The media is going crazy about COVID-19. And for good reason—no one alive today has seen a global pandemic like this! But there are some startling statistics that the media is failing to report on widely, perhaps because it doesn’t fit into their agenda.
But since I’ve been covering the coronavirus on my podcast since it started appearing in the U.S., I want to share these statistics with you. After all, what the media may not be telling you is that the death rate for COVID-19 is actually very low. Now, I realize this isn’t necessarily true for senior citizens. We’ve suffered devastating losses due to the coronavirus in nursing homes and assisted living areas.
Yet overall, the fatality statistics of COVID-19 are much lower than you would think. The CDC just came out with a report that, in some ways, is earth-shattering because it says the likely number of deaths could be as low as 0.26% of symptomatic individuals. The official estimate is 0.4%. This is far lower than what experts were saying just a few months ago. In fact, there was a time when the WHO estimated that the death rate was as high as 3.4%.
If the WHO were correct, the number of deaths across the globe would be absolutely devastating. As of yesterday, the number of deaths due to COVID-19 in the United States is reported to be around 99,000. Every single death is devastating, but I’m grateful that the number is not in the millions as predicted.
Sadly, the coronavirus isn’t the only virus that kills people. The CDC estimates that approximately 56,000 people die from the flu each year, depending on how bad that year’s flu season is. And yet we know COVID-19 has proved much more serious, especially since we don’t know exactly what we’re dealing with.
What we do know is that it appears to be highly contagious and that it originally spread from China. I record how all this happened in my latest book, God, Trump and COVID-19. In that book, I have a whole chapter on China and how it covered up so much information about the coronavirus from the very beginning.
If you’ve been following my podcasts and newsletters, you know I first got wind of China’s secrecy in February when my friend Pastor Frank Amedia reached out to me with a scoop. (You may remember my article about it at the time.) At the time, we had no way of verifying his claims, which came from information he received from Christian friends in China. I contacted several other people, including my friend Dennis Balcombe, a Christian missionary to China. I even interviewed an eyewitness—an American teacher who was living in Wuhan when the virus broke out.
But little by little, the secrets began to come out. And now it appears that the death rates in China have been far worse than they ever reported. Frank Amedia shared with me in March some ways China has been skewing the information. If China had been honest about what it knew about COVID-19, the world would probably have been much better equipped to help people who contracted the virus—and save more lives.
I talk about this topic more in depth in my podcast today, which I encourage you to listen to by clicking here. And if you are interested in reading about China’s role in the spread of COVID-19—as well as how the virus may affect the upcoming election—make sure to grab a copy of my book at SteveStrangBooks.com.
Joyce Meyer 
Stephen Strang 
