Some work with numbers to prove why it’s a very good idea to wash hands and to keep a goodly distance from others… It starts out grim, with fatality statistics, but we can nevertheless find some hope in those numbers, so do bear with me.

CDC data for 2017 shows there were 2,813,503 deaths in the USA that year. The top ten causes were:

Heart disease: 647,457
Cancer: 599,108
Accidents (unintentional injuries): 169,936
Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 160,201
Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 146,383
Alzheimer’s disease: 121,404
Diabetes: 83,564
Influenza and pneumonia: 55,672
Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 50,633
Intentional self-harm (suicide): 47,173
A comment on “Influenza and pneumonia”. That’s a heavy emphasis on “and pneumonia”. When we look at the breakout of those numbers, just less than a fifth are influenza – about 10,500. The rest are “and pneumonia.” So when we talk about influenza’s mortality, it needs to be decoupled from “and pneumonia” to get a truer sense of influenza’s mortality.

Now take the number of deaths and divide by 365, one gets 7708. That’s about how many deaths per day we have normally in the USA. We had an additional 1000+ yesterday, a 13% increase over the normal rate.

When we divide 100,000 by 2,813,503, we get 0.0355, or 3.55%. That means, every 100,000 deaths is an increase of our annual mortality rate by 3.55%. Put another way, every 28,135 deaths is an increase in the USA’s annual mortality rate by 1%.

So, with a little back-of-the-hand math, a low-end death toll of 100,000 would make COVID-19 the 7th leading cause of death in the USA, ahead of diabetes. 200,000 COVID-19 fatalities would make it the 3rd leading cause of death in the USA. You can see a pretty close cluster between 3rd and 6th place, but it’s a big gap to reach cancer and heart disease. That being said, it’s not impossible if we don’t, all of us, take this pandemic seriously. Death tolls of 1-2,000,000 are possible if we do not wash hands constantly and keep our distance from others of at least 6ft / 2m.

Around 1,340,000 American soldiers died in combat, accident, or disease in all of our nation’s wars and conflicts. If we wash and distance, we need not face down that awful milestone.
We want to take pains to avoid being in the statistics for heart disease and cancers – we diet, we exercise, we change what we do to beat those diseases. It’s the same with COVID-19: change what you do, and you beat that disease. Don’t change, and you risk becoming a sad part of a larger statistic. The good news is that you *can* change.

Finally, remember that if you’re reading about these numbers, look at them as golf scores – we have to play this out over many days, weeks, and months, but if we come out with a low score, we do all right. Stay indoors, and you’ll come out all right, most likely.

I’ll close with a quote from Mel Brooks:”Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. Life is a play, and we’re unrehearsed!” Don’t feel bad if this caught you flat-footed. You’re reading this, so you can take control of your own health and breathing, even if other things are spinning around you. You can own this, you can command this aspect of your life.

Now I’ll really close with a quote from Mel Brooks’ good friend Carl Reiner: “I read the obituaries every morning. If I’m not in them, I have breakfast!”