Many of you have wondered the same thing. Was all this necessary? Was this disease so deadly that we needed to destroy our economy? Did we really need to let the government take control of everything? Sadly, the answer is no. This is all the result of bad math. Or perhaps I should say legitimate math lacking any element of common sense.

The first assumption that was wrong was that 4% of people who get COVID 19 will die. The actual number is closer to 1.8% and in the end by some estimate it may be as low as .066%. Even at 4% about 65 million people would have to be infected to make that happen. The following simple chart shows how this works:

% OF INFECTED PEOPLE WHO DIE      4%           1.8%       .066%

NUMBER OF DEATHS                       2,600,000    2,600,000    2,600,000

# OF PEOPLE INFECTED                 65,000,000 144,444,444  EVERYONE

% OF POPULATION INFECTED             18.57%       41.27%     EVERYONE

Let’s assume that every infected person can infect another five people. The following chart shows that it would only take about 13 days before almost everyone is infected.

That obviously did not happen. But what if one person only infected one other person. This would grow more slowly, but after 29 days if the pattern continued without interruption virtually everyone would be infected.

That also did not happen. Now we aren’t testing everyone, but as of today 459,121 people have tested positive 16,676 died. That means 3.6% of people who tested positive died, which is already less than 4%. There are 1,605,548 people who tested positively world-wide with 95,808 deaths. That would be a death rate of 5.6%.

Let’s assume that only 15% of the people infected are getting tested. That means there are about 3 million people infected in the entire country. The death toll from that, at 4% would be about 122,000 people. Even the CDC now admits that is too high and they are down to about 60,000. Nothing, and I do mean nothing, adds up.

It is far from certain that we will even get to 60,000 deaths. In any event, there was never any chance we would get to the 2.6 million deaths that inspired such drastic action.

It gets worse. This is easy to understand, if you add just a little common sense. We don’t live in a world where everyone connects with everyone else. Instead we live in circles and most of the people we contact are within that circle. Every scientist knows this, which is why we have quarantines. If you isolate all the infected people, the disease doesn’t spread. In addition, in those circles where people have been isolated, not everyone gets infected. For example, on a cruise ship where virtually everyone was tested, about 15% appear to have been infected.

Think of it this way. Imagine yourself at a party with 100 people. They play a game. Everyone is given 1 dollar. One person is selected to be the spy. The spy is authorized to take one dollar from five people. Each of the five people he selects are then authorized to get one dollar from five more people. In theory, if you just rely on math, in about five minutes, everyone’s dollar would be gone. That is because (1 x 5) x 5 is 5, (5 x 5) =25, and (5 x 25) is over 125 or more people then are at the party. In real life it is easy for the first spy to get 5 dollars. It is much harder for the next 5 people selected to be spies to get their 5 dollars because they are competing with other spies and some people no longer have their dollar. It is impossible for the 5 people each of these spies selects to get 5 dollars.  This explains why multi-level marketing strategies and Ponzi schemes are doomed to failure.

The same principle applies to the spread of disease. You can’t infect someone who is already infected. When you add in the fact that people who get it once become immune, there is a hard ceiling to the number of people who can get infected, no matter what you do. The only exception is when you do something stupid like let people travel from circle to circle setting off another cycle of infections. That is why the Trump travel ban was the most important decision made by anyone.

Like I said, bad math. There was never any risk of 2.6 million deaths, yet a lot of people were expecting exactly that. The Governor of the Nation State of California really believed that 50% of the people living in California would get infected. Of course, many of these geniuses believe in global warming predictions based on the same type of modeling accompanied by circular reasoning.

The question is how long we are going to put up with people who make stupid decisions based on bad math that are doing more harm than if they had done nothing at all. The travel bans were necessary. Beefing up the hospitals and ventilators to treat the sick was very necessary, shutting down the entire economy not so much.

TDM