Returning To Facts and Common Sense

Roger Kimball

The tide is turning  - wait and see

The deeper and longer-lasting response will be a quiet revolution in sentiment against the people who abetted this wealth-destroying panic: against the media, first of all, but also the obscure bureaucratic elite that stoked the fear and helped spread the hysteria.

As each day passes, it brings new reasons to distrust the models and projections that turned the American public into a fearful, quivering jelly.

A month ago we were told that unless we turned our world into a giant condom and took care not to touch anyone or anything, millions would die. In recent weeks, those numbers have been revised downwards again and again, even as the strategies for counting cases and fatalities due to the insidious new virus have spiraled upwards. There is a great eagerness in municipalities thirsty for government funding to overstate the number of people affected by the virus.

In New York, the smoldering omphalos of the disease in America, with just over 40 percent of the cases nationwide, a third of “fatalities” were not even tested. Rather, they are said to have succumbed to “COVID-19 or an equivalent.”

It’s pretty clear, though, that many of the 20 million jobs that evaporated and tens of thousands of businesses large and small that have been crushed will not be coming back. How do we deal with that?

True, a collateral benefit will be the collapse of dozens or perhaps scores of pointless colleges as parents step up their scrutiny and decide that $250,000 for a degree in Gender Studies or Applied Marxism isn’t worth the price. Anyway, why spend up to $70,000 per annum when you can obtain the same skills online for a few thousand, at most? Nevertheless, what will be the result of the assault on the actual substance of the economy—the world’s as well as ours at home—can not yet be calculated

From the very beginning of this epidemic, the most elusive data point was the denominator: what percentage of those who were infected with the new coronavirus would ultimately succumb to it? One favorite number was 1 percent, which would make the virus ten times more lethal than the seasonal flu. Other estimates said two or even three or 3.5 percent, a chilling prospect

The Santa Clara study is so important. It tests for the important number: the people who have antibodies for the virus, meaning that they have been exposed and successfully fought back. There will be many, many more people who test positive for antibodies than test positive for the virus. This is good news, because the more “carriers” the lower the fatality rate.

This is why the Santa Clara study is so important. Here is the key finding,:

The population prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in Santa Clara County implies that the infection is much more widespread than indicated by the number of confirmed cases. Population prevalence estimates can now be used to calibrate epidemic and mortality projections. . . . The most important implication of these findings is that the number of infections is much greater than the reported number of cases.

by April 1 (three days prior to the end of our survey) between 48,000 and 81,000 people had been infected in Santa Clara County. The reported number of confirmed positive cases in the county on April 1 was 956, 50-85-fold lower than the number of actual infections predicted by this study.

An excellent aid to inquiry is in the essay “Moving the Goal Posts” by Dr. Jonathan Geach and a handful of colleagues. Geach shows that key criteria for dealing with the coronavirus epidemic have mutated as public awareness of the disease progressed—

Healthcare workers are being laid off and furloughed in droves as a result of healthcare centers having neglected patient care not related to COVID-19 in fear of a COVID-19 surge that failed to materialize on a nationwide basis. This means tens of millions of patients are failing to receive the medical care they need in a timely manner. Almost every hospital outside of the hotspots is empty.

And it’s not just small suburban or country hospitals that are affected. “Mayo Clinic is empty: 65% of the hospital beds at Mayo Clinic are empty, as are 75% of the operating rooms. This is the world’s premier medical center. If Mayo Clinic is empty, imagine how dire the situation is at smaller, community-based healthcare centers.”

One original goal of the flood-the-zone response to the coronavirus was to determine the real lethality of this new bug. But this brings us back to the Santa Clara study. The number that matters is not the percentage of those who get sick and then die but rather the number of those who have been exposed to the virus.

“The CDC states,” Geach notes, “that 247,785 people tested positive for the flu this winter and about 24,000 died. This makes the CFR for the flu 10%; nine in ten people who get the flu don’t die of it! 

While only 247,785 people tested positive, the CDC estimates that 39 million people were actually infected with influenza this winter. Hence, the IFR for the flu is around 0.1%.”

The most awesome toll of this new coronavirus is not the number of lives it has claimed—tragic though the loss of every life is—but rather the stupendous damage we have done to ourselves. The American public has been dutiful to the point of self-harm in heeding the injunctions of the people who manage their lives and livelihoods. I suspect that that deference is evaporating. I regard that as a good thing, for it means that neither the instinct for self-preservation nor the taste for liberty has been entirely bred out of the body politic.

Kevin McCullough

 
Nearly everything we’ve been told about models, rates of infection, deaths, and recoveries was inaccurate. The implication of this is a shockwave to the system.

• We’ve been told that the true death rate is 7.4% in New York.
• We were told there would be hundreds of thousands dead.
• We were told that this was worse than the flu, which has still recorded more deaths to date in this past flu season.
• We were told that we had to upend an economy, go into solitary confinement, and divorce ourselves from normal life because this would rage beyond any previous pandemic.

But none of these “truths” turned out to be so.

• The death rate in New York State isn’t 7.4%, it is actually .75%.
• The recently ended influenza season numbers from the CDC indicate possibly 56,000,000 cases of flu, 740,000 hospitalizations, and 62,000 deaths. Under the current count from the Johns Hopkins Dashboard in this five month stretch CoVid19 has racked up 845,959 confirmed cases, 122,000 hospitalizations and 46,972 deaths.
• Since going into national lockdown we’ve failed the key component of recovery from this virus—herd immunity. We’ve developed not nearly enough of it. For if 2.5 million New Yorkers were able to fight it off without any treatment at all—unaware they even had it—how much more immunity did we miss out on creating by simply sheltering everyone in place?
• Most importantly we’ve got millions upon millions of Americans who have been exposed to CoVid19 and who now have the late stage antibodies that demonstrate immunity.

It is time to acknowledge these facts, draw the necessary conclusions they lead us to, make changes for the benefit of the American people (for once), and end this nightmare.