Was the COVID risk overblown?

I have seen people claim that COVID wasn’t any worse than the flu, and that the toll from the disease was smaller than the number of people killed in traffic accidents each year.

Is that correct? Sources of data on deaths from all kinds of causes are easy to find. I will limit myself to the US.

Let’s see:

Today’s WorldOMeter says the US has had 666,627 deaths since the start of this pandemic, starting almost exactly 18 months ago (mid-March of 2020 to 9/7/2021).

That number of deaths, divided by 18 months, works out to a monthly death toll from COVID of about 37,000 per month.

Flu, however, takes roughly a full year to kill that many.

If we multiply the 37 thousand by 12 months, you get 444,000 killed by COVID in a year.

Flu’s Toll over the Past Decade

The CDC says that up to but not including the pandemic, influenza has inflicted, per year:

between 9 million and 45 million illnesses

between 140,000 and 810,000 hospitalizations

between 12,000 and 61,000 deaths (so by WorldOMeter’s numbers, COVID has been between 6 and 37 times more deadly)

Traffic deaths

For automobiles, the annual death rate had been about 36,000 people killed per year (up until 2019, and not including any pandemic months)

So COVID is more deadly than traffic accidents of all sorts by a factor of about 12 to one if we use WorldOMeter’s data.

Covid’s Toll

Now let’s compare those figures with the ones from COVID. I think you will see that COVID has been in fact much more dangerous.

Over the past 18 months, the CDC (as opposed to WorldOMeter) says we have had:

120.2 Million Estimated Total Infections (this includes both those who did NOT have any symptoms, as well as those who DID; this can’t really be compared to the figures for the flu)

101.8 Million Estimated Symptomatic Illnesses (since this is more than a year, to be fair, we should adjust by a factor equal to the ratio of 12 months to 18 months, or 2/3. Doing so, I get about 67 million symptomatic COVID infections per year, which is between 2 to 6 times larger than for the flu!)

6.2 Million Estimated Hospitalizations (adjusting as before, this is like 4 million hospitalizations per year, which is between 5 and 29 times worse than the flu)

767,000 Estimated Total Deaths (this is like 511,000 deaths per year – between 8 and 43 times worse than the flu!)

So, those arguments are full of nonsense, to put it politely.

The risk was NOT overblown.

I wish everybody in the US and abroad was permitted to take the vaccine, and did so!

I want this to be over.

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My sources were:

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html regarding influenza

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html for COVID-19

https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/yearly-snapshot for automobiles

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/#graph-deaths-daily for WorldOMeter’s estimates

Don’t Give Employers a COVID Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card!

This is by David Sirota and Julia Rock, published in The Guardian.

“Support from Democratic lawmakers for the liability shield legislation comes after the same healthcare lobby group that drafted New York’s law has poured more than $11m into House and Senate Democratic Super PACs.

“The party, though, doesn’t seem to want its own voters to know the details of the deal it is cutting with the Republican party: in a comically on-the-nose attempt at a bait-and-switch, the Democratic senator Joe Manchin touted the legislation as only financial aid for communities – leaving out the fact that it includes a liability shield for corporations.

“US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been one of the few Democratic lawmakers to spotlight what’s really going on. Last week, she tweeted: “If you want to know why Covid-19 relief is tied up in Congress, one key reason is that Republicans are demanding legal immunity for corporations so they can expose their workers to Covid without repercussions.”

“The bipartisan initiative aims to obscure its Dr Evil level of depravity by superficially depicting the liability shield as merely temporary. But that seems like a ruse, as indicated by private equity mogul and senator Mitt Romney of Utah, who said the federal Covid-19 liability shield provision “provides a temporary suspension of any liability-related lawsuits, state or federal level associated with Covid-19, giving states enough time to put in place their own protections”.

“Though full legislative language has not been released, the goal seems clear: to give state legislatures more time to permanently prevent workers from suing employers who endanger them, and to permanently block their families from mounting such lawsuits when the workers die.”

Notably, lawmakers announcing the proposal did not point to a spate of frivolous wrongful death lawsuits that corporations have been warning about as a rationale for the liability shield. Instead, as the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense recently noted, “of more than 4,100 Covid-19 related lawsuits filed, only 75 are for wrongful death or injury as a result of getting sick at work. Two-thirds fall into three categories – insurance disputes, prison cases and civil rights cases, including challenging shelter-in-place orders.”

Liability shields, laundered as a necessary Covid-19 salve, are really designed to permanently remove the last remaining deterrent to corporate abuse

“The liability shield legislation is not some standalone cause – it should be understood as the culmination of a much larger, long-term campaign to remove countervailing force and give capital supreme power over labor.

“Over the last few decades, the government – through legislation and court rulings – has weakened unions, which have used collective bargaining to protect workers rights; limited class action lawsuits and punitive damages, which are designed to punish corporate misbehavior; and gutted the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which is supposed to enforce the weak workplace safety laws still on the books.”

Who is crazy enough to believe such bullshit?

What this senior Trump hack is alleging is complete, bat-shit crazy nonsense. Apparently a good fraction of the American people believe it, even though Caputo apparently also says that he himself is nuts.

Read for yourself. This is from the NYT.

