And the mortality rate is hovering around 1% and will continue to drop
There's still unknowns both on the numerator and the denominator, and in the forward mortality rate, a big variable is whether urban hospitals are pushed to max capacity.
Bergamo (122k) delayed doing a lock-down until March 9 and maxed ICU beds just 9 days later (March 18). At the time of the Bergamo lockdown, Italy had 9k cases / 51M population, so 0.00018 cases per capita. The US, just yesterday, hit 35k cumulative cases / 325M population, so we're roughly at the same per capita *known* infection rate, so by that metric we're about ~2 weeks behind northern Italy if there's any analogous spread here.
Italy is now at 64k confirmed w/ 6k deaths. If the US has similar linear/multiple expansion, in 2 weeks we're looking at 245,000 cases. At the ~1-1.5% death rate we have now, we'll lose 2500-3500 of those people and the cumulative effect of this over the next 3 months will be like an aggravated flu season.
But there are a few really big unknowns. One is that we aren't even close to testing everyone, which includes the recently deceased outside of hospitals. Again, going back to Bergamo, its year-over-year death rate is still higher than what can be accounted for by known covid infections.
https://www.euronews.com/2020/03/21/italian-mayor-claims-the-true-death-toll-from-covid-19-likely-to-be-much-higher. One possibility is that they (and likely we) are missing a lot covid-19 in the wild that's killed people outside of the healthcare system. Pneumonia is not an uncommon cause of death as it is, and we have anecdotal evidence that this thing is more saturated in the US than we first thought.
A second variable is whether regional health resources are strained or exhausted. Northern Italy is fairly well of and they have more hospital beds than us per capita although fewer ICU units.
In any event, the 1-1.5% death rate presumes appropriate medical care. If we have to triage ventilators in any region, the death rate for elderly and at-risk patients will skyrocket. We have 1M hospital beds and 175k ventilators nationwide, but it's going to be more important that we avoid exhausting resources in individual metropolitan areas and it's more difficult to do that here than in other countries for a variety of reasons.
If we succeed in doing that, it doesn't mean covid-19 was overblown; it means we beat a real threat that was beatable. And it is a real threat b/c while Bergamo is the worst scenario in Italy currently, we have a good 15 metropolitan areas with 5-10x the people and higher population densities. And remember, this thing's like looking at the stars.
All this is compounded by that it's a weird disease that can be either entirely asymptomatic or put healthy young people into a tailspin and we have no idea what the long-term effects on lung issues are. Plus, what we see in ERs today is what was infected 1-2 weeks ago, so it's possible there's pending exponential growth in our bigger cities that we're not seeing yet.
It we see the growth curves level off and ventilator/ICU rotations stabilize, I'm fine with going back to quasi-normal, but we're not there yet and may not be for another few weeks. If we get to the end of the month and Trump tells everyone to go back to normal, we're risking a catastrophe that would amplify the economic issues that he's already complaining about. I don't think Trump has the capacity to imagine how ugly this is capable of being.
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