Coronavirus Math:
There are ~7.7B people in the world with
~1.4B in China, which leaves ~6.3B everywhere else. There are 4,691 cases outside of China (according to WHO). So you have a 0.000074% chance of getting it. And the chance of getting it AND dying from it would be even lower. But go ahead and stock-up on those masks and buy into the panic that the media wants you to buy into. ♂ Chance of dying from it in China 3.5% (78,961 cases and 2,791 deaths); outside of China is 1.4% (4,691 cases and 67 deaths). I think it’s time to start showing the Chicken Little cartoon again - “the sky is falling!!”
Probably the best epidemiologic model for us is to look at places like South Korea that have fairly robust medical systems and are testing a lot. they have population dynamics that are pretty close to a lot of the rest of the West.
We are in the early days of spread so you can't really compare numerator and denominator using cases and total world population. The cases haven't spread to the world, but it might be coming.
If you're in small town iran you're probably screwed if you're over the age of 50. That place is going to have a huge mortality rate. But there's lots of unique things there about group religious gatherings, insular country, limited health care, geopolitics limiting input and output for data. But then Iran itself is also a very young population country and you can't apply it's outcomes to somewhere like Japan. Japan will be interesting. Lots of old people who will be dying quickly but then again they are also a very clean focus society and a bit xenophobic. They arent hyper focus on freedoms and will lock people down. they already have all kinds of social institutions like wearing mask if you're sick and hyper focus on washing hands and cleaning public spaces.
Also wearing a mask while you're well is kind of silly. But not while you're sick.
If you look back at the Spanish flu, we made interesting political decisions to win the war. There's a case of this parade in Philadelphia that scientists urged politicians to stop but they refused for morale reasons. Newspapers weren't allowed to report because they didn't want to cause a panic. But then gatherings in Philadelphia led to these dramatically higher rates of infection versus sister cities like St Louis.