There’s a lot of good news on the COVID-19 front: New cases are dropping. Daily deaths are dropping. Our hospitals are managing their caseloads. We haven’t run out of ventilators. All and all, we are responding to this viral challenge.
Every single country that has encountered this virus is producing the classic bell curve first postulated by William Farr, the founder of modern medical statistics.
Farr discovered that epidemics follow a normal bell shape curve. Initially, the number of cases rises rapidly. Then they level off and fall back down in a predictable pattern.
National death predictions have dropped dramatically, from millions of deaths down to 60,000. That’s fewer deaths than killed by the flu in the 2017-2018 flu season.
It stands to reason, international lock downs have helped stymie the virus. To what extent will be debated for decades to come. Sweden decided to continue on as normal and their stats show the same Farr’s law curve that lockdown nations exhibit.
As we begin antibody testing, we are discovering that most people who get the virus have no symptoms or very mild symptoms. As a result, COVID-19 is turning out to be a lot less deadly than we initially thought. Last week, Germany conducted the first wide-scale antibody testing by testing an entire city. Turns out 14 percent of the population had COVID-19 antibodies compared to two percent of the town that got COVID-19.
That means for every one sick person there were seven people that had no illness or had an illness too mild to notice. This is bad news in one way. It will be very hard to stop the transmission of a virus that is unnoticeable in seven out of eight people it infects. But it’s good news in another way. The virus, on a percentage basis, is far less deadly than we initially thought.
Factoring in the asymptomatic exposures, the novel coronavirus has a fatality rate of one out of every 337 people who get infected. In comparison, the common flu kills one out of every 1,000 people infected.
So COVID-19 is three times more deadly than the flu. This is a serious disease we are grappling with, but it’s not outside of the scope of the world to handle. Earlier reports indicated Covid-19 was 30 times more deadly than the flu.
Once you get exposed to an infection-level dose of SARS-COV-2, the average incubation time is five days before you get sick (if you get sick.) After that, you are infectious for up to two weeks. That means a one-month national “shelter-at-home” quarantine should knock the wind out of this virus’ sails, if possible. The entire world is united behind this great effort. It is amazing to see such a global effort. But if this one-month effort fails, then it may be time to acknowledge that the virus is not containable. Despite our best efforts, it may run its course like the flu and all the other infectious diseases that plague mankind.
This is a trade off that our leadership must assess carefully. We cannot let a disease three times worse than the flu destroy the global economic system that saves far more lives through its productivity than COVID-19 could ever kill through its lethality. More affluent nations could withstand such an economic depression, but poorer countries will face catastrophes, indeed, starvation.
Economists estimate that the economic shutdown has caused up to a 30% decline in economic production. Spread out over 12 months, a one-month economic decline of 30% is only an annual decline of 2.5%. We can afford that. We can overcome that.
But a two-month shutdown becomes a 5% decline and so on. We begin to enter depression territory. Each month takes a greater financial toll with no guarantee of successfully stopping the virus.
After this month is over, we will still need to be cautious. Elbow bumping can replace hand shaking. Sick people can self quarentine. Vigorous and frequent hand washing needs to be practiced. But we will have to get out of our homes and get back to work.
Eventually, in a free country, each individual must decide what risk they want to take. Those who want to continue to shelter at home are free to do so. But soon the government should let each individual decide how they want to handle this risk. These government decrees must have a time limit.
It is so ironic that the government banned churches during Easter, preventing tens of millions from worshipping the one who conquered death. Death is noxious and a plague on mankind. But it does not get the final say.
Contact Wyatt Emmerich at wyatt@northsidesun.com.
