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No time for an essay today, I’m busy painting cabinets in my COVID kitchen. However, a quick look at the data suggest that both the global infections and deaths are flattening. If you believe is the principle of herd immunity, you want the infection curve to remain high so that we can get to a global infection rate of 70%. Currently only 0.04% of the global population has been infected so we have a long way to go. If we stay at the current rate of around 100,000 new cases each day, it will take 15 years to achieve herd immunity (70%), which is a long time to be lockdown.
The global death rate is holding at around 5,000 per day. If there is any good news in that, it’s that the numbers seem to be trending slightly downward. Currently the global recovery rate is 93%, which is not very good. This estimate though is probably wrong, since the actual number of infected (based on Stanford study), could be fifty times higher. If that were true, we would achieve herd immunity in 3 years and the recovery rate is 99.86, which is pretty good.
News from the home front is that we don’t appear to flattening or trending downward. But then again, the U.S. numbers are very unreliable. While states like New York and Pennsylvania report that they overcounted more than 50%, a CDC report says that overall the number the of deaths have been underreported by as much as 15%. I personally don’t put much faith in the CDC, and view their underreporting projection to be wrong. The CDC has a history of modifying numbers in past crises to suit whatever message they want to spin.
I think the message they want to spin right now is that the COVID crisis is out of control and we all need to remain in lockdown until a vaccine can be found.
