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But not resolved so you can’t figure a running death rate on 19000 cases, only against who has recovered(or officially 147). The 19000 cases are still ongoing....some of those will still die and that number of confirmed cases has quintupled in a week. We expect a good number of that will end up hospitalized.

That is the sticky nub....if confirmed numbers quintuple again then the numbers of those needing to be hospitalized will also go up. I expect that the mortality rate will drop...but worldwide the numbers so far show 11 percent mortality against 89 percent recovering and that number has been sticking for a while.

Should we end up with 1 million total cases with the 1.3 percent dying(using your figures) that will be at least 13000 folks passing away but....20 percent(or 20000) will need hospitalization to keep them from dying based on other parts of the world and half of those will need ICU beds. We don’t have the beds to accommodate them and accommodate the “regular” folks you already find in the ICU’s.... you know...strokes MI’s, major trauma and shootings!!?
So the health services with admissions on the upswing will be swamped and choices will start to be made as to who to save and who won’t be saved based on age and underlying conditions....so your precious 1.3 percent you are clinging to may rise to 4, 5, 6 percent death rates as care gets rationed (as they are doing in Italy) with many others, if they survive, left with lingering diminished lung capacities and in need of chronic medical monitoring.

I’m hoping that a big bulk of persons have already had covid before the testing started in earnest so that the numbers stay well under 1 million. I hope that the apparent rise in cases is just like the proverbial flashlight shined on the garage floor showing one that the cockroaches were already there but the insecticide has been applied. Hopefully we will see decreasing numbers and not increasing numbers because eggs are hatching and a given number of roaches seem to be resistant to the insecticide.

That is why we can’t accept both the 1.3 percent or the 62 percent mortality rates right now....not enough resolved cases to compare the deaths to, and the new numbers only tell us who was infected 7-14 days ago. How many of these folks get really critical and enter hospital we won’t know for a while; how many more cases get confirmed but with a huge spike of critical hospital admissions associated with those(eggs to hatch) we won’t know for another week or so.

People like to speak of happy SK but their death to resolved cases are 4 percent mortality with some 4300 cases still unresolved. They seem to have slowed their numbers with very good mitigation efforts though some new cases have popped up in the last few days. Can the US cap off at say 100000 cases? Remains to be seen.