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collyw

I didn't watch it, but a couple of the bullet points look pretty untrustworthy.

Covid-19 is a “mild disease” and similar to the flu, and it was the novelty of the disease that scared people.

It's a fair bit nastier, certainly in some cases, or the hospitals wouldn't be full.

The actual fatality rate of Covid-19 is the region of 0.1%

How can we be sure until we have widespread testing?

At least 50% of the population of both the UK and Sweden will be shown to have already had the disease when mass antibody testing becomes available

Again how can we be sure of this? It all seems very speculative.

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>> The actual fatality rate of Covid-19 is the region of 0.1%

> How can we be sure until we have widespread testing?

I think we can be sure that this is an incorrect number, with the data we have right now. At least 8448 people have died of COVID-19 in New York City, and if only 0.1% of the infected die, then we have 8,448,000 infected New Yorkers. This is the entire population of the city (including those who fled to other states) and would mean that we've reached herd immunity and can stop worrying about it now.

https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page

shows a significant drop in caseload. There might be herd immunity effect if you assume a death rate of ~0.2%.

> At least 8448 people have died of COVID-19 in New York City

Just to add: be very careful to compare deaths across countries. Every country seems to count deaths differently. Some only count it if you didn't have any other condition. E.g. you had something with your lungs? That death might not be reported.

In Netherlands they compared the amount of people dying per week. There was a sudden huge increase of deaths. It seemed to indicate the number of deaths for Netherlands was 2x as high as they were reporting. Though they did report the deaths with a very clear remark that the numbers were highly likely to be too low. Unfortunately such remarks were often ignored by the public, leading to eventual distrust of any figure. Interestingly, the press at various times did make it clear that the figure could be unreliable. Seems people often just read a headline :-p

PS: My point is that the 8448 might be greatly higher. Depends on how the 8448 was collected/reported.

>it's a fair bit nastier, certainly in some cases, or the hospitals wouldn't be full

While I agree that it probably is indeed nastier than your average flu, it actually wouldn't have to be much nastier to achieve health system saturation in places where it hits groups that are particularly vulnerable (the elderly mainly). Almost all healthcare systems operate on fairly thin margins of tolerance for overload, and a virus of even mild percentages for hospital-worthy or lethal cases could easily, temporarily overload clinical infrastructure if it comes out of the blue and is moving through a population that was entirely virgin to it before the infection in question arrived. This lack of immunity among all parts of society means massive numerical surges in cases very quickly and consequently, major numerical surges in that small fraction of cases that end up being bad enough to warrant hospitalization.

We won't be sure of such statistics whether or not we have widespread testing. Even for pandemics in the past, we just don't know how many people caught them, not even a single significant digit. The best we can do is make reasoned guesses based on the available evidence.

That's why I am suspicious of the claims it makes.

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