new york hasn't crashed yet, don't get cocky. and, please understand that the crux of my argument is that the virus is extremely contagious - that this r-not is twice or three times what is estimated in the models, even as the mortality rate pushes towards 0.1%, or lower. that means that my model suggests that roughly two thirds of people in new york city are either carriers of the virus or have antibodies for it, right now. so, your grandma is in greater peril going out for a walk now than she was last week - and that holds everywhere. give it a week past the point that deaths reach background levels.

what are background levels? 30 deaths a day? 70 deaths a day? we don't know.

apparently, 61,000 people died of the flu in the united states in the 2017/2018 flu year. if you naively divide that by 365, it's 167 deaths/day - but that assumes constancy, which is wrong. the seasonal flu is seasonal. you'd want to do something like assign 75% of the deaths to the first six months of the year, which would give you a death rate more like 250/day until the end of the flu season. given that we're still in flu season, i wouldn't be surprised if the death rate for the flu is around 200-300 deaths/day right now as we speak. that's across the united states, not just in new york. but, i would encourage new york to actually do the math on this to get a set of bounds as to what they can expect normalcy to actually be, moving forwards. you're probably looking at at least 25 as a realistic goal....

so, it's probably not going to fall to zero for a city like new york. like, ever. we'll know when we get to background when we see it, but we can take some better guesses now than we could a few weeks ago, given that we now have a better understanding of how low the mortality rate is than we did previously.