After all the sturm und drang the CDC now says…
Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, stated that the steps the U.S. is taking to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus will likely mean the worst-case estimates for the number of deaths don’t materialize.
ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked Fauci about the New York Times report on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) worst-case projections. The CDC reportedly predicted 160 million to 214 million infections, 2.4 million to 21 million hospitalizations and 200,000 to 1.7 million deaths in the country.
A model is only as good as the assumptions you put into it. Just in time, the CDC has new numbers to ponder.
Mason sends.
The CDC’s New ‘Best Estimate’ Implies a COVID-19 Infection Fatality Rate Below 0.3%
That rate is much lower than the numbers used in the horrifying projections that shaped the government response to the epidemic.
JACOB SULLUM
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the current “best estimate” for the fatality rate among Americans with COVID-19 symptoms is 0.4 percent. The CDC also estimates that 35 percent of people infected by the COVID-19 virus never develop symptoms. Those numbers imply that the virus kills less than 0.3 percent of people infected by it—far lower than the infection fatality rates (IFRs) assumed by the alarming projections that drove the initial government response to the epidemic, including broad business closure and stay-at-home orders.
The CDC offers the new estimates in its “COVID-19 Pandemic Planning Scenarios,” which are meant to guide hospital administrators in “assessing resource needs” and help policy makers “evaluate the potential effects of different community mitigation strategies.” It says “the planning scenarios are being used by mathematical modelers throughout the Federal government.”
The CDC’s five scenarios include one based on “a current best estimate about viral transmission and disease severity in the United States.” That scenario assumes a “basic reproduction number” of 2.5, meaning the average carrier can be expected to infect that number of people in a population with no immunity. It assumes an overall symptomatic case fatality rate (CFR) of 0.4 percent, roughly four times the estimated CFR for the seasonal flu. The CDC estimates that the CFR for COVID-19 falls to 0.05 percent among people younger than 50 and rises to 1.3 percent among people 65 and older. For people in the middle (ages 50–64), the estimated CFR is 0.2 percent.
That “best estimate” scenario also assumes that 35 percent of infections are asymptomatic, meaning the total number of infections is more than 50 percent larger than the number of symptomatic cases. It therefore implies that the IFR is between 0.2 percent and 0.3 percent. By contrast, the projections that the CDC made in March, which predicted that as many as 1.7 million Americans could die from COVID-19 without intervention, assumed an IFR of 0.8 percent. Around the same time, researchers at Imperial College produced a worst-case scenario in which 2.2 million Americans died, based on an IFR of 0.9 percent.
Such projections had a profound impact on policy makers in the United States and around the world. At the end of March, President Donald Trump, who has alternated between minimizing and exaggerating the threat posed by COVID-19, warned that the United States could see “up to 2.2 million deaths and maybe even beyond that” without aggressive control measures, including lockdowns.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“The majority of deaths in most of the hard hit European countries have happened in nursing homes, and a large proportion of deaths in the US also seem to follow this pattern,” Ioannidis notes. “Locations with high burdens of nursing home deaths may have high IFR estimates, but the IFR would still be very low among non-elderly, non-debilitated people.”
That factor is one plausible explanation for the big difference between New York and Florida in both crude case fatality rates (reported deaths as a share of confirmed cases) and estimated IFRs. The current crude CFR for New York is nearly 8 percent, compared to 4.4 percent in Florida. Antibody tests suggest the IFR in New York is something like 0.6 percent, compared to 0.2 percent in the Miami area.
Here is the empirical evidence, hot off of the CDC presses. I’ll draw my own conclusions, as I imagine most here will as well. Read the entire article: Reason.com
Thanks, Mason.
Category: "The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves", It's science!
It is becoming increasingly apparent that the exaggerations were intentional.
The -suicide- rate is climbing rapidly. Total suicides and otherwise avoidable deaths from “quarantine” induced medical neglect may exceed the deaths from the bug.
It may already have done so.
