By Randy Rossi -
Stanford University just released a new study that could be a complete “Game Changer” regarding this Coronavirus crisis. When the Coronavirus first hit the front page news, estimates were that up to 2.2 million Americans could die from it based on the estimated fatality rates. Those fatality rate estimates which were based on people who caught the Coronavirus went from 1%-2% to as bad as 3.4% from WHO which has lost all of their credibility. The math used in those estimates was to take the number of deaths from Coronavirus divided by the number of people that caught the disease. The serious problem with those estimates is that while deaths are pretty easy to track, knowing who has caught the disease is very hard to know because a huge percentage of people that catch it either have zero symptoms or just normal cold and flu symptoms so minor that they don’t even go to the doctor.
Our entire economy has been shut down based on these high estimates which so far has cost 22 million Americans their jobs and pulled trillions of dollars out of our economy, 401Ks, and investments. After all, 2.2 million deaths is a really big number even compared to the 650,000 Americans who died in the Spanish Flu epidemic in 1917-1918. But suddenly, based on new trends, those fatality estimates are going down dramatically. First they went down to 100,000-200,000 and now they have just been reduced to just 60,000. The medical experts credit our shutting down the economy and social distancing for those declines. As currently reported today, 692,169 Americans have caught the Coronavirus and 36,721 have died from it. Interesting to note that so far this year according to the CDC, between 39-52 million Americans have caught the annual flu this season and between 24,000 to 62,000 have already died from it. The average death rate from the annual flu is 0.1% every year and between 30,000 to 60,000 Americans die from it yet we don’t shut down our economy because of it. Even with this data, one has to ask if we should have shut down our entire economy and put 22 million Americans out of work if roughly the same number of Americans will die from Coronavirus as the annual flu. But it gets even more complicated with this new Stanford U test data.
The new Stanford U study is a massive wake-up call which really challenges the logic of shutting down our entire economy. Stanford did a random Coronavirus test in California which found that 50-85 times more Americans have caught the Coronavirus then has been reported! Believe it or not that is good news because it dramatically reduces the fatality rate of the Coronavirus to just about the same fatality rate of the annual flu. Using this new Stanford data, the fatality rate of the Coronavirus is between 0.12% and 0.2% which is pretty darn close to the annual flu fatality rate of 0.1%! Certainly not the 3.4% that WHO told us it was! If this Stanford test accurately identifies the trends across the nation, is it worth shutting down our entire economy and putting millions of Americans out of work which will cause massive pain and suffering and dramatically increase suicides and drug over dose deaths? I sure don’t think so!
Added to that, this data seems to confirm that a huge percentage of people under 50 (99.9%) have either no symptoms or very minor symptoms from catching Coronavirus. Studies show that it is people over 65 with other health issues that are the vast majority of people that die from Coronavirus. This data leads to the obvious conclusion that rather than kicking all our kids out of school and kicking out 22 million of our healthy workers under 60 from their jobs which has caused massive pain to our economy, we should have focused on isolating and protecting older people who are at risk that have already retired and let the healthy young people live their lives and keep our economy going.
To make this even worse, had we supported using safe, effective, and inexpensive oxychloroquine and azithromycin to treat those people who caught Coronavirus, we could have dramatically reduced the death rate even more and made the Coronavirus no big deal. What a tragedy that illustrates the incredibly high price of uninformed hysteria. In my opinion, if the Stanford U test proves accurate across the country, it will prove that this Coronavirus overreaction will be the most expensive hysterical overreaction in modern history which will have caused massive unnecessary economic pain and misery for millions of Americans for several years.
