Coronavirus Reality Check | R. R. Reno | First Things
"Data are coming in, and their import is clear.
The coronavirus pandemic is not and never was a threat to society.
COVID-19 poses a danger to the elderly and the medically compromised.
Otherwise, for most who present symptoms, it can be nasty and persistent, but is not life-threatening. A majority of those infected do not notice that they have the disease.
Coronavirus presents us with a medical challenge, not a crisis.
The crisis has been of our own making.
On March 16,
Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London
predicted a coronavirus death toll of more than two million in the United States alone.
He arrived at this number by assuming that infection would be nearly universal and the fatality rate would be high—a terrifying prospect.
The next day, Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis sifted through the data and predicted less widespread infection and a fatality rate of between
0.05 and 1.0 percent—not that different from the common flu.
...Nevertheless, all data trends since mid-March show that
Ferguson was fantastically wrong and Ioannidis was largely right about its mortal threat.
But Ferguson’s narrative has triumphed, helped by our
incontinent and irresponsible media.
...By the end of March, most of the United States had been locked down.
Tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs.
More than $6 trillion has been spent to
save society from complete collapse.
Relentless warnings have whipped the populace into frenzies of fear.
All of this to contain a disease that, as far as we can tell at this point, is
not significantly more fatal than the flu.
....But a study from the Oise region of France found an infection rate of 25 percent—which, if it is true for France as a whole, suggests that the virus fatality rate in that country (which is considered hard-hit) is
0.13 percent..."
Read all.
And this: https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/05/uk/neil-ferguson-imperial-coronavirus-sage-gbr-intl/index.html
