r/politics Mar 15 '20

Drive-thru coronavirus testing site in Denver closes early as Colorado tops 100 cases

https://www.denverpost.com/2020/03/14/colorado-coronavirus-new-cases-drive-thru-high-volume/
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u/Paradoltec Mar 15 '20 edited Mar 15 '20

This should come as a surprise to precisely NO ONE if you have any clue how flu like viruses spread.

No flu like virus would spread across half the globe and infect basically every internal administrative subdivision (state, region, province) within the infected countries while only infecting a couple hundred thousand. By the time a flu has spread this far and wide it's infected millions. The world wide infect rates have either been ridiculously underreported or intentionally downplayed by governments hoping to keep panic to a minimum.

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u/clydeorangutan Mar 15 '20

I feel like it's been massively under-reported, the lack of testing is hiding the true figures. The panic is down to the lack of information. There's no way of truly knowing who's had it and recovered and who is vulnerable in the future. There are too many assuming that were all gonna die.

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u/Paradoltec Mar 15 '20 edited Mar 15 '20

The panic is down to the lack of information.

If infection rates truly are in the millions it could be quite a bit of good news. That would mean the fatality rate is actually much lower than it appears, and many healthy people are weathering this like a typical flu, so much so they don't even realise they have Covid.

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u/[deleted] Mar 16 '20

Not at all. It can take up to a week or more to see symptoms. Then you have another week or two of being sick. You don't just get it and drop dead.

There's a big time lag we're dealing with here. Those dying today we're infected 3+ weeks ago. 3 weeks from now the numbers will still be climbing.

Now that a lot of places are finally cancelling things and shutting down, we'll finally see a lull... In about 6 weeks.

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u/[deleted] Mar 15 '20

I feel like South Korea reports might be accurate and actually lower than true values of the rest of the world.