The weekend brought the unfortunate, yet expected news that COVID-19 was on the move in the United States. The virus showed up in Oregon, Washington state, where it claimed its first two victims in the US and Illinois. The move across all contiguous west coast states was one thing. The arrival of it on the east coast, first confirmed in Rhode Island over the weekend, brings the realization that this is something we’ll have to contend with sooner rather than later. Currently, Florida is monitoring 150 people for the virus and two potential cases in Florida are suspected. Governor Ron DeSantis has declared a public health emergency. With that, let’s take an updated look at the good, the bad and the Coronavirus ugly.
The good - Despite the new cases outside of containment zones, the overall death rate for those who’ve had the coronavirus continues to improve. There remain misleading death rate estimates, commonly calculating them based on the total number of cases rather than on only closed cases. Here’s what the WHO has said about that type of mortality calculation: At present, it is tempting to estimate the case fatality rate by dividing the number of known deaths by the number of confirmed cases. The resulting number, however, does not represent the true case fatality rate and might be off by orders of magnitude.
Three weeks ago, when we first had solid “closed case” info, the death rate was 20%. This meant that one in five of every people diagnosed with the Coronavirus died. Today, it’s down to 6%. We have a positive four-week trend. Also, as it pertains to the two men who died in Washington state, they were already medically compromised at the time of contracting the virus.
The bad - A 6% death rate is still huge. To give you an idea of how bad that death rate is, the death rate for the flu, which has killed a minimum of 10,000 Americans per year is 12,000 times lower than the current COVID-19 death rate. Clearly bad.
The ugly - The 'what if' factor. I mentioned the flu kills at least 10,000 Americans per year. Already COVID-19 has killed more than 3,000 people and there are currently an additional 7,000+ in critical condition right now. We have 330 million Americans. Consider the downside risk if the Coronavirus impacted in the US in a way that at all resembled the traditional flu. COVID-19 remains the worst viral threat in modern science.
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