Let’s not forget that supposedly, according to CDC guidelines, states are reporting deaths that were not ChiCom virus caused are reported as virus deaths. Note that even the D-rat gov of Colorado has complained that people who committed suicide, traffic accident deaths, and gunshot deaths are being reported as COVID-19 deaths. Not surprising since healthcare providers are getting $39K of our tax dollars for each virus death in one of their facilities. So, how can a death rate be calculated, when the numbers are substantially inflated for financial gain?
Unless the CDC has some idea of what fraction of alleged Wuhan coronavirus deaths is BS and has accounted for same in their most recent estimates, that lucrative “augmentation” of Wuhan coronavirus death numbers means the true fatality rate is even lower. But I doubt we’ll ever know just how much padding of death statistics for financial gain was actually going on.
IMO profiting from death via fraud is truly despicable. And yes, I do have a standing to talk here. I pay taxes, and it’s Federal funding (e.g., money raised via taxes and/or borrowing) that’s being obtained via fraud.
Anyone has a link to the 39k dollars per casualty?
I have seen it repeated frequently but I haven’t seen a link.
Here ya go, Joe. This article links to the apparent source for those numbers.
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/hospital-payments-and-the-covid-19-death-count/
The $39k number appears to be a rough national average of Medicare payments made for for prolonged ventilator use; it varies regionally. For illnesses not requiring prolonged ventilator use, the average Medicare payment is a bit over $13k.
The Wuhan coronavirus has been classified as being in the group receiving such reimbursement from Medicare.
However, the
Democratic pork-and-other-unrelated-stuff-ladenCARES Act also authorizes a 20% “bump” to that if the diagnosis is the Wuhan coronavirus (AKA the truth-hiding “Covid-19”). Healthcare providers thus appear to get an extra 20% if the formal diagnosis is Wuhan coronavirus vice something else. That’s another $2.6k to $7.8k per Medicare patient.Further: the same act authorizes this same level of payment to hospitals for the treatment of uninsured patients diagnosed with the Wuhan coronavirus. Hospitals generally have to “eat” those costs, since many if not most people without insurance don’t have a few hundred thousand on hand and end up defaulting on large hospital bills.
So yes: healthcare providers have a huge financial incentive to diagnose everything possible as the Wuhan cornavirus. If I’m reading this right, it means they get an extra 20% for Medicare patients so diagnosed and Medicare plus 20% for any uninsured patient so diagnosed. For the latter group, that’s money the hospital would almost certainly never otherwise see.
Thanks. That’s an excellent analysis.
About the uninsured patients, wouldn’t the hospitals recoup that money by charging more to the people that actually pay for medical services?
I am not sure how competitive the medical market is, but it looks to me as heavily disrupted by government intervention, therefore leading to arbitrary price hikes without regard for competitiveness.
You’re welcome.
Yes, hospitals attempt to recoup unpaid bills by raising their prices like everyone else – which is why you hear stories about insane charges for common stuff (e.g., Tylenol costing $10 a pop while hospitalized). But it’s my understanding that hospitals are also heavily dependent on insurance and Medicare reimbursement to stay afloat financially. So they often do have to write off bad debts. The coronavirus payments for uninsured are thus a “freebie” to any hospital from Uncle Sam; it’s less bad debt they’ll have to eat.
Regarding how competitive the medical industry is, I can’t really say with certainty. My impression is that the industry isn’t terribly competitive, but I have no real experience there beyond my own from the patient side of things. Best I can tell it seems that most patients go to whatever hospital/lab their doctor tells them to – or is required by their insurance – without much question. Pharmacies are often ditto if there’s an insurance benefit involved.
Poetrooper worked with that industry for a number of decades. Perhaps he can give some insight into that question from both the wholesale supply and patient aspects.
The whole damned industry is riddled with fraud and professional incest.
Ever wake up in a hospital bed and see some doctor you’ve never seen before and have no idea who he/she is, making a notation in your chart?
