I was talking to my psychiatrist yesterday about anxiety due to COVID. Much of it is media-induced so I've been trying to avoid the "news" since then. He pointed me in the direction of Stanford's epidemiologist, Jay Bhattacharya.
Thought this piece was interesting and may temper some of the panic going around. That's not to say that I believe the actions we're taking (masks, social distancing) are not important/helpful (gotta say that because if you don't have the same level of panic as everyone else, they think you're out to kill folk or something), but some people are behaving kinda wild, letting their emotions take over just with the panic buying, shaming, blaming, stigma, etc.
Anyway, I found the article helpful in a way and maybe you will too
https://fsi.stanford.edu/news/coronavirus-deadly-they-say
https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-coronavirus-as-deadly-as-they-say-11585088464
Thought this piece was interesting and may temper some of the panic going around. That's not to say that I believe the actions we're taking (masks, social distancing) are not important/helpful (gotta say that because if you don't have the same level of panic as everyone else, they think you're out to kill folk or something), but some people are behaving kinda wild, letting their emotions take over just with the panic buying, shaming, blaming, stigma, etc.
Anyway, I found the article helpful in a way and maybe you will too
Stanford Health Policy's Eran Bendavid and Jay Bhattacharya write in this Wall Street Journal editorial that current estimates about the COVID-19 fatality rate may be too high by orders of magnitude.
"If it’s true that the novel coronavirus would kill millions without shelter-in-place orders and quarantines, then the extraordinary measures being carried out in cities and states around the country are surely justified. But there’s little evidence to confirm that premise—and projections of the death toll could plausibly be orders of magnitude too high.
"Fear of COVID-19 is based on its high estimated case fatality rate — 2% to 4% of people with confirmed COVID-19 have died, according to the World Health Organization and others. So if 100 million Americans ultimately get the disease, 2 million to 4 million could die. We believe that estimate is deeply flawed. The true fatality rate is the portion of those infected who die, not the deaths from identified positive cases."
"The latter rate is misleading because of selection bias in testing. The degree of bias is uncertain because available data are limited. But it could make the difference between an epidemic that kills 20,000 and one that kills 2 million. If the number of actual infections is much larger than the number of cases—orders of magnitude larger—then the true fatality rate is much lower as well. That’s not only plausible but likely based on what we know so far."
https://fsi.stanford.edu/news/coronavirus-deadly-they-say
https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-coronavirus-as-deadly-as-they-say-11585088464
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