Coronavirus, by the numbers, as I see it. Late August.

Coronavirus, by the numbers, as I see it.  Late August.

It has been 2 weeks since my last update.

The number of active cases continues to grow by less than .35% per day for the second half of the month of August.  The first half of August was .75%.

In my last missive, I mentioned that I suspected the growth in active cases to be too high because many states have lost track of “recovered” cases, and as such, their number of active cases are inflated.  Nothing I have seen in the last few weeks has dissuaded me from that opinion.  The most obvious is Florida, 529,000 active cases, up 40,000 since two weeks ago, but only 65,000 recovered, up from 59,000  two weeks ago.  Worst offender percentage wise is still Maryland, current active count is 95,000 (+ 5,000 from 2 weeks ago) and recovered 6,000 (unchanged).  However, since Florida currently represents about a quarter of all active cases, it is skewing the numbers quite a bit all by itself.

This has a side effect of inflating the mortality rate.  The official percentage nationally is around 5.4%, and falling.

This disease has a 3-6 week cycle time.  About 94% of those infected recover or die within 3 weeks.  Extreme cases up to 6 weeks.  In addition, the severely crippled can remain in the hospital even though they are cured of the infection.  I do not have a percentage of that.

Disclaimer.  The following is just an estimate based on my work.  I am not an official statistician, nor a medical expert.  This is just my observations.

Playing with the numbers, and assuming 94% of the cases from 3 weeks ago have recovered for the states that are the highest offenders, defined as having mortality rates over 9%, I get a national total of 1,400,000 current active cases.  The official number is 2,500,000.  If this is correct, then the mortality rate is reduced to around 4.2%. 

Keep in mind that a number of recovered victims will continue to suffer damage from heart, lungs and kidneys.  An estimate on that is about 100-200 percent the number of deaths.  Between 170,000 and 340,000 as of this morning

Disclaimer off.

Of states that seem to be accurately accounting for recovered patients, 17 are in an overall decline in active cases.  Two more are plateaued, dipping just above and below the zero percent mark.

The top five most declined states are:

Louisiana

Connecticut

NewHampshire

Texas

Arkansas

As mentioned above, there are a number of states that are not counting their recovered cases very well, so displaying the bottom five is kind of fictitious. 

For anyone interested, my spreadsheet is available.

Not numbers related

Regarding the future vaccine.  The USA has funneled about 5 billion dollars into 5 different pharmaceutical companies for developing a vaccine.  At least 15 other companies are also working on it in the US.

Many companies are already in trials to prove efficacy and prove no harm.  We are looking to December for approval of these.  With production lags, we are still looking to June, 2021 for enough available for the general population.

The vaccine will most likely require two shots.  And is most likely going to require yearly boosters.

This is because C-19 is like the common cold, and the antibodies produced by the body are a short time version lasting 1-6 months.

It had  been suspected that people can get C-19 twice, and for months there have been unproven examples of this, but as of this week there is the first fully documented case of someone coming down with it twice.