=========================================================

Trump Health Aide Falsely Alleges Conspiracies and Warns of Armed Revolt

Michael R. Caputo told a Facebook audience without evidence that left-wing hit squads were being trained for insurrection and accused C.D.C. scientists of “sedition.”

Michael Caputo, the top communications official at the Department of Health and Human Services, complained that he was under siege by the news media and said his “mental health has definitely failed.”Credit…Sam Hodgson for The New York Times

By Sharon LaFraniere

• Sept. 14, 2020Updated 6:35 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON — The top communications official at the powerful cabinet department in charge of combating the coronavirus made outlandish and false accusations on Sunday that career government scientists were engaging in “sedition” in their handling of the pandemic and that left-wing hit squads were preparing for armed insurrection after the election.

Michael R. Caputo, the assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, accused the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of harboring a “resistance unit” determined to undermine President Trump, even if that opposition bolsters the Covid-19 death toll.

Mr. Caputo, who has faced intense criticism for leading efforts to warp C.D.C. weekly bulletins to fit Mr. Trump’s pandemic narrative, suggested that he personally could be in danger from opponents of the administration. “If you carry guns, buy ammunition, ladies and gentlemen, because it’s going to be hard to get,” he urged his followers.

To a certain extent, Mr. Caputo’s comments in a video he hosted live on his personal Facebook page were simply an amplified version of remarks that the president himself has made. Both men have singled out government scientists and health officials as disloyal, suggested that the election will not be fairly decided, and insinuated that left-wing groups are secretly plotting to incite violence across the United States.

But Mr. Caputo’s attacks were more direct, and they came from the official most responsible for shaping communications around the coronavirus.

C.D.C. scientists “haven’t gotten out of their sweatpants except for meetings at coffee shops” to plot “how they’re going to attack Donald Trump next,” Mr. Caputo said. “There are scientists who work for this government who do not want America to get well, not until after Joe Biden is president.”

A longtime Trump loyalist with no background in health care, Mr. Caputo, 58, was appointed by the White House to his post in April, at a time when the president’s aides suspected the health secretary, Alex M. Azar II, of protecting his public image instead of Mr. Trump’s. Mr. Caputo coordinates the messaging of an 80,000-employee department that is the center of the federal public health bureaucracy. The Department of Health and Human Services oversees the Food and Drug Administration, the C.D.C. and the National Institutes of Health., three agencies that are all deeply involved in the pandemic response.

“Mr. Caputo is a critical, integral part of the president’s coronavirus response, leading on public messaging as Americans need public health information to defeat the Covid-19 pandemic,” the Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement.

Mr. Caputo’s Facebook comments were another sign of the administration’s deep antipathy and suspicion for its own scientific experts across the bureaucracy and the growing political pressure on those experts to toe a political line favorable to Mr. Trump.

This weekend, first Politico, then The New York Times and other news media organizations published accounts of how Mr. Caputo and a top aide had routinely worked to revise, delay or even scuttle the core health bulletins of the C.D.C. to paint the administration’s pandemic response in a more positive light. The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports had previously been so thoroughly shielded from political interference that political appointees only saw them just before they were published.

Mr. Caputo’s 26-minute broadside on Facebook against scientists, the news media and Democrats was also another example of a senior administration official stoking conspiracy theories about the “deep state” — the label Mr. Trump often attaches to the federal Civil Service bureaucracy — and public anxiety over the election.

Mr. Caputo predicted that the president would win re-election in November, but that his Democratic opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr., would refuse to concede, leading to violence. “And when Donald Trump refuses to stand down at the inauguration, the shooting will begin,” he said. “The drills that you’ve seen are nothing.”

There were no obvious signs from administration officials on Monday that Mr. Caputo’s job was in danger. On the contrary, Mr. Trump again added his voice to the administration’s science denialism. As the president visited California to show solidarity with the fire-ravaged West, he challenged the established science of climate change, declaring, “It will start getting cooler.” He added: “Just watch. I don’t think science knows, actually.”

Mr. Caputo’s remarks also dovetailed in part with those of Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime confidant of both Mr. Caputo and Mr. Trump. Mr. Stone, whose 40-month prison sentence for lying to Congress was commuted by the president in July, told the conspiracy website Infowars on Friday that Democrats were striving to rig the November vote, and that Mr. Trump should consider declaring martial law if he lost re-election.

Mr. Caputo noted with pleasure during his Facebook monologue that Grant Smith, a lawyer for Mr. Stone, was among the followers who had joined his talk on Sunday. Mr. Caputo has 5,000 Facebook friends, and his video was viewed more than 850 times and shared by 44 followers. He has now shut down his account.

Over all, his tone was deeply ominous: He warned, again without evidence, that “there are hit squads being trained all over this country” to mount armed opposition to a second term for Mr. Trump. “You understand that they’re going to have to kill me, and unfortunately, I think that’s where this is going,” Mr. Caputo added.

He said his physical health was in question, and his “mental health has definitely failed.”

“I don’t like being alone in Washington,” Mr. Caputo said, describing “shadows on the ceiling in my apartment, there alone, shadows are so long.” He also said the mounting number of Covid-19 deaths was taking a toll on him, telling his viewers, “You are not waking up every morning and talking about dead Americans.” The United States has lost more than 194,000 people to the virus. Mr. Caputo urged people to attend Trump rallies, but only with masks.

