Article • Dean Baker’s Beat the Press
The New York Times Says 200,000,000 People Have Been Infected with Covid in the United States (sort of)
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This is the implication of its analysis of likely Covid deaths and infections in India. Its central estimate assumes a case fatality rate of 0.3. This means that for every thousand people who get infected, three will die.
There have been roughly 600,000 reported deaths from Covid since the pandemic began. If this is 0.3 percent of the people who contracted the disease, then 200,000,000 people in the United States have been infected.