So, not even any pretend math on the airline travel claim.
Just an acknowledgement that there are more than 7 billion people on Earth -- again, fun with numerators and denominators, the statistical game for all ages!
Add to that ignorance of subject matter - conflating airline travel with all (fixed wing) air traffic - which matters in a world where deaths in regularly scheduled passenger aviation are a tiny (sometimes nonexistent) fraction of deaths in air traffic. Just for fun. Not that the initial claim isn't laughably silly for the subject we're discussing here, an infectious disease.
The denominator in airline travel has probably shrunk this year, but that's of virtually insignificant importance.
It has shrunk by a factor of perhaps 20 - i.e., there were single-quarter reports of a 95% decrease.
By comparison, the growth in known COVID-19 infections have gone from 0 to 18 million+ (global number) since (I believe) December '19. Certainly, the first known infection first happened within the last single year.
More fun with statistics! That's an increase not by a factor of 20, like the
decrease reported in one quarter of airline travel... but of 18,000,000.
At this writing:
There are 18 million more cases than there were at the first infection, a growth factor of 18 million since the first infection.
That said, we
know of 18 million cases globally at this writing.
Of these, 689,000 have died, and 11.3 million have recovered.
We can always add our guesses of how many we'd like to believe are infected but their infections unknown.
The same numbers for the U.S. are:
United States Coronavirus: 4,765,155 Cases and 157,921 Deaths - Worldometer
4.7 million known cases
157K known COVID-19 deaths
~2.4 million recovered.
Multiply these numbers by 18 million, and of course, they become meaningless. If the world population and the U.S. population were (impossibly) greater, the exercise
could make sense.
However, we need only extrapolate from the projected point at which the virus can no longer find new hosts, that is, a population saturation of somewhere at or under 70% of the entire population.
Without the "Hope multiplier" of an "estimated undercount" of infections, that is, going only by what we know, in the U.S., 4.7 million people have or had the virus.
The population of the U.S. is 331 million.
United States Population (2020) - Worldometer
So let's use a simple model, then think about other knowns, and finally, apply hopes.
The simple model is, you have to infect 70.4 times as many people to "skate to where the puck will be" by the time all is said and done.
In the U.S., this would yields 331 million infections and 11 million deaths. I do not think this is our ultimate number, but we're only going by the knowns.
1) We do not know whether there's any such thing as lasting immunity. If we saturate the country with COVID cases, the moment one
can "get COVID 19 again," one does. However, assuming that this does not completely gainsay the concept of herd immunity, you could multiply by a factor of .7 (or even lesss). .7 x that 11 million figure gets you to 7.7 million dead in the U.S. -- going by the known info. only.
2) We also do not know the extent of the
hoped for undercount of COVID cases. In that we've refused to measure this when we had the chance (i.e., when lower numbers made it possible) hiding behind this unknown to write a pretty story about how it's "not so bad" is a bit of a chutzpah.
3) Notwithstanding (2), I too choose hope.
But I did want to put the knowns out there too, however, just in case folks are unclear on what we hope versus what we know. I for one have gotten a little bit irritated by the manipulation and attempted manipulation of the credulous as regards the "bright side" of this virus.
4) Now let's look at the unknowns. It is unknown how many people truly do get the disease versus those who die of it, and it is unknowner still how many people get permanent damage without dying. It's also much more likely that the number of deaths by COVID is an undercount than an overcount -- but the business end of these unknowns is
how many actually become COVID positive, versus how many test positive.
4a) In 4, for those who need it spelled out, a high undercount is good for feeling safe, and a low undercount is more alarming. Most alarming of all (see above) is an assumption that at our present level of testing we know every case of COVID.
Certain worthies hereabouts love to quote guesses
based on these variables and scream about how alarmist the numbers are that they yield. So for them, I'll just blurt out what I think, and have thought since the beginning:
The ultimate death toll in the U.S.
probably will be confined to the hundreds of thousands, perhaps exceeding a million, and very very doubtfully reaching into the low millions (plural) if we really work on being as monumentally stupid as possible. So far we've done yeoman's work in this regard, but the ability of human beings to respond to personally experienced tragedy is perhaps --
perhaps -- a limiter on the influence of the death cult that has such political and media puissance at present through our present minority rule government.
Does anybody think it's funny to say that we'll exceed 200,000 deaths by the end of this? A few weeks ago I quoted someone in my sig as saying words to the effect of "Hundreds of thousands. LOL."
Again: If you get a ticket for a seat on an airline flight, sit down in the waiting area, and talk to a few unticketed strangers, they do not suddenly find valid tickets for airline flights in their pockets.
If that happened, you could compare fatalities based on a range-bound denominator (Airline trips per annum) against one based on an exponentially growing denominator.
The airline case is subject to "large" rate fluctuations -- see the case of 2018, in which two 737 Max aircraft were lost. But nowhere near as large as a factor of 18 million (or 180,000%, if you prefer).
All of this is to teach those who can read and who have command of at least the four basic operations the difference between throwing the ball through a tire and leading a receiver who is moving at the speed of sound (to mix a metaphor.)
Simpler metaphor: Skate to where the puck is
going to be.
Right now, about half of known cases are unresolved in the U.S.
We are presently looking at known cases numbering 1/70th of potential cases. That represents between 1/70th of the the cases we
will have and all the cases we will have. Both these extremes are exaggerations. The outcome will be somewhere in the middle.