In a statement on Monday, Mr. Caputo told The Times: “Since joining the administration, my family and I have been continually threatened” and harassed by people who have later been prosecuted. “This weighs heavily on us, and we deeply appreciate the friendship and support of President Trump as we address these matters and keep our children safe.”

He insisted on Facebook that he would weather the controversies, saying, “I’m not going anywhere.” And he boasted of the importance of his role, stating that the president had personally put him in charge of a $250 million public service advertising campaign intended to help the United States return to normal.

The Department of Health and Human Services is trying to use that campaign to attract more minority volunteers for clinical trials of potential Covid-19 vaccines and to ask people who have recovered to donate their blood plasma to help other infected patients. Department officials have complained that Democratic members of Congress are obstructing them.

While Mr. Caputo characterized C.D.C. scientists in withering terms, he said the agency’s director, Dr. Robert R. Redfield, was “one of my closest friends in Washington,” adding, “He is such a good man.” Mr. Caputo is partly credited with helping choose Dr. Redfield’s new interim chief of staff.

Critics say Dr. Redfield has left the agency open to so much political interference that career scientists are the verge of resigning. The agency, based in Atlanta, was previously seen as mostly apolitical; its reports were internationally respected for their importance and expertise.

Mr. Caputo charged that scientists “deep in the bowels of the C.D.C. have given up science and become political animals.” He said they “walk around like they are monks” and “holy men” but engaged in “rotten science.”

He fiercely defended his scientific adviser, Dr. Paul Alexander, who was heavily involved in the effort to reshape the C.D.C.’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports. Mr. Caputo described Dr. Alexander, an assistant professor at McMaster University in Canada, as “a genius” and said that public criticism had served only to make his position “permanent” as a watchdog over politically motivated scientists.

“To allow people to die so that you can replace the president is a grievous venial sin, venial sin,” Mr. Caputo said. “And these people are all going to hell.”

A public relations specialist, Mr. Caputo has repeatedly claimed that his family and his business suffered hugely because of the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Mr. Caputo was a minor figure in that inquiry, but he was of interest partly because he had once lived in Russia, had worked for Russian politicians and was contacted in 2016 by a Russian who claimed to have damaging information about Hillary Clinton.

Mr. Caputo referred that person to Mr. Stone and was never charged with any wrongdoing. Mr. Caputo later wrote a book and produced a documentary, both entitled “The Ukraine Hoax,” to undermine the case for Mr. Trump’s impeachment.

Mr. Caputo worked on Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign for a time but was passed over for a job early in the administration. He remained friendly with Dan Scavino, the former campaign aide who is now the deputy chief of staff for White House communications and played a role in reconnecting Mr. Trump and Mr. Caputo.

Some of Mr. Caputo’s most disturbing comments were centered on what he described as a left-wing plot to harm the administration’s supporters. He claimed baselessly that the killing of a Trump supporter in Portland, Ore., in August by an avowed supporter of the left-wing collective known as antifa was part of that effort.

“Remember the Trump supporter who was shot and killed?” Mr. Caputo said. “That was a drill.”

The man suspected in the shooting, Michael Forest Reinoehl, was shot dead this month by officers from a federally led fugitive task force in Washington State. He “went down fighting,” Mr. Caputo said. “Why? Because he couldn’t say what he had inside him.”

Mr. Caputo continued his social media messaging after the Facebook event, retweeting a conspiratorial post that hinted with no evidence that armed camps were being established in Washington, D.C.: “Occupants don’t look like vagrants. Looks like forward basing for militant street ops,” J. Michael Waller, a conservative provocateur, posted on Twitter.

On Monday, Mr. Caputo blocked access to his personal Twitter account.

Here is how Vietnam Stopped COVID-19, with ZERO fatalities

BBC had a detailed analysis of how Vietnam managed to prevent the coronavirus from causing massive fatalities: aggressive quarantining of anybody who came from abroad, lots of testing, and lots of contact tracing. All from the very beginning. The headline is “‘overreaction’ made Vietnam a virus success”

However, I doubt that most of the other nations with extremely low COVID death rates did what Vietnam did. Were they just lucky and/or isolated? This inquiring mind would like to know.

The article begins like this:

Despite a long border with China and a population of 97 million people, Vietnam has recorded only just over 300 cases of Covid-19 on its soil and not a single death.

Nearly a month has passed since its last community transmission and the country is already starting to open up.

Experts say that unlike other countries now seeing infections and deaths on a huge scale, Vietnam saw a small window to act early on and used it fully.

But though cost-effective, its intrusive and labour intensive approach has its drawbacks and experts say it may be too late for most other countries to learn from its success.

‘Extreme but sensible’ measures

“When you’re dealing with these kinds of unknown novel potentially dangerous pathogens, it’s better to overreact,” says Dr Todd Pollack of Harvard’s Partnership for Health Advancement in Vietnam in Hanoi.

Recognising that its medical system would soon become overwhelmed by even mild spread of the virus, Vietnam instead chose prevention early, and on a massive scale.

By early January, before it had any confirmed cases, Vietnam’s government was initiating “drastic action” to prepare for this mysterious new pneumonia which had at that point killed two people in Wuhan.

