You are correct, my bad. The estimate on infections so far this year is 38,000,000 to 54,000,000. This thing has the possibility to infect 200,000,000 because there's no vaccine, no herd immunity, etc.

Seriously! There is no way any doctor, analyst, mathematic genius, can make that absurd estimate.
No blind study no testing. That is the problem with this pandemic. It is working off totally made up numbers. Because the real numbers don’t add up for the people in charge.

I just realized they are using the penny a day doubled every day theory! Makes sense now. So in 3 years we will all be gone.

And my point is we deal with this every year and dont destroy our economy, this is an over reaction, it is contrived, it is a mess and some people need to be thrown in jail once this is sorted out for screaming fire in the theater.

WAWI I agree. How you and I go in and buy us a bunch of 5.00 a barrel oil, sell it in a year.
Man I wish I was liquid enough to take advantage of all of this BS right now!

No sir it came from China!

Unfortunately for all of us, this thing is real. We are not equipped to think about and really deal with this situation. We've been lucky in the recent past with possible pandemics and that led to the government and public not being prepared. I'm not trying to play any kind of political blame game. This is human nature. This virus is, very unfortunately, a sort of perfect mix of being highly infectious, relatively low percentage of people who get symptoms, apparently very deadly to a subset of infected folks, and has a pretty long incubation period. That means by the time a bunch of people get sick an astounding number of people are infected. And this whole process (low rates of infection leading to hot spots, peak hospitalizations in an area, etc.) takes a long time. Unless warm weather really slows it down (and so far we don't have enough data from the tropics to know much), then there's nothing to slow this down except isolation until they can deploy a vaccine. There's some evidence that if everyone wears masks on a pretty regular basis like they do in Taiwan, Japan, etc., then that might help. So hopefully once this outbreak process is somewhat under control (which is likely to play out until June unless more areas delay real social isolation), then maybe we can keep new hot spots from emerging, deploy intense localized testing, quarantining positive cases, etc. That's our best chance to avoid a very high death toll and the complete nuking of our health care system.

The math is brutal. A bunch of people are going to die even with current levels of social distancing to slow it down.

By the way, there are many, many non-symptomatic or low symptomatic viruses that infect pretty much every human in the United States and even the majority of the world. I think the latest estimates is that all of us are carrying thousands of viruses. If there's nothing to stop the spread of a highly infectious virus, then nothing will and you end up with a super high percentage of the population infected.

Dr. Fauci is predicting 100,000-200,000 or less will die. Not the 2 2 million originally predicted

Way to nail it down Doc F. I made a note on December on my calendar to look back and see if he was right. Personally I think he's full of s***.

Agreed

I do not have much faith in him or the surgeon general either.

Something like 60 or 70% of the population becoming infected over a two or so year period is not crazy. Unfortunately not crazy at all. "Regular" flu is a good example. Before and during the 2018-2019 flu season, 169 million Americans were vaccinated against the flu. CDC estimates that the burden of illness during the 2018–2019 season included an estimated 35.5 million people getting sick with influenza, 16.5 million people going to a health care provider for their illness, 490,600 hospitalizations, and 34,200 deaths from influenza. That's 35 million infections and 34,000 deaths when 169 million people were vaccinated. And unfortunately Corona is more infectious than recent strains of influenza. I'm not trying to be an alarmist. Definitely not happy this is happening. But this thing is not like the flu. The Spanish Influenza epidemic took two flu seasons to play out. This thing is likely to be a slow, slow train wreck with, unfortunately, a few horrible spikes mixed in. I'm not trying to scare you and others, but folks need to be prepared for a long "battle" with this thing.

We won't be gone in three years, but unless we take preventative measures a huge chunk of the US population will be exposed/become infected by the virus. Your three year analogy is interesting...what percentage of the US population becomes infected with a rhinovirus that causes the common cold during a three year period? It's a really, really high percentage of Americans. I think most of us get a cold during a three year period. As long as the virus doesn't mutate to a form that is unrecognizable by our immune system, then we shouldn't see the kind of spread we get with rhinoviruses because of herd immunity, but it could still very realistically be very bad.

Again, I am not trying to be an internet jerk, political, push an agenda, etc. The math on this thing is brutal. I am hoping and praying that the virus can't handle summer temps and then we can get a handle on public health measures for the fall (masks, etc.) and we can develop and deploy a vaccine. We can all hope and pray for the virus to mutate to a less virulent form. That definitely happens in a lot of virus outbreaks. But right now things look pretty rough. The fear is that we get three, five, ten mini-NYC hotspots going at once. That will really start to generate a lot of Covid deaths, crush the health care system, and start to cause a lot of indirect mortality from lack of proper health care for non-Covid patients, etc. I hope, definitely hope, that things do not play out as the numbers suggest it will.

Best to everyone right now.

Me too.

I can't wait for the tests to come out that show if you've had it.

We don't have enough tests? Here's my county's numbers through the 28th - looks like at least our county has way more tests than positive cases (at least for now):

• There have been 118 confirmed positive cases of COVID-19 in Collin County.

• There have been 547 negative COVID-19 tests in Collin County.


BTW - What do these people have that are testing negative?

About 2600 people have died in the US from CV 19 in march. If that pace keeps up( which I don't think it will) over the next 7 months about 18,000 will have died. That's a long way from 100,000-200,000. Plain old garden variety flu has already killed 23,000 this season but the media doesn't want to mention that,conveniently.

The people testing negative may have one or more of the following
Bad allergies
Strep throat
The flu
False negative test
Affluenza