Slow recovery

My husband got one of those little inexpensive pulse oximeters a few weeks back. It has been handy for quantifying just how ill we are, and how close we are to needing to go to a hospital. I'm much better now than I was last week, but far from completely well.

Minnesota's new confirmed cases per day has remained flat, after almost a week of shelter-in-place, at about 60. So the total number of cases appears to be growing linearly, not exponentially, which is good, but it is still growing, and at a constant rate.

Given that rate, I figure that it will take about 220 years for Minnesota to achieve herd immunity.  Actually, it won't really be that long, because so many cases go untested, or get false negatives when tested. If I take the confirmed cases as the "tip of the iceberg", 10% of the actual cases, then it will only take 22 years.  Maybe a bit longer than that, as some of those who are immune will die of old age or other causes each year.

I've received some fourth-hand-at-best information, though, that a number of senior living complexes in the area have been reached by the virus. Linear models no longer apply in those situations, and I think there is probably going to be a spike in severe cases soon. Which will give the state government an excuse to keep the shelter-in-place restrictions in place for everyone.

The health department says that the median age for confirmed cases is 47, for hospitalized confirmed cases is 64, and for confirmed deaths is 84.

To me, the median age of 47 looks to be just about in the center of the population age distribution, allowing for very low detection rates among the young. There have been very few confirmed positives under age 20, less than 3% of the total.

A few days, it was said that one in five of the total confirmed cases was a health care worker. It was thought that many of these had caught it through "community spread"; remember that they have better access to testing than the general population does. The health department attributes 30% of total confirmed cases to community spread, although realistically that has to be a lower limit, considering they don't know about the cases that they don't know about, and also considering that some of the cases that they attribute to other causes could have been caused by community spread instead.

One thing I've noticed in the graphs that are being given, is that the age cohorts are often not equal either in years covered or in population. In Minnesota, they've been breaking it down as 0 to 5 years, 6 to 19 years, 20 to 44 years, 45 to 64 years, and 65 and over. It's not surprising that there are very few cases in the 0 to 5 years bracket, which covers 5 years, compared to the the 65-plus bracket, which includes a 104-year-old and therefore spans 39 years. I don't know those categories compare in size on the demographic pyramid, but I do probably know more retirees around here than I do small children.