T. Madicus is an author, film maker, activist and educator, and the host of the medical news show MedBuzzFeed.
The daily deluge of coronavirus news can get your pulse up, both with fear and with hope. One moment, there’s talk of a vaccine, a “miracle” cure, a reprieve… the next, cases are rising, and regions are locking down again.
As a long-time commentator on medical affairs, I would like to offer my two cents: First, the bad news: The coronavirus isn’t going away any time soon.
WHO stats put the USA at 5.15M active cases as of August 12, 2020. That’s against over 20 million cases globally. So far, 12.6 million people have recovered from the coronavirus, and about 750,000 have died. And that’s just the stats that we know about. With as many as half of all cases being asymptomatic, it’s just too easy for the virus to keep spreading, undetectably, through our communities.
In the early 1900s, a cook called Mary Mallon made a disturbing discovery: While she was in fine health herself, people she had contact with kept getting sick. Now known as “Typhoid Mary,” her story is a lesson in how asymptomatic carriers can spread illness in a community. All it takes is one so-called “super spreader” (not my favorite hero in the “super” genre) to infect hundreds, even thousands of us, possibly across multiple cities or even states. These anti-heros often don’t even show symptoms. They go about their business feeling absolutely fine, while unwittingly leaving a trail of devastation in their wake.
With this as our reality, I think we all need to be mentally prepared: The coronavirus will be with us for a while.
Ok, now I’m sure you need the good news! Here it is: The virus probably isn’t as deadly as you think. At the start of the pandemic, chilling stats about the death rate of the virus littered the front pages of most newspapers. But since then, we’ve learned more about the virus and how deadly it is, or isn’t…
While initial estimates put the death rate as high as 5-10%, recent stats show that it could be as low as 0.28% for the population as large, plummeting to 0.09% – less than 1 in 1000 – for those under 65. The death rate is, of course, highly slanted towards the elderly population and those with underlying health conditions. This means that if you are reasonably young and reasonably healthy, the virus is not likely to kill you. That said, you could still spread it to others, and there are certainly plenty of exceptions, so best to play it safe and wear that mask even if you are strong and can do a hundred push ups, OK?
Of course, we also need to be very cautious about stats – they can easily be tampered with and may be misleading. For example, should someone who has a serious and deadly heart condition and also Covid-19 be counted as a Covid death, or a heart disease death? In this world of misinformation, many choose to err on the side of caution.
Covid-19 is going to keep on spreading, but with better hygiene and social distancing becoming the new norm, cases will go down. A lower rate of infection equals a lower rate of deaths. However, we must remain vigilant. Even though the virus certainly seems much less deadly than we originally thought, all it takes is a mutation for it to become even more lethal than we had feared.
Where does this leave us? We will get better at community tracing. Progress is already being made on a vaccine with dozens of the USA’s biggest pharmaceutical firms including Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline making this a priority. Treatment options like remdesivir, hydroxychloroquine and dexamethasone are showing progress, with more discoveries being made almost daily. The virus isn’t going to give up easily. But neither are we!