Coronavirus update - March 6th
Bottom Line: Another day, another mixed bag of news. Yesterday more people recovered from the virus in China than were diagnosed with it. That’s a huge development if the reporting is accurate. To date over 80% of all worldwide cases have come from China. Meanwhile in the US the news wasn’t as good. Dozens of new cases and additional deaths. In Florida there was one new case detected. The 72-year-old man lives in Santa Rosa County in the panhandle and had recently traveled internationally.
Here’s where we now stand in Florida:
- 4 cases – 0 deaths – 0 recovered
Nationally:
- 233 cases – 14 deaths – 9 recovered
Worldwide:
- 98,442 – 3,387 deaths – 55,661 recovered
The most disconcerting aspect of the virus at this point remains the death/recovery rate. It’s remained static at 6% since last weekend. That’s an extremely high death rate. To put this in perspective – let’s say every American obtained the H1N1 flu virus. Based on its average death rate it’d kill 165,000 Americans. If the COVID-19 virus maintained its current death rate and every American contracted it,19.8 million Americans would die. Again, I’m not at all trying to bean alarmist. Those are just the facts. Hopefully we begin to see progress with the death rate but as you can tell – we now have more Americans who’ve died from the virus than have recovered.
We remain 9th in the world for cases. The big concern stateside remains nursing homes and related healthcare facilities with anyone who is already medically compromised. As the Florida Department of Health has guided, anyone with pre-exiting conditions is at risk of complications if they were exposed to the virus.