6 March 2020

 I was trying to get a number sense about 100,000 cases since January...

Assuming the world population is 7 billion (low estimate), then 100,000 / 7 billion = 100 / 7 million = 1 / 70,000.

But, let’s back it up to 100 / 7 million . If Austin is about 1 million people, you could read that as 14 or 15 people in Austin would be “infected”... or you could say 100 people across 7 Austin-sized cities - like 100 people “infected” across central Texas.

Granted, the cases are getting out of containment, so it might be more accurate to estimate with 100,000 cases across China - a population of only 1 billion. But even changing by that factor of 7 puts an even spread as 100 people “infected” in Austin.

Now, have there been more than 100 births in Austin, over the last 2 months? Not entirely a good gauge, because there’s also been more than 100 deaths from other causes, over the last 2 months, in Austin. But, I suspect our birth rates are doing an admirable job of surpassing our death rates.

Still, infection does tend to follow a logistic curve, so we can expect a faster rate of infection before we start to see it slow down. I wonder, “Do we have enough information to accurately predict the growth curve of this virus?”