I cannot believe these words came out of the idiot’s mouth:
"Well, I think the 3.4 percent is really a false number. Now, and this is just my hunch, and — but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this. Because a lot people will have this and it's very mild. They'll get better very rapidly. They don't even see a doctor. They don't even call a doctor," Trump said.
"You never hear about those people. So you can't put them down in the category of the overall population in terms of this corona flu and — or virus. So you just can't do that," he continued. "So if, you know, we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better, just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work — some of them go to work but they get better."
To be fair, I think this is simply a garbled version of what he's been told but hasn't really understood.
As I understand it,
from what we're being told over here,
Sources at the WHO pointed out to the Guardian that the 3.4% figure represented no more than a snapshot of the total number of reported deaths over the number of reported cases on the given day. “It’s not a mortality rate. But it is the math. The calculation on the given day.”
“Globally, about 3.4% of reported Covid-19 cases [the technical term for the novel coronavirus strain responsible for the outbreak] have died,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a press conference on Tuesday.
Elsewhere, I read
At the start of an outbreak the apparent mortality rate can be an overestimate if a lot of mild cases are being missed. But this week, a WHO expert suggested that this has not been the case with Covid-19. Bruce Aylward, who led an international mission to China to learn about the virus and the country’s response, said the evidence did not suggest that we were only seeing the tip of the iceberg. If borne out by further testing, this could mean that current estimates of a roughly 1% fatality rate are accurate. This would make Covid-19 about 10 times more deadly than seasonal flu, which is estimated to kill between 290,000 and 650,000 people a year globally.
Ten times as many as the regular flu means an awful lot more people will die as a result of this outbreak than would normally be expected, and and it doesn't begin to take into account the effect this is going to have on health care generally.
I don't know how many people suffering from Covid-19 will be so badly affected they require hospital treatment, but it's going to be considerably more than the 1% who actually die from the illness, and that's on top of all the people the hospital will be treating in the normal course of events, not instead of.
And on top of that, there's the problem that the medical and nursing staff will all be at very high risk of infection, since they're treating so many people carrying the virus, meaning they'll need to be quarantined.
So on the face of it, if you untangle what he was saying, it's quite right -- everyone agrees the 3.4% snapshot is not the actual death rate but just what the numbers looked like on a particular day, but he was clearly simply trying to repeat what he'd been told but hadn't understood, while trying to spin it to minimise the seriousness of an impending and tremendously grave impending crisis in medical care that he doesn't begin to comprehend.
www.texasmonthly.com
