Jon Hamilton, reporting for NPR: Mounting evidence suggests the coronavirus is more common and less deadly than it first appeared. The evidence comes from tests that detect antibodies to the coronavirus in a person’s blood rather than the virus itself. The tests are finding large numbers of people in the U.S. who were infected but never became seriously ill. And when these mild infections are included in coronavirus statistics, the virus appears less dangerous. “The current best estimates for the infection fatality risk are between 0.5% and 1%,” says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
That’s in contrast with death rates of 5% or more based on calculations that included only people who got sick enough to be diagnosed with tests that detect the presence of virus in a person’s body. And the revised estimates support an early prediction by Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a leading member of the White House coronavirus task force. In an editorial published in late March in The New England Journal of Medicine, Fauci and colleagues wrote that the case fatality rate for COVID-19 “may be considerably less than 1%.” But even a virus with a fatality rate less than 1% presents a formidable threat, Rivers says. “That is many times more deadly than seasonal influenza,” she says. The new evidence is coming from places such as Indiana, which completed the first phase of a massive testing effort early in May. Further reading: Antibody Tests and Accuracy Issues Leave Some Americans With More Questions Than Answers.
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot