Over at The Wall Street Journal today, Andrew Restuccia and Jennifer Calfas are reporting that “more than 20 million people in the U.S. may have contracted the coronavirus since the start of the outbreak, according to an internal government estimate, a figure that is significantly higher than official case counts and reflects the large number of individuals who have the disease but don’t exhibit symptoms.”
Basically, the 2.388 million confirmed cases (as of today) in the United States is merely the tip of the iceberg.
“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate,” Restuccia and Calfas write, “is based on serology testing conducted to determine the presence of antibodies that indicate a person has had the disease, senior administration officials said. The figure is an estimate based on the number of officially confirmed cases—more than 2.3 million in the U.S.—and the average rate of antibodies seen in the serology tests.”
In layman’s terms, they took the rate at which serology tests come back positive in relation to confirmed cases and extrapolated that across the nation, coming up with a figure of somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 million.
What we’re witnessing is the first baby steps in coming up with a statistical analysis of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and its effects, something that is going to take a considerable amount of time to really nail down. (I’ve discussed before here and here.)
To me, the 20 million number sounds about right. In fact, it matches the best-case scenario that I wrote about last time. In that article, “Trying To Find A Real Comparison Between COVID-19 And The Flu,” I tried to come up with a better comparison of COVID-19 and the flu and picked a range of asymptomatic cases comparable to what the flu also experiences (from 33% to 75% asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic).
Those figures:
As you can see, my 75% asymptomatic stats for the beginning of June would have resulted in nearly 18 million cases, which tracks pretty closely what the CDC official is saying to the WSJ reporters.
So that’s good, right?
On one hand, it’s definitely good. Or at least better than that alternative. A lower asymptomatic rate would have meant we were in much worse shape.
On the other hand, it confirms my assumption that even my estimate of our best-case scenario—which we are probably in—is very bad. At a 0.58% death rate for ALL people who catch SARS-CoV-2, that could mean well over a million Americans are going to die of this virus before we reach a level of herd immunity that will slow it down. If the entire population catches the coronavirus, a death rate of 0.58% would mean the death of 1.914 million Americans.
The final number killed will depend on a lot of factors, all of which I’ll discuss in future articles. But suffice to say, today’s news is both promising and absolutely horrifying.