> For every confirmed case of COVID-19, there are likely another five to 10 people with undetected infections.
I wish this was reflected more in the numbers being presented by various authorities. There is just too much confidence that confirmed cases are representative of the spread of the virus.
This unknown denominator can change mortality rate, and severe case rate by orders of magnitude.
Because of the dearth of testing in the US, it seems highly likely that far more people are infected, and maybe even recovered.
I'm fairly certain I've just recovered from COVID-19 given my symptoms, but can't get tested here in Colorado. By the time I am able to get tested it seems likely that I won't be shedding the virus any longer, and will test negative.
1. The current test is designed for the scenario that someone shows up to medical provider with symptoms. Test answers the question: are the symptoms caused by COVID-19?, quite reliably (negligible false positives, low false negatives).
2. The current test won't produce terribly useful data in someone without symptoms (either before, or after the illness). This is why for example certain well-known political figures saying they have been tested and cleared after potential exposure is not very meaningful.
Therefore ideas like: let's randomly test the population to see how much of this is out there, and I had what I think was COVID-19, I want to be tested to confirm, are not practical.
A test that can determine if someone was infected in the past is in development still.
I'm curious about the technical reasons for what you're saying. Can you say more? Is it a problem with figuring out the false negative rate for people without symptoms?
Number 2 is misleading, Trump got tested to quell opponents' fear mongering about his health. That doesn't make it more useful scientifically but no one thought it was happening for science anyway.
> I'm fairly certain I've just recovered from COVID-19 given my symptoms, but can't get tested here in Colorado.
I'm glad you're better. Please be careful going forward, though. You shouldn't assume you have an immunity unless you have a positive test result.
Even with the strict pre-test screening that focus strictly on high probability patients, some locations are reporting very high (90%) negative test results from assumed cases.
It's best to continue practicing safety cautions as if you did not have a COVID-19 infection
Yeah, I keep getting stuck on the early test positivity stats in the US. Over the last two weeks, only the most urgent cases were getting tested. But even then, something like 92 - 98% of tests were negative. There are a lot of illnesses out there that are presenting as close enough to COVID to concern health workers, even when it's not COVID.
People don't talk about it much yet, but we really need an immunity test to determine if someone has antibodies.
We are also not 100% certain that having the virus once grants immunity.
People have tested positive again after appearing to make a full recovery. While these results are probably better explained by remaining infected and becoming asymptomatic for a period then getting symptoms again, we can’t yet rule out the possibility of reinfection to my knowledge.
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-03-13/china-...
From the number of deaths you can crudely infer the number of infected, assuming the mortality on the Diamond princess and in South Korea (1%). Demographic effects are in play that don't make this quite right.
Totally agree. That’s the number I’ve been watching most to get a sense of how many total are infected for different regions e.g. 1 death today = 50-200 people were infected 2 weeks ago.
South Korea went over 1% fatality yesterday, and they're seeing a rise in numbers again... they might not be testing enough either, so natural fatality could still be lower. (Maybe they should have shut down for two weeks.)
It seems like you're pushing back on the CFR, possibly driven by trying to pessimize the need for action.
In the small Italian city of Nembro in Bergamo, 0.6% of their entire population has died in the last 12 days. That's 70 people in a small town of 11,000 — typically there are fewer than 70 deaths every six months. Now we're certainly _overestimating_ the denominator and still getting a number that's larger than the flu. While the numerator is also an overestimate (because it includes deaths not related to COVID-19), their healthcare system is stretched beyond capacity due to the virus leading to difficulties treating all illnesses and traumas.
You should include demographic information, since it is relevant to your argument:
[Nembro] Age Distribution (E 2019)
0-9 years 1,018
10-19 years 1,191
20-29 years 1,179
30-39 years 1,192
40-49 years 1,640
50-59 years 1,850
60-69 years 1,465
70-79 years 1,181
80+ years 810
> In 2010, there were 119,551 people residing in Bergamo (in which the greater area has about 500 000 inhabitants), located in the province of Bergamo, Lombardia, of whom 46.6% were male and 53.4% were female. Minors (children ages 18 and younger) totalled 16.79 percent of the population compared to pensioners who number 23.61 percent. This compares with the Italian average of 17.88 percent (minors) and 20.29 percent (pensioners).
