Let’s start by pointing out that no one really knows:
How many cases there have been.
How many fatalities there have been.
How dangerous it is in the absence of underlying health conditions.
How long it’s been in the wild.
Any of China’s actual numbers.
If you claim to definitively know any of this then you are superhuman or a dirty liar. Unless it was released on purpose, then whoever did the deed, and maybe a few others, can even know how long it’s been around. Everything else is speculation. Believe that someone eating a raw bat started it or that it’s an escaped (or released) bioweapon, but take a moment to question your sources, and remain open to the possibility that whatever you think is not true.
I’ve seen a lot of people that are absolutely positive it’s 10X (up to 30X) more deadly than the flu. There is no way to make that assertion with any type of honesty because there is so much we don’t know, and so many ways the numbers can be interpreted dishonestly. Ask yourself, is the death rate really static? Does it matter if you’re old, young, healthy, sick, have a good diet, what medical treatments are available, and who is providing said treatment? It certainly makes a difference, and time will alter those percentages significantly as new treatments are created or adapted from other maladies, or people recover naturally. It’s also a very personal and individual statistic; I’m fairly certain I don’t share the same risk as my father, for example. Thus, the numbers we see on the news are meaningless. If you put it into the context of confirmed cases it helps more, but you’ll only get close to usable statistics if you can test a large percentage of the global population just to see who may have already had it and got better, and you’d need to test everyone who died going back several months from the first known case just to make sure it hadn’t been around longer than was assumed. If you can’t do that, it’s massively irresponsible to state a death rate from incomplete numbers. Just stick with what you can confirm and stop trying to scare people.
Which brings me to testing. If you only test people who are already showing symptoms, which makes sense with limited availability, you’ll naturally get a higher percentage of positive cases than a random sampling of the population (unless it’s significantly older and/or less deadly than the experts are saying). However, you can’t magically extrapolate those numbers and rates of infection to the greater population; you need to test them too. If the internet chatter I’ve seen is anywhere close to true then a lot of people had this, or a virus very similar to it, during the holidays. Potentially tens if not hundreds of thousands of people may have already been exposed. If THAT is true, then NOTHING you hear can be trusted until we test more people and get that information. Now I’m seeing “geometric progression” all over the place, and I’m not sure I understand the fear. The US has greatly increased testing, so we’re seeing a rapidly increasing number of positive cases. That’s it. It’s not like any of those people weren’t sick before being tested, or wouldn’t be sick if they weren’t tested. They simply have moved from “unknown” or “presumed” to “confirmed”. It’s the same with the number of fatalities; it doesn’t mean the virus is more deadly, just that more people are confirmed to have tested positive when they died. Here’s a thought, does anyone even know if they consider when the presence of Coronavirus isn’t a contributing factor? If I’m positive for the virus and I die in an accident, do I still count? Regardless, the geometric progression of positive cases doesn’t mean we’re all gonna die (unless there’s a geometric progression of fatalities within the population of confirmed cases, of which I’ve seen no evidence so far).
All we can do is test and treat people who have it, expand treatments for those afflicted and find lower-risk ways we can get back to regular life. If we don’t figure out how to get ourselves back to productivity we may be looking at a cure worse than the disease, as we’ll potentially have supply chain breakdowns, loss of essential services, and people will be unable to feed themselves. If that happens we will absolutely have to deal with mass starvation on top of the pandemic. And as we know from experience, poor diet and lack of sanitation aid the spread of diseases and make them more deadly; we won’t just be dealing with COVID-19 anymore.
