Critical Thinking on the Spread of Corona
A prominent Israeli mathematician, analyst and former general claims simple statistical analysis demonstrates that the spread of COVID-19 peaks after about 40 days and declines to almost zero after 70 days — no matter where it strikes, and no matter what measures governments impose to try to thwart it.
Is Professor Ben Israel right when he says the COVID-19 virus disappears after 70 days?
There are some tantalising hints that he might, in a way, be right.
Data from Sweden, Italy, and Germany seem to indicate that the official figures of infections are wildly off. These are the places where they have done any random testing at all while being a little bit into the development of the epidemic, and they all showed that the official figures were at the very most 10% of the true figure. Probably more like 5%. Possibly even lower. This means that for every person who shows up in hospital with Covid-19, at least 9 and maybe up to 19 people walk around undetected.
Ist relevant fact: new data seems to indicate that the number of people infected by every ill person isn’t 2.5, as they originally thought, but closer to 5.
2nd relevant fact: the number of new infections seems to be levelling off at about the same point, which is what Prof. Israel has observed.
3rd relevant fact: some people who have recovered from Covid-19 seem to have no Covid-19 antibodies at all.
4th relevant figure: school children are very unlikely to develop Covid-19 symptoms, and don’t seem to spread it to any significant extent.
One thing could explain all of this.
If a previous infection with some of the other common coronaviruses gives you long-lasting resistance to Covid-19.
This was suggested as the reason why so few children develop symptoms. They get colds all the time; they have in all likelihood been infected with one of the other coronaviruses fairly recently and have some resistance.
It would explain the absence of antibodies: the immune system can be primed to produce antibodies to the other coronavirus, and those antibodies can fight Covid-19 reasonably well but don’t show up on the tests.
It would explain why infections level off: the rate of people who will get infected isn’t in the region of 80%, which is simply something that has been assumed because the virus is new. It is actually closer to 20%. This would mean that “herd immunity” sets in a lot faster than has been assumed.
But since every infected person can infect 5 more, it still spreads rapidly and is capable of overwhelming a health system if no action at all is taken.
The key observation, however, is this. If the proportion of susceptible people is much lower than has been assumed, then this could explain what he believes he has observed. It doesn’t matter much exactly why this is so; We are just using an old conjecture we have come across.
We say it’s unlikely that he’s right. ,using a lot of “if” and conjecture and cherry-picking to string together the argument above. But it’s not something to be dismissed out of hand; there is a theoretically possible scenario that makes some sort of sense, and even a stab at a mechanism that could make it happen.
Critical thinking of this nature could certainly help in a difficult situation of this nature