Covid19 is far deadlier and far more dangerous than the common flu; we don’t need lethality statistics that include those who are asymptomatic to know that.

According to all the relevant statistics, #covid19 is going to be catastrophic.

Fauci, surely, was not denying this. Trump was.

Fauci was making a valid and important but rather technical point. Trump was not. 1/12

Fauci pointed out that the statistic that we have presently for #covid19 is largely the ratio of the number of individuals who died compared with the number of individuals who came down with severe symptoms, whether they died or not. 2/12

Fauci’s point was that this differs from comparing the number of individuals who die from a disease with the number of individuals *to whom the disease has been transmitted*. 3/12

(That statistic covers a much wider population, and it isn’t available for the novel coronavirus yet; it is a known statistic for the common flu.) 4/12

But having this statistic in hand, important as it is, is not necessary in order to reach a conclusion about how dangerous a viral disease is. 5/12

To do that, all we need to consider is the universe of people who enter the healthcare system b/c of flu-like systems, and who are thought by health care professionals to possibly have either flu or covid#19. 6/12

What the studies seem to have shown (I may be wrong) is that the lethality rate of the patients from *this* universe who turn out to have #covid19 is far higher than for those from the same universe who are diagnosed with the common flu. 7/12

In this universe (of those who have severe enough symptoms to have come to the attention of the healthcare system), the lethality rate of those who are diagnosed with the coronavirus seems to be at least 1.4–1.7%. (WHO says that it could be as high as 3.4%). 8/12

This is surely much higher, based on what we already know, than the lethality rate of those who have required medical care for the common flu. 9/12

The CCP’s response to #covid19 in Wuhan shows this. Wuhan, like most other places on the planet, gets a strain of the common flu every year. 10/12

But very quickly, the Chinese government realized that #covid19, though it is a strain belonging to the same family as the common flu, was *very different,* and demanded health measures that were unprecedented. 11/12

The following chart doesn’t give us the comparison that we need, but it is surely suggestive.

(For the U.S., based on a lethality rate for the novel coronavirus of 3.4%.) 12/12 https://tinyurl.com/tm9lf8m