In March, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) presented the coronavirus to the Western world as a danger equivalent to the plague. But China’s experience, which its government obfuscated, had already shown that COVID-19 was much less like the plague and more like the flu. All that has happened since followed from falsifying this basic truth.

Americans were led to believe that the virus was unusually contagious, and that it would kill up to one in 20 persons it infected—a 5 percent infection/fatality rate (IFR). Today, we still lack definitive, direct knowledge of COVID-19’s true lethality. The absence of that knowledge allows bureaucrats to continue fearmongering.

By May, a  host of studies in the U.S. and around the world showing that the vast majority of COVID cases cause mild symptoms or none, and showing the IFR to be equal to or lower than that for most flus, forced the CDC to conclude that the lethality rate, far from being 5 percent, was 0.26%––double that of a typical flu. Instead of amending their recommendations in the face of this reality, the CDC and the U.S. government tried to hide it by manipulating the definition and number of COVID “cases.”

Federal officials defined “cases” as people sick enough to be hospitalized who also tested positive for the virus—this represented the “curve” that we were urged to sacrifice so much to “flatten,” lest a wave of hospitalizations overwhelm our health-care system. That wave never came. The CDC and feds began labeling mere infections as “cases” and stopped reporting “cases” together with the number of deaths. They did this to frighten the inattentive public about “spiking COVID cases.” They also inflated the number of deaths attributed to COVID by including illnesses such as pneumonia and influenza and others into the death figures.

In reality, those who died with or of COVID-19 nearly always suffered from other diseases as well, such as Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and compromised lungs, in addition to being elderly and infirm. COVID-19’s effect on ordinary healthy persons is considerably milder than those of ordinary respiratory diseases.