LETTER: Coronavirus numbers

In his Tuesday letter, Fred Bilello contends that because the number of people infected with COVID-19 could be 10 times the official number, the “ratio of infections to deaths would be somewhere around one-third of one percent.” Therefore “our socioeconomic nightmare could end up being the most grotesque overreaction in history.”

First, the ratio he described is deaths to infections not infections to deaths. Second, he fails to consider the ratio of people infected to the entire U.S. population. The probability that a person will die from COVID-19 is the probability that a person infected will die multiplied by the probability that a person will catch COVID-19.

You may be more likely to survive a COVID-19 infection in the United States than in other countries, but you are also more likely to become infected in the United States. A person chosen at random in this country is more likely to die from COVID-19 than a person chosen at random in Germany, France, Canada, etc.

In the Cases and Mortality By Country table on the Johns Hopkins website, the United States is currently 10th highest in deaths/100,000 population.

COVID-19 deaths per capita tell how well we’re treating the disease and how well we’re controlling its spread. That’s the statistics to use to judge whether we’ve overreacted.