“Our county has 3498 cases and 83 deaths with a death rate of 2.37 percent.”
Your county has 3498 known cases and who knows HOW many unknown cases. In other words, your county has no idea how many people have been infected.
In order to understand what’s going on, they need extensive RANDOM testing to estimate the true level and spread of infected.
Testing and confirming only those sick enough to need hospitalization, and then using that case database as the denominator to calculate a mortality rate, or as a base for the rate of spread - is just INSANE!
That is like saying that if 2% of all people hospitalized for bee stings died as a result, then we can conclude 2% is the death rate from bee stings! Obviously, that is absurd, because the ONLY people who go to the hospital for bee stings are the people who feel their life is in danger - it is a statistically flawed sample.
It is the same with Coronavirus, and it is the reason the “case” data, and the “curve”, and the “death rate” - it’s all a load of crap.
Hey, maybe this virus is as bad as the Spanish Flu - I’m not trying to downplay anything.
But until they do random testing and get a good estimate of the true number of infections, they know nothing at all.
They would have to do random samplings of a certain given number each testing cycle over several weeks to see if the numbers are increasing or decreasing. It’s bit late in the game but with antibody testing becoming available we can at assess the true number of exposed/ got over it folks.