Jay Bhattacharya

It's true.

I mean, I wrote this op-ed, and I did some calculations using the Diamond Princess.

Remember that cruise ship that was floating around?

You could see the relative risk really, really easily in the data.

It was really older people that was high risk and younger people for dying from the disease.

So that key epidemiological fact was known, I'd say, by January 2020.

And so, I mean, I fully expected two things to happen almost immediately, say March, April 2020.

One was that we would do a much better job protecting vulnerable older people and conveying to the public at large the absolute necessity of doing that.

For instance, not sending COVID-infected patients into nursing homes.

And then the second problem was a sort of lack of urgency on the part of public health authorities involved.

to develop scientific evidence to clear up the uncertainties, to guide decision-making.

So I wrote a study very early on in the pandemic in April of 2020, estimating how many people in Santa Clara County, where I used to live, had been infected.

And it was like 3% of the population in early April 2020.

That doesn't sound like a lot, but it was like for every infected person who was a case that had been identified as having had the disease, there were 50 people walking around with antibodies.

I did a replication study in LA County a couple weeks later, same result.

And then dozens and dozens of studies all around the world, including at the NIH, found this very, very similar result, like that the disease had spread much more widely than people had thought.

This is how naive I was, Ross.

I thought that that...

result would change everybody's mind about how to manage the pandemic.

This is a disease that's obviously spread much more widely than people realized, despite, I mean, I call them draconian measures to try to keep the spread down.