The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) nows estimates that 35 percent of coronavirus infections are asymptomatic.
But that’s not even the most important part of their latest estimates. It’s the CDC’s new “best estimate” for the case fatality rate amongst symptomatic patients.
But, before I got to that, I should note that back in March, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated a 3.4 percent fatality rate and Dr. Anthony Fauci estimated that the fatality rate of the coronavirus was about 2 percent.
President Trump was skeptical of both those numbers, particularly the WHO’s estimate: “Well, I think the 3.4 percent is really a false number,” Trump told Sean Hannity. “Now, and this is just my hunch, and — but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this. Because a lot of people will have this and it’s very mild. They’ll get better very rapidly. They don’t even see a doctor. They don’t even call a doctor. I think that that number is very high. I think the number, personally, I would say the number is way under 1 percent.”
SEE ALSO: The United States STILL Doesn’t Lead The World In Coronavirus Deaths
Several studies have suggested that Trump was right. But, now here’s what the CDC is saying about the fatality rate the coronavirus:
- 0-49 years old: .05%
- 50-64 years old: .2%
- 65+ years old: 1.3%
- Overall ages: .4%
According to the CDC’s current best estimate, the case fatality rate of the coronavirus is .4 percent. And that’s just amongst symptomatic cases, which, the CDC estimates, is 65 percent of all cases. This means the CDC estimates that the fatality rate for all infections across all age groups, symptomatic as well as asymptomatic, is approximately .26 percent.
Quick video showing how to calculate the IFR from the CFR which the CDC gave us using actuals AND the 35% asymptomatic rate.
I think I have this right now. pic.twitter.com/XuC8f3FVtf
— Justin Hart (@justin_hart) May 22, 2020
The CDC does caution that the numbers are likely to change with new data, but considering we’ve gone from 3.4 percent to 2.0 percent to now 0.26 percent. The more data we get, the lower the numbers get. So, I’m thinking it might get even lower.
But, the bigger takeaway from this is that the early doomsday predictions about the coronavirus were all wrong. Everything that justified the lockdowns and the shutting down of our economy was wrong. We need to open this country back up.
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Matt Margolis is the author of Trumping Obama: How President Trump Saved Us From Barack Obama’s Legacy and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis
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