Trying to make things sound worse, the CDC accidentally gives us good news
The CDC estimates covid cases at nearly twice the reported rate, which means it’s not as deadly
Sometimes in an effort to make things sound worse people accidentally reveal that things aren’t as bad as we think.
That is the case with the report on March 1 from the Centers for Disease Control that attempted to make covid sound worse than the official numbers. They estimated that the number of cases may be nearly twice as many as the official numbers suggest.
At the time, there had been 74 million official cases, but they believed that through home testing or people not testing at all the number would realistically be closer to 140 million. Since then, another 5 million official cases have been recorded, so extrapolating that out by the CDC’s same percentage that would be around 150 million actual cases.
Wow, that certainly sounds worse, right? But let’s think about that for a few minutes.
First, we find that it means that in two years, more than half of all Americans have not had covid. There are around 334 million people in the United States (well, probably a few million more thanks to President Biden’s open border policy). That means that in two years covid has afflicted 45 percent of the population – initial estimates had been that 70 percent or more would become infected by the end of 2021.
So that is some good news already. It means the virus never spread as much as had been anticipated.
But this attempt by the CDC to make things seem worse provides even more good news. As of this morning, the CDC had officially recorded 79,198,539 cases resulting in 959,533 deaths. That means 1.2 percent of cases ended with death.
That’s actually already a fairly low number, but look what happens if we use the higher estimate of 150 million cases. That would put the death rate at around 0.6 percent.
The age group of 75 and older accounted for less than 5 percent of all those cases, yet more than half of all the deaths came from that same age demographic. The age group of 0-74 accounted for 95.2 percent of all cases but 47 percent of the deaths.
That means if you were younger than 75, by official statistics, you had a 99.4 percent chance of not dying! If the estimate is that there really have been 150 million cases, we can assume most of those extra 70 million would have been younger than 75 (since those in the older group are tested more frequently and those younger are healthier and less likely to show any significant symptoms). If so, those younger than 75 have a greater than 99.7 percent rate of survival.
And if you’re under 75 and healthy, your chances of dying from covid shrink to a number so tiny it almost can’t be calculated.
Of course, we’ll probably never have any real way of knowing if the 150 million estimate is true or not. It could be 120 million or 160 million. I know that since my wife and I never reported our cases to any official sources, the CDC number is short by at least two cases.
In any event, the official CDC numbers aren’t all that bad and their making-it-seem-worse numbers make them even better. So for once – although accidentally – the CDC has given us some good news.