Dr. Katz is a former professor of medicine at Yale. Dr. Ioannidis, mentioned here before, is a professor of epidemiology and biomedical statistician at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Both were on Mark Levin's show tonight. If that destroys their credibility with you, that's your call.
Katz believes developing herd immunity is preferable to waiting some vague time in the future to develop a vaccine. Said mitigation and lockdowns are just delaying the inevitable. He proposed protecting the vulnerable and letting the rest get on with life. When herd immunity is developed to a certain degree, the vulnerable can begin to fully participate in society again. Did not advocate a program of testing and isolating.
Ioannidis said current information suggests an actual infection fatality rate of 1 out of...get ready for this...1,000. Same as seasonal flu. He said all the models were wrong, not because the effects of mitigation and lockdowns were figured incorrectly, but because the infection fatality rate was incorrectly believed to be far higher. He did not advocate for opening everything immediately, but said we should start on that process very soon.
Which would make it - by orders of magnitude - the most contagious disease in history.
Seems rather unlikely.
Just keep in mind that those voices are in the minority. And Levin’s voice is that of a shrill loony.
I would guess, as a professional courtesy to a fellow professor at a prestigious university, he would be more than happy to converse with you. I'm not being facetious. I would be truly curious to hear what you and he discussed.
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Link: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html
“The Spanish flu, also known as the 1918 flu pandemic, was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic. Lasting from January 1918 to December 1920, it infected 500 million people – about a third of the world's population at the time.[2] The death toll is estimated to have been anywhere from 17 million to 50 million, and possibly as high as 100 million, making it one of the deadliest pandemics in human history.”
For you, Eli, how about you call it the Spanish Flu. This way you don’t keep sounding like a knucklehead.
You cannot be trusted to get your facts correct
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It's just that logically, Katz is wrong. The death rate would have been huge (you like that word) and our hospitals would have been unable to handle the ill. It would have been 1918 all over again
and likely much, much worse, worse because the national econ would have tanked on its own, we would be in a deep financial depression and the ill would not be able to be taken care of and the
infrastructure would have collapsed. As a National security issue, this would have devastated this country. As it is, only a small portion of our military became ill (so far) and we were able to keep our
borders safe. This virus is attacking all comers not just the elderly. Predicting the future with exact numbers is plain dumb unless you look at them as an idea of what the human destruction could be
and what to do to mitigate that scenario. Like I've said, this wasn't about preventing 60 thousand deaths - it was about limiting it to 60 thousand deaths - A big difference.
Katz is patently wrong - logically.
He said, now that we know what we know now, to begin creating herd immunity among the statistically healthy and to isolate the vulnerable. This won't overrun the health care system. He didn't say we should have done this before.
He does not think individual testing and isolation is the way to go, as developing an effective vaccine may be years away.
suggested much more widespread of the virus, 50-80 fold more than official confirmed the cases we saw. Certainly the fatality rate will fall much lower as a result of this widespread. They now should put more resources on antibody testing. For covid-19 testing, it should be "who feel sick who get tested". The rest of testing effort should be focused on antibody testing.
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