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Federal and state governments are making a massive gamble about a little-understood new virus. They are betting our future as a nation. //
The current gamble seems to be to shut down the nation indefinitely to suppress a virus that is especially deadly to some demographics and experts agree cannot be contained, only slowed. The New York Times claims the basis of many U.S. officials’ decisions so far is a report from Imperial College London, and other models that spit out similar results. It says to contain the virus it will be necessary to quarantine Americans for two- to three-month stretches repeatedly over the next 18 months. //
Just one competing projection, from the Hoover Institution, suggests “the total number of cases world-wide will peak out at well under 1 million, with the total number of deaths at under 50,000″ (emphasis added). This is near the annual death rate due to flu in the United States alone. We don’t know if that estimate is accurate either, but that’s the point.
Here’s another hysteria skeptic with impeccable medical and statistical knowledge, John P.A. Ioannidis, a professor of medicine, epidemiology, and statistics at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford’s Meta-Research Innovation Center.
If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths. This sounds like a huge number, but it is buried within the noise of the estimate of deaths from ‘influenza-like illness.’ If we had not known about a new virus out there, and had not checked individuals with PCR tests, the number of total deaths due to ‘influenza-like illness’ would not seem unusual this year. At most, we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average. The media coverage would have been less than for an NBA game between the two most indifferent teams.
Some worry that the 68 deaths from Covid-19 in the U.S. as of March 16 will increase exponentially to 680, 6,800, 68,000, 680,000 … along with similar catastrophic patterns around the globe. Is that a realistic scenario, or bad science fiction? //
Sharyl Attkisson has gone through the U.S. deaths to March 17, and as in other countries they are overwhelmingly among the very elderly and people with pre-existing conditions. The entire population is not at severe risk from coronavirus — although we are at severe risk from a wrecked economy and welfare expansions beyond Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s wildest dreams.