Let us be very, very clear: The death rate from COVID19 in the U.S. is 1.8%. In other words, if you get the disease, you have better than a 98% chance of survival.
It is reported that 547,649 people have died from COVID19 in the U.S. That number is arguable, but let's accept it for this exercise. It is also reported that 29,632,042 people have tested positive for the virus. Okay, this is easy! If you divide 547,649 deaths by 29,632,042 infectees, you get 0.0181...or 1.8%. That's how we derived the above survival rate. 100% minus 1.8% equals 98.2%.
But wait, there's more! Estimates are that, over and above those who've tested positive for coronavirus, X-number of people have it but don't have any symptoms and haven't been tested. Some experts put that number at "8X" the number of who have tested positive. But let's be conservative and just use a multiplier of 5X. Okay, so if we multiply 29,632,042 by 5, we get 148,160,210 people. Stay with me. Now if we take the number of deaths (547,649) and divide by 148,160,210, we get an actual death rate of...(drumroll)...0.37%. *POINT* three-seven percent....basically just under four-tenths of one percent. So turn it around. It means that your actual survival rate from COVID19 is in the area of 99.6%. Pretty good odds, I'd say, even without a vaccine that is said to be 95% effective.
Will those number I used go up? Certainly - we're not done with this virus yet. But I believe the relationship of those numbers will remain the same. Fake news outlets like the fear-mongering CNN and such are trying very hard to panic us into thinking that COVID19 is some horrible, deadly threat to humanity. The hard numbers tell a different story.
I do not get a flu shot every year, because I never get the flu. Apparently, I have a pretty good immune system or something, but seriously, I never get sick. So guess what...I won't be getting the coronavirus vaccine either. I just don't believe that COVID19 presents that much of a threat to our health. At least, not if you go by our government's own numbers.
WHAT ABOUT THE FLU?
We do know that a number of people die from the regular ol' flu each year. The trouble is, we really don't know how many people get the flu each year, because so many people simply self-medicate without going to the doctor. So it's very hard to come up with a reliable death rate for the flu. Any number would be a guess.
Similarly, we really don't know for certain how many people have the coronavirus but don't have any symptoms and have not been tested. Again, it's a guess. You might point to positivity-rates of those who do get tested, but I would counter that people who have no symptoms are very unlikely to be tested in the first place unless it's a job-requirement. And so many of the "asymptomatics" remain invisible to the statisticians.
But either way... If you go by the numbers we "know" (i.e. number of people who tested positive and number of deaths attributable to COVID19), the threat of you dying from this disease is tiny. This is obviously no comfort to anyone who's had a family member die of the coronavirus. But as horrible as that is, I think the threat to the general public is vastly overblown. Why is this? I do not know.
2 comments:
I'm in agreement of your assessment on the death rate of Covid, though I have heard a number of experts now say the multiple factor is probably closer to 3X than the 8X they used in the early days. Still your chances are pretty slim. I think one factor unmentioned in your post is that doctors simply have a better idea of how to treat the disease which has decreased the death rate. In the early days such as in Italy, it may have been closer to the 2% but now with the drug cocktails, faster test results, turning patients on their stomachs, etc., that number has dropped a lot. It will be interesting to see what the final numbers are after this is all but a memory.
The media over hyping thing is really starting to bug me. Lately they have been on an Asian racist bent due to one person writing about a 1900% increase in Asian hate crimes in New York City. I found that report and Asian hate crimes went from 1 in 2019 to 20 in 2020. Granted, like Covid, many go unreported but if you calculate the odds of experiencing a racist attack in New York City as an Asian, you are like 10 times more likely to die from Covid. I think the media is suffering from things to worry about with Trump no longer in office.
LOL, Ed, your last statement really did make me laugh out loud. So true, so true. I think all of these stupid reporters are worried that their news agencies are going to have to cut back on staff because they're not willing or able to dog Joe Biden like they did Donald Trump.
But let's not turn *this* post political. You mentioned treatment? That's funny.
I had two friends down visiting from Atlanta a week ago. They stayed with me a couple of days. They go home, and on Thursday my friend texts me, "Well this sucks." Then he sends me a picture of his *positive* COVID-19 test! "How are YOU guys doing?" he asks. Apparently, his wife and he contracted COVID while they were down here in Florida. Considering that we're all really close and on "hug and kiss" terms, he assumed that my roommate and I *must* have gotten sick too. He was wrong.
Fortunately, for both of them it was just a couple of days of being really sick. It was like...and hey, he described it this way, not me - a bad case of the flu.
So I asked him what the doctors gave him to treat it? "Nothing," he said to my astonishment. "They told me to just watch it and come back in if my cough got worse."
Astonished, like I said. If you turn up "positive" and are sick but not *too* sick, the doctors don't even give you any medication for it! Wow. The media always, always, always tries to make us think that every confirmed case is a hospitalization, which is simply not true. I honestly do not know why they emphasize and exaggerate the wrong things...
Maybe I should go stock up on some OTC medicine like Thera-Flu or Contact Cold and Flu, eh?
But all joking aside, yes, for the chronically sick, we have learned how to treat COVID19 better and I believe as you do that it has helped lower the death rate...or raise the survival rate depending on how you want to look at it.
But we may be seeing light at the end of the tunnel. My county (pop. 315,000) had been seeing between 300 and 400 new cases per day at the height of the pandemic. Now we're down into single digits, which is lower than the very start of it all. So we *may* be "done" with COVID here - knock on wood. However! We're at the start of Spring Break, and there are a shit-ton of college kids in town...so who knows. Fingers crossed, is all I'm gonna say at this point.
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