Time for my Covid-19 review for 5/4/2020, May the 4th be with you.

My primary issues with this pandemic are: 1) People are stupid. Mention of a pandemic and you can’t find toilet paper or cleaning supplies anywhere for several weeks/months… did those people not wipe their ass or clean their stuff prior? 2) The government has absolutely ZERO authority to “lock down” the country. They can recommend, even strongly urge, people to stay home, but they cannot legally force any healthy American to do it, period.

My numbers that I’m going off of are only confirmed/reported cases, including for seasonal influenza. Per the numbers below, you are more likely to die if you get seasonal influenza than you are if you get Covid-19. I admit that Covid-19 may be more contagious because it is new to humans and we have no natural immunity to it, but that is why herd immunity is so important. When enough healthy people get it, recover, and develop immunity while the at risk population self isolates, then the virus won’t really be able to continue to spread because the vast majority of potential hosts will have already developed the immunity (that’s the whole point of herd immunity).

I’ve had this opinion because, if you remember way back when I started doing these posts I mentioned the person that I’m pretty sure had it back in January/February, well, that person is my wife. The family and I went to New Orleans for the New Year. We got home and 2-3 weeks later the wife had flu-like symptoms for 3 days then a pretty bad, dry cough for several weeks. After 5 weeks of the cough she went to our doctor and got tested. Nothing came back on any of the tests (keep in mind that back then there was no available test for Covid-19, and even now it would cost me $200 to have my doctor test me for it). The dr put her on prednisone and the cough cleared up in another week. No one else in my household showed any real symptoms, although I felt a little under the weather for a couple days at one point. I went to the dr last week (for something completely unrelated) and we chatted about this. He’s pretty sure that he’s had it and there’s a very good chance that is what my wife had. We won’t know if we actually had it until there’s a test for antibodies readily available, but with all the evidence I’ve seen and all the reports I’ve read, I’m pretty sure I’ve already had it.

Now for the numbers:

As of April 25, 2020 there were 248,026 cases of seasonal influenza since 9/29/2019 in the US with a P&I Mortality rate of 9.3%, with approximately 23,067 deaths from the seasonal flu. This does not count Covid-19, which does not show up on the standard flu test (if you scroll through the links, you’ll see what types of virus they identify and include in these numbers). There are several reasons, IMO, that this is important: Out of the 1,350,201 people that went to the Dr. and were tested since September 29th for “flu like symptoms”, ONLY 18.4% of them actually tested positive for the flu. How many of those other 81.6% of cases were actually Covid-19?
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm

With 3,349,786 total cases and 238,628 total deaths, the Covid-19 Mortality rate Globally is 7.12%. This is from the WHO as of 5/3/2020, 10:00 CET.
https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200503-covid-19-sitrep-104.pdf

With 3,603,521 total cases and 250,047 total deaths, the Covid-19 Mortality rate Globally is 6.94%. This is from the “worldometer” as of 5/4/2020, 16:33 GMT.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

With 1,122,486 total cases and 65,735 total deaths, the Covid-19 Mortality rate in the US is 5.86%. This is from the CDC as of 5/3/2020, 16:00 EST. If you go to this link and click on “About the Data” you’ll see that these numbers include “both confirmed and probable cases and deaths”. Keep this in mind when you look at the next section.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/cases-in-us.html

I’m going to start tracking this “Provisional” list now. The reason I think this is important to track is because while the numbers above include confirmed and probable cases, there are no comments about updating the numbers as information is received, but this provisional list says “Death counts for earlier weeks are continually revised and may increase or decrease as new and updated death certificate data are received from the states by NCHS.” This makes this list much more believable as it is revised as new information is received. So, the “provisional” numbers state that there are 38,576 total Covid-19 deaths as of 5/2/2020. If we use this number, that drops the mortality to 3.44%.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm?fbclid=IwAR3s70TDgF_-zg7PdxGAB7lia7lugeLv31xpi0LHYHHXL0c1Zha-UK_CYaw

With 1,194,434 total cases and 69,008 total deaths, the Covid-19 Mortality rate in the US is 5.78%. This is from the “worldometer” as of 5/4/2020, 16:33 GMT.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

With 6,626 total cases and 275 total deaths, the Covid-19 Mortality rate in South Carolina is 4.15%. This is from SC DHEC as of 4/26/2020, 15:30 EST.
https://scdhec.gov/infectious-diseases/viruses/coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-19/monitoring-testing-covid-19

Here are the “provisional” numbers from the CDC… With 170 total deaths, the Covid-19 Mortality rate in South Carolina is 2.57%. This is from CDC as of 5/2/2020.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm?fbclid=IwAR3s70TDgF_-zg7PdxGAB7lia7lugeLv31xpi0LHYHHXL0c1Zha-UK_CYaw

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So, the major takeaway today is that the “provisional” numbers are updated as information is received, but the WHO, worldometer, etc numbers are not updated. I’m going to use the “provisional” numbers because they’re correcting assumptions as they get confirmations, rather than just running with the assumptions.

One more thing to keep in mind. I’ve said this many times already, but… the first identified case of Covid-19 was apparently in China around December 1st, 2019. A single patient doesn’t go to a dr with a “bad flu”, get tested, come back negative and cause the doctor to instantly go, “oh, this is new, let’s figure out what it is, develop a test, and identify it!” I don’t know how many people need to show the same symptoms for something that isn’t identified by any existing tests before the medical field invests the time and money to identify what it is so they can start working to cure it, but I’m pretty sure it takes a decent number of cases. So, you’ve got a bunch of people that got sick enough to cause the Chinese to come up with a way to identify it, then someone was confirmed to have “it”. How many of those originally sick people infected others who infected others (with this virus that can have up to a 3 week incubation period)? Now, consider that prior to the current travel restrictions approximately 10,000 people traveled from China to the U.S. EVERY DAY. How many of those people had this “new” bug and how many people did they infect before it was even identified? This is another reason I’ve never been freaking out about this virus. This was here long before the lockdowns. Yes, you could get it and you could die. Hell, maybe I didn’t already have it and maybe I get it and die. But these lockdowns, IMO (based on some studies I’ve read that I didn’t keep the links to), are having absolutely ZERO effect on the virus spread, but they are having disastrous consequences to the economy… which in turn is having disastrous consequences to actual people who lived paycheck to paycheck before this bullshit started.