|
Debunking Some Ideas About The Virus
We still do not know for certain where the virus that causes the current pandemic has come from. China's first known Covid-19 case has now been traced back to mid November. While the virus is most likely a natural creation the U.S. State Department officials now point to alleged insecurities at the safety level 4 laboratory in Wuhan which did research on similar viruses. It spreads unfounded rumors that the virus escaped from there. But the U.S. itself has many such laboratories with long documented security issues and there is reasonable suspicion that the real patient zero case has happened in the U.S.
Science will eventually solve that conundrum. Until it does there is little to gain from further speculation about it.
There is a loose group of people who think that the current pandemic is some conspiracy with a nefarious purpose.
Some of them still compare the disease caused by the novel coronavirus to a flu. Some doubt that current restrictions of their personal liberties are legitimate and justified. Still others doubt the value of masks (Yesterday I deleted a comment that argued against masks.)
It is probably a waste of time to counter the arguments of such people. But I will give it a try.
The graphs show the normal mortality rates in the England and Wales and in New York City and the current deviations from it. The flu does not create such graphs. Nor do the lock-downs.
England & Wales – Weekly Mortality – Blue: historic range, Red: 2020
Source: Ed Conway / Skynews – bigger
New York City – Deaths by Month 2000-2020
Source: NY Times – bigger
A lot of the currently occurring death get misclassified. This happens in both directions. Death caused by an underlying disease may be classified as Covid-19 death if the person was tested positive. But the extreme increase of 'cardiac arrests' in New York City is certainly related to Covid-19 even as those deaths are not counted as such:
New Yorkers are making four times as many emergency calls about cardiac arrests as they did last year […] about 200 of these heart-attack victims are being pronounced dead at the scene each day, up from around 30 this time last year.
New York, Cardiac Arrests
Source: Economist – bigger
Some people in 'western' nations fear for their freedom and mistrust their current governments when they order a lock-down. There must be some nefarious purpose behind it. But why have the governments of China, Iran and Russia ordered similar measures? Are they part of a global conspiracy? I don't think so. Lock-downs are simply a sensible method to slow the spread of epidemics. They have been used with more or less success for hundreds of years.
Personal freedom is not an unlimited right. Diana Johnstone has given a convincing argument for its limits. One's freedom and rights end where they infringe on the freedom and rights of others:
[V]irtually all key aspects of any civilized society go contrary to the absolutism of individual rights. Every civilized society has some sort of legal system, some basic rules that everyone is expected to follow. Most civilized societies have a public education and (except for the United States) a public health insurance system designed to benefit the whole population. These elements of civilization include constraints on individual freedom.
The benefits to each individual of living in a civilized society make these constraints acceptable to just about everybody. The health of the individual depends on the health of the community, which is why everyone in most Western countries accepts a single payer health insurance system. The only exception is the United States, where the egocentricities of Ayn Rand are widely read as serious thought.
It is without doubt that masks are helpful to limit the spreading of the epidemic. An infected person begins to spread viruses by breathing, talking, singing or coughing on day 2 after the infection. Only on day 5 or 6 will the symptoms of the disease set in. Some people will never feel symptoms but can still infect others usually up to day 10 after the infection.
Masks stop the viruses one sheds from reaching other persons. They do this effectively.
Without mask
Source: Flow analyses to validate SARS-CoV-2 protective masks
bigger
With mask
Source: Flow analyses to validate SARS-CoV-2 protective masks
bigger
The German government is currently evaluating when to lift the current lock-down. It's science advisors are pushing for making it mandatory to wear a mask in all public settings. It is likely that the government will follow their advice. The above pictures show that this makes sense.
occupatio@361
You are correct. I am more and more convinced that the root cause is the long war against Communism, which in fact was a war against socialist ideas. A defensive war to preserve capitalists from threats to their power and property.
Interestingly enough the long term consequences of this war and particular campaigns such as McCarthyism are easily detected in our discussions of issues such as the Covid crisis.
The two sides, putting aside their claims to be nothing more than attempts to discover the truth, are, on the one hand, those who are sympathetic to socialist ideas. And, on the other, those who, having grown up in societies in which anticommunism was close to being the state religion, felt themselves forced, when they became critical of aspects of those societies, their cultures, and their government, realising that to look at the socialist critique might be dangerous, could be career destroying and possibly lead to their permanent exclusion from government jobs, political advancement, academic careers or even polite society, channeled their criticism of the status quo into the licensed critiques of the ‘libertarians’ the Austrian Economists and the late Ayn Rand who taught that this isn’t really capitalism, but a system polluted by socialist ideas and compromised by its enemies.
That allowed such critics and contrarians to rage against the government and even the economic system without running the risk of being mistaken, by anyone in power, for people who would do anything to change them.
One function of this kind of mindset is that ‘libertarians’ are generally of the opinion that what is wrong with society is that the, perfectly designed, capitalist system, has been betrayed- the McCarthyites said that the Communists had secretly taken over key offices. And the list of those suspected of these betrayals never stopsd growing: the illuminati, the Jews, the Catholics, the Russians, the Chinese, lizards, the occult.
