So, yet another study (this one done by the University of Southern California) determined that in the Los Angeles, CA area, the number of people who have been infected with COVID-19 is 40 times greater than the number of people who have been tested and confirmed-positive. FORTY TIMES! This is a little lower than the first study I referenced before.
What does this mean? Well, it really confirms that the coronavirus is much more widespread than previously thought, which means it's also much more contagious. But it also tells us that COVID-19 is not nearly as deadly as people thought.
We cannot be on a permanent national shutdown. Vaccine or no vaccine, we have to get the economy working again or the collateral damage will be incalculable. The murder rate WILL be going up. (And soon, too. At least, here in my house my wife "jokes" that if I stay home any longer she's going to kill me, hah-hah, what a comedienne she is!)
But reopening the economy means infected and non-infected people are going to be intermingling with each other like the smelly hippie kids at Coachella in any given year. And the virus is GOING to spread like pot-smoke at said music festival.
And there's not much we can do about it - unless we come up with a way of simultaneously testing every living person in the U.S. and immediately quarantining The Infected Ones. Which simply isn't gonna happen. (Oh, and hope that no Undetected Infected Ones come in on any overseas flights.)
You could waltz out of the testing center, virus-free and clear ("Yippee! I'm going out to Sammy's to get drunk and then drive home and give the good news to the wife!"). But you bump into an Infected One in the parking lot - an old friend you haven't seen in years. You talk, reliving old times. It's noisy. You're under the busy approach path of the Pensacola "International" Airport which is like being at the end of the runway of that airport in St. Marten, and the two of you are standing close to hear each other over the roar of non-stop widebody arrivals (he's a Seinfeldian "low-talker"). He sneezes spontaneously and doesn't have a chance to cover it. Ooops! Sorry. And you're like, "God bless you! Wait a minute...you...you...YOU BASTARD!!" and now you've become assimilated like the Borg did to that famous French Englishman, Starfleet Captain Jean-Luc Picard - boom! - just like that.
There are people who are loudly claiming that we should have been doing antibody testing from the beginning. Perhaps they know somehow that the U.S. had this capability; I'm not so sure. Such testing, they say, would "by extrapolation" give us a better idea of how many people are infected. Good information, I guess...but fairly useless at this point. I suppose it could be helpful for the next time 'round with this virus.
"Experts" tell us that an asymptomatic person could be contagious for up to two weeks. But they really don't know. Antibody testing could tell us something about what percentage of the population already has (or has had) the virus. But it cannot tell us or predict how many Americans will ultimately become infected.
Right now, here in the U.S., 44,805 people have died from the coronavirus. The CDC says that we have 823,500 confirmed cases. Let's multiply the number of confirmed cases by 40. That would make it 33,000,000 infected people. Dividing the number of deaths by the number of infected people gives us a disease death rate of .0013 or .13%.
Now, how many people in the U.S. will contract COVID-19? Again, that is something that the antibody testing cannot really tell us. The government must be thinking that only a small number of us will become infected, because they're estimating maybe 60,000 deaths. To get that number, it would mean 15% of us get infected. (330,000,000 X 15% = 49,500,000. That number multiplied by .13% = 64,350.)
But some people believe that between 35% and 70% of the total population may become infected. So let's split the difference and say 50% of all Americans become infected eventually. Fifty percent of 330,000,000 is 165,000,000 people. If 165 million people get coronavirus, and .13% of them die, that number will be 214,500 deaths over the course of the next year or so.
If the government is right, somewhere around 60,000 people in the U.S. will die of COVID-19. But it could be as many as 214,500! That's quite a margin of error.
We better hope for a vaccine soon. Real soon.
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?
5 comments:
I just finished reading The End is Always Near by Dan Carlin, which was published last year. His chapter on plagues/pandemics is quite timely. It did make me realize that as horrible as the number deaths sound, in relation to the total population of the planet, it's still a small number. Plagues from the past (and there have been many of them... not just The Black Death), killed far higher percentages, and that's even in a less mobile world. Of course all deaths are tragic and none of these facts and figures will make a difference if it's someone I know or love that dies.
And that's the thing, Kelly - the media waaaaay overdid their coverage on the coronavirus, instilling panic and hysteria. It didn't help that NY Governor Cuomo was on TV crying all the time about how overwhelmed his hospital system was going to be and how he needed 30,000 ventilator when there were only a *fraction* of those in existence. Had these "news reporters" ventured out into the rest of the U.S., they would've seen that the situation was far less dire.
Here in Pensacola, the "catastrophe" is over, and we all know it. We're just waiting on the official word so we can go back to the beach, etc. But you know what? People are still voluntarily social-distancing and being cautious - like adults. (Not everybody, of course.) Grocery stores continue to be out of disinfectant products. Why? Because as a society we've much more aware of germs and stuff than we were during the Spanish Flu. We become a nation of germaphobes.
I'm hoping and praying that only 15% of the U.S. population gets infected with COVID-19, instead of some of the higher estimates. We shall se.
To make matters worse, I was reading a article about a major hospital preparing to start antibody tests and ordered kits from seven different manufacturers. In trying to verify that they gave accurate results, they found 70% of all the test gave inconclusive or inaccurate results. Doesn't give me much faith that large scale antibody testing will be the solution. We may just have to open up and hope for the best.
On a good note, all this over hyped media coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic has saved us from over hyped media coverage of the upcoming election.
You bring up an interesting question, Ed: How does one assure the accuracy of a test? Do you do a test for the test? Do you test people twice? I understand the "inconclusive" results. But if someone tests positive or negative, how would you know whether it's accurate? This whole testing process for both the disease or the antibodies has seemed troublesome from the beginning.
Over on Facebook, there are people (friends and their friends) huffing and puffing and being outraged that the U.S. didn't have antibody testing up and running from the beginning. ...As if that's something the federal government has ever done or could even be good at. Traditionally, it's always been up to each individual state to regulate and perform medical testing. But even the states can't ramp-up antibody testing in the blink of an eye. Hell, they're having too much trouble just getting the tests for the disease in place.
For better or for worse, here in Florida you still have to jump through hoops and meet certain criteria just to get tested. However, only about 7% of those who *do* get tested come back as positive. Seven positives out of every 100? Wow. This tells us that there are a whole bunch of hypochondriacs who sneeze and think they've got "CORONAVIRUS!!" Some people advocate that *all* people in the U.S. should be tested; some advocate open-testing whereby anyone who wants a test could get one.
Honestly, I don't know where I stand on testing.
Finally, I have to agree with you, Ed, that this pandemic has diverted our collective attention from the presidential election that's fixin' to happen in about seven months.
I had that same thought about election coverage!
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