COVID-19: much ado about nothing?

In this Friday’s first White House coronavirus press briefing in nearly two months, VP Pence suggested that the worst of the COVID-19 US epidemic was behind us. Could he be right? Have we just been hysterically chasing the COVID-19 Salem witch and fallen victims to Dionysian news cycles more concerned with sensationalism and ratings than objective reporting? Is it possible that the latest COVID-19 numbers are less grim than we think?

So, let’s try and see how bad -or not- the US COVID-19 epidemic really is

If you are anything like me, you have hard time dealing with big numbers. Sure, we all have a pretty good idea what a pound of apples, a gallon of milk, or $10 are, but a metric ton of grapes or a million dollars? I think something similar is happening to the collective American consciousness concerning the current COVID-19 pandemic: we keep hearing about the huge numbers of Americans getting infected, now surpassing 2,5 million, but the truth of the matter is that most of us just can’t get our heads around what those numbers actually mean. So, let’s try and see how bad -or not- the US COVID-19 epidemic really is.

Instead of staring at the actual number of new cases that are updated daily on a myriad of news outlets and websites, let us look at what happened in just one day in the COVID-19 saga. Let’s just look at this past Friday, the day VP Pence delivered his reassuring address on national TV: the US registered more new COVID-19 cases in 1 day than South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma, Laos, Thailand, Australia, and New Zealand since the beginning of the pandemic, together! And unlike the US which sits halfway across the globe from the initial pandemic epicenter in Wuhan, China, these 10 countries are in the same geopolitical sphere as China, some of them sharing physical borders with it, while others such as Taiwan, is intricately woven in the Chinese societal fabric, and within less than 600 miles from Wuhan.

Now let’s look at COVID-19 American fatalities. Have you recently been to South Bend, IN, Boulder, CO, Cambridge, MA, Rochester, MN, Ann Arbor, MI, Berkeley, CA, Odessa, TX, or New Haven, CT? If you have, try and imagine this: if all American fatalities were concentrated in just one town, the entire population of any of these towns would have been wiped out by the virus, sparing not a single soul. If you haven’t been to these cities and have hard time imagining the sheer devastation of it all, think of this: COVID-19 has killed more Americans in the past 3-4 months than the American lives lost to all US wars for the last 70 years (including the Korean war, the Vietnam war, the Gulf war, the war in Afghanistan, and the war in Iraq), in addition to all the lives lost in the past 7 decades to mass shootings and terrorist attacks (including the nation’s psyche scarring Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols Oklahoma City bombing and the 9/11 terrorist attacks), and including hurricane Katrina, the most devastating category 5 cyclone to hit the US in the past 15 years!

COVID-19 killed more Americans than all US wars, mass shootings, and terrorists attacks for the past 7 decades...

How about the idea that COVID-19 is nothing more than a little flu, a notion alluded to by more than one leader, including our own? Based on CDC’s data, COVID-19 killed in the month of May alone thousands more of our citizens than the flu did during the whole of 2018/2019. And in the case of the flu, there was no lockdown, confinement, or social distancing. People went to ballgames, flocked to movie theaters, and crowded concert halls. They traveled both the country and the world, uncensored, unchecked, and unprotected: authorities did not test travelers for the flu in an attempt to curb its spread, and people did not wear masks or gloves, nor did they obsess about personal hygiene and hand sanitizers. They ate at restaurants, food courts, and food stalls. They were served by equally non-hygiene obsessed cooks, waiters, and waitresses. Yet the flu killed less in 2018/19 than COVID-19 in just one month. There is no way around it: COVID-19 is unfortunately no little flu.

It would have been nice, but COVID-19 is unfortunately no little flu

In fact, there is nothing little about the COVID-19 virus: its genetic material is more than twice the size of that of the flu giving it more genetic flexibility, and a comparison of its fatality rates to those of the last seven flu seasons shows that despite all the precautionary measures taken, COVID-19 killed on average 20 times more Americans than did the flu.

So, COVID-19 much ado about nothing? Maybe. The same way Sandy Hook Elementary School and El Paso Walmart mass shootings, hurricane Katrina, the Vietnam war, and 9/11 much ado about nothing.