Still Watching

Obviously there is now more skepticism (and umbrage) over the government’s decision to lockdown the economy in response to the COVID outbreak. The early information was based on models. Here’s some real data that have now been recorded:

• Over 50% of COVID–19 cases had no symptoms. While some 80% of them had mild symptoms.
• COVID–19 was in the U.S. much longer than the experts claimed.
• Over 90% of the people who required hospitalization had other chronic conditions.
• Between one–fifth and one–half of deaths came from nursing homes.
• The actual real mortality rate is only marginally above that of the annual flu.
• NY, NJ, and CA became COVID–19 disaster zones because those states made the disastrous decision to send infected patients back to nursing homes.
• There are seven states that have yet to record a single COVID-19 death.
• There are an additional 16 states/territories that have recorded fewer than 100 deaths.
• There are an additional 17 states that have recorded fewer that 500 deaths.

The official numbers being thrown around by the media suggest that COVID-19 has killed over 65,000 Americans. This is based on an estimate from the CDC wherein “death counts include both confirmed and probable cases and deaths.” The CDC also publishes a separate table of “provisional deaths” related to COVID-19. It states that this data is “our most comprehensive picture of lives lost to COVID-19. These estimates are based on death certificates, which are the most reliable source of morbidity data.” As of May 1, 2020, the number of provisional deaths is 37,038. New York City, New York state, and New Jersey account for over 21,000 of those deaths – but the entire country got locked down. All the above is what we now know has been the biological impact of this virus that we imploded the US economy for. What costs sit on the other side of the scale ?:

The economic lockdown has caused over 30 million people to lose their jobs. Many retirement plans and life savings have been cut to fractions. Because of the closure of restaurants/bars and the food concessions at sporting and entertainment events, demand of certain foods has dropped so far that some farmers have found it less costly to turn their crops under as fertilizer than to pay the cost needed to finish-process and ship them to market. CO2 production is down over 20%, which may make some people happy until they understand that it is needed in purifying their drinking water. There are furloughs of doctors and nurses occurring in some areas of the country. Everyone knows about the dislocation in oil prices. Breakdowns in the supplies of water, food, healthcare, energy, as well as widespread loss of income is certainly costly. Mortgage delinquencies are up, and small businesses (which account for 70% of new job formation) are being most acutely hurt – many will not recover.

On the more personal side, some of the damage not being reported include an increase of women turning to sex work, and a spike in depression/despair, alcohol and drug use/overdoses, and domestic violence. The suicide rate has jumped, and in some states like Tennessee it now exceeds the infection rate. Some so-far minor outbreaks of civil unrest have occurred. These relate to the other part of this which is the political. I assume everyone is up to speed on all the petty tyranny and disrespect of individual rights going-on as well as the usual blame-laying and mudslinging. I will not go into that, but now that firm data is being accumulated, I think it is safe to say that the ‘experts’ whose advice we all trusted were not so trustworthy after all. Worse still, they are not capitulating on their mis-taken and now-disproven stances. As far as why not, it seems that so many people make up their own mind on that regardless what they hear, that it’s probably not fruitful to opine. I would only encourage those who are willing to, to refer to similar activity patterns in history (to data) and to avoid making conclusions based on sentiments. No matter the details, history will not be kind to the officials who called for this hysterical response to COVID-19. We didn’t switch off the economy and force 30 million people to lose their jobs because of the Swine flu, SARS, Bird flu, Ebola, or any of the other illness/pandemics that have hit the U.S. in the last two decades. The narrative that everyone was at risk with COVID-19 has been proven to be total nonsense.