Guest Post : The Real Covid-19 Risk is Vanishingly Small

A guest post by KrazyKiwi:

This chart uses publicly available Covid-19 statistics and published research on case reporting to show how few Covid-19 infections result in death. The chart has <i> four</i> data series plotted. Yes, four. More on this shortly.

At the beginning of the pandemic our consciousness was flooded with images of death. Bodies being removed from hospitals, funerals, scary charts, and a narrative that implied that every one of us could be next. The messaging made it clear that experts would guide us to safety, and compliance with their instructions was essential for ones’ survival.

Fast forward to today, and what should be clear to anyone with more than passing scrutiny of the official narrative is that deaths no longer cut it in terms of perpetuating the fear narrative, one that has been so successful in having populations relinquish many of their civil liberties with little protest. To keep the pandemic going, governments together with their obliging media partners have switched the focus to ‘cases’. Suspected, probably and confirmed ‘Cases’ have been supplanted as a cognitive proxy for deaths, and once again populations seem to have taken the bait, with a ‘case’ being feared to the extent that continued compliance with restraints on our life and liberty are broadly supported.

The problem with this strategy are the data. Covid-19 is similar to 100s of other infections in that the vast majority are inconsequential to the extent that the sufferer does not seek medical attention, and their immune system deals with the infection promptly. Unlike deaths which are rigorously cataloged, infections do not become ‘cases’ because they are not reported and subsequently managed by a health authority.

So how many Covid-19 infections become ‘cases’, and how many remain unrecorded, resulting in natural recoveries? There have been a number of published studies on this topic, with one of the most frequently cited being Chow, Chang et al. (2020). Global prediction of unreported SARS-CoV2 infection from observed COVID-19 cases. Their study suggests that there are nine unreported infections for every one ‘case’.

Back to that chart. It has four data series. The solid green series shows infections that have recovered, the <i>dotted</i> yellow series shows total infections, the pink series shows officially reported cases, and the red series shows deaths.

The Chow, Chang et al analysis makes it possible to chart infections vs deaths over time and, importantly, to calculate an population-wide Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of 0.28%. In other words 99.72% of those infected with

Covid-19 recover, and this why the green infection and yellow dotted recovery series are visually indistinguishable. Of course, the 0.28% fatality rate is skewed towards the elderly and those suffering a number of non-trivial comorbidities, so for children and healthy adults the real risk of dying as a result of a Covid-19 infection is smaller still. In truth that risk is vanishingly small.