What is their secret?

Looking at the ECDC figures on the current corona virus, I am struck by one thing: Some countries have tiny numbers of people dead from this disease, and some have enormous death tolls.

A lot of the nations with low COVID-19 mortality totals are not exactly famous for having wonderful medical systems> On the other hand, some of these nations are known for being relatively advanced and prosperous, and have well-equipped social networks.

So, what’s their secret?

I just made a list of all the nations with at least a half-million population that have so far had fewer than a hundred people who have died from COVID-19. After each one I list the number dead through today, June 20, 2020, and their population in millions. From that I derived the number of fatalities per million, or fpm. I have arranged them by continent, and then alphabetically by country name.

In ONLY ONE of these countries is the number of deaths per million population anywhere near what it is in the USA, namely about 354 dead per million to date. (That exception is El Salvador.) Many of the countries I listed have fewer than 1 fatality per million, which I denoted as “<1 fpm”.

In Africa:

Angola, 8 dead, pop 32 Million people, <1 fpm

Botswana, 1 dead, pop 2 M, <1 fpm

Benin, 11 dead, pop 12 M, 1 fpm

Burkina, Faso 53 dead, pop 20 M, 3 fpm

Burundi, 1 dead, pop 12 M, <1 fpm

Cape Verde, 8 dead, pop 0.5 M, 16 fpm

Central African Republic, 19 dead, pop 5 M, 4 fpm

Chad, 74 dead, pop 16 M, 5 fpm

Congo, 27 dead, pop 5 M, 5 fpm

Cote d’Ivoire, 49 dead, pop 26 M, 2 fpm

Djibouti, 45 dead, pop 1 M, 45 fpm

Equatorial Guinea, 32 dead, pop 1.4 M, 23 fpm

Eritrea, 0 dead, pop 3 M, 0 fpm

Eswatini (was Swaziland), 4 dead, pop 1 M, 4 fpm

Ethiopia, 72 dead, pop 112 M ,<1 fpm

Gabon, 34 dead, pop 2 M, 17 fpm

Gambia, 1 dead, pop 2 M, <1 fpm

Ghana, 70 dead, pop 30 M, 2 fpm

Guinea, 27 dead, pop 13 M, 2 fpm

Guinea Bissau, 15 dead, pop 2 M, 8 fpm

Lesotho, 0 dead, pop 2 M, 0 fpm

Liberia, 33 dead, pop 5 M, 7 fpm

Libya, 10 dead, pop 7 M, 1 fpm

Madagascar, 13 dead, pop 30 M, <1 fpm

Malawi, 8 dead, pop 19 M, <1 fpm

Mauretania, 95 dead, pop 5 M, 19 fpm

Mozambique, 4 dead, pop 30 M, <1 fpm

Namibia, 0 dead, pop 2 M, 0 fpm

Niger, 67 dead, pop 23 M, 3 fpm

Rwanda, 2 dead, pop 13 M, <1 fpm

Senegal, 79 dead, pop 16 M, 5 fpm

Sierra Leone, 53 dead, pop 8 M, 7 fpm

Somalia, 88 dead, pop 15 M, 6 fpm

South Sudan, 31 dead, pop 15 M, 2 fpm

Togo, 13 dead, pop 8 M, 2 fpm

Tunisia, 50 dead, 12 M, 4 fpm

Uganda, 0 dead, 44 M, 0 fpm

Tanzania, 21 dead, 58 M, <1 fpm

Western Sahara, 1 dead, pop 0.6 M, 2 fpm

Zambia, 11 dead, pop 17 M, <1 fpm

Zimbabwe, 4 dead, pop 15 M, <1 fpm

In the Americas:

Costa Rica, 12 dead, pop 5 M, 2fpm

Cuba, 85 dead, pop 11 M, 7 fpm

El Salvador, 93 dead, pop 0.6 M, 155 fpm

Guyana, 12 dead, pop 0.8 M, 15 fpm

Haiti, 87 dead, pop 11 M, 7 fpm

Jamaica, 10 dead, pop 3M, 3 fpm

Nicaragua, 64 dead, pop 7 M, 9 fpm

Paraguay, 13 dead, pop 7 M, 2 fpm

Suriname, 8 dead, pop 0.6 M, 13 fpm

Trinidad & Tobago, 8 dead, pop 1 M, 8 fpm

Uruguay, 24 dead, pop 3 M, 8 fpm

Venezuela, 30 dead, pop 29 M, 1 fpm

In Asia:

Bahrain, 57 dead, pop 2 M, 28 fpm

Bhutan, 0 dead, pop 0.8 M, 0 fpm

Cambodia, 0 dead, pop 16 M, 0 fpm

Jordan, 9 dead, pop 10 M, 1 fpm

Kyrgyzstan, 35 dead, pop 6 M, 6 fpm

Laos, 0 dead, pop 7 M, 0 fpm

Lebanon, 32 dead, pop 7 M, 5 fpm

Maldives, 8 dead, pop 0.5 M, 16 fpm

Mongolia, 0 dead, pop 3 M, 0 fpm

Myanmar, 6 dead, pop 54 M, <1 fpm

Nepal, 22 dead, pop 29 M, <1 fpm

Palestine, 5 dead, pop 5 M, 1 fpm

Qatar, 93 dead, pop 3 M, 31 fpm

Singapore, 26 dead, pop 6 M, 5 fpm

Sri Lanka, 11 dead, pop 21 M, <1 fpm

Syria, 7 dead, pop 17 M, <1 fpm

Taiwan, 7 dead, pop 24 M, <1 fpm

Tajikistan, 51 dead, pop 9 M, 6 fpm

Thailand, 58 dead, pop 70 M, <1 fpm

Uzbekistan, 19 dead, pop 33 M, <1 fpm

Vietnam, 0 dead, pop 96 M, 0 FPM

In Europe:

