There is still an issue. Two weeks ago we had 100 "presumed COVID" cases in our county which were told to go home and self quarantine. How many more are there in Allen County at this time? Fortunately, we do not have a high number of cases currently. But, do we actually have many more which isn't publicly recognized? If so, extrapolate that out to each county. Probably at a higher multiple in counties with more confirmed cases. My point is there are a lot more positive cases than we are hearing about. This brings us to a higher percentage of the public as recovered or recovering at home. This also brings the mortality rate down or survival rate up. However, you want to see it.
Fortunately due to controlled environments with high test rates like the Princess cruise ship we do have some solid data around those who were positive but showed no symptoms. (50.5%). Out of everyone who tested positive about 80% did not need medical intervention. Roughly 20% did. Of that 20% around 7% needed ICU care. This is the best solid baseline for medical intervention rate requirements for COVID that the world has because of the controlled environment and almost 100% test rate.
Let's compare those to ohios current numbers. Today we have 5,148 cases and 1,495 hospitalizations. That's 29% hospitalization rate. So 9% higher than the controlled princess cruise numbers. This means we need to add 2,327 cases to our detection to bring it in line with the control group. Aka we're missing and haven't detected roughly 50% of the cases. Not surprising considering roughly 50% of the people in the cruise ship who tested positive didn't have symptoms and Ohio is only testing people that are showing up sick and meet the symptom criteria. So those numbers match up quite perfectly and we can say with pretty good certainty that we're missing half of our total.
So while we are most certainly missing cases. However, we're only talking about 7k cases in a state with 11.6 million people to infect. It is an insignificant amount in the scope of things.
If we rerun the death numbers to reach 70% herd immunity (8,120,00) and assume that we're missing 50% of the cases due to them not showing symptoms and not meeting test criteria in Ohio (4,060,000). The fatality rate of those who displayed symptoms on the cruise ship was 1.9%. That means we will have 812,000 hospitalizations 20%. Per healthdata.org Ohio had about 15,000 hospital beads available with only around 1,200 of them being ICU beds. Go over that number and the death rate will increase dramatically due to lack of care.
when we're facing a pandemic that is extremely contagious where everyone is susceptible that has the potential to demand 54 times your available medical capacity, it's easy to see why they would want everyone to stay home to slow transmission.