Math for politicians or poor students

I really hate to get too involved in talking about politics as it usually has very little return. It is not all that different from trying to convince someone to change religion. If the Catholics and the Protestants cannot agree with each other, despite having a lot of common ground between the two, then how could you convince the atheists or the Muslims to agree with the Christians.

Yet, it is not religion but math that causes me to fire up my computer this evening. I happened to read in the US press that 99% percent of Covid19 cases are harmless. On its face, this particular statement sounds a bit simplistic, but let’s run a few numbers to help prove this statement cannot be true.

Letting Google do most of the work, I have found that the chance of getting a serious is about 37%

The majority of people who become infected with coronavirus are not expected to become seriously ill, but a large segment of the U.S. adult population – one third (37.6 percent) of adults ages 18 and older – have a higher risk of serious illness if they do become infected due to their age or underlying medical condition.

kff.org

That particular statistic is almost directly in contradiction of the 99% harmless. That seems to simple to be the answer, so lets consider that if we are speaking about the same disease with a suitably large group of infected people then it seems reasonable that the number of infected people would be at a similar rate.

Here are a few statistics for a few different EU countries

Germany Confirmed 207,707

Germany Deaths 9,131

Germany Death Percentage 4.39%

UK Confirmed 301,455

UK Deaths 45,961

UK Death Percentage 15.1%

Singapore Confirmed 46,098

Singapore Deaths 27

Singapore Death Percentage 0.005%

It is true that in general the percentage of the deaths should be somewhat similar but this can also vary. There can be different strains of a virus but other factors such as general health and specific genetic factors which could either provide additional protection or additional susceptibility.

So none of these death factors, which is perhaps the easiest way to measure how harmless a disease is.

I guess as I am not able to find any other statistics that imply that the United States has a 99% chance that the Covid19 cases are harmless.

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

https://ncov2019.live/

There is no evidence that I can find so I will simply use the John Hopkins data for the US as a final check.

US Confirmed 4,401,599

US Deaths 150,090

US Death Percentage 3.40%

I guess that politicians are not the best at math when it creates a contradiction to their narrative.

** Fact Check **

Failed

It almost makes you wonder if this level of attention to detail would be the cause for failing in the Casino industry.

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