The “death rate” of this disease is unknown because we don’t know how many people have or have had the disease. And while there was a dubious claim that deaths were being falsely attributed to C19, more credible is that many deaths caused by C19 were never counted.
All of this due to the lack of tests.
I tried to explain this to my wife the other night.
Death rate is a fraction: #Deaths over #Infections. Assuming #Deaths is reasonably well known, all we need to know is #Infections and perform simple division. Times one hundred if you want it as a percentage.
We are at, what is it, 40k deaths? Let’s go with that.
40k divided by what?
100k infections would produce a whopping 40% – pretty doggone deadly.
200k infections would produce 20% – still enough to knock your socks off.
For the death rate to be less than 2%, we’d need over 1M infections.
But the bottom line is: The only people being tested are those who are already sick enough to be hospitalized. If you aren’t hospitalized, then you don’t count – at least toward the death rate.
And goodness knows how many of us may have had it, gotten over it, or perhaps never had symptoms at all. Even more frightening is that it’s still not known whether having had the disease – or having been asymptotic all along – does that mean we’re immune? Or Typhoid Mary s?
Last article I read said, our best hope is that this disease did achieve at least a 40% – or more – infection rate. That way, we’d finally know whether this was really more deadly than the “common” flu.
What a contradiction in terms: The 1918 flu was anything but “common.” But I digress.
Regardless of how we look at it, we’re at 40k deaths – and counting.
We really have no idea either how infectious it is or how deadly it is. At this point, it is clearly at least one or the other.
The “death rate” of this disease is unknown because we don’t know how many people have or have had the disease. And while there was a dubious claim that deaths were being falsely attributed to C19, more credible is that many deaths caused by C19 were never counted.
All of this due to the lack of tests.
I tried to explain this to my wife the other night.
Death rate is a fraction: #Deaths over #Infections. Assuming #Deaths is reasonably well known, all we need to know is #Infections and perform simple division. Times one hundred if you want it as a percentage.
We are at, what is it, 40k deaths? Let’s go with that.
40k divided by what?
100k infections would produce a whopping 40% – pretty doggone deadly.
200k infections would produce 20% – still enough to knock your socks off.
For the death rate to be less than 2%, we’d need over 1M infections.
But the bottom line is: The only people being tested are those who are already sick enough to be hospitalized. If you aren’t hospitalized, then you don’t count – at least toward the death rate.
And goodness knows how many of us may have had it, gotten over it, or perhaps never had symptoms at all. Even more frightening is that it’s still not known whether having had the disease – or having been asymptotic all along – does that mean we’re immune? Or Typhoid Mary s?
Last article I read said, our best hope is that this disease did achieve at least a 40% – or more – infection rate. That way, we’d finally know whether this was really more deadly than the “common” flu.
What a contradiction in terms: The 1918 flu was anything but “common.” But I digress.
Regardless of how we look at it, we’re at 40k deaths – and counting.
We really have no idea either how infectious it is or how deadly it is. At this point, it is clearly at least one or the other.
We just don’t know whether it’s both!