The number everyone is concerned about with COVID-19 are CASES and CASE MORTALITY.

NEITHER number is meaningful in any way. They don't mean anything!

The number that EVERYONE should be worried about is TOTAL MORTALITY. That is, what is the chance that I (or someone I love) will die from the disease?

The way you calculate this number is you need 2 other numbers: INFECTION RATE and INFECTION MORTALITY. The infection rate will tell you how many people will get the disease. Infection mortality tells you how many will die if they are infected.

The infection rate is based on how many people an infected person will spread the disease to, as well as how many people are already immune to the disease. Already immune? Yes, your immune system is NATURALLY immune to all sorts of diseases it has never encountered before because of the way your immune system works. Some people have estimated that as many as 60% of the population are ALREADY IMMUNE to COVID-19, meaning that the total infection rate can never exceed 40%.

What about cases? Doesn't cases correspond to infections? NO, not in the slightest! INFECTED people are those who actually have the disease. CASES are people we suspect might have the disease. IE, they tested positive or one of their close friends or family tested positive. That's right -- you don't even need to test positive to be a case!

And when it comes to testing -- what is the false positive and false negative rate? That is, how many times will it say "NO" when the person is indeed infected and "YES" when they are not! This is important data that has been WITHHELD from the public. Anyone who understands the first thing about Bayesian probabilities knows that if you test positive for a super-rare disease, you still likely DON'T have that disease!

What about case mortality? Here again, this is the number of CASES that die with the disease. You might think of this as the number of people who test positive then die -- because that's what they are counting as a "COVID" death. Car accident? Gunshot wound? If you test positive, or even if we think you MIGHT have the disease -- you are counted as a victim of COVID. Note that we are asking "What is my chance to get the disease and die FROM it" not "What is my chance of becoming a case and then dying for one reason or another?"

If you want to get an idea of the infection rate, there are a number of things you can do:

• Measure how quickly the disease spreads. This number will drop as more and more people become immune.
• Take a random sample of the population and test them. Although not every positive test will mean that you have a positive infection, it does give you enough information to estimate how many people actually have the disease -- even if the tests are highly inaccurate (PCR tests are incredibly inaccurate!) Take the random sample every interval (1 week, 1 month, whatever) and you can see the infection rate change in the population, and figure out how many people are likely to get infected in the future.
• Count the number of people who would otherwise not have died except for the fact they had the disease. THIS number, my friends, is a TINY FRACTION of so-called COVID deaths.

Note that in handling a crisis like this, where community transfer is inevitable, it is POINTLESS to test people and try to create isolation wards. I mean, you can try, but unless you have a very accurate test, it's pointless. If there's a 5% chance your negative is false, then after 20 visitors, guess what? You just let someone in who has the disease but tested negative! Maybe, in the first stages of the disease, when it is only present in small populations and quarantine is still a viable strategy, you can quarantine entire populations, but even then -- if it's very quick to spread, this is a futile exercise!

So folks, ask the following questions:

• What is my chances of ACTUALLY having the disease if I test positive? And what is the chances of ACTUALLY being clear if I test negative? This is NOT the false positive / false negative rate! Use Bayesian math to figure this out.
• What is my chance of catching the disease? That is, what is the INFECTION RATE?
• What is my chance of dying due to the disease (NOT with the disease)? This is the TOTAL MORTALITY.

I can tell you folks, having done the math, testing positive for COVID-19 actually means you will live longer. You are LESS likely to die with the disease than you are to die without it. You can make up all sorts of reasons why this is, but you cannot deny the fact that in any given 2-week period, you are MORE likely to die if you don't have COVID.