Coronavirus may have an infection fatality rate of 0.2% or less

The Coronavirus epidemic dramatises the dangers of globalisation, just in time supply chains and mass movement but also, paradoxically, the need for international cooperation and the inadequacy of international organisations. 

The WHO in particular, led by an Ethiopian who is accused of covering up epidemics when he was Minister of Health in his own country and who spent valuable time when the virus was spreading warning against xenophobia and anti-Chinese prejudice. He owes his position to China and Third World countries and has used it to make the WHO the Chinese PR firm. 

The EU has been notably useless. There is no European solidarity, as Italy has learnt. When it's a matter of life and death nations and nation states are what count, not abstract principles or internationalism or social class. But it is better so - had the European Union tried to interfere it would have made things worse.

Talking of utterly corrupt international institutions I'd be happy if Coronavirus meant the end forever of the Olympic Games. Apparently Japan does not expect them to happen next year but need they happen at all? They long ago lost their original purpose.

They are now about business and drug taking rather than amateurism, the joy of taking part and a celebration of physical strength. 

Please bear in mind that there is no reason to suppose a vaccine will ever be developed for this virus and in any case the virus will mutate outwitting a putative vaccine. 

The US death toll now exceeds 40,000, mostly in New York State and New Jersey, though the numbers of dead in New York State fell yesterday to below 550. In Italy the daily death toll has fallen below 500. 

A third of two hundred participants in a Massachusetts study tested positive for antibodies linked to COVID-19 after giving their blood samples in the street at random. That suggests herd immunity is in sight, at least in New England.

90,000 cases have been recorded in Africa, but I imagine the real number in Africa is far higher and unknowable. This will be where the virus will probably kill most, unless it does not like hot weather.

I remember President Trump being jeered at by the press when he said his hunch was that the fatality rate for the Coronavirus was 1% or less. That was when the WHO was absurdly saying the rate was 3%. 

My hunch all along has been that the death rate was around 0.1% to 0.2% and this is what a new study by Stanford University suggests. It found Covid-19 antibodies in 50 to 85 times more people than previously thought in Santa Clara County, California, resulting in an infection fatality rate (IFR) comparable with a bad flu, though of course the Coronavirus is much more infectious than a normal flu. Professor John Ioannidis explains the study in a new video.

It is important to be aware of the difference between the case fatality rate (CFR) and the infection fatality rate (IFR). CFR is the number of deaths divided by the number of confirmed cases of disease, which depends on how many people are tested. IFR is the number of deaths divided by the number of actual infections, which also depends on how many people are tested. All these figures are questionable.

In a new analysis, the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford argues that the IFR is between 0.1% and 0.36%. Even with people over 70 with no serious preconditions, it is less than 1%. 

Professor Mikko Paunio of the University of Helsinki has evaluated several international studies in a working paper and concludes the Covid19 IFR is 0.1% or less.

The following information comes from an anonymous source, Swiss Propaganda Research (SPR), which describes itself as

an independent nonprofit research group investigating geopolitical propaganda in Swiss and international media. SPR is run by independent academics and receives no external funding.

It is hard to know if being anti-Western is left-wing or right-wing, as Syrian war coverage showed us. Do those terms mean much any more? SPR might back or be backed by Russia, for aught I know, but the stuff it publishes is very interesting and seems to be true. This does not look like the conspiracy theories the wilder corners of Facebook, for example, abound with.

In Switzerland, despite Covid19, total mortality in the first quarter of 2020 (until 5th April) was in the medium normal range. One reason for this could be the mild flu season due to the mild winter, which has now been partially offset by Covid19. I think the same is true of many countries in Europe. According to a report from April 14, Swiss hospitals and even intensive care units continue to be very under-utilized. The average age for test-positive deaths in Switzerland is 84.


In Germany, the reproduction rate of Covid19 had already fallen below the critical value of 1 before the lockdown, so why did Germany impose a lockdown at all?


On a French aircraft carrier 1081 soldiers tested positive. So far, almost half of them were symptom-free and most of the other half had only mild symptoms. 24 were hospitalized and one of them is in intensive care.


Dr Klaus Püschsel, a forensic doctor from Hamburg who has examined the corpses of numerous people who died after being tested positive, explains in a new article: 

"Corona is a relatively harmless viral disease. We have to deal with the fact that Corona is a normal infection and we have to learn to live with it without quarantine."

In Canada, 31 old people died in a nursing home after almost all nursing staff had left the facility in a hurry for fear of the corona virus spreading. Similar things happened in Lombardy when Eastern European nurses left the country in a hurry.