2020-Apr-21, Tuesday

dorchadas: (Cowboy Bebop Butterfly)
Yesterday, I saw an article about an LA County antibody study that indicated a much higher number of people had been infected than the official rate. Assuming the numbers are accurate, that 221,000 and 442,000 people who had coronavirus just in LA County is around 25%-50% of the total number of confirmed cases in the entire country currently.

On the one hand, this is really good! On the other hand, it is very bad:

Good
This means the mortality rate and rare of serious complications is much lower than expected. Even taking a place like Italy, with a mortality rate of 7.2%, and lower bound of the LA study numbers, produces a mortality rate of 0.25%, which is much more in line with the flu. That would mean that the major problem with coronavirus is that it's a new disease with no pre-existing immunity, not that it's in itself particularly deadly. It still seems to have a higher mortality curve, but most people who get it have no symptoms, or maybe feel a bit under the weather.

Bad
If the pool of potentially infectious people is that huge, we have nowhere near enough testing capacity to track who's infected, who's immune, and who's in danger. Also, the odds that someone has coronavirus and doesn't even realize it are much higher than we thought, so in order to return to something closer to normal, we'll have to institute randomized testing, including of people who previously tested negative, and probably require wearing masks in public, neither of which we have the capacity for at the moment.

The death rate is still appalling, and reports of lung or heart damage from coronavirus are still cause for concern, but assuming the antibody studies are correct, then it's liable to be a lot less serious in the future than we worried it was. Hopefully.