AlanSubie4Life
Efficiency Obsessed Member
Guys, I have to come clean on my predictions, it looks like I'm going to have a miss here:
I think we're likely to reach a little short of 10k deaths by the weekend, so this was a big miss by me! Maybe we'll get there by the end of day Sunday, but does that really count as the weekend?
And I don't know what I was talking about with the cases - I guess I must have been projecting from known cases - and I didn't account for test limitations. Obviously we're at 2 million cases at least NOW in the United States. So we'll probably be at 5-6 million by the weekend - hopefully not any higher.
Oops. My bad.
Still, with that many cases out there, and only maybe 300k identified by the weekend, how are we going to stop this thing? I'm not so sure we are. People are generally being good about staying at home and avoiding gatherings, but it seems like a lot of mixed messages out there in some states, and there will always be exceptions when you're talking about millions of infected people walking around.
I feel like the next pillar to crumble will be the trucking & shipping industries. It just seems like it's inevitable that they will get hopelessly infected with that many cases out there. I wonder if shipping will go on? Starting to feel a bit pessimistic, TBH. Is this why everyone is hoarding TP & food? Maybe these people are actually super geniuses?
Wanted to circle back around to this. I was looking at the Nextstrain data. It looks like all the 33 genomes currently from New York are likely European introductions, most of which likely occurred in February sometime (not January as I suggested might be the case). Nothing has been sampled yet that appears to have been an early China introduction. However, it is possible (I think) that there are missing pieces to the puzzle - it's still possible that there is a set of viruses out there that were more direct descendants/imports from China. We'd need a bit more sampling to know I think.
I guess it's also possible that virus was circulating at a low level in France, UK, etc., even in January, and one of these travelers did indeed bring it over in that timeframe from one of those places. Given how people travel, I suppose that might not be that unlikely. And I think the picture would look the same (meaning the introductions could have occurred in January and still been sourced from Europe).
In any case, what seems certain is that there were numerous sparks (from Spain, UK, Belgium, France, etc. - surprisingly, nothing yet sampled as clearly from Italy), as can be seen in the data in the tree (looks like at least 8 separate introductions, probably more). It's amazing how quickly these morphed into a raging fire.
I'm no expert on reading these trees of course, but it's relatively easy to figure out the basics. These issues of timing, etc., are harder to determine. The red dots are the NY sourced genomes.
I think we're likely to reach a little short of 10k deaths by the weekend, so this was a big miss by me! Maybe we'll get there by the end of day Sunday, but does that really count as the weekend?
And I don't know what I was talking about with the cases - I guess I must have been projecting from known cases - and I didn't account for test limitations. Obviously we're at 2 million cases at least NOW in the United States. So we'll probably be at 5-6 million by the weekend - hopefully not any higher.
Oops. My bad.
Still, with that many cases out there, and only maybe 300k identified by the weekend, how are we going to stop this thing? I'm not so sure we are. People are generally being good about staying at home and avoiding gatherings, but it seems like a lot of mixed messages out there in some states, and there will always be exceptions when you're talking about millions of infected people walking around.
I feel like the next pillar to crumble will be the trucking & shipping industries. It just seems like it's inevitable that they will get hopelessly infected with that many cases out there. I wonder if shipping will go on? Starting to feel a bit pessimistic, TBH. Is this why everyone is hoarding TP & food? Maybe these people are actually super geniuses?
Wanted to circle back around to this. I was looking at the Nextstrain data. It looks like all the 33 genomes currently from New York are likely European introductions, most of which likely occurred in February sometime (not January as I suggested might be the case). Nothing has been sampled yet that appears to have been an early China introduction. However, it is possible (I think) that there are missing pieces to the puzzle - it's still possible that there is a set of viruses out there that were more direct descendants/imports from China. We'd need a bit more sampling to know I think.
I guess it's also possible that virus was circulating at a low level in France, UK, etc., even in January, and one of these travelers did indeed bring it over in that timeframe from one of those places. Given how people travel, I suppose that might not be that unlikely. And I think the picture would look the same (meaning the introductions could have occurred in January and still been sourced from Europe).
In any case, what seems certain is that there were numerous sparks (from Spain, UK, Belgium, France, etc. - surprisingly, nothing yet sampled as clearly from Italy), as can be seen in the data in the tree (looks like at least 8 separate introductions, probably more). It's amazing how quickly these morphed into a raging fire.
I'm no expert on reading these trees of course, but it's relatively easy to figure out the basics. These issues of timing, etc., are harder to determine. The red dots are the NY sourced genomes.
Last edited:
