© REUTERS/Mike Segar
"The predictions of the models don't match the reality on the ground in neither China, South Korea nor Italy," Dr. Deborah Birx told reporters on Thursday. She noted that the alarmist statistics about the spread of the virus said Italy would reach 400,000 deaths by now, but the actual death toll was nowhere near that.
Italy, which has been the hardest-hit in terms of deaths from Covid-19, has reported over 80,000 cases with 8,215 fatalities and counting, just as the US surged to first place in the number of confirmed cases (over 83,000), but with far lower mortality of at least 1,200 deaths attributed to the virus so far.
There is "no reality on the ground where we can see that 60-70 percent of Americans are going to get infected in the next 8-12 weeks," Birx said.
Nineteen out of 50 US states have had a "persistently low" level of infection, with fewer than 200 registered cases, according to Birx, with 55 percent of new cases coming from the New York City metropolitan area. Several other urban centers - Detroit, Michigan and Chicago, Illinois - are also a matter of concern to the health officials.
However, of the 550,000 tests run in the US so far, only 14 percent came back positive - and 86 percent of those tested, who had to have symptoms in the first place, did not have Covid-19.
Birx pointed out that either there is a significant number of people out there not showing symptoms but carrying the virus - which the authorities are now trying to find, using new antibody tests - "or we have the transmission completely wrong."
Birx is a retired US Army immunologist who was appointed response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force a month ago by Vice President Mike Pence. Prior to that, she was the US Global AIDS Coordinator, appointed in 2014 by then-President Barack Obama.
Entire US states have put much of their population under house arrest over the past two weeks based on doomsday models of Covid-19 spread and mortality rates amplified by alarmist activist groups. The shutdown has effectively collapsed the US economy, spiking unemployment claims to 3.3 million this week, while more than $2 trillion in government funds intended to salvage the harm is still waiting to be approved by Congress.
Reader Comments
Hey, aren't we lucky that things aren't looking as bad as we feared? Gosh, we really pulled together and dodged a bullet here! Many thanks to all those people sewing masks and creating garbage-sack medical gowns! We did it! Give yourselves a pat on the back, everybody!
Brix herself was one of those who was pushing the hysteria based on her theoretical models and outright guesses that were not backed up by actual numbers reported from Japan, South Korea, Italy, and from the Diamond Princess.
There are many people who were able to evaluate the facts properly even before the hysteria promulgated by the CDC folks and when they tried to present them, they were ridiculed by the know-nothing media and the moronic Twitterati because their assessments were at odds with the garbage that was being presented by Fauci and Brix.
Yes, the Covid-19 deaths and deaths to come are tragic, but the entire situation has been made much worse by the incompetence of the "professionals" from CDC, the temerity of federal and state politicians who uncritically accepted whatever they were told, and the hysteria emanating from the media and amplified by "social media".
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