The Disease That Will Kill Us All: Mass Hysteria

UPDATE: In this post, I make reference to a couple of different fatality rate statistics for COVID-19. Lest I be accused of statistical inaccuracy, let me point out that this is because the statistics are constantly changing and I cannot keep it updated. However, what is important is that the HIGHEST fatality rate shown in any set of stats is 5%, which is nothing compared to ebola’s 50% or blood-borne MRSA (which kills 20,000 Americans per year) at about 20%. Malaria kills a million children in Africa every year. 

But in any case, it is beginning to appear that the TYPICAL COVID-19 infection is relatively asymptomatic. Public health politicians (and that is what the CDC is-a political institution) are trying to spin this that it makes the disease more dangerous, but that doesn’t make any sense. If there are hundreds of thousands or millions of unreported cases, that means the disease’s kill rate is much lower, possibly even lower than the flu given that asymptomatic flu infections are rare, and when you’ve got the flu, you know it. But still, the fact is, more than three months into this outbreak that began in the most populous country in the world and has spread around the globe, COVID-19, at about 60,000 deaths as of April 4, still has not killed as many people in the world as the 2018 flu killed in America alone in one winter. Every year on this planet, about 45 million people die. That’s about 150,000 every day, a great percentage of them killed by infectious diseases. If the media dragged up every individual instance of a tragic flu death like they’ve been doing with COVID-19, you’d have been “sheltering in place” since 1918. 

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I’m beginning to believe that Isaac Asimov’s classic sci-fi tale “Nightfall” shows our future. For those who don’t know it, “Nightfall” tells the story of a planet with six suns where there is no night. But every two thousand years, celestial alignment causes all the suns to set and when night falls, people go mad and destroy the civilization. 

I am only 44 years old, a blink of an eye in historical time, but yet we are now enduring the fourth instance of global mass hysteria in my lifetime.   The first was Y2K, then the aftermath to 9/11, and then the 2008 financial collapse. There have been many other incidents that have come close. And I would argue that the Cold War was an instance of extended, low-intensity mass hysteria. 

Let’s talk some facts about the COVID-19 coronavirus. But first, my bona fides to talk about it: I spent almost fifteen years working in intellectual property law mostly for biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies and law firms representing them. A regular part of my job at various times was reading clinical trial reports, scientific papers on medical research, patents and patent applications for drugs and medical devices. Most of the places I worked had subscriptions to the journals Nature, Science and the Journal of the American Medical Association, which for years I read every month. This is all atop a vast amount of independent reading and study I’ve done apart from work where I spent every day working with doctors and medical scientists. 

The common cold is caused by a coronavirus. What we are dealing with here is not some kind of global apocalypse. COVID-19 is not even in the top 20 of the most dangerous infectious illnesses in the wild at the present time. The flu kills about one million people worldwide every year. In the 2017-18 flu season, 45 million Americans were infected (despite wide dissemination of flu vaccine) and 80,000 died according to the CDC. 

Compare those figures to coronavirus that has killed less than 10,000 people worldwide. Like the flu and the common cold, the vast majority of people who are infected with coronavirus will recover without complication. Many infections are nearly asymptomatic. And the vast majority of those who have been killed were already in some way immuno-compromised due to age or another infection. 

While coronavirus does have a higher mortality rate than the flu, about 1-2% (declining fast as we become more familiar with the disease) vs about 0.2%, I think it is safe to say that it is LESS communicable, or else we would have likely seen millions of infections in China alone, let alone worldwide, by this point. This would be supported by a basic rule of thumb of epidemiology: the more aggressive a disease, the SLOWER it spreads. I would bet that research would support that COVID-19’s mortality rate is higher because it is not as infectious and tends to be caught by a generally older, sicker population. Remember the similar global mass hysteria over SARS and avian flu?  Both of those diseases fizzled out without altering civilization. But humans seemingly NEVER learn. 

Basically what we are dealing with is a new, worse version of the common cold or flu. It will likely become a new disease that is a part of our daily lives, but there is no medical or scientific basis for the absurd panic that is essentially shutting down the world. Sporting events cancelled, restaurants closed, grocery store shelves emptied, people being quarantined on ships, planes and in their homes. We’ve got a slightly worse version of a cold or flu, a disease with only a 5% mortality rate despite the fact that it is novel and we have no experience treating it. Yet, everyone is acting like its Captain Trips from Stephen King’s novel “The Stand” or an airborne version of HIV that was everyone’s nightmare scenario in the 80s.  It’s mass insanity, pure and simple. 

Americans especially, and humans in general are very bad at analyzing complex systems. I believe that the apocalyptic panic over COVID-19 will ultimately cost more lives than the virus itself if the right kind of analysis were to be done. 

There is no reasonable justification for coronavirus to cause any more precautions or changes to our way of life than a bad flu season. People simply don’t fear the flu because it has been around, we’ve all had it and recovered from it multiple times. Plus, unlike the flu, and like most of the more than 200 common cold viruses, COVID-19 infection  appears to confer subsequent immunity. So we’re probably eventually all going to get it once, like the chicken pox, and life will go on. From that standpoint, it may be worth a debate whether we even should try to stop the spread of it rather than letting it run its course. Yes, some people will die, and that is always a tragedy. But every day, people are dying of all kinds of infectious diseases. COVID-19 is not nearly the most serious of them. 

This hysteria just shows the tendency of our modern civilization to go mad for ANY reason. If we all remain so desperate for an apocalypse, one day we will create it. Sometimes I wonder if we really are too stupid to live. Well, not “we”...

The COVID-19 coronavirus has no chance of ending our civilization. But if we keep on this path, one day mass hysteria will.

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