[ProtectOurFreedom]

I don't understand why you are critical of Bhattacharya. His work on the fatality rate of COVID base on his early analysis of Santa Clara County residents infection and fatality rates was good work and proven later on in many studies. I don't recall him ever saying it was "just the flu." He was pointing out (correctly) that it wasn't the Black Plague and we should get on with our lives without the draconian lockdowns that caused orders of magnitude more problems than the disease itself did. He correctly pointed out that the disease is deadly for older people, especially those over 70, and NOT deadly for children.

Imprimis Magazine
A Sensible and Compassionate Anti-COVID Strategy
October 2020
Volume 49, Number 10
By Jay Bhattacharya

Seroprevalence is what I worked on in the early days of the epidemic. In April, I ran a series of studies, using antibody tests, to see how many people in California’s Santa Clara County, where I live, had been infected. At the time, there were about 1,000 COVID cases that had been identified in the county, but our antibody tests found that 50,000 people had been infected—i.e., there were 50 times more infections than identified cases. This was enormously important, because it meant that the fatality rate was not three percent, but closer to 0.2 percent; not three in 100, but two in 1,000.

When it came out, this Santa Clara study was controversial. But science is like that, and the way science tests controversial studies is to see if they can be replicated. And indeed, there are now 82 similar seroprevalence studies from around the world, and the median result of these 82 studies is a fatality rate of about 0.2 percent—exactly what we found in Santa Clara County.

...Whereas COVID is not deadly for children, for older people it is much more deadly than the seasonal flu. If you look at studies worldwide, the COVID fatality rate for people 70 and up is about four percent—four in 100 among those 70 and older, as opposed to two in 1,000 in the overall population. Here are the CDC data from today that confirm EXACTLY what Bhattacharya in March 2020...

[brookwood]

Can you divide 32,000 into 75 million? - get a calculator. The result is .43 percent. 32,000 people died in New York City of Covid. The population of New York City is 7.5 million. .43% of NYC died. Did everyone in NYC have Covid? of course not. So the minimum possible “infection fatality rate” is .43%. Using a more reasonable assumption about how many people in NYC had Covid (I know about 20 people in NYC and none of them had it), say 30 percent were infected - that gives an infection fatality rate of 1.2%.
There are 34 million diagnosed cases of Covid, and 600,000 dead in the US. That’s about 1.7%. Bhattacharya is a liar and and idiot and I just proved it. His phony study in Santa Clara study result was from an area which had practically no Covid, so false positives from the serology test gave him the garbage result he was looking for. Disgusting.