Well, it won't keep doubling forever, obviously. Out of curiosity what total death toll would we have to see for you to think "Well, I guess it turned out to not be much more than a normal flu epidemic"? In other words, at what point does it become undeniable that more people died than would have from a flu? I don't mean rate of spread or rate of increase, or projections, I mean a specific final minimum number. We obviously aren't there yet.
I started a spreadsheet ten days ago. I took the current numbers for the U.S. and just started multiplying them by 1.2 every day compounding, that was pretty close to the growth we had been seeing for the previous week. It turned out to be too optimistic. The total number of deaths as of today is more than twice as high than what my little spreadsheet predicted based on a 20% growth rate starting March 20.
So just out of curiosity, I started over, putting in today's fatality totals (3773 fatalities in America, so far) and assuming a 20% daily increase. That's a fair bit slower than the growth we've seen for the past three weeks.
Last year about 34,000 Americans died from the flu. If the current rate of growth keeps up with what we've had over the past two weeks, then we'll hit the 34,000 mark at about April 12.
The 2009 H1N1 pandemic is also often mentioned in comparison. That killed about 12,000 people in America. Again, if the current trajectory holds, we'll hit that around April 6.
To me, at least, hitting 34,000 would tell us that the current pandemic is much worse than the flu, because we've taken an "all hands on deck" approach, albeit later than many would have preferred. If we hit the same level of fatalities as influenza despite all that effort, that tells us something.
I guess we'll see. I would be pretty happy for you to be right. We might not have long to wait.
Just for the sake of conversation, here's a projection starting with today's fatality numbers and assuming a 20% daily increase run out over three weeks:
3773 31-Mar
4527 1-Apr
5433 2-Apr
6519 3-Apr
7823 4-Apr
9388 5-Apr
11,266 6-Apr
13,519 7-Apr
16,223 8-Apr
19,467 9-Apr
23,361 10-Apr
28,033 11-Apr
33,640 12-Apr
40,368 13-Apr
48,442 14-Apr
58,130 15-Apr
69,756 16-Apr
83,708 17-Apr
100,449 18-Apr
120,539 19-Apr
144,647 20-Apr
173,577 21-Apr
Hopefully those numbers are far too pessimistic. So far, assuming a 20% daily growth rate for fatalities has been too optimistic.