A comment by Bradley Kuszmaul on that blog post gives a good reason why the scenario presented is not likely:
> Given the amount of testing being done in South Korea, we can rule out that there are a lot more people currently infected than we know about. And if there were a lot more people recovered than we know about, we would have seen deaths earlier in South Korea, since South Korea started their testing earlier. I suspect there's a lot more evidence that rules out the "fast and stealthy" hypothesis.
It's possible (likely imho) that there is some missing factor that we have yet to discover that explains the funky nature of the data. Something about the people rather than a property of the disease. Almost like an allergy: peanuts are quite fine for everyone to eat, except those with severe peanut allergies.
What we do know is that it can't be quite "there were zillions of people infected so when we talk about 1% IFR really it's 0.01% so everything is fine", because there are accumulating bodies in various localized places around the world. There's nothing we know to say that pattern wouldn't repeated everywhere.
The type of testing S Korea does require the Virus to be present in the body and only work in a certain window of time. Once a Serological survey is done, we’ll know the true extant.
South Korea is far from the only place COVID-19 is present, and most of the rest of the world tests barely anyone, even if they have symptoms and would like a test, either due to lack of resources or formal policies of only testing hospitalised cases. I can detect my infection, but statistics on the rate it is spreading in the UK can't.
It's also pretty well established that even in symptomatic cases where testing is widespread the disease has a multi-day incubation period.
If the people who recover after mild/minimal symptoms do so within <5days (hypothetically), but people who have severe cases take 10 days to get severe, wouldn't that account for "would have seen deaths earlier in South Korea"?
Given the amount of testing being done in South Korea, we can rule out that there are a lot more people currently infected than we know about
That's a very strong claim. SK has done a lot of testing relative to most places but it's still:
a) A tiny amount relative to the population
b) Not a random sample of the population
Their tests were done at testing clinics that people had to take themselves to, which in many cases had large queues and generally you'd only go there if you actually felt really sick because otherwise why would you expose yourself to lots of probably really sick and infectious people?
So far there's overwhelming evidence that either a lot of people have the disease without symptoms, or the tests have a very high FP rate. There's also a lot of people writing like the person above, who are sure they've had the disease based on symptoms but were never tested. South Korea wasn't deploying their tests on people who were asymptomatic, they are doing the same as everyone else: testing people who present for testing or who otherwise seem to need it.
There is a blood serum test already available that can determine if you had coronavirus (by testing for COVID-specific antibodies produced by your body). I'd say wait until the pandemic dies down and then go get that if you're curious.
There's going to be some very interesting population studies done post-pandemic to determine exactly what percentage of people had asymptomatic cases (and thus could have unknowingly been contributing to the spread).
If conversations with my family are any indication, yes. People see low-looking numbers and place names of faraway cities in headlines and think it isn't serious.
After making them think about incubation times that starts changing, but it takes a conversation.
What is common knowledge depends very much on who you're common with.
People are mostly looking at the death count, which is still very low for a pandemic.
It's hard to convince people to sacrifice so much when they look outside their windows and see nothing special, plus read the news and find that some bomb/earth quake/accident somewhere killed more people in a day than the corona virus in a month.
Not to mention it is still extremely difficult to be tested in the US. Yes, doctors can test you, but you basically can’t get a test unless you have all of the symptoms and are sick enough to need to visit the ER.
The current testing that's reported in the media is an antigen tests, that directly tests for the presence of the virus. Once your viral load comes down, you will test negative for the virus. Hence the reason people are declared recovered after having two negative tests in a row.
