These
are interesting times in which we live.
The mass hysteria over
COVID-19, “TheCoronavirus,” supplies the remotely thoughtful with
much food for thought.
In a
following series of articles, I will unpack the many implications of the mass
panic.
Before
doing so, though, we must first establish one fundamental fact:
This is indeed a mass panic.
“The Coronavirus”
is, in reality, but the latest discovered variant of a family of corona viruses
that are located in all acute
respiratory diseases. As Wolfgang Wodarg—a German medical doctor who once
ran his own health department with a system for monitoring flu diseases among
people within an area of some 150,000 inhabitants—informs us, coronaviruses constitute
anywhere up to 15% of respiratory diseases. “Hence,” Dr. Wodarg says,
“it’s just normal that a big part of viruses are coronaviruses.”
So as
to gain the much needed context of which Big Government and Big Media are all
too ready to deprive us, it is worth quoting the doctor at length:
“So while looking for a
specific virus, for example, the coronavirus, you can examine the total
population. What you will find is that presumably around 8% or 10% of the
population will have some kind of virus that makes them sick. But if you
examine medical practices, do your tests there, to determine who is sick, then of
course you would find a lot more positive cases. And if you examine hospitals
and take samples there, then you would find even more corona-infected people.”
Context,
in other words, makes all of the difference as to the confirmed cases of a
virus.
Yet, “depending on which proportions of the population you
examine—whether it is the whole population, patients in the waiting room,
people in a clinic, or when you examine very ill patients in the intensive care
unit that are about to die—you will expectedly find these 7%-15% coronaviruses
every time you do a test.”
“However,” Wudarg adds,
whether these patients die of the coronavirus itself or
of other viruses that are accompanied by the coronavirus, this is not
something that can be determined with surety (italics added).
He
ties it altogether:
“So when you look at the death
rates in Italy, you want to know where the tests have been taken. Where
and how have these few available tests been used? If they were used in a
hospital on serious or terminally ill cases, then obviously the corona death
rate rises.”
Although
this context is crucial, Big Media fails to provide it.
John Ioannidis is a Stanford
University faculty member. He is a professor of medicine, of epidemiology and
population health, of biomedical data science, and of statistics. He is also a
co-director of Stanford’s Meta-Research Innovation Center. In a recent op-ed,
he warns against the “once-in-a-century
evidence fiasco” that is the mass hysteria ensuing upon the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The
data collected so far on how many people are infected and how the epidemic is
evolving are utterly unreliable,” Professor Ioannidis remarks.
Considering “the limited testing to date,” it’s unknown whether “we are failing
to capture infections by a factor of three or 300.”
He
continues:
“Three months after the
outbreak emerged, most countries, including the U.S., lack the ability to test
a large number of people and no countries have reliable data on the prevalence
of the virus in a representative random sample of the general population.”
What
this in turn means is that the global fatality rate of 3.4% relayed by the
World Health Organization (WHO), while it “cause[s] horror,” is utterly
“meaningless.”
Why?
The answer is that those who have tested for COVID-19 are “disproportionately
those with severe symptoms and bad outcomes.”
Professor
Ioannidis adds: “As most health systems have limited testing capacity,
selection bias may even worsen in the future” [for given the inherent scarcity
of resources in the way of testing and, hence, the need to test
selectively—i.e. to test only those who are displaying symptoms of sickness and
who seek treatment—the numbers diagnosed may become that much more skewed].
But there is another reason,
one that Ioannidis does not mention, that accounts for why the WHO’s reported
fatality rate is not only meaningless, but even deceptive. As Ben Swann
astutely observes, the WHO figure of 3.4% is a rough
average between two other figures: the reported mortality rate of 2% of
COVID-19 in the United States, and its 4% mortality rate throughout the
world. Following its release of this number, the WHO announced that “the Coronavirus” is much deadlier than the
seasonal flu, for the mortality rate of the latter is only .1%.
The
American media has proven all too eager to uncritically accept this
declaration—issued, after all, by the Experts at the World Health
Organization—and share it with the world.
There’s
just one little problem with it: It’s not in the least bit accurate.
The flu’s mortality rate of
.1% is accurate only if it is based on the
number of estimated cases. Because
the WHO calibrates the mortality rate for COVID-19 solely on the basis of confirmed cases—it doesn’t even try to supply an
estimated number of undiagnosed or suspected cases of this coronavirus—it is
significantly higher than that of the flu.
Yet if the Experts at the WHO
(and the sock puppets in the American media) were interested in just the most
rudimentary analogical reasoning, they would have figured out this comparison
is worthless because the two things being compared are incomparable. Now, when
the mortality rate of the seasonal flu is grounded in confirmed cases, then its .1% mortality rate jumps
to 10%! This makes it vastly more deadly than the
thing that has brought the whole world to a grinding halt.
Dr.
