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COVID-19: Test, Test and Test Again
By Nana Dadzie Ghansah
Anyone paying attention to the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 (the virus) and the development of COVID-19 (the disease) would notice two things:
- the spread in any population depends on how officials react to patient zero;
- the mortality is a function of how quickly the health system that cares for this population gets choked up.
Let’s use an illustration here. We will use Fayette County, KY. The population is about 324,000. Let just say that the Governor did nothing even after the first case was found on March 7. Looking at data from places like Vo in Italy and New York, US, about 3 to 25% of the population can get infected. Let’s average this out and say 14% of the population of Fayette County gets infected after patient zero was found. That is 45,360 people.
The data from China and the initial CDC data from the US show us that 80% of this 45,360 may be asymptomatic or have very mild symptoms, while 15% will have a severe presentation of the disease — 6804 people. Another 5% — 2268 — will get critically ill. (In China, close to 50% of those who got critically ill died.)
Fayette County, by the latest count, has about 2000 hospital beds between the University of Kentucky (UK), Baptist Health and St. Joseph Health System. Thus we see that…
