I haven't seen any experts dropping them below 1% &

Posted on: March 24, 2020 at 22:37:35 CT

some give a range up to 3.4%. Of course time will tell.

We may come up with much better treatments and hopefully a vaccine will come out, but it sounds like that would be late in the year or sometime next year assuming they can do it.

Guessing that the number is lower than the experts in the field are projecting as most likely doesn't seem to be a reasonable way to make public policy.

The way this has spread in other countries should be a major warning sign.

If the base reproduction rate is 2 (avg # of secondary cases from an infected person in a susceptible population), as many were projecting, then the numbers of new infections would not drop naturally on their own until half of a relevant population has recovered from the infection and has immunity.

From the numbers I have seen, here is how the math would work out to:

330,000,000  US population
165,000,000  infected
 33,000,000  hospitalized
 16,500,000  intensive care
  1,650,000  low end of deaths
  4,950,000  high end of deaths if 3% fatality rate

and those numbers would just be for the peak of the infection, when the herd immunity would start bringing the numbers back down. Theoretically everyone would be infected if it ran its course, though that could take years.

I've seen at least one paper that indicated that the early figures predicted a base reproduction rate of 4.08, meaning each infected person would infect 4.08 other people on average in a population with no preexisting immunity. It would spread twice as fast as the base reproductive rate of 2, of course.

Edited by JeffB at 22:41:00 on 03/24/20