If the total number of people who have been infected by coronavirus doubles every five days, then doesn’t that mean that a normal person infected with coronavirus infects one other person in five days? It’s not very transmissible.
By all means sell off your stocks (I have) and maybe stock up a bit on food (I haven’t) but the Rational person wouldn’t panic. We’re not all going to die of water lily poisoning.
Not exactly. There’s an incubation period, and people eventually stop being infectious. A longer incubation period slows the doubling rate, but makes containment harder rather than easier. The majority of infected people won’t infect anyone; they’ll be quarantined or self-isolated before they get the chance. The 5-day doubling time is an empirical observation, made in contexts where significant efforts are already being made to limit spread; if we make less effort than the cities which generated that data, the doubling time will be faster.
The parameter typically used for estimating infectiousness is R0, which determines the fraction of transmissions which would have to be prevented in order to contain an outbreak. Estimates of R0 range from high to very high.
If the total number of people who have been infected by coronavirus doubles every five days, then doesn’t that mean that a normal person infected with coronavirus infects one other person in five days? It’s not very transmissible.
By all means sell off your stocks (I have) and maybe stock up a bit on food (I haven’t) but the Rational person wouldn’t panic. We’re not all going to die of water lily poisoning.
Not exactly. There’s an incubation period, and people eventually stop being infectious. A longer incubation period slows the doubling rate, but makes containment harder rather than easier. The majority of infected people won’t infect anyone; they’ll be quarantined or self-isolated before they get the chance. The 5-day doubling time is an empirical observation, made in contexts where significant efforts are already being made to limit spread; if we make less effort than the cities which generated that data, the doubling time will be faster.
The parameter typically used for estimating infectiousness is R0, which determines the fraction of transmissions which would have to be prevented in order to contain an outbreak. Estimates of R0 range from high to very high.