It’s been six years now since the early days of the Covid pandemic. People who were paying super close attention started hearing rumors about something going on in China towards the end of 2019 — my earliest posts about it on Facebook were from November that year.
Even at the time, people were utterly clueless about the mathematics of how a highly infectious virus spread. I remember spending hours writing posts on various different social media sites explaining that the Infection Fatality Rates and the R value were showing that we could be looking at millions dead. People didn’t tend to believe me:
“SEVERAL MILLION DEAD! Okay, I’m done. No one is predicting that. But you made me laugh. Thanks.” You can do the math yourself. Use a low average death estimate of 0.4%. Assume 60% of the population catches it and then we reach herd immunity (which is generous): 328 million people in the US.
60% of that is 196 million catch it.
0.4% of that is 780,000 dead. But that’s with low assumptions…
Graph showing fatality rates with and without comorbidities, by age.
It was like typing to a wall. In fact, it’s pretty likely that it still is, since these days, the discourse is all about how bad the economic and educational impact of lockdowns was — and not about the fact that if the world had acted in concert and forcefully, we could have had a much better outcome than we did. The health response was too soft, the lockdown too lenient, and as a result, we took all the hits.
Of course, these days people also forget just how deadly it was and how many died, and so on. We now know that the overall IFR was probably higher than 0.4%, but very strongly tilted towards older people and those with comorbidities. We also now know that herd immunity was a pipe dream — instead we managed to get vaccines out in record time and the ordinary course of viral evolution ended up reducing the death rate until now we behave as if Covid is just a deadlier flu (it isn’t, that thinking ignores long-term impact of the disease).
The upshot: my math was not that far off — the estimated toll in the US ended up being 1.2 to 1.4 million souls, and worldwide it’s estimated as between 15 and 28.5 million dead. Plenty of denial of this, these days, and plenty of folks blaming the vaccines for what are most likely issues caused by the disease in the first place.
Anyway, in the midst of it all, tired of running math in my spreadsheets (yeah, I was tracking it all in spreadsheets, what can I say?), I started thinking about why only a few sorts of people were wrapping their heads around the implications. The thing they all had in common was that they lived with exponential curves. Epidemiologists, Wall Street quants, statisticians… and game designers.
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