Folks, first for context, please check-out this infographic of every pandemic in recorded history. Covid-19 is literally a blip on the screen. For those of you that remember astronomy, think how many planets the size on Mercury can you cram into the sun?
This headline tells you that something is wrong with the 24/7 news coverage (as if we needed any further proof).
A team of researchers in California found that the number of coronaviruses cases in one county may actually be up to 85 times higher than the what health officials have tallied, and say their data may help better estimate the virus’ true fatality rate.
“The most important implication of these findings is that the number of infections is much greater than the reported number of cases,” the researchers wrote, in a yet-to-be peer-reviewed study. “Our data imply that, by April 1 (three days prior to the end of our survey) between 48,000 and 81,000 people had been infected in Santa Clara County. The reported number of confirmed positive cases in the county on April 1 was 956, 50-85-fold lower than the number of infectious predicted by this study.”
Folks look at this paragraph in the story.
“This probably aligns with what overall national exposure may be, on order of about 5 percent once we do wide serology,” he tweeted on Friday. “Santa Clara was a hot spot and I would have expected exposure to be higher. Overall we’re probably diagnosing 1 in 10 to 1 in 20 infections.”
The current US population is north of 330 million, thus using the study’s conservative number of 5 percent national exposure, this translated to about 17 million people in the US have had Corona. These stats are based on numbers from 3 weeks ago (April 1) so presumably that number would be higher now.
Thus, this whole economic shutdown is overblown, and the Covid-19 fatality rate would be less than the common flu.