So much disinformation out there on this virus, and scary charts, that I want to explain to people what numbers are ACTUALLY important and what they mean, and why numbers that people are touting with the wrong names should be completely ignored.

First, the ONLY two numbers you should care about is:

1. What are my chances of getting the virus?
2. What is the chance, if I get the virus, that it will kill me (or seriously harm me)?

These two numbers are different for different people in different age groups living in different areas of the world, with different sanitary practices, etc...

If you are already immune, congratulations! The chance of you getting this disease (again) and dying are 0%! Well, maybe someone gets immuno-compromised and gets it a second time, but that is extraordinarily rare, and you'd have bigger problems than COVID-19 if that were your case.

Now, here's the numbers you WILL see, and what they ACTUALLY mean, and why they are not important.

1. The so-called "DEATH RATE." The two words "death rate" are completely meaningless because it tells you NOTHING about what the deaths are measured against. There are several numbers that are important: death rate PER INFECTIONS, death rate PER TOTAL POPULATION, and death rate PER POSITIVE TEST. PER INFECTIONS is the number you want, and maybe even PER TOTAL POPULATION. But PER POSITIVE TEST is almost useless, especially when a virus is "stealth" and infects a lot of people who never know they have it.

2. Even "death" isn't really meaningful on its own. To wit, what if a grandpa who is 120 years old, has pneumonia already, has stage-4 terminal cancer, is on life support, and already brain-dead, catches the virus and dies. Would you count that as very meaningful and scary? No. What if a perfectly healthy 6-year-old boy catches the virus and dies. Is that very meaningful? Yes. I would be more scared of a disease that kills healthy people than terminal people. So look for numbers of people who died BECAUSE of the virus, not who happened to have it. IE, in Italy, only 12% of the COVID-19 deaths are due to the virus, because the other 88% had PRE-MORBIDITY -- conditions making them likely to die from pretty much anything.

3. The number of people who tested positive is a virtually meaningless statistic, especially because this is a "stealth" virus, meaning a lot of people are running around without symptoms but with the virus. We cannot know how many people have the virus -- the INFECTED -- until we start doing random sampling of the population. Likewise, we don't even know how many are RECOVERED and IMMUNE to this disease by checking their antibodies. If enough people get immunity, then the disease CANNOT SPREAD in the population anymore. Each immune person is a giant "STOP" sign to the virus. As far as I know, only Korea and a few small towns in Sweden and Italy have been sampled, and I'm seeing numbers as high as 99% and as low as 50% of people that have the virus but show no symptoms or very mild symptoms. We have no idea on how many people are immune yet because we are just now starting to test antibodies.

4. Finally, you will see a lot of nonsense about how long the virus lives, how it is transmitted, and such. All of this data is pure speculation, as NO ONE KNOWS how the virus spreads because we are not really able to track it yet. Korea did the best so far, because they have great data on people who test positive and are able to backtrack, and they are showing that this virus really doesn't spread as well as some had hoped. Some people are saying that's because of the masks, other people are saying we don't know. The truth is there is no way we can know at this time until we see how many people are actually infected and track that over time. (Antibody tests will give us some good data as well.)

WHAT YOU SHOULD BE ASKING ABOUT:

1. How many people ACTUALLY have this virus? NOT HOW MANY TESTED POSITIVE, but how many have it that we haven't even tested yet?
2. How many of THOSE PEOPLE die from the virus? What are their ages and pre-existing conditions? Where did they live? What kind of treatment did they receive?
3. How many infected never realized they had it? How many had mild symptoms, or recovered without any medical treatment?
4. How many are immune to the virus?
5. How does quarantine / stay-at-home orders change anything about this virus?

MOST IMPORTANTLY: New numbers are constantly coming out, models are constantly being revised, and every day is a brand new day with new data.

As of right now, my understanding:

1. Lots of people have this and we don't even realize it.
2. EXTRAORDINARILY few die of the virus. It's in the neighborhood of 1/10 the death rate of flu. Those that have the virus and die are almost always very old and have pre-existing conditions that make then susceptible to die from almost anything.
3. There are treatments that have near-100% success (the TRUMP CURE, for instance) and they are cheap and readily available, and completely unnecessary for the vast majority of people who get the virus.
4. There may already be a significant portion of the population that is immune to the virus, meaning the virus may no longer be able to spread.

WASH YOUR HANDS -- STAY HOME IF YOU ARE SICK -- AVOID HOSPITALS IF YOU CAN. Nothing new, just keep doing what you should've been doing since you were a young child.