The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) announced that COVID-19’s fatality rate dropped 30% since April.
But yet we need to cancel Thanksgiving and Christmas.
From Reuters:
In the United States, COVID-19 now kills about 0.6% of people infected with the virus, compared with around 0.9% early in the pandemic, IHME Director Dr. Christopher Murray told Reuters.
He said statistics reflect that doctors have figured out better ways to care for patients, including the use of blood thinners and oxygen support. Effective treatments, such as the generic steroid dexamethasone, have also been identified.
Experts have struggled to accurately measure a crucial metric in the pandemic: the fatality rate, or percentage of people infected with the pathogen who are likely to die. The difficulty is exacerbated by the fact that many people who become infected do not experience symptoms and are never identified.
Wait one: 99.4% of the people that get the Wuhan V will survive? And the Biden team is already planning on locking down the country for a sickness that is less likely to kill you than walking late at night in Democrat-Controlled city?
Bravo Democrats, you voted well.
The place I work has long had random drug testing. Fail it, get fired, with one exception in about 30 years. Refuse it, counts as a fail, get fired. Show up more than 2 hours after getting the call, counts as a fail, etc cetera. Not uncommon in the industry.
Now they’re instituting mandatory COVID testing. And talking about placing restrictions on gathering sizes – including in one’s own home – that employees can attend.
This is not a good direction to be headed in.
As I saw it out elsewhere (and here), and how I’ve been describing this in conversation, the first lockdown and riots didn’t starve enough of the Kulaks into submission. If your business or employer didn’t succumb to the first round of lockdowns, they’ll make sure you come crawling to daddy government to save you after the second.
How much of the decrease is attributable to Cuomo killing off vulnerable populations before we figured out these effective treatments?
On thing all these reports fail to note is that the mortality rate is for *known cases*. As this report acknowledges there is an unknown number of asymptomatic carriers that push the true mortality rate even lower than what is measured. Depending on how widespread these carriers are we could be off the true mortality rate by orders of magnitude.
Odds are nearly everyone has been exposed at this point. Not every exposure results in a full blown infection, which is why it’s such a nothing burger. Last I heard upwards of 80% of people fall into this category, and not all of the remaining are seriously ill of course. So yea, we blew up our economy over a cold basically.
Available data suggests the known cases amount to perhaps 10 percent of the total cases. One consequence is that it’s worth testing for antibodies before administering a vaccine when it appears, because about 1 in 3 people are likely to have the antibodies already and have no need for a vaccine.