He/she is likely legally defrauding your insurance company or Medicare, or whoever the funding source is, as a “consulting specialist” on your case, courtesy of your primary doctor’s beneficence in signing him/her on as such.
Such specialists won’t do anything for you on their daily visits but they will be well compensated for their few minutes (or seconds–I’ve timed them) in your room. Multiply that fee by a dozen or more patients each day as they make their morning rounds and you’re quickly talking big bucks for very little professional effort. Whether any of that fee finds its way back to the referring physician (your doc) is anybody’s guess and I guess yes.
My point in citing that professional back-scratching fraud is to show that when the people around whom our whole health care system is built are corrupt at such a basic level, the entire system is rotten to the core when it comes to funding.
My bride of 49 years had an emergency in late Feb. If the insurance company had not screwed up we probably would not have seen the bill for the ER’s “traveling” physician – $1,855 for quote, “Critical care, time based first 30 to 74 minutes”. $1,855 for 30 – 74 minutes! And here we thought lawyers were ripping people off. We have no idea who this doctor is and whether he actually did anything. As Poe and Hondo note, there is serious corruption in our medical system. This stems from the serious corruption in our government.
Wow, that’s…worst than I thought.
That kind of corruption is something you expect to see in a banana republic, not in the most successful nation in the world.
Obviously anything the government touches, no matter how good the intentions, turns to shit.
Any solutions to this will be resisted by the entrenched bureaucracy in the government and the industry.
I believe you on the suicide increases
We have have two people now from out of town who just parked there cars
One in a overlook area the other
Just East of town here and shot them self’s
The first one people passing on the road
Thought he needed help
The police arrived and BOOMB !!!!
I know the officer and he was shaken up
The other both a man and a woman
Shot them self’s At a overlook
Both were from Texas
There are reports of this happening
Up in ruidoso too but I can’t confirm as of typing
Lawdy, Lawdy, Lawdy, I swan and demoan. Last summer we had classes on Civics from VoV. It was not only educational, but he made it entertaining. And he throwed in some history lessons too. I think I passed that course with at least a 3.69 gpa. I had been curious as to what this year’s summer school was going to be on, maybe some STEM, what with all the Sciency things posted lately, the new Technology of the Space X ships. Thought that The Stranger Pappy would be teaching some Engineering Classes on blowing up stuff, bangalores, or how to properly drink adult beverages. Or fall down. I even had considered some Home Ec cooking classes what with the Thursdays are for Cooking, the Friday’s Recipe, and the newly added Pancakes on Monday. The latter, by the way, we haven’t seen yet today, but after all, it is Memorial Day, and the day isn’t over yet. There’s still time to add it, but I digress.
It is obvious by now that we will be studying Math, more specifically fuzzy Math using lies, damn lies, and statistics. And a smattering of health related issues. And more being home schooled. Great! /s/ I’m fair at ‘rithmetic, I’m only a fraction of the people who don’t believe their numbers and I am 100% tired of being lied to. And the only chip that’s going into my body better be dipped in salsa or melted cheese.
If the masks work why are we “social distancing”?
If the “social distancing” works why do we need masks.
If we can safely stand in line at a grocery store, why can’t we stand in line to vote?
If being in close quarters and not washing, why aren’t the homeless camps being wiped out by this bug? They live close, share everything, and you can bet, they are not clean.
Garbage in = Garbage out! Larsie boi showing up to blame Trump for the numbers being skewed in 5.4.3.2…
Pancakes on Monday? How about biscuits instead?
Try this on for size, Gun Bunny:
This was a test. This was only a test. Stay tuned to this station for further information.
AHEM!!! A very well received post from last Monday. Do believe there was mention of sourdough, blueberry, assorted waffles even. And toppings! And we ask for so very little. And you love us and want us to be happy. And….and…and…
https://valorguardians.com/blog/?p=99847
Or if you prefer, biscuits…with sausage gravy.
You do the cooking, we’ll do the testing.
Oh, Lawd, gimme some patiensss.
