...before they are even collected, because the virus has such a long symptom-free infectious incubation period before a person actually gets sick. So every single identified CV-19 case had a week or two walking around infecting other people before they got noticeably sick.
That means that for every CV-19 case that's been identified, there are probably at least three more that are incubating, and those individuals are walking around spreading it to even more people before they get sick. That's not even factoring in the likelihood that a fair number of people may get the virus and become carriers without even getting sick.
The fact that there is an individual in California who got the virus but from no identifiable source is damning. It's out there, it's not contained, and that means containing it won't be possible. The fact that only a few percent of its victims die actually makes it worse because it increases the opportunity for the infection to spread before the disease manifests. The estimate that 70% of the human race -- the entire human race, globally, over five billion people -- will get the disease seems very reasonable. The math is terrifying.
Dear Leader is actually right that most of the people who get it won't get die or even get all that sick. But enough will get sick to overwhelm our hospitals, which could increase the death rate, and enough will die to disrupt our economy and create one of the largest single lethal disasters in living memory.
How many people do you interact with in the course of a week? How many will they go on to interact with in the week after you meet them? If the rho is 3, meaning each victim infects three more before becoming sick, and that takes one week, then there are probably close to half a million people walking around infected already. By the end of March there will be 20 million. By the end of April there will be half a billion. By the end of May, it will reach everyone who does not have natural immunity or live on a desert island.
Those numbers are all on the conservative side of what has been reported.
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