*The CV Death Rate, PLUS Intensive Care Hospitalization, 4-6 Week Recovery*: Deeply Concerning

[appalachiablue]

'It Isn’t Just the Death Rate From Coronavirus That Should Have Us Concerned,' Daily Kos, Feb. 28, 2020.

There has been a lot of focus on the fact that, based on known cases, the Coronavirus mortality rate sits somewhere between two and three percent. Much less discussed is the fact that up to 25% of known cases have required intensive care hospitalization and a four to six week recovery window.

So lets play that out. Say 10% of Americans contract the virus. That is 32.7 million people. Should current trends on known cases hold, more than eight million of those could become so ill that they require hospitalization in order to survive. According to the American Hospital Association, as of 2020, America has a total of 924,107 staffed hospital beds across the country. Even at an infection rate of 10% of the population, spread across the country instead of (more likely) clusters, our hospitals would be massively overrun and unable to cope.



Of course, given the highly communicable nature of the virus and the fact that our government is headed by malignant, navel-gazing incompetents, it is not outside the scope of possibility that infection rates could exceed 10% of the population.

So how does the story look if the unimaginable happened and 50% of the population – 163.6 million people – became infected? Again working off current known cases, the number of people potentially requiring long term hospitalization in such a scenario could reach 40 million or more. I don’t feel particularly alarmist in saying that such a number would cause a complete breakdown in our society.

China took draconian measures to halt the spread of Coronavirus because it played the numbers of the possible. Here in the United States, our leadership is more concerned with playing the numbers of the stock market. It is deeply concerning.

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