Covid-19 Update | March 26 at 9:58 PM

So, corona virus update time. As the entire media complex has made every American acutely aware, we’re number one! That’s right, there are more confirmed cases of corona virus in the US than anywhere else in the world. It could have something to do with the fact that we’ve tested 550,000; which is also more than any other country in the world. I think with what is going to be a testing disparity, the best way to compare apples to apples at this point is deaths. We are the largest country in the world that is having more cases so the raw number of deaths is less important, you can see the deaths per million rate to compare outcomes. As of today, with 1295 deaths, we are at 4 deaths per million; both of these numbers will rise. Italy for example has a rate of 136 deaths per million. Spain has a death rate of 93 per million. We are pretty much even with Germany, S Korea, and Norway in this metric. Two things happened today that did not go unnoticed by the stock market. Neil Ferguson, lead scientist at the Imperial College, testified before the House of Commons earlier in the day and revised his earlier estimate of death from corona virus. Initially he had predicted 550,000 in the UK and 2.2 million in the US would die from CoVID-19. He revised that down to 20,000 in the UK and he further testified that over half of those deaths were the frail and elderly that were likely to die within the year based on their age and other health conditions. This falls in line and extrapolates out well with the second data point. A team of researchers at the University of Washington who are predicting 80,000 deaths in the US from corona virus. This is much lower than earlier estimates here as well. They have also published and made public an incredibly useful tool that allows you to toggle by state and see their projected deaths by state and when the peaks will be. It is all based on the current level of social distancing restrictions. And it also shows if your state’s hospital system has capacity to handle the sick. The good news is they project Florida to have only 3300 deaths and that’s despite our large elderly population. And they note that our state has adequate capacity to handle the hospitalized and even ICU level patients. That website may be accessed here: http://covid19.healthdata.org/projections
That’s it for tonight folks. Until tomorrow!