Paul Offit, a pediatrician and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at
The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, is an expert on vaccines, immunology,
and virology. He is also the co-inventor of rotavirus vaccine which is
recommended for universal use by the Centers for Disease and Prevention Control
(CDC).
Dr. Offit recently said, what I’ve been at pains to show here,
that “the fear of the virus is a bigger problem than the virus itself.”
COVID-19 may be only marginally more dangerous than the Swine flu of 2009, if
it’s more dangerous at all. At any rate, it’s not even close to being
deadlier than the seasonal flu.
“I
wish that every week they put up the number of deaths from influenza and the
number of deaths from COVID-19; we would realize that influenza is far worse.”
He elaborates:
“This year, in the United
States, there were between 300,000 and 500,000 hospitalizations from influenza.
We had between 20,000 and 45,000 deaths. Of those, 154 occurred in
children.
In the last two months since
COVID-19 has been in the United States, 20 children have died from influenza;
no children have died from COVID-19.”
Offit
continues, noting that even though the flu is “far worse” than COVID-19, “we do
not quarantine and we do not cancel meetings for shut down schools, churches,
and synagogues from influenza.” The good doctor expresses his perplexity: “I do
not understand what the difference is. If these two viruses are likely to
cause infection and disease, why are we treating one different from the other?”
Good
question.
“The
problem with coronavirus,” Dr. Offit asserts, “is that people think they are
more likely to die if they get it.”
Offit’s
verdict?
“I
think all the evidence says that is not true.”
As of
the time of this writing, March 18, 2020, the John Hopkins Center for Systems
Science and Engineering (CSSE), which tracks the spread of this virus all over
the globe, informs those who would consult it that there are 204,251 confirmed
cases of the virus now. Of these, 8,246 people have died, and 82,091 have
recovered.
None of this is a good thing,
obviously, but it’s critical to keep perspective: On a planet of 7 billion human beings, a tiny fraction of a
percent of people, .00291787%, have contracted this thing. And of that number, officially, about 4%
have died. The real mortality
rate is lower, for many people ride out the disease and don’t get tested, for
in the vast majority of cases, symptoms are mild. There are
unquestionably many unconfirmed cases.
In
case this isn’t clear, to reiterate, the vast majority of people, particularly
those who aren’t already high-risk—the elderly, those with preexisting
pulmonary-related conditions and otherwise compromised immune systems—who
contract this coronavirus have mild symptoms and recover.
In other words, especially if
one is the inhabitant of an advanced Western country like the United States,
even if one contracts the virus—and this is a big if—it is not an automatic death
sentence. Quite the contrary, in fact. It is
overwhelmingly likely that, just as is the case when your average person gets
the seasonal flu, one will make a full recovery.
For
the sake of perspective:
Between
October 2019 and the end of February 2020, approximately 45 million Americans
contracted the flu. There were 560,000 hospitalizations.
And
46,000 Americans died from it.
In
2018, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 49
million Americans contracted the flu. About 960,000 were hospitalized.
More than 80,000 died.
Consider, the number of
Americans to have died from the flu in just one flu season
is about ten times the number of all Earthlings to have
died from the latest coronavirus.
The number of Americans to
have died from the flu since 2018 to the present is about 20 times greater than
that of all human beings to have died from the latest coronavirus.
When we compare the number
of Americans to have contracted and die from COVID-19
with the number of Americans to have contracted and die from the flu, the gap
becomes that much starker.
As of March 18, in the United
States there were currently 6519 confirmed cases of coronavirus. Of those
who have contracted it, 115 have died.
So,
let’s break this down:
In a country of about 330
million people, .0002% of the population has officially contracted
COVID-19. And of this number,
less than 2% have died.
The
real mortality rate is surely appreciably lower than this.
In
China, from which the virus originated and where the majority of all of the
world’s cases remain, a study of 45,000 confirmed infections revealed that in a
whopping 81% of instances, the virus “caused only minor illness,” with 14% of
patients displaying symptoms “described as ‘severe,’ and just 5%” identified as
“‘critical.’”
Think about this: Because in
the vast majority of instances carriers of the virus exhibit only mild symptoms
that they ride out and from which they recover, there are many more undiagnosed
cases. Thus, an even smaller percentage of patients than the official
1.66% who have officially died from COVID-19 actually die
from it.
Considering that this world
is and has always been disease-ridden, basic precautionary measures like
washing one’s hands, covering one’s nose and mouth while sneezing and coughing,
etc. are always sensible (even if we never heard of “The Coronavirus”).
Yet
given the facts concerning COVID-19, any set of responses over and above this
amounts to hysteria.
Jack
Kerwick [send
him mail] received his doctoral degree in philosophy from Temple
University. His area of specialization is ethics and political philosophy. He
is a professor of philosophy at several colleges and universities in New Jersey
and Pennsylvania. Jack blogs at Beliefnet.com: At the Intersection of Faith
& Culture.
