WHO publishes inferred COVID infection fatality rate

@no1marauder - We should do whatever public health professionals tell us is necessary to stop its spread as much as possible.

It depends. Would you approve of the medical professionals in Sweden?
And when do people get to risk their own health regardless of what pros say?

The professionals are not desperate, they have secure, sizeable incomes. Maybe
they would change their mind if they had to live like the many laid off people who
are losing their homes.

If it is voluntary, I have no problem at all with it. Let the pols suggest to us what is
ideal but let the people choose. and tell the people that their is great risk if they
do not lock down. Sounds fair to me.

@no1marauder said
sh: If you're under 70 and relatively healthy, it's exceedingly unlikely that this poses a danger to your life.

As of June 17th, about 20,000 people under the age of 65 had died from COVID in the US. https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/06/23/coronavirus-covid-deaths-us-age-race-14863

That was when the death toll was around 100,000.

Another 21,462 in the age group 65- ...[text shortened]... ould suggest that about 60,000 Americans under the age of 70 have died from COVID in about 8 months.

Stop saying died "from" this virus, it is a totally deliberately misleading term. They died "with" this virus, and that being the most likely scenario, that makes it non existent in my books.
The statement sh76 made is very true. I have listened to a number of experts say it. Just the panic merchants using the term "from" say otherwise, using the term as a false means of justification.

In the UK there is a growing public objection to the severity of the restrictions and especially further lockdown. Even His Tonyness Blair has come out and said that a second lockdown would be catastrophic.

Never before have we faced a pandemic or epidemic where we have isolated the healthy by force; in the past the sick and the vulnerable isolate, not the healthy.

If governments are not careful they will tip the world into a generational global recession which will create devastating social upheaval and terrible suffering. And still the infirm elderly will die.

The average age of COVID-19 deaths in the UK is slightly higher than the average of all deaths. It’s ridiculous! The situation is becoming quite concerning.

@mchill said
I only object to your telling my children that they can't go to school or play with their friends at the local park.

Calm down SH - I've not told your children to do anything of the kind.

You haven't, but my dear Governor Cuomo has.

@no1marauder said
Because there's a deadly contagious disease that has killed over a million people worldwide still spreading throughout the US.

We should do whatever public health professionals tell us is necessary to stop its spread as much as possible.

And for six months you've been told that simplistic messaging is a false choice; the economy will never recover to its previous le ...[text shortened]... h's fairy tales are just going to get people unnecessarily killed for little or no societal benefit.

Speaking of false choices... it's probably not possible to "control" COVID; not at this stage anyway. It's a highly infectious respiratory disease that's embedded in the population. You may be able to slow it down, but to prevent flare ups (especially as the weather cools) is probably impossible.

COVID will be controlled when the population has developed enough immunity or when we've developed good therapeutics or effective vaccines. Before that, it's impossible.

Public health professionals can't have the only say. A balance needs to be struck between the damage COVID does and the damage shutting schools and businesses does. Anthony Fauci, for example, is not qualified to do this entire balancing test himself.

@no1marauder said
sh: If you're under 70 and relatively healthy, it's exceedingly unlikely that this poses a danger to your life.

As of June 17th, about 20,000 people under the age of 65 had died from COVID in the US. https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/06/23/coronavirus-covid-deaths-us-age-race-14863

That was when the death toll was around 100,000.

Another 21,462 in the age group 65- ...[text shortened]... ould suggest that about 60,000 Americans under the age of 70 have died from COVID in about 8 months.

Okay, let's go with 60,000.

First, that includes people with serious comorbidities. If you want to let people with serious comorbidities stay home, I'm fine with that. I'm just not in favor of forcing the rest of us to also stay home.

Second, that includes outcomes from times before there was any immunity in the population. Even those of us without COVID antibodies may have been exposed to COVID at one point or another and might have built up some level of T-cell resistance. I have certainly been exposed to COVID, though thankfully, I have never been sick with the disease. It's highly likely that if I do get it, my body will have some level of resistance built up, as opposed to in March, when nobody had any COVID-specific resistance available.

Third, that includes outcomes from times before we knew how to treat the disease. Now that we have some good therapeutics and even better ones on the way (hopefully), we can expect the death risk to continue to fall.

Finally, even setting aside all of that, 60,000 deaths, while tragic, is about 1 out of every 5,000 people in that demographic. You need to balance the suffering you're imposing on the other 4,999 against the evil of the death of the 1.

I'm really not saying that COVID is not bad. It's just a matter of what we can do about it. this may sound callous, but if public health experts tell us that 50,000 children have to stay home from school to save 2 lives (or even 4 or 6), we have to seriously consider whether it's worth it. I know the analogy has been worked to death, but people die in car accidents every day too. There comes a point where the societal costs are simply too high and the burden has to shift to the individual to decide his or her own risk tolerance and act accordingly.

@no1marauder said
Why should we consider your ideas more seriously than public health professionals?

Someone walking alone anywhere can suddenly encounter another person and if either has COVID then there is a risk of spreading the disease. Wearing a mask is a minor inconvenience under the circumstances existing as compared to the possible consequences of not wearing one.

Show me one documented case of an outdoor transmission from a fleeting encounter lasting only seconds.

Edit:

The review found very few examples of outdoor transmission of COVID-19 in everyday life among c. 25,000 cases considered, suggesting a very low risk. However risk of outdoor transmission increases when the natural social distancing of everyday life is breached, and gathering density, circulation and size increases, particularly for an extended duration.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.04.20188417v2

Outdoor fleeting encounters (non-gatherings) present miniscule risk of transmission.

Edit 2: https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/health-wellness/article/3105376/why-wear-masks-outdoors-if-covid-19-mostly-transmitted

@sh76 said
https://www.who.int/bulletin/online_first/BLT.20.265892.pdf

This was originally submitted in May, before we were using convalescent plasma, Dexamethasone, mab treatments and Remdesivir (in fact, it was right in the heart of the hydroxychloroquine era).

Long story short, the paper infers a median COVID infection fatality rate of 0.23% (or about 1/15 of the scary 3.6% number ...[text shortened]... re under 70 and relatively healthy, it's exceedingly unlikely that this poses a danger to your life.

Bump.

How you feeling about your positions in this thread now, Sh?

@no1marauder said
Bump.

How you feeling about your positions in this thread now, Sh?

Better than ever.

If you mean the rise in cases, I never said there wouldn't be increased cases in the Fall. In fact, I've been assuming since May that cases would go up in the Fall. If you can show me when I said otherwise, I will be happy to retract.

In this wave, Europe is showing a CFR of about 0.75%. In the US, it's still over 1% but falling.

IFR is almost certainly below 0.4% and probably closer to 0.25. For healthy people under 70 it's well below 0.1%.

I never said that COVID is not a problem. My entire point is that it's not a threat to the lives of most people and that before we destroy people's businesses and children's education, we need to realize and consider that.

Edit: The 0.75% CFR in Europe courtesy of Michael Levitt.