Fun With Math #3 And Then There Were Four (members of the House) predicting 2,446,355 US cases of Covid-19

Joe Cunningham and Mike Kelly join Mario Diaz-Balart and Ben McAdams, are the third and fourth members of the House of Representatives to test positive for Covid-19. As with our earlier “fun with math” posts, if we extrapolate out the US level of infection because one of the few groups in the country that can get a test on-demand are Senators and Congresspeople. Many others are turned away even if they lost their sense of smell and taste. (a common symptom)

So let’s run the math to come up with 2,446,355 total US cases (thereabouts). Four out of 535 or .74766355140187 percent of the house. (in the Senate we have one out of 100, so quite similar percentage).

Then we multiply the .74766355140187 percent times the US population of 327.2 million to arrive at a projected US infection rate of 2,446,355. Well over 2 million total infections.

Even if the fatality rate is much lower than currently projected/estimated (because other than congress, there is far too little testing), let’s assume a 1% fatality rate. That would predict that 244,636 people will die from Coronavirus this year. Since the CDC estimates that 12,000 and 61,000 deaths annually since 2010 can be blamed on the flu, Corona according to our third “fun with math” estimate will be at least 4 times worse than a typical flu season. I fully expect more members of the House of Representatives to test positive and that means we’ll have more “fun with math” updates to come.

I certainly hope that our “fun with math” estimates are way off. They would predict an even more sad year indeed.