Earlier this month, I wrote an article sharing some of my thoughts on the coronavirus.
In the article, I wrote that Pennsylvania, the state I live in, had about 3,000 confirmed cases of the coronavirus. It’s been less than a week and that number has jumped to nearly twenty thousand, nearly six times as many cases as when I first did the research for my article at the beginning of April.
It has been extremely disheartening to see that there are still so many people who aren’t taking precautions like social distancing seriously. It’s even more disturbing that there are so many people who remain ignorant because they’re young and relatively healthy.
As if they could never get sick.
It might be inconvenient to not be able to go to your favorite restaurant or bar, or to hang out with your friends or family whenever you want, but there’s a reason why these guidelines and protocols exist: to stop the spread of disease and help flatten the curve.
Helping to stop to spread is especially crucial. According to the CDC, the coronavirus has a two-week incubation period, so symptoms may appear anywhere between two and fourteen days after initial exposure.
That means that once you’ve been exposed, you can continue to spread the coronavirus to anyone else you come into contact with.
Likewise, a report issued by the CDC using data gathered from the month of March indicated that while rates of infection increase by age, there was a significant number of patients admitted to the hospital under the age of sixty-five.
Of the 1,482 patients in the report, 0.3% were between ages 0 and 4, 0.1% were between ages 5 and 17, 2.5% were between ages 18 and 49, while 7.4% were between the ages of 50 and 64.
These numbers may seem small, but this report was taken from a survey across a network of hospitals in fourteen states, including California, Colorado, Maryland, New York, and Ohio. This data is representative of only about ten percent of the entire United States population.
To put it into perspective, the age demographics for the state of Pennsylvania are listed below.
Age Cases
0-4 < 1%
5-12 < 1%
13-18 1%
19-24 7%
25-49 41%
50-64 29%
65+ 21%
The total number of cases in the United States has recently topped five hundred thousand, bringing the world total to well over one million.
Although there have been nearly 376,000 recoveries, there have been about 100,000 deaths with about 27,000 recoveries and eighteen thousand deaths in the United States alone.
Flatten the curve. Just stay home.