Survival Rate Hits New High of 99.6% Yet Policy Continues to Badly Lag

The CDC’s current best estimate of the survival rate of COVID-19 is 99.6%.  This is a new high for the reported survival rate which has been climbing for weeks.  The news is even better than it appears as this number includes only symptomatic cases.  The true survival rate will almost certainly turn out to be higher when asymptomatic cases, which the CDC estimates at 35%, are added to the calculation.

This latest estimate of the survival rate, reached by subtracting the fatality rate from one hundred, is

… consistent with other assessments. “By now, multiple studies from Europe, Japan, and the U.S. all suggest that the overall fatality rate is far lower than early estimates, perhaps below 0.1 to 0.4%, i.e., ten to forty times lower than estimates that motivated extreme isolation,” Dr. Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, told lawmakers in early May, referring to the infection rate.

There have been a slew of other encouraging developments including, most recently, that Denmark reopened schools and day care centers and did not see a rise in cases, emulating Finland’s experience.

Following a one-month lockdown, Denmark allowed children between two to 12 years back in day cares and schools on April 15. Based on five weeks’ worth of data, health authorities are now for the first time saying the move did not make the virus proliferate.

It is inexplicable that governors of still-locked down states like Rhode Island have been so very slow to incorporate the most important data point – the survival rate – into their response to COVID-19, as well as the outcome of numerous real life re-open experiments, including Denmark, Finland, Georgia, Florida and Texas.  The result has been that “flatten the curve” has turned into a rolling, open-ended project that has needlessly prolonged a debilitating – health-wise, academically, economically – lockdown long past achievement of the original goal of protecting hospitals.  It is also near the top of a long list of evidence and reasons that a lockdown is a really bad idea and can never be repeated.

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