The COVID Zone

Is it just me, or is this “COVID-19 pandemic” something out of The Twilight Zone?  There is an avalanche of confusing, faulty and conflicting information to draw from, making it hard to draw definitive conclusions – I’ll admit that right up front.  Nevertheless, for me, the mainstream narrative simply doesn’t add up, and the extreme measures taken by authorities don’t make sense in the context of an honest attempt to keep people safe while avoiding an economic and social catastrophe.

What do I mean?  Come on, people are still dying in droves, often 1,000 or more of them in a single day, just in the United States, even though we’re already past the first onslaught, right?  This a fast-mutating, fast-spreading killer, a threat unlike any other since 1918, right?  So, of course we need to take special measures or it’s curtains for millions of people, right?  So what’s my problem?

For starters, COVID-19 accounting is so liberal that the numbers so shamelessly wielded by the establishment – and dutifully and unquestioningly broadcast by all “respectable” media – are artificially inflated to the point of meaninglessness.  That is, case and death numbers are bloated by diagnosis based on the most general of symptoms (cough, fever, shortness-of-breath), often in spite of a negative test result.  Making a false impression worse, administrative pressure to attribute more deaths to the virus combines with ludicrously liberal death certificate procedures to skew the numbers even more.  Then, reporting agencies lump all “COVID  related” deaths together in one frightening total, failing to distinguish between death “by” COVID-19 and death “with” COVID-19.  

Perhaps more crucially, any comforting context is omitted from official pronouncements or news reports.  What I mean here is that we’re given scary numbers such as daily death tolls well over 1,000, but never told that normal “turnover” – people dying each year as a matter of course, mostly as they age and deteriorate – in the United States (pop. about 330 million) is close to 3 million, which amounts to about 8,000 per day.  Does an additional 1,000 per day for a few months constitute an existential crisis?  And in this light, are about 200,000 deaths in 7+ months – in part the result of moving deaths from other causes into the “COVID-19” bucket, and in any event a fraction of one-tenth of one percent of the U.S. population – something that should change life as we know it?  I don’t think so.  

And oddly, the establishment and its media mouthpieces attribute all of the horrific consequences of the response – an economic meltdown, with all the accompanying stress and fear; rampant hunger; mass foreclosures; vastly increased suicides; burgeoning alcoholism and drug abuse; exploding domestic violence; delayed care for strokes and heart attacks, as well as delayed recognition and treatment of cancer (due in part to people being terrified to go the hospital); and more – to the coronavirus itself, as if our hands are tied and there’s no other possible way to deal with the pandemic besides shutdowns, lockdowns, isolation and masks.  Bizarre.

With so much at stake, one would think that, at a minimum, citizens of democratic societies would be afforded a vigorous debate on the relative merits of potential approaches.  Yes, time is of the essence, but that doesn’t mean governments can’t respond to public feedback, including “midstream” when it’s clear some action or another isn’t working or isn’t necessary.  Instead, with humanity in an induced state of dread fear and panic, governments and technocrats have suppressed any dissenting views, cynically seized ever more power, and cavalierly deleted what used to be known as inalienable rights.  All this with scarcely a question from the Fourth Estate, which if anything has cheered on creeping (galloping, really) totalitarianism. 

In February, I never could have imagined how close we were to an Orwellian system here in the United States.  Yet seven months later it seems that the American public has settled into a submissive posture with scarcely a hint of rebellion.  One would think it’s perfectly natural and entirely consistent with our values, our traditions, and our Constitution to meekly submit to humiliating and suicidal policies, surrender our privacy, snitch on our neighbors, and promote censorship.  On the Fourth of July, while my flag flew at half mast, there seemed to be no sense of irony on the part of my neighbors as they joyously celebrated their rapidly vanishing freedom with fireworks (this, of course, while appropriately social distanced from the poisoned breath of their neighbors).  Perhaps most Americans (and from what I’ve observed, the bulk of humanity) just want the conceit of being free and don’t have the stomach to confront authority.  

This is very, very sad, not least because the pandemic response – enabled by cooked numbers, inordinate fear stoked by controlled media, and decades of grooming the public to be passive and obedient – is probably killing more people than it is saving, while destroying the economic security of tens of millions of Americans and perhaps billions worldwide.

