Claim: “The CDC may have to stop calling COVID-19 an ‘epidemic’ due to a remarkably low death rate.”
Verdict: REFUTES

Retrieved passages:
title: Patrick S. Moore
text: from the University of California, Berkeley. As an epidemiologist working at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), he developed widely used international guidelines to control meningococcal meningitis epidemics and led a team of CDC epidemiologists during the 1992 Somali Civil War. Civilian death rates documented during this civil war-famine were among the highest ever reported. The extreme mortality statistics helped to solidify international support behind the US-led military intervention Operation Restore Hope. He received the CDC Langmuir Prize for his work on epidemic meningitis control. After leaving the CDC, Moore served briefly as a New York City

title: Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report
text: Children's National Medical Center in Washington, actually found a marked increase in high-level results from 2001 to 2004, among small children. The results of Marc Edwards "et al." came from analysis of the same raw data as those underlying the 2004 CDC report. In 2007, Edwards wrote to the CDC's associate director of science, James Stephens, questioning the report's conclusions and methodology, and the competence of its principal author. In 2008, Stephens answered him: "We have examined CDC's role in the study and have found no evidence of misconduct." According to Salon, there was an evident dip in critical year

title: Victor C. Vaughan
text: the very young and very old, was killing men in prime physical condition, leading him to warn, "If the epidemic continues its mathematical rate of acceleration, civilization could easily disappear from the face of the earth." By the time the epidemic ran its course, over a million troops were afflicted with influenza, and 30,000 of them died; 675,000 people died in the United States as a whole. Following his resignation as dean on June 30, 1921, Vaughan accepted a one-year appointment as chairman of the Division of Medical Sciences at the National Research Council. The Vaughans moved to Chevy Chase,

title: 2011 United States listeriosis outbreak
text: others with compromised immune systems", the median age of all the people that had been infected was 78. On September 30, an update was released by the CDC, reporting that as of 11 am (EDT) Sep 29, 2011 the number of confirmed cases was 84, number of deaths was 15 and the number of states involved was 19. On October 4, the CDC updated their report to 100 infected individuals in 20 states and a total of 18 deaths from the outbreak. The outbreak was shown to have continued to spread to new states, with the CDC update on October

title: 1993 Four Corners hantavirus outbreak
text: stopped breathing and the paramedics were performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation. The young man could not be revived by doctors and died. The physicians, recalling the similar symptoms and death of the young woman, reported his death to the New Mexico Department of Health. New Mexico state health officials notified the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Within a week, a task force had formed in Albuquerque that included Bruce Tempest, chief of medicine at the Indian Medical Center. Tempest quickly discovered that five people, including the young man’s fiancée, as well as an Arizona resident, all had experienced the same symptoms and

title: Maiztegui National Human Viral Disease Institute
text: 1,000 people annually and claimed up to a 30% mortality rate in its early years. One of its researchers, Dr. Julio Isidro Maiztegui, developed breakthrough in the treatment of the disease in 1971 when he devised the introduction of blood plasma from recovered patients in saline solution to those whose exposure had taken place under eight days earlier. The treatment, which reduced motality rates from 30% to around 1% of those infected, led to greater support for the work at CEMIC, and in 1978, the National Institute of Hemorrhagic Viruses (INVH) was established in Pergamino, with Dr. Maiztegui as its

title: Marburg virus disease
text: or alopecia. Importantly, MARV is known to be able to persist in some survivors and to either reactivate and cause a secondary bout of MVD or to be transmitted via sperm, causing secondary cases of infection and disease. Of the 252 people who contracted Marburg during the 2004–2005 outbreak of a particularly virulent serotype in Angola, 227 died, for a case fatality rate of 90%. Although all age groups are susceptible to infection, children are rarely infected. In the 1998–2000 Congo epidemic, only 8% of the cases were children less than 5 years old. MVD was first documented in 1967,

title: Daniel L. Ritchie
text: he was at its helm. As Ritchie recalled in a 2005 article honoring his legacy, an affiliate station in San Francisco came to him with solid reporting about a new plague that was terrifying the medical community. The story was so startling—and its ramifications so serious—that Ritchie said he knew it merited national attention. Ritchie and his team decided to cancel the corporation’s prime-time lineup in favor of a report chronicling the virus. “It cost us money not to have prime-time programming,” he explained, noting that no company wanted its products promoted during such an alarming program. Nonetheless, he said,

title: Contagion (film)
text: kidnappings were widespread, and the doses were placebos, Orantes rushes back to warn the villagers, exhibiting Stockholm Syndrome. By Day 26, the death toll had reached at least 2.5 million in the U.S. and 26 million worldwide. The discovery, production and initial deliveries of vaccine took until Day 133, with vaccinations to run until nearly Day 500. The final death toll is not seen. Dr. Hextall places samples of MEV-1 in cryogenic storage, alongside samples of H1N1 and SARS. The source of the virus is revealed to viewers. A bulldozer owned by AIMM Alderson, the same company Beth worked for,

title: Epidemic!
text: Epidemic! Epidemic! is a turn-based strategy game in which the player stands in control of a world on the brink of extinction. It was developed by Steven Faber for the Apple II and published by Strategic Simulations in 1982. It was ported to the Atari 8-bit family. A meteorite crashes into Earth, bringing with it an alien virus. The player must stem the epidemic across 14 regions quickly as possible and with minimal loss of life. The player has from 15 to 30 turns, with options ranging from inert methods like interferon, to quarantine, to destruction of a region with

