The sky is not falling....
Multiple Studies Suggest COVID-19 Mortality Rate May Be Lower Than Expected
Published: May 07, 2020 By Gail Dutton
As the mortality figures for COVID-19 continued to rise, people are wondering where they will stop. The actual death toll for COVID-19 won’t be calculable for some time, but there are early indications that it may be significantly lower than calculations of deaths per confirmed cases lead one to believe.
As an
article in Lancet Infectious Diseases pointed out, calculating mortality rates based on the number of deaths divided by the number of confirmed cases of infection is not representative of the actual death rate. There are two issues, the authors said. First, the denominator should be the number of people who were infected at the same time as those who died. The second issue is that many people experienced very mild symptoms and so did not seek medical treatment and were not included in the calculation.
To get to the bottom of this, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched a
10,000 person study in mid-April. It aims to determine how many adults in the U.S. who do not have a confirmed diagnosis of COVID-19 who have antibodies against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The results of this serosurvey will shed light on the spread of this virus throughout the U.S. and on which populations and communities are most affected.
“An antibody test is looking back into the immune system’s history with a rear-view mirror,” said Matthew J. Memoli, M.D., M.S., principal investigator of the study and director of NIAID’s Laboratory of Infectious Diseases Clinical Studies Unit. “By analyzing an individual’s blood, we can determine if that person has encountered SARS-CoV-2 previously.”
Results from the NIH study ought to settle the controversy swirling around other similar studies.....
....
There are two possible inferences from all of these studies.
One possibility is that academics from our leading institutions – or the tests they employed – are error-prone. Debates over methodology are ongoing, and questions swirl around error rates for tests that as yet are approved only under the FDA’s emergency use authorization.
Alternatively, these results may indicate the deadly COVID-19 pandemic – with mortality rates generally under 1% – is no more deadly than the seasonal influenza. If that is true, the near-global stay-at-home mandates could have been an overreaction.
entire article:
The actual death toll for COVID-19 won’t be calculable for some time, but there are early indications that it may be significantly lower than calculations of deaths per confirmed cases lead one to believe.
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