Albania, 42 dead, pop 3 M, 14 fpm

Cyprus, 19 dead, pop 0.9 M, 21 fpm

Estonia, 69 dead, pop 1.3 M, 53 fpm

Georgia, 14 dead, pop 4 M, 4.5 fpm

Kosovo, 33 dead, pop 2 M, 17 fpm

Latvia, 30 dead, pop 2 M, 15 fpm

Lithuania, 76 dead, pop 3 M, 25 fpm

Malta, 9 dead, pop 0.5 M, 18 fpm

Montenegro, 9 dead, pop 0.6 M, 15 fpm

Slovakia, 28 dead, pop 5 M, 6 fpm

Elsewhere:

New Zealand, 22 dead, pop 5 M, 4 fpm

Papua New Guinea, 0 dead, pop 9 M, 0 fpm

Once again, I would very much like the secret of what those countries (apparently) did right, and what the US, Brazil, Mexico, France, Spain, Italy, Belgium and a lot of other countries obviously did wrong.

Ideas?

The US is surrendering to COVID

 “The facts suggest that the U.S. is not going to beat the coronavirus,” the Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal and Robinson Meyer write. “Collectively, we slowly seem to be giving up.”

That demoralized attitude is reflected at the top of American politics: It has been more than a month since the Trump administration held a daily coronavirus task force briefing. – reports the Washington Post. 

North and South America now have by far the most cases and the most deaths, as these histograms that I lifted from the European CDC make clear. 

All that orange? That’s mostly the US and Brazil, both led by ignorant, right-wing, would-be autocrats who have spent most of the past several months ignoring the threat.

Recall that the virus apparently made the leap from animals to humans in China? Well, somehow, it appears that China and most other Asian countries have done a pretty good job of stopping the spread of this deadly disease. The early death toll in Europe was frightening, but has decreased by a LOT. The US, however, has pretty much given up even trying, and now all by itself has over one-quarter of all of the deaths in the entire world, as this graph shows. Those in Africa (so far) and Oceania are minuscule by comparison.

USA: Highest COVID Death toll in the entire world; One of the highest infection rates per capita; and highest number of cases

Making America Great Again – was it really intended to make the USA have the highest Covid-19 death toll in the entire world, PLUS the highest infection rate? What a record!!

Please look at this table, which I compiled from data I found here and here. I have sorted it by the total number of reported Covid-19 deaths and left off almost all of the nations with less than three thousand cases, except for Taiwan and Vietnam.

If you look, you will see that the US (with 105 thousand deaths) is way ahead of every other country — in fact, it’s about the same as the next three or four nations combined (UK, Italy, Brazil, and France).

The US also has the highest number of reported cases in the entire world, with about 1.8 million; that’s roughly the same amount as the next seven nations combined (Brazil, Russia, UK, Spain, Italy, Germany, and India).

No Herd Immunity

People have been talking about herd immunity and low fatality rates. My calculations tell me that we are a long, long way from herd immunity anywhere, and that the fatality rates are rather high.

To get herd immunity, you need to have 70% to 90% of the population that has antibodies – either from a vaccine or from having contracted the disease and recovered by their own body producing the necessary antibodies. I simply divided the total number of reported cases (which is probably too low in every case, but I have no idea by what factor) by the population of each country. What I find is that not a single nation has reached even 1% of their population having been infected and recovered. The highest such rates are in the small nations of Bahrain, Kuwait, and Luxembourg, which have about 7 people diagnosed as having been positive per THOUSAND, that’s 0.7%. The US has about 0.55% positive.

No herd immunity there.

High Fatality Rates

If we divide the number of coronavirus deaths by the total number of cases, we get rather large percentages. For the world as a whole, it’s about 6%, and for the very worst-off nations like France, Belgium, Italy, the UK, Netherlands, Sweden, Spain, and Mexico, your chances of dying if diagnosed positive [EDIT] are over 10%.*

Scary.

