UK’s Chief Medical Officer’s May 11 description of COVID’s minimal impact
UK Gov’t confirms Covid19 harmless to VAST MAJORITY of people
OffGuardian | posted May 14, 2020
Clip from the Downing Street Corona Briefing on May 11th. The first part is a statement by Chris Whitty, the UK’s Chief Medical Officer.
Governments endlessly contradict their own fear-mongering propaganda. There are examples of Fauci doing the same thing. I think the mixed messages are meant to disorient people.
The following is based on the YouTube Transcript with corrections. I’ve highlighted the main positive points and underlined the contradictory negative statements or the agenda statements (that it’s “serious,” that it’s going to go on for a long time, that they’re going to test more and more people even though their symptoms are mild or non-existent).
[Whitty] It clearly is a very serious epidemic, but equally, the fact that actually the great majority of people will not die from this.
And I’ll just repeat something I said right at the beginning, because I think it’s worth reinforcing.
Most people, a significant portion of people, will not get this virus at all at any point in the epidemic, which is going to go on for a long period of time.
Of those who do, some of them will get the virus without even knowing it.
They will have the virus with no symptoms at all, asymptomatic carriers. And we know that happens.
Of those who get symptoms, the great majority, probably 80%, will have a mild or moderate disease. Might be bad enough for them to have to go bed to bed for a few days, not bad enough for them to have to go to the doctor.
An unfortunate minority will have to go as far as hospital but the majority of those will just need oxygen and will then leave Hospital.
And then a minority of those will end up having to go to severe and critical care.
And some of those sadly will die. But that’s a minority, it’s 1% or possibly even less than 1% overall.
And even in the highest risk group, this is significantly less than 20%. . . the great majority of people, even the very highest groups, if they catch this virus, will not die. And I’ve really wanted to make that point really clearly.
[Question] Right, do you know for example, now, how many people in the country have recovered from the virus are now perfectly health again such as the prime minister for example?
[Health minister(?)] Well, we have we have data obviously, didn’t everybody, for the reasons Chris has said, because a large number of people have been asymptomatic or haven’t gone to the doctor, but we do have recovery rates. They are available and I see absolutely no reason why they shouldn’t be made available.
[Prime Minister] Yes we certainly have hospital recovery rates.
[Whitty] Yes so we have. In a sense what we have, and this is where I wouldn’t want people to over-read them, but it’s important, they’re perfectly open data actually, it’s perfectly possible to get hold of them if people want. We have data on the people who got as far as hospital, how many of those left hospital, but of course they’re at the very severe end of the spectrum. All the ones I was talking about before that point, they make a full recovery, they don’t enter the statistics. Now they increasingly will enter the statistics now that we have a better testing capacity, that means that we’re picking out more of the milder cases in the community.
But I think what, if people look at those, to get back to your point, what I wouldn’t want is for people then to say, oh well that’s . . the mortality rate is higher than I expected.
That’s because the recovery rates we have are for people who are severe enough to get to hospital. And even so, that is a majority [“majority” of the ones who went to hospital, I believe he’s saying they only had recovery numbers for those hospitalized at that point]. So it is important that the sense is read in that context.