Originally Posted by mickeycrimm View Post
Originally Posted by redietz View Post
As per usual, "Singer' avoids posting numbers of any kind.

My opinion? There will be a minimum of 10 million infected. The trick will be, if 20% require hospitalization, to not overwhelm the U.S. health care system in a span of a couple of months.

My opinion is probably way, way low. The head of the German equivalent of the CDC just announced an expectation that more than half of Germans will be infected.

I understand the preference to pretend it's an illusion, but that preference does nobody any favors.
Bump. On March 10 redietz predicted 10 million infected and he put the over/under on hospitalizations for those infected at 20%. And he was "worried" about our health care system being overwhelmed by that 20% in the span of the "next couple of months." Since he wrote the post on March 10 then May 10 would be the end of the "next couple of months."

The context of his post is that 10 million would be infected by May 10, that number has turned out to be about 4.5 million. And he was well off on the 20% hospitalization rate too.

But I guarantee you redietz has more routes than Greyhound Bus Lines so will have ample excuses for his very bad math. But he will probably go with a flat out denial that he was wrong.
Mickey, you were always good with numbers, but you butchered these.

First of all, there are just 1.4 million confirmed cases in the U.S. right now (May 14). The world total is about 4.5 million, which is the number you quoted. The confirmed number is so low because testing has been low per capita compared to other countries. Now "confirmed cases," of course is not the same as "people in U.S. who have had the virus." I figure that's pretty obvious, but you seem to have messed that up. Let me repeat that. In the post you quote, I said "infected," not "confirmed cases." Two very different things, which leads to:

Second, as to how many people actually have had the disease in the U.S., the estimate based on testing thus far (at the low end) is 5%. At the high end, it's 15%. Five percent of U.S. population would yield about 15 million, so my 10 million was low.

Third, it's mitigation and social distancing, which were instituted AFTER that March 10 post, that flattened the curve. The trick was going to be to prevent overwhelming hospitalizations, and the trick did the job. It also slowed the spread, which resulted in a more staggered incursion of the virus state-to-state. Now you'll see the red southern states begin to have issues.

Fourth, I framed much of this in hypotheticals, as in "if 20% require hospitalization." You seem to skip the meaning of these, as you do with responses to kewlJ, and you frame them in declaratives. For example, the title "Coronavirus is a scam" is a declarative. Not sure how you posted that and have the cajones to keep posting on the subject, but to each his own.

Finally, Boz, any time you want to put me through a polygraph, you let me know. Did you manage to contact that company president who partnered with me on the futures deal back in 2000? I sent you his name and the business name. I actually do not know if he is still alive; I haven't spoken to him in more than a decade. He retired and has got to be 20 years older than me. I'd give the company of which he was president a call. I see they are still open for business during the pandemic.

Good luck, fellas. As I said, I post here mainly to correct egregious errors. Mickey's were egregious.