Tuesday, May 5, 2020

Let's see

According to Power Line, only 83 of the 428 total deaths in Minnesota as of yesterday have been of people living outside of long-term care facilities.

At the same time, the official stance is that there could be 100 cases for every known positive. As of yesterday, that was 7234, with possibly as many as 80% of them outside long-term care. So maybe over 580,000 Minnesotans have already had it...that would almost 11% of the state's population.

But let's be conservative, and say that it is half that; 83 deaths divided by 290,000 cases would be a death rate of 0.03% (outside long-term care).

Some of those cases are people who recovered, but some cases are still in progress, and because the pandemic has still been spreading, the number that will die soon could be much larger than the number that already have died; I will make a guess of 1000 additional people here.  That raises the death rate to 0.4%; about 21,300 (outside long-term care).

The epidemic in the long-term care facilities is basically separate. I guessed above that they were 1.5% of the population, or 81,000, but maybe it is only 1%.  [EDITED TO ADD:  It is under 1%.] Clearly their death rate is much higher than the general population, my guess at present would be 10%*.  So say 8100 additional long-term-care deaths, for a total of 29,400.

The latest I've seen from the state's model, which they are supposedly running again this week, is a projection of about 22,000 deaths. The governor's orders don't exactly match the modeling assumptions, so this is probably too high.

Now, to make a more liberal estimate, 83 deaths divided by 580,000 cases would be a death rate of 0.01%.  If I stay proportional to my earlier guess, and say that there maybe are 2000 additional infected people who will die soon, then the guess overwhelms the number of actual deaths, and I'm back to an estimate of a 0.4% death rate, and the same prediction for the state overall.

If I keep my guess at the same 1000 as before, then it would be a death rate of 0.2%, with total deaths of about 18,800.

These numbers partially confirm what my intuition has been telling me:  some level of shutdown is helpful, but the state has been locked down too much for too long. Put more safeguards around the nursing homes, but most of the restrictions on the general population should be eased. People will still act according to their personal risk tolerance, which will do much to "flatten the curve" without any government action.

A couple of days ago, by the way, the health department representative when questioned revealed that 99.24% of the people who died had underlying health conditions. They're sitting on a lot of data that they're not sharing freely, and they are trying to get even more, legally or not.

That 580,000 is also the last number that I've heard for the number of unemployment applications in the state.

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* I noticed while writing that an estimate of a rate of 10%, for something that must be at least 1%, mathematically cannot be off by more than a factor of 10.

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