Covid-19 is ‘probably’ only as deadly as the flu – Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

A Stanford professor of medicine who also has a doctorate in economics, Prof Jay Bhattacharya has questioned the conventional wisdom on the death rates from Covid-19 that governments all over the world are using to model their responses. He said it is likely to be orders of magnitude lower than the estimates of 3.4% of the World Health Organization. The death rates, he believes, are much closer to that of flu. He has subsequently concluded a study in Santa Clara Country, California that he released at the end of last week that confirms his claims. In a Youtube podcast, he explained to Hoover Institution fellow, Peter Robinson that the study used an antibody blood test to estimate how many people had been infected. Prof Bhattacharaya said his study meant that governments need to rethink modelling and their policies on Covid-19. – Linda van Tilburg

We drew a sample of people from Santa Clara County – basically using a Facebook targeted ad strategy. We looked at about 3,200 people in these drive -through testing facilities that we set up on the fly. They took the fingerprints and then we just looked to see if the fingerprint test showed evidence of antibodies to Covid-19. Why is that important? Because those antibodies imply very strongly that you had Covid-19 previously – some sort of infection with SARS -CoV-2 virus (which is the technical way to put it). We've figured out that somewhere between 2.8% – 4% of Santa Clara County has had evidence of Covid infection. OK, so what does that mean? So first thing; right around the time when we were doing this study there had been about a thousand cases of Covid infections – active SARS-CoV-2 infections found within the county. There's about 2 million people in the county. If 4% have it (have evidence of the infection) – that means that there's about 85 times more people who've had it per person than the amount actually identified as having it. 

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