I still hear, in too many Covid conversations, something like this: "Well, I don't know if this is real or not. I don't know anyone who's had it." Some go on to say, "I don't know anyone who knows anyone who..."
Others, fixated on denial, latch onto the President's words, such as yesterday: "Only 6% of the Covid deaths 'really count'--all the rest had underlying conditions" So, instead of 180,000 dead Americans, the number is maybe 10,000 'real deaths'--all the rest would have died by now of indigestion or cancer or severe asthma. Not even counting car accidents (which, not incidentally, are way down because no one is driving now).
So I thought it might be worth asking "How many does it take, and how close to your home, to make you a believer?" And the answer comes out, usually, to be something like "in our block, or in our extended family" or "in my xxxx group (e.g. Kiwanis, church, workplace).
And, if you think about it, that says there is probably a number that matters--a different number for each person, to be sure, but a number for which you say, "Hummn" or something like that.
I'm going to assert that the number is somewhere between 1 in 20 and 1 in 30. If 5% of the people in your town/county have it, odds are good that one of them is known to, and maybe even close to, you.
Which says that more than 5,000 Confirmed Cases per 100,000 population might begin to wake folk up.
Where are we finding such numbers? Well, for starters, there are 3,142 counties in America, and only 61 of them as of this morning--a mere 2% of them--have such a number.
Original HOTSPOTS--Connecticut, Illinois , Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Delaware--not only don't have any counties with 1 in 20--they don't even have any counties with 1 in 30 people confirmed.
The leaders early--New York and New Jersey--have one county with 1 in 25, and 4 counties with 1 in 30 between them. The most populous state--California--once seemingly immune, has struggled of late, but it has only one county out of 58 with 1 in 20 (and one with 1 in 25, and one more with 1 in 30).
So the point is--if I go chatting about 'how awful it is" in nearly all of my home state, it mostly elicits statements like the opening to this post, certainly for folk who aren't busy studying all these details.
If we broaden the 'search' to 1 person per 25, it adds another 63 counties. Move the marker to 1 in 30, adds another 118 counties. So, all told, 8% of America's counties have at least 1 in 30 confirmed cases. And in the 92% who don't, it can seem 'far away' perhaps--even ridiculous to worry about.
By contrast, the 1918 flu pandemic seemed 'up close and personal' It killed 675,000 Americans in a year and a half (which, not incidentally, Covid could easily match at current rates), but the country was not quite one-third as populous, and at some point, estimates are that 28,000,000 Americans were infected (again, a number that Covid might conceivably reach). That means that 1 out of 4 people got the virus, and at that level, you HAD to know someone closely who was a victim.
Such absolute numbers today would still be only 1 in 12 that 'get it' and only 1 in 400 odds of dying.
The other thing that was different was that the 1918 pandemic was agnostic about its victims--it tackled everyone of all ages, whereas Covid to date is still mainly a killer for oldsters. Indeed, setting aside the asinine arguments about 'kids don't get it' and 'kids don't transmit it' so let's open the schools willy-nilly kinds of statements, the fact is pretty clear that Covid is a great culling device for oldsters.
How so? Well, when the numbers began, something like 1.1% were aged 0-17; and all told, from 0-44 was 47% of the total. Today, that number has increased to 62%. Ages 45-64 were 28%, which has hardly changed at 27%. Folk over 65 were 22.5% of the total then; they are now 11% of the total. Here is a picture of the current distribution by age.
But note what happens when we compute the ratios for the oldsters. Oldsters are 30% of the deaths, but the rate of death, should they contract Covid, is that it kills more than half of them. This has largely gone UNREPORTED, but it is the basis on which much of the administration's argument rests.
Another nuance here is that 40% of the Covid deaths in the US to date are said to have been in the 1% of the population living in 'old folks homes' such as assisted living or nursing homes. I cannot find supporting statistics for this--if true, it would say that every person over 85 who died, plus half of those over 75, were living in a nursing home, which is just clearly bullshit.
But that is the sorry fact with which we are dealing. Hard numbers are difficult to come by; some claim that morticians are cheating the system, labelling deaths as Covid because of back-room payments while others insist that many deaths (more than 200,000 over "normal") were actually undiagnosed Covid.
To dig deeper, into ethnic or economic impacts, or to do contact tracing, is fraught with more issues.
However we slice the onion, though, the odds are getting better that you will know someone affected by this terrible pandemic, if not now, certainly in the not too distant future.
