Tipping Point: The USA Already Has a Million COVID-19 Cases

Guest Blog by Marissa Carter

On March 1st, I emailed a number of people a model I had developed (see Fig 2 below) for the USA. Many people said it was unbelievable but if you look, it accurately predicts exactly what has happened in the USA. It actually beat the Harvard models hands down. But that’s not the worst of it. Right now, Johns Hopkins is showing about 225,000 CONFIRMED cases. What is not widely known are 3 things: testing backlogs, insufficient testing, and almost asymptomatic cases.

• Backlog of at least 300,000 tests but probably a lot more
• 25-50% of the population, mostly young people have C19 (loss of taste/smell) but our case definition doesn’t include those people
• Insufficient testing that doesn’t count people who have the virus.

So, a quick back of the envelope calculation (this is just one way; you can play with some of the numbers and do your own).

225,000 + (300,000 x 0.25) + 225,000 x 1.5 + 225,000 x 1.3 = 930,000

This number won’t obviously affect number of hospital admissions and deaths but you can use it to recalculate mortality rates, critically ill rates, etc. Fig 3 shows where we go from here.

I am pointing this out because if it’s correct, the USA is very close to the tipping point beyond which it really doesn’t matter what you do, the result will be very bad.