This is the drum that right wing media Is thumping right now. Somewhere between a number that sounds horrifying on its’ own and one that their know-nothing viewers can’t readily calculate.
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Uh - you don’t compare the number who died to the number of people total - you compare it to the total number of people got the disease and died to get the total mortality. The actual US numbers are about 4% mortality rate right now. But the talking point by others is “only about 1% will die” when they factor in younger, healthier people getting it. That is like a best case mortality rate at this point. And then the numbers in the post show a worst case effect if everyone was infected.
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I can think of a One Percent we could easily spare.
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All of this is true enough, but even if it just struck 1% of the population down quickly and cleanly, leaving everyone else totally unharmed, it’d still be massively damaging to the economy. And I wouldn’t expect people to be too surprised by that, honestly.
Under normal circumstances we’re watching for teensy little dips or soft patches in sub-sub-sub-sectors of the economy, and for good reason. Uh-oh, Americans bought 0.2% fewer washing machines this June than they did last June. Hmm, the company that sells hammers to professional carpenters missed their sales projections. Wait a minute, prices in the bellwether Racine, WA housing market are rising slower than inflation… and sure enough, 18 months later a housing bubble has burst and you’re in a recession.
Three million extra people just up and dying when they weren’t supposed to is a tidal wave compared to those kinds of ripples.
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Burying somebody who has Covid is a lot easier than treating someone who has it. If Covid killed you on your first inhale of a germ, it wouldn’t spread, and it wouldn’t take up resources. But it develops over time, during which you give it to other people, and those people if hospitalized demand PPE and equipment that we are rapidly running out of. Like someone said above, modern battlefield munitions aren’t designed to kill, they’re designed to make the enemy expend resources keeping wounded and maimed soldiers alive. Covid doesn’t want to kill you, it wants to make sure that you expend resources to help spread for as long as possible.
Indeed, if you were designing a hypothetical bio warfare project, it would look something exactly like Covid-19: low visibility, long incubation period, unknown effects across the long term.
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Based on a near 100% infection rate. Not by any particular deadline, but assuming that it continues to escalate out of control and that no effective treatments or prevention is possible in a relevant timeframe. Only doubling for the rest of the year also is pretty unrealistic given that half the year is left, and we didn’t really start seeing large numbers infected until April and they have been growing strongly since early June with daily case rates more than double what they were 6 weeks ago. Based on our current trajectory we could easily be having 200,000 new cases per day by the end of summer. At that rate we would be getting nearly 3 million new cases per 2 weeks – equal to the total number infected in the last 3 months.
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It also seems to be wrong. 4% mortality in the US, 4.4% worldwide.
So, the potential for deaths is not 3 million, it is 12 million by rough numbers.
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The John Hopkins rate is closer to 4.1% today. Where is that 1% number coming from?
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Mortality rates are calculated based on deaths divided by the # of infected, not the total population.
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The 1% number is coming from extrapolations from studies that have have attempted to count/estimate the asymptomatic infections that go uncounted.
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1% is a fairly reasonable guess for how many people would die if everyone (across all demographics) got this. The observed numbers are much higher (2-15% depending on the country), because we’re more likely to identify cases when people die of it, and because it’s already preferentially hit the demographics that are most vulnerable. So at the moment we have ~3.3M diagnosed cases and ~130K attributed deaths, but nobody really thinks 3.9% of people die from it on the average.
The “true” number might be still lower, like 0.4%, but that doesn’t factor in the increased mortality from a situation where hospitals were overflowing with cases, as would definitely happen in a situation where most or all Americans contracted it. Then again it also doesn’t take into account the likelihood that it will evolve into a less deadly (somewhat more likely) or more deadly (somewhat less likely but still possible) strain.
Bottom line, there are a lot of unknowns, but nobody would laugh you out of a public health seminar for estimating 1%.
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Sweden has already proven that going about business as usual still leads to a damaged economy, only with more people sick or dead. And we’re still only talking about short term effects.
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In the US, the 1918 flu pandemic killed between 0.48% and 0.8% of the population according to Wikipedia. If the coronavirus was as deadly as that pandemic we’re still talking about a million and a half dead. That would make the coronavirus necropolis one of the ten largest cities in the US. As it stands right now. it’s only 201st or 202nd.
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I was gonna say “excess deaths” will be a good indicator, but it won’t unless they die in the period measured. And all the non-dead Covid sufferers with significant long-term side-/after-effects won’t get counted that accurately. I suspect “excess disability” or “excess permanent damage” isn’t a thing.
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Sadly, I haven’t seen any good ways of really getting the data in a very usable way. The problem with Case Fatality is that there are still a lot of people in that denominator who are still fighting for their lives. While I hope all of them make it… some of them won’t.
We could look at the number of deceased / (deceased + recovered), but this could be thrown off by differences in recovery times versus how long it takes to die of the disease; and both are long and varied enough that this data would be a rough estimate only. (Of course, there is a lot of other problems with the data set too.) Right now, horrifyingly, this number is around 10%.
Eventually, survival rates at certain time intervals would be helpful, but I haven’t seen any data arranged this way. I.e…, of the people who got it during this week, at certain time intervals this is how many are still alive. This is how the mortality rate for some diseases are shown, particularly cancers. Hopefully, by the time we get to 5 and 10 year data, this will be a horrible memory.
If you made me guess the overall fatality rate for this disease, sadly, I’m going to guess that it’s going to wind up being somewhere around 6-7%. If 70-80% of Americans get this disease because we can’t slow it down enough or can’t get effective vaccines, our horrors that we have already seen will only be magnified.
(Disclaimer: I’m a computer scientist, not a medical professional.)
Well, I agree we can’t get completely accurate numbers. We can’t completely predict how those numbers will flux if different demographic become more common. How full are ICUs will be an issue.
The best we can do is estimates. 1% may end up being low- but if someone is blowing it off as “only 1%”, then this post shows the worst case numbers if that ends up being true.
So - really early into this, Joe Rogan had a virus expert on, and he said, conservatively, if we have 96 million infected with a .5% death rate, that is 500,000 people. His prediction has been my “target” number and the one I was throwing out in the beginning. I feel like his prediction will be eclipsed by the end of the year.
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I agree with you but I can’t bring myself to heart that. I am very concerned that this is going to get even worse by an order of magnitude. 
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One anecdote I’ve heard is that of a pregnant woman (ETA: in TX, possibly Harris Co.) unable to schedule her C-section, because now that’s elective surgery.
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Depending on the reason for the C-Section, that can most certainly lead to someone dying… possibly 2 people.
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I know – that was a couple of weeks ago, and presumably whatever was going to happen has, by now, indeed happened, I hope for the good. (If not I think I’d have heard otherwise from same source.)
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