	Total Reported Cases	Total Reported Deaths	Calculated fatality rate	Population, millions	Infection rate so far
World	6,104,980	370,078	6.06%	7594	0.080%
United States	1,811,016	105,295	5.81%	327	0.554%
United Kingdom	274,762	38,489	14.01%	66	0.416%
Italy	233,019	33,415	14.34%	60	0.388%
Brazil	501,985	28,872	5.75%	209	0.240%
France	151,496	28,771	18.99%	67	0.226%
Spain	239,429	27,127	11.33%	46	0.520%
Mexico	87,512	9,779	11.17%	126	0.069%
Belgium	58,381	9,467	16.22%	11	0.531%
Germany	183,411	8,602	4.69%	83	0.221%
Iran	151,466	7,797	5.15%	82	0.185%
Canada	90,516	7,092	7.84%	37	0.245%
Netherlands	46,442	5,956	12.82%	17	0.273%
India	182,143	5,164	2.84%	10	1.821%
Russia	405,843	4,693	1.16%	144	0.282%
China	83,001	4,634	5.58%	1393	0.006%
Turkey	163,103	4,515	2.77%	82	0.199%
Sweden	37,542	4,395	11.71%	10	0.375%
Peru	155,671	4,371	2.81%	32	0.486%
Ecuador	38,571	3,334	8.64%	17	0.227%
Switzerland	30,862	1,657	5.37%	9	0.343%
Ireland	24,990	1,652	6.61%	5	0.500%
Indonesia	26,473	1,613	6.09%	268	0.010%
Pakistan	70,868	1,519	2.14%	212	0.033%
Chile	94,858	997	1.05%	19	0.499%
Philippines	18,086	957	5.29%	107	0.017%
Egypt	23,449	913	3.89%	98	0.024%
Colombia	28,236	890	3.15%	50	0.056%
Japan	16,804	886	5.27%	127	0.013%
Ukraine	23,672	708	2.99%	46	0.051%
Austria	16,731	668	3.99%	9	0.186%
Algeria	9,394	653	6.95%	42	0.022%
Bangladesh	47,153	650	1.38%	161	0.029%
South Africa	30,967	643	2.08%	58	0.053%
Denmark	11,633	571	4.91%	6	0.194%
Argentina	16,201	528	3.26%	44	0.037%
Hungary	3,876	526	13.57%	10	0.039%
Saudi Arabia	85,261	503	0.59%	34	0.251%
Dominican Republic	16,908	498	2.95%	11	0.154%
Panama	13,018	330	2.53%	4	0.325%
Finland	6,859	320	4.67%	5.5	0.125%
Czech Republic	9,233	319	3.45%	11	0.084%
Bolivia	9,592	310	3.23%	11	0.087%
Moldova	8,251	295	3.58%	3.5	0.236%
Israel	17,024	284	1.67%	9	0.189%
Nigeria	9,855	273	2.77%	196	0.005%
South Korea	11,468	270	2.35%	52	0.022%
Sudan	4,800	262	5.46%	42	0.011%
United Arab Emirates	33,896	262	0.77%	10	0.339%
Afghanistan	15,205	257	1.69%	37	0.041%
Serbia	11,381	242	2.13%	7	0.163%
Norway	8,437	236	2.80%	5	0.169%
Belarus	42,556	235	0.55%	9.5	0.448%
Kuwait	27,043	212	0.78%	4	0.676%
Morocco	7,783	204	2.62%	36	0.022%
Honduras	5,094	201	3.95%	9.6	0.053%
Iraq	6,179	195	3.16%	38	0.016%
Cameroon	5,904	191	3.24%	25	0.024%
Bosnia & Herzegovina	2,510	153	6.10%	3	0.084%
Bulgaria	2,453	140	5.71%	7	0.035%
North Macedonia	2,226	133	5.97%	2	0.111%
Armenia	9,282	131	1.41%	3	0.309%
Malaysia	7,819	115	1.47%	32	0.024%
Luxembourg	4,016	110	2.74%	0.6	0.669%
Croatia	2,246	103	4.59%	4	0.056%
Australia	7,193	103	1.43%	25	0.029%
Guatemala	4,739	102	2.15%	17	0.028%
Cuba	2,025	83	4.10%	11	0.018%
DR Congo	3,046	72	2.36%	84	0.004%
Azerbaijan	5,494	63	1.15%	10	0.055%
Thailand	3,081	57	1.85%	69	0.004%
Tajikistan	3,807	47	1.23%	9	0.042%
Oman	11,437	46	0.40%	5	0.229%
Senegal	3,535	41	1.16%	16	0.022%
Kazakhstan	10,858	40	0.37%	18	0.060%
Ghana	7,881	36	0.46%	30	0.026%
Ivory Coast	2,799	33	1.18%	25	0.011%
Guinea	3,706	23	0.62%	12	0.031%
Singapore	34,884	23	0.07%	5.6	0.623%
Djibouti	3,194	22	0.69%	1	0.319%
Bahrain	10,793	18	0.17%	1.5	0.720%
Uzbekistan	3,554	14	0.39%	33	0.011%
Taiwan	442	7	1.58%	24	0.002%
Vietnam	328	0	0.00%	96	0.000%

* EDIT: The divisor here is the number of people who have been formally and medically diagnosed as positive. The number of people who have actually been exposed to COVID-19 is probably considerably higher than the number of people who have tested positive, since no country is testing every single citizen, and the technicians are not testing people randomly.

By what factor is the reported positive rate in the various nation’s populations too low? I cannot say, and I’m positive it varies a lot from nation to nation and even within any country or state or region.

CDC gives a much lower fatality rate than I do – they estimate it to be under 1%, which would mean that every single reported positive case represents about 10 to 60 people who got the infection and fought it off unknowingly. That’s the only way you can lower a 6% fatality rate to 0.6% or 0.1%. Does that sound reasonable to you? It would be nice if that were true, but I rather doubt it.

