From The New York Times: How Much Worse the Coronavirus Could Get, in Charts
By NICHOLAS KRISTOF and STUART A. THOMPSON
How many Americans may become infected with the coronavirus? How many might die? To answer those questions, I teamed up with my Times colleague, Stuart Thompson, and with two epidemiologists to develop a model that you can interact with to get answers.
The model suggests that more than 100 million Americans could become infected, resulting in 1 million or more deaths. But the real lessons are that the outcome depends not just on the virus but also on our policy. It matters enormously how aggressively we respond, and how soon we respond.
The United States has already wasted time. We’ve botched the most important thing we could have done, which was roll out widespread testing. South Korea, which has managed its outbreak well because of testing, now tests more people each day for coronavirus than the United States has since the beginning of the epidemic. We need drive-through testing provided free so that we know the scale of the virus, for we can’t manage something we don’t understand. It’s plausible we already have more than 50,000 infections in the United States, which means that in about six days we’ll have 100,000.