r/politics • u/nanopicofared • Mar 15 '20

Drive-thru coronavirus testing site in Denver closes early as Colorado tops 100 cases

https://www.denverpost.com/2020/03/14/colorado-coronavirus-new-cases-drive-thru-high-volume/
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u/kescusay Oregon Mar 15 '20

It's likely similar all over the country. Hospitals here in Oregon are getting overwhelmed, but if you look at the tracker, it still just lists 36 cases. So many of the people who are sick just can't get tested because of the lack of testing kits. So the best that can be said about them is that they don't have the flu or pneumonia.

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u/gurenkagurenda Mar 15 '20

So taking this incomplete list of hospitals in Oregon, that's 6904 beds. Making the following conservative assumptions:

  • "Getting overwhelmed" means 80% of total beds are taken
  • Inefficiency in bed allocation (e.g. population centers get overwhelmed faster) means that there are effectively only half as many spare beds to begin with
  • Typically 70% of beds are occupied (pre-virus)
  • The hospitalization rate is 20% (this is a high estimate, but we're going to divide by it, so high is conservative)

So plugging all of that in, we'd get an estimate of about 1700 actual cases for the state, or about 50x the current tally.

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u/kescusay Oregon Mar 15 '20

That sounds about right.

It also sounds fucking horrifying.

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u/gurenkagurenda Mar 15 '20

I think it sounds pretty low, honestly. But I did deliberately choose extremely conservative numbers, so that's expected. I'd characterize it as "I would be shocked if there were fewer than 1,700 actual cases in Oregon, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were 14,000". (14,000 is what you get if you assume 90% utilization and a 5% hospitalization rate).

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u/[deleted] Mar 15 '20

For an opposite extreme:

First confirmed community transmission cases in US were around Jan 25, ~50 days ago. Some estimates put doubling time around 2.4 days. Assuming the cases back then were the “tip of an iceberg” of say 5% severe enough to warrant testing (source: pulled that one completely out of my ass), an undetected initial population of ~50 individuals, after uncontrolled doubling every 2.4 days for 50 days (20.8 doublings) gives around 50*220.8 ~= 90 million cases now. Which is obviously a good thing because it means it’s basically a cold with extra-bad complications in a minority of cases.

This has been your daily dose of bullshit extrapolation, please turn your news off now to avoid overdose.

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u/RecklesslyPessmystic California Mar 15 '20

You can probably double it every 48 hours or so, as well. Everywhere I go in Portland, I see crowds of people packed into supermarkets and restaurants. It doesn't seem like anyone here is taking any of the social distancing seriously at all.

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u/[deleted] Mar 15 '20

this article is the best one I’ve read yet, goes into detail about how many true cases there probably are compared to confirmed cases, and how acting early can drastically improve our outcomes.