Here’s a number you don’t see grab the headlines much…. the number of people in the US now recovered from COVID is likely in excess of 1 million!!!
The number of daily cases of COVID in the US peaked on April 24th – around 46 days ago (at the time of writing this blog). At that time 31,430 cases per day were being identified. Today that number is closer to 22,000 – also at a time when testing has vastly increased. (see my blog entry on 400,000 tests per day).
With the first cases diagnosed in February this year, how long do we have to wait for a case diagnosed today – to be an officially ‘cured’ case? Here’s some assumptions that I’ve made to help us better understand the active case load today.
- Assume that a newly diagnosed person is contagious for 2 weeks.
- Assume recovery takes around a month
- Assume fatality (if applicable) takes place within 1 month
The problem with assumptions is that you can always poke holes in them… but as a starting basis these seemed reasonable to me.
Using those assumptions for the US we have a total of 1.9m cases since inception; 109,000 fatalities. That leaves us with….. drum roll please….. 1.1m people RECOVERED from COVID; 388,000 coping with COVID; and 281,000 actively CONTAGIOUS.
As a sense check – at an average of 21,000 new cases per day – and following the self quarantine requirement for 14 days – that would give around 290,000 people in self quarantine.
By the end of this week, the US will likely pass the milestone of 2 million COVID cases. You can bet that will be widely reported. But will the in excess of 1 million recovered be as widely reported? Lets see….
JF Insights 