Why hospitals were not and will not be overwhelmed

Right now this is what the CDC is saying the hospitalization rates are BASED ON NUMBER OF DIAGNOSED CASES.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6915e3.htm Hospitals So why didn’t our hospitals get overwhelmed despite all the fear?.... simple the virus is 10x-50x more widespread than the diagnosed cases. (Source) Let’s say 10x to be conservative (and this is very conservative). So doing some basic math these are the actual rates of hospitalization by age. People who get Covid 19 who need will a hospital. Kids 0-4 years 3 out of 1000 infections (Kids this young are almost never infected) 5-17 years 1 out of 1000 infections (Infections are rare in this group)

Working Age 18-49 years 2.5 out of 1000 infections. 50-64 years 7.4 out of 1000 infections. Older 65- years 12.2 out of 1000 infections. 50-65 years 15.8 out of 1000 infections.

That means the hospitalization rate for people of working age is 0.2% to 0.7% and only 1 in 3 people who go to the hospital need and ICU bed. And 30% of people in the ICU don’t go on ventilators.

So for working age adults.

2-7 in 1000 infections needs a hospital (and the majority of those have pre-existing conditions, so we can drop this number is those people isolate)

1-2 in 1000 infections needs an ICU bed.

1 in 1300 infections needs a ventilator.

We currently can/are making 5000 ventilators a week.

That means with conservative estimates we can take on 6.5M new infections among working age adults per week in the US. If these numbers are right we now understand why New York was not overwhelmed despite all the predictions! Why are we worried about medical capacity? The shut down is to “flatten the curve" and flattening the curve is not to reduce total deaths but to ensure hospitals are not overrun. Only one place on the planet had a problem with that and it was because they were caught totally unaware. Everywhere, else we not only had no surge we now are laying off hospital workers, include ER hospital workers. When we are aware and take basic precautions there is NO RISK when you look at the data. It’s time to send people under 65 and healthy back to work and save the economy. We all know the models are wrong and need to be adjusted based on the new data. Our hospitals can handle us going back to work. Isolate the at risk and let people go back to work.