devRant - A fun community for developers to connect over code, tech & life as a programmer

!rant

If any of you were wondering why all the panic when we keep hearing reports of so few people personally knowing anyone with covid19 symptoms, I think I just figured out why.

So as of yesterday, assume unofficially fatality is 15%. Yesterdays death total was 3861.

If we assume roughly 15% death rate, based on ten days average for a case to recover or die, then the cases that would be recovering today on april 1st would have been infected or started to show symptoms on march 22nd.

At that time there was 32882 cases total in the u.s.

Therefore for april 1st, that would mean by the end of the day today, if the ~15% fatality rate is accurate, there would be at least 4,932 fatalities logged today.

I don't know about you, but here it's almost 9am, not even halfway through the day, and we're already at 4067 deaths.

And now we get to the part where all this shit starts to make sense.

For a long time since this outbreak has started somethings been bugging me and I couldn't place what it was till now.

Why did it seem, no matter how high the numbers climbed, no matter how much this spread 'like the flu', no matter how hard I looked into it, very few people seemed to personally know anyone *in real life* who died or at least came down with this?

I mean we'd all heard the rumors that it was more lethal, and then mums the word, it seemed like media the world over simply except the official "it's only 2% lethal" line. Same as the line about it only infecting people of asian descent.

And it didn't make sense to me why the numbers were so high, and why all the panic if it's just the flu? I knew in the back of my mind it wasn't I just didn't have a specific reason why.

Here it is: This thing is still pretty contagious, but not as contagious as it *could* be with a lower fatality rate. And with a fatality rate at 15%, combine with *just sufficient* spread, it would continue to burn and fester in communities for a year or more until those panic-numbers we see on the news would become a real thing. And then no matter HOW flat we made the curve, it would be x5-x50 times worse than a bad flu.

So we get panic and fake numbers. Because you really don't want to catch this thing. It kills 1 in 6.6. And it spread just enough that it is hard to effectively fight.