Your chances of dying from Covid are …?

I saw a question on Reddit recently asking that if there had been no action taken on Covid, what would have happened? One of the answers said you would notice when your neighbours were dying and the coffins were stacked up in the streets.

I hope that people who inhabit the Reddit world are not representative of the population, but if you are in Australia and you listened only to the ABC or you got your news from The Age or the Sydney Morning Herald, you would probably have the same view. If you live in the UK the counterparts would be the BBC and The Guardian. I’m not familiar enough with the US but I’m sure you get the idea.

So what is the real figure? The CDC website will tell you that if you are over 29 years old your chance of dying from Covid goes up alarmingly: four times as high for the 30–39 age group, and so on to 90 times higher for the 65 year age group and 630 times higher for 85 years plus. There’s no mention of comorbidity which is extremely common in the higher age groups. But what none of this tells you is the actual figures. 630 times chance of dying sounds alarming until you realise that is 630 times the control group. (18–29 year olds). According to The American Council on Science and Health website the percentage of deaths due to covid for the 25–34 age group is 3%. That’s not a 3% chance of dying, it is that if you go to a hospital and you go to the morgue and there’s 100 bodies stacked up only 3 of them would be due to Covid. For the high-risk group 85 and over the percentage of deaths due to covid is 8.9%, and many of these are people dying with Covid rather than from Covid. Of course, the lockdowns are causing more suicides but that’s ignored by the media.

The Infection Fatality Rate, that is the chance of dying from Covid once you have been infected, is just 0.0092% for the 20–49 group and jumps to 5.6% for 65 and over. That means that only 5.6% of the over 65s who have Covid are dying.

There’s considerable evidence that all these numbers are going down. Recent ‘second wave’ infections in Europe have not been associated with a corresponding rise in deaths. So if no action had been taken on Covid we would not see ‘coffins stacked up in the streets’, in fact probably no one except a few epidemiologists would have noticed that it was a bad flu season.

Obviously in well structured society the aged should be protected but there is absolutely no reason to keep other healthy people in lockdown or even wearing masks.

By Philip Braham on September 19, 2020.