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 + JMJ    Smith made the following statement:: Simple. On Dec. 27, 2020, I took the official world COVID death numbers from worldometers.com , divided it by the world population of 7.8 billion, moved the resulting number's decimal point two places to the right to get a percentage and a total population mortality rate. That TPMR was 0.023%. In contrast, taking an average of the estimates that have been made for total deaths from Spanish flu, and dividing it by the estimated world population at that time, etc. you get a TPMR for Spanish flu of 2.33%  Smith and I have been exchanging emails about this stat and a few other things. First, what is the TPMR for the Spanish Flu and what does it mean? Total Population Mortality rate. I understand that there is some variation in the estimates of the population of the World in 1918. This is understandable on a number of levels. I've seen census notations from that era., so the USA had a working census system. So this is probably a

 + JMJ ****** NOTA BENE ****** Smith just sent a lengthy reply to How Lethal is SARS-CoV-2.  In order to manage my time, I will post this draft of my reply to his earlier query. P^3  ****** ARTICLE ******  Smith replied to Update 1 by email and since it is a detailed and deep response, I felt (and they agreed) that it was better to post it on the blog.  This post has been long in the making ... apologies for the delay and any offense I may provide as I try to follow the threads. If I understood correctly, Smith believes that because of the small percentage of the population that have died from the disease, the restrictions (masks, social distancing etc) harm as opposed to help the common-good. I disagree as the TPMR does not reflect the lethality and therefore the anticipated impact a pathogen would have when given unfettered access to a population.   IFR and CFR (see below and the Lethality articles ) a better stats to estimate lethality and therefore the impact. For the fun of it, I

 + JMJ   So, when not approving comments between Athanasius and Peter, accidentally publishing Athanasius' contact information (still feel bad about that), working full time in two different roles, facilitating conflicts and preparing for personal life events - I have been doing some research on the lethality of various pathogens. Why? To provide some context around this pandemic. Early on in the pandemic I had come across the graph shown below. I thought it was a useful thing to put some context around the SARS-CoV-2 virus.  When getting down to the discussion lethality etc it's utility was limited. I've also found that some of their data didn't quite sync up with other data. In my discussion with Steven, I needed additional information So I found the "Information is Beautiful" graphic (link below). While this was better, I couldn't zoom in to the lower left hand side of the graph ... but I found that they had published all their data. Another thing is th

 + JMJ      I have been carving out time to research and respond to Smith's recent email.  In the course of this I have been digging further into understanding the current Pandemic in light of Previous Pandemics and outbreaks. The results of the research was making my response to Smith longer and it has shaken some of my earlier understandings of the pandemic to such a degree that it now merits a separate treatment. So what was shaken?  I originally believed that the CFR for Spanish Influenza was around 10%, however it really is between 2.5 to 3.0%.  Which is uncomfortably close to that of COVID-19? So - I'm going to do a deep dive into the stats to place SARS-CoV-2 into its proper niche in the pantheon of pathogens. P^3 Key Statistics For the purposes of this article, I will be using the WHO methods noted at the article linked her: WHO: Estimating Mortality  From COVID-19 . I will also be quoting heavily as it is easier to just take their explanations instead of translating ev