Covid-19: Nobel Laureate Sees Light at the End of the Tunnel

If you are already tired of social distancing, compulsive hand washing, and empty grocery store shelves, here's an encouraging item from the Lost Angeles Times:

Los Angeles Times, March 23, 2020: Michael Levitt, a Nobel laureate and Stanford biophysicist, began analyzing the number of COVID-19 cases worldwide in January and correctly calculated that China would get through the worst of its coronavirus outbreak long before many health experts had predicted. Now he foresees a similar outcome in the United States and the rest of the world. While many epidemiologists are warning of months, or even years, of massive social disruption and millions of deaths, Levitt says the data simply don’t support such a dire scenario — especially in areas where reasonable social distancing measures are in place. Read more

The turning point in an epidemic occurs when the number of new cases reported each day turns down. Canadian Government stats, suggest that this may have happened in Canada late last week:

Figure 3. New reported COVID-19 cases (n=1,041Footnote1) in Canada by date of symptom onset.

Note: The shaded area represents a period of time (lag time) where it is expected that cases have occurred but have not yet been reported nationally.

But today, March 24, British Columbia announced 145 new cases, so maybe the worst is yet to come. 

Related: 
Nassim Taleb: The UK's coronavirus policy may sound scientific. It isn't:

... when one deals with deep uncertainty, both governance and precaution require us to hedge for the worst. While risk-taking is a business that is left to individuals, collective safety and systemic risk are the business of the state. Failing that mandate of prudence by gambling with the lives of citizens is a professional wrongdoing that extends beyond academic mistake; it is a violation of the ethics of governing. The obvious policy left now is a lockdown, with overactive testing and contact tracing: follow the evidence from China and South Korea rather than thousands of error-prone computer codes. So we have wasted weeks, and ones that matter with a multiplicative threat.

New York Post: Coronavirus may have already infected half of UK, study says

If the New York Post is correct in reporting that half the UK population has already been infected with Covid-19, while only 422 deaths have resulted, we can infer that the death rate from this virus is in the order of 0.0006%, give or take the odd zero. If that's the case, then maybe I need not worry that so many of the people where I live seem to have no comprehension of the meaning of the term "social distancing."