https://www.dailywire.com/news/fatality-rate-plunges-as-cdc-director-says-covid-cases-likely-10x-higher/?fbclid=IwAR2tR-gktQmDyVb8pV5LKZHV0on4hSCGYRubsqKc2TnwLVI1komAUzC1ef0

Looks like's saying ten times more people have or had it than they thought! That makes it ten times less lethal!

Bad news, looks like they were looking at very flawed models, so the new one just reflects more of the current thinking, if anything it's higher than what they'd said it was likely at earlier.

In any event, nobody can seriously say it has a 5% death rate at this point. Looks like .25-.5% at the very most. Meaning, you have a 99.75% to 99.5% chance of survival plus all those terrible stories about people with damage to their lungs, that would also be ten times less likely to happen as well.

Great news, I'm glad to see this getting out.

Okay, the fatality rates are one-tenth of what they were previously thought to be -- but that actually doesn't change the death toll by one single human life. America has still lost 130,000 people to this horror and rates are spiking in many populous states. The world has lost 512,000 people total.

You can argue that you're extremely unlikely to die if you get this based on the new information, but you can also flip it and see this virus is spreading VASTLY more than was previously thought, and everyone is ten times as likely to get it as we previously thought. And people are still dying from it. Half a million people worldwide is hardly a figure to sneeze at, especially as this is long from over.

I know you don't think that's important, Enigma, because you love to point how the fatalities are centered on the old and the unhealthy. But some of us can sense some actual human tragedy in those hundreds of thousands of lives lost, even though the majority of them were nearing their natural end. But if your grandmother or grandfather was killed by the coronavirus when they might've gone on to enjoy five or ten more years spending time with their children and their grandchildren, you might've mustered a more human response. (Shrugs.) But who knows?

Meanwhile you're giddy with delight to learn that ten times more people have had the virus than was previously suspected?!? Oh yeah, because this tithes the fatality rate. Are you really that sentimental about statistics? Presumably you see this as aiding Trump in his re-election? (Your use of Trump's favorite word "bigly" in your header was the giveaway.)

To each his own.

Yes, it's great news that ten times more people had it. That means ten times more people won't get it down the line, it means we're ten times closer to Herd Immunity (which kicks in once roughly 60% of the population get it) and it means ten times as many people as we thought had very mild symptoms.

That is AMAZING news. It's incredible. It's wonderful, even.

The virus is less deadly, the people who haven't gotten it yet are ten times less likely to die, they are ten times less likely to have bad symptoms, they are ten times more likely to have very mild symptoms that others mistook for allergies or a cold and you are ten times less likely to need ER or ventilator or suffer long term damage.

That is truly wonderful news, sorry you think it's not. I guess you prefer is ten times more people die, but not me. I want people to survive.

I mean, it does kind of make sense.

The death rate among Native Americans is roughly 500% that of whites, blacks and Hispanics are also way, way higher. We know how you feel about brown and black people, you hate them and don't think they matter, so I guess in your eyes maybe it is better if it's more deadly, but not mine. I don't want people to suffer or die, especially not just because of their ethnicity.

It's crazy how all of a sudden you care about 500,00 deaths when you laughed about over a million people dying in Iraq alone in the Joe Biden approved Iraq War. How inconsistent, unlike me - I am sad about all the deaths and don't pretend brown people being bombed 'don't count' like a racist would.

Okay, in fairness, you point to a couple advantages to this news I hadn't realized.

But putting your psychotic delusions about me being a racist aside, Enigmahood, your man TRUMP sure doesn't give a fuck if a lot of black and brown lives are lost to COVID. That was a huge factor in his decision to re-open the American economy after a couple months of shutdown. It's been reported that he literally came to this decision shortly after perusing statistics that told him a wildly disproportionate chunk of the deaths were happening to African-Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans -- and whites were faring much, much better, especially the wealthier ones. Of course, The Trumpus was also eyeing November as well in deciding to gamble with American lives... and he didn't do so all that successfully. Look at the spiking rates in Florida, California, Texas, and Arizona, which are all shutting back down after opening up relatively early. I guess maybe these populous states fall under the umbrella of "incompletent places like New York" you love to grouse about because you have claimed in other posts things are going great with virus currently, except in the "incompetent places." But there are an awful lot of both Native Americans and Hispanics in the southwestern states, especially Arizona, which houses many reservations, including the bulk of the Navajo Nation. I guess you don't give a fuck about those brown lives though, huh?

That last point isn't a serious argument or allegation against you. It's a joke. I'm just using the same "logic" (or opposite thereof) you do when accusing me of racism.

You should be more concerned with the spikes in cases in the states who were lax on their orders early on. These are the ones we're seeing the greatest increase in cases.

The fatality rate plunged because the epicenter of the disease was in the tri-state area, who now have it under control because people have been doing what they need to do. Even now they are wearing masks. In our state, we have under 100 hospitalizations now but everyone, at every place of business, is wearing a mask and probably will until there is a vaccine.

The fact that millions more Americans may have been infected shouldn't be a comfort, but a fear at this point, since the Independence Day weekend is coming up and we're going to see a huge increase because of this.

Just a correction, millions more Americans were infected AND recovered not that there are ten times more out there now. If anything with more testing, that might be spiking things. Rather the perception.

