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Corona Is a Very Mild Virus, No More Deadly Than Many Others We Don’t Make a Fuss About

24-3-2020 < SGT Report 8 794 words
 

from Russia Insider:



Let’s get one thing straight. In terms of capacity to kill you SARS-CoV-2-19 is an extraordinarily weak virus.


The fatality rates being thrown around are all over the place, 8% for Italy, 3.4% from WHO, 2% from the early days for China. But there is a good reason to believe all of these are nonsensical. They’re accurate for what they represent, which is the ratio between recorded instances of infection and fatalities where infection was present, but they are absolutely not the fatality rate of either the SARS-CoV-2-19 infection or even of the COVID-19 disease.



Data from Italy suggests the median age of fatalities is 79.5 years, where Italian life expectancy is 82.5 years. Of the 2500+ victims, only 17 were under 50. Also, 99 percent of all fatalities had pre-existing conditions. True enough, Italian health authorities were rather liberal in their inclusion of “pre-existing conditions” counting even often rather benign conditions like high blood pressure. But there is something else you have to consider:



  • 48.5 percent of those died had 3 or more illnesses and 25.6 percent had at least two

  • The thing about statistics of natural phenomena is that there’s a sea of difference between something occurring 95% of the time and 99% of the time. For example, at a normal distribution to go from covering 95% of the population to 99.7% you need to go from 2 standard deviations to 3. If 90 percent of fatalities had at least one pre-existing condition I’d think nothing of it, but tell me it’s 99 percent (!) and you’ve got my attention.


So then, how is it that a viral disease that according to empirical data collected by Italian health authorities has the capacity to kill only the most enfeebled of us is stacking up a kill rate of 2, 3.4 or 8 percent? Simple: It isn’t.


In fact, this data indicates that SARS-CoV-2-19 is very similar to other coronaviruses in that it represents next to no risk to a healthy individual, but can stack up a body count when it encounters a population that is particularly frail:



…even some so-called mild or common-cold-type coronaviruses that have been known for decades can have case fatality rates as high as 8% when they infect elderly people in nursing homes.


In fact, such “mild” coronaviruses infect tens of millions of people every year, and account for 3% to 11% of those hospitalized in the U.S. with lower respiratory infections each winter.


These “mild” coronaviruses may be implicated in several thousands of deaths every year worldwide, though the vast majority of them are not documented with precise testing. Instead, they are lost as noise among 60 million deaths from various causes every year.



In fact, the actual infection death rate is almost certainly below 1%, possibly as low as 0.05% (a death rate of 1 in 2000):



The one situation where an entire, closed population was tested was the Diamond Princess cruise ship and its quarantine passengers. The case fatality rate there was 1.0%, but this was a largely elderly population, in which the death rate from Covid-19 is much higher.


Projecting the Diamond Princess mortality rate onto the age structure of the U.S. population, the death rate among people infected with Covid-19 would be 0.125%. But since this estimate is based on extremely thin data — there were just seven deaths among the 700 infected passengers and crew — the real death rate could stretch from five times lower (0.025%) to five times higher (0.625%).


It is also possible that some of the passengers who were infected might die later, and that tourists may have different frequencies of chronic diseases — a risk factor for worse outcomes with SARS-CoV-2 infection — than the general population. Adding these extra sources of uncertainty, reasonable estimates for the case fatality ratio in the general U.S. population vary from 0.05% to 1%.



Keep in mind that a virus is driven only to multiply and to spread. To accomplish that it has to sneak past your immune system, or disable it, or fight it, but it doesn’t gain anything from killing the host. To the contrary, it needs the host to replicate itself further and, as it does not have cells of its own, to even fully exist. Evolutionary successful viruses, which the coronaviruses are, do not cause massive damage to the host — albeit the damage they do cause may be enough to push someone who is already frail over the edge.


Read More @ Russia-Insider.com





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