Okay, just for you, out of sheer love, tomorrow will be another day of starch, fat and kitchen chemicals. My dad’s handwriting is in the notes made for the biscuits recipe, so I will go with that.
I think for sourdough, you have to have a “starter”, but I will look that up… just fer you, Big Guy.
We Love You! We will be Thanking You! I’ll start sifting flour. And defrosting some bulk grounded up porked beast sausages. C U in the morning!
*facepalm*
I had to take Cameron to the woodshed for straying off-topic just the other day. Now this.
I blame myself.
?Whut?!? It wasn’t me! I didn’t do it! I was kinda sorta tracking within a mile or 12 of the flag pole. We being schooled on numbers & such. And the word assumptions was in the thread. And the empirical evidence will show that we do better at math on a full tummy. Or reasons. Besides, I know for a fact that you like sausage gravy & biscuits. AND pancakes. You’re welcome! Be nice to have some right now for mid rats.
Holey Moly, this new news are going to make the demoRATS heads spin when they read the new report in that Millions ans millions are going to die which they figured would change the 2020 election around to get their demoRat peeps in office. KOB hit it right on the head with his last comment paragraphs.
If the masks work why are we “social distancing”?
If the “social distancing” works why do we need masks.
If we can safely stand in line at a grocery store, why can’t we stand in line to vote?
If being in close quarters and not washing, why aren’t the homeless camps being wiped out by this bug? They live close, share everything, and you can bet, they are not clean.
Garbage in = Garbage out! Larsie boi showing up to blame Trump for the numbers being skewed in 5.4.3.2…
Masks and distance “work”.
They are fear inducers, and intended to keep us afraid of the latest hobgoblin.
Pointless circus for all but the most vulnerable.
Proggies require victims in need of their ” help”, and they will make them as needed.
Frankly, 11B, they are the ones who need help. I really do not want them trying to help me – ever.
“Larsie boi showing up to blame Trump for the numbers being skewed in 5.4.3.2…”
What is that brainwashed Kool-Aid head going to say other than “Russia elected him, Orange Man bad, Orange man bad…”
And now this:
“Cuomo Admits ‘We All Failed’ At Making Coronavirus Projections”
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/cuomo-we-all-failed-coronavirus-projections-new-york
“New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo admitted Monday that coronavirus projections from experts were all wrong — and he’s getting out of the business of speculating because of it.”
“Cuomo said he can’t predict when the hospitalization and death rate numbers will drop to the necessary threshold required for reopening certain regions because as he put it, “we all failed” at predicting.”
“Now, people can speculate. People can guess. I think next week, I think two weeks, I think a month,” Cuomo told reporters on Memorial Day.”
“I’m out of that business because we all failed at that business. Right? All the early national experts. Here’s my projection model. Here’s my projection model. They were all wrong. They were all wrong.”
He does have his moments of honesty in all this.
“We” ?
He is deflecting blame with “everyone is doing it”.
That wasn’t an admission of wrongdoing. It was CYA.
“We” also didn’t mass murder senior citizens with predictably lethal pushing of ChiCom Coof patients into nursing homes.
Yep. Contrast NY with FL, where the policy was that Wuhan coronavirus patients would NOT be sent to nursing homes. FL has about 70% of the nursing home population of NY. It has around 10% as many fatalities among their nursing home population.
Cuomo and his cronies have much blood on their hands because of their asinine policy regarding nursing homes and the Wuhan coronavirus, almost certainly adopted in the name of “preventing discrimination”.
When are the conspiracy theorists going to start that this thing was a plot to purge the upper end of the social security rolls in order to save Social Security or at least keep it solvent for a few more years.
Lars wants it for the Free Shit Army…
If he’s mentioned 2 more times, he’ll show up like “Betelgeuse” and fuck up everything.
He’s already been mentioned 3 times here. He’s thus already late.
I hadn’t thought of that but now that you
mention it Obama did say something to that
effect with his blue pill suggestion about Grandma.
