I left for my annual trip to Alaska where I work as a lead guide for the Tordrillo Mountain Lodge on February 16th with early rumblings on the news about a novel respiratory virus that had emerged in China. Not really news worthy at the time, and for all intensive purposes it was business as usual for me. We had an amazing start to the ski season as the Tordrillo Mountains had an abundance of snow, good stability and great weather. It appeared like it was going to be another great season with all but one week booked with clients.
Four weeks later it all came to a screeching halt as the world saw the evolution of a wide spread pandemic that had crippled Europe to the point that air travel from there was completely shut down. Guests began cancelling from all over the globe, New Zealand, Brazil, Europe, and eventually the US as travelers cancelled domestic flights. Ski resorts in the lower 48 closed, CMH shut down, and the domino effect kicked in. One by one all heli operators were forced to suspend services.
On March 20th I found myself on a crowded flight from Anchorage to Seattle, my season effectively over almost 4 weeks early. As a physician I was dumb founded by this unprecedented lock down that the US and other countries had initiated. I looked at the numbers, did the math and struggled with the implications as the market crashed, schools closed and people were sent home from work.
Today, the CDC is reporting 163,539 cases in the US with 2,860 deaths. Comparing it to the 2017/2018 influenza season which according to CDC estimates had 44,802,629 cases, of which there were about 800,000 hospitalizations and 61,099 deaths (mortality rate of 0.1%) the numbers are not as staggering…… yet.
But, remember the influenza numbers reported for 2017/2018 are in a vaccinated population. The CDC reported that 37% of the population was vaccinated with a reported vaccine effectiveness of about 30-40%. Not great, but it did reduce the burden by an estimated 5.3 million cases.
In contrast we have a COVID-19 naive population unprepared, and no vaccination to help blunt the effect. The infection coefficient is about 2.6, similar to Influenza depending on your source. With that we can expect todays current number of infected individuals in the US is closer to 425,201 with a corrected mortality rate of about .7 %.
If the number of COVID-17 infections approaches the 2017/18 influenza infection rate we could see in excess of 300,000 deaths.
Hopefully what we are doing right now with research, resource mobilization, and social distancing, will be enough to contain this illness. Everyone has an important role in resolving this pandemic, thank you for your part in it.
For a great transparent analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic, view this video by Dr. John Ioannidis Professor of Medicine Stanford University.