After a facebook acquaintance posted that he thought we were overreacting to COVID, citing a recent Oxford Study that estimated the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) at .1% to .36%. So I fell into the trap of playing armchair epidemiologist. First, percentages mean nothing without comparison, so I dug up a website from the CDC that says we have 12-61k deaths for 9.3-45M of symptomatic transmissions.
Just doing a rough average of those rough numbers results is 36.5k deaths for 27,150k symptomatic infections. Which is a symptomatic IFR of .00134 = .134%
However then I realized that Oxford study included asymptomatic cases. So I dug around a little more and found a couple NIH articles on the issue. The first one is a bit complex, but the second one said that 1 in 3 flu cases is asymptomatic. As such the asymptomatic IFR is roughly .048% which would would make COVID somewhere around 2x to 8x as deadly as the flu.
edit: I made an error in that paragraph above. If 1 in 3 flu infections is asymptomatic, that means that the symptomatic flu cases are 2 out of 3 flu infections. So that would change the overall average infection count to 40,725k total infections for an IFR of .000896 = .0896%, which is a little less than the low end Oxford IFC to being 4x worse than an average flu.
The first lesson is obviously I have no business being an epidemiologist, what a minefield of numbers, charts and percentages! (But I have to admit it was fun to mess around with the numbers for a bit this fine morning!)
The crux of the question is “should we keep flatlining the economy for something that is 4x worse than the flu?” If our hospitals were fully stocked with PPE and ventilators, I’d be open to the idea of getting the economy back up and running. There is definitely a balancing act between letting a few people die versus keeping the economy flowing, after all, we don’t shut down the economy for the flu.
Then again, the flu doesn’t result in global shortages of medical supplies. With the continued panic in the medical supply markets with the feds and states getting into bidding wars, we’re clearly not ready to reopen yet.
I suspect we will eventually be forced to open before a cure or vaccine is found. However if I’m gonna die of COVID for the great American Economy(TM), it better be due to co-morbidities, bad genes, or shitty luck — not a lack of PPE, equipment, or hospital staff.
And this is may be the greatest disappointment of the moment, because I don’t think we’ll be ready when the time comes. I fear we will have squandered the time of quarantine for no good reason.
Postscript: Lest the first half of the post lull you into a false security. Another of my friends posted this stark analysis from the Washington Post. Basically, COVID was logged as the 2nd highest cause of death in the past week, only after cardiac arrest. Whatever magic you might be able to spin using percentages, you can’t get around the body bags.