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Everyone understands that the number of real cases much exceeds the number of reported cases, which was one of the main issues in The Atlantic piece I linked a few days ago. There seem to be some rather fundamental problems with the Stanford/Santa Clara study reported in the Guardian piece, which you can find discussed all over the place if you care to look.
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To the contrary, we have seen solid reporting that the actual deaths from the virus can be 10x the numbers of people who are tested, in places like Italy, Spain and New York.
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https://www.mdedge.com/dermatology/a...en-cruise-ship
If you use their adjustment for people who never experience symptoms, you get a roughly 1/5 increase in denominator. The denominator in the death/hospitalization ratios is many many multiples of the numerator. Italy has 180k cases and 24k deaths (rounded up). That's a thirteen percent death rate. 10X of that is impossible because that number of people, 240k, haven't died of all combined cuases in Italy during the entire time the virus has been present.
Here's the math: Italy has 60 million people. In 2019, deaths per 1000 residents were 10.56. Cite:
https://www.macrotrends.net/countrie...aly/death-rate That means deaths per all 60 million residents in 2019 were just just over 60,000.
That's over a whole year. Covid has been savaging Italy for a quarter. So adjust the national death rate down to 15k. If Covid is killing 10X more than reported (143k [13k x 10 + 13k]), then it is killing nearly 10X more than all aggregate causes killing Italians during a typical quarter.
I don't have total deaths in Italy for this year so far, but that stat cannot be close to true.
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And now more than .1% of the population of NYC is dead, which shows both that the disease is much deadlier than the flu and that it hasn't been circulating widely yet undetected in other parts of the country.
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I'm not arguing the disease is not more deadly than the flu.
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"We" have been having this conversation, in the sense that "we", by which I mean both Icky and myself, have said you can't get anywhere close to normal until you have really widespread testing and the ability to isolate people who test positive and do contact tracing. That is "the fashion" in which we start wading into the pool. I'm more optimistic that this will happen in California than anywhere else in the country, because our infection rate seems to be low, our state and local authorities have done a good job, and it's pretty easy to stop people at the border and test them.
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I'd be optimistic about CA as well. And I'm optimistic for my state, as we have not even come close to maxing out medical capacity. Hence, I suggest we can incrementally, in a reversible fashion, introduce robust populations back into the work force in thin slices, in order of least likelihood to be hospitalized if infected. While also expanding testing. These are not mutually exclusive concepts. They are actually complimentary.
ETA: Also adjust US deaths (37k) to remove nursing home deaths (7k) and you have a death rate under 1% (30k v. 330mil US citizens):
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/inside...ry?id=70225836
Italy is an old country (22% old to elderly) where people live in close quarters. It's more analogous to our nursing homes in many regards than our broader population, particularly in the cities in the north where it really got slammed, which tended to have uniquely old populations even in that country.
