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It’s Elementary — More Americans Have Been Infected by the Coronavirus than Previously Thought
In Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of the Four, Sherlock Holmes rebukes Watson after the good doctor accuses him of engaging in mere guess-work by tersely responding: “No, no: I never guess. It is a shocking habit — destructive to the logical faculty.” Holmes then patiently (and perhaps a bit condescendingly) walks Watson through the pieces of data and steps of deduction that led to his correct conclusion.
If Holmes were alive in 2020 and working on The Case of the COVID-19 Pandemic, he undoubtedly would be intrigued by four critical pieces of data that were made public over the past few days:
· On April 17, health officials in Santa Clara County, CA released findings from an antibody study that concludes far more people probably have been infected with COVID-19 than confirmed cases would indicate. Specifically, the study estimates that between 2.49% and 4.16% of county residents had been infected by April 1. That translates to between 48,000 and 81,000 people — 50 to 85 times more than the official confirmed case count of 956 people.
· On April 20, the University of Southern California and the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health released preliminary results of a different antibody study. This study indicated that somewhere…