Comparison with Non-Lockdown Countries

To see that this “unprecedented crisis” is nothing of the sort, one need only compare the situation in Sweden with that in the United States.  Why Sweden?  Because Sweden eschewed lockdowns (or the like), social distancing, and mask mandates.  The idea was to protect the vulnerable while letting everyone else go about their business (including kids attending school).  Sadly, Sweden did a poor job of protecting the very elderly living in nursing homes, which the government has admitted, but otherwise appears to have fared quite well.  Different countries are using different age ranges in reporting the demographics of the pandemic, so there’s a little apples-and-oranges thing going on here, in that I’m comparing COVID-19 mortality for the 0-59 age group in Sweden (total pop. est. at 10.12 million) with that of the 0-54 age group in the U.S.  Now, I may be accused of cherry-picking, by excluding the elderly, but since so much of the elderly population resides in nursing homes, and these facilities don’t benefit much from lockdowns, social distancing, or mask mandates for the general population, if we’re seeking to evaluate the efficacy of these draconian measures, it makes sense to exclude this demographic while choosing as large a portion of the remaining population as possible (and these swaths comprise over 70% of the population in each of the two countries). 

So, crunching the numbers, it appears that for the 0-59 demographic in Sweden, there so far (as of the end of July) has been an overall mortality of 31 deaths per 1,000,000 population.  (This should really astound people, given the fear-mongering and public shaming of those who are resisting the isolation-masks-distancing regime.  Sweden didn’t bother with any such mandates.  Should have been a disaster, right? And this demographic representing the vast majority of their population has succumbed to the “killer virus” at a paltry rate of about 3 per 100,000 people.) For the U.S. – also through July – the figure for the 0-54 demographic is over 55 deaths per 1,000,000 population.  

I should note at this point that I’m using Centers for Disease Control (CDC) provisional data, which is subject to change because the data trickles in over time; however, I’m using provisional data for a period ending almost a month prior to the CDC’s most recent report, and thus it should be pretty final (besides, it’s much more likely to be revised upward than downward).  I should also mention that, not having age demographics for the U.S.’s 2020 population, I applied 2019’s demographics (from the U.S. Census Bureau) to the estimated U.S. population of 330 million.  Imperfect, but close enough for my purposes.  

Of course, I have favored the U.S. in this comparison, because COVID-19 mortality gets exponentially worse with advancing age. Observing that COVID-19 mortality for the 0-64 age group in the U.S. is about 118 per million, we can estimate that for the 0-59 cohort, the true figure will likely be somewhere around 70-80 per million.  So, the U.S. has had well over 100% greater, and possibly 150% greater mortality in the 0-60 age grouping than has non-lockdown Sweden.

[Comparing Sweden’s 0-69 range with the U.S.’ 0-64 range doesn’t make the numbers much prettier, either – Sweden has a fatality rate per million of 73, and the U.S. has a rate of 99 per million. Given that the rate for the 0-74 age group (in the U.S.) is about 213 per million, a reasonable estimate of the figure for 0-70 is likely to be at least 125 to 130 per million; at least 70% greater than Sweden’s. It should also be noted that these groupings comprise about 85% of Sweden’s population and close to 90% of the U.S.’ population.] 

