc.) strategies used, so I'm hopeful we can keep it to that, even if we are late in responding like they were. Although there are lots of doubts that Wuhan only had 60-70K infections and all of China has only had the 80K reported, but even if the Wuhan number were 200K, that's only 2% of that city's population.
So, let's for argument say that even in the worst actual cases, like Wuhan or Italy, with a breakdown of the healthcare systems, followed by draconian lockdown, that with that kind of response we might only see 2% total infection rate, not 20%, due to the aggressive lockdown measures. That's 10% of the 20% rate cap and would bring the ultimate outcome of the COVID-19 outbreaks down to total mortalities and hospitalizations close to influenza levels. 2% of the US population is 6 million and if the mortality rate were 1% of those, that's 60K in a year, which is similar to the 30-60K deaths we see in a typical flu year.
The problem with the above is we don't know yet that we're likely going to see 2% total infections in a Wuhan/Italy scenario with eventual lockdowns, as we can't trust the Wuhan data and we're not there yet in Italy, plus we do know that in both cases the peak rates were well above what the area's health care systems could handle. In addition, we can't even be sure we'd see the 20% overall infection rate cap that Levitt is postulating if we did essentially nothing, so we have to act in the face of huge uncertainties, which is difficult for whole countries to do. Interesting stuff...
