The pandemic from hell erupted as a panic of politicians. It is now a comedy of Mash-minded med admins and stooges with microphones. They are covering their ifs, ands, and butts. There’s no question about their use of ever more morbid and distorted statistics.
ICYMI: Op-Ed: Those at Risk Should Take Caution, As for The Other 98% of the Population…
But the latest reports are of plummeting death rates from all causes, this crisis is over.
Lies, damned lies and statistics
The crisis now will boomerang on the politicians and politi-Doctor Faucis. Their gullible acceptance and trumpeting have led to massive economic distress. It is what statistician William Briggs calls “the most colossal and costly blown forecast of all time.” This has been an egregious statistical horror story.
It began once upon a time… there were millions of projected deaths. They were suffusion with incense and dark and brooding accents. From Imperial College of London to Harvard School of Public Health the druids were prompting the politicians. They whispered impose destructive lockdown on the economy… Lock the healthy in their houses.
It was an outrage even if the assumptions were not wildly wrong. Flattening the curve was always a fool’s errand. They knew or should have known the action widened the damage. President Trump had better take notice. He will soon own this gigantic botch of policy and leadership. No one will notice that his opponents urged even more panicky blunders. They whispered.
Total death rate compared to years earlier
Recent figures on overall death rates from all causes show no increase at all. Isn’t that interesting? With much of our healthcare system shutdown… Deaths are lower than in 2019, 2018, 2017 and 2015. Deaths are only slightly higher than in 2016. Any upward bias is almost certainly attributable to population growth.
Statistician William Briggs concludes: “Since pneumonia deaths are up, yet all deaths are down, it must mean people are being recorded as dying from other things at smaller rates than usual.” Deaths from other causes are simply being ascribed to the coronavirus. As usual every year, deaths began trending downward in January. It’s an annual pattern. Look it up. Because the lockdown began in mid-March, politicians cannot claim their policies had anything to do with the declining death rate.
Herd immunity
In Israel, a global study by Professor Isaac Ben-Israel, chairman of the Israeli Space Agency and Council on Research and Development has seen publication. The study shows “the spread of the coronavirus declines to almost zero after 70 days—no matter where it strikes, and no matter what measures governments impose to try to thwart it.”
Impeding herd immunity among students and other non-susceptible young people the lockdown in the U.S. results in prolongation and exacerbation of the medical problem. As Briggs concludes, “People need to get out into virus-killing sunshine and germicidal air.”
This Flu, like all previous viral cases of flu, will give way only to herd immunity. Whether we get there through natural propagation or through the success of a vaccine project. The herd is or should be our goal. The evidence does not indicate this flu was exceptionally dangerous.
On March 20th, the French published a major controlled study. It shows no excess mortality at all from coronavirus compared to other flu’s. SARS and Mers were both much more lethal. Neither of them amounted to taking a hammer and sickle to the economy.
What do we know?
At this point, we now know the crisis has been a comedy of errors. The Chinese let it get going in Wuhan. But together with the Koreans, the Chinese are responsible for delaying six weeks. The result, rampant propagation, to create herd immunity before they began locking everyone up. Therefore, the Chinese and Koreans were among the first to recover.
The Italians scared everybody with their collapsed single-payer healthcare system with insufficient capacity and political healthcare decision making. Crammed together in subways and tenements, the New Yorkers did register a brief blip of extreme cases. Intubations and ventilators turned out not to help in that 80% of patients so treated died.
The result was sowing fear and frustration among medical personnel. The medical professionals were slow to see that the problem was impaired hemoglobin rather than lung damage. The New York media was only too happy to hype the panic. They ran with bogus reports of rising deaths. “Coronavirus deaths” were made to swell by assuming people dying with the virus were dying from the virus. They then went to ascribing to the coronavirus other deaths among people with symptoms of pulmonary distress, even without testing.
Playing with the statistics
Now jacking up the case rate will be further pointless testing. As Briggs points out, Fauci is calling for ‘tripling’ of testing, which can only boost these dailies [case totals]. It will make it seem like there’s a genuine increase occurring. Oh my! The daily reported cases are up! It must mean the disease is spreading! No. It could also mean, and probably does given all the other evidence we now have from sampling, that the disease was already there, and we just now have measured it.”
The death rate rises with further reclassification of pneumonia and other pulmonary deaths. On the basis of New York and Fauci logic when we reach herd immunity, and nearly everyone has the antigen, nearly all deaths can be chalked up to COVID19. Hey, it will be Quod Erat Demonstrandum for the panic mongers.
Epidemiologist Mihai Grigoriu concludes that with the French study, corroborated by findings from a Stanford antibody seroprevalence study in Santa Clara County, “the case for extreme measures collapses like a house of cards.” Grigoriu says that since the virus has already spread widely in the general population, efforts to stop further spread are both futile and destructive.
Moving forward
So let’s stop pretending that our policies have been rational. Let’s ditch the fiction they need to be phased out. Stop pretending they once had a purpose. They should be reversed summarily and acknowledged to be a mistake. The statisticians with erroneous computer models and the doctors who swore to them were wrong.
We are witnessing a statistical horror story. We should learn from this experience. It highlights the flaws of reliance on silos of expertise. The lesson: Do not shut down the economy again for the totally bogus “crisis” whatever the claim.