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March 19, 2020 03:30 am

What Happens If the US Does Absolutely Nothing To Combat COVID-19?

On Monday, the Imperial College report on COVID-19 was released and the results are terrifying. For those who may not know, the Imperial College in London "has advised the government on its response to previous epidemics, including SARS, avian flu and swine flu," reports The New York Times. "With ties to the World Health Organization and a team of 50 scientists, led by a prominent epidemiologist, Neil Ferguson, Imperial is treated as a sort of gold standard, its mathematical models feeding directly into government policies." In a series of tweets, Jeremy C. Young, Assistant Professor of History at Dixie State, summarized what the report says would happen if the U.S. does absolutely nothing. That is, if we treat COVID-19 like the flu, go about our business, and let the virus take its course. The Imperial College team plugged infection and death rates from China, Korea, and Italy into epidemic modeling software and ran a simulation... Here's what would happen: 80% of Americans would get the disease. 0.9% of them would die. Between 4 and 8 percent of all Americans over the age of 70 would die. 2.2 million Americans would die from the virus itself. It gets worse. People with severe COVID-19 need to be put on ventilators. 50% of those on ventilators still die, but the other 50% live. But in an unmitigated epidemic, the need for ventilators would be 30 times the number available in the US. Nearly 100% of these patients die. So the actual death toll from the virus would be closer to 4 million Americans -- in a span of 3 months. 8-15% of all Americans over 70 would die. How many is 4 million people? It's more Americans than have died all at once from anything, ever. It's the population of Los Angeles. It's 4 times the number of Americans who died in the Civil War...on both sides combined. It's two-thirds as many people as died in the Holocaust. Americans make up 4.4% of the world's population. If we extrapolate these numbers to the rest of the world (warning: MOE is high here), this gives us 90 million deaths globally from COVID-19, in 3-6 months. 15 Holocausts. 1.5 times as many people as died in all of World War II. The Imperial College then ran the numbers for what would happen if countries assumed a "mitigation" strategy and "suppression" strategy. You can read the full summarized breakdown of what happens in each scenario below, but basically the mitigation strategy flattens the curve with an actual death toll at around two million deaths while the suppression strategy has the death rate in the U.S. peaking at 3 weeks with only a few thousand deaths. You can view a screenshot of the thread below:

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