CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Researchers at Texas A&M Corpus Christi say based on their research, the worst-case scenario has the coronavirus peaking in late June or July.
Doctor Chris Bird says right now, Texas has a transmission ratio of 4 meaning for every one person that has COVID-19, 4 people are becoming infected from that one person. The goal is to get that number down to 1.
To help show the effects of social distancing the model poses these questions:
- What would happen if we didn't enact social distancing at all?
- What would happen if we ended social distancing today?
- What would happen if people ignored social distancing during the holiday weekend?
- Is social distancing working?
"Social distancing is flattening the curve here, in the worst case of worst-case scenarios we have 87,000 cases instead of 300,000 cases if we never did anything at the peak, or 200,000 cases if we ended social restrictions right now," Dr. Bird said.
Researchers estimate if there was no social distancing, we would see about 200,000 cases by mid-April, and 5,000 fatalities. If we ended social distancing today, there would be 200,000 people infected by mid-May, and 5 to 20 deaths just during this holiday weekend.
If we keep social distancing for the foreseeable future, we could have between 10,000 - 87,000 cases of COVID-19 here in the Coastal Bend.
If social distancing is removed today, hospitals will be overwhelmed, more people will die, and there will be more transmissions.
For the latest updates on coronavirus in the Coastal Bend, click here.
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