And inexplicably there have been 50,000 less pneumonia deaths this year then usual.

Granted, the statistics we have are low quality, and provide room for interpretation. But I don't think there's near enough room to say what happened in NYC looks much like a normal flu season.

I'm amazed that the President managed to find a new low yesterday with the comment about internal disinfectants. Given previous performances, that's a really impressive bar. He seems to instinctively know that the virus needs to be contained, but tragically, his actions seems almost in the reverse direction.

There is a wide range in how an infection presents from didn't notice to death.
The public health folks seem focused on containment. Another strategy might be to reduce the severity of the average case. A mix of these might give us a sustainable standoff we can live with till we have immunity or vaccine.

I wish we had a better understanding of how the virus interacts with the victim to make the range of symptom severities. Areas I'd like to understand better include:

1) What does immunity mean? If your immune system is alert and wise to the virus, then what happens when you get a new viral load? Does the still have to wake up and kill it?

2) Is an exposure event a binary yes or no, or rather a range of how many virus particles, where in your body, and over what time frame.


It's kind of a wild leap of faith to hope that exposure is a range with small exposures leading to mild cases and improved immunity. But if that were so, then leaving home while doing things to lower but not eliminate viral loads might get us back to life. Has anybody seen any science in this direction? Maybe a study of health case workers?