A textbook example of contempt for the intelligence of the American public has emerged in a media attempt to make Trump look wrong, when he is actually right. A Yahoo News headline reads: “White House defends Trump’s claim that 99 percent of COVID-19 cases are ‘harmless’ with chart showing 5 percent are fatal.”
The article refers to Trumps remark over the weekend that “99 percent” of U.S. coronavirus cases are “totally harmless,” a correct appraisal of the CDC’s latest overall infection fatality rate which includes all infections, whether they are symptomatic or asymptomatic, diagnosed or undiagnosed. The CDC now estimates that over 99.7% of people infected with COVID will recover. Most will never even know they had it.
The CDC estimated survival rate is now over 99.7% of all cases, both confirmed and unconfirmed. The number touted by the media to contradict Trump’s claim is the 5% of confirmed, diagnosed cases who die, which does not take into account the vast number of COVID infections which show no symptoms or show mild symptoms, after which the infected person’s immune systems builds antibodies on its own.
The widely accepted total infection mortality rate for common flu is .1%. The CDC infection mortality rate estimate for COVID is now .25 to .3 percent.
The mortality rate of the 1967 Hong Kong Flu Pandemic was .5% The mortality rate of the 1957 H2N2 Asian Flu was .7%.
The Yahoo News headline, which appears on millions of browsers around the world as a part of Yahoo’s search engine, begins:
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany came to her press briefing on Monday prepared to defend President Trump’s claim over the weekend that “99 percent” of U.S. coronavirus cases are “totally harmless” with two charts illustrating the country’s COVID-19 death rate.
But McEnany’s slides showed a case fatality rate — the percentage of confirmed cases that result in death — of 4.6 percent, not the 1 percent implied by Trump.
But the 4.6 percent is an entirely different measure, as is comparing apples to oranges. The 4.6% deaths is for only diagnosed, confirmed cases. Many times more cases are asymptomatic and never confirmed or diagnosed. Adding these to confirmed cases gives the true mortality rate of the virus. Typically the total is referred to as infections.
Those most at risk of death, as with influenza, are frail elderly, mostly in nursing homes, and people with serious co-morbidities, the primary one of which is morbid obesity. These are people who are roughy 80 to 100 pounds overweight, and have trouble breathing or walking.
The estimated total infection fatality rate of COVID – all diagnosed and undiagnosed cases, has been in steady decline since present lockdown policies began to be announced in March, as more studies show that the great majority of infections are asymptomatic or show only mild symptoms.
Media reporting on the coronavirus, in fact, seems to have devolved into a juvenile press corp keen for the next opportunity to do a “gotcha” of Trump on an issue which has resulted in millions of Americans out of work, and facing life-changing decisions. Another glaring omission in reporting is the context of pandemics in recent decades which never resulted in the barest whisper of shutdowns, but which in per capita terms, took more lives that the present COVID. This is the case with both the 1957 and 1968 flu pandemics, which most people have never even heard of.
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