Intentionally misleading COVID numbers are enslaving the American public — and Government is not quickly working toward getting more accurate ones

© 2020 Peter Free

 

20 April 2020

 

 

First — an elementary observation

 

Media keep pointing to graphical representations of COVID-19 infections, deaths and numbers of the critically ill, as if they are accurately representative of the pandemic's reach.

 

They aren't.

 

In essence, the COVID data is a loosely gathered propaganda ploy that preys on humanity's inability to think scientifically, statistically and in proportion.

 

For instance, the 'real' number of COVID cases vastly exceeds those that have been detected and recorded. And death rate and morbidity rates are (therefore) much lower.

 

Even for the data that one would think authorities could get somewhat correct — like the absolute numbers of COVID deaths — the number is probably significantly skewed toward being inflated.

 

Also lost in this propaganda juggernaut is the frequent inaccuracy of the variety of tests designed to detect:

 

 

(a) SARS-CoV-2 RNA

 

and

 

(b) IgM and IgG antibodies to virally infected cells.

 

 

Without consistently accurate tests — and with consistently inadequate scope-of-testing in most places — COVID data is reliably questionable at all times.

 

 

Perspective — it has been 5 months

 

As late in this pandemic as one month ago, I observed that American COVID numbers were essentially bullshit. I revisited the topic two weeks ago, with the same conclusion.

 

Recall that the epidemic started in mid-November 2019 in China. That means that virtually all authorities, internationally, have been sitting on their figurative asses (investigation-wise) for five months.

 

They almost nothing to paint an accurate picture of what this pandemic actually entails — with regard to ascertaining its infection and mortality rates.

 

Instead, most authorities appear happy to manipulate death tolls to make the illness seem way worse than it really is. Virtually all available data has been collected from places that it is easy to get — meaning hospitals, clinics and a few neighborhoods — leaving in-the-wild (so to speak) information more or less completely unsampled.

 

Three characteristic reporting errors occur all the time, regardless of who is doing the communicating:

 

 

The first mistake refuses to investigate what the real infection rate is. Meaning who has the illness, who doesn't, and how quickly it is progressing through the population.

 

Admittedly, this information is not easy to obtain. It requires testing a variety of developing infection 'fronts' and comparing the data obtained therefrom with each other.

 

The best way to do this is (arguably) via contact tracing, lumping each patient's contacts into an array of high-to-low contagion-proximity groups. And then agglomerating and comparing those groups, so as to ascertain specifics on the spread and levels of morbidity.

 

This process, naturally, requires tracing the contact net through time, as some people progress into illness and others do not.

 

The second error (usually intentionally) assumes that everyone who dies of COVID-like symptoms, died of SARS-CoV-2. The Corbett Report does a good job of showing how this works to measurably inflate the death toll, here.

 

The third interpretive misdirection takes these inflated COVID death numbers and posts them, but without providing any comparative contexts.

 

People are naturally frightened by large pulses of deaths because their attention is not usually drawn to similar (or larger) numbers under other circumstances.

 

 

Why this lack of investigation matters

 

Governments have mandated lockdowns (of the public), using grossly inflated COVID deaths and morbidity numbers — as well as absurdly based mathematical modeling — to motivate national publics to accept our arguable overreactions.

 

The working economy — meaning the one that 'real' people occupy — is getting bashed to smithereens based on unquestionably bad and missing data.

 

Civil liberties are again taking humongous hits, under the familiar American "war" excuse:

 

 

War on Drugs

 

War on Terror

 

War for Waging Perpetual Wars

 

War for Making America Safe against Everything except Pandemics

 

and

 

War to Make and Keep Everyone Immortal — Forever and Beyond

 

 

I agree with those Americans, who are beginning to resist

 

Even as an old and COVID-vulnerable person myself, I do not especially mind that most of the protesters are not wearing protective masks.

 

Someone, no matter how seemingly epidemiologically dopey, has to stand up for the US Constitution.

 

'We the People' have to corral totalitarians, who are bent on seizing yet more power to themselves, ostensibly for our own good.

 

 

A Social Contract proposition

 

If Government is too lazy, incompetent or cheap to collect the accurate data necessary to justify this stunning removal of people's civil rights, then it deserves no respect and no obedience.

 

 

Consider the Government's 'flattening the patient curve' excuse

 

We are repeatedly told that flattening the patient curve is necessary to get everyone, who is currently sick, treated without overloading the medical system.

 

A related justification argues that this flattening helps keep our medical workers alive and able to cope.

 

The flattened curve option is, however, only a value choice. It is not (by itself) necessarily a logical, or rationally balanced, must-do:

 

 

Since when has any pandemic been 'designed' to be 100 percent treated?

 

Since when can medical workers not say 'no' to being overloaded with an excessive number of patients?

 

Why do we assume that pushing the attainment of herd immunity into the distant future is a completely good thing?

 

Why do we think that near instantly making most people poor, homeless and hopeless is preferable to killing off a proportionately tiny fraction of us now?

 

(I say this last, as one of the likely to-be-killed minority.)

 

 

The argument in favor of 'flattening the curve' is arguably . . .

 

. . . top-down social engineering, whom no one explicitly voted for.

 

I would think that:

 

 

if presented with a choice between

 

(a) virtually everyone being locked up and forced into unemployed impoverishment

 

as opposed to

 

(b) seeing lots of (but nevertheless comparatively many fewer) people die, sooner rather than later —

 

many Americans would favor continuing their Freedom and paychecks.

 

 

Did anyone ask them?

 

 

The moral? — Government's totalitarians thrive by . . .

 

. . . scaring everyone into trying to avoid Life's necessarily painful ambiguities.

 

There were more subtly aimed ways to deal with this pandemic, than those that most leaders chose.

 

The question now is whether significant numbers of them will begin to modify their reflexive blanket responses into less harmful methods.

 

A start at such would entail a COVID infectivity data collection effort.

 

A tiny beginning of such took place in Santa Clara County (California) recently:

 

 

Eran Bendavid, Bianca Mulaney, Neeraj Sood, Soleil Shah, Emilia Ling, Rebecca Bromley-Dulfano, Cara Lai, Zoe Weissberg, Rodrigo Saavedra-Walker, Jim Tedrow, Dona Tversky, Andrew Bogan, Thomas Kupiec, Daniel Eichner, Ribhav Gupta, John P.A. Ioannidis, and Jay Bhattacharya, COVID-19 Antibody Seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, California, MedRXiv, doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463 (17 April 2020) (PDF here)

 

 

Although that study has easily arguable shortcomings — see, for instance:

 

 

Balaji S. Srinivasan, Peer Review of “COVID-19 Antibody Seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, California”, Medium (17 April 2020)

 

 

— it capably goes in the right direction.