The problem with writing about the coronavirus pandemic is that there have been a lot of things happening, and things are changing relatively quickly at this point. It's hard to keep up.
Government officials are moving to reopen our economy. They claim that we’ve “passed the peak” of this COVID19 pandemic. So now we can start to get back to work and play.
Here’s the problem: We may be trending downward in new cases, but that doesn’t mean people have stopped getting infected altogether. In my county, we are still seeing ten to fifteen new cases every day. Thankfully, the mortality rate has stayed pretty stable at only eleven deaths.
By my calculation, only about 7.8% of the residents in Escambia County have contracted COVID19. That’s awfully low. I’m betting that it will increase. Studies now suggest that 39% of New Yorkers either are or have been infected at some point. But that number doesn't apply smoothly to the whole country. Some areas are much lower than that. Nationwide, it looks like around 13% of all Americans have been infected. The mortality rate for COVID19 itself (independent of total population) looks to be around 0.15%
Some experts theorize that as many as 50% of Americans (or more) could ultimately contract COVID19. That’s 165,000,000 people getting infected! If that happens, then perhaps 250,000 of them could die. 250,000! We’re only at 60,900 deaths right now!
My point is that we’re hardly out of the woods with this disease. If the lockdowns, social-distancing and “Safer At Home” policies had any effect at all on the number of infections, then as society begins to get back to "normal," that number will go up, perhaps drastically.
Did we “flatten the curve?" Perhaps. Experts disagree as to whether any of the draconian isolation policies that were put into effect did any good at all. But even if they did help in any way, the curve still never would have gotten as high as was initially predicted. In other words, New York Governor Cuomo never would have needed those “30,000” ventilators he was screaming for. The computer models were simply wrong.
As the deaths from COVID19 continue to climb (at whatever rate they do), the True Believers in self-isolation and social-distancing will loudly screech, ”We told you so!” What they do not acknowledge and accept is that those deaths would have likely happened anyway – sooner or later, even if the American public had stayed in quarantine until the end of the year.
Who Am I?
- Bob Barbanes:
- A nobody; a nitwit; a pilot; a motorcyclist; a raconteur; a lover...of life - who loves to laugh, who tries to not take myself (or anything) too seriously...just a normal guy who knows his place in the universe by being in touch with my spiritual side. What more is there?
2 comments:
We shall soon see. To some extent I feel as if Iowa is a guinea pig in a lab. Yesterday I total daily deaths set an all time high, the number of people in hospitals seeking treatments hit an all time high and tomorrow we are relaxing restrictions across the vast majority of the state.
Yes most of those numbers setting our record highs are in areas that aren't being relaxed just yet but here is what worries me. The day after our governor announced the upcoming relaxation, our city facebook page received a post from someone in one of those very hard hit areas asking if there was a church in our town that was opening and would accept several busloads of church goers from their area come Sunday. Several people tried to suggest to that man that perhaps this wasn't a great idea right now and it got into an all out verbal war between the two sides.
This made me realize that while a state wide shutdown prevents all but the most determined or those along the border of open states from moving around and spreading the disease, a county by county shutdown is probably not going to do much if at all. Regardless of what our governor says and not being extremely social anyway, I think I'm going to give the general public a month head start on jump starting this society and will wait and see what happens. I have no desire to have to stand in line for a ventilator if I am one of the unfortunate few that need one.
Deaths in AR are going down (so they say), but my county is starting to have more and more cases. (maybe more and better testing?)
As restrictions are eased, I think it's going to come down to the individual. If you're vulnerable and feel the need to continue being cautious, there's no reason you have to let down your guard. I'm just taking it a day at a time.
When I posed the Sweden scenario (they've imposed no lockdowns, yet had a similar mortality rate) to my doctor brother, he said there was no way to predict how it would have played out in our demographic. It would have probably overwhelmed the healthcare system even more.
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