{"id":30692,"date":"2021-01-05T21:49:12","date_gmt":"2021-01-06T02:49:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/?p=30692"},"modified":"2021-01-05T21:49:12","modified_gmt":"2021-01-06T02:49:12","slug":"we-ran-but-could-not-hide-more-than-half-of-americans-have-now-had-covid-19","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2021\/01\/05\/we-ran-but-could-not-hide-more-than-half-of-americans-have-now-had-covid-19\/","title":{"rendered":"We ran but could not hide: more than half of Americans have now had COVID-19"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The CDC says that multiplying the laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 “cases” by approximately 8 is the best estimate of the actual number of Americans who’ve been infected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus (i.e., “had Covid,” though if there were no symptoms, this is not the medically accurate term). See “Government Model Suggests U.S. COVID-19 Cases Could Be Approaching 100 Million”<\/a> (NPR) and the academic journal paper on which it reports, “Estimated incidence of COVID-19 illness and hospitalization \u2014 United States, February\u2013September, 2020”<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As of today, the CDC says<\/a> that the U.S. has had 20,732,404 “cases” of COVID-19. Multiplying by 8, that’s 165,859,232 (important to have 9 digits of precision when guessing wildly for #Science). The Census Bureau’s pop clock<\/a> says that the U.S. has 330.8 million residents (though Yale says that the error bars on undocumented migrants are in the millions<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I’m not sure that we’ll ever get a better estimate so it is reasonable, in my view, to say that today was the day when the majority of Americans had been infected, at least to some extent, by the virus we call “COVID-19.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Related:<\/p>\n\n\n\n