Look for this study to be ignored or argued with...

Stanford study suggests coronavirus might not be as deadly as flu

One of the great unknowns of the COVID-19 crisis is just how deadly the disease is. Much of the panic dates from the moment, in early March, when the World Health Organization (WHO) published a mortality rate of 3.2 percent — which turned out to be a crude ‘case fatality rate’ dividing the number of deaths by the number of recorded cases, ignoring the large number of cases which are asymptomatic or otherwise go unrecorded.

The Imperial College modeling, which has been so influential on the UK government, assumed an infection fatality rate (IFR) of 0.9 percent. This was used to compute the infamous prediction that 250,000 Britons would die unless the government abandoned its mitigation strategy and adopted instead a policy of suppressing the virus through lockdown. Imperial later revised its estimate of the IFR down to 0.66 percent — although the March 16 paper which predicted 250,000 deaths was not updated.

In the past few weeks, a slew of serological studies estimating the prevalence of infection in the general population has become available. This has allowed Prof John Ioannidis of Stanford University to work out the IFR in 12 different locations.

They range between 0.02 percent and 0.5 percent — although Ioannidis has corrected those raw figures to take account of demographic balance and come up with estimates between 0.02 percent and 0.4 percent. The lowest estimates came from Kobe, Japan, found to have an IFR of 0.02 percent and Oise in northern France, with an IFR of 0.04 percent. The highest were in Geneva (a raw figure of 0.5 percent) and Gangelt in Germany (0.28 percent).

So basically, it may be slightly higher than the seasonal flu (0.1% to 0.2%)  or it just may be significantly lower (as in about 10% as deadly).  Moreover, these are numbers associated across the board, that includes very high fatality rates with older people, and fatality rates approaching zero for younger, healthier people.

With this information (the wide difference in demographic fatality rates) our overall powers to be cannot come up with anything other than full lock down, all the time, for everyone, with no exceptions. Apparently we are not only unable to think outside the box, but one might wonder if some of our experts and leaders can think at all.

Of course, it would help just a little bit if people actually were told about this stuff, rather than just scare them into thinking everyone is in danger of a slow painful death if they venture outside for 10 minutes without a mask, a bottle of Purell, and some Lysol spray.