Continuing CoVID19 uncertainties

I found this recent review by Dr. Jane Orient very helpful.

She happens to be wrong in accepting the conventional story about HIV/AIDS, but that does not detract from her ironic comparison of Fauci’s response to AIDS and to CoVID19.

Estimates made by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention at the end of April indicate that the morbidity and mortality are comparable to the 2009 H1N1 flu season.

 

	Age range	CoVID19 (to end April 2020) *	H1N1 2019 New York City **
Symptomatic case fatality rate
	0-49	0.0005
	0-17		0.0008-0.0012
	18-64		0.0081-0.0132
	50-64	0.002
	65+	0.013	0.0094-0.0147
	all	0.004	0.0054-0.0086
Symptomatic case hospitalization rate
	0-49	0.017
	0-17		0.098-0.151
	18-64		0.076-0.124
	50-64	0.045
	65+	0.074	0.079-0.124
	all	0.034	0.084-0.134
% asymptomatic infections		35%
asymptomatic vs. symptomatic infectiousness		100%

* https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html, “best estimate”

** https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0011677

 

I still do not understand many aspects of this pandemic well enough to try to convince others. Some uncertainties will remain intractable until there are reliable data, comparable from different sources, about at least
— What is being tested? what tests are being used? are they comparable across countries? How specific and how precise?
— Rates of infection
— Ratio of hospitalizations to infections
— Actual causes of death of what are being labeled “CoVID19” deaths. Orient’s quote about Medicare reimbursements is rather frightening, suggests hospitals would call every death they conceivably could as “CoVID19”

The uncertainties are underscored by the remarkable experience of Joseph Fair, who had all the apparent symptoms, was very ill for some time; but on 5 tests 4 were negative and one “weakly positive”; and he is negative on antibody tests: https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/health/after-severe-illness-nbcs-dr-joseph-fair-tests-negative-for-covid-19-antibodies/2506117/

With all that, it does seem clear that USA and UK did not shut down early enough nor sufficiently enough.

Not being discussed, but surely needed:

“Bad” “flu” seasons seem to harm as many people as this “pandemic” does; but most of the harm is not owing to actual influenzas but to what the CDC calls “influenza-like illnesses”. It would be nice to know more precisely what goes on and what — if anything — might be worth doing on both personal and society-wide levels; particularly as the “flu shots” are only minimally effective: https://theconversation.com/the-flu-vaccine-is-being-oversold-its-not-that-effective-97688

 

CoVID19 Conspiracy theories are rampant.

I reject them for two quite general reasons:

1. They suffer from the same fallacy that pervades so much popular as well as academic discourse about social matters, namely, attributing intentionality to the interactions of human characteristics and social forces: ambition, arrogance, dogmatism, greed, ideology; silly laws, bureaucracy, etc. etc.
   Not to mention insufficient technical understanding of viruses and human immune systems.
2. Malice is much less common than incompetence