Month: April 2020

Stats and info I assume reliable:

• The CV19 test has an 80% false positive rate, and tests for covid viruses (regular flu and cold are also covids), in general, not 19 particularly, so the testing stats are fundamentally wrong, wherever they are or end up, with presumably many people with other covids that also create respiratory symptoms having been added to 19’s list.
• Many patients are being assumed to have 19 without testing, further degrading any stats about rates of infection.
• People merely assumed to have 19 because of symptoms (without having been tested by the test which is wrong 4/5ths of the time, anyway), and people thought/presumed to have died WITH 19 (though possibly another covid or other respiratory aggravant), but not provably FROM it (carriers, asymptomatic people), are still added to the fatality totals for the virus.
• Some U.S. people being tested in mid-March, before any quarantines were in place, already had 19 antibodies, so the virus had already been through the country/world, and a certain amount of general immunity was already in place (I’m avoiding the use of the word ‘herd’).
• Dr. Fauci wrote in the NEJM in late March, awhile ago now, that CV19 fatality rates would likely wind up at .10 % (a tenth of one percent), or similar to a heavy flu season (Great Britain likewise downgraded it back in late March, though it ramped up the lockdown).
• Lowering that prediction further now, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria did a segment a couple days ago, linked here, summarizing the huge extent of the threat’s overstatement, and its continuing downgrading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LG-so-8qwg. This explains the avalanche of quiet hospital (and strange dancing hospital staff) videos on the internet, with even the supposed ‘war zone’ hospitals looking very quiet when regular people visit to have a look. In any case, it looks like we can all breathe a sigh of relief, and that we probably never needed to be scared witless and put on house arrest in the first place, in fact.
• TB, which still exists in the world, and which is super transmissible, much more so than 19, via just shared air, was contracted, according to the WHO’s website, by 10 million people in 2018, and killed 1.5 million of them, a 15% fatality rate; 150+ x greater than the latest expected rates for 19. Super deadly, in spite of the disease being a known to the world of medicine, which presumably should make it more manageable. The world was not locked down over it.
• The world was and remains locked down over this virus in an unprecedented worldwide exercise of central authority, and with people like Zakaria still suggesting that we may all need to prove ourselves to be illness free to go back to work, anyway, wrong or exaggerated stats or not. I assume, too, that there will be a big push now to mandate the taking of a vaccine for 19, in spite of this all being a combination of the inaccurate and wildly overblown.
• Lives and businesses have already or will yet be financially ruined, a depression likely caused, and the health and well-being of many people badly harmed in many other ways not related to any virus by the reaction to this one.

This episode felt like a societal experiment to me, and has finally taught me that people will always trust experts and leaders, no matter what, wrong or not; rarely employ any critical thinking; and really don’t care that much about their freedom. They care about safety. Even if, inevitably, they will wind up far less safe as a result of their pursuit of it and their trust of authority.

Regardless, none of the stats above ever warranted almost EVERYONE losing their fundamental freedom and being given ongoing and possibly extreme financial and other hardship, and the abuse of power by people who probably should never have any has already been pretty ugly in certain places in police actions and lawmaking or executive edicts, with recent stories from England and Michigan coming to mind most immediately.

There have been silver linings in this time for the environment, and people calming down, getting a different perspective on life, neighbors finally meeting, getting to projects they’d never have had time for, but for any student of history, this should be a sobering moment. An outrageous centralization of power has occurred, one which fundamentally changes the relationship between citizens and their states, and sets a precedent we never should have allowed be set, and certainly not so easily.

Centralizations of power generally have very predictable outcomes, and this one is the greatest in history, so I’ll hope its outcome proves an exception to the rule, or is very slow in reaching its expected and natural end. At the least the worldwide reaction to and propaganda about an overstated and temporary health risk at the level of a seasonal flu has created what I expect to be a permanent attenuation of and crisis for the concept of human liberty, and I don’t think that was an accident.

