1:1,000

I'm seeing, with increased frequency, misleading statistics on the internet, usually in Comments sections on news feeds, that America is overreacting to the coronavirus pandemic, and that 99.9% of people who contract the virus survive, so what's the big deal?

Well, for starters, the number isn't quite right.  To date, some 18.8 million Americans have tested positive for the virus, and of those, 330,832 have died.  In other words, 1.76% of the people who've become infected went on and died, or the inverse., 98.2% of them have survived, not 99.9. 

Still, 98.2% survival sounds pretty good, right?  What's the big deal?

To the non-specialist, 98.2% sounds pretty darn close to 100%. but toxicologists and epidemiologists don't discuss death rates in terms of percentages.  There are far too many corpses in the number-roundings.  But let's compare that survival rate to other causes of death.  For decades now, the globally "acceptable" level of additional cancer deaths has been set at 1 in a million.  If a chemical or consumer product or drug or other substance causes less than 1 additional cancer death out of every one million persons exposed, it's considered safe.  After all, you can't completely eliminate cancer, and some drugs, chemicals, and other consumer products have benefits that outweigh the one in a million cancer death.  

But if the rate is greater than one in a million (expressed as 1:1,000,000), then the substance is banned.  Otherwise promising drugs, potentially game-changing pesticides, and useful household products have been taken off the shelves and banned from any future use when their carcinogenicity has been shown to exceed 1:1,000,000.  

Even then, there's some wiggle room.  If something is very useful and could otherwise save more lives than are lost due to cancer, exceptions are made.  Some substances are still sold with cancer rates greater than 1 in a million.  Some cancer rates that have been accepted are as high as 10 in a million (10:1,000,000, or 1:100,000) or more rarely, 20 in a million.  But 100 in a million is far beyond anything any government or civilized society would tolerate, and the substance becomes a dreaded Class A Known Human Carcinogen.

Okay, back to Covid-19.  As noted above, to date 330,832 Americans have died from virus-related causes.  Fact.  There are 330 million people in America.  Fact.  The math is easy - one out of every 1,000 Americans is now dead from the virus, or 1,000 out of every one million.  I don't know if a carcinogen that deadly is even known to exist - plutonium-241, maybe?  But the death rate of covid-19 is well beyond 1:1,000,000, even beyond 100:1,000,000. It is 1 out of a thousand, or 1,000:1,000,000.  That's staggeringly deadly.    

Even worse, that's the covid death rate of all Americans, including those who've never been exposed to the virus.  If 330,832 Americans have died out of 18.8 million who've been exposed (as opposed to 330 million total Americans), then the death rate leaps to a jaw-dropping 17,600 out of a million

Why are people willing to except a morbidity rate 1,000 to 10,000 times higher than the chemicals we regulate and the drugs that we test?  DDT and asbestos are only fatal to less than 99.9% of the people exposed (but far greater than 1 in a million), but I propose that few readers would be willing to handle DDT in an asbestos-laden environment.  Why then are they comfortable, even insistent, on mingling maskless in enclosed places?  It doesn't make sense. It isn't, as Mr. Spock would have said, logical.