| Absent strong public health measures, we would expect it to kill something like 0.5% to 1.0% of a nation’s population, and whether or not that’s a large number is a matter of personal opinion. |
So declared Ron Unz, publisher of the Unz Review.
That claim is far from the truth as the case of Sweden demonstrates. There, in the absence of "strong public health measures" there have been 5,846 reported Covid deaths, or about 0.06% of the population. That must be close to the final toll, as Covid deaths in Sweden peaked in March and are now at or close to zero.
Why would a scientifically literate person such as Ron Unz make such a false claim? Mere confusion, perhaps*.
One way in which Covid death rates have been greatly exaggerated has been to confuse, deliberately or otherwise, two measures of the death rate; namely, the "Case Fatality Rate" and the "Infection Fatality Rate."
The Covid19 Case Fatality Rate (CFR) is a measure of deaths among confirmed Covid19 cases, the latter being mainly cases of serious illness, which thus came to the attention of the medical profession and were identified as due to Covid19 by a more or less reliable diagnostic methods.
The Covid19 Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) is a measure of deaths among all those infected with Covid19, whether they were seriously ill or not, or whether they were ill at all. The IFR can only be determined if there is population-wide testing for past or present Covid19 infection, for example by means of a reliable serological test for Covid19 antibodies.
Evidence currently available suggests that the the IFR is only about one tenth of the CFR. Therefore, to mistake the CFR for the IFR will result in an exaggeration of the actual IFR by a factor of around ten.
But even a ten-fold error does not explain Ron Unz's claim that "absent strong public health measures" Covid19 will "kill something like 0.5% to 1.0% of a nation’s population." To explain that, assuming it is not a straight lie, one must assume that Ron Unz confuses the Infection Fatality Rate with the Population Fatality Rate (PFR). Such confusion assumes a Covid death rate among the population as a whole equal to the Covid death rate among those made sick by a confirmed Covid19 infection, which is nonsense.
But perhaps Ron Unz's claim is a straight lie, which would be consistent with the fact that, when I pointed out the error on his Unz Review post, my comment was deleted.
______* Cf. Ronald B. Brown, 2000, Public Health Lessons Learned from Biases in Coronavirus Mortality Overestimation.
Related:
Zero Hedge: "It's Like Using A Hammer To Kill A Fly" - Architect Of Sweden's COVID-19 Anti-Lockdown Strategy Finally Vindicated
