Anthony Fauci is the doctor regularly interviewed and consulted by the major media of late as an expert on the CV-19 virus and on epidemiology, in general. These are his words, from a paper of his published in the New England Journal of Medicine this past week (emphasis added):
“On the basis of a case definition requiring a diagnosis of pneumonia, the currently reported case fatality rate is approximately 2%.4 In another article in the Journal, Guan et al.5 report mortality of 1.4% among 1099 patients with laboratory-confirmed Covid-19; these patients had a wide spectrum of disease severity. If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.2”
Link to the full article/paper: https://nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387
Here, also, are the CDC’s own annual influenza stats: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html Even at the low end of the ranges given, those are very large numbers, that happen every year, and we’ve never shut down so much as a single town that I know of, much less THE ENTIRE WORLD.
Other realities:
- Not everyone who contracts the virus will get sick.
- Most that do get sick have mild symptoms.
- Not all of those that die while this virus is active, and also test positive for the virus, will have died because of the virus. Many will also have the flu, and have died from that, or another underlying, concurrent cause, though they will likely be listed as CV deaths, anyway.
- Most importantly, from a general welfare and public health perspective, the economic harm caused by the lockdown would seem to have the potential for much greater and longer lasting negative consequences than the virus would have caused if it simply played out like any other virus we all confront every year, and offsetting, possibly swamping, any benefits derived from this most extreme containment reaction in human history.
- People will lose or have lost already, their jobs or businesses, thus their income. As a result of their imposed destitution, they will lose (or have already lost) their private insurance, directly affecting health care options and finances.
- People in or moving towards poverty can’t afford better, cleaner, organic food, nutritional supplements, gym memberships or the time to exercise, massages, chiropractic, acupuncture or other wellness treatments. Subsistence living doesn’t allow those choices.
- Lost work & homes, increased divorce, worry, addictive behavior, domestic violence, people chasing low-wage work just to survive, and working longer hours to do so, or not working at all, on welfare, negative stress will likely go through the roof, spiking all the very well-known and deadly health related maladies that are bound to it.
So, some percentage of people will obviously have their health harmed by this staggering containment reaction, maybe a big percentage, some seriously harmed. It’s possible, too, that the percentage and the absolute number of people harmed will be much higher than the number of people ultimately killed by the CV, though I think it’s unlikely those stats will get tracked and reported by major media as the virus has been. They’ll count, anyway, though, and if dire consequences be what society seeks to avoid here, then they ought be considered now.
So, all that for a virus the most interviewed expert on the topic has stated recently in one of the most esteemed medical journals in the world could finally have a mortality rate akin to “a severe seasonal influenza….approximately 0.1%)” The entire world’s economy shut down for that, and inviting all the major harm that will bring.
This whole scenario can now also get repeated, whenever, any time some health threat is deemed dire, and even if that threat does not surpass or even reach the threshold for routine threats we’ve all faced every single year, forever. The precedent – to which there was almost no resistance at all – has been set now, and it strikes me that that almost any risk that can be deemed general can now likewise be deemed unacceptable in the future, and hyper-extreme measures again taken to avoid it, and regardless of the risk the extreme measures themselves cause.
That’s leaving aside that we all just completely forfeited our freedom, and now move about increasingly only at the discretion of government. A cursory scan of history will make obvious how dangerous that precedent and dynamic is.
Though not at all politically correct to state, something not to be said aloud in ‘polite’ company, at the risk of offending the both thundering and cowering herd, I think this a crazy and crazy dangerous moment, and, I would guess, a contrived one. Capitalized upon, at least. Leaving aside the origins of the virus, it’s too big and consistent a worldwide reaction to be random or spontaneously arising, and is a huge and profound transfer of power to centralized authority, so I hope people will bring critical thinking to bear now on this circumstance, because if this really goes on another month, much less gets REPEATED in future, the damage and results from this lockdown and the precedent it sets will likely be with us forever. Much longer than those of CV-19, certainly.
