{"id":163464,"date":"2020-06-29T12:00:31","date_gmt":"2020-06-29T11:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=163464"},"modified":"2020-12-02T10:07:15","modified_gmt":"2020-12-02T10:07:15","slug":"covid-19-lethality-how-not-to-do-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/06\/covid-19-lethality-how-not-to-do-it\/","title":{"rendered":"COVID-19 Lethality: How Not to Do It"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
Covid deaths in Sweden: Prediction by Imperial College London model (no measures and moderate measures) versus reality without lockdown (HTY\/FOHM).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

23 Jun 2020 – <\/em>A German medical professor claims the Covid-19 infection fatality rate (IFR) is \u201cfive to ten times higher\u201d<\/a> than the IFR of seasonal influenza. But he makes two classic mistakes.<\/p>\n

He first compares the seasonal influenza IFR (up to 0.1%) to early model predictions of the Covid19 IFR. But these early model predictions turned out to be completely unrealistic<\/a> (see above). Besides, even the US CDC in May reduced its (still conservative) best-estimate Covid IFR to just 0.26%<\/a>.<\/p>\n

He then claims antibody studies in Brazil and Spain showed an IFR of 1% or more. But they didn\u2019t: the professor confuses the so-called \u201ccrude IFR\u201d<\/strong> (deaths divided by infections in a study group) with the population-based IFR<\/strong>, which is adjusted for the age and risk profile of a population.<\/p>\n

This distinction is crucial, as Covid-19 mostly affects elderly high risk groups: in fact, 40% to 80% of \u201cCovid-related\u201d deaths occurred in nursing homes<\/a>. But if ten of one hundred nursing patients die, this doesn\u2019t mean 10% of the whole population will die.<\/p>\n

As an example, the famous Diamond Princess<\/strong> cruise ship with its mostly elderly passengers had a crude IFR of about 1.5%. Based on this value, Stanford professor John Ioannidis, already in March, calculated a population-based Covid IFR of about 0.13%<\/a> for the US society as a whole.<\/p>\n

The German professor does mention the German antibody study of the Gangelt hotspot which showed a population-based IFR of 0.36%. The professor doesn\u2019t mention, however, that this was an upper bound<\/a>: the adjusted IFR was 0.27% and the median age of death was 81 years.<\/p>\n

Most antibody studies showed a population-based IFR between 0.1% and 0.3%<\/a>, which is comparable to a severe influenza. In fact, for people under 50, the Covid19 IFR is rather lower<\/em> than for influenza. A few hotspots did show locally higher IFRs of up to 0.7%, but these places usually were affected by a collapse in elderly care due to infections or panic.<\/p>\n

More recently, immunological research has revealed that serological (i.e. blood) antibody studies detect at most 20% of infections<\/a>, as most people neutralize the coronavirus with their mucosal or cellular immune system without even needing to develop (permanent) antibodies in the blood.<\/p>\n

This means the real Covid19 IFR may drop well below 0.1%<\/strong> and thus into the range of seasonal influenza. It also means Covid19 \u201cimmunity passports\u201d and mandatory vaccines won\u2019t work. And it explains why even hotspots like NYC and Stockholm found antibody values no higher than 20%.<\/p>\n

Despite its rather low lethality (IFR), mortality <\/strong> can still reach locally and temporarily very high levels if the coronavirus is spreading fast and manages to infect high risk groups in care homes and hospitals, as indeed happened in many hotspots like northern Italy or eastern France.<\/p>\n

But even so, cumulative all-cause mortality<\/strong> since the beginning of the year even in hard-hit countries like the US and the UK or in Sweden (without a lockdown) remained in the range of a strong influenza season<\/a>. Countries like Germany and Switzerland saw a mild \u201cinfluenza season\u201d.<\/p>\n

The following chart shows that global Covid-19 mortality is comparable to the notorious Swine Flu \u201cnon-pandemic\u201d<\/a> of 2009\/10 and remains an order of magnitude below the flu pandemics of 1957 (Asian flu) and 1968 (Hong Kong flu). These were serious, but life still went on as normal<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Importantly, while these death rates are population-adjusted, they aren\u2019t even age-adjusted: the age group most affected by Covid-19 today (80+) hardly existed back in the 1950s. Hence adjusting for age would make Covid-19 look even less dramatic in comparison.<\/p>\n

In contrast, the UN warns that due to the unprecedented political response<\/strong> to Covid-19, half of the world\u2019s workers or 1.6 billion people<\/strong> are now at immediate risk of losing their livelihood<\/a>. In the US alone there are already 46 million unemployment claims<\/a>.<\/p>\n

See also<\/strong>: Facts about Covid-19<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Covid-19 death toll compared to earlier epidemics and pandemics (DB Research<\/a>)<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Swiss Policy Research, founded in 2016, is an independent, nonpartisan and nonprofit research group investigating geopolitical propaganda in Swiss and international media. SPR is composed of independent academics that<\/em> for personal and professional reasons prefer to protect their identities,<\/em> and receives no external funding; t<\/em>here are no financial sponsors or backers. <\/em>Our articles have been published or shared by numerous independent media outlets and journalists, among them Julian Assange<\/a>, and have been translated into more than two dozen languages.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/figcaption>Go to Original – swprs.org<\/a><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

23 Jun 2020 – A German medical professor claims the Covid-19 infection fatality rate is \u201cfive to ten times higher\u201d than the IFR of seasonal influenza. But he makes two classic mistakes. [Read on…]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":161314,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2236],"tags":[244,271,1879,1829,1868,530,289,744,401,710,1937,1864,1102,723,304,1447,1956,1880,1957,339,124,1836,75],"class_list":["post-163464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-covid19-coronavirus","tag-china","tag-community","tag-compassion","tag-coronavirus","tag-covid-19","tag-cuba","tag-economy","tag-empathy","tag-environment","tag-health","tag-lockdown","tag-pandemic","tag-public-health","tag-research","tag-science","tag-science-and-medicine","tag-semen","tag-sharing","tag-sperm","tag-trade","tag-united-nations","tag-who","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163464\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/161314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}