Here is a shocking statistic that you may not have considered in all the noise about the COVID 19 pandemic. The mortality rate among humans is 100%. That’s right: every single person who ever gets born eventually gets dead. (The only exception will be those alive at Christ’s return, but that doesn’t really figure into standard statistical calculations.) I am not trying to be glib or flippant here. I mean no disrespect toward those who have lost loved ones due to the COVID 19 virus. What I would like to do is calm the fears many people have toward the COVID 19 pandemic.
The word “pandemic” sounds scary. A true pandemic is scary.
The black plague that swept Europe in the middle ages killed roughly 50% of the
population; that’s a pandemic. The Spanish flu of 1918 killed tens of millions
worldwide and approximately 675,000 in the US alone; that sounds like a
pandemic until you realize that it
represents a mortality rate of only 0.5%. That means 5 people out of 1,000
died. That’s not happy times, but it’s not all that scary. I don’t know 1,000
people; I don’t think I am close enough to 100 people to know when one of them
dies. In other words, I could have lived through the Spanish flu and not known
a single person who died from it.
According to a Google
study in 2020, about 160,000 people have died in the US (as of July) due to
COVID 19; however, that is a sloppy statistic (based on Wikipedia and NY Times
numbers). Even if that number was correct, statistics also show that 75% of
2020 COVID 19 deaths were patients in nursing homes. People go to nursing homes
because they already have serious health issues. One
study reports that only 6% of reported COVID 19 deaths in nursing homes were
due to the virus alone. That means 94% of nursing home deaths reported as COVID
involved comorbidities.
Here is what makes that fact really curious. In a pre-COVID study, it was found that 31.5% of nursing
home patients die in any given year. According to the Nursing
Home Abuse Center, there are 1.4 million nursing home residents in the
United States. If 31.5% of them die in 2020, that is 441,000. Follow me: take
160,000 reported COVID deaths overall; make 75% of them nursing home fatalities
and you have 120,000. Notice that is only a little more than half of the expected deaths
in nursing homes by this time in 2020. I don’t mean to
be crass, but almost twice that many people would have died even without the dreaded virus
pandemic.
Between 2010 and 2017, deaths reported
as flu-related ranged from a high of 51,000 in 2014-2015 to a low of 12,000
in 2011-2012. If you take the 120,000 nursing home deaths out of the 160,000,
you are left with 40,000 COVID deaths outside the nursing home population. If
that death rate in the non-nursing home population remains steady, we would
lose 80,000 to COVID 19 in 2020. That number is highly suspect because there is
so much hanky-panky going on with the reported deaths due to political and financial
motivations. (For more thoughts on this see, “The
Emperor Has No Clothes.”) However, if the 80,000 number were true, it still
is only a tiny fraction higher in deaths per 100,000 than our recent flu seasons.
Not so scary, really.
As a way to compare with other causes of death in the US, here
are some facts. Preventable injuries killed approximately 160,000 people in
2018 – the same number as this scary pandemic is supposed to have claimed so far. On the
other hand, over 650,000 people died in 2018 from heart disease; nearly 600,000
died from cancer. Those numbers are pretty scary. It is interesting to note
that according to the Institute
for Highway Safety, “There were 33,654 fatal motor vehicle crashes in
the United States in 2018 in which 36,560 deaths occurred.”
They also noted that 65% of those fatally injured had alcohol in their blood at
some level. Drunk drivers kill more people than die from the flu most years. Maybe
the COVID bar shut downs will have some effect after all.
I said up top that my goal is to calm fears. There are
people in our society who are trying to make us afraid. My fear is that the
draconian measures that are being applied to the COVID 19 situation are going
to so damage our economy that it will take several years to recover. Many small
businesses may never recover because there is no “Reset” button for a lost life’s
work. Millions of people will be harmed by the COVID 19 policies instituted by
governments. I realize that’s not as bad as getting dead from the virus, but
when you understand the truly tiny morbidity rate from the virus, you have to
ask if the economic disaster is worth the cost.
There is another good reason not to fear. If you waded
through all my statistical evidence and remain unconvinced, try this. For a
true believer, death is not scary – sure, being drawn and quartered or sawn in half
or burned at the stake would be kind of scary. Many Christians have had to face
that kind of fear. But the truth is that death is the best thing that can
happen to anyone whose life is hidden in Christ. Like Paul
said, to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. That being
the case, bring it on, COVID; I ain’t skeered.
No comments:
Post a Comment