The US now has 1,000 deaths from SARS CoV-2 in the last month. Let’s put this in perspective.
Flu season last from October to March, roughly half the year, or 26 weeks. Each year 25-60,000 people die in the US from flu, so on average around 1,000 – 2,300 people die from the flu each week of flu season each year. But those deaths are not evenly distributed. Flu season normally peaks between December and March, most commonly in February, and in the peak season we’ll see many more deaths per week than the average.
So 1,000 in a month is not in itself an unusual number of deaths from a viral respiratory illness More important is what happens in the next few weeks, when, if I understand correctly, Covid 19 illnesses in the US should peak, assuming the various social distancing practices that have been tightening up over the past several weeks work to prevent the spread.
So I’m sure we’ll get an increasing number of deaths for the next couple of weeks. At what number, exactly, does it become really frightening? I’m not sure. Somewhere over 2,000 per week I’d say, and especially so if it’s over 2,000 3 or 4 weeks from now and not dropping significantly.
People talk about the coronavirus crisis costing $10 trillion dollars, which seems plausible and maybe even a lower bound (equivalent to a one-year 10% GDP hit).
That's $1,250 per person on the planet. As some people have already pointed out, if we could find a way to scale up the cheapest form of COVID-19 test to the massest of mass production, how much would it cost to get everyone in affected areas to take a test once a week, or once a month?
I'm no expert in that technology, but likely less than $1,250 per person.
That plus isolation for those who test positive would probably be enough in itself to keep the virus under control. And those who test negative can go back to work, keeping the economy ticking over, creating a huge return on investment.
To me this suggests:
• Massive scale-up of testing might be the key thing we end up waiting for before we return to normal life (obvious alternatives are 'home isolation kills it off', 'discover a great drug treatment', 'built up tonnes of ICU capacity', 'invent a vaccine')
• Anything we can do to speed up the rate of growth of our testing capacity is pure gold
• Having lots of slack diagnostic capacity (like a nanopore sequencer in every hospital, office or even house) could be the key thing we need to prepare for next time around.
Is this sound thinking?