TL DR: OPEN THE FUCKING SCHOOLS. DO YOUR OWN MATH AND DATA VISUALIZATION.
Hopefully the last one (sorry, this shit pisses me off). I was pretty pissed off when they closed schools, and even more pissed off when they extended the closure to the full Spring semester. We got lucky where we live that we have experts from both the local children’s hospital and parents that recognize the critical need to get kids in school and we opened full 5 days. While one of the local schools is closed due to an outbreak for 2 weeks, everything else is full steam ahead in our area, and it’s working fine. Many, many children aren’t so lucky and their school districts have given in to fear.
I urge you to understand this epidemic outside the media and their experts and especially as a multivariate problem. Independent scientists have been the only ones actually applying the scientific method, and in many cases, very basic math. Most of them are retired so they are not beholden to anyone’s budget nor any tenured position. Settled science is not science at all. We start with the original problem: being primed to panic due to ridiculous modelling by the Imperial College and the University of Washington and somehow, this bullshit stuck and stuck hard.
“Neither Vallance nor Whitty outrightly challenged Ferguson’s model or predictions. By contrast, in a series of messages from Michael Levitt, a Stanford University professor who would correctly predict the pandemic’s initial trajectory, Ferguson was warned that he had overestimated the potential death toll by ‘ten to 12 times’….“
When the prediction was made, the UK went from the Swedish approach to hard, fear-driven lockdown and the US followed suit in most states due to Fauci’s using the model to stoke the Trumpster fire. Fear was rampant, on twitter, on facebook on reddit. I was banned from the WI reddit for posting that the University of Austin projections for deaths in WI were only 600 by May, while other cranks estimated with their napkin math deaths in Wisconsin into the hundreds of thousands. Days later the dire UK-Imperial College projections went down from 2 million to 500 thousand in the USA (still a big number). Then Fauci was pressed on the news and gave 65K as his estimate in April. And yet, Fear became law.
We have seen revealed some critical problems with ourselves, our government and our media via this pandemic. There are no clean hands, everyone is in the same plague pit on this, the Left should have never accepted lockdowns and all the upper middle class are pretty much all hidden in their houses because this financially doesn’t effect them (only to go out and protest systemic racism) instead of protesting the lockdowns and school closures that have crushed the lower middle class and poor. Republicans denied it was a thing at all, which was stupid, yet they ended up much closer to right that it is not severe for younger people statistically. Lucky for us because early mistakes were made by our federal government’s response (Fauci is square in the sights on this again). When someone said it’s the flu, they were wrong, but not nearly as wrong as the Left which constantly compares this to the 1918 Flu, which it is nowhere near. And yet, this is a pandemic, it isn’t fake and it isn’t a full casedemic (though it’s becoming moreso every week this goes on). The shit is real and it’s nasty but, it’s nowhere, nowhere, nowhere near as serious as we were led to believe and at no time was there any justifications for the horizontal lockdowns or school closures after March.
C-19 is a largely nosocomial (there is no vaccine that nurses/doctors can take to minimize hospital spread) and nursing home (50%+ of casualties were from the nursing home population so far) disease that primarily effects people over 65, which is not smear spread, but may spread via aerosols (like farts and shit air from toilets with no lid) and certainly from droplets. It spreads very easily but is barely noticed in the general population until hospitalizations and deaths spike (primarily among the elderly) and by that time the peak of the epidemic is likely already past. Lockdowns only work to slow the spread, but the outbreaks will come as soon as the lockdowns end. If there was a quick vaccine that prevented spread, this might be a viable tactic, but it won’t be quick and the vaccines in process only target reducing symptoms and not spread.
