Wednesday, March 18, 2020

Don't Panic

3/16/20 NPR reports 6353 cases, 108 dead.  That's a 1.7% mortality rate.  This is not the Black Death, nor is it even the Spanish flu.  From 3/16/20 StatNews discussing mortality data from China:
The chance of someone with symptomatic Covid-19 dying varied by age, confirming other studies. For those aged 15 to 44, the fatality rate was 0.5%, though it might have been as low as 0.1% or as high as 1.3%. For people 45 to 64, the fatality rate was also 0.5%, with a possible low of 0.2% and a possible high of 1.1%. For those over 64, it was 2.7%, with a low and high estimate of 1.5% and 4.7%.

The chance of serious illness from coronavirus infection in younger people was so low, the scientists estimate a fatality rate of zero.
3/13/20 The Lancet:
Italy has had 12 462 confirmed cases according to the Istituto Superiore di Sanità as of March 11, and 827 deaths. Only China has recorded more deaths due to this COVID-19 outbreak. The mean age of those who died in Italy was 81 years and more than two-thirds of these patients had diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, or cancer, or were former smokers.
ICU beds are critical.  And guess what backward, market-driven health system has the most ICU beds per capita?  The U.S.

4 comments:

  1. Adding to the mix, Italy has been a noted outlier with excessively high flu deaths compared to other first world countries since at least 2013, so higher deaths from a flu-like illness shouldn't be surprising and its skewing the perspective on the lethality level of the virus.

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  2. But the news media and Dems clearly want panic for obvious reasons. While I agree that it would be better for Trump to refer to the virus as Covid-19 rather than Chinese flu the news media obsession at today's news conference that Trump is a racist would just about make me probably go all physical violence (beat the crap out them---though sense they were mostly women making that assertion maybe not) on those people if I were in the same room.

    NPR left it while still in progress to give their antiTrump rants instead. Surely they would not have done that to their Messiah. Totally disgusting. End federal funding of NPR & PBS now!!!!

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  3. Has anyone told Red Bernie that the benighted United States has more ventilators per capita (if he can understand that statistic) than the Scandinavian countries he thinks we can and should emulate?

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