Since we’ve officially reached 30 days since the stay at home orders in Orange County, I thought I’d take a look at the numbers again and look back at my comparison to the flu I did back on March 30th. https://www.facebook.com/kccrow75/posts/10219266576113120
I had estimated that we were running at 40 cases of Covid per day and so would see 1200 cases over 30 days. We actually saw a total of 1299 cases and of those 1115 were in the under 65 demographic (which is significant because as I wrote about before, in Orange County we do not include the over 65 population in our flu statistics). So my numbers have been pretty close so far in terms of total covid cases and also pretty much right in line with the reported number of flu cases per month from the 2018-2019 season.
We’re still running at only 8.7% of those tested coming back positive which again seems super low to me and I’m not sure I’ve seen any explanation that makes sense (except perhaps that the tests don’t work). In theory only those who have significant symptoms or known exposure would be tested so I would have expected the number of positive cases to be much higher relative to the number of tests conducted. In any event, we’ve only tested a total of 14,977 in our county of 3.5 million (and who knows how many of those are repeated tests for our health care workers and prior positive cases) so we haven’t even reached the half of a percent mark yet in terms of testing.
I may have been significantly wrong in terms of the death rates based on the number of known cases. The mortality rate of the flu (in terms of the percentage of those who had the flu that died from the flu) was .26%. For Covid (taking out the over 65 numbers) we are at a rate of .81%. In the last two weeks, we went from 1 death in the under 65 age group to 9 deaths in that group. So even though our number sample size is fairly small here in Orange County, Covid is showing itself to be deadlier than the flu. However, the analysis doesn’t exactly end there because in the last two weeks information came out that the CDC has instructed medical professionals to code any death with covid or any covid-like death even if no positive test result as having died from covid which we know from data coming out of Italy is not accurate reporting. In Italy, the numbers showed that 80% of those who died with covid were actually dying from something else. Only 12% of the total reported deaths could actually be fully attributable to Covid. Since we’re taking a liberal approach to coding deaths as Covid here as well, let’s assume that only 20% of the covid deaths in OC should be included in comparing the numbers to the flu – that would take our number from 9 to 2 and our morality percentage down to .18% (less than the flu). So I’m still inclined to believe that the numbers – at least here in Orange County – are still in line with an average flu season. And if you really want to go down a rabbit hole, you can research for yourself how the flu, pneumonia and respiratory illness-related death numbers have plummeted in the last month.
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