SOME of the coronavirus figures being pumped out by “the experts” should be treated with a pinch of salt. In fact, in certain cases, that should be a shovel full of it.

For example, the death rate is being computed by dividing the number of deaths by the confirmed number of cases, instead of the suspected number of cases which, research suggests, could be as high as 135,000.

Compared with the 5.2 per cent death rate that the doom mongers are quoting this means that the death rate is more likely to be around 0.3 per cent, and that is a massive difference.

At the time of writing this letter Germany’s fatality rate was 0.4 per cent, compared with the UK’s 5.2 per cent, but that does not mean that the situation is far worse in this country than Germany.

Germany stepped up testing much faster than the UK and has reached a rate of 69 per cent, whereas the UK, because, at present, it is only testing those in hospital, is only recording six per cent of cases.

In other words, the more testing that takes place the lower, and less dramatic, the death rate will be.

Also, official figures appear to indicate that the recovery rate from the virus is quite low.

However, anyone who self-quarantines and recovers at home, which will almost certainly be the majority of cases, will not be included in the recovery rate.

This all means that the recovery rate that is being bandied about is much, much lower than the reality.

Two more points. Firstly, we have been told that Italy’s death rate is far higher than that of China but that is also misleading, because 20 per cent of Italians are over 65 as opposed to 11 per cent of the Chinese, and the average age of Italians is 46, almost ten years older than the Chinese whose average age is 38.

Also, Italy classes every patient who dies while carrying the coronavirus as being a death caused by the virus, potentially inflating the death toll, even though the National Institute of Health has indicated that only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88 per cent of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity... many had two or more.

This potentially adjusts Italy’s 9.5 per cent fatality rate down to a fraction over one per cent, which then puts that country into the same category as Canada and Portugal.

To sum up, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine has said that “given that only a proportion of cases are being reported, we should be very cautious about assuming the case counts reflect the actual level of infection”.

Or, to put it into other words, “Please don’t believe everything that ‘the experts’ are propounding and then start getting upset and making yourself ill.

Many of them probably don’t really know much more about what exactly is going on than we do.

Eric Waters

Lancing