Posted on 07/03/2020 7:47:19 AM PDT by teeman8r
A new NPR report suggests the global response to COVID-19 may have been reached on a flawed premise.
Mounting evidence suggests the coronavirus is more common and less deadly than it first appeared.
The evidence comes from tests that detect antibodies to the coronavirus in a person's blood rather than the virus itself.
The tests are finding large numbers of people in the US 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.
Many people will recall the fatality risk debate that took place prior to and in the early stages of the lockdowns. There was much discussion over how deadly the virus was and what the collective response to the virus should be.
(Excerpt) Read more at fee.org ...
The Case Fatality Rate depends completely on the total number of people who have been infected.
My own estimate is 10% of the USA population - about 33 million.
We have tested 33.5 million Americans, and their infection rate is 8.2%.
No one is reporting the antibody test numbers, but they are at least 1.8%, and probably much higher than that.
Total USA deaths are - 128,783
Divide 128,783 deaths by 33 million infections = 0.4%
If we counted COVID deaths the same way we count flu deaths, the COVID Case Fatality Rate would drop to 0.2% - almost identical to the flu rate in 2018.
“I was promised crematoriums that could be seen from Space.”
That run 24 hours a day.
interesting post from an ER Doctor
https://texags.com/forums/84/topics/3122478
Doug Ross10:16p, 7/2/20AG
So it has been a while since I have been on this website. When Covid started to hit back in March-April, going to work and then coming home and interacting/reading more about Covid just stressed me out even further. I had a few occasions where I would lash out and say rude things to other users for no reason, so I put myself in timeout for a few months.
That said, I did want to just share my own personal experience in the ED over the past few months.
So I am an ER doc in one of the major hospitals in Dallas. I work about 13-14 shifts a month and have logged probably 500 hours in the ER since all this started. I want to also preface this by saying, all of what I am going to say is based on my own personal experiences in Dallas. I have been following the numbers like all of you have, but my opinions are strictly anecdotal. I know for a fact some of my ER doc friends in Houston/SA have had different experiences. I guess I will start with what I am seeing now, start riffing, and see where this goes.
So as of the month of June, we are definitely seeing a higher volume of positive tests. The reason for seeing a higher volume of “positive tests” is twofold, #1-more people are sick aka the disease is spreading, and #2-we are pretty much testing everyone who walks through the door now. Now back in March/April, I was still seeing a ton of people who I thought had Covid, but we weren’t testing any of them. I would shoot a chest xray of the patient, look at their vitals, and if they weren’t toxic appearing, I would explain the disease process to the patient, would give azithro at the time, discharge them, and basically would tell the patient to come back to the ER when they were too short of breath to talk, or too weak to walk to the bathroom. For that reason, I believe we are definitely seeing a higher volume of covid + patients as the disease is now more prevalent, however I don’t think the “positive cases” is a true accurate reflection of how bad it has gotten, because I was rarely testing those people back in March-Early May. I think it is getting bad, but not as bad as the numbers reflect.
Of note, there is also a handful of patients who have come to the ER for something unrelated to covid (broken arm, car accident, missed dialysis, kidney infection), who we automatically test for covid because they are being admitted to the hospital. I’ve seen a handful of these patients test positive, even though their reason for being in the hospital has nothing to do with the disease. To my knowledge, these patient’s are still being counted as “covid admissions” even though they aren’t there because of covid, they were asymptomatic carriers, but its now a positive patient and we move them to the covid area of the hospital.
Why are less people dying if the disease is spreading more? I have two theories. Probably the number one thing is our understanding of the disease and the treatment strategies. My hospital has learned a lot by what happened in Italy and NYC. The big thing has to do with intubating patients and putting them on vents.
