Coronavirus Cases — the real numbers

Various websites show the reported numbers of Coronavirus patients and deaths of countries around the world. With the exception of China, these are the number of people who tested positive to Coronavirus and (for deaths) those who died having tested positive for Coronavirus.

With a pandemic of this magnitude and growth rate, there’s no way of telling how many are really positive, what percentage of the population will contract COVID-19, and how many will die. All we know for sure is that there are a LOT more people with COVID-19 than are being reported, simply because they haven’t been tested.

To give an indication of how many actually have COVID-19, we used three discrete populations and extrapolated from there.

These were Korea, Singapore, and the Diamond Princess.

The Diamond Princess in particular is interesting because it showed how fast the virus spreads and the mortality rate.

712 of the 3755 people on board contracted and tested positive for COVID-19. Most of them were asymptomatic.

Of the 712 who tested positive, 306 were symptomatic. The median age was 68. Of these, 11 died. That’s about 1.6% for this age group.

Let’s keep that number in mind.

In Korea, 183 people have died of the 8,900 who tested positive two weeks ago. That’s 2%.

In Singapore, 6 people have died of the 455 who tested positive two weeks ago. That’s about 1.3%.

Even these may be higher than the actual mortality rate.

In Iceland, where 6.5% of the population has been tested for COVID-19 (US is 0.4% for comparison), there have been 4 deaths of the 568 who tested positive two weeks ago. This is a small population, so it’s not statistically meaningful, but does give an indication of how low the mortality rate could be in a normal population rather than a cruise ship full of retirees.

Based on the most reliable statistics in the world,
the coronavirus case mortality rate is between 0.6 and 2%

To be conservative, we’ll use the 2% mortality rate of Korea. This will likely UNDERSTATE the number of COVID-19 positive people in the population. So this is more of a best case scenario (in terms of total infections).

We also use a doubling rate of 7 days, which is much slower than it would have been at the outbreak, but takes into account measures taken in most countries, such as social distancing, facemasks, and government shutdowns.

We didn’t bother with developing countries because they simply don’t have the testing capability to have meaningful numbers.

We also excluded China because the country has shifted from under reporting to outright denial.

So here are the numbers for two weeks ago (March 21) and today, April 5:

That may look a bit shocking, but unless Americans, Italians, and Spaniards are somehow particularly prone to dying from this virus (and the experience from Diamond Princess suggests that they aren’t), then these are CONSERVATIVE numbers.

You’ll notice also that Australia is the outlier in the comparison between the estimate and the reported numbers. This is because Australia started testing aggressively far earlier than most other countries (excepting Korea, Singapore, Luxembourg, and Iceland).

If we compare it to the H1N1 outbreak of 2009, we can see how pandemics grow.

The H1N1 “Swine Flu” started in Mexico around November 2008. It spread rapidly in Veracruz and then to Mexico City. The Mexican government basically shut down Mexico City to contain the virus. It didn’t work of course. Who on earth would think that closing down a city would contain a highly infectious virus? Oh, yeah, the flock of sheep we call “world leaders.”

By April 2009, the World Health Organization declared a public health emergency. By June, the US CDC gave up, stopped counting cases, and declared it a pandemic. In October 2009, President Obama declared a national emergency. Three weeks later, the CDC reported that an estimated 22 million Americans had contracted H1N1. Three month after Obama declared the state of emergency, the pandemic ended.

In total, 50 million Americans and 1.4 billion people worldwide contracted H1N1.

So that’s the timeline.

And if the numbers conservatively double every month from now, the US will exceed 22 million in four months. If they double every two weeks, it will take 2 months That will be the “Apex” that everyone keeps talking about.

The “Apex” everyone is talking about will occur in the US between June and August if this spreads at a slower rate than it has been.

Three months later it will be all over and governments around the world will be able to pat themselves on the back for taking such great steps to contain the virus and “flatten the curve.”

The tragedy will be several orders of magnitude larger than the 2009 pandemic. This is a far deadlier virus with a case mortality rate of between 0.5 and 2%. In a worst case scenario where the infection rate is double the cases (i.e. fully half the people infected were actually tested) and that 70% of the US population is eventually exposed to the virus, the death toll could be as high as 2 million.

A more likely scenario is that only 20% of infections have been identified, which would still lead to a population fatality rate of 0.07% (best case, 229,000) to 0.28% (worst case, 918,000).

So the actual deaths in the US will be likely be closer 560,000 than Donald Trump’s 100,000 and the H1N1 toll of 3,433 — assuming that everyone who had the virus

It’s already tragic. But we can depend on governments to make it worse.