A Theory On Coronavirus

Here’s three facts about the spread, so far, of this disease:

1) There are a growing number of people who have tested positive for the virus but have no symptoms, and may never show symptoms.

2) The CDC, for complicated and not very interesting reasons, has not had a very reliable test for coronavirus but will have one any day now.

3) For the past two weeks, there has been a coronavirus case in a Sacramento hospital where the person had no known connection with China, the cruise ship in Japan, or any other known source of the disease.

The last of these items has been especially intriguing, at least for me.  What could it mean?  All the other cases in the US are traceable to some specific person or place or airport or restaurant or something, but this particular California poobah has no connection to any of them.  How did she get it?

Well, unless she made her own bat soup, or unless she secretly traveled to Wuhan, China on her hovercraft, got infected and then snuck back into California, she probably got the disease the way California poohbahs always get sick, which is by being in contact with some other California poohbah who is carrying a germ they got from some other California poohbah, and so on and so on and so on.  In other words, there are thousands or tens of thousands of people in California and the rest of America who are carrying this virus around and we just haven’t identified them yet.

And there are two reasons we haven’t identified them yet.  First, the CDC hasn’t been able to identify them because they haven’t had a reliable test for coronavirus.  Once they do, however, which will be any minute now, the American healthcare infrastructure will start identifying these people like the dickens.  We will be the best country in the world at counting all the people with coronavirus because once we get our act in gear, there is nobody more thorough and efficient (and annoying), than America at doing stuff like that.  We’re going to have A LOT of cases.  We could have a hundred thousand positive tests.  There will be a panic, and it will be Trump’s fault, of course, and the stock market will take it on the chin again.  Major selloff.  Another two thousand points on the DJIA.

And at that point, buy.

Remember I said there are two reasons we haven’t identified all our coronavirus cases?  Well, one is the lack of a good test, but the other reason is that most of the people with coronavirus don’t get sick, or they don’t get very sick, and they certainly don’t die.  I can’t verify this, but I don’t think there has been a single child anywhere in the world that has died from corona, and among victims who are young and strong adults, there have been (almost) no fatalities.

Once the full epidemiological profile is known, the panic will end.  Yes, there will be some deaths, but they will be mostly 90-year-olds who already had pneumonia and diabetes.  The flu averages about 40,000 deaths a year in America.  A year from now, will there be 40,000 deaths in America from corona?  If this theory is correct, the number will be far, far less.

Copyright2020MichaelKubacki