Joe Rogan on covid-19: what the evidence says · JRE #1515

What the evidence says 01 / RECORD

Rogan claimed that the COVID-19 fatality rate for "healthy people" is very low, well under half of one percent. Contemporaneous and subsequent epidemiological research shows fatality risk from COVID-19 was not uniform even among people without diagnosed comorbidities: a large multi-country analysis (Nature, 2020) found the infection fatality ratio rises log-linearly with age starting around age 30, meaning risk for an older "healthy" adult could be far higher than for a young healthy adult, even without underlying conditions. CDC data separately show age over 50, and especially over 65, substantially raises risk of severe illness and death, and that most COVID-19 deaths occurred in older adults. Averaged infection fatality rate estimates for the whole population in 2020 were often cited in the range of roughly 0.5-1%, but this obscures wide variation: estimates for people in their 20s-40s were commonly well under 0.1%, while risk for people over 65-70 was substantially higher, sometimes exceeding several percent. The claim that fatality is uniformly "less than half of 1%" for "most healthy people" blends together very different age-stratified risks into a single reassuring figure, and omits that hospitalization, ICU admission, and long-term or post-acute effects were far more common than raw fatality figures alone suggest. The underlying point that fatality risk is much lower for young, healthy individuals than for elderly or comorbid populations is broadly consistent with the evidence, but the specific blanket figure understates risk for older subsets of the "healthy" population and omits non-fatal severe outcomes.