With the alarming percentage or Republican voters not planning on getting vaccinated and outright flouting any sort of social distancing or masking rules, I am struck with the morbid question of “How many of these people are going to get COVID and consequently, how many will die?”
I don’t know if there are similar posts here, but I felt the need to do some cursory research on estimates of the numbers we should expect. I think that this is also a way for me to wrap my head around the absolute insanity of the very large number of people in this country who are unwilling to get vaccinated, thus putting their fellow country-persons at risk, not to mention their own families. Maybe a little therapy, because it angers me and I’ve kind of lost hope for these people. However, I still need to interact with some of them and really would like to have some good numbers to shut down any silly argument about the risks.
To boot, I grew up in Western Montana and I have relatives who are still living there and refuse to get vaccinated. This branch of the family ended up with a dozen cases and 1 hospitalization(my uncle was on a respirator for several weeks). They still refuse to get vaccinated despite the fact that a woman they knew, 41 years of age, from our home town and a former high school team mate of my baby sister’s died of COVID complications just a few short weeks ago. The woman was an anti-vaxer(apparently), got infected and died of blood clot issues related to the disease. She and her family lived up the road from my family and we rode the school bus together. She was a cute little blond hair, blue eyed girl who was quiet and shy. My other little sister was assigned the task by the bus driver to make sure she hadn’t fallen asleep on the way home so she wouldn’t miss her stop. Now she’s gone, leaving 2 young children and all of her family dealing with grief and loss. A tragedy for sure.
So I arrived here, typing the phrase “what percent of people will get infected by covid” into Google brought up a WebMD article from April 1, 2020 titled “How Scientists Predict How Many People Will Get COVID-19”. Although this article is now outdated, the alarming percent in the 1st paragraph, stating “researchers from the Imperial College of London cautioned that without adopting social distancing measures, 81% of the US would be infected.” Think about that. Replace “of the US” with “of Republican Voters/Anti-Vaxers” and you have a very large number of people still to get sick and a terribly large number of those will die.
So I just crunched a few rough numbers to calculate a close-ish number based on current rates of death with infection, which is 2%. I am basing it on the simple number of 74M(the approximate number of votes for tRump) and came up with this:
(74,000,000 * .81) * .02 = 1,198,800
For simplicity, that is 1.2M deaths based on the assumption that 100% of tRump voters won’t get vaccinated. The actual number in a PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll from May 17, 2021, that number is 41%, so adjusted:
1,198,800 * .41 = 491,508
That is a staggering number of deaths when there is a vaccine available to all but eliminate such an outcome!
Like I said, this is rough and does not include democratic voters that don’t plan on getting vaccinated or people who can’t/won’t get vaccinated for medical/religious reasons. There are a ton of assumptions in this rough calculation, so I don’t have any methodology to account for concentration of people at risk due to race, religious or political affiliation. We tend to congregate with “like” people, which may also be a factor increasing risk. I am not an epidemiologist or CDC employee, so don’t have all the info(obviously), but am interested in some of the demographic breakdowns and risks in urban vs rural areas, etc... Unlike those people who don’t believe science, I want to have as much solid information in my brain when I have to deal with the crazy that will be coming, if nothing else, just to shut the crazy down.
And again, I’m doing this a little for my own mental health. This last 15+ months has been a crazy period in the history of the country and the world, so everybody is on edge and likely traumatized(I know I am). I look forward to your comments and additional resources.
Tuesday, Jun 1, 2021 · 4:58:06 PM +00:00
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EcoWolverine
Hey folks. Thanks for the interest and corrections! Since I used the CFR(wrong!) and not the IFR(right!), there is significant change. I’ve gotten 2 quotes of .6 and .7 IFR and also did not take into account those already infected, the total numbers might look something like:
(491,508 * .33) * .6= 97,319
Not as massive, but still, unnecessary and terrible.
As has been pointed out, some figures are questionable or controversial, but I was just doing a little back-of-the-napkin scribbling to try to wrap my head around it. Of course, the new variants are worrisome, so who knows whether or not there will be significant increases in mortality?
Also, thanks for posting links to get to some of the peer reviewed studies:
Infection fatality rate of COVID-19 inferred from seroprevalence data
COVID-19 Science Update released: April 9, 2021 Edition 84
Stay healthy and march on!