This is all people, not broken down by age. The dotted lines beneath the main ones are the same, but knocked back a bit by the reinfection rate (the 10%).Īnother caveat. The red line is the upper bound of all infections estimate using the CDC’s method. The black line is cumulative infections, since the beginning of the panic. There is some evidence the Ominous Omicron is sufficiently different than other doom variants, so the reinfection percentage might be higher. This means the official total count is a bit too high because of double counting. That is, of all the officially reported infections, 10% of them are reinfections. I have no idea what figure to use here to represent the entire population. Like flu or the common cold, you can catch more than one variant. For one, we’re not accounting for the chance of reinfection. We have to moderate this somewhat, I think.
Assuming (a big assumption) the CDC’s same calculations are valid, this means that some 220 million to 305 million Americans have already been infected. In other words, even by last September about half the country had already been infected.Īs on Monday evening, there were just under 65 million officially reported total infections. Last September, there were an estimated 146.6 million already infected. And there’s no reason to have only done them once. The calculations the CDC did, while they can be critiqued, are the right idea. Why? Because, well, how dare you take your non-illness non-seriously! Which I’ll emphasize: 15% of those infected never knew it. That makes for a 15% asymptomatic rate, incidentally.
The point is that back in September 2021, the CDC said there were already “146.6 Million Estimated Total Infections”, of which there were “124.0 Million Estimated Symptomatic Illnesses”. And we’re supposed to love our Experts unconditionally. Except to mention the interval is almost certainly too narrow, because it is parametric and not predictive. Which can be critiqued in various ways, none of which, however, are of interest to us today. The interval is the result of a statistical model. They said that only “1 in 4.0 (95% UI 3.4 - 4.7) COVID–19 infections were reported”. What it really meant was that a good many infections were never officially reported. They wept that this was awful because it meant people wouldn’t panic to the level required. These are the CDC’s own numbers, not mine.įor some reason, the CDC’s report “ Estimated COVID-19 Infections, Symptomatic Illnesses, Hospitalizations, and Deaths in the United States” made only a minor splash, or more like a faint ripple, when it was released last fall, but it should have been trumpeted far and wide for the bright picture it painted.įirst, do you recall all those “Panic If You Don’t Have Symptoms!” headlines from 2021? Fretting doctors fretted that many didn’t even know they were infected, or that many mistook their doom infection as a cold or allergies. Once that figure reaches 100%, surges in deaths should subside to background levels, like flu, and any remaining justification for declaring a crisis or “emergency” evaporates. Here’s why.īecause up to 90%+ of Americans have already been infected with the coronadoom, one way or another. The testing is asinine, but the soaring infections are to be celebrated. Some three million tests each and every day, and increasing! Of course, testing is now at the highest rates ever, too. More infections are being reported now than ever before.
The bump up is, as you’ve heard, caused by the Ominous Omicron. That’s the number of daily infections reported to the CDC - which they mistakenly call “cases”, but let that pass.