I wonder how president Fauci feels about Obamacare.
Pain pill, not “blue pill”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rin4h4cRs6Y
FWIW: “Grandma” apparently survived 5 years after installation of the pacemaker. Seems kinda doubtful she’d have lasted that long if she’d just “taken a pain pill” instead.
LARS! POST! Explain this! Explain how this is exactly how you said it would play out. Tell us all how we were wrong when we predicted this exact outcome. I want empirical data and most ricky tick!
You know, I watched the seige of firebase gloria this weekend.
Does Lars remind anyone of the company commander on that base?
asking for a friend…
I think I saw that movie sometime around 1992, so my memory is definitely hazy (as I was drunk that year.), but would there be a centerfold and a naked officer in your reference?
R. Lee Ermey and Wings Hauser clean house, starting with the CO who has clearly lost it.
If the authoritarian dickbags that are continuing to shutdown society for reasons unapparent would like to suicide, that’d be great.
Might save we tax donkeys from having to house and feed them in prison.
Ymmv.
(This is satire. Or is it? IDGAF, open it up or else. Signed, Publius)
At my signal, unleash Hell. General Maximus
General Maximus Loser.
The worst Roman General ever portrayed in a movie.
The guy goes from general to slave because after the Emperor made him his heir he forgot to prepare his own coup d’etat to make sure his rivals couldn’t take the throne from him, despite having several loyal legions under his command.
So, CDC now says we’re talking about a disease that’s about 3x worse in terms of mortality than a routine flu year where about 0.1% of those infected die of complications. Or, to put it differently, is about as bad, in terms of mortality rate and total deaths, as we’d expect from a truly bad seasonal flu year?
Now, where have I read something like that before? Oh yeah – I think I read something like that here.
Hondo, with all due respect, you used the wrong empirical data. Wrong, as in “not approved by the Commissar”.
Damn Larsie girl…. your shit just got owned. Going back and reading all your panic is fucking hilarious. What a douche bag.
Ya know, he really owns a lot of you. Your knickers are all twisted at the THOUGHT of him…. why invoke his sorry butt?
For entertainment purposes only. I enjoy the show.
Less than 2.6%.
When the widespread antibody testing is in place, probably .1% or less for other than high age folk. Lots of folks didn’t even realise they had it.
In other words “no worse than annual flu”.
Unless ther is panic and counter productive government spazz.
Which hostile foreign powers did this dem-panic aid? Purely coincidently?
This is not complicated.
The worst case models were based on the government essentially doing nothing. It was “worst case”.
And it was published in order to spur action and pressure state, local, and federal government to take measure to slow the spread.
That happened.
So, thankfully, the worst case did not happen.
The fact that they will, likely, not happen, does not make the models wrong.
It means the variables have changed.
Because we changed them.
By taking action.
And this is just the beginning, the second wave or even higher peak, will hit us in the fall.
We are already at 100,000 deaths, and the year over year “unexplained” mortality increase indicates the number may be as high as 150,000.
We will likely reach 300,000 by the time this is all pretty much over next summer. Which a 5000-10000 a year steady death rate after that in perpetuity.
If we had not shut down and social distanced we would be looking at 100s of thousand more deaths already.
Shutting down and social distancing reduced the R0 substantially. And even small reductions in R0 saves tens or hundreds of thousand of lives when we are dealing with exponential growth of infections.
So do-nothing Trump who didn’t react quickly or thoroughly enough actually did save hundreds of thousands of American lives when he shut our boarders down.
Got it, thanks.
But did you reach your desired level of deceased boomers?
He will never answer that question? Anyway, not responsively.
(1) I still think there is a difference between dying OF Corona Virus and dying WITH Corona Virus.
(2) I still think the Virus was created for the Chinese Goverment to eliminate their Elderly population as well as those with chronic illnesses.
(3) I still think Fauchi overcompesated on statistics because of his previous “failure” with HIV, i.e. redeeming himself.
