Your Sunday Voices edition had an interesting opinion piece submitted by Juliet Bailey Bischoff (“COVID 19: Enough Already,” Nov. 15), where she argues that the constraints put upon our citizens have become extreme and unproductive.
Although I, too, support the honest questioning of tradeoffs between controlling the spread of the virus versus the mental and economic pains caused by such controls, I am disappointed that, where she asks that voters select politicians “who can do the math,” her own math is deeply, and dangerously, flawed.
Including this opinion piece, I have now read the quote that 99% of us will recover from COVID-19 twice in your newspaper. This statistic is patently wrong and misleading.
In fact, epidemiologists are calculating the COVID-19 mortality rate at between 2.3 percent — 234 thousand deaths from 10 million reported cases — and a conservative 1.6 percent, assuming another up to 30% of unreported asymptomatic cases.
Even at the lower-range estimate, this results in an excess of 5.2 million deaths across the U.S., more than 600,000 deaths in California alone.
For the benefit of your readers, I think it would be valuable for your newspaper to ensure that opinions have a foundation of facts that are supported by the evidence.
Trevor Pritchard
Santa Barbara
