Covid Retrospective
The Covid epidemic begin almost 18 months ago, in December 2019. It now looks like the worst is over and I thought I would do a retrospective on what I predicted after I first learned about the epidemic.
I first heard of covid early in February of 2020. When I heard that it could be spread by asymptomatic people, I knew it would be unstopable and spread around the world. However I thought it would first spread widely in China and not reach the West until autumn. As it turned out, it was already in America and Europe when I first heard of it.
In early March I agve a talk on Diabetes to the Homeopathic Study Group. I changed the talk so that I started with a discussion of covid. I said that the quoted case fatality rate (5% at the time) overstated how dangerous covid was, because there are probably nine asymptomatic infections for every symptomatic infection. I also said that covid was a respiratory virus that easily became pneumonia and that the homeopathic remedies that covered pneumonia in Borland would probably cure covid. At the time the circulatory problems associated with covid were not well known. Of course, I've had no chance to treat covid, so I can't say how successful homeopathy can be. There's a small group of remedies that I've heard homeopaths use to treat covid. They are a subset of the most common pneumonia remedies plus a few less common remedies.
It soon became clear that covid infections follow the 80-20 rule. Eighty percent of infections are mild, but 20 percent get pneumonia and need to be hospitalized. Of these, 20 percent need intensive care. And of those needing intensive care, 50 percent die. I guessed that according to that rule, 80 percent of people encountering covid develop no symptoms. That would make the infection fatlity rate 0.4%, which still seems about right. And multiplying that by the population of the United States, that means 1.3 million people would die if covid spead unchecked. So far we have seen about half that according to the official count. Since the official count is probably too high, I would guess between a third and a half of the population has been exposed to covid and now has resistence. If you add to that the 40% of the population that has been vaccinated, I think we are near or at herd immunity and I do not expect another wave of covid later this year.
Two things I got wrong about the covid epidemic are that I thought it would spread more rapidly and that the vaccine would take longer to develop. The mathematics of exponential growth say that everyone in the United States should be infected after 31 generations if 1.5 people are infected per generation. So I expected that hospitals would be overflowing and patients needing help would receive minimal care. So I was interested in learning how to treat or prevent covid without medical help. Thankfully that never happened and I would advise anyone with covid to get medical advice and care. I also did not expect the vaccine would be ready until the epidemic was over. The covid vaccines have been developed faster than any vaccines previously and mostly seem to work well, something we can all be thankful for.