COVID-19 crisis: Have we overestimated the threat?

The virus is a dreadful enemy and by all accounts most countries were unprepared to deal with it.

But as we...learn to deal with the virus, curiously several scientists have begun pointing out that estimates of COVID-19 deaths in countries such as the USA and Italy are possible ‘overestimates’.

Nina Schwalbe, Principal Visiting Fellow at the United Nations University’s International Institute for Global Health... argued that while calculating fatality percentage or rate, the denominator in the form of number of infections is underestimated, hence the fatality rate appears to be much higher than what it actually is.

What is more, Schwalbe writes, even when we are testing, depending on the type of test used, we may only be counting people who are actively infected, not those who had it earlier and are currently immune.

“By not counting the people who don’t need hospital care, we are massively over projecting the per cent of infected people who die of COVID-19. It is a dangerous message that is causing fear—all driven by a false denominator.”

Another reason why the fatality rate is getting exaggerated is that the number of deaths related to COVID-19 are being overestimated. While the denominator is underestimated, the numerator is overestimated in several official estimates.

Dr. Jason Oke of Oxford University... and Dr. Carl Heneghan say, “Dying with the disease ( association) is not the same as dying from the disease ( causation).” (CEBM Research Evidence Service).

Failure to make this distinction may be responsible for a lot of confusion and overestimates, as is also evident from the writings and video recordings of scientists like Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi (Head of the Institute for Medical Microbiology and Hygiene) and Dr. John Loannidis (Professor of Medicine and Professor of Epidemiology and Population Health at Stanford University School for Medicine).

Dr. Jason Oke of Oxford University... and Dr. Carl Heneghan say, “Dying with the disease ( association) is not the same as dying from the disease ( causation).” (CEBM Research Evidence Service).

Sorry, but that's a line invented to try to downplay the seriousness of the virus. Deaths from heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and the other conditions that make Covid-19 more serious did not suddenly and mysteriously jump last year when the pandemic hit. The diabetics who died of Covid-19 really died of Covid-19, not diabetes. Furthermore, if deaths from heart disease, cancer, and lower respiratory disease would have jumped by 38% (which would be the case if the trope "dying WITH Covid-19, not dying FROM Covid-19" were true), that kind of massive jump in death rates would have public health authorities scrambling to figure out what is going on. Death rates do NOT jump so drastically from year to year.

As for the claim that massive numbers of cases were missed, causing the death rate to skew, it is also not supported by facts. At this time, a total of 423,232,285 Covid-19 tests have been performed in the US. The more tests performed, the less likely a case is to be missed. The related claim that tests aren't being done to detect past cases of Covid-19 is irrelevant. There is no reliable way to test for past Covid-19 infection, unless virus can be detected after a person recovers and before their body clears all remaining viral material. Antibody tests are not reliable, because they can detect antibodies that result from infections with related viruses, and coronavirus infections are common. Some studies have shown that up to 20% of infected people are asymptomatic at the time of testing, but this only means that they developed symptoms later, or that they did not recognize their symptoms as Covid-19. It does not mean that vast numbers of people catch and recover from Covid-19 undetected; at most, missing 20% of cases would only increase the case count to 38 million instead of the actual 31 million, and the death rate would be 1.49% instead of 1.79% (still quite high). I should point out that if a person tests positive (through a reliable PCR test, not an antibody test), they are counted as a case regardless of whether they show symptoms at the time of testing.

Please stop posting misinformation about Covid-19. This kind of misinformation greatly helped Biden's campaign when he was trying to make the case that only he understands the threat well enough to guide us through it. In fact, Trump handled the Covid-19 crisis very well. But he was undermined by the misinformation that spread among (some) conservatives and gave the left ammunition to portray us as minimally educated scientifically illiterate buffoons. I suspect that leftist activists were the source of the misinformation and am saddened that so many conservatives fell for it.

Read these economic figures and it becomes clear why the Covid flu hoax is being pushed by socialists.
“ China’s economic indicators for the first quarter of 2021 have been released. At an annualized rate, the economy grew 18.3% from January through to April, facilitating a complete economic recovery as the world deals with the disruption of COVID-19, and consumption reasserts itself, registering the highest tally since 1993. In line with the GDP figures, industrial output increased 24.5% from last year, exports by 38.7%, imports 29.2%, retail sales of consumer goods 33.9%, and fixed-asset investment by 25.6%, all positive indicators showing a healthy and resilient economy, which is forecast to end the year up around 8.4% as a whole.”

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/market-talk/market-talk-april-21-2021/

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