I want to talk about timeline for all of this, what's gonna happen? because the
predictions we've been getting from our elected officials have been a little
unreliable. "when you have 15 people and the 15 within a couple of days is going
to be down to close to zero that's a pretty good job we've done". that was
February 26, there were 60 cases in the US by then, not 15, and it didn't go to
zero, they went to 4663 as of March 17. where
are the numbers going next? up or down? let's take a look at the history of this
thing. first case of coronavirus surfaced in China mid November. by late December
Chinese doctors were trying to sound the alarm, something unusual was going on. but
as we all know initially the authorities shut them down and tried to keep the
whole thing under wraps. Wuhan went into lockdown on January 23
roughly a month after doctors tried to blow the whistle. by then there were 830
cases. now, the incubation period varies from a couple of days to all the way to
27 days for some outliers so we're talking average a couple weeks give or
take, and in fact the quarantine in most airports and borders is 14 days so if
the measures work we should expect the number of new infections to start going
down after about two weeks roughly. this is new cases reported day by day in
China, here we are in January 23, Wuhan goes on lockdown
but new cases continued to pop up, that's expected, right? the virus was
incubating in those people. two weeks of lockdown puts us on February 6. after
that, it does start to come down. a couple odd days but in general the trend is a
clear down ramp from 3,000 new cases a day at the peak to 40 cases a day
recently, that's a massive drop. okay, some people don't trust those numbers, maybe
they're not reporting them accurately, they want to look better for the
international community, who knows. in science you always want to look at
replication so let's look at South Korea. in Korea they never did a full lockdown.
instead, throughout February there are massive campaigns of public education
and containment, they were asking the population to work
from home and they started rolling out their extensive testing. about a quarter
million Koreans have now been tested for coronavirus. by early March we see the
number of new infections start to go down
they're seeing very small numbers now. now, these are not like the experiments
I'm used to doing in a lab where you control every little factor, there's a
lot of variables here, we're looking at an entire country, but the trends suggest
that these countries have turned the corner. wait, maybe this is the normal
course of the infection, maybe the virus comes on for a couple weeks and then
naturally dies off and goes away, maybe all those measures have nothing to do
with it, this is just the natural course. what we need is another example where
things didn't go so textbook. Italy. after China it's the country that's been hit
the hardest, let's look at Italy and Korea side-by-side. unlike China they
have similar population size, 60 and 51 million. I replotted all the numbers day
by day, Korea is orange, coronavirus got there a little earlier, not surprising
they're right next to China, Italy is about three days behind Korea. so Korea
rose first but by early March Italy had caught up. now, remember throughout
February Korea's clamping down hard, social education, people are staying at
home, getting tested, by early March their numbers are going down
Italy keeps rising. Italy finally sets the nationwide quarantine on March 9. by
then they're averaging almost 2,000 new cases a day, twice what Korea was
averaging at their peak. and Italian cases kept rising. they're currently
averaging 3,500 new cases a day. that's the same China was averaging at their peak
with a much larger population of course. okay the numbers kept rising even after
Italy instituted the quarantine. does that mean it's not working?
no, it's expected. it's been about 10 days of quarantine now so if it's like in
Asia this may start to round down sometime this week. now, of course there
are many differences between the two countries, societal and otherwise
Italians are touchier, italians may be more gregarious, they may go out more
that may all play a role but the point here is we have two countries of similar
population size that got hit at around the same time and yet vastly different
outcomes. and I love Italy, it's one of my favorite countries in the world and I
love Italian people and it really hurts me to see this but all we can do is
learn from it. France and Spain are also hurting, both instituted a lockdown this
week, borders closed, still trending up entirely expected. okay, what about the
US? clearly trending up. now, the US government has started to change its attitude
recently. new guidelines came out this week recommending closing schools and
avoiding non-essential travel, not going to bars and restaurants, etc. so all
societal and geographical differences notwithstanding, if the virus behaves in
the West as it did in the far east, we're looking at a couple weeks until we pass
that peak and the numbers start going down and then probably another couple
weeks till the numbers get really low. things are gonna get worse before they
get better. also worth noting, we don't know what happens after the lock downs
get lifted and people go back to their normal lives. it's possible we will see
another little uptick but even if we do it'll probably be much much smaller than
what we're seeing now and we'll be much better prepared. so we have a model to
follow, we can try to replicate the Korean case or the Italian. this is
doable and we can make it happen but it's gonna take laying low for a while
it's a drag, I get that, but it will keep the number of deaths in the at-risk
group as low as possible. in the meantime, we're gonna figure out a lot about this
virus and how to deal with it. these are the scientific studies on coronavirus
published over the last three days. the pace of publication has been insane. I
can tell you from personal experience it normally takes months, sometimes even
years to get a paper peer-reviewed and accepted and published and out and
available for reading. this turnover is unreal. they're probably fast-tracking
these papers on coronavirus like crazy. clinical trials ongoing all over the
world looking at possible therapies and some vaccines are already in phase one
of testing. this virus is a couple of months old, I've never seen this speed of
development in my entire life. it's just to show you that the scientific
community is not gonna take this lying down. science is the most powerful thing
we came up with as a species and this is the time to put politics and ideology to
the side and let science and Public Health do the work. which is another
reason that containing the spread is a great strategy, this whole idea of
flattening the curve. even if I do end up getting infected, having it now or six
months or a year from now is probably gonna make a huge difference in terms of
resources, knowledge and experience. the only vaccine we have right now is high
quality information and I'll do my part to keep sharing it with
everybody so stay positive, we're gonna figure this one out and I'll see you
soon. if you thought that video was useful consider sharing with others who
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