WE'RE NOT DYING (YET) LIKE THESE SCAREMONGERS SAID
So far Australia's death toll from the coronavirus is just 13. It will rise, but is much less than we were led to expect. Was the danger - real enough - wildly exaggerated? Here are the most alarmist predictions that helped to panic our governments into burning down the country in order to "save" it.
So far Australia's death toll from the coronavirus is just 13. It will rise, but is much less than we were led to expect.
Was the danger - which is real enough - wildly exaggerated?
Here are the most alarmist predictions that helped to panic our governments into burning down the country in order to "save" it.
Note well for the accounting when this is over.
Professor Warwick McKibbin and Roshen Fernando:
Close to 100,000 Australians .... could perish to the coronavirus in a worst case-scenario, according to a new report...
The chilling prediction was made in a paper released this week by professor Warwick McKibbin and Roshen Fernando called The Global Macroeconomic Impacts of COVID-19: Seven Scenarios.
The colleagues from the Australian National University said ... under different “pandemic scenarios” Australian deaths ranged from 21,000 to 96,000. Modelling also suggested between 15 million and 68 million people could be wiped out globally.
Between 25 and 70 per cent of Australians could end up by contracting COVID-19, according to one infectious diseases expert.
And in a worst case scenario, “hundreds of thousands” could die here, said Professor Raina MacIntyre, head of the University of NSW’s school of public health and community medicine.
Sydney Morning Herald, extrapolating from Deputy Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly:
Up to 150,000 Australians could die from the coronavirus under a worst case scenario, the Morrison government says, as it considers advice on restricting visits to pubs, cinemas and aged care homes.
Deputy Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly said that the number of infections would range between 20 per cent to 60 per cent of the population. He urged the public to comply with social distancing measures such as avoiding large gatherings of 500 or more people.
"This is an infectious disease," Professor Kelly said in Canberra. "The more we can do to separate people and stop the disease spreading, the better. The death rate is around 1 per cent. You can do the maths."
University of Sydney Professor Robert Booy, who has previously advised Australia's chief medical officer on influenza pandemics, said the best case scenario is that one in five people in [NSW] will be infected with the deadly coronavirus.
New South Wales has a population of eight million people, meaning 1.6 million people are predicted to get coronavirus this year.
Australia's latest Health Department alert said the global case fatality rate is now about 3.7 per cent.
Based on those figures, 59,200 people would die in the state...
University of Queensland virologist Ian Mackay said the virus could infect up to 80 per cent of the population.
Daily Telegraph, extrapolating from Deputy Chief Medical Oficer Paul Kelly:
About 50,000 Australians could die from coronavirus if the Australian Government’s most conservative modelling comes true.
Deputy chief medical officer Paul Kelly said the government was looking at the possibility of between 20 and 60 per cent of the country’s 25,000,000 citizens contracting the killer virus — with a fatality rate of one per cent.
He would not say exactly how many the government was predicting, just that it was somewhere between German Prime Minister Angela Merkel’s 60 per cent prediction and NSW Health’s Dr Kerry Chant’s modelling of 20 per cent.
Then there's this panic, thanks to Ben Phillips and Macquarie University’s Hamish Meares and Michael Jones (reported on March 28):
Modelling by the University of Melbourne’s Ben Phillips forecast Victoria’s ICU capacity will be half-full within just six days, completely full within 10 days, and stretched beyond 140 per cent capacity in 11 days.
Even more grim modelling in the Medical Journal of Australia this week by Macquarie University’s Hamish Meares and Michael Jones forecast one in 10 COVID-19 patients may require intensive care at the height of Australia’s transmission.
If the current rate continues that means the nation’s existing ICUs will be full by April 5.
Even if Australia doubles ICU capacity the extra beds would fill by April 8.
On The Bolt Report this week I've pointed to evidence suggesting those scares are greatly exaggerated.
- The mortality rate is actually much lower than first thought, in part because many people with mild symptoms were undetected or not tested. In Australia it is so far around 0.4 per cent (although that could rise, as those critically ill eventually die.)
- Many of those said to have died from the virus actually had serious and even fatal pre-existing conditions. They include two people in the cancer ward of Melbourne's Alfred Hospital, and a 68-year-old man who died in Queensland.
- Britain's Imperial College, which had warned that 520,000 Briton could die from the virus, now says the toll could be just 6000 - or less than the toll from the seasonal flu. it adds that many of the dead would have died within months of other illnesses.
- We are younger than Italy (our median age is 10 years less), and I suspect healthier. The average Italian smokes three cigarettes to an Australian's two.
- Our hospitals are so far nowhere near overwhelmed, and have all the equipment needed to keep alive the seriously ill for the foreseeable future.
UPDATE
Note to trolls: to say the danger was exaggerated is not to say the danger does not exist. To say the danger was exaggerated is certainly not to argue that nothing should have been done to save us. These points, I thought, were too obvious to need stating, but the vindictive responses from some trolls suggests I put far too much faith in some people putting aside the pointscoring to work out how best to help this country.
The question is how best to fight this virus. It is not whether we should even bother.