Turn on your TV, and cable news will show you a chyron with the cumulative total of known COVID-19 cases in the United States. That number increases daily, by a simple process of addition, but that’s not the number which matters most in terms of coping with the pandemic. What matters, from the perspective of avoiding a crisis that overwhelms our health-care system, is not how many people are infected with the coronavirus, but rather the number of patients hospitalized. As tests for the Chinese virus have become more widely available, a majority of people who test positive — more than 80 percent in some states — are never hospitalized. Earlier projections of a system-crashing crisis have so far been proven false, but the media refuse to acknowledge the failure of the doomsday prophets and their computer-generated pandemic models.
It feels unfair to point this out, at a time when health-care workers in the hardest-hit areas of the country like New York, Detroit, and New Orleans are struggling to keep up with a surging number of COVID-19 cases, and the daily death toll continues increasing. More than 1,300 Americans died from the virus Saturday, concluding a week in which U.S. deaths totaled 6,232. Next week’s coronavirus death toll will almost certainly be much larger; the progression of the disease takes time, and patients who die typically were infected two or three weeks earlier. However, at least 95 percent of those infected survive — in some states, the death rate is less than 2 percent — and most people with the virus never require hospitalization.
Dr. Scott Gottlieb of the American Enterprise Institute last week produced a chart of coronavirus statistics from Florida, showing three lines: Reported cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. The case number line curved sharply upward, but the lines depicting the numbers of hospitalizations and deaths were on much lower trajectories. Why? Since March 25, Florida conducted more than 6,000 coronavirus tests daily; more than 65,000 people were tested in Florida during a single week, March 28-April 3. More testing means more cases are identified, Q.E.D. However, of those who tested positive (about 12 percent), very few were hospitalized. As of Sunday, Florida had reported 11,545 cases of COVID-19, but only 1,490 were hospitalized with the disease (12.3 percent) and there were 218 reported deaths — a death rate of 1.8 percent.
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See Also:
(2) Joe Biden says Democratic National Convention might be ‘virtual’ event
(3) Coronavirus: More Widespread, Less Deadly Than Claimed?
(4) Democrats’ Attempt to Use Coronavirus to Take Down Trump Will Be Strike Three
(5) During the Pandemic, Don’t Be a Prisoner of the ‘Experts’
