Math 4 Wisdom. "Mathematics for Wisdom" by Andrius Kulikauskas.

Notes from talk with Shu-Hong:

"Wait for the test"
Guidelines for developing policy
US General in Italy (vigorous) vs. US General in Stuttgart (lax)
Michael Levitt's predictions

New Cases / Total Cases - Country - Total Cases

0 % China 82241
1 % South_Korea 9786
3 % San_Marino 229
4 % Qatar 693
5 % Kuwait 266
6 % Bahrain 515
6 % Italy 101739
6 % Taiwan 306
7 % Lebanon 446
7 % Singapore 844
7 % Slovakia 336
7 % Slovenia 763
8 % Bulgaria 359
8 % Denmark 2577
8 % Egypt 609
8 % Finland 1313
8 % Greece 1212
8 % Iceland 1086
8 % Iran 41495
8 % Japan 1953
8 % Malaysia 2626
8 % Norway 4226
8 % Pakistan 1625
9 % Ecuador 1966
9 % Estonia 715
9 % Sweden 4028
9 % Switzerland 15412
9 % Thailand 1651
9 % Uruguay 320
10 % Austria 9618
10 % Costa_Rica 330
10 % Germany 61913
10 % Latvia 376
10 % North_Macedonia 285
11 % France 44550
11 % Luxembourg 1988
11 % Peru 950
12 % Armenia 482
12 % Australia 4557
12 % Brazil 4579
12 % Czech_Republic 3002
12 % Hungary 447
12 % India 1251
12 % Indonesia 1414
12 % Iraq 630
12 % Netherlands 11750
12 % Saudi_Arabia 1453
13 % Algeria 511
13 % Bosnia_and_Herzegovina 353
13 % Colombia 798
13 % Croatia 790
13 % Haiti 15
13 % Ireland 2910
13 % Lithuania 484
13 % Moldova 298
13 % Poland 2055
13 % Spain 85195
14 % Andorra 370
14 % Mexico 1094
14 % United_Arab_Emirates 611
15 % Argentina 966
15 % Belgium 11899
15 % Israel 4473
15 % Panama 1075
15 % Portugal 6408
15 % Serbia 741
15 % South_Africa 1326
16 % Chile 2449
16 % Romania 1952
16 % Tunisia 312
16 % United_Kingdom 22141
16 % United_States_of_America 164620
17 % Dominican_Republic 901
18 % Morocco 556
18 % Russia 1836
19 % Canada 7424
19 % New_Zealand 647
19 % Philippines 2084
21 % Kazakhstan 325
23 % Ukraine 480
25 % Turkey 11535

Letter written March 23, 2020

The Coronavirus COVID-19 is an extremely contagious disease, a troublesomely lethal disease, and what is perhaps worst, a surreptitious disease. You can be spreading the disease before you even realize that you have it yourself.

There are two ways that countries approach this disease: 1) snuff it out, or 2) try to live with it and "slow it down". China, South Korea, Japan have almost succeeded in taking the first route. That means aggressively shutting down society, closing off cities, isolating people, testing everybody who might possibly have it, and chasing down every person they may have contacted. If you want to see how successful they are, then calculate the New Cases (In the Last Day) and divide by the Total Cases. In South Korea, it is 98 / 8897 = about 1%. Data

The US and many European countries have instead taken the "just slow it down" route. The statistics show that it is simply not effective. Here are countries in lockdown (New cases / Total Cases = Daily Growth Rate)

Italy: 6557 / 53578 = 12%
Spain: 4946 / 24926 = 20%
Germany: 3140 / 21463 = 15%

Note that lockdown is not as aggressive as chasing down every single case. So it is too little, too late. Here are countries without lockdown:

UK: 1035 / 5018 = 21%

Statistics for the US are here, click on "Yesterday"

US: 9339 / 33546 = 28%

You can see that it's too little, too late. The US is full of wishful thinking. And surely the US is underreporting and undercounting. Who knows how many mild cases are there in the US? But they are all carriers.

