Rob Kerchner made a case in his letter to the editor that everyone is going to get COVID-19, eventually. This might be about the only thing correct in his opinion piece.
I checked on U.S deaths as a percentage of cases. There are 820,000 deaths out of 53.3 million cases. That is a rate of 1.54%. Kerchner claims that 99.6% get mild COVID. Perhaps “mild COVID” is what somebody else gets.
Serious illness that required hospitalization is 878,613. That is a rate of 1.65%. Those who got COVID but were not quite sick enough to be hospitalized was an even bigger percentage of total cases. These numbers are inconsistent with the Kerchner claim that 99.6% of cases are mild, by at least a factor of 8. He also says that the average age of the COVID dead is 80. I do not like that number either, mostly because I am 79.
Tell the parents of children who died, at any rate, that there is an overreaction to COVID. Or the parents who die and leave the kids on their own.
Thomas Oatway
Valencia
