https://twitter.com/FxzzOnTheBeat/status/1236556448810831872
"Virality of C19 is overstated due to conflating diagnosis date with contraction date & over-extrapolating exponential growth, which is never what happens in reality. Keep extrapolating & virus will exceed mass of known universe!"
"Fatality rate also greatly overstated. Because there are so few test kits, those who die with respiratory symptoms are tested for C19, but those with minor symptoms are usually not. Prevalence of coronaviruses & other colds in general population is very high!"
The panic is "dumb", sure, but panic is people reacting emotionally. Of course it's dumb. It's also understandable. Posting about how dumb it is is not constructive, it's just chest thumping about how intellectually superior you are.
Also, I'm not taking medical advice from Musk, and you shouldn't either. He's not an epidemiologist, an infectious diseases expert, or any sort of medical doctor for that matter. He's just a techie who got lucky and has the loudest megaphone in the world.
The audience for this tweet isn’t the people who are panicking, it’s the people who are not. Its only effect is striking the egos of people who feel they are too smart to panic about this.
If people want him to stop saying dumb things, they should just ignore him. Same for other Twitter-friendly people like Trump and McAfee.
[1] UK
True fatality rate is likely close to what South Korea is registering, because they test everybody regardless of whether they're sick or not. It's about 0.7% there.
Exponential growth won't continue forever, but it doesn't have to. If exponential growth continues until COVID-19 has infected 30-60% of the world's population (as typical flu pandemics do), that's 2-4B infected and 15-30M dead. Those are huge numbers.
Deaths will be overwhelming concentrated among older folks (death rates are about 0.2% for < 40, up to 15% for > 80), but that basically amounts to "Would you play Russian roulette with your mother?" I certainly wouldn't.
It has infected <0.1% of South Korea's population and the number of new cases per day has been going down for several days in a row now. Today they reported less than a hundred new cases.
It sure doesn't seem to be sweeping through the South Korea population like wildfire. It doesn't appear they will even reach 1% infected, let alone 30-60%.
It also doesn't look to be on a path to infecting 30-60% of China's population. New infections in China have dwindled to almost nothing, and the total number of cases there is less than 1/10,000th of their population. (Even if one is skeptical about China's official count, it's preposterous to think they've undercounted by tens or hundreds of millions.)
The problem is that coronavirus escaped and is now circulating worldwide. So as soon as they drop the quarantines, they're likely to end up reinfected from some other country. Most of the infections in the U.S. are now coming from Italy and Iran, not China. All it takes is one asymptomatic carrier (and evidence from South Korea and the Diamond Princess indicates that close to half of cases are asymptomatic) to start a local outbreak. The Washington State and Italian outbreaks were both started from a single undetected index case, for example (Washington State was the original index case from Wuhan in Seattle, Italy was traced back to the German car manufacture that had a local outbreak in early January).
You can't really stop a highly-infectious airborne disease with no natural immunity in the population. The best you can do is buy time to develop treatments or a vaccine, or hope that it mutates into something less virulent.
You can’t use relative risks to say something about absolute numbers; you also have to take group sizes into account.
Given the hugely varying population pyramids between countries there will be a lot of variation between countries, but with about 2% of the world’s population over 80, and about a third under 40, that factor of 75 goes down to around a factor of 5, globally. Still a large difference, but maybe not quite overwhelming.
It’s in his best interest to keep the stock price up.
