I posted a long time ago, months ago, what I felt were the most important numbers.

This are the questions that should be at the forefront of your mind with any disease:

1. What is the chance that I (or someone I care about) will be seriously harmed by the disease?
2. What can I do to prevent myself (or those I care about) from getting seriously harmed?

As with any epidemic, it starts off with a few carriers in an isolated area. If we can identify the disease early, and quarantine those who have it, perhaps even quarantine towns or entire states that have it, we can contain it. However, once you see "community transfers" -- that is, people who get the disease from who knows where, the disease is loose and you cannot contain it. You switch from trying to contain the disease to trying to weather the storm.

Community transfers happened as early as February in the United States, here in Washington State.

Now that we are in the community transfer stage, and we have been for some time, you need to understand the important numbers.

1. How many people currently have the disease?
2. How many people do they infect?
3. How many people are immune to the disease?
4. Overall, how contagious is the disease?
5. What are my chances of getting harmed by the disease if I get it?

Note, that NONE of these numbers are being shared publicly. You have to really dig into the data to get it. The reason why these numbers are not being shared should be obvious.

For 1, you need to know (a) how many people have tested positive, and when, (b) how long the disease lasts, and (c) how many people test positive in random samples.

We started doing random samples as early as April, and when those numbers started hitting, we realized two facts: First, that A HUGE number of people already HAD the disease. That is, they are already immune to the disease, for whatever reason. Second, that the number of people who currently have it is much lower than it used to be. Some people who study these numbers are thinking that the disease really hit hard in January, maybe as early as December.

You might be thinking, "Yeah, I got a bad flu in December- January", but this does NOT mean you had COVID-19. In fact, only ~8% of people who have the symptoms of COVID-19 actually have it. ~92% who have the symptoms and get tested test NEGATIVE.

How contagious is the disease? Early research suggested it was highly contagious, but you need to understand that different populations behave differently. Particularly, a significant factor in determining how well many diseases spread is how well people wash their hands. The US is one of the best countries when it comes to washing your hands. (China is one of the worst. So is South Korea.) It turns out it is about as contagious as the common cold. (Indeed, many coronaviruses are indeed responsible for the common cold.)

Immunity is always a question, and despite the fact that people imagine new super-diseases that are impossible to get immune to, this is highly unlikely, and totally disproven. People who get COVID-19 once never get it again. Early media reports were just scary articles about "What if?" What if COVID-19 gives you super-powers so you can fly like Superman?

We now know that many, many people are immune to COVID-19. Indeed, that number keeps going up, and as it goes up, the disease becomes less and less contagious. I believe, looking at the data, the disease has stopped spreading in June. What we are seeing now are mostly false positives or just piss-poor reporting.

The final question: How dangerous is the disease? The answer is, it is not dangerous at all. At least, no more dangerous than the common cold. People who die "from" COVID-19 are really dying from an overreaction to the infection called Cytokine Storm (CS). This is triggered in very old or very sick people, and anything can set it off, even diseases that are harmless like COVID-19. The effects of the CS is that your immune system goes crazy and begins destroying the body. The treatment is very simple: Cool off the immune system. And now that we know, we are treating patients and they just aren't dying from COVID-19 or CS anymore. In fact, the best practice right now is to treat patients with severe symptoms as if they are suffering from CS, and then once they are stable send them home to recover. You may have heard that HCQ, Z-pak, and Zinc Sulfide are 100% effective. This is true. It works because it handles the CS that results from the symptoms of COVID-19, which can be caused by any number of viruses.

Where are we at?

Well, this disease is over, and has been over since June. We are seeing pretty much anyone who dies get recorded as a COVID-19 death -- your guess why is as good as mine. We are seeing a TON of tests being performed, but a bunch of people who test positive with no symptoms at all. Now, in my book, I look at Bayes' Theorem which tells me if you test positive with a test that isn't 100%, and the disease is very rare, then you don't have the disease.

Unfortunately, it's impossible to get good metrics on what the current state of the disease is. Reporting is so horrible, metrics are being fudged, and no one seems to care what the random testing is telling us.