” The coronavirus is approaching 4% fatality. “
We don’t know that because we don’t know how large the infected population is.
When they say 4 percent fatality rate, they’re saying 4 percent of the people with symptoms. Yet if hundreds of thousands of people have the virus but don’t exhibit symptoms, then the number of deaths is a much smaller percentage of the overall number of cases.
Problem is, we haven’t tested many people - and even now the government isn’t only going to give tests to people with symptoms. So we’re now trying to find out how many people have the virus but have no symptoms.
Case fatality rates are, of necessity, calculated from the number of diagnosed cases. They are not calculated until all cases have resolved, which is impossible to do while the pandemic is growing.
It looks to me like a lot of people are hoping that Covid-19 has already spread throughout the population, and that it is only causing a tiny number of cases. This is wishful thinking. The virus recently emerged—no one has ever had it before, and the hope that it is already widespread and not very serious is not founded on any data.
further look at the 4% and see its not distributed evenly, but the elderly and ill/infirm are the vast majority of cases. like you’d expect with any disease, just like the flu as well.
Not with symptoms...of those who have been tested.
We know with the same degree of certainty as we do with the flu so Apples to Apples comparisons are appropriate. Or do you think that everyone who gets the flu runs right to the doctor or reports to some government agency?
Flu may be under reported by as much as 100% in a mild strain year. Kids stay home from school because Mom thinks they have a cold, someone uses a sick day because of the sniffles, all that happens in mild years and it's not associated with the flu, just a cold.
Until there's widespread testing that 4% figure may be way below reality or way above but there's no reason to believe it's wildly out of whack. There aren't even enough test kits around to know whether someone just got a bad case of pneumonia or has this virus that led to the pneumonia. If it's fatal, their death certificate will say pneumonia, though, at least until any tissue they save is tested and numbers for COVID-19 are revised later.
Flu doesn't work like this to inhibit oxygen uptake in the blood cells so COVID-19 is absolutely more serious than the flu.
Serious potentially lethal effects not present in other strains of flu, someone can spread it for weeks before they even have symptoms, accurate tests not widely available to detect cases early, what part of that doesn't point toward a much higher fatality rate than "just the flu"?
What's done may well be an over reaction but without tests that find it early and extremely widespread testing we'd just be maximizing the number of people infected knowing people can be an infected a second time. Looking back at 1918 we know that flu was most lethal the second time through the population so there's that to consider, not just the immediate effects.
The idiot media is the idiot media but their encouraging panic doesn't mean there are no legitimate reasons for doing a lot more than shrugging this off.