From the article (bold added):

At present, based on the most recent government data, only about three Americans in a thousand could conceivably transmit Covid-19 to someone. In other words, nearly 99.7 percent of people in the United States are currently no threat to anyone of spreading the virus. And despite the large case count, 24 out of every 25 cases are recovered, meaning not only that those people are no longer threats, but also that they now have the strongest form of immunity against Covid-19.

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Those numbers may sound counterintuitive — or at least counter to the usual presentation of official Covid numbers. From the outset, media reports on Covid-19 have been calculated to stoke fear. Whether out of sensationalism for clicks, desire to shape political outcomes, or panic in the pressrooms, media have offered an unrelenting diet of terror about the pandemic with little to no context. Experts spoke with impressive unanimity; anyone who dissented, regardless of impressive credentials, was quickly canceled.

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Early on, international number-crunching outfits gobsmacked us all with enormous numbers of projected deaths. In turn, public health officials everywhere laid it on thick with talk of field hospitals soon to be set up everywhere, bandying about huge projections of people who would need hospitalization and warning that, at the very least, we would run out of ventilators and have to choose which of our neighbors deserved saving. Fear compounded upon fear as we consented to lockdowns and tried to figure out which Hollywood pandemic movie we were in for.

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Anyone who pointed out the massive disparity between the projections and reality was absurdly accused of not taking the virus seriously and trying to get people killed.

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The idea that nearly everyone recovers from this virus, as from other illnesses, rarely entered the news stories, let alone the minds of the terrified populace.

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People need a dispassionate assessment of risk in order to weigh their choices correctly. To listen to media and public-health bureaucrats, one would think that the threat of death and severe life impacts from Covid-19 is the only threat worth avoiding, but that was never true. Nevertheless, we have seen — and too many people have allowed — unprecedented government interventions aimed at managing the Covid threat to the exclusion of all others.

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Those other threats had expanded, meanwhile, to include the deadly unintended consequences of lockdowns and other extreme government orders. They also included withheld but necessary medical treatments, either from non-Covid treatments being suspended or people being too afraid to seek treatment, which has been especially bad for heart disease, cancer, and diabetes, but also bad for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, high blood pressure, and stroke. These other threats, furthermore, included increases in substance abuse, anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, and deaths of despair. Job loss as well as school closings and isolation of young children contributed to them, and all these carry long-term health implications, too.

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For all those reasons, back in the summer of 2020 I started producing contextualized looks at Covid case numbers in my home state that I later started calling the “NC Threat-Free Index.” The idea was simply to offer context to the big, raw numbers and tamp down people’s fears to a healthy, warranted respect for the virus rather than unhealthy, unwarranted abject terror.

Here I offer a threat-free index for the nation as a whole.

(more at the link)

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h/t to u/3andfro for pointing me to this article.