As we're learning more, it seems like a very good chunk of people are mild or even asymptomatic, which is why so many flew under the radar. Not discounting the serious cases, of course. From what I've seen personally, it's a very weird random thing, people can be fine one moment and then get really bad in short order.

That infection doesn't stop in one point in time is the problem.

The infection mortality rate has been estimated at 1-3% from the start, and this has not changed. In March, they thought it was 3%; now it is thought to be more like 1%. (History: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-rate/) The 5% estimate referenced in the article is likely the case fatality rate, which is not the same thing at all. Here's a helpful explanation of the difference. https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid#the-case-fatality-rate

It is now thought that, not only is the actual number of infections vastly higher than previous believed, but also that the death count is ALSO higher than previously thought. That latter idea might seem surprising, but there are lots of reasons the data isn't perfect. Coroners miscount because the cause of death is sometimes misdiagnosed or testing is delayed due to triaging testing kits; sometimes diagnosis is masked by pre-existing conditions; the hospitals are swamped because of health care austerity; etc. Also keeping in mind that these are estimates, albeit ones that are informed.

I wish and HOPE that is the case. But it could very well end up like the flu where it begins to change and you need a different vaccine each year and the doctors guessing which one is sort of like playing the shell game.

There's still a LOT of information we don't have on the immunity front.

There is still a lot of information we don't have on a lot of fronts, well said.

One thing on viral mutations, it's actually not as bad or dangerous as it could be. Having one strain of a virus might not offer total immunity to another but often it does help with recovery and keep the symptoms down. With Covid, that's pretty essential to the whole thing, just keeping it from tipping over into a situation where it's deadly.

Also with mutations, as they mutate you can expect it to be less deadly. I don't want to get into a Religious creationism/evolution debate, so if someone is into creationism, fine but for this example just pretend like evolution works on a micro level (that at least has been shown many times in labs so even if you deny it as a whole, that much is hard to deny).

That disclaimer out of the way, it is not in any virus' best interest to kill it's host. All the most deadly viruses, they don't spread nearly as much. They kill their host too quickly. It's in any virus' best interest to sicken their host, get them coughing or spreading it and having them be sick as long as they can to get them spreading it the most. If they quickly kill their host, that's not in the virus' evolutionary programmed best interests.

With covid, and really pretty much any other virus, as it mutates the more successful mutations will be the ones that spread it better. Which means, less likely to outright kill anyone and less deadly.

So we might be dealing with a second wave or honestly there could be a Covid season like the flu from here on out and even if they come up with a vaccine, if it's mutating constantly that vaccine might not be overly effective. That's the bad news.

The good news is, as it mutates we're likely to see it decrease in lethality and over time as more and more people get various strains, more people will have partial or full immunity to it. Next season, it could very well be flu-level.

Btw, an earlier comment said the mortality rate was 1-3%. The link I posted was from the CDC, it was just a few days old. You might have been linking or looking at some older estimates, those have been thoroughly disproved by now. It's 0.25% to 0.5% by the CDC's estimates which is roughly 2.5 to 5 times more lethal than an average flu (and btw the flu kills a lot of people every year, so not saying it's nothing)

The links were provided for historical and analytical context, especially addressing the 5% statistic, which, as I said, was likely an estimate of the crude mortality rate.

You're right that the CDC is making some pretty lowball estimates over the past few weeks, but reasonable people disagree. Modeling is tricky, the data is incomplete, the CDC's estimates have been subjected to some sharp criticism. Here's a recent take from Nature, a highly reputable journal, whose author estimates 0.5-1%: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01738-2


It is true from a certain perspective that the most deadly viruses overall are the ones which only kill over time and not all at once, because if they led to instantaneous death then the virus itself would flame out. People need to survive in order to be vectors.


It is quite a stretch to start from talking about selection effects and end up with these conclusions about mutation. The points about survival of the fittest (putting aside the false anthropomorphization) do not entail that the virus will mutate to be less deadly. Instead, it means that the virus has to make a tradeoff with its environment, such that an instakill, "Captain Trips" style virus will not be evolutionarily successful, as opposed to a slow burn virus that reliably kills or maims a substantial proportion of the population.

It's especially troubling in this case because we know that this virus has many of the hallmarks of a blood disease. We don't know what its long-term or cumulative effects are. A yearly flu doesn't usually lead to chronic illness, but this one has given people nerve damage and blood clotting, respiratory distress, strokes.

Just a little something; I work at a research hospital, my boss (a medical doctor for 30+ years, a professor at a top Uni and in a research team working on a vaccine) just told me "1 in 20 people don't produce antibodies and a large number of people that do, the antibodies don't work due to the nature of the virus".
Sorry, but there will be no "herd immunity" in the same way you can get influenza more than once. Constant yearly vaccines will be needed to stem the flow of this virus each year, just like 'flu.

This is not a horserace. For that reason, this thread is intrinsically gross.

It also won't age well.

See you in two weeks.

No, a disease thought to have a 1-3% mortality (or as ludicrously high as 5% by some very misinformed people) being reevaluated and now being considered 0.25% to 0.05% mortality is a very good thing.

I'm sorry you seem to want people to die. I guess dead bodies somehow serves your political motivations of something odd, but some of us don't want people to die from this and are happy when we learn more about this novel disease that makes it less dangerous than we'd previously thought.