On March 3, 2020, the WHO Director General Tedros, claimed in a press conference that the fatality rate for COVID-19 (3.4%) is higher than that of the common flu, “because no one has immunity”, on the back of the China Report. [1, 2] This figure could be calculated from February 25, 2020 WHO COVID-19 situation report with 80,239 confirmed cases globally and a total of 2,700 deaths, this amounts to 3.36% case fatality rate.
WHO fatality rate was based on faulty assumptions, and have simply assumed a “new” virus has no cross-immunity from previous coronavirus infections. Natural infection confers broad spectrum immunity. China concealed the true extent of the virus outbreak, thus the IFR was off by a “factor of 10” [3, 4]
Importantly, “WHO does not distinguish between people who died with the Covid-19 virus, rather than because of it.”
On March 26, 2020 US Dr Anthony Fauci et al published paper claiming the “[o]n the basis of a case definition requiring a diagnosis of pneumonia, the currently reported case fatality rate is approximately 2%”. They also state that if “one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%).
President Trump has a “hunch” the WHO’s 3.4% number is “false number“, based on who he was speaking with. [5, 7] Dr Jay Bhattacharya published on April 11, 2020 the infection fatality rate (IFR) in the US was “0.12-0.2%“. Trump’s statedment that it is likely “a fraction of one percent” proved to be correct. [6] The high estimated fatality rate was the figure that helped justify lockdowns.