Facts That Informed This Essay

* The seasonal flu kills between 12,000 and 61,000 people a year. * In Italy, about 10% of people known to be infected have died. In Iran and Spain, the case fatality rate is higher than 7%. But in South Korea, it’s less than 1.5%. And in Germany, the figure is close to 0.5%. * A study published in mid-March estimated that in Wuhan, the chance that someone who developed coronavirus symptoms would die was actually 1.4%. * Estimates for the West Nile virus, which appeared in the US in 1999, were higher than 10%. But wider testing eventually found hundreds of thousands of people who’d been infected but never got sick enough to notice. The real case fatality rate in the US turned out to be less than 1%. * There are only about 180,000 ventilators in the US and only enough respiratory therapists and critical-care staff to safely look after 100,000 ventilated patients. * Coronaviruses tend to be winter infections that wane or disappear in the summer. That may also be true for COVID-19, but seasonal variations might not sufficiently slow the virus when it has so many immunologically naive hosts to infect. * When people are infected by the milder human coronaviruses that cause cold-like symptoms, they remain immune for less than a year. By contrast, the few who were infected by the original SARS virus, which was far more severe, stayed immune for much longer. Assuming that COVID-19 lies somewhere in the middle, people who recover from it might be protected for a couple of years. * The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention developed and distributed a faulty test in February. Independent labs created alternatives, but were mired in bureaucracy from the FDA. In a crucial month when the American caseload shot into the tens of thousands, only hundreds of people were tested.