Flintlock76
Three million people are not going to die from COVID-19, which is nothing more than a heavy-duty version of the common cold. My non-existant crystal ball doesn't work any better than anyone elses, but no way is another catastrophe like the one 100 years ago going to happen.
I would not predict how this is going to go, but I see no reason to conclude that it cannot be worse than what happened 100 years ago. Every day we are told how many cases there are in this country as though it is true. Yet it cannot be true. It has to be an undercount because it ignores the pre-symptomatic pool.
If we actually knew how many cases there are, we could look at the actual progression and tell about how many cases there would be the next day or next week. But we don’t have that ability because we don’t have any way of knowing the number of cases in the pre-symptomatic pool
In order to know that, we would have to have the ability to test everyone on a real-time basis. That way, we could gain the greatest advantage over the progression by isolating without delay, everybody entering the pre-symptomatic pool the moment they enter it.
But we do not have the ability to do that kind of real time testing, so instead of isolating people the moment they get the virus, we have to wait until they get symptoms and self-report. In the meantime, they get the virus without symptoms and therefore do not know they have the virus. Then as they continue to spend time in the pre-symptomatic pool, they freely transmit the virus to other people. So our lack of testing is giving the virus a head start on its multiplying rampage.
This is the critical point about testing. It is not to merely give people the knowledge of whether or not they have the virus so they can get treated, although that is a benefit. But the real main point is to test in order to eliminate the head start we are giving the virus by not knowing how many people have it without yet having symptoms.