claim: “For every one person who dies: 19 more require hospitalization; 18 of those will have permanent heart damage for the rest of their lives”
evidence: FULL CLAIM: "For every one person who dies: 19 more require hospitalization; 18 of those will have permanent heart damage for the rest of their lives; 10 will have permanent lung damage; 3 will have strokes; 2 will have neurological damage that leads to chronic weakness and loss of coordination; 2 will have neurological damage that leads to loss of cognitive function." [...] Despite the update, Veaux’s methods for calculating probability remain unclear and the sources he used contain some unacknowledged flaws and/or caveats. To support his statement that 18 people will have permanent heart damage for every one person who dies, he gathered statistics on heart damage from this article, which is largely based on a 12 June article published by Vox. The relevant passage states: [...] Finally, if we assume that Veaux made his calculations based on the Lancet study and if we leave aside all these caveats, the number of deaths (six) among the study cohort to the number of cases of heart damage (five) means that for every one person who dies, approximately one person suffers from heart damage, rather than 18 as he stated in his post. At any rate, given the limitations of the Lancet study, it would not be good practice to attempt to use its numbers to extrapolate to a hypothetical situation for the general population in the U.S., or indeed, anywhere else.