1570 visits yesterday to this blog. Let’s assume that each person in the US is exposed to the Coronavirus.
Approximately 15 people known to have the virus were reported in comments (at least one death, sadly)
So the anecdotal data shows about 1 in 100 people from 1570 responses.
Now let us use some numbers and some math.
For a number, lets say that each person responding knows….50 people in the parameters that I set. I don’t know that that is a valid number, but it should work to give us a picture. 50 times 1500 gives us a sample size of 75,000
15 cases out of 1570 responses. Lets round that down to 1500 just to make the numbers neat.
15/1500= 0.01….1 percent…….1 percent of the people reading this blog knew of a death or a case of coronavirus in their circle of friends and/or acquaintances and chose to comment.
So far, most have or are recovering. 1 out 15. So of the confirmed (ish) cases, we have a current death rate of (1/15)….or 6.6666% Six percent of the cases died. Let’s round that number to .07….seven percent.
So (so far!) we have 7 percent of 1% as a rate of death. 0.01 times 0.07 equals .0007. Do it in percentages……07%.
Is it gonna be a big number when extrapolated out to the 375 Million people in the US? Let us see….
0.0007 times 375,000,000 equals 262,500. Which is pretty close to the death total for Swine Flu. (and we all remember the dead piled up like cordwood outside of the hospitals in 2009-2010, right?).
This is more serious than the “Normal” flu (about 55,000 dead each year) but it isn’t gonna end up killing us all. Even if this is low by a factor of TEN, it still isn’t gonna end us all.
Now, please understand, this isn’t a valid survey, it isn’t really terribly good data (lots of assumptions made, and a poor sample, and it isn’t corrected for location nor age of the sample or a lot of other things), and it isn’t, in fact, designed to prove anything one way or the other. But as a sample, it does match the currently REPORTED cases vs deaths at least somewhat. The picture looks something like what I present here.
This is based on some pretty sketchy data and it is a snapshot, not total cases…., so take these numbers with a grain of salt…maybe the whole shaker….
Try to stay healthy. Do the Distancing Thing. Be smart about this.
Wash your goddamned hands. Often.