Originally Posted by
742Dash
Here are some facts for you.
My son is a physician in a major metropolitan area located in a state with less than 100 cases. Nevertheless, in his hospital they have patients in the ICU on ventilators who are symptomatic but as of last week were not allowed to be tested because they had no known contact with anyone who tested positive.
If you think that your numbers are accurate you really need to get your information from a broader range of sources.
And I add another fact. Northern Italy has more ICU beds and more ventilators per population unit than the United States does.
Here are some facts for you:
NONE of the testing numbers (the epidemiological denominator data) are accurate. THEY NEVER ARE, because you ALWAYS miss asymptomatic cases, especially in the US where anti-vaxxers want nothing to do with epidemiologists sticking them with needles. But you SELDOM miss the people who actually DIE of a disease, because those people are a whole lot more conspicuous. So yes, you miss a lot of asymptomatic cases while catching almost all of those that are serious and/or lethal, which causes you to OVERSTATE THE LETHALITY of the illness you are studying. Which has certainly been the case with coronavirus.
Initial reports gave this illness a lethality (is, case-fatality rate) very similar to that of SARS. But with more comprehensive testing - that is detecting more of that asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic denominator data that we were not testing - that estimate has FALLEN drastically. We now know that it is no worse - in the general US Population, NOT IN A POPULATION OF geriatric nursing home cases with multiple preexisting conditions in Kirkland Washington - than 2%, probably less than 1.5%, and trending towards about 0.4%. And yes, 0.4% of 330 million people is still a lot of people, although like all other biological organisms coronavirus is unlikely to continue logarithmic growth because NONE IF THEN DO. If they did, dandelions might well be the only plant on Earth. The likelihood of every American citizen getting coronavirus very closely approximates every lawn becoming nothing but dandelions - not impossible, but vanishingly small. Just like coronaviruses more lethal cousin, SARS virus eventually died out without infecting us all, so will coronavirus.
Nobody is saying coronavirus can’t kill people, but it’s certainly no extinction event for the world population. The sky is NOT falling.
If you don’t believe me, ask your son.
Current case-fatality rate data:
https://www.cebm.net/global-covid-19...atality-rates/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/...tes-worldwide/