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This will be more than you probably want to know, but my hospital is the center of DOD medial research so we’re getting daily email blasts and I have had 3 f-ing meetings on the thing so I feel pretty up to date. Here’s what I know:

Coronaviruses are part of the bag that make up the common cold. COVID19 is mutating fast and now has 2 major haplotypes and dozens of subtypes. This is where a lot of the misinformation is coming from. That and leave it to America to politicize a goddamn plague. H1 which started in wuhan and went west is the most virulent and prevalent. This is what is decimating Italy right now. H2 went south and East and is what we’re getting a taste of in the states. It’s probably on par with a bad flu. There are reports of people carrying both strains so getting the “light version” doesn’t mean you can’t  get the bad one. Since most of the data coming out is on H1 that’s what the rest of this will be on.

 It’s pretty bad. Those that are saying it’s just like the flu are doing a disservice to the populace in an attempt to stabilize the market.

COVID19 is worse because it’s A) super contagious (most have an Ro if 1.4 meaning the average person will infect 1.4 people, so far this thing has an Ro of 2.9) and B) this one seems to hit older folks particularly hard. The average mortality rate is anywhere between 1-2%. Hard to tell because the numbers from China don’t make sense and are untrustworthy. But for people less than 50 it’s on par with a bad seasonal flu, around 0.4% but starting at age 60 it’s 3.5% and it seems to be a linear progression with age peaking with a whopping 20% mortality in people over 80.

Interestingly it seems to hit the part of the lungs that converts angiotensin so if you take an ACE inhibitor for high blood pressure you may be protected from getting the real bad version.

It will probably end up being similar but lighter than the 1918 Spanish flu which had a similar Ro but the mortality was around 4%. That ended up infecting roughly 60% of the world and killing between 20-100M people (there was a little conflict going on in Europe at the time so numbers are not known. It’s known as the Spanish flu because Spain was neutral and the only country reporting reliable numbers).

Given that there are 7 times as many people in the world now if we follow the Ro to estimate ~40% infected and if we go with 1-2% mortality rate (which is halfway between the 2 haplotypes) then quick back of the envelope math says we may end up seeing ~30-60M deaths world wide, mostly baby boomers.

Also like the 1918 flu (the first H1N1 strain) this will probably have a 4-5 year cycle that will be much lighter than the original. But I think we will all be getting coronavirus shots to go with our flu shots in the not to distant future.

So unless this thing suddenly evolves into a less deadly or virulent strain, things could get interesting around here between now and late June (projected worldwide saturation)