1 in 45,000 That was the (pre-vaccine) Covid death risk for people under 50 – not 30, 50, and including people with severe comorbidities. Aren’t you glad we shut down the world! Alex Berenson
We have known almost since the beginning of the coronavirus epidemic that young people face much lower risks from Covid than the elderly.
But Dutch researchers now have offered what should be the last word on the issue, using data from a national registry to show that even people in their thirties and forties have a risk from Covid almost too low to measure.
The researchers compared the results from a nationwide sample of Covid infections in the Netherlands at several points in 2020 and 2021 to nationwide excess death totals. To determine the Covid death rate, they assumed all the excess deaths resulted from Covid infections.
This method likely overstates Covid deaths. Some extra deaths were likely drug overdoses, suicides, or untreated heart attacks and other lockdown-related health problems. In addition, the sampling technique they used may have understated infections.
Put those issues aside, since they don’t change the most important finding. The researchers determined the death rate from Covid infections was about 1 percent overall in the Netherlands during 2020. (Again, that figure almost certainly is high.)
The researchers then did what governments and Covid hysterics have tried not to do for three years. They explicitly stratified deaths by age, from under 10 to over 80.
The results are… enlightening.
The chart below measures infections, hospitalizations, and deaths from the second Covid wave in the Netherlands, in fall 2020. That stretch probably marks the truest measure of Covid’s lethality. It occurred after the ventilator and nursing home catastrophes of the first wave but before the short-lived happy vaccine valley of spring 2021, when the mRNAs sharply reduced infections.
The crucial column is the rightmost.
The researchers had to combine deaths under 50, because they had so few. They estimated that the 10.5 million people under 50 in the Netherlands had a total of 24 excess deaths during the second half of 2020.
10 million people, 24 deaths.
The researchers estimated 1.06 million infections in people under 50 in that time period. Assuming all 24 extra deaths were Covid-related, the infection fatality rate for people under 50 was 0.002 percent – about 1 in 45,000, give or take.
Again, that number is blended. The researchers didn’t try to figure out who in that under-50 group had died. But other research has shown that most people under 50 who die from Covid have two or more health problems, such as diabetes or even cancer diagnoses. Anyone under 50 who doesn’t have severe preexisting conditions, such as morbid obesity, likely has a Covid dath risk almost too low to measure accurately.
Even people in their fifties had only about a 1 in 1,000 chance of dying from Covid, the researchers reported – again, without taking account of any comorbidities.
Meanwhile, they estimated that during the same period Covid killed as many as 36 percent of the people over 80 it infected – roughly one in three.
(24 excess deaths under 50, 8,374 over 80. The second chart is just a close-up on the right column.)
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Nothing in this study should come a surprise to anyone who has paid attention the last three years. Still, it is useful high-quality research from a country that can hardly be accused of minimizing Covid’s risks. The Netherlands repeatedly locked down in 2020, including a December 2020 order the government described as “its strictest lockdown yet.”
Will anyone in power ever admit – much less apologize for – the fact that 2020 was one long exercise in sacrificing the young to save the old?
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