[Perfectlap]

Originally Posted by piper6909

While he was giving his Liar-side chat, We reached 100,000 confirmed cases. The most of any country in the world. This started 3 months ago on the other side of the world..

One of my best friends who is an ardent stable genius (his words not mine) supporter has been arguing with me that this will not end up being a high death count or high ventilator use situation. I never take a strong position on first time catastrophic events. But I pointed out to him that the testing center in Secaucus, NJ have just reported a 64% positive rate for its first round of testing (highly infectious? Roger that). He argued that "yeah but a million or two deaths worst case is ridiculous and alarmist". Yeah a million or two dead would be incomprehensible. But I pointed out to him that of the nation's 330 million people about 80% live in urban areas or their immediate suburbs. That's ~264 million. About 70% of Americans are over 18. So maybe 185 million adults live in cities or their suburbs? Say 25% of these urbans and suburbans test positive you're at ~46.2 million. if the mortality rate is "only" 1% for COVID-19 you've got 460,000 dead in a low social distancing scenario. A 40% positive rate gets you to 740,000 dead. So any death rate above 1% in urban or geriatric centers will be a big problem.