What Proportion of the US Population Will Get Coronavirus?

Charts Show NM, Las Cruces, El Paso Will Likely Run Out of Hospital Beds

Unless We All "Flatten the Curve" Now

What About Cd. Juárez? 

NM in Depth (click here) found a ProPublica study (click here) based on data from the Harvard Global Health Institute, showing the hospital bed situation under different scenarios on a map of the United States.  It is sobering, especially for much of the country West of Texas, and reminds us how important our personal behavior, today and for the next few weeks, will affect "flattening the curve" enough to avoid the kinds of shortages of beds for those needing top-notch care.

First a little background:

How many of us will get the virus?  We don't know.  We do know that the potential is very high.  Swine flu, just a decade ago, was contracted by one of every five persons on the planet:  20%.  Testing numbers are still far too limited to give us a better picture of what is happening and where.  Governor Cuomo, on national television two days ago, presumably after consulting with top experts,  projected 40%-60% of New Yorkers will get coronavirus, .  In the Harvard study the projections on hospital beds were based on three scenarios:  in the "light" category 20% will contract the disease; in the "moderate" category 40% of us will come down with it, and in the "severe" category 60% of us will get it.

How fast the virus spreads is important:  Governor Cuomo expects the disease to "peak" in New York in about 45 days.  That is just six weeks from now.  New York's hospital bed capacity will not be up to the demand for treatment by that time.  He called on President Trump to mobilize the Army Corps of Engineers to build hospital capacity in the next 45 days.  If you look at the maps (click on the links above), which have gone viral (no pun intended) on the internet today, you will see that if the disease spreads relatively quickly over the next six months and if 20% of New Mexicans get the disease, we will have a severe shortage of beds.  If 40% of us get the disease in 6 months most of the entire US will face severe bed shortages, and we will be like Northern Italy is today.  If you've been watching the news, you've seen that the curve of spread in the US looks almost identical to the early curve in Italy.  If something doesn't happen now we will look like Italy in only about 3 or 4 weeks or possibly sooner--we can't know because we haven't tested enough.  We can only look at our trajectory and compare it to Italy's, and it is scary.

We Can Control Some of the Outcomes, But We Have to Act Quickly:  One of the key takeaways from these maps and charts is that our behavior today will affect both the total incidence of the disease in the next few months, and the timing of the peaks throughout the country.  To prevent our health system, rickety as it is already, from being overwhelmed by sheer numbers of patients, we need to act now, through social isolation, to slow down the spread of the disease.  The more sloppy we are about limiting our contact with people, the faster the virus will spread, which is to say, the more people will come down with it before our health care system can ramp up to handle it.

What About Cd. Juarez?  Over two million persons live within 50 miles of Las Cruces, El Paso with over 800,000 and Juárez with about 1.3 million.  Evidence strongly suggests that neither Juárez nor El Paso have been testing adequately, so there have only been a handful of people detected so far with the virus.  That doesn't mean that the virus just arrived this week. About $110 billion of goods cross the border in this region in both directions each year, much of it in trucks.  Thousands of pedestrians, particularly from the Juárez side, have walked across the bridge to go shopping.  If one trucker or business person, say, from New York, who had the virus but wasn't sick enough to stay home wandered into a maquila plant in Juarez and infected someone there a month ago, the virus is now spreading quickly in Juárez, undetected, and almost certainly has crossed over the bridge into El Paso. And vice versa. El Paso or Santa Teresa may have infected Juárez.  Only massive testing will tell us how bad it is in this area, and we are not there yet.

If you look at the airport schedule for the Juárez International Airport for today (click here), you will see that 12 flights are expected to arrive from Mexico City, and 13 from other parts of Mexico.  The Mexican President less than two weeks ago declared that "getting coronavirus is not terrible; it's like catching a cold "(see my blog below for sourcing)--two of Donald Trump's own talking points around that time.  The El Paso International Airport is much busier than Juarez's.  Today 51 flights are expected to arrive in El Paso (click here), from all parts of the US., including one from Seattle, where the disease is rampant, 5 from Denver, where testing is reasonably good and shows a a hot spot for the virus, and 3 from Atlanta, another hot spot. Are we heading to the "light" 20% level?  The 40% level?  The 60% level for the disease?  We can't know yet.  But we know the virus is spreading quickly and our only weapon right now is social isolation.