Out there in the quagmire of the Internet Covid controversy, Ron Unz remains insistent on the deadly peril of covid, asserting that:
... research—examining deaths out of the total number of infections, which includes unreported cases—suggests that Covid-19 kills from around 0.3% to 1.5% of people infected.
Thus stated, without qualification, covid mortality rates will be taken to refer to the population as a whole, which is an entirely false inference.
Covid mortality is hugely age-dependent, so infection fatality rates are meaningless as a basis for assessing personal risk.
If you are under 21, your risk is of death from Covid19 is substantially less than the risk of being killed in a motor vehicle accident. If you are over 75, your risk of death from Covid19 is 10% or more.
There's another factor that massively distorts understanding of the Covid mortality risk, and that is the prevalence of infection among different groups.
A study conducted in UK care homes revealed that as early as April 2020, 40% of investigated care home residents and 21% of staff were Covid19 antibody positive. These rates, which are vastly higher than national rates at the time (almost certainly less than 5%), mean that UK care homes were death traps for the most vulnerable, and accounted for a large majority of the UK's total Covid death toll.
Take these facts into consideration and it is evident that talking of population-wide IFRs is either foolish nonsense or deliberate misdirection.
In Canada, for example, as of October, 2020, 73% of all Covid 19 deaths were of care home residents.
Covid is not a world-destroying pandemic, but rather, whether launched deliberately or by chance, a mechanism for saving both the UK's bloated National Health Service from collapse under its own monstrous weight, and the profits of the US Healthcare insurers. This it is doing by ridding the world of the most useless and expensive eaters.
Young people mostly understand all of this, which is why they don't give a bleep about lockdowns and resent the cowardice of school teachers and university faculty who won't show up and teach.
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