COVID-19 Status 3/29/2020

I wanted to draw your attention to the table above, sampled from this article at the Associated Press, depicting the number of cases of COVID-19, deaths due to the disease, and number recovered by county. If I could embed the table, I would. It’s interesting for a number of reasons.

You should take note of a few things. The most important thing is that these are just diagnosed cases. I believe that the actual number of cases not just in the United States but everywhere is much, much larger. Maybe an order of magnitude larger. Notice that in the United States, Western Europe, and Canada the number of deaths as a percentage of diagnosed cases the number of deaths is in single digits (or less). Here in the U. S. it’s 1.65%. In Germany it’s less than 1%. In Italy (10.8%) and Spain (8%) are seeing much higher rates. Why that is will undoubtedly be the subject of much study in the years to come. Diagnosed cases and deaths will continue to increase. As testing expands beyond those who definitely show symptoms to include those who show no symptoms, the diagnosed cases will increase substantially. I strongly suspect that the number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 will not increase proportionally, i.e. deaths as a percentage of diagnosed cases will decrease substantially.

Consider that last column: recoveries. Those are the statistics I’m worried about. Even if the rise of new cases is slowed the very slow pace of recovery from COVID-19 could overwhelm the health care system.

I believe you could construct a model that demonstrates, at least as a first order approximation, that the number of cases can be predicted based on variables including population, population density, and how connected a country is to the world economy (maybe just to China).

Many, many major unknowns remain. Among them are whether reinfection is possible or even likely, whether the prevalence of the virus abates as the weather warms, whether the avoidance strategy being used here can work even with society-wide testing, whether there are effective treatments for COVID-19, whether a vaccine can be developed for it in the foreseeable future, and just how credible the stats that China is reporting are.

0 comments… add one

Leave a Comment