Remember When People Were Ridiculed For Claiming Covid-19 Is Just A Bad Flu?

Despite the scary media headlines and politician's speaches, the data shows the Covid-19 infection fatality rate is now on par with just a bad flu season. That's without a Covid-19 vaccine in play!

It proves we shouldn't wait for a vaccine to get back to normal. Even with just a voluntary vaccination program, the Covid-19 infection fatality rate could fall below seasonal influenza and we haven't stopped the world for that!

At the end of April last year France had the world's highest Covid-19 case fatality rate at 18.65%. [source removed]

Today, with good health care, and provided the patient is not medically fragile due to advanced age or multiple co-morbidities, most patients would be expected to survive Covid-19.

This dramatic turnaround in survivability is due to a number of factors including: (not in any order of priority)

1. Reduced median age of patients.
2. Early detection of infection.
3. Early Treatment of Patient.
4. A much better understanding of the virus.
5. A range of effective treatment protocols.
6. Prophylaxis treatments are being used widely.

Globally the current case fatality rate is 3%, well down from the rates above 10% early last year. This takes all deaths from all cases from January 2020.

We can get an idea of what the future likely case fatality rate will be by the time we stop bothering to report daily Covid-19 reports, when we look at current data.

There are an estimated 22.6 million active Covid-19 cases with just 0.4%, or 95,482 cases listed as serious. Some of the active cases will become serious , while most will recover, as will most of the serious cases.

It is therefore logical that the case fatality rate for Covid-19 from this point in time will be somewhere lower than the current number of serious cases at just 0.4%

There are plenty of 'experts' who warn against pointing to dramatically falling case fatality rates. They say a more deadly or more infectious strain of the virus might come along..

These are the same panic merchants who glibly lock-down the economy, destroying lives and livelihoods so they can claim they are keeping you safe.

According to the CDC, each year, on average, 5% - 20% of the United States population gets the flu. [source removed]

In the last 12 months or so, 28,523,524 people have returned positive Covid-19 results in the US despite a massive, free, testing campaign. That's not even 9% of the total US population.

According to the CDC in the US the flu has resulted in 9.3 million to 49.0 million illnesses each year in the United States since 2010.

Covid-19 infections are well within this range. [Source removed]

It is estimated that the flu results in 31.4 million outpatient visits and more than 200,000 hospitalization s each year on average.
[Source removed]

During the severe 2017-2018 flu season, one of the longest in recent years, estimates indicate that more than 900,000 people were hospitalized and more than 80,000 people died from flu.
[Source removed]

In the US there have been 1,690,996 Covid-19 hospitalisation s and 505,309 Covid-19 deaths, since January 2020. [Source removed]

That is much more severe than the bad flu season of 2017-18 without question. But as can be seen from the graph below, even though the number of daily cases dramatically rose from September last year, the number of deaths increased only fractionally. Which means the infection fatality rate was dropping dramatically.

In one major review of the literature 71 studies were looked at around the world and calculated current Covid-19 infection fatality rates of between 0.0% and 1.67% with a median rate of 0.27%.
[Source removed]

The most recent data from the US estimates the seasonal influenza infection fatality rate at between 0.12% and 0.15%.
[Source removed]

Given continuing falling fatality rates for Covid-19 and improved treatments, we can expect the median infection fatality rate to fall further.

Based on the recent data and literature, Covid-19 is looking more and more like becoming as troubling as a bad flu. And that might be the worst case scenario.

Add to the equation that we have an annual influenza vaccination program which covers about 50% of the US population, and 65% of the Australian population which would help dampen the flu infection fatality rate, once a Covid-19 vaccine is introduced, we might even see Covid-19 infection fatality rates drop below that of seasonal influenza.
Or
After all, the claimed efficacy rate of Covid-19 vaccines is up to 95%. The efficacy of the seasonal influenza vaccine is between 45% and 70%. It's likely the infection fatality rate for both Covid-19 and seasonal influenza will close to around the aboiy0.

We need to drop the shackles of Covid-19 restrictions and learn to live with what is likely, just the latest, in many more viruses to come.