Earlier this week I made a $101.52 bet with a friend that there would be over 50 million Americans infected with coronavirus in the next three years. No one else really seems to agree with me. Indeed, my friend said it was plausible but unlikely that even 10 million Americans would get Coronavirus. In this post I would like to argue the liklihood of my side of the debate and respond to counter arguments.
Separately from the bet, there are obviously big negative implications if I am right. If 50 million Americans get it, and it has a 1% mortality rate (which seems to be the current best estimate), that is 500,000 thousand deaths. That is horrible. I dont suppose to know how bad it is among those who dont die, but I wouldnt want to find out personally. If I am right, maybe you should start prepping? I have been prepping for the last month.
When trying to establish the liklihood of any event, it helps to start by establishing the facts of how similar historical events played out:
- Each year the seasonal flu infects 5-20% of Americans
- The 2009 swine flu pandemic lasted over a year, and infected 57 million Americans. A vaccine was developed 6 months into the pandemic.
- SARs never really became a pandemic, but it did infect 29 Americans. Interestingly enough, a vaccine and a test for detecting SARs were developed only after the virus was stopped.
- The Spanish flu infected 28% of the US population (which at the time was 101 million). It lasted three years, and came in two waves. But that was in 1915, so I suppose things were different back then.
- The most recent Ebola outbreak killed roughly 10,000 people.
- In the continental US there were 5,168 cases of Zika virus.
This is a combination of comments I have heard and just the best arguments I can come up with.
- The population density of Wuhan China is apparently the same as the population density of my home city of Phoenix Arizona. Phoenix itself is less dense than the average US city. It doesnt seem like density has been a big factor in disease spread.
- When the Spanish flu infected so many Americans the population was much less dense (One third of the population in the same area, and much more of the population in rural agricultural areas).
The SARs vaccine took a year to develop. The vaccine for the h1n1 vaccine was released 6 months into the pandemic. The seasonal flu actually has vaccines, and 5-20% of the US population gets the flu each year anyway. Certainly a vaccine would help stop the spread of Coronavirus, but its not a slam dunk.
Yes that is true. Nothing happened for those diseases. But, among the epidemics I listed above, those two are the most different from the rest. They spread differently than the others: Zika spreads by mosquitos and Ebola spreads by contact with blood of those infected with Ebola. SARs, the spanish flu, the season flu, swine flu, and Coronavirus spread similarly and are actually all related genetically.
A lot of people got the Swine flu. Something did happen, in the sense that lots and lots of people got it. I think people remembered it as "nothing happened" because getting a cold or the flu is a mundane unexceptional event that is not at all comparable to the kinds of serious illness people worry about with Coronavirus. That doesnt mean nothing happened, just nothing all that bad happened.
The spanish flu infected so many people, but that was 100 years ago. Now we are better and more capable of combatting the disease
Well, how exactly are we better at combatting disease? I dont know if people are actually any smarter than they were in 1915. There certainly is a lot more science and technology about disease today- we can design and manufacture vaccines for instance- but someone has to actually implement smart and effective policy to combat epidemics. The effectiveness of government and the practical wisdom of disease experts are the real bottlenecks.
We are a lot more wealthy, and we have telecommunications, and unlike 1915 everyone works service jobs instead of agriculture jobs.
Maybe. This counter argument seems the most correct, however inconclusive. People today have more wealth than they did in 1915, and agriculture is a lot more productive. If people want to hole up in their house for a month or two, then I think they are capable of doing so today than 100 years ago. If we simply all did this, then I would think we would beat Coronavirus.
But, for this to work, we would actually have to do it. Good ideas dont just happen for being good, they happen for reasons, and I cant see a reason why people would put this into practice. People currently have a hard time believing there will be any problem at all, much less believe they need to shore up months of supplies to self quarantine. Even if this would work and we were in a real crisis, how do you get people to do it? Coordinating people into doing the right thing is hard.
It is too late. It cannot be contained. To contain a virus, you actually have to shut down all traffic between infected and non-infected areas. After it has spread even a little bit into an infected area it is too late, and it is already too late. The US did not shut down enough air traffic to enough places nor did it do so quickly enough. Some people have definitely gotten into the US with the virus. That is all it takes.
Furthermore, coronavirus is spreading far faster than SARs, Ebola, or swine flu did. As I type this, there are roughly 80,000 cases. A month ago it was around 5,000. The number of cases has doubled roughly every week. Authorities cannot chase down and quarantine infected individuals fast enough.
This was told to me after I said I was worried about a plane trip I may be taking in a few months. Getting Coronavirus on a plane today may indeed be at that rate, but the growth rate of cases is super high. There were 15 cases of Coronavirus in the US at the beginnig of February. 3 months of doubling every week is 122,800 Americans or 0.3% of the US population. Those odds seem greater than that of getting in a car accident.
I really just cant see how Coronavirus could not become a pandemic. People just seem to have a kind of blind hope about it. Here are some non-charitable explainations for why so few people are on my side:
- People just havent learned from history, so they dont know anything. When people dont know, they dont say "I dont know" and feel a little confused, they often just believe something. So, people dont know anything, and the normal default belief for this kind of thing is apparently that it will be nothing.
- Seems like in practice, a lot of people just deny that outlier events ever happen. I think its a bias against considering outlier events. I think people are understandably worried that if you talk about a rare event, or anything that is very implausible, that it will sound as if you think that rare event is actually not rare, and you will therefore not sound reasonable. So in an attempt to appear reasonable, they avoid talking about them or even underestimate them to advertise that they know how rare they are. But you know, rare things do happen, albeit rarely.
- I think people are kind of statistically illiterate and they round small percentages to 0%. So the mortality rate is 2% (which is actually scarily high), but for them, 2% is small so they treat it like its really 0% instead. Furthermore, I think people "clump" evaluations together in their head. So if Coronavirus is nothing to worry about because the morality rate is 0%, then it is also nothing to worry about for every conceivable way it might be worrisome. If its not worrisome because it wont kill you, it is also not worrisome because no one will get it. That doesnt make any sense when you say it, and it is obviously false, but I think thats how people actually think.