This Is Really Important - Deborah Birx Says

[HARDCORE]

3-30-2020

too hot not to note

ALG Editor’s Note: In the following featured report from the Washington Examiner, the White House coronavirus task force is developing a method of surveillance via antibodies of the Chinese coronavirus to find asymptomatic cases:

washington examiner

'This is really quite important': Deborah Birx says administration looking into plummeting UK death toll

By Andrew Mark Miller

White House coronavirus task force member Deborah Birx said the Trump administration is looking with “great detail” into a report from the United Kingdom that reduces the expected death toll from 500,000 people to 20,000 or less.

A widely regarded U.K. study that inspired strict coronavirus crackdowns in the United States was revised to show that it is now expected to be at about 20,000, it was reported Thursday.

“I am sure many of you saw the recent report out of the U.K. about them adjusting completely their needs,” Birx said Thursday evening during a press conference updating the nation on the coronavirus. “This is really quite important.”

“If you remember, that was the report that said there would be 500,000 deaths in the U.K. and 2.2 million deaths in the United States. They've adjusted that number in the U.K. to 20,000. So, half a million to 20,000. We are looking into this in great detail to understand that adjustment.”

Birx went on to explain the “complicated” process of calculating a model that effectively conveys the mortality rate of a deadly virus.

“In the model, either you have to have a large group of people who are asymptomatic, who've never presented for any test, in order to have the kind of numbers that were predicted,” Birx said. “To get to 6 million people infected, you have to have a large group of asymptomatics because, in no country to date, have we seen an attack a rate over 1 in 1,000. So, either we're only measuring the tip of the iceberg of symptomatic cases and underneath it are a large group of people. So, we're working very hard to get that antibody test.”

Stanford University's professor of medicine, Jay Bhattacharya, echoed Birx’s sentiment by calling for more testing of random samples in the U.S. to get a better idea how many people have been infected to understand the mortality rate.

“We don’t know how many people have gotten the disease and were cured from it,” he said. “You need everybody in the denominator, not just the people who have the current disease.”

Bhattacharya and fellow Stanford professors penned an opinion piece earlier this week with the headline "Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say?"

Almost 500,000 coronavirus cases have been confirmed worldwide, and over 22,000 people have died, while almost 120,000 have recovered.