[Occupymendocino] Grim facts about CO19

[Richard Karch]

What is the grimmest fact about COVID-19?

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Chris Snyder
Updated Wed

Its a toss-up, in my opinion, so I’ll give you my top 5 grimmest COVID-19 facts and let you pick which one is worst:

Asymptomatic carriers of the disease are quite common (relative to symptomatic cases), may never get identified, and are responsible for the inadvertent transmission of about 80% of all new cases of the disease.
At best, it seems that any “immunity” effects for those who “recover” from the disease are temporary; it is quite possible to get the disease again and again, so if we do not get a working vaccine, there may be no end to the need for the hygiene precautions we are currently taking (masks, isolation, and distancing).
People can be very close to death by Acute Respiratory Distress and not even realize that they are having problems breathing, this is because they are able to adequately exhale CO2 (so they have no sense of suffocation that CO2 build-up gives), but they are not able to adequately get oxygen into their blood. Get a pulse oximeter and track your and your family’s blood oxygen levels, and if they drop below 92% get the person to the hospital.
People of any age and any state of health can fall severely ill and even die from this disease; it is not just those who are old and/or already sick that we are losing to this disease, and the factors that determine the severity and consequences of infection are not understood yet, so we can’t predict who will fall to the disease, therefore we should act as if we are all at risk, because we are.
Those who “recover” in the sense of having tested positive repeatedly and then with or without illness eventually test negative repeatedly may not be fully “recovered” for a very long time; even mild cases with no symptoms may have incurred immune system changes that leave them more vulnerable to a repeat case or other severe illness in future, and those who have a severe case can have life-threatening long-term disabilities as a result of having battled the disease. In that respect, the deaths are not the only casualities of this disease, nor even the worst outcomes, if measured in total suffering.
In addition to the above grim facts specific to COVID-19, I want to add some facts about the how the exponential growth of pandemics works; we have access to the number of confirmed cases and the number of confirmed and total deaths, but those are just the tip of the iceberg. Even if we had some way to ensure that there were absolutely no more cases of COVID-19 overnight, there are so many COVID-19 cases in the USA currently, that those who are already infected would result in half again as many deaths as have already occurred by the time the current infected became no longer infectious by either recovering or dying. However, we can’t just prevent new cases of COVID-19, and those currently infected will infect many more people even if most are complying with the hygiene advice of the epidemiologists; that is just the nature of exponential growth. And if the POTUS was to get his way and the USA was to go the pathway of “herd immunity” such that at least 2/3rd of our population were to get infected with COVID-19, the total USA deaths could easily exceed 26 million people, assuming a conservative mortality rate of 12% for the overwhelmed medical system that would result (Italy had a 14% mortality rate when their medical system got overwhelmed, and they were not even approaching 2/3rd of their population infected). All of the above should be plenty of reasons why we all should take this pandemic seriously and do every precaution the epidemiologists recommend, no matter how much it inconveniences us. I, for one, dread causing someone else’s death unwittingly far more than I fear getting this disease myself.

UPDATE: Several commenters are unhappy that I have credited DJT with most of the USA’s problems with COVID-19, but I have data to back up my conclusions.

The US federal leadership has made all the difference with COVID-19, and not for the better. The proof of this is by comparing our results with the country of S. Korea, which had its first case of COVID-19 within a day of the first case of COVID-19 in the USA. As of today, 11/28/2020, Coronavirus Update (Live): 62,550,616 Cases and 1,457,505 Deaths from COVID-19 Virus Pandemic, S.Korea has 0.065% of its population that has had COVID-19 past or present, compared to 4.1% of the US population, and S. Korea has had 10 deaths per million of the population (522 total deaths), compared to 822 deaths per million of the US population (272,247 deaths, = more than a quarter million). Even the mortality rate (=total deaths/(total deaths + total recovered cases)) is considerably better in S. Korea (1.9%) than in the USA (3.3%), probably because its moonshot level effort to eradicate the disease (by doing mass testing around hotspots to find everyone infected, including asymptomatic carriers, trace all their contacts, and quarantine all infected and exposed persons until they are proved to be free of infection) has prevented the medical facilities from being overwhelmed with COVID-19 cases. In S.Korea of the total COVID-19 cases, only about 17% of them are current cases, while in the USA, 39% of total cases are current cases. If you apply the current mortality rates to the current cases, we will have 1344 deaths per million in the US (446,008 total deaths= just a bit shy of half a million dead), but S.Korea will have only 12 deaths per million people (625 total deaths).

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