Shakesbear makes a case which
seems logical, but which does not match known conditions.
China is the rub for me.
The virus first appeared November 2019, to the best knowledge we have, beginning in Wuhan, no matter how we want to describe its creation. By March 2020 the disease had reached its maximum extent, with around 81 thousand official cases and under 3300 deaths, in a nation of over a billion people.
Why? There's no evidence that China engaged in the social distancing being used in the US, and while some Chinese cities were quarantined, cities like Beijing and Shanghai were not quarantined. Yet they did not experience the outbreak to any great degree. And now the virus appears to be producing fewer and fewer new cases in China.
Why?
Some nations are experiencing terrible expansion of the virus, but others are showing almost none, notably Russia.
Why?
I agree with social distancing, with all the precautions in place to prevent the spread, yet the evidence shows there is more going on than we understand. Especially the question of why the virus hits some countries harder per-capita than others. Part of the vaccine research that matters, is that the same research which produces a vaccine will also be able to tell us why the growth is so variable, in order to help us know where to target efforts to wipe out the spread of C-19.
My gut tells me the US death total this year will stay below 2,500. My gut also tells me we will be unhappy with that total because we will discover that many of those deaths could have been prevented, but we made mistakes at the time which were obvious only after the fact.
One problem that is still ignored, is that we do not know about all of the people who contract C-19, much less who was exposed to it. Some people will not be exposed to the virus at all this year, and of course those people will not contract it. Others will have immune systems which prevent infection. Still others will have symptoms mild enough that they do not go a doctor and so we never know they had it. We only know about people who had the virus to a degree that they experienced symptoms,
and were tested positive for the virus. The true mortality rate for C-19 won't be known this year, just as we did not have that number the first year MERS came out, or during the first year of SARS, or so on.
My worry is that at some point, when case counts and fatalities don't skyrocket to the numbers promised by the media, people will start ignoring quarantine and antiseptic rules and the virus will be able to spread into the wider population. If that happens, the virus will seem overblown in 2020 but could be worse in succeeding years, while if we can identify the primary risk conditions now, we can take targeted actions the public will accept in a longer time frame, and so improve the future condition.
That which does not kill me, will try again and get nastier