But let's accept the current numbers for the US and the current rate. We can project:

March 27: 115,000 cases
April 1: 400,000 cases
April 11: 4,500,000 cases
April 21: 55,000,000 cases

Those are the numbers with your current behavior in the US, where it's thinkable to have such get togethers, which nobody in Italy would contemplate. Now suppose that TODAY the US took drastic measures, as in Italy. Well, that would push it down to a 12% rate.

March 27: 60,000 cases
April 1: 105,000 cases
April 11: 320,000 cases
April 21: 1,000,000 cases
May 1: 3,000,000 cases
May 11: 10,000,000 cases
May 21: 30,000,000 cases
June 1: 90,000,000 cases

So you push it back a good month.

Here in Lithuania we took strict measures BEFORE internal spreading occurred. We had a lower rate than the US, and in fact, we had no internal spreading of the disease. But we shut down our society one week ago, on Monday, March 16. That meant the borders were closed, all schools were closed, all stores were closed (except for food and medicine), all events were prohibited, all government services were stopped (except online), and so on. Even so, the virus is progressing. About 100 people who returned from other countries were found to have the disease and so there have been cases where they spread it to family members. What is worse, the virus has appeared in various hospitals, probably because doctors came back from trips and didn't self-isolate sufficiently. So that means that hundreds of medical staff have to be quarantined. All kinds of mistakes are being made, and there are shortages of testing supplies. But this is the GOOD case. We are dealing with the virus and we have a chance.

If the world had worked together to snuff out the virus, then that would have been great. But instead we have hundreds and thousands of clusters throughout the world, spreading the disease. So the virus won't stop until it has gotten billions of people sick. This is not going to end in a couple of months. This will take a couple of years. This is like the 1918 flu pandemic.

In our case, what is the death rate? So far 340,000 have contracted the virus. About 15,000 died (4%) , 100,000 recovered (29%), and 225,000 are still sick. Which is to say, for the inactive cases, the death rate is 13%. Now, if mild cases are not being reported, then it could be lower. Also, in Germany, there have been 25,000 cases with 94 deaths so far (0.3%), whereas in Italy there have been 59,000 cases with 5,500 death so far (9%). In the US, there have been 33,000 cases with 420 deaths so far (1.3%).

Even a low death rate of 3% means 30 million people out of every billion people. Which is to say, we can expect 100 million people to die because of our behavior. But it could be 500 million people depending on our solidarity. What will happen to the people in Africa or India or South America?

This problem has changed our world. We are very vulnerable. Countries like Russia or China or Turkey and many others can take the opportunity to start wars. There will doubtless be a great depression.

The good thing is this is an opportunity to remake our world. We see the kind of effort that we should be making to deal with climate change. We see the need for a world that is better organized and better governed, on a planetary level. Here in Lithuania we will likely succeed in transforming our economy to perform in a state of quarantine, making maximum use of the Internet. People will repopulate the villages. The education system will be transformed.

But look at how the US is responding. The main goal is to salvage the stock market. Trillions of dollars will be borrowed with the idea that this crisis will end in a couple of months. And what will you do after that? Why are you stimulating your economy, heating it up, rather than letting it shut down, rather than waiting this out? Why are you propping up industries, like the airline industry, rather than saying, hey, this is the time to deal with climate change, and let certain industries shrink?

The situation is reminiscent of 9/11. That changed our lives for a couple of years. It also lead to trillions spent on wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the end, it didn't amount to much. But it did represent a lost opportunity by the US to do positive things. That money could have been spent on integrating the US and Mexican economies and cultures in a friendly way, much like the EU integrated Eastern Europe successfully, at a cost of a trillion or so. The coronavirus will change our world for a couple of years at least. What will be the longer term upshot? It seems likely that China will advance and the US will recede. It would be nice if the US got its act together.

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