Posted on 04/13/2020 10:29:26 PM PDT by grundle
I think most people consider The Economist to be a fairly reliable source.
They looked at these numbers, and speculated that it’s possible (but not certain) that the real fatality rate might be 0.1%.
I don’t know if that’s accurate or not. And even they readily admit that they might be wrong.
Still, I do hope that it turns out to be true.
Here’s the relevant text, which The Economist reported on April 11, 2020:
Covid-19 takes 20-25 days to kill victims. The paper reckons that 7m Americans were infected from March 8th to 14th, and official data show 7,000 deaths three weeks later. The resulting fatality rate is 0.1%, similar to that of flu. That is amazingly low, just a tenth of some other estimates. Perhaps it is just wrong, possibly because the death toll has been under-reported. Perhaps, though, New York’s hospitals are overflowing because the virus is so contagious that it has crammed the equivalent of a year’s worth of flu cases into one week.
I don’t know if that’s accurate or not. And even they readily admit that they might be wrong.
Still, I do hope that it turns out to be true.
I love hard science! What does the paper reckon about Globull Warming?
Smile while you are saying that..
The other thing to keep in mind is how infectious this virus is. So even if the CFR is comparable to the flu, since we already know for sure that it’s much more communicable, it’ll kill many, many more people.
It takes a while for this to sink in, i’ll admit. This “lockdown” won’t reduce the total death count by much, but it might buy us enough time to come up with a strategy for maintaining civil order and some sort of viable economy.
The CCP has a lot to answer for.
How many of those days are spent in the Intensive Care Unit?
Somebody show me a glass board where “reckoning” is part of the equation!
If it only killed bloggers wouldn’t that be a hoot?
> I think most people consider The Economist to be a fairly reliable source.
Regrettably, it now seems to be operating IMHO at roughly the reliability level of the NYT.
It’s unfortunate we don’t have hundreds of thousands of antibody test kits to get a true idea of how many Americans have actually had it. I don’t think anyone is going to let such an estimate determine policy. And they shouldn’t.
LOL, I had a subscription to The Economist for decades. My grandma used to pay for it for me every year. It’s been imo a generally reasonable, fair and reputable medium. She passed a couple of years ago, age 96, and my subscription lapsed with her.
FWIW, doctors gave her 6 months to live, metastatic cancer. She gave them the finger and lived 6 years longer. Never took anything stronger than 1 advil a day, until her very last days when they more or less forced morphine on her.
Hmmm. The infection period for these deaths was March 8th to 14th. That seems very close to St. Patrick’s Day. With the parades cancelled, people must have packed into the bars in those big cities.
I think the ‘social distancing’ lockdown has only had one important effect, and that is to prevent the healthcare system from being overwhelmed by a flood of demand over a very short period of time.
The flip side of that coin means it is likely that once the lockdown ends those who avoided the virus will be more likely to catch it. Hence, the seasonality that Dr. Fauci talks about. So potentially we traded the saving of the HC system in return for an extended period of disease recurrence. It may have been a good trade-off since it is a utilitarian good to prevent the HC system from being crushed. But long term, natural human immunity to the disease is better - and maybe some of these drug cocktails will work to help people survive the virus... e.g. we bought the human race some time to figure out a way to defeat the virus.
Not to suggest the entire human race was at risk of death, just that if a drug regimen we discovered over the spring works well more people will live through the infection ala herd immunity. Just give those infected a cocktail of drugs that is apx 91% effective, and the virus harms only those who were most at risk to begin with. The medium at risk will be able to sweat it out where they otherwise might have succumbed.
Yes, they did indeed. I remember reports that weekend (3/14-3/15) of business-as-usual St Paddy’s pub crawls in several cities including NY & Chicago.
the truth is coming out. democrat flu is a hoax.
Why, it'd almost be humblegunner heaven, where the only posts are mainstream!
But I know you don't want to leave out us FReeQs!
you can not have it both ways...people like yourself have decided it didn't matter the cost to the entire country and its future for you to feel a little bit safer hiding under you bed...
and now you wonder about maintaining civil order and a "viable economy"....
how generous of you to even think about the millions out of work, the families split apart, the businesses that will never come back, not to mention the retirement assets of all of we non govt workers and retirees...
Y’all are at least entertaining.
COVID-19 seems to be very contwgious. At first they said that the spread is 2.5 per person but now they’re saying it’s over 5.
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