COVID-19 and risk

 

Guest post by PatD:

CDC recently updated estimated infection fatality rates for COVID. Here are the updated survival rates by age group:

0-19: 99.997%

20-49: 99.98%

50-69: 99.5% 

70+: 94.6%

Remember also that 94% of the fatalities had other morbidities, such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer, according to the CDC. 

If you are old like me, or our overweight President, you face a greater risk, but, for most people the chances of dying from COVID-19 are minimal. Yet, we are destroying the lives of children by keeping schools shut down for most of the year. We are destroying countless small businesses for a virus that is less deadly than the flu. We have shut down live sports and entertainment for no good reason.

We all know of people who have died with COVID-19. But we know of far more people who have died from other causes, such as traffic accidents, drowning, murder, cancer, heart disease and so on. The problem is we not balancing out the risk factors.

For example, we lose 37,000 people a year in traffic accidents. From 1899 to 2013, it is estimated 3.6 million people died in traffic accidents. Unlike COVID-19, people will continue to die in traffic accidents for the foreseeable future. If we cut the speed limit to 15 mph and require vehicles to be limited to a top speed of 15 mph, we would just about eliminate those deaths. But society won't do that. The convenience and time savings from much higher speed limits outweigh the risk of dying in a traffic accident.

The treatment the President received was little different from that received by most hospitalized COVID-19 patients. The only difference was that he was given an experimental therapeutic that is not yet approved for general use. Our healthcare system has learned a lot since March and the death rates are dropping as better therapies are used to treat patients. 

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Therapeutic totalitarianism

 

Nicholas J. Kaster’s column today at American Thinker has a sobering analysis of the local and state governments’ endless mask mandates, lockdowns, and other joys of the never-ending pandemic:

We have entered the seventh month of coronavirus panic, with large parts of America still partly or wholly shut down. What began as a 15-day expedient designed to “flatten the curve,” has gradually become the norm in American life. The goalposts have continued to shift. First, the focus was on hospital overcrowding; then it moved to overall deaths; then it moved to number of positive cases; now it seems to be shifting to the availability of a vaccine. The real endgame appears to be the November election.

. . .

Many have seen parallels in this creeping authoritarianism to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. And indeed, there are some: the obsessive mask conformity, the endless and often contradictory edicts by state governors and mayors, and the tiresome mantras celebrating obedience (e.g., “Alone together”).

But a closer analogy to our current predicament can be found in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Huxley’s novel, published in 1932, 17 years before Orwell’s, envisions a dystopia that is sated but soulless, where the people’s every earthly need is met, but at the cost of their liberty and humanity.

. . .

The idea of a riskless utopia is pure fantasy, of course, but the power that will accrete to the ruling class is very real.

Mr. Kaster’s column is here.

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