Let me first say I am all good with staying shut down for April and May if it gets to that. If we get to June im starting to sweat a little bit that everything is going to crash, if we are in July still shut down our economy is toast and we are staring at the next Great Depression.
For those that do not know an estimated 7 MILLION PEOPLE DIED from the last Great Depression. They starved to death. So that is why i say just shutting down is not the answer to save lives. You are saving at most 200,000 and losing 7 MILLION. That is why i hate to see the medical person saying “you dont care about lives being saved”. That could not be further from the truth.
Here is the problem I have currentlt with Covid and its mortality rate. We assume Covid is the result of every death on a positive test. Whether that was the ultimate factor or not.
My issue with Covid mortality predictions (which are all over the place, everyone knows that. One day its 2 million, then its 36,000, then its 200,000)
Since many of us are experiencing homeschooling these days, it seems a good time for a math refresher. Once the number of infections is determined, this becomes the denominator in our public health calculation. The number of deaths is our numerator.
Numerator (number of deaths)/denominator (number of people infected) x 100 = infection fatality rate
We know the virus spreads very fast once it is introduced to a population. That means many of us in the general population are or were already infected with the virus- whether or not we have symptoms.
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Testing rates - and counting methods - vary widely from country to country
Image: Our World in Data
However, instead of counting us all in the denominator, in many countries including the US, only people sick enough to go to the hospital are counted. People sick enough to go to the hospital are more likely to need critical care, and patients in critical condition are more likely to die than patients with mild symptoms. This means the fatality rate looks higher than it really is.
BUT i will say this thing is scary as hell when you know so little about it...but for once i believe we are actually tackling a disease and will have an answer to this thing sooner than later.
I wish the nation/globe would respond like this in order to beat Cancer. Cancer is a pandemic if you ask me. It does not spread like Covid, but it is a global killer with the highest mortality rate of them all. My wife lost her mother to it. I lost my mother to it. We should tackle that sob after we get done with Corona