8 Comments

Commenter Jon Schulz eloquently misses the point like so many pandemic panic porn purveyors (including those with endowed chairs). While there are many personal and social reasons why humans seek to elevate the severity of a crisis, the past few months have demonstrated how pernicious such psychopathology can be--killing more with a cure fueled by academic hubris and political fecklessness.

It's time for those who have staked their reputations on worst case speculation to admit that it hasn't come to pass. All the modeling and in vitro experimentation must yield to real world, observable clinical outcomes. Very few people outside of the clearly defined at risk group are getting sick from this and virtually none are dying. If Mr. Schultz, you're now going to tell us that serious latent morbidity awaits us because this virus is different from Cov-1, we're going to ask you politely to throw your panic party elsewhere. We have lives to live.

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Death rate is only one negative aspect. Let's discuss cost of hospitalizations

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This doesn't include the lying from China and Russia etc. which would really put the world over 1,000,000 more deaths!

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There’s no money or power in the truth. The world will continue to be duped by the evil power center. Just wish we could pry those scabs off the planet.

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I agree that the WHO statements may be misleading. In my opinion there should be three categories, the infection fatality rate (IFR), the disease fatality rate (DFR) - counting all people who develop symptoms - and the case fatality rate (CFR) for people who actually develop "severe acute respiratory syndrome" (although with SARS-2 there can be serious illness via other routes as the virus has a "polybasic cleavage site," which SARS-1 does not, enabling it to attack numerous organs and types of cells.

I believe the reported 10% CFR of SARS-1 only applies to people who were hospitalized with serious illness, I could not find any IFR figures on the WHO website (so the CFR of SARS-2 may be higher than that of SARS-1). In any case I think the IFR is almost meaningless because people can test positive with a low viral load, not get sick, and not develop any immunity to a subsequent infection.

A big question with this virus, according to virologist Henry Niman of Recombinomics dot co, is how well it will be able to adapt/mutate so as to avoid both infection-derived and vaccine-derived immunity. And I don't believe it has been established whether or not the virus can "hide" in the body, like some other viruses, and cause serious problems down the road.

So I think people who claim the virus "is no worse than seasonal flu" are really talking without knowledge and doing the world a big disservice. If you listen to the latest weekly podcast interview with Epidemiologist Michael Osterholm of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy - in which he opines, "the worst is yet to come" - I think you will get a clearer picture of the real situation.

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