Another Medical View:

Part 2 I have a supposition which I...

Tommy Megremis

[Note: As an admission, Tommy was in my medical school class (well, technically the class the year behind me) and lived on the other side of my duplex - I was pleasantly surprised to see this piece below...As another footnote, Tommy came to my brothers funeral and I was deeply touched that he showed up, having not seen him in decades...If he happens upon this, I want to thank him for that act of kindness...Speaking of which, I have been thinking about a post solely about my brother, who came to Christ as a result of studying prophecy with an open mind...]

I have a supposition which I believe may explain why we really aren't seeing the rapid increase in COVID-19 here in the US. Look at the graph by our own CDC as of March 12. Although there is incomplete data by our lack of testing, it suggests that new cases are either stabilizing or going down. What? I thought we were supposed to see a meteoric rise. Now look at the Hubei China graph.It shows a bell curve lasting 3 months or so. What makes the total cases go down after a the peak? The answer may be the overall ability of the virus to infect goes down with time as it becomes less less potent. Otherwise everyone in Hubei would be dead.. Each virion going forward, although still highly transmittable, is now less potent, and because we are on the backside of the Hubei curve as of middle of March, we are inheriting a less potent virus as it spreads to the rest us, and to the rest of the world. This seems to be born out by looking at WHO daily numbers of new cases each day. In many areas of the world it is dwindling. If my theory is correct, it means we will get far less cases than the experts are predicting.  

South Korea is our best predictor of events because of their high testing rate.

Indeed the S.Korea press announced decreasing numbers of cases for 3 days straight suggesting that they are on the downslope of their bell curve having imported an earlier more potent virus. Here are the latest numbers from S. Korea. Number of tests = 261.335, the number of positive tests =25,720, with a total number of active cases as of midnight last night of 8088. There have been 72 deaths. What does this all mean? This means that 17,632 infected patients recovered . The death rate currently for S. Korea if you tested positive therefore is 72/25720 x 100 = 0.28%. That is 3 per 1000 people who tested positive. 

It will be interesting from an academic standpoint to see what happens here, but I don't believe that we will suffer like the Chinese did. Had it originated here it may have been a different story. I realize this goes against everything we are being told right now, but this is my opinion based on the information in front of me. I am not recommending to anyone to change any the precautions set out by our CDC and government agencies.

Addendum this evening.
As I have been thinking more about about this, trying to figure out where we are on the bell curve, and since we have done little testing which in my opinion is only informational anyway, I believe the best metric to decide if we are entering a crisis would be for the CDC to start following ICU admissions. If there is a sharp uptick with pneumonia then we can pretty much guess what it is. For all we know we may be right in the middle of it with the CDC counting 41 deaths. I have no doubt that the number of cases that are to be reported will go up dramatically because we are committed to testing now. That will not necessarily indicate that things are getting worse, it will probably show what is already here. Going forward it will be difficult to interpret any numbers coming from the CDC. The only treatment is respiratory support so just like the flu, if we see admissions go up we know it is there.