Free Republic

Does COVID-19 truly warrant a nationwide shutdown? No, and that has been made increasingly clear. The predicted dire need for hospital beds did not materialize, while most infected are among those who are quarantined, especially elder care facilities which account for over 40% of deaths. Up to about 80 percent of those infected with COVID-19 are estimated to be silent carriers, [1] meaning they show no symptoms (the New York City labor and delivery unit found 88 percent of infected patients had no symptoms, [2] while over 600 sailors on the coronavirus-stricken aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt tested positive, yet 60%...

Well over half of all documented coronavirus deaths in the United States have occurred in just five states, a statistic which mirrors the heavily concentrated and localized nature of COVID-19 outbreaks in several other countries. Of the nearly 80,000 deaths from the virus in this country as of Saturday afternoon, nearly 48,700, or about 60 percent, had occurred in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Michigan and Pennsylvania. New York remains the hardest-hit state of any in the country by far, having logged nearly 27,000 deaths as of Saturday afternoon. The next-hardest-hit state, New Jersey, had recorded over 9,100.

The actual death toll for COVID-19 won’t be calculable for some time, but there are early indications that it may be significantly lower than calculations of deaths per confirmed cases lead one to believe. As an article in Lancet Infectious Diseases pointed out, calculating mortality rates based on the number of deaths divided by the number of confirmed cases of infection is not representative of the actual death rate. There are two issues, the authors said. First, the denominator should be the number of people who were infected at the same time as those who died. The second issue is...