At first glance the news today in the UK looked good as only 2 new cases were being reported, but then I realised that was only for Scotland. And instead of the 70 cases I had predicted yesterday, I saw 85. I had been hoping the 70 was me spotting a false trend, but apparently not.
This brings forward the day when I expect to get 3000 cases to 18th March which is now just 14 days away.
One bit of good news is that I would have expected 2 deaths by now. That might mean we have just been lucky, but it also might imply a much higher rate of detection. But even at the highest rate of detection I expect deaths to start occurring in the UK by the weekend.
I estimate there is now one person infected per 160,000 people, which means if they were evenly spread, then there is a good chance of there being someone any large town. By Saturday 7th March I predict one person in every 80,000 will be infected which means roughly one person in an average premier league football crowd, but only 4 deaths. But by the following Saturday I estimate one in any crowd of 10,000 people, a 1 in 20 chance of being on a train with someone who has CV and 30 deaths.
Worldwide
S.Korea
I see S.Korea continues to find new cases, however their detection rate is falling from 180 down to 160 cases per death. That means that either many people are being missed, or there’s a lag in the death rate. One bit of good news had been that the rate of rise in the number of cases had dropped at about 10 days after they implemented a new pro-active policy, that had given hope they were finding almost everyone and had it under control, but it may now be climbing again.
But it’s difficult to konw whether the increase is due to higher effort being put into finding cases or whether it’s an underlying increase in infections.
It’s now pretty certain that even the S.Korean pro-active searching out for infected people is missing huge numbers and so I suspect that the 180 cases per death may be an underestimate. Over the last few days the rate of day-to-day increase has halved. That suggests they are catching half the carriers. So perhaps 350 people infected per death and nearer to 90% of people are not being caught by self-reporting.
The bad news that brings, is that it will spread like wildfire and the lacklustre “plans” of the UK will do almost nothing to halt it. The good news is that the total death rate and peak of hospitalisation could be half what had been previous thought. So, the health service will still fail in about 14 days, but the peak of the disaster could be half the carnage that I was expecting (but remember I’m expecting scenes far worse than Wuhan – perhaps an order of magnitude worse).
Iran
On a brighter note, Iran has hugely upped its detection rate. It’s still a 32 compared to S.Korea’s 160 but it was closer to 8 when they started.
Italy
Unfortunately, Italy’s detection rate remains low at only 31, however, in the next few days we should get an idea what effect the quarantine has had.
United States
The detection rate in the US is only 14, which is about as bad as Iran when it started. That is immensely worrying. They have found 129 cases. With 9 deaths I would expect at least 1800 cases and probably closer to 3500 cases. As such, it’s extremely likely it is already out of control and will hit the US extremely hard in the next couple of months.
Germany
One odd country is Germany with 244 cases and no deaths. That’s a massive difference compared to the US 14 cases per death. I don’t know the reason, but it seems that for some reason a higher percentage of cases are being found in Germany.
