More of my boring math...
Just learned something you guys may be interested in - R0 is used to calculate herd immunity. I did not know this.
The formula is 1- (1/R0)
So, if the R0 is the original 2.3 that was estimated, we need about 55% of the population to get this for herd immunity.
If it is as high as the 5.7 that more recent studies have suggested, we need about 82.5% of the population to get this for herd immunity. That's 272,000,000 people in the US. You can apply any of the math above, but that would lead to somewhere around 2.5M deaths.
Still, while that was in a medical journal, I feel like there is more to it, because the formula would suggest something like the flu, with an R0 or 1 or so, has herd immunity from the first infection?
Also, new data from Boston suggests 1 in 10 people in the populatiom has antibodies. The population of the city is roghly 695,000. It is difficult to get covid data for the city, but Suffolk County has a population of approx. 804,000.
There are almost 17,300 cases in Suffolk County.
You can apply 10% to 804,000 and that yields 80,400 infections and 17,300 cases show up in the hospital - which means 21% of the cases or a little more than 1 out of every 5 cases are being confirmed.
Or you can take 695,000/804,000 = 86.4% and apply that to 17,400 = 14,947.
10% of 695,000 = 69,500.
14,946/69,500 = 21.5%
So, it looks like the serology data, by my math, and based in all of the antibody data that is rolling in, suggests we are confirming 1/7 - 1/5 of the cases.
So extrapolating, that would suggest we have roughly 11M people infected with this virus in the US so far and 97,000+ deaths.
This is only just beginning is my take.
If we need 50% of the population to get this (which looks highly optimistic) we are almost 1/15th of the way there. If we we need 80+% - we are about 1/25 of the way there.
Bambam has brought up some good points about the overall deaths. My initial reaction is that people are hunkering down and there is a significant reduction in d a aths from that - fewer car accidents, work accidents, shifts in crime, etc.
I have also seen a few articles suggesting that the overall death rates imply that we are undercounting covid deaths by quite a bit.
In the end, I don't know enough about the numbers to have much of an opinion...but it is a valid and interesting point.
As a side note, I also believe the death rate for sleeping with someone's wife can be pretty high. Some people, however, are more mature than I am.