In April of 2020, a professor of medicine at Stanford University led a study to determine what percentage of the population had actually been exposed to COVID 19. He was testing for seroprevalence, or evidence of COVID antibodies in a person’s blood.

He was able to show that there were fifty times more infections than identified cases. His results were affirmed with eighty-two similar studies from around the world. What this scientifically derived data demonstrates is that the actual WuHan COVID fatality rate is 0.2 percent, not 3.0 percent, that is two deaths for every thousand, not three deaths for every hundred.

For perspective, in 2018, the most recent year for which I could find data, the plain old influenza/pneumonia fatality rate from Washington State Department of Health statistics was 1.7 percent.

The majority of people who are infected by COVID have very mild symptoms or no symptoms at all. These people were not identified in the early days, which resulted in a highly misleading fatality rate. That is what drove public policy. Even worse, it continues to sow fear and panic, because the perception of too many people about COVID is frozen in the misleading data from March.

From A Sensible and Compassionate Anti-COVID Strategy, by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D., Stanford University, October 9th, 2020

More good news,

We have all heard the rumors of asymptomatic spreaders. It could even be you or me feeling fine as we walk about town, shedding the COVID virus everywhere we go. 

Research early in the pandemic suggested that the rate of asymptomatic infections could be as high as 81%. But a meta-analysis published last month, which included 13 studies involving 21,708 people, calculated the rate of asymptomatic presentation to be 17%. Bianca Nogrady, Nature.com, November 18, 2020.

The study referred in this article at Nature.com, Estimating the extent of asymptomatic COVID-19 and its potential for community transmission: Systematic review and meta analysis, was published October 9, 2020 on the peer reviewed website of the Journal of the Association of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Disease Canada.

The authors found asymptomatic individuals to be a much smaller percentage of the population that was much less likely to transmit the virus. 

“Our estimates of the proportion of asymptomatic cases and their risk of transmission suggest that asymptomatic spread is unlikely to be a major driver of clusters or community transmission of infection”.

Last, but not least.

In Denmark, over the months of April and May of 2020, when “masks were uncommon and not among recommended public health measures”, researchers completed a study using 4862 participants above the age of eighteen as a test of the theory that masks reduce the risk of contracting SARS-cov-2. 

The study revealed, “Infection with SARS-cov-2 occurred in 42 participants recommended masks, 1.9% and in 53 control participants, 2.1%” who did not wear masks.

The researchers concluded, “The recommendation to wear a surgical mask when outside the home did not reduce, at conventional levels of statistical significance, the incidence of SARS-covid-2 infection in mask wearers.”

Check out the study for yourself at ACPjournals.com, Effectiveness Of Adding A Mask Recommendation To Other Public Health Measures To Prevent SARS-cov-2 Infection In Danish Mask Wearers.

In a world in which facts no longer matter and the truth is relative I don’t expect accurate data provided through scientific research to change anything. The bureaucracies that rule our lives are like the giant container ships that cruise by Port Townsend every day. Once they are up to speed and moving in a certain direction there is very little anyone can do to change their course. Regardless, I provide this information with the hope that as individuals we can decide whether we want to continue to live in fear of each other, or lead the way forward to a time when we can be together once again.

Brett Nunn

Brett Nunn has spent the last two decades in Port Townsend’s Uptown, raising a family, volunteering at local schools and wandering the outdoors. He writes about survival, community and culture. He is the author of the book, “Panic Rising: True-Life Survivor Tales from the Great Outdoors.”