“Your chance of catching Covid-19 is almost 74 times as high now as it was in mid March.”
So what? If you are anywhere between 1 and 65 yrs of age your chances of dying are to insignificsnt to even think about. I read somewhere that you are more likely to be killed by a Coke Machine falling over on you.
BTW your claim of our being 74 times more likely to catch the virus now rather than before is a totally bogus use of stats. Multiply a miniscule number by another and you still have a miniscule number. Besides that you have NO idea how many cases there were on March 13 since we have all been hearing how the case count is likely 20x or more higher than has been reported. This serves to drastically reduce the death rate and the DEATH rate, dear DR is the ONLY thing important here.
Exactly what are you referring to when you say "your chances of dying"? If I am never exposed to Covid-19, I have zero risk of dying from it. But if I am exposed, my risk of death suddenly increases to over 2%. Among people who are confirmed with disease, the risk of dying if they have Covid-19 is higher than the risk of dying from influenza for all age groups except those 19 years and younger. (This is based on Maryland numbers only; death rates by age group may vary in other areas.)
BTW your claim of our being 74 times more likely to catch the virus now rather than before is a totally bogus use of stats.
Actually, it is a perfectly valid use of stats. Your risk of catching a disease is a direct function of its prevalence in the population. Back on Mar 13, a total of 137,445 people in the world were diagnosed with Covid-19. Today, 10,302,867 people have been diagnosed. That is 75 times more people now than on Mar 13. Although, as I look at it, I realize I used the wrong number; I should have calculated using active cases only. So, there were 62,578 active cases on Mar 13, and now there are 4,561,441 active cases--which is a 73 fold increase. (Note that changing the numbers I calculated did not greatly change the outcome.) Ergo, you are 73 times more likely to catch Covid-19 now than you were 3.5 months ago.
Besides that you have NO idea how many cases there were on March 13 since we have all been hearing how the case count is likely 20x or more higher than has been reported.
I have not been hearing that. What I have been hearing is that some people who do not understand the limits of antibody testing were rushing to announce that they had found that there were 90 times as many Covid-19 cases as anyone though because they found antibodies. (Insert your own ridiculously high number in place of "90.") But you cannot use antibody testing as an indicator of past infection for a virus like Covid-19, because there are already several circulating strains of coronavirus and the antibodies cannot distinguish between them. While I can accept that some cases could have been missed early on before tests to detect actual virus became widely available, what I do not accept are wildly inflated claims of infections based on dubious antibody tests. The only way you can reliably test for past infection is by testing for lingering presence of viral RNA. I do not know how long Covid-19 RNA would remain in the body; I know that Ebola RNA has been detected in patients up to 9 months after recovery, but that tells me little about how long Covid-19 RNA remains.
This serves to drastically reduce the death rate and the DEATH rate, dear DR is the ONLY thing important here.
The only reliable calculation of the death rate is based on the total number of confirmed deaths divided by the total number of confirmed cases, times 100 to make it a percent. This is the method I use, as well as the WHO, the CDC, the Johns Hopkins team, and every other public health agency. No reputable public health agency would pad the numbers with unconfirmed guesstimates of cases to artificially lower the death rate for political purposes.