so, there's preliminary results from new york.

media reports are...i want to see the studies, and i'm kind of sleepy right now. soon.

for now, i just want to point out that the very high numbers i was throwing around had to do with the city itself, where the media reports suggest the number is higher. i wouldn't have expected those numbers to hold upstate. so, the media suggests around a 20% infection rate in the city, with a mortality rate around 1%, give or take. that's spanish flu territory, still much stronger than a seasonal flu - and 10x higher than my own bounds.

sampling at a grocery store is not truly random. you can present arguments about bias in either direction - maybe people that went to the store are more likely to come into contact with the virus because they're out, and people that stay in are less likely to come into contact. or, maybe people that stay in are in because they're sick, and the bias is the other way, in the waning stages of the pandemic. these are hypotheses, and they are useful as caveats before you take the information as truth. but, you need to do random sampling to really know.

the value of a test like this to guide public policy is to help political leaders understand where we are, and the conclusion to draw is that the virus is indeed quite widespread.....in new york city.

does that mean that 20% of people in toronto have it? the precision of the numbers and the efficacy of social distancing aside, toronto is weeks behind new york. whatever the true value is in new york, you should expect lower values in toronto, at this time.

i'll look at the actual data and provide further analysis when i'm more alert.