Hey all. Time for a status update with some predictive data. Slashdot has a piece with some useful links. Here's the
Slashdot article link.
And here's a bit of info from one Jeremy C. Young, linked in the Slashdot piece, on what the report from the UK's Imperial College says would happen in the US if we basically do nothing and treat this just like the flu (for those of you so-inclined to think this is just like the flu).
80% of Americans would get the disease. 0.9% of them would die. Between 4 and 8 percent of all Americans over the age of 70 would die. 2.2 million Americans would die from the virus itself. It gets worse. People with severe COVID-19 need to be put on ventilators. 50% of those on ventilators still die, but the other 50% live. But in an unmitigated epidemic, the need for ventilators would be 30 times the number available in the US. Nearly 100% of these patients die.
So the actual death toll from the virus would be closer to 4 million Americans -- in a span of 3 months. 8-15% of all Americans over 70 would die. How many is 4 million people? It's more Americans than have died all at once from anything, ever. It's the population of Los Angeles. It's 4 times the number of Americans who died in the Civil War...on both sides combined. It's two-thirds as many people as died in the Holocaust. Americans make up 4.4% of the world's population. If we extrapolate these numbers to the rest of the world (warning: MOE is high here), this gives us 90 million deaths globally from COVID-19, in 3-6 months. 15 Holocausts. 1.5 times as many people as died in all of World War II.
Now, thankfully, many states ARE doing something, but that means our national response isn't remotely uniform, creating situations where some areas will do better and some will do much worse, and that also means there will be great risk as people move around between parts of the country.
So if you can at all do so, please stay home and self-isolate, for everyone.
