A UPMC doctor on Wednesday said the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 within UPMC is the lowest in many weeks, and people who test positive aren’t getting as sick.
Dr. Donald Yealy pointed out that is occurring even in the midst of Pennsylvania’s reopening and the ongoing social justice protests.
He suggested the country is focusing too much on rising COVID-19 case counts.
“We need to change our mindset and focus not exclusively on the number of cases, but on the severity of illness. We shouldn’t just be counting those who have a diagnosed infection,” Yealy said. “For the vast majority of people testing positive, their illness is mild, or they don’t even know they have any symptoms of COVID-19 infection.”
Related: Hospital patients four times less likely to die now than they were in April, Oxford study finds.
Experts say doctors may be becoming better at treating patients and several drugs now appear to have an impact on survival
Related: Heather Mac Donald: Where Are The Deaths? “In May, Georgia was the main target of expert contempt for its allegedly premature reopening. Since then, the media have gone silent, due to the state’s truly discouraging downward daily death toll from a high of 119 on April 7, long before the reopenings, to 10 on June 24. . . . There are no crises in hospital capacity anywhere in the country. Nursing homes, meat-packing plants, and prisons remain the main sources of new infections.”
Also: Getting Realistic About The Coronavirus Death Rate.
Nearly all the studies find between 10 and 100 times the number of total infections as reported infections, with the average somewhere around 20 to 25 times.
In other words, while the CDC reports 2.34 million Americans have been infected with the coronavirus, the actual number of infected and recovered people may be closer to 50 million. (CDC Director Robert Redfield told journalists Thursday that the number of cases may be 10 times higher than the earlier 2.34 million.)
Thus, the death rate, which would be 5.2 percent based on that 2.34 million figure, is actually more like one-20th as high — or 0.26 percent.
It can be awful in some people, but overall it’s turning out to be nowhere near as bad as we feared a few months ago. And that’s good!
h/t GR