A test for the presence of antibodies is a serology test. The last time I looked into it (~one week ago), serology tests were under active development, but had not been deployed anywhere in a widespread way.
So, right now the testing will only tell you if you currently have the virus. Coming relatively soon are tests that will tell you if you previously had the virus.
Yes, but I don't think the PCR test is testing for that, currently. It's looking for pieces of viral RNA that are present in your blood. Antibody serology tests aren't readily available anywhere yet. In fact, the CDC is still developing theirs.
It doesn’t get called out, but when I read about the Spanish Flu I can’t help but feel that certain genotypes got very strong selective pressure.
Conversely, there are probably genotypes running around today that are completely asymptomatic to Covid. You could have whole families shedding virus wherever they go and never even know what they’ve done.
And one of the ways we learn about immunology is to study people who are immune or asymptomatic, so it’s not just about quarantining people that we need to identify infected individuals.
Quick recombination so that a beneficial gene can spread without losing genetic diversity of the population is is one of the benefits of sexual reproduction. And immune resistance to new threats is one of the top reasons why we need this capability.
In fact we broadcast signatures of our immune systems in pheromones and women are attracted to the smell of men whose immune systems are different from their own. This improves the probability that the children will be resistant to a wider range of possible diseases.
> Because of the dearth of testing in the US, it seems highly likely that far more people are infected, and maybe even recovered.
It's not just highly likely, it's absolutely certain. I recommend the recent Khan academy video on this if you want to understand the math and you want a healthy dose of panic:
> This unknown denominator can change mortality rate, and severe case rate by orders of magnitude.
The two best data points we have would be South Korea and the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Both of these groups have high rates of testing and both have had enough time that we can know how the most of the cases played out, and in both cases we see the death rate at about 1%. This doesn't take into account possibly different age group distributions. The cruise ship probably has less children and less 80+ people than on typical distributions.
Additionally both the Diamond Princess and South Korea cases assume ready access to medical treatment. If the medical system is overwhelmed we will see much higher CFR due to critical cases not receiving adequate care.
The German virologist Christian Drosten mentioned in his daily coronavirus update that some specialized labs at least in Germany are able to do an antibody blood test.
There are also some commercial antibody tests, which have some error rate and as all antibody tests can identify the virus after 7-10 days after onset of symptoms.
I think the term "asymptomatic" gives a wrong picture of the severity of the disease, when various authors use it to mean "testing positive before disease onset" or even outright untested due to testing criteria and availability.
One of the doctors on one of the press conferences (sorry, can't remember which one), said that she would prefer the term "physical distancing" as well for the same reason.
She said that "social distancing" is a medical technical term that doesn't translate super well to the public.
> She said that "social distancing" is a medical technical term that doesn't translate super well to the public.
Which is 100% the opposite of what I in my daily life observe: everyone, young & old, private & work, calls it social distancing.
It addresses the issue better too, then the "proposed" physical distancing. When you pass people physically the (need and) possibility to keep that 2 meters is often impossible where as while socialising it very much is.
While you're correct in the term being wrong, I don't think anybody misinterprets it. Moreover, the recommended 2m/6ft gap makes it clear that we are talking about physical distance, not purely social.
Social distancing of the entire population also slows the acquisition of immunity with zero and low risk age groups, which drags the whole situation out months longer.
It might even be logical with the above 3 steps in place for zero/low risk group to deliberately seek out the virus. This grants immunity quicker, and if they become sick, they can receive treatment whilst hospitals are still underwhelmed.
Speaking personally I would happily accept a strain of the virus considered to be low risk, then go into 14 day quarantine, if it meant I could afterwards work and socialise without any lockdown or restriction.
Italy is proof that we need to slow this down for months longer. Our medical system was projected to only have enough N95 masks and related supplies for two weeks of a pandemic... sure enough, we're having to cobble together makeshift supplies MacGyver style here in Washington.
In a couple weeks, more of our front-line medical staff will start getting sick (the first case just occurred here), and requiring their 14-day quarantine... taking them out of rotation and adding even more strain.
