Deaths certainly have declined significantly in the past year and more (even as high transmissivity delta variant has probably maintained high levels of infections). Why? Because of far better actions in hospitals and because infected people have surely learned a lot about home treatments to catch COVID infection early after initial symptoms and possibly a positive test. Cutting the deaths in half for the same number of infected people results in an IFR of .007, probably a more realistic figure for today.
World Health Organization
At an October 2020 meeting of the World Health organization, Dr Michael Ryan, the Head of Emergencies revealed that they believe roughly 10% of the world has been infected with Sars-Cov-2. This is their "best estimate." This figure was based on the average results of all the broad seroprevalence (blood) studies done around the world. The message was that the virus is nothing as deadly as everyone predicted. At the time the global population was roughly 7.8 billion people, if 10% have been infected that is 780 million infections. The global death toll then attributed to Sars-Cov-2 infections was seen as 1,061,539. That's an infection fatality rate of roughly or 0.14% [.0014]. Consistent with seasonal flu and the predictions of many experts from around the world. And inconsistent with the dire picture given by Fauci.
Great analysis
Now consider the detailed analysis "Public Health Lessons Learned From Biases in Coronavirus Mortality Overestimation" by Ronold B. Brown published in August 2020. He has doctoral degrees in public health and organizational behavior.
Here are highlights from this article that focused on what Fauci said.
"The validity of this estimation could benefit from vetting for biases and miscalculations. The main objective of this article is to critically appraise the coronavirus mortality estimation presented to Congress."
[What Fauci said] "helped launch a campaign of social distancing, organizational and business lockdowns, and shelter-in-place orders."
"Previous to the Congressional hearing, a less severe estimation of coronavirus mortality appeared in a February 28, 2020 editorial released by NIAID [Fauci's department] and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Published online in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM.org), the editorial stated: '"the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%).' Almost as a parenthetical afterthought, the NEJM editorial inaccurately stated that 0.1% is the approximate case fatality rate of seasonal influenza. By contrast, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported that 0.1% or lower is the approximate influenza infection fatality rate, not the case fatality rate. "
Brown correctly hit the key semantic issue: CFR versus IFR.
"IFRs are estimated following an outbreak, often based on representative samples of blood tests of the immune system in individuals exposed to a virus. Estimation of the IFR in COVID-19 is urgently needed to assess the scale of the coronavirus pandemic." [Now, over a year later this has not happened.]
Brown correctly emphasized "it is imperative to not confuse fatality rates [CFR and IFR] with one another; else misleading calculations with significant consequences could result." [That is exactly what Fauci engineered.]
Brown said the 1% figure in the testimony was consistent with the "coronavirus CFR of 1.8-3.4% (median, 2.6%) reported by the CDC." [As I write this data in The Washington Post shows a CFR of 1.6%. This substantiates that the health care system has made progress in curbing COVID deaths. But this current CFR is still 16 times higher than the IFR figure for the seasonal flu. IFR remains the issue.]
Now Brown gets to the heart of the problem: "A comparison of coronavirus and seasonal influenza CFRs may have been intended during Congressional testimony, but due to misclassifying an IFR as a CFR, the comparison turned out to be between an adjusted coronavirus CFR of 1% and an influenza IFR of 0.1%." [Did Fauci, the widely lauded expert, not know what he was doing? Hard to believe this. If he knew, then we have the explanation for the Big Lie.]
By May 2020 "it was clear that the coronavirus mortality total for the season would be nowhere near 800,000 deaths inferred from the 10-fold mortality overestimation reported to Congress [emphasis added]. Even after adjusting for the effect of successful mitigation measures that may have slowed down the rate of coronavirus transmission, it seems unlikely that so many deaths were completely eliminated by a nonpharmaceutical intervention such as social distancing, which was only intended to contain infection transmission, not suppress infections and related fatalities."
As to getting good data to determine IFR, Brown noted: "A revised version of a non-peer-reviewed study on COVID-19 antibody seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, California, found that infections were many times more prevalent than confirmed cases. As more serosurveys are conducted throughout the country, a nationally coordinated COVID-19 serosurvey of a representative sample of the population is urgently needed, which can determine if the national IFR is low enough to expedite an across-the-board end to restrictive mitigating measures." [In other words, with systematic blood testing, if we have an IFR for COVID similar to the IFR for the seasonal flu, then the many disruptive and costly actions by the public health establishment are not justified. And they never were!]
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