Some Coronavirus Spread Analysis

I'm doing some analysis on how many actual cases there are in Louisiana (not the number confirmed or reported). These are going to be some huge assumptions and we can play around with the numbers some. This is simply me being a nerd and looking at data.

Based on data released by China and Italy, time from onset of symptoms to death is about 15 days, and incubation time is about 5 days. This gives a general estimate of 20 days from infection to death. Obviously this is an average.

Now for mortality rate. Some places have reported as high as 8%, some as low as 0.6%, but this is just the number of reported cases. I will assume 0.5% for this and we can run different numbers for different rates later.

If 0.5% of the population dies, and it takes 20 days for them to die, then 20 days before the first death, there were 200 infections. Louisiana's first death was on March 16th. That means on February 25th, there were 200 cases.

Now it gets a little bit tricky. In Italy, the number of cases doubled roughly every 3-4 days before they shut everything down. I'll assume that from Feb 25th we doubled every 3 days because we were running business as usual at that point.

That means that by the time of the first death (March 16th), our number of cases would have doubled 6 times. So by the time of the first death, there were already 12,800 cases. Since Italy shut everything down they have been doubling about every 5 days. If we assume the same for us since we've started shutting things down, we've doubled 1 more time since the first death, putting our current number of actual cases at 25,600. Which is about 0.54% of the population of Louisiana. We are currently reporting 392 cases. We are really behind on testing but as the tests begin to ramp up so will the number of cases. If the math is correct (huge assumption lol), then by April 9th we will have around 128 deaths in Louisiana.

This isn't a sky is falling thread I'm just playing with numbers. You can move the mortality rate up and down and the length of time it takes the virus to double and you'll get a wide variety of numbers.


*Based off of estimated 542 cases by COB today. IF ALL RATES REMAIN THE SAME THROUGH MARCH 30*