Georgia YMCA camp COVID outbreak — good example of infection scare tactics — without reporting downstream health effects

04 August 2020

US authorities are still acting as if . . .

. . . being infected with SARS-CoV-2 is the same as being noticeably sick and simultaneously condemning everyone around us to death or permanent disability.

That is not epidemiology.

It's scaremongering quackery.

Consider the now infamous Georgia YMCA camp

It managed to achieve a 44 percent infection ("attack") rate in June 2020, despite Georgia public health authorities overtly admitting that more than 250 people were not checked.

The 250-plus person lapse in testing and tracing, alone, shows us how sloppy American public health has generally been.

Recall that the first reported symptoms YMCA case occurred on 22 June

That's more than a month ago.

Yet, we still have no published follow-up numbers to show us what proportion of kids and camp staff — among those who supposedly were infected — actually fell (or are falling) significantly ill:

Officials recorded information about symptoms for only 136 kids.

Of those, 100 reported symptoms — mostly fever, headache and sore throat.

Yeah, that's the equivalent of routine kid illnesses.

Big deal.

One would think that . . .

. . . someone would have traced the camping kids' many contacts to see whether any of those people (presumably adults) came down with serious effects.

Yet, we apparently still have no published numbers showing:

how many of the campers' home and out-of-camp contacts

also got sick

and are now

visibly headed down a frightening slide into intensive care, grave or disability.

Not a word about this, from any source that I can find online.

Why does such lackadaisical ignorance still exist . . .

. . . in such an epidemiologically perfect case to trace, observe and quantify?

Should we begin to think that American authorities are:

deliberately fanning COVID hysteria

or, alternatively

intentionally concealing its significance?

Or both.

There's no way to know the answer to this question . . .

. . . when nobody knows nuthin' — 'cause everybody is too busy not looking.

With such extraordinary levels of ignorance in mind

Do we think that we can still legitimately criticize the many Americans, who have concluded that the COVID-19 pandemic is grossly inflated bullshit that does not meaningfully apply to most of them?

And can we (fair-mindedly) harp on the equally many, among the US public, who think that the reported COVID death toll is just an agglomeration of virtually everyone, who is dying inside the Healthcare System these days?

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Robert Redfield admitted last week that American hospitals may have monetary incentive to inflate coronavirus death counts.

During a hearing by the House Oversight and Reform Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis on Friday, Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-Mo.) asked whether hospitals have “perverse incentive” to inflate COVID-19 fatality numbers.

Shockingly, Redfield admitted that they do.

“I think you’re correct in that we’ve seen this in other disease processes, too,” Redfield said.

Those of us with medical backgrounds know that . . .

. . . Dr. Redfield's statement is accurate.

Happens all the time. Facts are almost always distorted, as a result of existing incentives to screw with them.

How much this is so, in COVID's case, we do not know.

That is the case, in large part, exactly because American authorities are making almost no appreciably direct effort to obtain and calculate accurate rates of infection, morbidity and mortality.

The raw COVID data has long been there (in this COVID-clobbered country of ours)

It just needs to be traced through time and then quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed.

But instead of attempting to do this, even under the apparently ideal — meaning comparatively confined instances like the YMCA camp — US authorities have given up on doing any true epidemiology at all.

Apparently, we'll wait for the Magic Vaccine . . .

. . . instead of conducting effective epidemiological investigations today.

And once that vaccine arrives — in the continuing absence of the scientific analysis of the pandemic's mechanisms and effects (that should have been done) — Americans will still have no idea how dangerous COVID-19 actually is or was.

A pile of watery frog turds could (figuratively) do better.

Maybe we should ask South Koreans and Taiwanese to help us

They have obviously better brains and superior scientific skills, if those nations' overall COVID performances are indicative, than we do.

In short, President Trump and COVID, together . . .

. . . have revealed the United States' greedy unwillingness to do anything public-spirited, or societally competent, in any meaningful sense.

In this regard, rotavirus vaccine co-inventor, Dr. Paul Offit, recently observed that:

We don't think like a society. We think as individuals. I think that's what distinguishes us from a lot of these European countries.

We are so individualistic that we basically consider [it] our right to catch and transmit a potentially fatal infection.

This is true.

At the United States' anti-community extreme, history will (almost certainly) eventually demonstrate that unremitting Hostility toward the Whole is not a society-saving strength.

The moral? — Ask yourself . . .

Why is (supposedly scientifically enlightened) American culture acting as if we are still trapped in the black magic Witch Age?

The US record during this pandemic has been so lazily unreasoned, that it cannot be explained, without hypothesizing the existence of culturally institutionalized demons:

Where are the incentives that are so badly destroying (purported) US epidemiological science and American public health?

Who is gaining from actively maintaining oppressive levels of COVID ignorance, along with the direction-lacking hysteria that is built upon them?

PeteFree.com

Georgia YMCA camp COVID outbreak — good example of infection scare tactics — without reporting downstream health effects