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He lowered it from 40-70% to 20-60%, hardly a qualitative change. The fact is that under essentially any epidemiological model, if you have R0 > 1 and no countermeasures, it's going to hit a sizable fraction of the world population, because the exponential growth only gets stopped by running out of victims.


Please read the entire source.

> Summary: Should have said 40-70% of adults in a situation without effective controls.

There's an enormous difference between 40-70% of everyone and 20-60% of adults - specifically if no countermeasures are deployed.


But the point of this thread is discussing why countermeasures are justified. I'm saying that you should expect a disaster if no countermeasures are deployed -- which is exactly what you're saying too.


The subject of this whole discussion is that there's a travel restriction being put in place. This is why I believe promoting numbers that were arrived at prematurely (I would argue unethically, with the intention of being 'first' in the news) and that specifically don't account for countermeasures to be a bad idea.

We should be trying to promote risk assessments that are situationally correct.




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