Burying the lede
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Robert Moses’ would have loved the Kung Flu shutdown
The press and hysterics, but then, i repeat myself, are screaming that this means we’re killing prisoners, and of course, are using these numbers as “proof” that we need more testing before we’re released from home confinement, but they’re deliberately missing the point: the models have hugely overstated the death rate of this flu.
“As mass coronavirus testing expands in prisons, large numbers of inmates are showing no symptoms. In four state prison systems — Arkansas, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia — 96% of 3,277 inmates who tested positive for the coronavirus were asymptomatic, according to interviews with officials and records reviewed by Reuters.
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After a recent spike in cases at the Neuse Correctional Institution in Goldsboro, North Carolina, state correctional officials tested all 723 prisoners last week. Of the 444 who were infected by the virus, 98% were asymptomatic, the state’s department of public safety said. …Similarly, mass testing at two Arkansas prisons — the Cummins Unit in the city of Grady and the Community Correction Center in the state capital Little Rock — found 751 infected inmates, almost all of them asymptomatic, the state corrections department said.
The implication, of course, is that vastly more Americans have had the virus than has been believed. That would be great news, because it means that 1) the disease is far less lethal than was once feared, almost certainly in the range of a seasonal flu virus, and 2) we are farther down the road to herd immunity than has been believed.
For reasons I can’t explain, those commenting on the Reuters story don’t see the fact that the virus produces no illness in the overwhelming majority of people it infects as good news:
“Prison agencies are almost certainly vastly undercounting the number of COVID cases among incarcerated persons,” said Michele Deitch, a corrections specialist and senior lecturer at the University of Texas. “Just as the experts are telling us in our free-world communities, the only way to get ahead of this outbreak is through mass testing.”
What, exactly, will testing prove? A negative test conducted at, say, a doctor’s office means nothing: the patient could stop at a supermarket on his way home from the doctor’s and get infected by a fellow shopper. And positive tests of asymptomatic people will merely demonstrate what’s already known: this is a false panic, whipped up by “health experts” who are neither.
Appearing on Justice with Judge Jeanine on Saturday night, Dr. Debora Birx admitted something that anyone paying attention to the coronavirus pandemic has known for some time now. “I think we underestimated very early on the number of asymptomatic cases,” Dr. Birx said. “And I think we’re really beginning to understand there are people that get infected that those symptoms are so low-grade that they don’t even know that they’re infected.”
The question, of course, is how much? Well, we have a rough idea already.
But, first, let’s go back to what experts said originally. Back in March, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated a 3.4 percent fatality rate and Dr. Anthony Fauci estimated that the fatality rate of the coronavirus was about 2 percent. “If you look at the cases that have come to the attention of the medical authorities in China, and you just do the math, the math is about 2%.”
Some of us will remember [ but not the press, which savaged him for saying so - ED] how President Trump endured a lot of criticism for saying that he had a “hunch” that the WHO’s estimate was too high and that the fatality rate of the coronavirus might actually be below 1 percent. “Well, I think the 3.4 percent is really a false number. Now, and this is just my hunch, and — but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this. Because a lot of people will have this and it’s very mild. They’ll get better very rapidly. They don’t even see a doctor. They don’t even call a doctor,” Trump said. “I think that that number is very high. I think the number, personally, I would say the number is way under 1 percent.”
There have actually been at least five studies that found the coronavirus has a fatality rate of less than one percent, just like Trump said.
None of these studies were perfect. Some are large, some are small. As you’ll see, they came up with a range of fatality rates, but considering our country was shut down over the belief that the coronavirus had a CFR of 2% to 3.4% and all of these studies suggest the actual CFR is under 1 percent, it makes you wonder why the country was shut down.
A better, saner approach might be to protect the vulnerable, like nursing home patients and let the rest of the country go back to work so they can earn the money that pays the taxes that pay for health care in the first place.
