Stanford University researcher Dr. John Ioannidis presented his findings from a recent coronavirus study in Santa Clara, California.
The research project looked at 3,300 people in Santa Clara County in California. The Stanford study revealed that 2.5% to 4.2% of people tested for COVID-19 were positive for antibodies.
The data indicates that there are between 50 to 80-fold more infections in the general population than confirmed cases.
In describing his findings Dr. Ioannidis concluded that the coronavirus has an infection fatality rate that is in the same ballpark as seasonal influenza. Dr. Ioannidis added, “It suggests that even though this is a very serious problem, we should not fear. It suggests that we have solid ground to have optimism about the possibility of eventually opening our society and gaining back our lives.”
Dr. Andrew Bostom also published a report Sunday on the COVID19 lethality.
Dr. Boston also says today’s coronavirus may be no worse than the 1957-1958 H2N2 flu pandemic that killed over 100,000 Americans.
One of the most striking features of covid19 disease is its overwhelmingly disproportionate lethality in those ? 65 years old, vs. those < 65. Stanford University Prevention Research Center’s Dr. John Ioannides, and colleagues, analyzed covid19 mortality data as of April 4, 2020 from European countries and U.S. states, or major cities, with at least 250 covid19 deaths (total deaths included=25,692). An analysis pooling data from New York City, Italy, and the Netherlands, for example, revealed that only 0.9% of all deaths occurred in those < 65, without known underlying co-morbidities. Given these findings and the more modest overall U.S. covid19 CFR based upon realistic population infection estimates (i.e., 0.13%), the CFR should be considerably lower still, in those < 65 years of age.
Ioannides et al proffered (on April 8, 2020) these increasingly evidence-validated, eminently rational recommendations for managing the covid19 pandemic going forward:
“If larger scale studies further document that the infection is very common and infection fatality rate is modest across the general population, the finding of very low risk in the vast majority of the general population has major implications for strategic next steps in managing the COVID-19 pandemic. Tailored measures that maintain social life and the economy functional to avoid potentially even deaths from socioeconomic disruption plus effective protection of select high-risk individuals may be a sensible option.”
Unaccompanied by mass economic lockdowns, the 1957-58 H2N2 influenza A pandemic—equal, at least, in virulence and lethality to the current covid19 pandemic—had only a negligible effect on the U.S. GDP, within the range of ordinary economic variability.
The more we know the more it looks like the coronavirus from 2020 may be no worse than the
Fatalities now total 4,753 in New Jersey, which has the second highest infection rate after New York. New Jersey reported 3,643 additional cases, for a total of 92,387.
NY, NJ and CT have more than one half the deaths in the US from the Corona-virus.
@ Shmuel Mohalever:
It’s going to be even crazier than you think:
“Coronavirus has mutated into at least 30 different strains, Chinese study finds”
https://nypost.com/2020/04/21/coronavirus-has-mutated-into-at-least-30-different-strains-study/
Ted, please detrash my comment, made just now, about the CDC’s unrealistic prediction of an extremely severe flu season and many COVID-19 deaths beginning this coming September.
“A second coronavirus outbreak could emerge this winter in conjunction with the flu season to make for an even more dire health crisis, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told The Washington Post in an interview.
“There’s a possibility that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through,” CDC Director Robert Redfield said in a story published Tuesday. “And when I’ve said this to others, they kind of put their head back, they don’t understand what I mean.”
“We’re going to have the flu epidemic and the coronavirus epidemic at the same time,” he added, predicting a dual assault on the health care system.
While there are shots to help prevent the flue and drugs to help treat it — unlike with the novel coronavirus, which still has no approved treatment or vaccine — it remains a deadly infection.
The flu season has been underway since September, and while flu activity now is considered low, the season has seen a high number of hospitalizations and infections, killing at least 168 children, according to the CDC. Last year, the flu killed at least 34,200 Americans, according to the CDC, and made an estimated 35.5 million people sick.
To have both the flu and the coronavirus circulating at the same time could overwhelm hospitals and doctors’ offices that are already stretched thin in a bad flu season.” Quoted from the CDC website. Strange, when several disease-control experts, including those at Washington State University, are predicting total U.S. COVID-19 deaths will amount to 61,000. That is not consistent with a high death toll during the next flu season (2020-21. Who has made even more dire predictions for the next two years. Again, without any evidence.
Of 397 people tested, 146 — or 36% — came up positive, BHCHP President Dr. Jim O’Connell says. But another finding jumped out at clinicians.
“Every one of these folks were asymptomatic. None of them had a fever, and none of them reported symptoms,” O’Connell explains. “So the usual screening tool we had been using in order to see who should be tested turned out to be essentially useless for us. So this was stunning to us. We were not expecting that.”
This is from an article on a Boston radio station site about a test that was run on all the residents of a homeless shelter in that city. None of the residents had COVID-19. But 36% were “asymptomatic.” But did Boston’s “health” authorities find this encouraging? By no means. Instead, they expressed concern about the “spread of asymptomatic cases in the homeless population.” Immediately, they “segregated” the asymtomatic individuals who tested positive for the virus from the the asymtomatic people from those who were asymptomatic and did not test positive for the virus. As any child would immediately realize, when you segregate people with some kind of potentially disease-causing microbe(“cootie” as kids call them) in their bodies, and keep them all in close proximity to each other, the liklihood that some of them will get sick increases.
So far, though, only one of these segregated “homeless” people has developed “mild cold symptoms.”
When “homeless people,” or “street people,” vagrants” “bums” and “derelicts,” as we used to call them in less PC times, who have access to fresh air and sunshine, and who are allowed to freely mingle with each other, are less likely to get sick with “COVID-19” then middle class people who “play by the rules” and are hunkered down in “isolation” in their own homes, one would think that the “health” authorities would rethink the way they are compelling the people to behave during the “pandemic.” Regrettably, these authorities haven’t rethought anything, and are continuing to enforce their deadly rules, even on a small group of people who have managed to avoid getting sick by ignoring them. What utter madness.
@ deanblake:
You may be perfectly right. However, the powers that be are using the virus for political purposes. They wanted to try a lockdown, and they did.
At first, the media published stuff to get everybody scared into accepting a lockdown, now they publish stuff to get everybody ready to lift the lockdown.
Most of these measures are totally senseless.
This is just a test case. The dates are absolutely arbitrary, the same as their “models”.
Illogical. The cost of C-19 ventilation ICU treatment for 14 days is much greater than any available treatment for influenza.
2d: influenza doesn’t invade the brain, C-19 apparent does. The immune response causes inflammation leading to brain bleeds.
3d: C-19 seems to settle into the lower lungs making it both a chronic infection and the carrier a new ‘typhoid Mary’ continuing the epidemic until their death – a new way for older people to die from pneumonia.
Each new disease has its own characteristics and shouldn’t be compared for purposes of denigrating the mortality of the threat.
No worse? as long as you are not one of dead!!!