There is NO Herd Immunity in the US but we have a High Fatality Rate

Notice from this pink graph that in the USA, technicians are still detecting twenty to 25 THOUSAND new cases of COVID-19 per day. These folks didn’t all get sick; they just all tested positive for antigens and/or antibodies. Some did get sick, some less so, and some more so, and some died.

One of the key questions is, what is the fatality rate? We now have some idea, which we can get by comparing the total number of cases reported so far with the total number of deaths. This yellow graph shows the cumulative ECDC-reported number of cases in the USA. Right now it’s a bit over 1.7 million people – roughly one half of one percent of the population, which is roughly 330 million.

One half of one percent of the population is nothing like herd immunity! You need 70 to 90% or more of the people to have been exposed to reach that level according to JHU.

Now let’s compare that to the total deaths each day and cumulative.

As you can see from the white graph above, the US is recording something like 1000 to 1500 deaths from COVID every day. (My guess as to why it’s going down has to do with the fact that the vast majority of the population is engaging in social distancing.)

Total, cumulative deaths can be seen below:

The above graph shows that at present, a bit over a hundred thousand people have been killed in the United States so far by this virus at this writing. Now let’s compare that total number of deaths, namely 102,836, with the total number of detected cases, which is 1,747,087. Get out your favorite calculator and divide. If you divide the big one (~1.7 million) by the smaller one (~103 thousand), you get roughly 17 — which means that about ONE OUT OF EVERY 17 PEOPLE IN THE USA WHO HAS TESTED POSITIVE, HAS DIED.

Let that sink in.

If you are infected, it looks like you have a one-in-seventeen chance of dying.

And there is neither a vaccine, nor a cure, nor herd immunity, nor any contact tracing to speak of. Testing is still rationed tightly, or else you have to pay a LOT for it. Will that ratio continue to hold in the future? I don’t know, but it’s alarming all the same.

If you divide the little one by the big one, you will get about 0.05886. That means 5.886% chance of dying – nearly 6% fatality rate!

That is one hell of a lot more lethal than the flu.

If we open up again without contact tracing and effective and humane quarantine and/or medical care of those who test positive, I am really afraid of what will happen.

5.886% of the population of the USA is over 19 million people.

I’ve checked about a dozen other countries, and their fatality rates range from about 2% (Taiwan) up to 19% (France).

 

The best way to re-open the economy is to defeat the virus. Not by yelling slogans.

By Alex Tabarrok and Puja Ahluwalia Ohlhaver in the Washington Post

May 15, 2020 at 10:06 a.m. EDT

With the unemployment rate at its highest level since the Great Depression — 14.7 percent and climbing — many Americans are clamoring to reopen the economy, even if it means that thousands of daily covid-19 deaths become part of the backdrop to life. It’s time to move on as “warriors,” President Trump has said, because “we can’t keep our country closed down for years.” We, too, favor markets and share the president’s eagerness to stop economically ruinous shutdowns. But the choice between saving lives and saving the economy, the latter of which Trump has endorsed implicitly, is a false one.

In fact, framing the issue that way could kill many Americans and kill the economy.

The dangers of reopening without disease control — or a coronavirus vaccine or therapeutic breakthrough — are illustrated by events at the Smithfield Foods meatpacking plant in Sioux Falls, S.D. Smithfield offered workers a bonus if they showed up every day in April. Normally, bonus pay would increase attendance. But in a pandemic, encouraging the sick to haul themselves into work can be disastrous. The plan backfired. Hundreds of Smithfield employees were infected, forcing the plant to shut down for more than three weeks. If we stay the current course, we risk repeating the same mistake across the whole economy.

The economy consists of people who have hopes and fears. As long as they are afraid of a lethal virus, they will avoid restaurants, travel and workplaces. (According to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll last week, only 25 percent of all Americans want to “open businesses and get the economy going again, even if that means more people will get the coronavirus.”) The only way to restore the economy is to earn the confidence of both vulnerable industries and vulnerable people through testing, contact tracing and isolation.

As covid-19 spreads through Nebraska meat plants, workers feel helpless and afraid

There is already a bipartisan plan to achieve this; we helped write it. The plan relies on frequent testing followed by tracing the contacts of people who test positive (and their contacts) until no new positive cases are found. It also encourages voluntary isolation, at home or in hotel rooms, to prevent further disease spread. Isolated patients would receive a federal stipend, like jurors, to discourage them from returning to workplaces too soon.

But our plan also recognizes that rural towns in Montana should not necessarily have to shut down the way New York City has. To pull off this balancing act, the country should be divided into red, yellow and green zones. The goal is to be a green zone, where fewer than one resident per 36,000 is infected. Here, large gatherings are allowed, and masks aren’t required for those who don’t interact with the elderly or other vulnerable populations. Green zones require a minimum of one test per day for every 10,000 people and a five-person contact tracing team for every 100,000 people. (These are the levels currently maintained in South Korea, which has suppressed covid-19.) Two weeks ago, a modest 1,900 tests a day could have kept 19 million Americans safely in green zones. Today, there are no green zones in the United States.

