By Mark Ellis –
Many states are re-tightening Covid-related restrictions, as the mainstream news continues their fear-based drumbeat about a rise in cases.
It is not a time to panic,” Dr. Scott Atlas told Fox News. “It is not a high-risk disease for people under 70. It is certainly not a high-risk disease for people under 30 or 40 who almost all recover.”
Dr. Atlas is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and a former professor and chief of Neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center.
In his opinion, officials who buy into the panic are “disqualifying” themselves because they have relied on superficial data analysis.
“We’re seeing a focus on cases, but it doesn’t really matter how many cases. It only matters who gets the cases, because we know the infection fatality rate for people under 70 is 0.04% on the latest analysis, that’s less than or equal to the seasonal flu,” he notes.
The tragic consequences of the cases should be the primary focus. “When we look at these new cases in every state, the overwhelming majority are younger, healthier people.
“It only matters if we cannot protect high-risk people, which we are protecting.
How do we know? Because the death rates are not going up.”
Dr. Atlas acknowledges the lag between positive tests, hospitalizations, and deaths. “Right now the cases have been going up for three weeks and we have no increase in death rates, in fact we have a decrease in death rates.
“It doesn’t matter if you get the illness if you fully recover and be fine from it. That is what people must understand. For younger, healthier people, there is not a high risk from this disease at all.”
When low risk people get the infection, that helps to generate population immunity, also known as herd immunity. “People have been really mistaken about the number of people who have immunity,” he observes, “because immunity is not just based on antibodies, it’s based on a larger number of people who have T-cell immunity.”
Dr. Atlas cites the state of Texas as an example of a place where officials are relying on a cursory analysis of the data. “When you look at Texas for instance, yes, they have a lot of people in the hospital. But when I looked at every single hospital area in Texas today, 15 to 20% of people in the hospital today as inpatients are Covid-positive patients.
“That means 80 to 85% have nothing to do with Covid-19. The same things go for these other states. There are people who are hospitalized, a large number, and because they are tested as Covid-positive, somehow they are categorized as Covid hospitalizations and that’s a problem.”
Dr. Atlas points the finger of blame at politicians. “We have the wrong people in charge of our states. They don’t seem to understand it is not the superficial analysis that counts.”
The most recent surge of Covid cases among young people has a distinct nexus. “What correlates to these new cases is the large protests in these large cities. Somehow that goes unspoken. It is not the guy getting his haircut in the barbershop that created all these thousands of cases. That is ridiculous.”
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