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.
