COVID Health Information
Extracting more from the Franklin Templeton survey work I addressed last week, the U.S. public on average believes that 9% of the U.S. population has died from COVID, overstating the actual number by 225x … Even the public’s perception of positive cases has been overestimated by 20x. President Trump today announced emergency authorization for convalescent plasma treatment of COVID-19. The Mayo Clinic has led significant studies on the treatment, and this order will allow antibodies from blood of previously infected to be injected in new patients.
A devastating report from Public Health of England led by its senior clinical epidemiologist, Dr. Sharif Ismail, has concluded that out of 1.6 million school-age kids brought back to campus school in June, only 70 contracted COVID, and that ZERO cases involved any medical attention or hospitalization whatsoever. The percentage of school staff or instructors who contracted COVID was no greater than the broad population, and schools contributed to well less than 1% of all positive cases. The PDF report is available upon request.
Nine players on the Chicago Bears tested positive for COVID-19 in their NFL pre-season practice testing, and all nine were later determined to be false positives. So this is good news, but it should be said – does not do anything to help the Bears score more points. Apparently the same thing happened to the Jets yesterday as well. But making the same football joke about the Jets is, well, too easy.
There has been an odd attempt by many to try and find comparisons between the COVID event of 2020 and the Spanish Flu of 1918 (and lately, to extrapolate a so-called “second wave” out of COVID such as what took place a hundred years ago. A friend sent me a journal report from the National Institutes of Health from 2008 addressing the Trends in Recorded Influenza Mortality. I thought this excerpt was interesting, and useful to our understanding of the current context:
“In the 1918–1919 pandemic, which stands out for its high mortality rate, although perhaps 10% to 15% of deaths were attributed to acute respiratory distress syndrome, many if not most of fatal cases are believed to have occurred because of secondary bacterial complications. Had no other aspect of modern medicine but antibiotics been available in 1918, there seems good reason to believe that the severity of this pandemic would have been far reduced.”
Total national hospitalizations (country population: 330 million) are now below 40,000 for the first time since Fourth of July weekend. Today’s testing data shows nearly 700k tests done per day the last three days (average), with a positivity rate of ~6.1%.
https://thebahnsengroup.com/covid-and-markets/daily-covid-markets-missive-weekend-edition-august-23