I don’t buy the numbers infected. they have no idea how many are actually infected. There was infection in the US as early as November long before numbers were kept. The RO changes daily as well. Add into that the 40-60% of people that likely have T cell immunity and your numbers fall apart pretty fast. it it makes a great number to scare people with
You’re confusing the basic reproduction number with the effective reproduction number. The effective reproduction number changes daily. R0 does not.
And your “T cell immunity” numbers are clearly false as well. If 60% of people already had immunity to a disease with an R0 of 2.5, there would be no infections and no deaths. If 40% had it, New Jersey wouldn’t be sitting at ~28% infected nor New York at ~26% infected with new cases popping up daily. Once you reach HIT, Rt drops below 1 and new infections dwindle towards zero. That has not been observed anywhere in the US.
The thing that scares people more than anything is bad information. It makes it look like we don’t know what’s going on, and fear of the unknown is always much worse than fear of the known. Alfred Hitchcock made a career out of knowing that.
We do know what’s going on. SARS-CoV-2 has infected around 10.4% of the US population. It has an R0 of 2.5, indicating a Herd Immunity Threshold of 60%. 40% of those infected experience no symptoms. Another 40% experience mild to moderate symptoms requiring no medical treatment to recover. 20% will require medical intervention. 3-5% require critical care. 0.65% of those infected will die. We have multiple viable vaccine candidates completing phase 3 human trials right now. Due to President Trump’s negotiations and funding, doses of those vaccines have been manufactured throughout the phase 3 trials, shaving months of time off that timeline. We’ll likely have 2-5 safe and effective vaccines approved by the end of this year. Possibly 1-2 before election day. Tens of millions - possibly 100 million - doses will be available to Americans by the end of this year. Transmissions will slow to a crawl and life will start returning to normal normal early next year.
It’s really not that scary. We know what it is, we know how it spreads, we know how to slow it, and we know how to stop it. The way to alleviate fear is not with misinformation, but with verifiable facts.