The Second Wave Is Coming!

The question facing the nation revolves around how much are we willing to suffer to preserve lives?

Of course the equation changes when the life we are talking about is your life.

Still, as we allow people to re-enter the economy, some will become infected and those infections will result in some deaths.

It would be simpler if the deaths were simply a one to one trade off, say a person was willing to risk his life to make some money, but based on what we know people infected can spread the virus even if they seem perfectly healthy.  So they become in effect walking boobytraps who can infect more vulnerable members of their own families or others.

Of course this is a risk people take routinely in other situations, if you don't get vaccinated against any number of deadly diseases including the flu.  The difference seems to be that in many of those cases there is what they call herd immunity as long as the vast majority were in fact vaccinated.

There is a bit of herd immunity building for this virus but how widespread is a mystery.

We are starting to see some statistical results indicating that the number infected greatly exceeds the reported cases (something we already knew).

In LA County a sample indicated the number actually infected could be as much as 50% greater than the number of official cases.

This could result in a mortality rate very close to what we see with the flu.  Of course the number of flu cases is greatly reduced already because of the vaccines and prior year exposures so the same mortality rate would result in many more dead.

So how many dead are acceptable?

At one time the projections were as high as 2 or 3 million without mitigation.

The estimates now seem to be less than 100,000.  Is that too low?

Since the mitigation has worked fairly well, some feel it was never really needed.

We may find out if they create the second wave.