Someone With One Watch Knows What Time It Is

I just got back from the local grocery store as I picked up dinner for this evening and what I saw surprised me. On an evening like tonight I have the option of a protein shake or a bowl of low-calorie soup. When I went to the soup isle, only a few cans of soup remained. Normally there would be hundreds of cans, if not thousands. I decided to head to the toilet-paper isle and as expected, not a single roll could be found. It looks like the Novel Coronavirus (officially COVID-19) has the general public in fear.

Unfortunately this is not a rational fear. At least not yet. Let's look at some numbers. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) and according to this morning's report, there are only 62 people in the United States with the illness and no deaths yet. But wait a second, didn't we hear that 6 people in the state of Washington have died for COVID-19? Let's look at what the Center for Disease Control (CDC) has to say. They are reporting 43 cases with 2 deaths. How about CNN? They are reporting over 100 (102 as of this moment) cases in the US with 6 deaths. Which one is correct? This comes down to one of my favorite sayings: "Someone with one watch knows what time it is, someone with two isn't quite sure." Let's talk about why the numbers are different after we do a small amount of math.

Let's take the worst case numbers and divide the number of cases by the population of the United States (331 Million). That means you currently have a 0.000031% chance of getting the disease. Those are pretty slim odds. I know I wouldn't want to take any chances but buying up all available soup and toilet paper seems extreme.

Ok, so back to why the numbers are different. CNN has different numbers because it is a news agency and wants to report the latest numbers on COVID-19. Both the WHO and the CDC update their numbers on a less frequent basis. The WHO reports daily and the CDC reports Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. They also have different protocols between the 3 groups. A news agency will include suspected cases while both WHO and CDC have to wait for verification. The difference in the later two groups boils down to minor technicalities in how they verify if someone has the illness or not.

Any time you are looking for accurate numbers it is important to read all of the fine print. One source may be more lenient while another is more strict. Unfortunately it can be difficult to decide which number to use. In non-life-threatening cases, it may not really matter and a rough number is all that is needed. Should the number of COVID-19 cases jump to a million in the United States overnight, it will be important to have the numbers we are getting from both CDC and WHO be a lot closer in value than they are right now.