Dr. Matteo Bassetti, director of the Infectious Diseases Clinic at the San Martino Hospital in Genoa, Italy, has noted a significant difference in recent patients versus those who came to his emergency room “very sick” in March and April.
“In March and April, patients reached the emergency room very sick,” Basetti said, according to WebMD. “They had acute respiratory distress syndrome, multi-organ failure. They needed immediate oxygen, ventilation, and in two to three days, we had patients that died. But now, in the past four to five weeks, it’s been totally different. Patients of a similar age as the ones before, even very elderly patients, are not as sick as patients were just four to six weeks before.
Dr. Scott Atlas, former chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, explained that the sharp rise in COVID hospitalizations among younger people in Texas and other states could at least partially be because hospitals are testing everyone admitted, regardless of the reason.
“I think that what is happening in Texas, I know that this is true, they are testing every person that gets hospitalized for Covid-19,” Atlas told Fox News’ Martha MacCallum earlier this week. “We know that the vast majority of people with COVID-19 who are young, particularly, are asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic. I question if those people who are positive for COVID-19 and being hospitalized for something else are classified as COVID-19 hospitalizations. That’s a big difference.”
In other words...sure, avoid the virus, especially if you are, or frequently interact with, high-risk persons. But on the whole..."cases" are not nearly as severe as they were once made out to be. Studies are mounting that the virus is weakening, and cases in people (even elderly patients, as noted above from Italy) simply don't carry the severity that they did as little as one month ago.
You can also see the divergence of case count vs. fatality rate in this chart from the Daily Mail - even though case counts continue to climb...fatalaties continue to drop. And, they have done so for a while:
My range has been open the whole time. It's a private gun club. Oldest one in Texas. Very rarely do I have to share the entire rifle or pistol range with anyone.