This hits your ACE2 receptors in your nose, forms a coagulate mass and then drops into your lungs where it creates a gel out of stuff leaking out of your infected cells. For most people, they don’t even notice or it’s just a crappy cold and extremely mild compared to the flu. For some, especially the elderly and infirm, it can causes horrible problems and the disease gets into other organs and causes issues. This was thought to be a cytokine storm (where your immune system goes crazy) but it’s now thought to be a bradykinin storm. There’s a lot being learned about treatment for the disease even as it disappears from European countries that didn’t lock down and, strangely, almost all of Asia. I’m stating this here because it’s important that I note that this is not the flu, it is much milder in the young and much worse for the elderly. It’s not some made up thing because the rest of this may read like I believe this is nothing or completely fake. It is not fake, people that would not have died of something else have died of C-19 and healthy people I know got very sick for a couple of weeks, a few for longer, yet as a society: our over-reaction to it is the actual problem.
The second issue after completely failed modelling, is internet and social media fueled panic. We started hearing about this and seeing videos in December and it was pretty scary, but so was SARs and MERS and Ebola and Swine flu (which was a fake pandemic). Data was already coming in that this 1) primarily effected the elderly and 2) spread like crazy 3) was novel (it’s not as novel as we thought). A torrent of social media posts, and people who’s entire existence is social media were crying out for attention with the most apocalyptic and dire nonsense, and they got plenty of what they wanted. I remember confronting someone with data that completely refuted their claims that there was exponential growth (this never had sustained exponential growth, and if you think that, you can’t math) and would kill millions in the USA. Their response: the scientist that authored the report was a conservative. This is basically social contagion. The Word Virus. Due to this and probably some crafty information creation out of China, we were primed for panic, and we did. We basically let our governments run a playbook of shutdowns and school closures en masse that was straight from an authoritarian regime that everyone should hate. Blue states were completely closed and shuttered and their children are still not back in school. This is absolutely horrifying and again, something no one on the Left should ever have accepted. School closures for a few weeks is absolutely understandable, Japan does it for the flu here and there, but for 6 months? This is a social experiment in fear that went horrifically wrong.
‘Flattening the curve’ turned out to be complete horseshit: first, because except in some extremely specific places and times, the curve never needed flattening, there were always enough hospital beds, and no one that needed a vent couldn’t get one, and secondly, some cities are still under total lockdown after 30+ weeks. Let that sink in: 30+ weeks, few overflowing ICUs. This is in order to go to complete suppression or ‘zero covid’ which is about as flat earther as you can get. Goalpost shifting basically forever, and for what purpose? If lockdowns work to suppress, as soon as you open up again, boom: virus gonna virus. What have we allowed to happen?
Take what you think the deaths are going to be if you can do basic math, add a zero, and that’s what most people have been led to believe it will be. To put it simply, you had a fuckload of real life and internet Karens who put enormous pressure on local governments to do ANYTHING to allay their fear, however ridiculous. Almost all governments panicked, some regained composure quickly, others did not and have not.
The second huge issue we face as a culture is information suppression due to tech companies that now control information. HCL treatment with Zinc, The California Doctors video to their LOCAL news agency, Prof. Wittkowski, Prof. Ioannidis (?!) and now the President’s advisor on Covid have been and are currently brutally suppressed by technology companies, including Google, Twitter, Squarespace and Facebook. They allow flat earthers and innumerate idiots that predicted 10 million deaths in the USA to keep posting their trash, yet these Doctors and professors who predicted a much less lethal course for this disease, or suggested a treatment that has now shown to have good effect for some patients (however odd one of them turned out to be), have been censored. Now that the evidence is in it would be almost comical that the tech companies picked the wrong horse, because they are imbeciles right? Nope, this was done deliberately. Why? The answer is simple. You sitting in your fucking house on your ass with nothing to do makes money for the above mentioned companies, TONS of money. The longer the lockdowns, fear and panic last, the more money they make.
