![]() In April, I ran a series of studies, using antibody tests, to see how many people in California’s Santa Clara County, where I live, had been infected. ![]() Seroprevalence is what I worked on in the early days of the epidemic. And even antibodies fade over time, so testing for them still results in an underestimate of total infections. What we need to test for, then, are antibodies or other evidence that someone has had COVID. Someone who is infected with COVID and then clears it will be immune from it, but it won’t still be living in them. COVID, on the other hand, like other coronaviruses, doesn’t stay in the body. Anyone who has had chickenpox, for instance, still has that virus living in them-it stays in the body forever. So how do we get an accurate fatality rate? To use a technical term, we test for seroprevalence-in other words, we test to find out how many people have evidence in their bloodstream of having had COVID. Even worse, it continues to sow fear and panic, because the perception of too many people about COVID is frozen in the misleading data from March. These people weren’t identified in the early days, which resulted in a highly misleading fatality rate. But the majority of people who are infected by COVID have very mild symptoms or no symptoms at all. In March, only the small fraction of infected people who got sick and went to the hospital were identified as cases. But to obtain an accurate COVID fatality rate, the number in the denominator should be the number of people who have been infected-the number of people who have actually had the disease-rather than the number of confirmed cases. “Case fatality rate” is computed by dividing the number of deaths by the total number of confirmed cases. The reason for the highly inaccurate early estimates is simple: in early March, we were not identifying most of the people who had been infected by COVID. The COVID fatality rate is much closer to 0.2 or 0.3 percent. In other words, when the World Health Organization said back in early March that three percent of people who get COVID die from it, they were wrong by at least one order of magnitude. Compare that to today, when the fatality rate of COVID is known to be less than one half of one percent. was roughly three percent-nearly three out of every hundred people who were identified as “cases” of COVID in early March died from it. In early March, the case fatality rate in the U.S. We have heard much this year about the “case fatality rate” of COVID. A lot of fear and confusion has resulted from failing to understand the difference. In discussing the deadliness of COVID, we need to distinguish COVID cases from COVID infections. ![]() ![]() My goal today is, first, to present the facts about how deadly COVID-19 actually is second, to present the facts about who is at risk from COVID third, to present some facts about how deadly the widespread lockdowns have been and fourth, to recommend a shift in public policy. The following is adapted from a panel presentation on October 9, 2020, in Omaha, Nebraska, at a Hillsdale College Free Market Forum. ![]()
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