US Coronavirus Projections Underplayed?
Guys I’m fully willing to claim ignorance, but I’ve been thinking about the recent estimate at 100-240k deaths here in the US. It’s documented well enough that of the people who show symptoms, it’s between a 1-5% mortality rate (some countries like Spain estimate total mortality of around 10% but I’m assuming that they aren’t counting asymptomatic carriers).
Hypothetically, let’s say that only 10% of the US gets infected. That’s 330 million * .1 = 33 million. Of this number, let’s say that only half of the carriers are symptomatic. With 16.5M symptomatic carriers, even guessing a LOW mortality rate of 2%, the number of deaths blows the 240k death number out of the water, landing at 330k.
Now, knowing how crazy the virus is and how quickly it spreads, it’s more likely to assume that 20%+ of the US gets infected. At one point, it was estimated that 40-60% of people were going to be infected. With everyone worrying about the economy (potentially dropping into a depression, not just a recession) it’s possible that the government really will try to open everything before the virus is eradicated.
No matter what your political views are (I’m personally a greedy capitalist republican), I feel like the death number might be underplayed in an effort to comfort people enough to start buying products quickly again. Essentially, I believe the projection is way too low, and that the idea is to comfort Americans enough to where they will kickstart the economy when it’s deemed “safe”. It’s no secret that this virus is going to have long-standing effects - it’s not like people are just going to all go out one day and start touching everything again. At least, not unless a vaccine is created tomorrow by some divine miraculous design. What do you all think?
Again, I’m totally open to hearing any opinions and I really just want to be more educated as a whole. I’m typically not a conspiracy theorist, but these are wildly unprecedented times. I’d love to hear what you all think and if anyone thinks this makes sense.
Bump
I wonder what number will be higher - the amount of people who get Covid-19 or the amount of different threads on WSO about it.
I’ll agree it’s excessive, but I thought it would be interesting to hear some opinions because this hasn’t been touched on specifically
The mortality rate is lower than 1%. I think the case mortality rate is around 2% in the US but if you include those who cant get tested (in early days you needed foreign travel or direct contact with a confirmed), those who choose not to get tested (e.g. spouse of someone who is positive, who has symptoms), and those who arent showing symptoms, the infection mortality rate is much lower.
I think the 100k figure was prefaced by the white house as a best case scenario, if we adhere to strict social distancing through May. So you're probably right that the overall number will be higher. Will be interesting to see if they start lumping in additional numbers from other diseases, like will more people die from the standard flu because there are fewer beds available? And will the death count from a pre-exsiting condition (heart, diabetes, cancer) take a dip this year as those deaths get expedited due to / blamed on covid...
True - it would be interesting to see if they count the number of people who kill themselves from the economic turmoil too
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