Both NY and CA report that the number of new cases of coronavirus is dropping. But even more is dropping—a March 30th paper published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases estimates a 0.66% death rate [WHO said it would be 3.4% and that set off the panic]. (1) For those under 40, the death rate is estimated to be 0.16% (regular flu is 0.1%). Kids under 9 have the lowest death rate at 0.00161%. For those over 80: 7.8%.
The dust hasn’t settled yet. My prediction is that they have preferentially tested sick people, who likely would have died from their existing health conditions. Since it’s always in the population, people die with coronavirus rather than from coronavirus. But it’s reported that the virus killed them. Until we look at background death rates, we have no way of knowing if there’s an increased mortality or not.
Peter Gøtzsche, MD, founder of Cochrane Collaboration, with 75 papers published In top bio-medical journals, writes in the British Medical Journal, March 8th, 2020:
Case-fatality rates for respiratory virus infections are highly uncertain. Many mild infections pass unnoticed, and if an elderly frail patient with serious heart disease is pushed over the edge by an infection, was it then a virus death or a cardiac death?
I have suspected for a long time that we are the victims of mass panic. Two days ago, I read in a newspaper that the average age of those who died after coronavirus infection was 81 and that they also often had comorbidity.
What if the Chinese had not tested their patients for coronavirus or there had not been any test? Would we have carried on with our lives, without restrictions, not worrying about some deaths here and there among old people, which we see every winter? I think so. (2)
We should have learned our lesson in 1976We should have learned our lesson in 1976
It began with one lone soldier.
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