Andrew Bolt: Facts show coronavirus doesn’t deserve this panic
The World Health Organisation has gone from underplaying the outbreak to screaming that the death rate is worse than the flu. But don’t be fooled, coronavirus is much less deadly than you’ve been told, writes Andrew Bolt.
Andrew Bolt
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The dad of music star Missy Higgins was trashed for going to work sick. In fact, doctor Chris Higgins shows us the coronavirus is much less deadly than you’ve been told.
Politicians won’t say that. There are no votes in playing down a virus that the World Health Organisation claims — falsely — kills 3.4 per cent of the people it infects.
No, no votes when we’ve just had a third death from the virus — an 82 — year-old man.
So Victorian Health Minister Jenny Mikakos went to town on Higgins, who’d returned from the US a week ago with what he thought was a mild cold, and treated patients until he realised he actually had the coronavirus.
“I have to say that I am absolutely flabbergasted that a doctor who has experienced flu-like symptoms has presented to work,” Mikakos declared, making Higgins seem reckless instead of completely dedicated.
Higgins is furious, and called out Mikakos for her “unfairness”.
But the story he tells doesn’t just clear his good name. It adds to growing suspicions that the death rate from the coronavirus is exaggerated because many people who catch it have almost no symptoms.
Higgins said he’d returned to Australia with what he thought was a “mild cold” that “had almost resolved itself”, and then tested himself only “for the sake of completeness, not imagining for one moment it would turn out to be positive.”
Had Higgins not been so careful, no one would yet know he had coronavirus. Indeed, Australia’s chief medical officer, Brendan Murphy, says many people with the virus get “very mild” symptoms, and children may get none at all.
The top doctor in America’s fight against the virus has made the same point. Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, says that’s why “we’re going to see a diminution in the overall death rate”.
Right now, though, people are freaking – and stock markets shuddering – because they’re hearing only the very worse.
The incompetent World Health Organisation, for instance, has gone from underplaying the outbreak to screaming that the death rate is now 3.4 per cent — making it 34 times more deadly than the flu.
Likewise, Australian National University researchers last week assumed a worst-case death rate of 3 per cent and very high infection rates to predict 68 million people could die. At best, 15 million would die with a death rate of 2 per cent.
Now, before you race to your supermarket to loot the last of its tinned food, calm down.
Why? Because these death rates are worked out by excluding tens of thousands of patients just like Dr Higgins.
A study a month ago by researchers from WHO and the Imperial College London said China’s figures — now suggesting a death rate of nearly 4 per cent — did not include patients with no or even mild symptoms.
Outside China, the death rate was lower — now about 2 per cent — because increased testing at airports picked up slightly sick people who China would not have tested. Even then, the study said, many people with next to no symptoms were missed.
For a startling example of the unreliability of the supposed death rates, compare South Korea and the US.
South Korea has had more than 7000 cases and 46 deaths so far, for a death rate of 0.65 per cent, or six times worse than the flu.
The US has had just over 400 cases and 19 deaths, for a death rate of 2.2 per cent.
This much higher death rate in the US isn’t because it’s got a deadlier kind of coronavirus. It’s because South Korea has tested 100 times more people, including those not obviously ill.
Even South Korea’s lower death rate of 0.65 is probably still too high. Only random tests of the population will tell us just how deadly this coronavirus is, and we might then find it’s not so very much deadlier than the flu.
That’s still dangerous for the elderly, of course, but does it deserve quite this panic?
Take the US. So far it’s lost 19 people to the coronavirus, with 3200 more dying in the rest of the world.
But the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says another 20,000 Americans have meanwhile died from the flu this northern winter, including 136 children, with no media meltdown or brawls in supermarkets over toilet paper.
I’m not saying the coronavirus isn’t dangerous. But look at Dr Higgins … and chill.