It's going to get bad. We have to slow this down, to reduce the mortality rate. Or that 1% number people are throwing around is going to look like roses.
I wonder if mildly symptomatic healthcare providers should treat patients known to have the same strain. As opposed to fully benching those providers, I mean.
> Social distancing of the entire population also slows the acquisition of immunity with zero and low risk age groups, which drags the whole situation out months longer.
Dragging it out is exactly the point. The total number of active cases should be kept as low as possible in order to stay below our healthcare system's capacity. Look at Italy for what happens when cases exceed capacity. Their death rate is partly so high because they have to let the worst cases die in order to save those that have a better chance at living.
My hope is that the thinking is that we have a very disruptive social distancing phase (now), in order to give our medical system time to ramp up to handle much higher surge capacity, and then transition to a more focused isolation / social distancing policy (maybe based on regions or outbreaks).
>It might even be logical with the above 3 steps in place for zero/low risk group to deliberately seek out the virus. This grants immunity quicker, and if they become sick, they can receive treatment whilst hospitals are still underwhelmed.
This is extremely irresponsible. The long-term effects of the virus are currently unknown but there are some worrying signs of possible long-term lung and other-organ damage that have been reported (anecdotally) from China and Italy. It's going to take time for these studies to be done.
Not to mention the immunity period length is unknown at this time. If this coronavirus follows the pattern of other coronaviruses, immunity could last 6 months to a year tops. That is ... not good. And a secondary infection could be worse than the first due to immune system overresponse/cytokine storm.
It's important we take the time to study these secondary effects and allow time for treatments and/or a vaccine to be developed and studied before we come up with any long-term plan.
If the immunity period is unknown/short then isn't there some logic in trying to build heard immunity amongst the entire lower risk group before the immunity would be lost. If we shut everything down for a bit, then start returning to normal life, that would stretch out the timeline for everyone being exposed and risk creating a cycle where people get it over and over again.
With half of infections being completely asymptomatic, this doesn't work. You need to do what South Korea and some towns in Italy have been doing successfully: widespread, fast, free testing, and then anyone who tests positive is isolated for 14 days.
> Although they are thought to be only about half as infectious as individuals with confirmed COVID-19, individuals with undetected infections were so prevalent in China that they apparently were the infection source for 86 percent of confirmed cases.
Figuring out how to manage this risk so we can return to society / open venues at a much lower risk of infection (while not giving all of our data to the government) is a challenge with which maybe some of this site's audience could assist.
Not to be a hardass, but I'd prefer real information not babyfood. Something akin to "Currently predicted US deaths without social distancing: X. With social distancing: Y. Potentially recurring each year"
I really wish we had widespread testing, or even a test to see if you had COVID-19 in the past. Before we had all been so focused on this thing, my child's friend came back from China in December, and she had a upper respiratory illness with a fever. Then my whole family and I suffered under a low-grade fever and upper respiratory illness for a week or so in early January. I have no idea if it was COVID-19, but it is hard not to wonder.
That's fear talking. Why would you want to be tested? What would you do differently? You had a virus, now you aren't sick any longer. You aren't making other people sick, either.
Well, for one thing, if people can be tested to confirm they had and recovered from the virus and therefore have some immunity to it, those people can more safely assist people who are currently ill and move about more freely in society (unless they are still at risk to transmit the virus to others, of course).
The first confirmed case of community contracted COVID-19 in the United States occurred in MY community, and was treated at MY place of work. So, no it is not entirely fear talking.
I think the motivation for this change is to prevent employers from trying to maintain "business as usual" operating conditions.
Anecdotally I've heard of places where the company has made no policy changes about sick leave or what employees who are feeling ill should do and, therefore, hourly workers keep coming in to work with "flu-like symptoms" or days after having had symtpoms because otherwise they don't get paid and could get fired.
