500,000

I had done a little calculating in my head last night and was very disturbed. I wasn’t even sure if I should talk about it, but I decided I would sleep on it and run the numbers more carefully this morning. I had the same result.

I used a case attack rate of 20% (that’s the percentage of the population that will get infected). To put that number in perspective, the 1918 Spanish Flu is estimated to have infected 20-30% of the world population.

Next, I used the case fatality rates I’ve been tracking for weeks. For the low end, I used the numbers from South Korea, for the midrange the global average, and at the high end, Italy.

Without aggressive social interventions (school closings, banning any kind of mass gatherings, mandatory quarantine of entire cities, here’s the the number of deaths I’m projecting in the US using a very gross analysis of the data. I’ll be working through new models breaking this down by age categories this weekend.

Low: 506,896
Medium: 2,422,566
High: 4,377,735

In context, a normal influenza season in the US, we have about 36,000 deaths each year. Do you understand why this is different than influenza?

I don’t know what else to do to get people to take this seriously. We are in trouble and are way behind the eight ball in the US.