How Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg sees the current Corona pandemic
The above links to a viral video people were posting on social media. My response:
I watched it. It is five days old and showing its age. He makes some very good points, but you only have to look at what is happening in Italy (and Spain and France) to realize that he can be both right and wrong. Right about a baseline persistence of corona viruses in general, but wrong about the death rate of this one. This one kills at least 5x more people than the usual ones on a normal year. That is what the fuss is about. We can worry that the testing is wrong, and it is true that all the official numbers are bs. The thing to look at his how many people are in the hospital at once in Italy. This is not a normal year. And those dead people — way more than on any typical day — are the one statistic that is solid. It is true that we don’t know relatively what percentage are sick, how many get mild vs severe symptoms, etc. But we do know that this is much, much worse than seasonal flu. One statistic I read noted that in all of Italy the death rate is currently 20% above normal, and in Lombardy it is 80% above normal right now. The hospitals are overfull, and that is after the lockdown. In another ten days those who have been exposed in the past week will start showing symptoms, and we will know whether we have all been fooled, or if it is for real.
To another writer who insisted it is a hoax:
Well, in ten days we will know for sure whether the US health care system is similarly overloaded, or whether this was all a hoax. Early trends are not looking good for the hoax hypothesis.
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