You Don't Need To Be Einstein To Figure Out A Scam

Via the New York Post,

The US topped 15 million cases of COVID-19 this week, but that number is likely exponentially higher — by as much as seven times, a top Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official said Thursday.

. . . “The total estimated number of infections is likely two to seven times greater than reported cases,” [CDC Suit Aron] Hall said, adding that the evidence was based on seroprevalence surveys and models.

So let's take this official's highest estimate, that the number of infections is as much as seven times greater than the 15 million reported. I brought up my calculator and found that 7 times 15 million is 105,000,000, Later, the same article says there have been 289,000 deaths to date. So I divided 289,000 by 15,000,000 and got a case fatality rate of 0.0027 of 1%. If 105 million people have been infected in the CDC's worst case scenario, but only 289,000 have died, then we definitely don't have mass graves in public parks the way they said we would back in March, right?

What's the explanatiion? 105 million is like a third of the country, but nobody's getting all that sick. And if a third of the country is infected, what's with the lockdowns and masks? Obviously they haven't worked, huh?

Curious, I looked up the daily new deaths in the US vs the daily new cases. As of December 5, there were 218,671 new cases and 2,461 deaths, which gives a case fatality rate of a little over 1%, which is consistent with the observation that the case fatality rate in the US has been steadily declining since the start of the pandemic.

Healthcare workers are now seeing unprecedented increases in COVID-19 diagnoses and hospitalizations -- but there hasn't been a congruent rise in mortality rates even as case counts set records.

That decline has no single, clear explanation, but experts have pointed to a host of contributing factors. . .

This table gives a survey of case fatality rates in various countries at all dates over the course of 2020. As of December 5, the case fatality rate in the US was 1.9%. As of June 27, it was 5.1%. The decline in rates is almost certainly an artifact of testing -- as more people test positive, but the number of new deaths remains relatively constant, the fatality rate is going to decline.

The CDC official at the New York Post link above also said "the death toll is also likely higher" than the published numbers, although it's generally acknowledged that the published COVID death totals include a large proportion of people with comorbidities. But let's examine what he's said and take the numbers for granted. He's said the actual case rate is two to seven times higher than the published numbers. So again, let's take his worst-case estimate of 105,000,000 infections.

Although the current published COVID case mortality rate in the US is 1.9%, let's round it off at 2%. So if there are 105,000,000 infections, we would in fact be seeing 2.1 million deaths, I mean right now. not next January. You'd need Ryder rental trucks to haul the dead off to the mass graves in public parks. But we aren't seeing this. Why not?

So you say OK, maybe it's unfair to take his worst-case estimate, that's way out of reasonable range. Let's take his best case estimate, there are only twice as many infections as reported. Twice 15 million is 30 million. At a 2% case mortality rate, that's 600,000 deaths, more than twice what we've seen all year. But allowing for a number of deaths that's anything like what's reported, that's an actual case mortality rate of less than 1%. The CDC estimates that the case mortality rate for the 2019-20 flu season was in the neighborhood of 0.1%.

In other words, the more COVID cases the suits at the CDC find, with deaths remaining relatively constant, the closer the case mortality rate for COVID comes to that for the flu. And I just don't see where they can find equivalent numbers of extra deaths to make up the difference. This is a guy who's apparently authorized to speak on behalf of the CDC as an "official", but he's talking the purest moonshine.

When I first talked about moral panics last week, I said that one feature of them is that the perceived threat is disproportionate to the actual threat in some measurable way. The New York Post story is an example: we have a "CDC official" saying that the number of COVID infections right now is so great that, if his estmate were true, just based on published case mortality rates, we'd be seeing Category 5 level disasters in every city.

We aren't. At least some people are beginning to lose patience. The problem for the CDC becomes how much more the rate is going to decline as more and more people are tested -- and at what point this indicates that, as a practical matter, the problem has been solved, even without a vaccine.