While New York in juicing their death stats by attributing to Chinese Lung AIDS Wuhan virus random deaths from any cause so long as they account for the number of ‘excess deaths’ occurring, a new study is giving strong indications that relatively few people who contract Wuhan virus have any symptoms that would merit medical attention.

New data support the skeptics’ view—a preliminary study by a Stanford team, released Friday. They conducted a seroprevalence study of Santa Clara County, Calif., on April 3 and 4. They studied a representative sample of 3,300 residents to test for the presence of antibodies in their blood that would show if they had previously been infected with the novel coronavirus.

The county, where I live, is home to about two million people in the heart of Silicon Valley, including San Jose, the state’s third-largest city. It has the largest known number of cases in Northern California and saw some of the earliest cases of community spread in the U.S.

The researchers found that the percentage of infections was indeed vastly larger than the roughly 1,000 known positive cases in the county at the time of the study. The preliminary results—the research will now undergo peer review—show that between 2.5% and 4.2% of county residents are estimated to have antibodies against the virus. That translates into 48,000 to 81,000 infections, 50 to 85 times as high as the number of known cases.

That may sound scary, but it’s great news. It suggests that the large majority of people who contract Covid-19 recover without ever knowing they were infected, and that the U.S. infection fatality rate may be more than an order of magnitude lower than authorities had assumed. Based on this seroprevalence data, the authors estimate that in Santa Clara County the true infection fatality rate is somewhere in the range of 0.12% to 0.2%—far closer to seasonal influenza than to the original, case-based estimates.

What this means is that if the US has 700K known cases, the actual number of people who have been infected and recovered without medical intervention is something on the range of 35-56 million. While there are some who are taking issue with the story and showing a skepticism of this empirical study that they have yet to show for the accuracy of models, we can be fairly sure that it is a very reasonable estimate. As the story goes on to point out, the notion that infections are about 30 times as high as known cases is becoming standard finding in cases where tests of the general population for antibodies indicating previous infection are compared to test results for Wuhan virus.

Think about it for just a second. While we’ve been suffering from a national case of the squirts over Wuhan virus, the vast, vast majority of people with the infection don’t know they have it and don’t seek medical care for it. As we’ve shuttered our economy and pissed away a decade or more of economic growth, we’ve accomplished nothing in the way of public health, we’ve done nothing to make people healthier (quite the opposite and chronic unemployment is much more lethal than Wuhan virus), but we have given over the control of our republican form of government to an unelected and unaccountable priesthood waving models in our faces.

5/ We seem to have locked ourselves into a position where we need to justify the damage we've already caused, instead of recognizing the harm and stopping it. Unless, of course, some people out there really prefer the streets empty and workplaces and stores shut.

— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) April 18, 2020