Millions of Americans will be infected by the coronavirus and 100,000 to 200,000 will die, the U.S. government's top infectious-disease expert warned Sunday, as people in and around the country's outbreak epicenter of New York were urged to limit their travel to contain the scourge.
The dire prediction came from Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, speaking on CNN's “State of the Union.” As of Sunday morning, the U.S. had about 125,000 infections and 2,200 deaths.
Let’s talk about how we get to that number. What makes this virus isn’t how dangerous isn’t the mortality rate, it’s how quickly it spreads. It is highly contagious to begin with, our population has no immunity to it, and non-symptomatic or pre-symptomatic people can spread it unknowingly.
There are about 328MM in the US.The assumption being made is that we will reach a level where 30% - 40% of the population will have been infected by the virus barring a vaccine. That’s really the only way to stop it. Vaccine or herd immunity.
It will slow down considerably when we get to that 30-40% mark because the rate of infection will drop significantly. Right now it is estimated that one person infects between 2.2 (US number) and 3 (WHO number). We are social distancing to reduce that number and slow the spread so that we can handle the patients that need care can cared for.
This thing only starts to get better when that number is under 1.
When the rate of infected and recovered people increases, the ability for a person to transmit it lowers because where they would have have encountered 3 people and transmitted it before, now 1 or 2 of those people have immunity and it can’t spread through those channels drastically reducing the infection rate.
Again, we may be able to slow this thing with medicine, but the only defense system this point is immunity by vaccine or antibody.
Does anyone disagree with any of this?
