People’s lives all over the world are on hold because of a perceived threat from a virus called COVID-19.  So is the economy.  Millions of people all over the world have lost their jobs, their security, their livelihoods, etc. because of intense government lockdowns to combat the spread of a virus we know little about.  The effect of this will be devastating for millions of people for potentially years to come and will completely change the face of the world as we know it.  A majority of the media has been pushing fear more than facts.  I find very little published data in the mainstream news articles.  Mostly articles basically scaring us to believe that if we don’t lock down immediately we are going to get sick and potentially die.  So therefor in a time like this it is of the upmost importance to have actual scientific facts published about COVID-19 instead of nonstop media bombardment of what we fear it might be.  Here’s what we do know. The following is a quote from the CDC website sourced below.

"The complete clinical picture with regard to COVID-19 is not fully known. Reported illnesses have ranged from very mild (including some with no reported symptoms) to severe, including illness resulting in death. While information so far suggests that most COVID-19 illness is mild, a reportexternal icon out of China suggests serious illness occurs in 16% of cases. Older people and people of all ages with severe chronic medical conditions — like heart disease, lung disease and diabetes, for example — seem to be at higher risk of developing serious COVID-19 illness. A CDC Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report that looked at severity of disease among COVID-19 cases in the United States by age group found that 80% of deaths were among adults 65 years and older with the highest percentage of severe outcomes occurring in people 85 years and older.” (CDC 1) 

A report labeled in the previous quote as “a reportexternal icon” (couldn’t fix it) is a medical journal study that claimed this rapidly spreading virus has caused 6.1% of the people in the study to go into critical condition with 1.4% dying.  Report source below (NEJM 2).  However, the first thing you must take note out of this is that the 1,099 people in the study were already at the hospital because they were sick enough to go to a hospital.  How many people had COVID-19 that were not sick enough to be in the hospital?  How long has COVID-19 been spreading around the earth until we noticed? Weeks? Months? Maybe years? We don’t know for sure. The answers to those questions could change everything and needs to be some of the main things we are trying to figure out before we destroy the lives of millions of people and ruin the economy worldwide. How many people are flooding the hospitals and clogging the system because they think they have COVID-19 and might just have the flu or another illness?  The test results can take days to come back and meanwhile they keep these people in the hospital clogging the system and that causes a greater issue. The issue being when someone does come into the hospital with COVID-19, then it can spread to all the people in there who are there with something else but think its COVID-19, because of the fear the media has spread.  This creates a never-ending cycle of more and more people rushing to hospitals anytime they get sick, which causes the disease that is there to spread more prevalently than it would under normal conditions.  This also affects the people in the hospital who are already there for other serious medical conditions, it could cause them to get COVID-19 on top of other medical conditions and that pushes them to their limit and they die.   It is possible that the fear of this disease is causing more problems than the disease itself left unnoticed.  

In times like this it is of the upmost importance that we base our decisions on facts not fear.  As of March 17th, In Italy 99% of the people who died from COVID-19 had other illness (BB 3).  48.5% of them had 3 or more illnesses. A majority of them were over 65 years old.  How do we know for a fact that it was COVID-19 that killed them and not their other illnesses?  As of writing this there’s been 720,000 cases and 33,906 deaths from COVID-19.  So we know for a fact that at least 33,906 people who died had COVID-19 at the time of death along with most of them having other illness as well. Based on the Italian data being effective on a bigger scale that means about 48.5% of these people had 3 or more illness at the time of death.  Was it truly COVID-19 that killed them?  Do we know that as a Fact? The answer still is that we don’t know. 

Here is a quote from Dr. John Lee. I strongly recommend reading his article I have listed the link below (S 5).

"In the current climate, anyone with a positive test for Covid-19 will certainly be known to clinical staff looking after them: if any of these patients dies, staff will have to record the Covid-19 designation on the death certificate — contrary to usual practice for most infections of this kind. There is a big difference between Covid-19 causing death, and Covid-19 being found in someone who died of other causes. Making Covid-19 notifiable might give the appearance of it causing increasing numbers of deaths, whether this is true or not. It might appear far more of a killer than flu, simply because of the way deaths are recorded (S 5)."

From October 1, 2019 through March 21, 2020 the CDC estimates there was between 400,000 - 730,000 hospitalizations because of the flu with 24,000 - 62,000 deaths just in the United States (CDC 4). That’s 71 days which equals to between 5,634 - 10,282 hospitalizations a day and 338 - 873 deaths a day in the united states from influenza alone.

That means that if you only looked at the hospitalizations of the regular flu it would appear to have a death rate of between 6% and 8.4% based on the people who were sick enough to go to the hospital with it. That number comes from dividing the total deaths from the flu vs the hospitalizations found in the information on the CDC website (CDC 4). So if you then compare that data to COVID-19 the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found a 1.4% death rate in COVID-19 based on hospitalizations. Even if you just looked at the evidence from Italy with almost a 10% death rate (currently the highest in the world by far) among those hospitalized from COVID-19 then compare that to the 6% - 8.4% death rate of people who are hospitalized for the flu it still is only 1.6% higher then the worst death rate of the flu of 8.4% based on hospitalizations. We also know that ITALY has one of the oldest populations on earth with their median age being almost 10 years older than people in the US. Now the flu has a 0.1% death rate when you look at the people on the earth as a whole and don’t just base your data off of hospitalized people. Right now for COVID-19 we are basing almost all of our data off of people who are already sick enough to be in the hospital and when you do that any sickness will appear to have a higher death rate just like the flu does.

So is there enough evidence to forcibly lock down the entire world and destroy millions of lives and the economy.  I do not believe so.  However, based on what we do know I do understand that some restrictive and preventative measures are a good thing.  However these need to be based on realistic expectations of what people with an active life and economy can handle in a healthy way. For example, asking people who are over 65 or people with other serious illness to stay home and self quarantine until we know more about the situation. Younger generations have a higher likely hood to develop a herd immunity which eventually would protect the older at risk people.   Overly restrictive movement policies will delay the possibility of a strong herd immunity developing.  The media pushing fear and the government ordering lockdowns will cause panic and ruin the economy which will then make the problem even worse and could perhaps cause WW3.  We are still at least over a year away from developing a vaccine and it is not possible to lock down for that long so we must allow a herd immunity to develop or risk the catastrophic effects lockdown will have on society.  While also taking note it is a direct violation of our civil rights and the constitution.

SOURCES

1.  CDC. Center for Disease Control.  https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/summary.html

2.   NEJM. New England Journal of Medicine.  https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2002032

3. BB. Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-those-who-died-from-virus-had-other-illness-italy-says

4. CDC. Center for Disease Control. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-estimates.htm

5. S. The Spectator https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/The-evidence-on-Covid-19-is-not-as-clear-as-we-think