NPR: “Coronavirus is more common and less deadly”
From that paranoid rightwing news outlet National Public Radio (NPR): “Mounting evidence suggests the coronavirus is more common and less deadly than it first appeared.”
The tests are finding large numbers of people in the U.S. who were infected but never became seriously ill. And when these mild infections are included in coronavirus statistics, the virus appears less dangerous.
“The current best estimates for the infection fatality risk are between 0.5% and 1%,” says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
That’s in contrast with death rates of 5% or more based on calculations that included only people who got sick enough to be diagnosed with tests that detect the presence of virus in a person’s body.
It must be noted that the early data (from March 17) did not show a death rate of 5% as NPR claims, but one exactly in the range that NPR is now touting, about 1%, and even that number was thought to be a high estimate at the time.
Of course, you would not have known that if you depended on your news from NPR, or most other mainstream leftist news sources. Once they realized they could use this virus to gin up a panic that could be used politically, suddenly the Wuhan flu was the next plague, with death tolls expected in the millions.
The death rate number of 0.5% to 1% is still about five to ten times higher than the annual flu, but since there is substantial evidence that the number of COVID-19 deaths has been inflated by 25 to 50 percent, we should not be surprised if this new death rate number drops even more with the accumulation of more data.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
From that paranoid rightwing news outlet National Public Radio (NPR): “Mounting evidence suggests the coronavirus is more common and less deadly than it first appeared.”
The tests are finding large numbers of people in the U.S. who were infected but never became seriously ill. And when these mild infections are included in coronavirus statistics, the virus appears less dangerous.
“The current best estimates for the infection fatality risk are between 0.5% and 1%,” says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
That’s in contrast with death rates of 5% or more based on calculations that included only people who got sick enough to be diagnosed with tests that detect the presence of virus in a person’s body.
It must be noted that the early data (from March 17) did not show a death rate of 5% as NPR claims, but one exactly in the range that NPR is now touting, about 1%, and even that number was thought to be a high estimate at the time.
Of course, you would not have known that if you depended on your news from NPR, or most other mainstream leftist news sources. Once they realized they could use this virus to gin up a panic that could be used politically, suddenly the Wuhan flu was the next plague, with death tolls expected in the millions.
The death rate number of 0.5% to 1% is still about five to ten times higher than the annual flu, but since there is substantial evidence that the number of COVID-19 deaths has been inflated by 25 to 50 percent, we should not be surprised if this new death rate number drops even more with the accumulation of more data.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Bob,
What is truly the “tale of the tape” is the newly updated COVID Deaths chart covering across all age groups. Their data is current up to June 27th. The number of deaths is in steady decline and approaching ZERO!!!
Below is the CDC link.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm?fbclid=IwAR3yZEL1A6LqL4TmDv3cjkI_cXLP78kH6mVMIsEmsXlsqByHjO_0K1c7wQY
Tom, you can’t read too much into the most recent two to three weeks of that “provisional” graph, due to late data not yet coded or received. You can see this by clicking over to the table on frame 2 of 2, and seeing how the total deaths — even for age groups hardly ever affected by COVID-19 — are significantly down for the final two or three figures.
For instance, there are about three to four hundred total deaths under the age of 1 every week, with at most 1 or 2 attributed to COVID-19. But the last ten figures read: 334, 297, 319, 343, 303, 283, 288, 229, 158, 35. Yet no one is claiming total infant mortality from two weeks ago is down by half or that from the most recent week is down to a tenth of what it normally runs.
They other way to see this is to use the pull-down to switch the graph from “COVID-19 Deaths” to “Total Deaths”, and see a similar trend toward zero. If the final three weeks displayed were true to life and could be extrapolated, funeral homes everywhere will soon be going out of business. (Of course that is not as bad as the “cubic model” bizarrely put out in a tweet from the Office of Management and Budget a month or so ago which not only showed the pandemic going away in a couple of weeks, but a decreasing “Cumulative COVID-19 Deaths”, implying reanimation of the dead, a.k.a. zombies!
That said, reported COVID-19 deaths are way down, though week-on-week numbers have been pretty much level for the last couple days (when discounting retrospective additions).
Side note: I am amazed that health statistics reporting in the US is as inefficient as it is.
Rose: One component of the COVID-19 stats that I have not noted yet in an essay, but keep meaning to, is the false sense of accuracy they give. We always get an exact number (though that number gets adjusted repeatedly).
Yet with the flu, the CDCs never reported total flu deaths with this kind of precision. Look at the past seasonal estimates here, covering flu seasons from 2011 to 2019. The final death tolls are never given as precise numbers but across a range that generally equals margins of error from 20% to even 50%.
Yet suddenly the CDC and the U.S. can determine, to the person, how many died from COVID-19? To put it mildly, I have serious doubts.