For the tech companies, this is not about protecting the public, especially since shortly after the Ioannidis study came out the CDC itself showed very similar data in their planning documents on May 15th, and the WHO have now published one of Ioannidis’s papers themselves. Google, Facebook, Twitter and Squarespace are led by evil people and are terrible companies that are out for one thing and one alone: your data and your money. They don’t care about your politics and will happily allow posts of funny videos of antifa people embarrassing themselves (no wonder they don’t want to be filmed anymore), fake scientists like Eric Dingledong along with detailed reasons why rampant capitalism is going to be the bane of human existence and lead to and environmental catastrophe. Like the news media, they need your eyes glued to their product and your ass glued to your chair. That’s why they leave flat earther videos and remove anything on Covid that doesn’t cry out: stay home, stay home, stay home. And look at you, you are staying home. Guess what, Ioannidis predicted the Infection Fatality Rate to be 0.26, another paper came out last week and what was their IFR? 0.26 or less. You’re still at home because scientists like him were banned. You think you should stay home for a disease with an overall IFR of 0.26 where 80% of the deaths are over 75? Google thinks you absolutely MUST, not for your benefit, but for theirs.
“Accept the truth from whatever source it comes.” –Maimonides
But who they didn’t delete, except for one interview with Toby from Lockdown Skeptics, which is shocking to me in retrospect, was probably the most brutal critic of the lockdowns, fear and media panic because he did it with just college level math, not some bullshit Nate Silver ‘model’: Nobel Prize winner Michael Levitt. I did some digging and one of the principles at Google was one of his students at Stanford along with his son. Otherwise, I believe he would have been absolutely repressed for his views by google, twitter and youtube. Levitt predicted China’s case and death toll almost exactly in March, as well as Sweden. He made some statements about Israel that turned out to be a bit off and easily taken out of context to pillory him. He basically stated that most of the major outbreaks (not the entire pandemic) follow the Gompertz Curve rather than a Sigmoid curve and there was never exponential growth at any time (a big bunch of bullshit the media kept playing up). When you have a trickle outbreak (like where I live) it doesn’t really work as we don’t have the population density to even have a curve at all, but places like Sweden, New York, UK, France, Italy, Spain all have very distinct Gompertz curves. He destroys everyone in this short clip.
Unfortunately, while he had an incredibly important paper on China in March, it did not get out and about soon enough to allay the panic except for very few people. He made statements that he felt the Pandemic would be over on August 25th in the United States, which is now looking very close as people are examining quite the case and death rates data as much of it right now is extremely sketchy. When the CDC announced that only 6% of the casualties were directly FROM C-19, all death coding became even more suspect. PCR tests are another huge issue, as the PCR test is a diagnostic test that is now being used as a screening test(!?).
The more traditional news sources are awful as well, and their motivations are the same as the technology companies: create panic and people buy our newspapers or view our web pages. This everyone knows instinctively, but it’s been at a fever pitch during this pandemic. MSNBC has gone back and deleted articles where it predicted mass deaths– you can’t find them anymore unless they have been mirrored by other new sources. CNN and Fox are mirrors of the orange man bad, orange man good. Neither should be watched or listened to at any time, though I was shocked as the panic narrative on Fox ceased abruptly and they, the right wing conservatives, were the first to question the lockdowns– not the left anti-authority mavens, but the Right. What, the, Fuck. Trust in the scientific community, the CDC and Virology as a whole has been completely lost, and deservedly so. Yet now even opinion journalism CNN has started to turn against the liars and imbeciles.
Bhattacharya: “Very, very disappointed with the scientific community… also the press as well. There have been open calls by fellow folks here at Stanford to establish, in effect, a censorship board over open science, published in the New York Times. I’ve seen my colleague, Dr. John Ioannidis, one of the very top scientists, epidemiologists, infectious disease experts in the world, his videos that he’s done, suppressed…
I’ve seen… respected scientists descend to attack in the ugliest ways. I’ve been trying to understand what is motivating it, and almost always, the complaint is that if you have dissent on this issue, you’re endangering the public…
I don’t understand how having open scientific debate could possibly endanger the public. Science is not a mechanism of population control; it’s a mechanism for learning true things when you have a very complicated situation, and everyone in science gets things wrong…
That’s why we have open scientific debate, to correct one another. That has fallen away in service of this idea that as a scientific community, we should convey a single message, so we get the entire public to do the set of things we want them to do…
That itself is an error and has really poisoned the scientific debate… I think it’s going to take a long time to repair.”
