The Gathering Storm: Could Covid-19 Overwhelm Us in the Months Ahead?

• The entire CoVid19 Pandemic facts don’t add up. Influenza kills a few hundred thousand people a year worldwide. Covid19 has killed so far only 3K+ in China. Why is China reacting like it is Apocalypse by shutting down the entire nation? See:
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  5 Million Cases Worldwide, 650,000 Deaths Annually: The Seasonal Flu Virus is a “Serious Concern”, But the Wuhan Coronavirus Grabs the Headlines
  The flu has already killed 10,000 across US as world frets over coronavirus
  Trump ‘shocked’ by deadliness of flu — it’s killed at least 16,000 Americans this season
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• The Gathering Storm: Could Covid-19 Overwhelm Us in the Months Ahead?
  by CHARLES HUGH SMITH, http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/
  Either the science is wrong and the complacent will be proven correct, or the science is correct and the complacent will be wrong.
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  The present disconnect between the science of Covid-19 and the status quo’s complacency is truly crazy-making, as we face a binary situation: either the science is correct and all the complacent are wrong, or the science is false and all the complacent are correct that the virus is no big deal and nothing to fret about.
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  Complacency is ubiquitous: readers on Facebook leave comments on my posts “this is silly.” Correspondents report that people don’t even cover their mouths when coughing, much less use a tissue. People keep repeating like a mantra that a bad flu season kills 35,000 in the U.S. alone, and so why worry about a couple thousand deaths globally?
  Another common trope is “hepatitis kills far more people in the U.S., so why worry about the coronavirus?”
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  So let’s look at some data and consider what science can tell us about the potential consequences of the Covid-19 virus spreading as widely as conventional flu viruses.
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  The fallacy made by the complacent is that the number of cases will remain small (in the dozens or hundreds) and so the number of deaths will also remain small.Since the evidence suggests the Covid-19 virus is more contagious than conventional flu viruses, a reasonable assumption is that it will eventually infect more people than a conventional flu, which according to the CDC infects up to 45 million Americans annually.
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  According to the CDC, viral hepatitis B caused 5,600 deaths in the U.S. in 2017, and hepatitis C caused 19,000 deaths, for a total of 24,600. That certainly exceeds reported deaths of Covid-19, but since the statistics presented by the Chinese government are unreliable, we have no idea how many people have the virus and how many have died.
  According to the CDC, influenza and pneumonia together caused 55,000 deaths in the U.S. in 2017.
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  Given the scientific evidence that Covid-19 is highly contagious, let’s do a Pareto Distribution (80/20 rule) projection and estimate that 20% of the the U.S. population gets Covid-19. That’s 66 million people, roughly 50% higher than the 45 million who catch a flu virus in a “bad flu” season.
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  Data suggests between 2% and 3.4% of all Covid-19 cases end in death, but the deaths are concentrated in the 20% of cases that become severe, and in the vulnerable populations within the 20% severe cases that require hospitalization.
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  Using the lower CFR (case-fatality rate) rate, 2% of 66 million is 1.3 million, so if Covid-19 infects only 20% of the U.S. populace, current data suggests 1.3 million people will die. This is considerably more than 24,600,or 55,000. (Total annual deaths in the U.S. are around 2.8 million.)
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  But these mortality data are drawn from small numbers of patients who have had access to intensive care. Anecdotal evidence from places where the healthcare system has been overwhelmed (Wuhan) so intensive care is unavailable to the majority of severely ill patients suggest much higher death rates around 15%, with worst-case scenarios going as high as 80% mortality for untreated severe cases in vulnerable populations (elderly and chronically ill).
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  If 20% of all cases can be expected to be severe and require hospitalization/intensive care (20% of 66 million is 13 million people), then intensive care will quickly become unavailable due to the low number of intensive care beds in the U.S. (94,000). The total number of all hospital beds in the U.S. is around 931,000. (Recall that the majority of these beds are already in use, so the number available to those severely ill with Covid-19 is a fraction of the total.)
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  If 15% of untreated severely ill patients die, that is 13 million X 15% = 1.95 million.
  So let’s cut all these numbers in half: let’s assume only 10% of the U.S. populace gets the Covid-19 virus (33 million), so only 6.6 million people become severely ill. If 15% of untreated severely ill patients eventually die, that’s 1 million deaths in the U.S. alone.In other words, the death rate is only low if the number of severely ill patients remains very low. Once the number of patients needing hospitalization exceeds the number of ICU beds, the death rate leaps dramatically.
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