“A well-functioning gut with healthy gut flora holds the roots of our health.”
— Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride
Mortality
Things to know about covid-19:
Few people had immunity to it before it recently appeared.
It’s contagious and spreads quickly.
It poses little danger to young, healthy people.
Mortality occurs predominantly in the old and infirm.
Here is a graph of the mortality of people suffering from covid-19 taken from the Korean population (Cho, 2021) plotted against a patient’s incidence of comorbidity. The horizontal scale is the CCI, the Charlson comorbidity index, which counts the number of major ailments that a person has. The vertical axis is the percent of patients who died. The graph is based on the 7,890 people who were admitted to hospital with confirmed cases of covid-19.
Healthy patients who have no comorbities have a roughly 0.5% chance of dying. This number comes from that group of otherwise healthy people who are sufficiently ill with covid-19 to have been admitted to hospital. We assume roughly ten times this many people were ill with covid-19 at this time and in this population who did not go to the hospital. Consequently, the mortality rate for the whole, young, otherwise healthy population drops into the neighborhood of 0.1%, which is equivalent to that of the seasonal flu (Armitage, 2020).
For the older population with preexisting illness the mortality rates are huge. Remember the 0.1% mortality rate for the seasonal flu is for the whole population, including the ill and elderly. The mortality rate due to covid-19 for the whole population, young and old, is between 3 and 5% which is 30 to 50 times higher. The point is that these mortalities are coming from the older, infirm population. The covid-19 pandemic in its most virulent form predominates in this group.
Most healthy human immune systems can defend themselves from covid-19. The real pandemic, then, relates to the high number of people with unhealthy immune systems. Why are so many people unhealthy?
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