This virus is different. It has the potential for great desolation, both economically and medically.
The figures regarding mortality are not the right ones in my opinion. Total infected includes those that have just been infected, but haven’t completed the course of illness. Many of these will die. More importantly are the numbers of killed over killed plus recovered. These numbers are jaw dropping.
Coronavirus Update (Live): 181,310 Cases and 7,128 Deaths from COVID-19 Virus Outbreak - Worldometer
Looking at the numbers on Worldometers above, this number shows the mortality of 7.9 percent for those whose illness has completed its course (whether dead or survived). The total number infected and dead graphs for the world are chilling.
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That, my friends is wicked exponential growth. We also don’t know about morbidity, long-term lung damage, renal failure, etc. The mortality number very well may go up in the next year as those whose lungs were permanently damaged suffer from COPD, Fibrosis, and complications of chronic lung disease.
Economically, this is the death knell for the stock market, which requires perpetual growth for solvency. Some would define a financial scheme that requires perpetual growth in order to not collapse a pyramid scheme. Basing the financial future of a country on a pyramid scheme was a bad idea.
This is an interesting virus. The explanations of the numbers, don’t fit any model that I have heard described by epidemiologists. In China, there was clearly exponential growth, followed by brief linear, then a transition to logarithmic growth curve with a ceiling, above which, infections seem to fail to exceed.
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Everywhere else is currently in exponential growth phase.
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The outcome statistic from Italy is very chilling: Cases which had an outcome: 4,144; Deaths:1,809 (44%)
That is a Death rate of 44 percent!
Why in the world is Italy getting hit harder than Iran? Northern Italy is one of the richest areas in all the world. By comparison, Southern Italy is poorer. Their medical care is equivalent to our medical care in technology. Hygiene and living conditions are much better in the North in my imperfect understanding.
The USA is in exponential growth phase. In cases which have an outcome, we have a death rate of 44%
We are in exponential growth phase.
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Iran seems to be transitioning to a linear growth phase, likely to plateau like China did. The outcome for Closed cases in Iran is only 16% compared to more modern countries. If the transmissibility of this virus were dependent on hygiene and the mortality were linked to the sophistication of the medical system, why is Iran lagging behind in growth of the disease and mortality, compared to Italy?
Why would a virus have an exponential growth phase and then transition to a logarithmic growth phase before infecting the entire nation?
Why would kids have a low prevalence and zero percent mortality?
Why are there sex differences with more men getting the virus and more of them dying from the illness?
This outbreak is breaking many of the rules of other viruses.
Here's how the outbreak has grown and changed over time, what we've learned about who's at risk, and how to assess your own safety now.
www.businessinsider.com
“The disease's death rate is highest among more elderly groups. The study this data comes from did not report any deaths in children younger than 10, who represented less than 1% of the patients studied.”
Some say that this virus is like Chicken Pox or Hepatitis A, which infects kids but doesn’t give them severe illness. This could be true, but those diseases tend to have very high prevalence in the population of children compared to adults. That isn’t the case with COVID 19. The kids are getting infected at relatively low rates. Not a single kid has died! That is unprecedented for most diseases! Although I think MERS and SARS had similar trends due to the fact that they are also Coronaviruses.
I have a theory that I openly admit could be wrong. I theorize that kids are exposed to numerous colds every year. There are over ten different viruses that get swapped around by them every year. The average kid gets 7 URIs per year. On average, they are getting a Coronavirus every year or other year until the age of 10, when they stop eating boogers, and kind of figure out hygiene. As a result, the younger the kid, the more immunity they have to the coronavirus family. This would explain why Northern Italy has terrible spread and outcomes, there are no kids. The more prosperous a nation, the fewer kids they have. The better the nation’s hygiene, the less coronaviruses they are exposed to every year. Could it be that the most prosperous cities on the planet will get devastated by a virus because they aren’t taking care of kids who are feeding them yearly colds? Could the exponential growth found in China have dropped off because those adults that didn’t have exposure to children and children’s diseases were affected and the remaining population harbored a herd immunity? Could the relatively low prevalence in China have been caused by higher prevalences in the past of Coronavirus infections (SARS, MERS) that the population had been exposed to previously? This theory would explain the difference in sex distribution between men and women. Women are much more exposed to the diseases of childhood, due to the fact that they are more likely to suspend their careers while their children are young and they go into careers that are much more likely to have pediatric exposure (nursing, elementary education).
