So we know that the official number of Corona virus cases is not the true number because
not everybody is being tested.
And so globaly we have about 2 million cases in the United States, it's roughly 600000
cases.
But these are the official numbers and the official numbers are only a fraction of the
real number of cases.
And as we do more testing the official number, we'll get closer and closer to what we would
call the true number.
But it still is way off.
And depending on which study you look at, it is significantly off.
So what might the true number of Corona virus cases be?
And this is important because if way more people have actually had it.
It means it's far less deadly.
It's a far lower death rate if way more people have had corona virus.
But it also means that it spreads much more easily and it can impact what the plan would
be or should be for starting to reopen parts of society
and the economy, which Donald Trump seems determined to do.
And even said at yesterday's press briefing that this week he would likely have some guidelines
or ideas about how that's all going to happen.
So let's look at a few different data points.
There is a town in Germany, gang guilt, and they did a randomized sample of a thousand
residents.
They just randomly tested a thousand people and they found that 14 percent of the people
in Gangel had Corona virus antibodies.
Now, this is a comically cartoonishly high number.
And there are a few caveats.
One is that antibody testing specifically for this Corona virus, meaning SA's COVA too.
It's still early and it's possible that some of the people that tested positive for antibodies
have antibodies for a different corona virus and that the test is not precisely showing
antibodies for this Corona virus combined with
Gangel being a center of infection.
So it's unlikely 14 percent of the world has been infected.
Of course, if the real infection rate were 14 percent in Germany, that would imply as
many as 11 million people in Germany had the virus.
The official number is only 128 thousand if it's anywhere close to accurate.
We're talking about drastically different infection rates than the official numbers.
But there are multiple reasons to significantly question whether 14 percent is really the
right number.
We have another data point from Austria.
Austria tested 15 100 people.
It was a representative sample of the population.
And they found that looking at a confidence interval somewhere between point 12 and point
seventy six percent of the population had the virus.
Now, that's a pretty wide confidence interval because the official case number in Austria
is fourteen thousand point 12 percent of the population would be fewer people.
It's only
10000 Austrians.
If you go to point 76, that's like sixty seven thousand Austrians.
So, again, we don't know.
It seems that according to this test, the true rate in Austria is somewhere between
the official rate and five times the official rate.
Very different numbers than that sample from Germany, where 14 percent supposedly had the
antibodies.
Then here in Massachusetts, we have a totally different type of test that was done, a sewage
analysis.
This is not an exact science.
Nobody is pretending that it is.
The sewage analysis suggests that a region here in New England with 500 official cases
estimates that the real number of cases could be anywhere from 20, 300 to 150000.
And again, these are wacky, large confidence intervals.
This would imply that the real rate is anywhere from five times to 250 times the official
number.
It's almost impossible to believe that
the real number might be 250 times the official case number.
That would imply 143 million cases in the United States seems inconceivable, but certainly
5x the official number 10x the official number may be 20 x the official number, if there
are really a ton of asymptomatic cases, could be possible.
That's data point number three.
And then lastly, we have a study which suggests the detection rate is 6 percent.
So if we're detecting 6 percent of the cases, that would imply the real rate is about 16
times higher than the official rate.
Once again, that would suggest we've had 10 million infections in the United States instead
of 600000.
So the real answer right now is we don't know the amount that we don't know about the spread
ability and.
Other factors about this particular coronavirus is huge, and every day I'm reading pre-print
of soon
to be published, peer reviewed studies, many conflict with each other.
As an example, there's a new one that suggests that the way that Corona virus is initially
hurting people is actually by reducing blood oxygen supply rather than being a primary
in respiratory illness, and that what is initially a low oxygen level in blood is leading to
respiratory symptoms.
Again, this stuff in retrospect, we're going to figure it out as we get closer to a vaccine,
as we continue to learn about which therapeutic treatments will work better.
But there is so much that we just don't don't know right now.
And that is part of what makes this so difficult, which is when we say look at the curve, look
at how it's starting to plateau and go down.
We don't know the effect of whether there are conflicting studies about temperature
and humidity.
There's just so much that we don't know.
And we will learn it in retrospect and hopefully in time for Wave 2 and possibly what we'll
be wave 3.