How we were lied to: why the science shows that the mortality rate of COVID-19 may have been as low as pandemic influenza--0.1-0.2%--even in early 2020

CDC is now recommending to treat COVID-19 like the flu. Many are saying that "the conspiracy theorists were right", since this comparison between COVID-19 and influenza was made throughout the entire pandemic.

But this is inaccurate. In a NEJM article from February 2020, Redfield and Fauci said the same thing. They knew the whole time.

This is what they wrote:

In another article in the Journal, Guan et al. report mortality of 1.4% among 1099 patients with laboratory-confirmed Covid-19; these patients had a wide spectrum of disease severity. If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.

See for yourself:

Yet the rabbit hole goes much deeper.

A paper published in the Lancet in 2022 estimated that the mortality rate of COVID-19 was:

0.47% in April 2020
0.31% by January 2021

See for yourself:

Yet this is an overestimate, as the authors of studies like the one published in the Lancet know. Seroprevalence studies use the prevalence of antibodies in the blood of people infected by COVID-19 to estimate the mortality rate of the virus. They compare deaths with the number of infections, as measured by the number of people in the population with a positive antibody test.

Yet between 50-75% of COVID-19 infections do not cause elevated antibodies in the blood after the infection clears. This means that there are between two-times and three-times more people who have been infected by the virus than it indicated by the presence of antibodies, since only 25-50% of people infected actually get antibodies. (This is because T cells fight the infection before B cells produce significant antibodies.)

See for yourself:

This means that the number of people infected by COVID-19 is higher than seroprevalence studies estimate, by two- to three-fold. This means that these seroprevalence studies are overestimating the rate of COVID-19 infection by two- to three-fold.

Therefore, we can reestimate the mortality rates provided by the seroprevalence studies as follows. At the lower end, we can convert the above figures from The Lancet paper by 50% and get the following:

0.24% mortality in April 2020
0.16% mortality by January 2021

At the higher end, we can convert them by 75% and get:

0.12% mortality in April 2020
0.08% mortality by January 2020

Thus, seroprevalence studies show that the real mortality rate of COVID-19 may have been as low was 0.1-0.2%, on par with pandemic influenza, as reported by Fauci and Redfield in February in 2020 [4].

We may have been dealing with a virus only as deadly as the severe influenza from the very beginning of the pandemic. During the deadliest period, 2020, it may have killed only 1 person per 500 infections or even 1000 infections.

Contrast this with the insane figure promoted by the World Health Organization in March 2020, 3.4%.

See for yourself:

This figure was known to be a dramatic overestimate by scientists at the time.

It is even at odds with the estimates of CDC Director Robert Redfield and NIAID Director Anthony Fauci, who speculated that the mortality rate was "considerably less than 1%" in February 2020.

We were told that the mortality rate was 1-in-30.

It was really as low was 1-in-1000.

Thus, we were falsely told that the virus was 30 times deadlier than it actually was.

We made the decision to lockdown and freak out as a society based upon an embellishment, a lie.

The public health establishment and the media lied to us.

The pandemic was one of the most notable pandemics in Western history--in that it is the only pandemic that was almost entirely one of hysteria.

It was a real pandemic, but the monster we made it out to be was almost entirely a product of our collective hysterical imaginations.

Incredible.