Tag Archives: Flatten the Curve

Bait-&-Switch: How they’ve changed the Covid conversation, by Kit Knightly

Both coronavirus case and death numbers have been badly fiddled. When the death numbers started coming down the commissars and their lackeys in the press switched the conversation to cases. From Kit Knightly at off-guardian.org:

It was supposed to be about life and death, but for weeks now we’re only hearing about cases.

Do you remember five months ago? Normally I wouldn’t ask, but the world is moving incredibly fast these days.

Do you remember that it was predicted that covid19 would kill literally millions of people?

Do you remember that hospitals were going to be over-run with patients and our struggling medical infrastructure was going to collapse under their weight?

Do you remember that locking down global society was the only way to prevent this disaster? That we had to do it, regardless of how much damage it did to the livelihoods and security of countless millions of people?

Final question – do you know how many people in the United Kingdom officially died with (not of) the coronavirus yesterday?

It’s 12.

Twelve people. You probably didn’t hear about that, because sometime in the last five weeks or so the media completely stopped using the word “deaths”, and started talking only about “cases”.

A “case” is anyone who tests positive for Sars-Cov-2, using the notoriously unreliable PCR tests which produce huge numbers of false positives.

Even supposing the positive test is real, the vast majority of “cases” are asymptomatic. Between false positives, unreliable tests and asymptomatic infection, a “case” count for sars-cov-2 is borderline meaningless.

Let’s say there are symptoms AND a positive test, and assume they’re not just a false positive who has a cold or the flu. Well, even the vast majority of the “symptomatic cases” will only ever be mildly ill. In fact of the 6 million active cases in the world, only 1% are considered severely ill. The majority of them will survive.

The CDC estimates the infection fatality ratio of Sars-Cov-2 to be about 0.26%. A number perfectly in line with severe flu seasons. Virtually every country in Europe is now reporting average, or even below average, mortality.

Broadly speaking, the vast majority of the world is, and will likely remain, absolutely fine.

But things aren’t going back to normal, are they? In fact, they are getting worse. The governments have got their foot in the door, and they have no intention of moving it.

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When Governments Switched Their Story from “Flatten the Curve” to “Lockdown until Vaccine”, by Ryan McMaken

Trying to slow the spread of the coronavirus so as not to overwhelm emergency rooms and hospital facilities was plausible. “Lockdown until Vaccine” is idiotic on its face. From Ryan McMaken at mises.org:

In the early days of the COVID-19 panic—back in mid-March—articles began to appear pushing the idea of “flattening the curve” (the Washington Post ran an article called “Flatten the Curve” on March 14). This idea was premised on spreading out the total number of COVID-19 infections over time, so as to not overburden the healthcare infrastructure. A March 11 article for Statnews, summed it up:

“I think the whole notion of flattening the curve is to slow things down so that this doesn’t hit us like a brick wall,” said Michael Mina, associate medical director of clinical microbiology at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “It’s really all borne out of the risk of our health care infrastructure pulling apart at the seams if the virus spreads too quickly and too many people start showing up at the emergency room at any given time.”

In those days, it was still considered madness to suggest outlawing jobs for millions of Americans or “shutting down” entire national economies in an effort to flatten the curve. Thus, the article lists far more moderate mitigation strategies:

By taking certain steps—canceling large public gatherings, for instance, and encouraging some people to restrict their contact with others—governments have a shot at stamping out new chains of transmission, while also trying to mitigate the damage of the spread that isn’t under control.

What we got, of course, was something much more far reaching, radical, and disastrous for both the economy and for long-term health problems.

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