Covid Infection Rate Of Just .77?

From the Pastor:    Covid Infection Rate Of Just .77?

       Last week I was reading a news article about New Jersey’s Governor Phil Murphy chastising his people for not fully participating in “contact tracing” for covid. Evidently 52% of his people who might have maybe been possibly in the presence of someone who may or may not have covid refused to give the government a list of all of the places they have been and the people with whom they have been in contact for the prior two weeks or more so that they and everyone they implicate in those answers will then be forced to “voluntarily” self-quarantine for an additional two weeks after the others also produce their own list of contacts. Go figure. “It is highly disturbing, to say the least” he is quoted as saying, while I find it highly disturbing that his government is trying to shame people into revealing such personal information. This comes on the heels of the governor of Ohio and dozens of professional athletes being told that their tests came back positive for covid, only to find, through a different test or closer examination of the same test, that it was only a false positive. (Of course, those “important” people were able to get nearly immediate results from their covid tests and were only in panic mode for one day or less before they got the desired but not necessarily any more accurate negative results, whereas “real” people often have to wait longer than the recommended quarantine length of days to find out if they tested positive or negative and never get the chance to verify if it was an accurate diagnosis either way.) But there was something in the article which caught my eye and which I don’t remember ever hearing about from any source before. The following two sentences made me say, “hmmm...!”

“It also could explain why New Jersey has had a hard time recently in keeping its transmission rate below 1.0, which is considered too high. That means every person with the coronavirus is spreading the disease, on average, to at least one other person.”

       Did you know that the transmission rate of this pandemic virus in coronavirus hotbed New Jersey is below 1? I hear news stories constantly that indicate that each person infected with covid is responsible for dozens, perhaps hundreds, of new cases and deaths! A quick search shows the following news stories: One single person in a meeting in Boston resulted in more than 99 covid cases in Massachusetts alone; One covid positive person at a Georgia funeral resulted in more than 100 infections and several deaths; An Arkansas pastor infected 30 churchgoers including 3 who died; 23 Clemson football players got it from one person; the list could go on and on. As I pointed out in a recent bulletin article (August 2) the slant in the news is fomenting fear and outright panic as if every person with covid will infect dozens, if not hundreds, of other people, and (insert scream of horror, shame, and guilt here) kill everyone’s grandma. But this New Jersey article about how bad the people are behaving by not disclosing where they have been for weeks, who they have spoken with, which restaurants and stores they have entered, which form of transportation they have taken, and so much more that the contact tracers demanded that they reveal, tells us that, on average, each covid-ill person has spread it to less than one other person!
       I wanted, of course, to see how many others we Florida covid-ill grandma killers infect. I knew that it must be far and away a larger number, since we are all (at least in this area) forced to wear masks, cannot visit loved ones in nursing homes or enter hospitals for sick calls, and restaurants still cannot serve more than a minuscule number of masked and isolated customers. Surely we must be the ones infecting dozens and hundreds if we so much as think about coughing! But no, as of August 27, Florida has an “infection rate” or “transmission rate” of just .77! Here is a “brain teaser” puzzle for anyone reading this. If 80% of all covid cases come from so-called “super spreader” individuals (a google search shows this to be the statistic) and the average Floridian (including those in the 80% statistic) passes on covid to slightly more than 3/4 of a person (that is, for every four infected people, only three more will get the virus), then, in reality, the chances of a Floridian with covid passing on the virus to even one person is X. Solve for X. The number must be very small.
       During the 2 weeks that a person could be (will be! according to the panic-inducing news media) highly infectious he/she may have gone to church two Sundays (extra days if a daily communicant), gone to the grocery store even more often, visited (in close contact for extended periods of time) family and friends, gone out to eat, exercised near others, etc., yet, although you would think from news stories that that person would have infected everyone in each building or within sight while outside during every single one of those encounters, he/she most likely has not, according to statistics (not pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking), made even one other person sick! If anyone solves the above problem, please let me know and I will put the X number in on our webpage. If I am not thinking this through properly, let me know that as well, for I will need to correct my false inferences.

With prayers for your holiness,
Rev. Fr. Edwin Palka

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