Winston Churchill: "This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end, but it's perhaps the end of the beginning."
Infectious disease expert Michael Osterholm, who has been warning for a decade and a half about the possibility of a global pandemic, said the coronavirus we're fighting is at least as infectious as the one that killed an estimated 50 million people in the 1918 flu worldwide outbreak.
He said we're only in the second inning of a nine-inning contest, with the possibility of as many as 800,000 deaths or more in the US over the next 18 months.
Osterholm also pointed to a shortage of chemical reagents that are necessary for widespread testing for the virus and said that the CDC's low public profile in this pandemic in the United States has been a "tragedy."
He decried the lack of a national long-term strategy for the pandemic and noted that there are real questions about the efficacy of the antibody tests that are being developed to detect if people have been exposed to the virus.
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There are 320 million people in the United States. If half of them get infected in the next 6 to 18 months, that's 160 million people. The 50% rate of infection over the course of the pandemic is at the low end of my colleagues' consensus on what we can expect to see given the infectiousness of this virus.
Based on what we know from Asia, from the European Union and from the United States, about 80% of these cases will have asymptomatic, mild or moderate illness but won't need professional medical care. About 20% of infected people will seek medical care. That's 32 million people.
Of those, about half will be hospitalized. That's 16 million people. Of those who are hospitalized, about half will actually require some form of critical care. That's 8 million people. About 0.5 to 1% of the total number of 160 million infected people will die. So you have the possibility of at least 800,000 deaths in the US over the next 18 months.
This is the number of deaths I'm expecting.
If you don't like the numbers I just used, go ahead and change them however you want. Just provide your justification. We have a long way to go with this pandemic.
We just need to make people understand that this is going to be bad until we get a safe, effective and widely available vaccine.
It's a sad commentary about our state of affairs that the number of people who die from Covid-19 in the US ranks as one of the top daily causes of death -- on some days it's been ranked higher than heart disease, cancer and accidents. Six weeks ago, it wasn't even in the top 60 causes of deaths.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/21/opinions/bergen-osterholm-interview-two-opinion/index.html
Infectious disease expert Michael Osterholm, who has been warning for a decade and a half about the possibility of a global pandemic, said the coronavirus we're fighting is at least as infectious as the one that killed an estimated 50 million people in the 1918 flu worldwide outbreak.
He said we're only in the second inning of a nine-inning contest, with the possibility of as many as 800,000 deaths or more in the US over the next 18 months.
Osterholm also pointed to a shortage of chemical reagents that are necessary for widespread testing for the virus and said that the CDC's low public profile in this pandemic in the United States has been a "tragedy."
He decried the lack of a national long-term strategy for the pandemic and noted that there are real questions about the efficacy of the antibody tests that are being developed to detect if people have been exposed to the virus.
....................
There are 320 million people in the United States. If half of them get infected in the next 6 to 18 months, that's 160 million people. The 50% rate of infection over the course of the pandemic is at the low end of my colleagues' consensus on what we can expect to see given the infectiousness of this virus.
Based on what we know from Asia, from the European Union and from the United States, about 80% of these cases will have asymptomatic, mild or moderate illness but won't need professional medical care. About 20% of infected people will seek medical care. That's 32 million people.
Of those, about half will be hospitalized. That's 16 million people. Of those who are hospitalized, about half will actually require some form of critical care. That's 8 million people. About 0.5 to 1% of the total number of 160 million infected people will die. So you have the possibility of at least 800,000 deaths in the US over the next 18 months.
This is the number of deaths I'm expecting.
If you don't like the numbers I just used, go ahead and change them however you want. Just provide your justification. We have a long way to go with this pandemic.
We just need to make people understand that this is going to be bad until we get a safe, effective and widely available vaccine.
It's a sad commentary about our state of affairs that the number of people who die from Covid-19 in the US ranks as one of the top daily causes of death -- on some days it's been ranked higher than heart disease, cancer and accidents. Six weeks ago, it wasn't even in the top 60 causes of deaths.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/21/opinions/bergen-osterholm-interview-two-opinion/index.html
