A massive study involving over 43,000 cases of confirmed covid-19 in China estimates that young children are not at risk. That’s the good news.

As a nation we have bungled our response to a disease we cannot cure (only nurse) and cannot protect against with a vaccine (for another year or more). Most estimates suggest that covid-19 will kill 3.4% of those who contract it. Mostly they will be old. really bad news is, we have no idea how many Americans are actually sick.

from The Atlantic three days ago:

The CDC confirmed eight days ago that the virus was in community transmission in the United States—that it was infecting Americans who had neither traveled abroad nor were in contact with others who had. In South Korea, more than 66,650 people were tested within a week of its first case of community transmission, and it quickly became able to test 10,000 people a day. The United Kingdom, which has only 115 positive cases, has so far tested 18,083 people for the virus.

No one believes we have test results on a tiny fraction of that many, despite America’s enormous population.

As of three days ago, “The Atlantic could only verify that 1,895 people have been tested for the coronavirus in the United States, about 10 percent of whom have tested positive. And while the American capacity to test for the coronavirus has ramped up significantly over the past few days, local officials can still test only several thousand people a day, not the tens or hundreds of thousands indicated by the White House’s promises.”

Over 8500 tests have now been administered in the United States, but the CDC is unable to confirm how many of these tests had been completed, that is: how many tests have returned a result.

For two months most people, even those who were sick and had likely been exposed, were not tested. Until this week, mostly only those sick enough to be hospitalized were tested. Since then testing capacity has increased (good news), but we’re still not clear about the extent of the illness.

What does this mean? We have failed to respond as we should have, and not because of anything Obama did or did not do. This failure lies at the doorstep of the current administration. It is the result of a system that has suffered revere, recent budget cuts and that would have struggled to keep up at the best of times.

These are not the best of time.

Many of us have elderly family members and friends who are most at risk because of their age. Most of us, even those old enough to be endangered ourselves, know people with underlying health issues.

Nevertheless, with prompt and appropriate care, most people who get sick will have mild cases of covid-19. Most people who have serious cases will survive.

A reminder that ordinary flu kills between 12-62 thousand Americans each year and that is with vaccination available that some people refuse to have. (A firned recently rvealed to me that she never had a flu shot because she never threw up. I had to explain that influenza is a respiratory illness, not so-called “stomach flu” which is generally caused by something eaten.) Each year a flu shot prevents or weakens the impact of the disease.

All of this suggests that as a nation, from top to bottom of the power structure, we are in a sorry condition to deal with a health emergency.

NOTE: A friend in the health care industry posted that the Ro (R-nought) of covid-19 is 2.2. This means it is much more contagious than earlier reported. I found confirmation in Forbes from 11 March 2020:

There’s a term floating around in the media — you might have seen it before, it’s called R₀ (pronounced “ARR naught”) — which represents how contagious a disease is. For COVID-19, R₀ = 2.2, meaning that each newly infected person can expect to infect 2.2 additional people, on average.

The Forbes article provides a clear and comprehensive review, which does an excellent job of explaining what it means, how the virus spreads from person to person, and what we should do about that. I highly recommend it.