 

What antibody tests can teach us about potential coronavirus immunity

Most Americans — about 298 million — live in yellow zones, where disease prevalence is between .002 percent and 1 percent. But even in yellow zones, the economy could safely reopen with aggressive testing and tracing, coupled with safety measures including mandatory masks. In South Korea, during the peak of its outbreak, it took 25 tests to detect one positive case, and the case fatality rate was 1 percent. Following this model, yellow zones would require 2,500 tests for every daily death. To contain spread, yellow zones also would ramp up contact tracing until a team is available for every new daily coronavirus case. After one tracer conducts an interview, the team would spend 12 hours identifying all those at risk. Speed matters, because the virus spreads quickly; three days is useless for tracing. (Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., are all yellow zones.)

 

A disease prevalence greater than 1 percent defines red zones. Today, 30 million Americans live in such hot spots — which include Detroit, New Jersey, New Orleans and New York City. In addition to the yellow-zone interventions, these places require stay-at-home orders. But by strictly following guidelines for testing and tracing, red zones could turn yellow within four weeks, moving steadfastly from lockdown to liberty.

 

Getting to green nationwide is possible by the end of the summer, but it requires ramping up testing radically. The United States now administers more than 300,000 tests a day, but according to our guidelines, 5 million a day are needed (for two to three months). It’s an achievable goal. Researchers estimate that the current system has a latent capacity to produce 2 million tests a day, and a surge in federal funding would spur companies to increase capacity. The key is to do it now, before manageable yellow zones deteriorate to economically ruinous red zones.

 

States can administer these “test, trace and supported isolation” programs — but Congress would need to fund them. The total cost, we estimate, is $74 billion, to be spent over 12 to 18 months. That sum would cover wages and training for contract tracers, the cost of building voluntary self-isolation facilities, stipends for those in isolation and subsidies to manufacture tests.

 

That amount is a lot, but not compared to the cost of a crippled economy. In Congress’s latest relief package, $75 billion went to struggling hospitals alone, $380 billion to help small businesses and $25 billion toward testing. But hospitals and businesses will continue to hemorrhage money and seek bailouts as long as they can’t open safely. Not spending on disease control means new waves of infection followed by chaotic spikes in disease and death, followed by more ruinous cycles of economic openings and closures. Economists talk about “multipliers” — an injection of spending that causes even larger increases in gross domestic product. Spending on testing, tracing and paid isolation would produce an indisputable and massive multiplier effect.

 

States have strong economic incentives to become — and remain — green zones. Nations that have invested the most in disease control have suffered the least economic hardship: Taiwan grew 1.5 percent in the first quarter, whereas the United States’ gross domestic product contracted by 4.8 percent, at an annual adjusted rate. (Taiwan was fortunate to have its vice president, Chen Chien-Jen, a U.S.-trained epidemiologist; under his guidance, the island acted quickly with masks, temperature checks, testing and tracing.) The second quarter will be worse: The projected decline for U.S. GDP, at an annualized rate, is an alarming 40 percent.

 

Looking forward, we will see stark economic contrasts across states, depending on their investment in disease control. With $74 billion, Congress could close the gap between states and relieve pressure on state budgets hamstrung by collapsing revenues. In the spirit of federalism, states would then become laboratories for discovering the best ways to implement testing, tracing and isolation. States might choose to form interstate compacts that pool and move testing resources across state lines as the disease travels and surges; county health officials might tap firefighters or other municipal workers to build regional contact-tracing workforces (as is happening in Tyler, Tex.). When local and state governments become accountable for adopting strategies that work, we can expect more innovation.

 

How do we know that testing, tracing and supported isolation would work? It already has worked in New Zealand, South Korea and Taiwan — where there have been few to no new daily cases recently. Taiwan never had to shut down its economy, while New Zealand and South Korea are returning to normal. It would work here, too. Since March, Congress has passed relief bills totaling $3.6 trillion to support an economy devastated by a virus — and $3 trillion more is on the table. We should attack the disease directly so we can stop spending to alleviate symptoms. Following this road map, we can defeat the coronavirus and be celebrating life, liberty and livelihood by the Fourth of July.

Slight Downward Trend in Daily US Covid-19 Deaths After More Than 90 Thousand Die

This graph shows the daily reported number of deaths from COVID-19 in the US since March 10. As you can see, the daily reported death numbers fluctuate rather wildly from day to day, but that’s probably because of the bureaucratic hurdles involved in reporting a death (and many offices are closed on weekends, so it’s probably not because fewer people die on Sundays and Mondays).

But overall there seems to be a slight downward trend since a high point near April 15. Most of that longed-for reduction seems to be from massive numbers of people practicing self-isolation, washing hands, wearing masks, and so forth, rather than because of a vaccine (none yet) or highly effective drugs that aid in recovery (only in experimental phases so far), or because of any skilled, consistent, and scientific help from the lying megalomaniac currently residing in the White House. (Nobody has seen any skills, consistency, or knowledge of science emanating from Mango Mussolini, except for his breathtaking abilities to swindle and fool a large subset of the American voting public.)

This second graph shows the cumulative numbers of Americans who have died from this pandemic. It is clearly not an example of exponential growth, but it also has clearly not leveled off.

I got this data from the European Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which has a website with both daily Covid-19 cases and Covid-19 deaths for just about every country in the world. You can find it here.