Words like too little — too late really don’t help. I live in Missouri where the response to the pandemic has been
pretty much nothing. Some mayors have called for nonessential business to cease. Restaurants in my town heeded the call days ago switching to carryout only. As of midnight tonight the entire state is to follow suit.
I have been tracking the number of infected since last week. There is a video on DW the German broadcaster
where a doctor compares the rate of spread and mortality of Covid19 and flu.
The rate r= 2.1 for Covid-19 it’s r= 1.3 for influenza meaning for every Covid-19 carrier can infect 2.1 people , a person with the flu can infect 1.3. The rate of death from corona virus is 30 times higher than influenza.
The chart at the top is made from the number of positive tests from the Missouri Dept of Health. They update the numbers daily, today they did it twice. We started yesterday with 106, around noon it was 130, By 2:30 it was 183.
According to data from the health department, nobody in my county has the virus yet. I don’t believe that. It’s not because I have witnessed people walking around with symptoms (although I cringe every time I hear a cough), it’s because I know not enough people have been tested.
The number 1 on the chart above represents April 1, the day the governor said we might have a quantity of test kits available. Two days ago I started the chart with the r=2.1 rate when the number of positives was around 60 and extrapolated the number of cases possible on April 1 was 310,000! When I did it using the reported numbers and calculating an average daily rate of change, the result was 130,000. Still not good.
I looked into how Hong Kong and Singapore managed to get control over the spread and slow it down so quickly.
The answer is TESTING! Without knowing who is a carrier you can’t predict where it will spread. Singapore
has done extensive contact tracing to the point of tracking carriers cell phones and using cc tv cameras that are
on all the streets. One person who violated an isolation order was stripped of his citizenship. It makes me wonder
what they did to him afterwards. Did they put him on a raft and tow him out to sea? However unfair that may seem
it does allow everyone to see one effective solution to the contagion.
Until we get more testing we will continue to be in the dark about the real extent of our problem.