What’s the biggest tragedy through all of this is the collapse into fearmongering and tribalism of the New York Times. In both their editorial section and articles, they have been the worst journalists and flat out look like they are funded by Big Pharma (buy our vaccines) and big tech (stay at home and use our product) at this point. Their panic laden editorials, biased covid coverage of the non-lockdown countries (Sweden, who have an extremely nuanced approach–not simply “no lockdown” as people claim), their support of total virus suppression, their lack of questioning lockdowns beyond 2-3 weeks and their lack of investigative reporting into hospitals, nor Cuomo’s horrifying, yet understandable at the time, mistakes with nursing homes in the state with the largest city in the country. They should be ashamed of themselves. As a primarily left wing person politically, it’s tough for me to say this but while Fox and CNN don’t pretend or hide their extreme political bias, the NYT puts itself forward as actual journalism. They are, like CNN and Fox, opinion journalism masquerading as something else. The New York Times is no longer of any value to our country nor the city that they have helped eviscerate.
This is probably the best video I’ve seen on the situation, worth watching all the way through.
So who was right? Belarus, Sweden, (Brazil), Japan.
“Nothing would be more fatal than for the Government of States to get into the hands of experts. Expert knowledge is limited knowledge and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man, who knows where it hurts, is a safer guide than any rigorous direction of a specialist.”
My advice out of this is to look at the data itself from the primary sources, some of which may be dubious, but I really think people are trying their best. I use the CDC site linked above and COVIBES— a site out of Hong Kong that is outside our sphere of political biases. If you are feeling scared about local increases in C-19 mortality, read your coroner reports. While morbid, it gives a very solid indication of who is vulnerable to this disease.
From Prof Levitt:
1) Ignore cases, use number of hospitalizations, deaths.
2) Beware of reported death: many ‘with’ not ‘due to’ COVID19.
3) All-cause deaths bias-free but ambiguous & badly delayed.
4) MSM is rarely right. WHO often right but timing off.
5) COVID19 is a contrast agent revealing what is wrong with society but was invisible.
6) Make errors: exploring the unknown cannot be correct. Learn from errors.
7) Use common sense. Think.
(8) Stop being scared. World reported COVID19 at 1,050,000 is 7 days of natural death. [Just be cautious]
- Sign This: https://gbdeclaration.org/
- Here is their FAQ.
- do not use Google, delete the Chrome browser (unless you are a front end developer), use Duckduckgo instead. Firefox for your browser.
- For fucksake delete your Facebook account, there’s no reason to have it.
- Squarespace? Never use it again.
- Cancel your NYT subscription. Ignore all articles on any subject.
- Vote against any candidate using COVID as part of their platform. This will likely force you to vote third party. Do so.
- Support getting rid of the WHO and get another Pandemic office that is properly staffed in the United States. Remember the WHO said there was no evidence of human to human transmission, and then went from not recommending masks except if you were sick, to 100% recommendation, to recommending lockdown, and now against lockdown. That there was very little asymptomatic spread, to it being a vector of the epidemic. They are not to be trusted and seem to have left the H out of the WO.
- Masks. Wait for the worm to turn on this one pretty fast. Follow the WHO guidelines from April. Remember, masks are attached to people who struggle with them constantly. Regardless of the material, there’s still a person (or FFS, a child) under there most of the time not wearing or using it properly. Based on some anecdotal with people I know that wore masks all the time and still got sick, I personally think it’s all bullshit, but I’m willing to read studies that say otherwise– still can’t find them.