So back in March/April, our agreed upon treatment method, was if a patient was requiring more than 6 liters of supplemental oxygen, we would just intubate them. The reason for this was the fear that giving higher flows of oxygen, including CPAP/BiPAP/Hi Flo O2, would aerosolize the oxygen through out the entire ER/ICU thus spreading it to more patients and staff...... We are now realizing that early intubation is a bad thing. Previously we were using O2 saturation (a vital sign) to determine when someone should be intubated. We are now using other assessments such as how hard someone is working to breath, their mental status, or acidosis in the blood. The reason for this is because Covid is causing something called silent hypoxemia. Meaning, when you take the patient’s oxygen saturation, it could be 70% but the patient looks fine and is not having any shortness of breath (usually we get worried when its under 88%). You would think someone with an O2 sat of 70% would be turning blue and huffing/puffing, but they aren’t with covid. We are now letting these patients basically just ride on supplemental O2 and not intubating them. I think this is saving lives. We also know hydroxy doesn’t work, dexamethasone may help, and we have covalescent plasma.
2nd theory.- the virus is becoming less deadly. Now my microbio/infectious disease docs could probably correct me on a lot of this, (I am going off first year of med school here) but it seems like the virus is becoming less virulent. It seems like we are seeing a higher volume of patients, but they are less sick. I haven’t intubated a patient since April. I’ve probably sent 10 total to the ICU since May. So one idea is that NYC got hit with a more deadly strain of Covid, and we got the less deadly version. Or we got the same version, but over long periods of time, as the virus enters thousands of people, it goes through millions of RNA replications within our cells. And every time the virus replicates in our body, there is a very small chance the virus mutates. And over four months, is the virus slowly mutating out of a less deadly version of itself until it is finally gone?
Kinda going back to hospitalization numbers. One thing we are seeing is a high number of “covid admissions”. Yes this is true. But a majority of these patients are staying in the hospital 1-3 days and getting discharged home. We aren’t having a prolonged stay in the hospital for most patients. Basically what is happening is we get a big batch of covid patients one day, while at the same time a big batch from a few days ago are being discharged. It is a revolving door. They aren’t stacking up on each other and clogging our hospital up. We are definitely very busy but we aren’t overflowing. To my knowledge my hospital has aprox 15-20% of our beds occupied by Covid.
So to summarize, I feel like I am definitely seeing a higher volume of patients with covid. They are less sick than they were in early March/April. This thing could turn on a dime at any moment. I feel our hospital is busy but we aren’t drowning. I feel the numbers are increasing but the numbers given out to the public are not an accurate representation about what is actually going on. Would also like to say I am by no way trying to downplay the disease. We are still seeing the disease do amazing things. I am 100% still seeing young healthy people get sick to the point that they need to come in the hospital. Have had two 30 year olds in the past month who presented with covid symptoms and were in complete renal falure (Crt of 15-19 for each), had a 40 year old who was positive with a celiac artery thrombosis, a few elderly adults who presented with encephalitis, and a guy who had a massive heart attack. The disease still isn’t to be taken at all lightly and it continues to surprise me everyday. Luckily myself and my fiance (ER nurse), have all been healthy. We have probably taken care of a combined 500 covid patients to this point and I have only had one coworker who has gotten covid, and she is doing great now., aka masks work. Sorry for the long article. Stay safe everyone. Gig’em
TLDR- wear a mask and wash your hands if you want Aggie football
-doug
If this groundbreaking study is right, President Trump is right: hydroxychloroquine can save tens of thousands of American lives and millions worldwide in America's FIGHT against the CHINA VIRUS #ChinaLiedPeopleDied Betcha NYT won't even cover the story! https://t.co/lN6DpIncQf— Peter Navarro (@PeterNavarro45) July 2, 2020
Maybe. the real crack in the dam would come if even ONE rank-and-file Democrat rebelled against all this madness going on, instead of helping feed it.
It shouldn't surprise me, but it does, that out of more than 280 Democrats in Congress, not ONE has dared to issue a statement at all critical of the insane way this party has been acting. Just mindless sheep, like they want the rest of us to be.
No Shit.
The Media should be warning DIABETICS and people over 70 to avoid it at all costs.
The rest of us should have got on with our lives WITH NO LOCKDOWNS.
“Widespread testing will drive down fatality rates.