Fascinating that they recommend you take OFF masks while on things like crowded BART trains and airports (I had lots leftover from forest fires) if you are "healthy", even though that might mean you are asymptomatic, or not yet diagnosed etc.
Despite claims masks (with good adherence to wearing) are highly effective - primarily by reducing hand to mouth/nose contact, secondarily as a direct barrier. And surgical masks are dirt cheap.
It looks like other countries went big on mask production and wearing - be very interesting if the claims that you should NOT wear masks if "healthy" even on crowded BART cars etc checks out in the end.
My understanding is that the urging to not wear masks when healthy is solely due to preserving masks for people who actually need them (sick people and doctors) given a limited supply, not because they're ineffective when healthy.
There is really low number of infected people and also low density of people walking outside in Czech republic. I am not sure you can make a lot out of it. I think requiring face covers outside is more panic than reasonable measure.
I live in Prague and when I go outside I meet someone once in few minutes and majority of the people are not wearing face cover despite it is required. Mostly they have it prepared on the neck to put it on when they go inside. One doctor in TV did not recommend extensive usage of face masks as cheap or improvised masks tend to get wet after 20 minutes. This significantly reduces their effectiveness. Risk of being infected outside is really low unless you are in crowded area.
Readit News
I wish this was reflected more in the numbers being presented by various authorities. There is just too much confidence that confirmed cases are representative of the spread of the virus.
This unknown denominator can change mortality rate, and severe case rate by orders of magnitude.
Because of the dearth of testing in the US, it seems highly likely that far more people are infected, and maybe even recovered.
I'm fairly certain I've just recovered from COVID-19 given my symptoms, but can't get tested here in Colorado. By the time I am able to get tested it seems likely that I won't be shedding the virus any longer, and will test negative.
This article captures my feelings on this very well: https://blog.longnow.org/02020/03/14/an-epidemic-of-false-co...
1. The current test is designed for the scenario that someone shows up to medical provider with symptoms. Test answers the question: are the symptoms caused by COVID-19?, quite reliably (negligible false positives, low false negatives).
2. The current test won't produce terribly useful data in someone without symptoms (either before, or after the illness). This is why for example certain well-known political figures saying they have been tested and cleared after potential exposure is not very meaningful.
Therefore ideas like: let's randomly test the population to see how much of this is out there, and I had what I think was COVID-19, I want to be tested to confirm, are not practical.
A test that can determine if someone was infected in the past is in development still.
I'm glad you're better. Please be careful going forward, though. You shouldn't assume you have an immunity unless you have a positive test result.
Even with the strict pre-test screening that focus strictly on high probability patients, some locations are reporting very high (90%) negative test results from assumed cases.
It's best to continue practicing safety cautions as if you did not have a COVID-19 infection
People don't talk about it much yet, but we really need an immunity test to determine if someone has antibodies.
https://cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/severity/diamond_crui...
This is considered in the article I posted.
In the small Italian city of Nembro in Bergamo, 0.6% of their entire population has died in the last 12 days. That's 70 people in a small town of 11,000 — typically there are fewer than 70 deaths every six months. Now we're certainly _overestimating_ the denominator and still getting a number that's larger than the flu. While the numerator is also an overestimate (because it includes deaths not related to COVID-19), their healthcare system is stretched beyond capacity due to the virus leading to difficulties treating all illnesses and traumas.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/coronavirus-obit...
https://www.citypopulation.de/en/italy/lombardia/bergamo/016...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergamo#Demographics
> Given the amount of testing being done in South Korea, we can rule out that there are a lot more people currently infected than we know about. And if there were a lot more people recovered than we know about, we would have seen deaths earlier in South Korea, since South Korea started their testing earlier. I suspect there's a lot more evidence that rules out the "fast and stealthy" hypothesis.
What we do know is that it can't be quite "there were zillions of people infected so when we talk about 1% IFR really it's 0.01% so everything is fine", because there are accumulating bodies in various localized places around the world. There's nothing we know to say that pattern wouldn't repeated everywhere.