(4) Sadly, there is a population that has no voice that are murdered on a daily basis. That population exceeds 100,000.
(5) I still think Obesity kills, that Poor Dental Hygiene kills, that Cancer kills, that Mental Illness kills, that Illegal use of Drugs kills, that Abuse of Alcohol kills, that Intoxicated Folks behind or using any machinery kills, that Ladders can kill, that eating Tide Pods can kill..
ninja
(1) ^THIS^
(2) ^WORD^
(3) ^YEP^
(4) ^PREACH!!!!!!!!!!!!^ north of 60 million now?
(5) ^TESTIFY^
You just gradumated from the KoB school of confirmable conspiracies. At the Top of The Class. Congratulations and Thanks for your continued support. The Truth is out there and gradually coming to light.
The models were demonstrably false.
The bug is nowhere near as lethal as was claimed, thus doing nothing would have produced numbers way under the false models.
This isn’t hard. The models were wrong.
Again.
“False” may be overstating it a bit, as that could be taken to imply willful deceit. “Wrong” or “in error” is probably a better assessment.
See my reply to our resident Deity Koalemos (AKA Commissar AKA Poodle AKA Seagull AKA Cthulhu AKA ‘Roo) which follows.
False.
Too consistently wrong one way to be error, or some would have gone the other way.
Deliberate panic-mongering.
Once happenstance. Twice Coincidence. Three, no, four, no, five, no…..
Negative, Koalemos (AKA Commissar AKA Poodle AKA Seagull AKA Cthulhu AKA ‘Roo). And no, it’s not complicated. But the rather draconian measures we’ve taken to date are only a part of the reason – and they have zero effect on the main reason. The original worst case projections were simply far too high. They were badly wrong because the assumptions concerning the Wuhan coronavirus infection fatality rate (IFR) were off – badly. Specifically, the initial IFR estimates were too high by roughly a factor of 3. That in turn means that the original worst-case estimates were at least 3x too high. I say “at least” because the original worst-case projections also included what appears to be a completely unrealistic total number of US infections. That additional error further skewed the numbers even farther higher than reality. If I recall correctly, the original IFR estimates used for the Wuhan coronavirus were in the 0.8% to 0.9% range. Per the CDC, the latest data they’ve examined shows that the actual IFR appears to be a bit less than 1/3 as high as originally thought – about 0.26% (0.4% for symptomatic cases, but only 65% of cases are symptomatic; thus the overall IFR is [0.65 x 0.4%] = 0.26%). Both of those facts are clearly stated above; you’d know that if you had actually bothered to read the material AW1Ed quoted instead of blindly parroting your preconceived notions. As I recall, the worst of the original “worst case” projections were from Imperial College in the UK; it used a 0.9% IFR and projected 2.2 million US deaths. Working backwards, that implies a total of 244 million US infections – which is roughly 75% of the US population. This almost certainly was a gross overestimate, but was also apparently never seriously questioned. (FWIW: those “fine forecasters” at Imperial College who made that projection appear to have a truly p!ss-poor track record when it comes to epidemic projections – and routinely seem to project ridiculously high.) I say that because we don’t see anywhere close to that number of infections annually for seasonal flu, which… Read more »
Doofus DID IT AGAIN!
Hypocrite!
And now, AFTER 2 Months, he is requiring Virginians to wear masks indoors…to protect Virginians, but still has no qualms about the murder of the unborn:
“Virginia’s Northam Apologizes For Not Wearing A Mask At Beach: ‘I Wasn’t Prepared'”
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/virginia-northam-apologizes-not-wearing-a-mask-at-beach
The new measure is a requirement for anyone 10 years or older and is meant to stop the spread of the virus when people are inside public places like restaurants, hair salons and government buildings. – newspaper.
He really is an idiot. Dumber than a box of rocks and twice as stupid as – oh, never mind!
And this dickhead has a medical degree?
Well, TOW, do you have any questions regarding WHY he is not practicing medicine?