All-cause mortality in Europe, including Italy, in March was no higher than normal

In March the number of dead from all causes in Europe and in Italy was still normal or even below-average. Is this only because of the lockdown? Possibly. 18,000 have died in Italy with (not necessarily of) the virus. This compares with the 6,000 in normal years whose cause of death is recorded as flu. US data, according to a new paper by Justin Silverman and Alex Washburne quoted in The Economist, shows rates for 'influenza like illnesses' have soared in the USA, which suggests that the virus is widely spread there already and that the death rate among people infected with the virus might be as low as 0.1%.

The median age of all deaths with the Coronavirus in most countries in Europe, including Italy, is over 80. In the overwhelming majority of cases the deceased had another serious health problem as well.

It looks like most people are going to get this virus sooner or later, unless a vaccine is developed and there might never be one. Angela Merkel said last month that 70% of the population would be infected.

What I think might be a good idea is if - initially- people under thirty were allowed to go about their normal lives (and wreak havoc?), while the over thirties stay cooped up.

There are a lot of things to question about the epidemic. Lombardy has one of the oldest populations and the worst air quality in Europe and this is obviously a large part of the reason for the many deaths. In South Korea only about 70 deaths with a positive test result have been reported so far. As in Italy, those affected were mostly high-risk patients. 

Virus test kits may give a false positive result in some cases. Some persons who show positive may not have contracted the new coronavirus, but one of the many existing human coronaviruses that are part of the annual common cold and flu epidemics.

Coronavirus, for those who need to be hospitalised, can be very, very nasty indeed, as this article by Dr. Qanta Ahmed in The Spectator describes.

It was watching a colleague intubate a patient of mine with a ‘GlideScope’ — a fiber-optic camera that places a tube into the patient’s airway to connect them to a respirator — when I first saw the coronavirus effect. I watched on the screen. The secretions (or gunge, if you will) bubbling up from the lung were unlike that of any other disease I had ever seen. The discharge was not pink and frothy, as you see in heart failure, nor purulent, like in bacterial pneumonia. It was extremely gelatinous, thick and translucent. You could only imagine how it packs the lungs. I watched the screen longer than I should have (exposure risks are very high during an intubation procedure). The mucus looked like a monstrous creation in a Ridley Scott movie. That was when I knew this was not influenza, or anything like it.

Some doctors, by the way, think intubation (who knew that word two weeks ago?) can be counter-productive.

Ali Sharif Razavian does research in Data Mining, Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. He guesses, in an article he published on www.medium.com, that 1 billion people will catch the bug. He thinks a great many of these people already have or have had the virus, meaning that the peak infection period has already passed. The eventual mortality rate will be 0.06%, slightly less than the seasonal flu, he believes, but the chances of getting it are 300 times greater. He also thinks the pandemic will be over by July.