It's also pretty well established that even in symptomatic cases where testing is widespread the disease has a multi-day incubation period.
That's a very strong claim. SK has done a lot of testing relative to most places but it's still:
a) A tiny amount relative to the population
b) Not a random sample of the population
Their tests were done at testing clinics that people had to take themselves to, which in many cases had large queues and generally you'd only go there if you actually felt really sick because otherwise why would you expose yourself to lots of probably really sick and infectious people?
So far there's overwhelming evidence that either a lot of people have the disease without symptoms, or the tests have a very high FP rate. There's also a lot of people writing like the person above, who are sure they've had the disease based on symptoms but were never tested. South Korea wasn't deploying their tests on people who were asymptomatic, they are doing the same as everyone else: testing people who present for testing or who otherwise seem to need it.
There's going to be some very interesting population studies done post-pandemic to determine exactly what percentage of people had asymptomatic cases (and thus could have unknowingly been contributing to the spread).
That's the necessary data to know when we can start rolling back the extreme measures being taken to slow the spread.
We need a measure to detect herd immunity
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/615379/antibody-test-how-...
Is that really the case? I'm finding it to be pretty common knowledge that "confirmed cases" is simply just that.
Furthermore, when you see that (larger) number it has a psychological effect of "this might be serious".
After making them think about incubation times that starts changing, but it takes a conversation.
What is common knowledge depends very much on who you're common with.
It's hard to convince people to sacrifice so much when they look outside their windows and see nothing special, plus read the news and find that some bomb/earth quake/accident somewhere killed more people in a day than the corona virus in a month.
Shouldn't the test detect antibodies that your immune system has developed?
The current testing that's reported in the media is an antigen tests, that directly tests for the presence of the virus. Once your viral load comes down, you will test negative for the virus. Hence the reason people are declared recovered after having two negative tests in a row.
A test for the presence of antibodies is a serology test. The last time I looked into it (~one week ago), serology tests were under active development, but had not been deployed anywhere in a widespread way.
So, right now the testing will only tell you if you currently have the virus. Coming relatively soon are tests that will tell you if you previously had the virus.
Conversely, there are probably genotypes running around today that are completely asymptomatic to Covid. You could have whole families shedding virus wherever they go and never even know what they’ve done.
And one of the ways we learn about immunology is to study people who are immune or asymptomatic, so it’s not just about quarantining people that we need to identify infected individuals.
Quick recombination so that a beneficial gene can spread without losing genetic diversity of the population is is one of the benefits of sexual reproduction. And immune resistance to new threats is one of the top reasons why we need this capability.
In fact we broadcast signatures of our immune systems in pheromones and women are attracted to the smell of men whose immune systems are different from their own. This improves the probability that the children will be resistant to a wider range of possible diseases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_odour_and_sexual_attracti... is one of many places that you can start learning more about this topic.
It's not just highly likely, it's absolutely certain. I recommend the recent Khan academy video on this if you want to understand the math and you want a healthy dose of panic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCa0JXEwDEk
The two best data points we have would be South Korea and the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Both of these groups have high rates of testing and both have had enough time that we can know how the most of the cases played out, and in both cases we see the death rate at about 1%. This doesn't take into account possibly different age group distributions. The cruise ship probably has less children and less 80+ people than on typical distributions.
Additionally both the Diamond Princess and South Korea cases assume ready access to medical treatment. If the medical system is overwhelmed we will see much higher CFR due to critical cases not receiving adequate care.
UK authorities presented this exact number at their press conference last week.
I know of one that’s in the works https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/singapore-claims-fir...
I have seen other talk about such tests on Twitter but it’s too difficult to find it now.
Such tests seem to be called antibody tests or serological tests/assays.
EDIT: this twitter thread discusses such tests https://twitter.com/nachristakis/status/1240689935557865472?...
There are also some commercial antibody tests, which have some error rate and as all antibody tests can identify the virus after 7-10 days after onset of symptoms.
https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/info/15-Coronavirus-Update-In...
