Please think about this for just a second. Assume the following data (from a 10-day old article in US News) is right:
Quote:
By decade, the risk of hospitalization from infection with the new coronavirus is: Zero for kids under 10; 0.1% for kids 10 to 19; 1% for people aged 20 to 29; 3.4% for people aged 30 to 39; 4.3% for people in their 40s; 8.2% for those in their 50s; 11.8% for people aged 60 to 69; 16.6% for those in their 70s; and 18.4% for those in their 80s or above.
As for the death rate, the risk was near zero for people under 40, crept up to 0.2% for people 40 to 49, to 0.6% for 50-somethings, just under 2% for people in their 60s, 4.3% for those in their 70s, and 7.8% for those in their 80s, the findings showed.
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You give the malaria drug to 100 infected people in their 40s. Only six are hospitalized. Good result? No, the opposite. That's 6% hospitalization instead of of baseline 4.3%. But that's 94 people who go around saying, I took the malaria drug and it cured me!
You give the malaria drug to 100 hospitalized people in their 40s. Fifteen of them die. Good result? No, the opposite. From the data above, you would expect the mortality rate to be a third of that. But now you have 85 people who say, I was hospitalized and I took the malaria drug and it cured me!
Is it any surprise that you see a ton of anecdotal evidence of people who took the drug and say it made them better? No. If we tried the same thing with placebos, you could get the same result without risking the health of people with lupus.