As New Data Improve Our Understanding of COVID-19, Our Responses to It Could Become More Effective
“As New Data Improve Our Understanding of COVID-19, Our Responses to It Could Become More Effective” was originally published at National Review.
Until recently, the most commonly accepted timeline suggested that the COVID-19 first appeared in Wuhan, China in late December 2019, first hit the U.S. in mid January, and caused its first American death at the end of February. In total, over 1 million individuals have been infected with the coronavirus in the U.S., and 58,000 have died, for a rough American case-fatality rate of 5.8 percent.
Unfortunately, this epidemiological profile comes with several caveats: There are many Americans who have caught the virus but don’t show up in the official infected count because they haven’t been tested. And at least some have died from the virus without being counted toward the official death toll, so the true case-fatality rate remains unknown. The noise inherent in the data makes it all the more essential that we continue to develop our epidemiological understanding of COVID-19 so that we can make sound policy decisions in the fight against it.
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