title: 2014 enterovirus D68 outbreak
text: to Oct. 10, 691 people in 46 states and the District of Columbia had come down with a respiratory illness caused by EV-D68. Five children died. The outbreak is the largest ever reported in North America. Enterovirus infections are not rare; there are millions of isolated infections every year. One possibility is that CDC began looking for the virus only after the outbreak. CDC received specimens for lab testing after the outbreak-related hospitalizations. The surveillance shows that a number of cases are admitted to the hospital each year. Children infected with the illness known as D68 have died in the

title: Les Roberts (epidemiologist)
text: were much lower. In opposition to the study's claims, an official Ministerial Statement from the United Kingdom Parliament stated that "the Government do not accept its[The Lancet study's] central conclusion", noting that the Iraq Ministry of Health figures, which were collected from daily hospital reports, showed 3,853 civilian deaths and 15,517 injuries between April 5, 2004 and October 5, 2004. In October 2006 Roberts instigated a second study, Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey, using similar methods and increasing the number of households surveyed. The study was also published in The Lancet, and reported:

title: Ebola virus epidemic in Sierra Leone
text: U.S. doctors who "followed all CDC and WHO protocols to the letter" still managed to contract the disease and it is not clear how they got the disease. By 27 May 2014 it was reported 5 people died from the Ebola virus and there were 16 new cases of the disease. Between 27 May 2014 and 30 May the number of confirmed, probable, or suspected cases of Ebola went from 16 to 50. By 9 June, the number of cases had risen to 42 known and 113 being tested, with a total of 16 known to have died from the

title: 2017–18 United States flu season
text: that year hadn't "changed enough from previous seasons to be considered a novel strain." In the first week of February, deaths from influenza and pneumonia were responsible for one of every ten deaths in the US, with 4,064 from pneumonia or influenza recorded in the third week of 2018, according to CDC data. The CDC also reported 63 child deaths at that point, half of which were not considered medically high risk, and only about 20 percent who were vaccinated. Only two of those deaths were babies under six months old. On February 9, 2018, the CDC announced that the

title: Lujo mammarenavirus
text: submitted for laboratory confirmation. In addition, a cleaner and a nurse that had contact with the first patient also fell ill. A second nurse was infected through contact with the paramedic. The outbreak had a high case fatality rate with 4 of 5 identified cases resulting in death. The Special Pathogens Unit of the NICD-NHLS together with colleagues from the Special Pathogens Unit of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) identified the etiological agent of the outbreak as an Old World arenavirus using molecular and serological tests. Sequencing and phylogenetic investigation of partial genome sequencing indicated that

title: Spanish flu
text: of young adults. In fast-progressing cases, mortality was primarily from pneumonia, by virus-induced pulmonary consolidation. Slower-progressing cases featured secondary bacterial pneumonias, and there may have been neural involvement that led to mental disorders in some cases. Some deaths resulted from malnourishment. A study – conducted by He et al. – used a mechanistic modelling approach to study the three waves of the 1918 influenza pandemic. They tried to study the factors that underlie variability in temporal patterns, and the patterns of mortality and morbidity. Their analysis suggests that temporal variations in transmission rate provide the best explanation, and the variation

title: Epidemic
text: both common source and propagated outbreaks (sometimes referred as mixed outbreak). For example, secondary person-to-person spread may occur after a common source exposure or an environmental vectors may spread a zoonotic diseases agent. Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates wrote an essay published in the "New England Journal of Medicine" in March 2015. In the essay, Gates states that an epidemic caused by a natural disaster or bioterrorism is the most likely event that could kill 10 million or more people all at the same time. Gates and other experts suggest that the best way to prepare for an epidemic

title: Epidemic
text: way anyone could guarantee the right of medical evacuation for people affected by Ebola.” Aylward said that for future emergency health workforces, it is critical to offer a "duty of care", meaning the ability to ensure that aid workers will be taken care of in terms of health and safety. The CDC will scale back global disease prevention efforts by 80 percent by October 2019 due to a lack of funding (as funding had been temporarily increased in 2014 to address the Ebola epidemic). Bill Gates has warned that epidemic disease will kill more than 30 million people in the

title: West African Ebola virus epidemic
text: cases were recorded in Senegal, the United Kingdom and Sardinia. In addition, imported cases led to secondary infection of medical workers in the United States and Spain but did not spread further. The number of cases peaked in October 2014 and then began to decline gradually, following the commitment of substantial international resources. <section begin=casesasof /><section end=casesasof />, the World Health Organization (WHO) and respective governments reported a total of <section begin=cases />28,616<section end=cases /> suspected cases and <section begin=deaths />11,310<section end=deaths /> deaths<section begin=caserefs /><section end=caserefs /> (39.5%), though the WHO believes that this substantially understates the magnitude of

title: Corrupted Blood incident
text: research on this incident, citing the resemblances with biological plagues. Some scientists want to study how people would react to environmental pathogens, by using the virtual counterpart as a point of reference. Subsequently, she co-authored a paper in "Lancet Infectious Disease" discussing the epidemiological and disease modeling implications of the outbreak, along with Eric Lofgren, a University of North Carolina graduate student. She spoke at the 2008 Games for Health conference in Baltimore, Maryland and the 2011 Game Developers Conference about the incident and how massively multiplayer online populations could solve the problems inherent with more traditional models of epidemics.