Director of CDC says 99% of patients will recover from COVID-19

Last updated on January 3, 2023

Director Dr. Robert Redfield, of the CDC gives a rare interview about COVID-19 fatality and recovery rate

NPR published this Q & A with Dr. Redfield who I referred to before, on March 21. The highlights are below:

• “It’s probably now about three times as infectious as flu.”
•  [Asymptomatic patients] may be as much as 25%. [no link to research, and have not seen this confirmed anywhere. But many news sources have quoted it anyway!]
• “Is the mask something that protects me or … if I wear a mask, is it something that protects others, from me?” His reply: “We’re looking at that…”
• Social distancing is “a powerful weapon.” [No data given. But he hopes so!]
• “One of the critical areas is, of course, long-term-care facilities.” [This is an important clue as to where it’s actually spreading! Why isn’t the public being told this??? We know it’s almost all older people, but patients in these places are seriously unhealthy, and so weak they can’t take care of their lives.]
• “I don’t think anybody would disagree that for decades, collectively, our nation’s underinvested in public health.” [Understandable, but a pretty bald plug for more funds.]
• At the end of the day, most of us who get this infection will recover. The majority of people do — probably 98%, almost 98.5%, 99% recover. [Why isn’t this front and center in the news??? Instead of the millions forecasted to die in the imaginative projections?]

Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Robert Redfield joined forces to write about COVID-19 recovery rate in the NEJM!

Drs. Anthony Fauci and Robert R. Redfield also wrote about this in the New England Journal of Medicine on March 26. Studying the numbers in China: Note that this was published BEFORE social distancing, on Feb 28, 2020.

The median age of the patients was 59 years, with higher morbidity and mortality among the elderly and among those with coexisting conditions (similar to the situation with influenza); 56% of the patients were male. Of note, there were no cases in children younger than 15 years of age.

If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively. [my Bold]

Positive news on COVID-19 that you won’t find most places

And here’s today’s news, from Apple and New York Magazine. Good news! (I have liked a couple of their fairly neutral articles lately, so yay to find a reputable trustworthy source.)

Hospitalizations in NYC have gone down, and San Fran might lighten up on their lockdown. (Tell that to jailer Gov. Gavin Newsom.)

And they point to the IHME, and their pandemic model developed by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. I have been following the IHME for a week, but they have not returned my phone call. From what I can find it’s a small company, and are famous for the $10 million grant from Bill Gates.

All of the IHME projections have gone down drastically each week: deaths, beds available, ICUs. The link above is for California, but they list all the other states and countries, too, upgraded in real time. Right now, California has twice as many ICU rooms we would need, and 5 times as many beds, and the death projection goes down every day!

Take a look at this:

When Donald Trump unveiled his “flatten the curve” chart, months after public-health experts began advocating that approach to the disease, he was working off the IMHE model [above], and suggesting that between 100,000 and 240,000 Americans would die. A model developed by the CDC projected a range between 200,000 and 1.7 million. The Imperial College model famously predicted 2.2 million deaths in the U.S. in a do-nothing scenario, and more than 1 million even if quite aggressive mitigation measures were adopted.

I always knew Imperial College was a crock. And look what a Debbie Downer the CDC is. Anything to get more money from the Federal budget, right?

President Trump’s predictions of coronavirus recovery rate are more correct than his whole team

As of this writing, 20,600 have died in the US, so President Trump has won this betting pool. And maybe he wasn’t so far off to be sceptical about what the public should do.

The new IHME model suggests an ultimate toll less than one-quarter that number, about one-20th the figure projected in the Imperial College’s “mitigation” scenario, and less than one-30th what was projected in their “do nothing” scenario.

After this, the New York Magazine goes way off course, so I was too soon to name it as trustworthy. They say the numbers are down because we were such obedient little girls and boys:

We are doing so willingly, with hardly any meaningful resistance to shelter-in-place guidance, even though the statistical profile of the disease, while brutal, would allow most Americans to think it was a much more significant threat to others.

BINGO. No meaningful resistance because WE WERE FUCKING SCARED to DEATH by the media and our own Governors and the Public Health. Isn’t this the dictionary definition of fascism?