Dead Comment
Since when they say "social distancing" it seems to mean stay physically distant from each other.
She said that "social distancing" is a medical technical term that doesn't translate super well to the public.
Which is 100% the opposite of what I in my daily life observe: everyone, young & old, private & work, calls it social distancing.
It addresses the issue better too, then the "proposed" physical distancing. When you pass people physically the (need and) possibility to keep that 2 meters is often impossible where as while socialising it very much is.
Deleted Comment
It is more effective to follow these three simple measures:
1. Symptomatic cases stay at home for 7 days
2. All household members of symptomatic cases stay at home for 14 days
3. Social distancing for the over 70 population only
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...
Social distancing of the entire population also slows the acquisition of immunity with zero and low risk age groups, which drags the whole situation out months longer.
It might even be logical with the above 3 steps in place for zero/low risk group to deliberately seek out the virus. This grants immunity quicker, and if they become sick, they can receive treatment whilst hospitals are still underwhelmed.
Speaking personally I would happily accept a strain of the virus considered to be low risk, then go into 14 day quarantine, if it meant I could afterwards work and socialise without any lockdown or restriction.
In a couple weeks, more of our front-line medical staff will start getting sick (the first case just occurred here), and requiring their 14-day quarantine... taking them out of rotation and adding even more strain.
It's going to get bad. We have to slow this down, to reduce the mortality rate. Or that 1% number people are throwing around is going to look like roses.
Dragging it out is exactly the point. The total number of active cases should be kept as low as possible in order to stay below our healthcare system's capacity. Look at Italy for what happens when cases exceed capacity. Their death rate is partly so high because they have to let the worst cases die in order to save those that have a better chance at living.
This is extremely irresponsible. The long-term effects of the virus are currently unknown but there are some worrying signs of possible long-term lung and other-organ damage that have been reported (anecdotally) from China and Italy. It's going to take time for these studies to be done.
Not to mention the immunity period length is unknown at this time. If this coronavirus follows the pattern of other coronaviruses, immunity could last 6 months to a year tops. That is ... not good. And a secondary infection could be worse than the first due to immune system overresponse/cytokine storm.
It's important we take the time to study these secondary effects and allow time for treatments and/or a vaccine to be developed and studied before we come up with any long-term plan.
Figuring out how to manage this risk so we can return to society / open venues at a much lower risk of infection (while not giving all of our data to the government) is a challenge with which maybe some of this site's audience could assist.
So I really doubt there are that many i dividual with undetected virus.
Define "beat Covid-19."
Not to be a hardass, but I'd prefer real information not babyfood. Something akin to "Currently predicted US deaths without social distancing: X. With social distancing: Y. Potentially recurring each year"
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/19/new-york-gov-cuomo-orders-75...
This is pretty damn close to quarantine, without actually saying quarantine in the headlines.
Anecdotally I've heard of places where the company has made no policy changes about sick leave or what employees who are feeling ill should do and, therefore, hourly workers keep coming in to work with "flu-like symptoms" or days after having had symtpoms because otherwise they don't get paid and could get fired.
Despite claims masks (with good adherence to wearing) are highly effective - primarily by reducing hand to mouth/nose contact, secondarily as a direct barrier. And surgical masks are dirt cheap.
It looks like other countries went big on mask production and wearing - be very interesting if the claims that you should NOT wear masks if "healthy" even on crowded BART cars etc checks out in the end.
It's just a form of triage.
Czech Republic recently started requiring face covers so we will have results in few weeks.
I live in Prague and when I go outside I meet someone once in few minutes and majority of the people are not wearing face cover despite it is required. Mostly they have it prepared on the neck to put it on when they go inside. One doctor in TV did not recommend extensive usage of face masks as cheap or improvised masks tend to get wet after 20 minutes. This significantly reduces their effectiveness. Risk of being infected outside is really low unless you are in crowded area.