Fatality Rates At Least 10 Fold Lower Than Estimates

Stanford Professor States Fatality Rates At Least 10 Fold Lower Than Estimates

 

No matter where you look — social media, TV, radio or streaming services — the predictions for deaths due to COVID-19 are dire. If the numbers are correct, then millions upon millions of people are destined to die before the pandemic is over.

But are these dire death predictions on-track? According to an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, they’re not only grossly inflated, but biased in the way prognosticators are configuring the numbers. “The true fatality rate is the portion of those infected who die, not the deaths from identified positive cases,” the authors argue:

“The latter rate is misleading because of selection bias in testing. The degree of bias is uncertain because available data are limited. But it could make the difference between an epidemic that kills 20,000 and one that kills two million.

If the number of actual infections is much larger than the number of cases—orders of magnitude larger—then the true fatality rate is much lower as well. That’s not only plausible but likely based on what we know so far.”

Of course, as shutdowns in the U.S. and around the world continue, the true numbers won’t be known until all this is over. In the meantime, one thing is certain: Health officials seem to be way more concerned about COVID-19 than they have been about other diseases that have had solid, known epidemic numbers for years. For example:

Opioid overdoses claim more than 130 people per day. If nothing else this is tantamount to mass homicide, and governments, health agencies and even insurance companies are complicit in this epidemic. Yet, aside from a bit of hand-wringing and lawsuits brought on by various state attorneys general, there are no panicked calls to shut down life as we know it to stop these deaths and address them head-on.

Obesity is an epidemic in the U.S. and in many countries worldwide, yet there’s been no clarion call for the causes of this epidemic — processed foods and fast food fare — to be rationed, scaled back or replaced with whole, fresh foods options in every store in every community.

Obesity is rooted in inappropriate food choices but, unfortunately, the food industry has been permitted to confuse the issue by shifting the focus and discussion to exercise and faux fixes like low-fat options, completely omitting the importance of your specific food choices. What’s worse, the massive shutdowns with coronavirus are steering people to — you guessed it — the very foods that are killing them slowly.

Medical mistakes kill nearly a half-million people every year. That’s an epidemic that practically no one talks about. Yet, each day more than 40,000 are harmed with a lethal medical error, while governments and health officials stew about what to do about the epidemic of patients harmed by their health “care.”

Interestingly, since some of the top ways patients are injured are through hospital-acquired infections that can lead to death, it’s ironic that the thing health leaders are now concerned about is a viral infection that can lead to death.

This isn’t to say that COVID-19 isn’t something to fear. But, like The Wall Street Journal’s writers point out, it is quite possible that “A universal quarantine may not be worth the costs it imposes on the economy, community and individual mental and physical health” and that statisticians should be called upon to “evaluate the empirical basis of the current lockdowns.”