93% of the deaths were of people over 55
97% over 45
99% over 35
And 160 people under 25 died, they say from COVID.
During the period where 107,000 or so people died from COVID, 1.2 million Americans died of all causes, or a bit more than 10x that number.
The mortality rate is still a closely guarded government secret–I’m half kidding, but only half–but according to the guy at Stanford who called this thing, in my view, more or less right from the very beginning, and who is certainly qualified to comment, the true death rate among those infected is “between 0.02%-0.4%, far lower than the 1%-and-way-up numbers that were once bandied about – and much closer to the 0.1% death rate of the flu.”
So .4 is on the high side. So if you are a 30 year old person in reasonably good health, and someone injects you with COVID-19, your risk of dying is .4 on the high side, multiplied by your demographic share of those deaths, which is 1%, multiplied by .66 because about a third of people have natural immunity for some reason. Actually, I can’t find that study at the moment, so let’s stick with the original math: .004 (four people in a thousand) multiplied by .01 (one person in a hundred). I can do that in my head. .00004. 4 people in a hundred thousand. If that is right by other math is wrong.
But this math is if you are already infected. Most people walking just about every street on the planet are not infected. So your chance of being EXPOSED to the disease in the first place is quite small. And then there is the chance that you will actually GET it.
Something around one in a million to one in ten million seems to be in the neighborhood. The risk is so close to zero, and so much lower than risks we all take for granted every day–the risks of obesity for example and driving–that it should not be a factor for anyone under 55 at all.
I am reminded again of the Bush 1% doctrine, which was supposedly based on a quote from Dick Cheney: If there’s a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It’s not about our analysis … It’s about our response.
Or to quote Ronin, when there’s any doubt, there is no doubt.
This is the level of panic and supposed care going on. But what is missing in all this is the mass famines looming on the horizon from the disruptions in the food chain, mass drug overdoses and suicides and mental illnesses, disease fatalities that would not have been fatal if we hadn’t paralyzed our healthcare system for no reason, the excess mortality from increases in unemployment, Etc.
The whole thing is a cluster fuck. If I might retool an old metaphor, it is literally like investing all your time fixing a window while your building is on fire. Saving 1 life and losing 5 because of how you saved the one life is stupid. And it’s not even clear that one life was saved.
If we had done nothing more than ask everyone older than 55 to wear masks, and to shop at designated times at their local stores, and for people in poor health to do their best to stay home and not socialize, far fewer people would have died. Cuomo and others in effect murdered tens of thousands of people with stupid policy.