Anthony Fauci is the doctor regularly interviewed and consulted by the major media of late as an expert on the CV-19 virus and on epidemiology, in general. These are his words, from a paper of his published in the New England Journal of Medicine this past week (emphasis added):

“On the basis of a case definition requiring a diagnosis of pneumonia, the currently reported case fatality rate is approximately 2%.4 In another article in the Journal, Guan et al.5 report mortality of 1.4% among 1099 patients with laboratory-confirmed Covid-19; these patients had a wide spectrum of disease severity. If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.2”

Link to the full article/paper: https://nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387

Here, also, are the CDC’s own annual influenza stats: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html Even at the low end of the ranges given, those are very large numbers, that happen every year, and we’ve never shut down so much as a single town that I know of, much less THE ENTIRE WORLD.

Other realities:

• Not everyone who contracts the virus will get sick.
• Most that do get sick have mild symptoms.
• Not all of those that die while this virus is active, and also test positive for the virus, will have died because of the virus. Many will also have the flu, and have died from that, or another underlying, concurrent cause, though they will likely be listed as CV deaths, anyway.
• Most importantly, from a general welfare and public health perspective, the economic harm caused by the lockdown would seem to have the potential for much greater and longer lasting negative consequences than the virus would have caused if it simply played out like any other virus we all confront every year, and offsetting, possibly swamping, any benefits derived from this most extreme containment reaction in human history.
  • People will lose or have lost already, their jobs or businesses, thus their income. As a result of their imposed destitution, they will lose (or have already lost) their private insurance, directly affecting health care options and finances.
  • People in or moving towards poverty can’t afford better, cleaner, organic food, nutritional supplements, gym memberships or the time to exercise, massages, chiropractic, acupuncture or other wellness treatments. Subsistence living doesn’t allow those choices.
  • Lost work & homes, increased divorce, worry, addictive behavior, domestic violence, people chasing low-wage work just to survive, and working longer hours to do so, or not working at all, on welfare, negative stress will likely go through the roof, spiking all the very well-known and deadly health related maladies that are bound to it.

So, some percentage of people will obviously have their health harmed by this staggering containment reaction, maybe a big percentage, some seriously harmed. It’s possible, too, that the percentage and the absolute number of people harmed will be much higher than the number of people ultimately killed by the CV, though I think it’s unlikely those stats will get tracked and reported by major media as the virus has been. They’ll count, anyway, though, and if dire consequences be what society seeks to avoid here, then they ought be considered now.

So, all that for a virus the most interviewed expert on the topic has stated recently in one of the most esteemed medical journals in the world could finally have a mortality rate akin to “a severe seasonal influenza….approximately 0.1%)” The entire world’s economy shut down for that, and inviting all the major harm that will bring.

This whole scenario can now also get repeated, whenever, any time some health threat is deemed dire, and even if that threat does not surpass or even reach the threshold for routine threats we’ve all faced every single year, forever. The precedent – to which there was almost no resistance at all – has been set now, and it strikes me that that almost any risk that can be deemed general can now likewise be deemed unacceptable in the future, and hyper-extreme measures again taken to avoid it, and regardless of the risk the extreme measures themselves cause.

That’s leaving aside that we all just completely forfeited our freedom, and now move about increasingly only at the discretion of government. A cursory scan of history will make obvious how dangerous that precedent and dynamic is.

Though not at all politically correct to state, something not to be said aloud in ‘polite’ company, at the risk of offending the both thundering and cowering herd, I think this a crazy and crazy dangerous moment, and, I would guess, a contrived one. Capitalized upon, at least. Leaving aside the origins of the virus, it’s too big and consistent a worldwide reaction to be random or spontaneously arising, and is a huge and profound transfer of power to centralized authority, so I hope people will bring critical thinking to bear now on this circumstance, because if this really goes on another month, much less gets REPEATED in future, the damage and results from this lockdown and the precedent it sets will likely be with us forever. Much longer than those of CV-19, certainly.