Now, I don’t say these mortality figures are correct for the U.S. – actually, I think they’re vastly inflated, for reasons I’ll elaborate on later – I’m just using the official numbers, giving the benefit of the doubt for the moment.  On this basis, it appears that the measures taken in the U.S. were ineffectual or even counterproductive,  and that’s without even getting into the economic and social costs.  Of course, one wouldn’t know this from the press coverage on Sweden, which has tended to compare Sweden’s figures with Norway’s, or to compare Sweden’s overall figures with the rest of the world’s, without providing context such as the fact that 75% of the country’s deaths took place in nursing homes or nursing apartments.  Yes, Norway’s figures are very, very low (9,249 cases and 255 deaths as of August 1), and yes, Norway is another nordic country which is next door to Sweden (80,422 cases and 5,743 deaths).  Even accounting for the fact that Norway is barely half Sweden’s size, in terms of population, that’s a striking difference.  Good for Norway.  (Leave it to the MSM to find the one comparison by which Sweden looks bad.)  However, bearing in mind the distortion of Sweden’s figures by their nursing home calamity (and again, nursing homes don’t benefit significantly from general lockdowns, masks, etc.), as well as the extraordinary harm caused by lockdowns (which is hard to quantify and largely taking place in the future, e.g., in the form of suicides, alcoholic cirrhosis and other “deaths of despair”), it’s unclear which country will be better off in the long-term.  It’s worth noting that the Prime Minister of Norway has publicly admitted that she probably overreacted in March, out of fear, when she closed the schools and imposed lockdowns.  The head of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, moreover, has stated, “Our assessment now….is that we could possibly have achieved the same effects and avoided some of the unfortunate impacts by not locking down, but by instead keeping open but with infection control measures.”

Before leaving the topic of Sweden, I should mention that it’s almost funny to compare the continuing hysteria in the U.S. with the relative calm in that supposedly reckless country…. in August, Sweden was an oasis of normality, and the country reported less than 80 deaths due to COVID-19. By contrast, the U.S. was marked by panic, and almost 30,000 deaths were reported. Even accounting for the U.S. population being 32 times that of Sweden, that’s a remarkable difference. Moreover, it’s instructive to contrast the disaster predicted by the geniuses at the U.K’s Imperial College if Sweden didn’t tow the line, with their actual results.

Japan provides another interesting counterpoint… if any country were hyper-vulnerable to a fast-spreading, senior-targeting, killer virus, it would have to be Japan.  With a huge (approx. 126.5 million), extremely aged (having the largest share of people over 65 years old in the world, at 26%), very densely-packed (10th greatest density among the 90 countries with at least 10 million people) population, it was ripe for the picking.  On top of that, its government opted not to impose lockdowns.  Should have been a catastrophe, right?  Well, not really, at least so far.  With less than 35,000 cases and barely 1,000 deaths (when I gathered the numbers at the end of July), Japan has essentially been spared.  Many observers have attributed this good fortune to the Japanese cultural habit of wearing masks during flu season.  However, this practice didn’t do them much good during an early 2019 flu epidemic that was the worst on record, in terms of total flu diagnoses.  Unless masks are uniquely effective for trapping SARS-CoV-2, this is an unlikely explanation.  Perhaps a better one is that the Japanese eat a very healthy diet, and that consequently, a large proportion of the population was exposed to SARS-CoV-2 but didn’t develop overt symptoms.  To be fair, Japan has done far less coronavirus testing than many other countries (e.g. the U.S.), and a number of observers suspect that the country has been hit much harder than its government has let on, and simply undercounted the toll.  Yet, a study of Japan’s excess mortality (overall deaths above normal) during the peak months of the outbreak – March and April – found no significant excess mortality.  I’ll get into this in a later post, but any outbreak of a seriously “lethal” infectious disease should result in substantial excess mortality.

And, flogging what should already be a dead horse, we have another country – Belarus, population a bit shy of 9.4 million – that has opted out of the isolation-mask-distancing regime.  As of noon, August 1, their death toll from this merciless scourge of mankind, this virus that has grown men soiling themselves in fear, was 563.  That’s an overall COVID-19 mortality rate of 60 per million of population (the overall rate for the U.S. was about 473 per million at that time), or 6 per 100,000.  Probably just lucky. 

It’s fortunate that we have these counter-examples to draw on, because there has been enormous pressure brought to bear on both Sweden and Belarus to “go along.” There are reports that in June, the government of Belarus was offered a $940 billion loan by the World Bank, on condition (among other things) that it impose lockdowns and shut down the economy. Obviously, Belarus said no, and excuse me for wondering if there is any connection to the strengthening effort to depose President Alexander Lukashenko. With respect to Sweden, I’m not aware of a similar “offer that couldn’t be refused,” but its government was pilloried in the press for months, until the results became so difficult to shed in a bad light that the strategy changed to one of ignoring Sweden.

In my next installment on the “pandemic,” I’ll look at the COVID-19 numbers game, and explore whether the malady is as lethal as we’re told.