Some Interesting Facts

One of the concerns with the current Covid-19 pandemic is that the virus seems so deadly and the morbidity rate for the virus seems so high that federal and state authorities have decided that it's better to shut the country down than to expose people to such a deadly contagion.

As new data keeps coming out, though, the morbidity rate (the deaths/ the number of cases) appears to be much less than had been feared.

In a column at TownHall.com Kevin McCullough points out that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo stated on Thursday that antibody testing in his state has shown that at least 13.9% of New Yorkers have had Covid-19. This is very significant because it means the denominator in the morbidity ratio has been pegged way too low.

Here's McCullough:

The implication of this is a shockwave to the system. With a population of 19,540,500 the findings point out that over 2,500,000 New Yorkers had the virus and have recovered. Keep in mind that as of this writing that only 263,000 New Yorkers have currently confirmed cases. Also as of this writing New York has reported 19,543 fatalities.

We’ve been told that the true death rate is 7.4% in New York. We were told there would be hundreds of thousands dead. We were told that this was worse than the flu, which has still recorded more deaths to date in this past flu season—even though the CDC instructed medical personnel to start counting influenza, heart disease, pulmonary, respiratory, drug overdose, and possibly even car crash deaths as COVID-19 deaths.

We were told that we had to upend an economy, go into solitary confinement, and divorce ourselves from normal life because this [disease] would rage beyond any previous pandemic. We were told that this virus with 846,000 current confirmed cases was worse than the H1N1 that broke out on Obama’s watch that infected 60,000,000 people.

More precisely, using McCullough's numbers, the number of New Yorkers who have had the virus would be 2,716,129. This means that the actual morbidity rate is about .72% which makes it just slightly more virulent than the seasonal flu:

The death rate in New York State isn’t 7.4%, it is actually [about] .75%. The recently ended influenza season numbers from the CDC indicate possibly 56,000,000 cases of flu, 740,000 hospitalizations, and 62,000 deaths.

Thus, the morbidity rate for the seasonal flu is about .11%. I have no doubt that Covid's toll would've been higher had New York and a few other locales not taken the measures they did to slow it, but I'm not sure that the risk the disease poses warrants the continued destruction of our economic infrastructure.

At some point soon we have to find the point at which the risk to health is outweighed by the need to get people back to work and save us from a federal debt burden that will almost certainly crush our children and grandchildren.