I spent the first couple of hours today reading research out of China and about the Diamond Princess and the village in Italy where they stopped Coronavirus via aggressive testing. These all make for interesting reading.
What I took away from it all is this….
Based on everything I read today, it seems that the vast majority of people infected show NO symptoms – could be 80-90% in total. Of those infected that do show symptoms, 85% or so get a mild form. Just 15% of the those with symptoms have severe issues and about 2-4% of those die.
What does that mean? It means all of this stuff we are doing is a total waste of time.
Take those numbers and do some math. It infers a real death rate of significantly less than 1% – probably around 0.4% or even less – about the same as a normal flu in fact.
Unless you test EVERYONE and isolate all infected you cannot stop the progression until everyone has been infected – which is probably what happened in Wuhan according to the chinese.
So, if we take the deaths in China and apply this death rate, it suggests 650,000 were infected and yet only 81,000 tested and infected.
Look at Italy. It suggests almost 700,000 are infected currently based on the death rate and only 41,000 detected.
Think about it.
I’m sorry to say but either everyone needs to be tested or we do nothing at all and get it over with.
The middle ground we are pursuing right now has another result altogether – the total collapse of our economic system, those who would die from the virus will anyway (even if that includes me) but everyone else is in for a very rough ride.
Am I wrong?
I realize the data is still not definitive and the margin of error could be quite large but I think the thinking is sound.