The Most Important Coronavirus Number Is How Many Survive

Focusing too much on these estimates, though, can be an exercise in missing the point. For one thing, Covid‑19’s fatality rate is much, much higher for those age 65 and older—who happen to make up a second-highest-in-the-world 22.8% of Italy’s population (Japan is No. 1 at 27.6%), which helps explain some of that country’s problems. Those with preexisting conditions such as heart disease and diabetes also face much higher risks than the rest of us.

Perhaps the more important set of statistics to ponder is that in 1918, an estimated 97.3% of people worldwide and 99.3% of Americans didn’t die of influenza. Yet that year’s pandemic still killed more people than any disease outbreak in history. Maybe, just maybe, the biggest concerns that most of us should have about Covid‑19 involve not personal risk but risks to people we care about and to society at large.

• Will this overwhelm hospitals?

One key issue is hospital capacity. In the most severe recent flu season, that of 2017‑18, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that 45 million Americans contracted influenza-like illnesses, 810,000 were hospitalized, and 61,000 died. That makes for a fatality rate of 0.14%, five times lower than even South Korea’s Covid‑19 death rate. Multiply those 2017‑18 flu hospitalization and fatality numbers by five—or 10, or 20, both of which seem at least conceivable—and it’s easy to see how the rapid spread of the coronavirus could overwhelm U.S. hospitals, which have 924,107 staffed beds total and only 46,500 in medical intensive care units. If that happens, the fatality rate will go up, not just for Covid‑19 but for other ailments as well. It’s probably no coincidence that low-fatality-rate South Korea has the world’s second-most hospital beds per person (Japan is again No. 1), with more than four times as many per capita as the U.S.

It’s this prospect of an overwhelmed health-care system that has motivated lockdowns in China and Italy. It has also spurred the intensive efforts to test and isolate Covid‑19 patients that appear to have halted the spread of the disease in several East Asian countries. Epidemiologists in the U.S. seem to be divided on whether it’s still possible to stop the spread of the coronavirus here this way. It’s definitely possible to slow it, though—which is what the current rash of event cancellations, college shutdowns, and work-from-home advice is about. Almost all of us are going to survive this. The question is whether we can avert a situation where millions of us don’t. —Fox is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.

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