@gardenman wrote:
I've been poking around to see how long a person could still be shedding the virus (infect others) and the generally accepted numbers are between 4 and 11.5 days. A Chinese researcher claims it could be as long as 37 days but even in his study, the average was twenty days and he was looking for any trace of the virus, not necessarily a viral load that's transmissible.
If you use his worst-case number of 37 days for everyone infected in the US and go back 37 days to May ninth, that would mean that the 1,311,125 who tested positive by that date are no longer infectious now. When you subtract them from the 2,085,028 that have now tested positive you end up with a maximum of 773,903 people that could be capable of passing on the virus right now. In a country of 320 million that means that at most, only one out of every 413 people even could be capable of passing the virus on.
If you use the US standard of people no longer being infectious after 14 days you end up with 292,807 possibly infectious people and about a 1 in 1,093 chance of encountering an infected person who could spread the virus to you.
If you assume that the worst-case number of 773,903 are each infectious and infecting one other person a day then we should be seeing new infections of over seven hundred thousand per day. Instead, we're seeing numbers in between 14,000-24,000 per day. If you use the US numbers of 292,807 possibly infectious people you'd expect a one to one transmission rate to give you over two hundred thousand per day. We're getting less than a tenth of that in the number of new cases.
Do these numbers mean we can let down our guard and go back to normal? No. Wear your masks when out in public to be safe and practice normal safe behavior, but there's really no need to panic. The numbers are not horrible and seem to be improving. The odds of you encountering someone with Covid-19 are pretty slim. The odds of you getting infected are slim. The odds of you dying from Covid-19 are also slim as more than 94% recover.
This virus has been around long enough now that we're getting some solid numbers. Even the worst-case numbers of how long someone could spread the virus make the odds of you encountering someone with the virus pretty low. The number of new cases relative to the number of people who could be spreading it makes a pretty good argument that the virus isn't spread all that easily. Practice safe behavior, but the odds are you'll be safe as long as you do what you should do.
This is what I've been saying!
The fear, panic and hysteria has been and totally overblown!
People freaking out and having a total meltdown just because someone isn't wearing a mask, and acting as if every single person in the county is going to the virus and die from it, when that is simply not the case.
But fear sells.
If the news told us what you did @gardenman , then people wouldn't tune in and watch, hence, less $$$.
What you said makes absolute sense.
The Sky looks different when you have someone you love up there.
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