CORONAVIRUS: It's A Numbers Game

When it comes to the coronavirus, there are lots of theories, predictions, and outright falsehoods. Some people say that we all should stay in lockdown until the virus disappears or the rate of transmission becomes negligible. Some people think we should open the economy back up and abide by the results.

Staying in lockdown might work to inhibit or reduce the spread of COVID19, but it's not going to stop it completely.  Maybe the same number of people are going to get infected, and the same number are going to die no matter what we do.  Because as long as we allow people to come into the U.S. from overseas, we are going to have people come in who have the COVID19.  

But there are other costs associated with the lockdown, some financial and some societal in terms of increased deaths from other things, like the ones caused by the delay in getting diagnoses or treatment for other medical problems which cannot be addressed because hospitals only want to deal with coronavirus cases now and everything else gets put on the back burner.

Not to mention what this lockdown is doing to our GNP.

So, to us as a society, how important is it to deal with the coronavirus and stamp it out? In the beginning, we were told that this COVID19 would be as deadly as the Spanish Flu from 100 years ago. Those predictions turned out to be very, very wrong. But yet some people are still operating under the mindset that if we don’t do something to stop the virus from spreading, we might see millions! of deaths.

The truth always lies somewhere in between the extremes.

Now that we’ve come down the road a bit since the virus first started spreading here in the U.S., it’s instructive to look at the numbers. Let’s take the place where I live: Escambia County, Florida. We have 315,000 residents here. So far, our Health Department reports 719 confirmed-positive cases, and 21 people have died.

On a strictly deaths-per-population standpoint, the total mortality rate of COVID19 here is 0.007%. If we divide the number of deaths by the number of confirmed cases, we get a case-mortality rate of 2.9%...let’s round that up to 3%. That seems high. But it makes one other figure look suspiciously good – and that is the percentage of the population that is infected with the virus. Our 719 cases divided by 315,000 people works out to be only 0.2%. Not “2%” but point two-percent. Two tenths of one-percent. That seems low.

Obviously, only 0.2% of us infected is not correct. It’s got to be higher than that.

We know that more people have the virus than are being tested. We know that some people suffer no symptoms at all, and others suffer symptoms so mild that they don’t even go to the doctor. Estimates are that the “actual” number of coronavirus cases is, like, 25 and 80 times higher than the official number of confirmed-positive cases. That leaves us guessing.

So let’s split the difference and guess that the number is actually 40 times higher. Forty times 719 equals 28,760. If you divide our 719 real deaths by 28,760 estimated cases, you get a case-mortality rate of 0.07% - extremely low, not even a tenth of one percent.  Using math again, that also means that around 9% of our population has been infected, which may be a more accurate number – at the moment.

So now let’s work backwards! Let’s assume that 60% of our 315,000 residents will ultimately become infected with COVID19. That would be 189,000 people.  Let’s further guess the case-mortality rate goes from 0.07% up to 0.1% (it makes the math easier). A tenth of one-percent of 189,000 cases would be 189 deaths. That number of people would certainly stress the capacity of our three local hospitals. And if all those deaths happened at once it could be a catastrophe. (Of course, 21 people have already died, so we’d “only” be dealing with 168 more deaths – still a horrible number.)

However, if the case-mortality rate stays at 0.07%, then our county would “only” see a total of 132 deaths (minus the 21 we’ve already had). And if for some reason it goes to 0.05%, then we'll only see 126 deaths in our county.  

The Big Question becomes, In any community, how many people will ultimately become infected with COVID19?  The next question must be: Can we reduce or otherwise limit the number of people who get infected?

This is where the pro-lockdown people come in. They believe that if we all just stay in our homes and self-isolate, then we’ll effectively stop the spread of the disease. Fewer people become infected = fewer lives lost. Ergo, self-isolation saves lives!

And that might be true if we forced everyone to stay inside and also closed the supermarkets and other stores and places where people gather en masse. However it is foolish to believe that the virus could have been totally stopped. There’s no way that could happen.

So, given that reality, we get back to our Big Question from before: How deeply will the virus penetrate society? Again, anyone who makes any kind of claim is guessing. I’m guessing 80%. And then, what will the case-mortality rate be? Because those are the two most important numbers. If 80% of the total U.S. population (264,000,000 people) eventually becomes infected with COVID19, and the case-mortality rate is, say, 0.1%, we could be looking at 264,000 deaths.

What I’m praying for is that "only" 60% of our national population becomes infected with the coronavirus and the case-mortality rate stays down around 0.07%. This would give us 138,600 deaths. It must be noted that we are already at nearly 94,000 deaths.  So right now, I'm guessing that we'll see another 44,600 more deaths before the virus works its way through society.  And I don't think there's much we can do about it.  

I hope my guesstimates are ridiculously high.