what are they not telling us?

Well, I think mostly what "they" are not telling us is that they are not really sure what to do for the best either. I'm sure Boris's knowledge of Greek and other classic civilsation is no more use than my physics - though I can say when looking at rising numbers that they look much less scary on a logarithmic plot....

Even the mortality seems to vary enormously by county - which may actually suggest that in some places more people have it than we realise, deaths are easy to count, folk with mild symptoms rather less so.

The other elephant in the room not mentioned very loudly is that once you go into isolation, you cannot come out, or at least when you do the risk is unchanged. Unless you expect a cure in the mean time,  So all these folk still trapped  in tower blocks in Wuhan may not have caught the disease, but they are a vulnerable to it as soon as they come out. So at best you have to release the restrictions very slowly, zone by zone.

IF you like numbers, here are some sobering tables and charts


Compared to the 1918 'spanish' flu, where in the end we think it fizzled out by the time that about 27% of people had got it (so a touch under 6 billion from an estimated  world population of 1.8 billion back then, but of course with a lot less travel and interconnections), and of them we estimate that about 1%, say 50 million, died.

Some figures make it look like this new one could be about twice as deadly as that, even though medical understanding has improved quite a bit in the last century, but we are extrapolating from the wrong end of the curve at the moment, we'll only know for sure in hindsight.

what are they not telling us?

Well, I think mostly what "they" are not telling us is that they are not really sure what to do for the best either. I'm sure Boris's knowledge of Greek and other classic civilsation is no more use than my physics - though I can say when looking at rising numbers that they look much less scary on a logarithmic plot....

Even the mortality seems to vary enormously by county - which may actually suggest that in some places more people have it than we realise, deaths are easy to count, folk with mild symptoms rather less so.

The other elephant in the room not mentioned very loudly is that once you go into isolation, you cannot come out, or at least when you do the risk is unchanged. Unless you expect a cure in the mean time,  So all these folk still trapped  in tower blocks in Wuhan may not have caught the disease, but they are a vulnerable to it as soon as they come out. So at best you have to release the restrictions very slowly, zone by zone.

IF you like numbers, here are some sobering tables and charts


Compared to the 1918 'spanish' flu, where in the end we think it fizzled out by the time that about 27% of people had got it (so a touch under 6 billion from an estimated  world population of 1.8 billion back then, but of course with a lot less travel and interconnections), and of them we estimate that about 1%, say 50 million, died.

Some figures make it look like this new one could be about twice as deadly as that, even though medical understanding has improved quite a bit in the last century, but we are extrapolating from the wrong end of the curve at the moment, we'll only know for sure in hindsight.