13-04-20 12:34:00,
Fully referenced facts about Covid-19, provided by experts in the field, to help our readers make a realistic risk assessment. (Regular updates below)
“The only means to fight the plague is honesty.” Albert Camus, The Plague (1947)
Overview
- According to data from the best-studied countries such as South Korea, Iceland, Germany and Denmark, the overall lethality of Covid19 is in the lower per mille range and thus up to twenty times lower than initially assumed by the WHO.
- A study in Nature Medicine comes to a similar conclusion even for the Chinese city of Wuhan. The initially significantly higher values for Wuhan were obtained because a many people with mild or no symptoms were not recorded.
- 50% to 80% of test-positive individuals remain symptom-free. Even among the 70 to 79 year old persons about 60% remain symptom-free, many more show only mild symptoms.
- The median age of the deceased in most countries (including Italy) is over 80 years and only about 1% of the deceased had no serious previous illnesses. The age and risk profile of deaths thus essentially corresponds to normal mortality.
- Many media reports of young and healthy people dying from Covid19 have proven to be false upon closer inspection. Many of these people either did not die from Covid19 or they in fact had serious preconditions (such as undiagnosed leukaemia).
- Normal overall mortality in the US is about 8000 people per day, in Germany about 2600 people and in Italy about 1800 people per day. Influenza mortality in the US is up to 80,000, in Germany and Italy up to 25,000, and in Switzerland up to 1500 people per winter.
- Strongly increased death rates, as in northern Italy, can be influenced by additional risk factors such as very high air pollution and legionella contamination, as well as a collapse in the care of the elderly and sick due to infections, mass panic and lockdown.
