We already have at least one confirmed case of COVID-19 in Pope County.
There are very likely quite a few more people in the county with COVID-19 who are undiagnosed. As well, it seems reasonable to assume that infected people traveling through the county have made stops here for fuel, food, shopping, and/or lodging. There will be more cases identified in the county.
According to estimates, for every case confirmed, there are at least 10 undiagnosed cases. Other estimates go as high as 50 times more unknown infections than known infections, according to Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital.
At 100 cases, Arkansas has already exceeded the estimate of 44 for March 20th in the table above by more than a factor of 2. This “spike” in confirmed cases is likely due, in part, to increased testing capabilities working the backlog of COVID-19 tests down.
We don’t yet have any deaths for COVID-19 in Arkansas. This will likely change.
Importantly, though, by prevention and mitigation of infection, the drastic actions that have been taken and are being taken are saving lives that would have otherwise been lost. Assuming a mortality rate similar to the infection rate, without action the COVID-19 related deaths in the US could have skyrocketed to over 100,000 in the next month.
The figure below started with 108 deaths in the US that had been documented as of March 18th.
The total US deaths related to COVID-19 over the next month will be somewhere less than the 120,000 suggested by an every-three-days doubling, hopefully significantly less. Social distancing and quarantine measures are breaking social connections and interactions between the infected and the uninfected.
The every-three-days doubling requires that the virus have free access to everyone in the public. If that access can be interrupted, doubling will occur over some longer period and, eventually, will stop happening.
Reaching the point at which there are no longer significant numbers of new cases may not mean the end of our troubles. It’s likely that there will be successive waves of infection, most of them probably less severe than what we are facing now due to some amount of immunity those who were previously infected will likely have. There’s also the potential for treatments to be developed or existing treatments determined to be effective in treating the disease as well as the possibility of the development of a vaccine.
If COVID-19 had been left to spread without any actions, healthcare in the US would collapse under the weight of the needs of the sickest of the coronavirus patients. COVID-19 related US deaths would be in the millions, possibly even over 10 million.
