Day: April 2, 2020

This post appeared first on Daily Reckoning . “Failure to comply with this order will result in a $5,000 fine and up to one year in prison…” We woke this morning to this menacing threat. It came issuing from the loudspeaker of a prowling police cruiser.

Source: Urgent Questions

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The Case of the Diamond Princess

Dr. Ioannidis cites the case of the cruise ship Diamond Princess:

Projecting the Diamond Princess mortality rate onto the age structure of the U.S. population, the death rate among people infected with COVID-19 would be 0.125%. But since this estimate is based on extremely thin data — there were just seven deaths among the 700 infected passengers and crew — the real death rate could stretch from five times lower (0.025%) to five times higher (0.625%). It is also possible that some of the passengers who were infected might die later, and that tourists may have different frequencies of chronic diseases — a risk factor for worse outcomes with SARS-CoV-2 infection — than the general population. Adding these extra sources of uncertainty, reasonable estimates for the case fatality ratio in the general U.S. population vary from 0.05–1%.

That huge range markedly affects how severe the pandemic is and what should be done. A populationwide case fatality rate of 0.05% is lower than seasonal influenza. If that is the true rate, locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational. It’s like an elephant being attacked by a house cat. Frustrated and trying to avoid the cat, the elephant accidentally jumps off a cliff and dies…

If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths. This sounds like a huge number, but it is buried within the noise of the estimate of deaths from “influenza-like illness.” If we had not known about a new virus out there and had not checked individuals with PCR tests, the number of total deaths due to “influenza-like illness” would not seem unusual this year.

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Perhaps “We, The Sheeple” are being herded to the pens for loading on the trains to the camps.

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