Positive result test inflation will drive it down even more.
Pretty soon the lock-downers will be looking more ridiculous and totalitarian.”
************************************************************
Just report everyone with a sniffle as C+. (Sorta like hospitals reporting all death by people suspected of having C-19, regardless of cause of death, as a C-19 death.) It would be fun to see how much this could lower the “death rate”.
Reality...what is it they say “figures don’t lie, but liars can figure”? Reckon you can use data to make any point you have a need to make, especially if you are creative. And, Democrats/media definitely needed to stop Trump somehow.
CNN pointed out that 80 percent of the deaths were from people who got the virus in late February before serious action kicked in.
“””We have tested 33.5 million Americans, and their infection rate is 8.2%”””
No, we have conducted 33.5 million tests in the USA.
Many people are tested more than once. The number of Americans tested is probably less than 20 million.
I think I saw on the news this morning that the cumulative deaths from this virus so far in Minnesota, excluding residents of long term care facilities, is 315.
A few months back, scientists were honestly claiming to know little about Nuvo Coronavirus imo, other than it was highly contageous.
And we’re at the point where we are with pandemic mayhem because elite, deep state Democrats, who don’t want to go to jail for breaking law to try to keep PDJT out of Oval Office, have weaponized the pandemic to try to prevent PDJT from winning another term imo.
So (deep state?) NPR is arguably attempting to attack PDJT indirectly by attacking his virus experts.
Corrections, insights welcome.
Send “Orange Man Bad” federal and state government Democrats and RINOs home in November!
Supporting PDJT with a new patriot Congress and state government leaders that will promise to fully support his already excellent work for MAGA and stopping SARS-CoV-2 will effectively give fast-working Trump a “third term” in office imo.
bkmb
“He overreacted, shutting down the economy and putting millions out of work when it wasn’t necessary.””
There is a minor point: democrat governors are the ones shutting down the economy. That can not be hid from public view, especially with a the profanity directed their way.
Just think, if we hadn’t sat on testing for three months, we could have known this much sooner.
“This will be used against president trump”
Not possible, although they will try.
Waiting on my wife's blood test to come in - she donated blood because they were also doing Covid testing and we are hoping the fact that they took blood means it will include an antibody test.
If she has antibodies, then it indicates we both had it and suffered no bad effects...she's 70 and I'm a few months from 68.
When the enemy loses NPR,,,,,,,
“Calling all fearbros... Please pick up the red enlightenment phone.”
The worst is one who calls herself something like “formerdemmom” or something close. swear this one is actually that weasel Fauci posting here.
This is all based on an incorrect computation.
Number of infections divided into number of deaths — this is not correct.
The correct computation must be consistent. If you are going to have number of deaths in the numerator, you must have number of infected people vulnerable to death in the denominator. Why would you put numbers in the denominator that include those who aren’t relevant to death.
That would be like saying the pregnancy count in the numerator and number of people, men and women, in the denominator and declaring the pregnancy rate to be the result.
The disease kills old people. The correct computation is # of deaths / number of infected people 65+. That result is floating along at about 10%, with 85+ at 15% and 65-75 at 5%.
Why would you include 15 yr olds who have a 0.000001% death risk? That’s just wrong math.
Every stupid Republican Governor who re-locked down their states and issued statewide mask edicts should stand up and say, “Enough! Take off those stupid masks and get back to work!”
+++++++++++++++++++++++
eanwhile, I got this in an email from the king of Washington State Workers and Business Update. It reads in part:
July 2, 2020
What you need to know about…
Universal Masking
Masks are now required universally in Washington state
All people in Washington state must wear a face covering in any indoor or outdoor public area. Children under two should not wear a face covering. People unable to wear a face covering for medical reasons are not required to. The mask may be removed to eat, drink, or communicate with someone who is deaf or hard of hearing. Disregard of the order may result in a misdemeanor charge, punishable by a fine of up to $100 and/or up to 90 days in county jail.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
It doesn’t specify workers, customers etc. It says “ALL PEOPLE.
F U INSLEE !
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