Am I the only one who really doesn't give two ***** about confirmed cases? The daily panic surrounding this number is baffling to me because it's so directly tied to testing. It's not based on some comprehensive survey of the population. We don't know, and may never know, the real number of infections, including those who were infected and recovered with little awareness. Is it reasonable to believe that a highly contagious virus in a connected society hasn't infected thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, in a state of 3.2 million?
I'm much more interested in the number of hospitalizations and deaths. Those are real numbers, as is the total population. So, in a state of 3.2 million, we have 3 dead (0.0001%) and 32 hospitalized (0.001%). Forgive my lack of panic over "confirmed cases."
You are right, hospitalizations are the real thing to look at from a "how bad is this situation" perspective. Nobody should be in a panic over the actual positive test numbers.....it's here, we've been mixing it around the population too well for too long, and numbers will increase.
I'm not sure on the scope of the assumed number already infected though....just don't know. Due to testing logistics and complete lack of symptoms in a certain percentage of infection, we certainly haven't ID'd every single infection.....be great if many many millions have already been unknowingly infected and possess some immunity.
It'd be great to have the capability to test 10,000+ randomly selected people in Iowa that have been healthy and have had no symptoms. The closest we can probably come is to look at wherever the highest amount of testing of outwardly healthy people has been done: South Korea. As of March 20, they had done 316,664 tests with 8,652 cases: 2.73% positive. But even that likely wasn't true random sampling: some/many may have been selected due to symptoms or contact tracing of positive tests.
Those numbers are also based simply on detection of the virus. Antibody tests will eventually help figure out about how many people responded to an infection, even if they didn't have signs or get tested.
I've heard a lot of people saying something like they had a bad cold in early January or their co-worker was coughing back in December and tested negative for influenza.....this of course leads to "maybe it was COVID"....has anyone seen data on testing of retrospective samples to attempt to show how long the virus was in the US prior to the first reported case? I haven't, but I'm curious....