It doesn’t matter that the ‘culprits’ are never actually identified in the act, it is enough to promote the idea that ‘elites’, criminals, or whoever is responsible for what socialists see quite clearly are the obvious and direct results of running society for the profit of a few at the expense not only of the many, but of the environment, other species and the planet itself.
Unfortunately, given the intensely anti-communist brainwashing to which Americans have been subject for decades, the default position for those critical of the Imperial society tends to be from the “Individualist/libertarian” spectrum. And from their position the lessons of the conjunction of neo-liberalism with the pandemic is horrifyingly illustrative of the need for socialism- the very thing which, all their lives, they have learned to fear.
From this position it is almost necessary-unless one is ready to change one’s deep-seated beliefs- to deny either that there is a pandemic, or that it can be suppressed by society, or that China appears to have made exemplary progress in the matter, or that it was a predictable natural occurrence, or that its mortality can be directly attributed to neo-liberal policies.
The problem being that, for the critics and contrarians who join in the conversation from the right, neo-liberalism is close to being the ideal form of society. They are after all, courtesy of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, Jo Schumpeter, Friedrich von Hayek, Steve Bannon, Donald Trump and all, in the final analysis partisans of capitalism, red in tooth and claw.
Posted by: bevin | Apr 16 2020 16:25 utc | 396
The UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) has just published its Analysis of deaths involving COVID-19.
Even though it reports 3,912 deaths involving the coronavirus (COVID-19) that occurred in March 2020 in England and Wales, it also states that:
The overall mortality rate in March 2020 was lower than the five-year average
This appears to be the opposite of what it reported only two days ago that the number of deaths in one week was 6,082 more than the five-year average
This huge discrepancy makes it hard to believe both those reports at the same time.
Posted by: Brendan | Apr 16 2020 12:42 utc | 382
This discrepancy is caused by a very expensive fudge, that dramatically distorts the data. “Expensive” in this case meaning expensive in credibility. The price they pay for that fudge is the lowering of the mortality rate to below the five-year average, thereby making fools of themselves and making the manipulation obvious.
This is a HOTTIE!!!
It shows the government’s narrative is already starting to fall apart!
What they have done is this: in order to try to justify their grossly inflated panic porn (even after removing their designation of Covid-19 as a highly dangerous communicable disease!), they misrepresented death rates by representing all deaths as age-standardised mortality rates (ASMRs). See, for example, Figures 1 and 3.
Why is this a problem? Because covid deaths occur virtually exclusively in a relatively very rare age group of over 70’s and especially over 80’s. By representing deaths as age-standardised deaths, they are skewing the whole of the data to give equal weight to every age group. As a direct result of doing so, they end up with this patently false and patently absurd statement:
Taking into account the age structure of the population, the rate of deaths due to COVID-19 was 68.5 deaths per 100,000 persons
That is saying, in effect, that for every 1000 people living in England and Wales, 0.685 of them died in March 2020 from Covid-19. The population of England and Wales is about 59 million, so the above statement is equivalent to claiming that 40,400 people died from Covid-19 in England and Wales During March 2020!
Sounds frightening, doesn’t it? That’s the whole purpose! Yet the total number of deaths in England and Wales in March from all causes was only 47,358!
*** FAKE NEWS !!! ***
Use of age-standardised mortality rates here is inappropriate because it grossly misrepresents the data, as you can see very clearly by my comparison above. In effect, what it is doing is to scale the deaths in each age group by different scaling factors, giving equal weight to each age group by compensating for their differing population frequencies. The average age for Covid deaths is over 80, and the over 80’s form only a very small part of the population, therefore the distortion is huge.
The use of this trick here is a politically motivated stunt, intended to enhance panic porn. It will backfire, because it seriously undermines the basis of that panic porn, and proves that the UK government is deliberately distorting Covid-19 statistics in order to exaggerate fear.
The ONS try to justify their use of age-standardised mortality rates with the following statement:
ASMRs are a better measure of mortality than the number of deaths, as they account for the population size and age structure.
Are they a better measure of mortality than the number of deaths? Only if your intention is to deceive.
But that is not the only trick the ONS is using here to exaggerate Covid deaths!
Firstly, they add in the “involving Covid” stunt to further inflate the numbers. This is a totally irrelevant distraction. According to their own description, they assign a “most likely underlying cause of death”, but if the patient (who might have died in a car crash, to take an extreme example) happened to have had a Covid-19 test, that (as a result of UK Government policy) automatically gets mentioned on the death certificate, and is then classed by the ONS as a death “involving Covid-19”. Ignore the “involving Covid-19” deaths, they are irrelevant, according to ONS’s own definitions.
Secondly, they have inflated the number of deaths “mainly caused by Covid-19”. This is very clear from the ONS charts: See Figure 4.
Note the massive reduction of deaths caused by heart disease compare to the 5-year average – this should immediately raise suspicions, and indicates that they have classified far too many deaths caused by heart disease as “Covid-19 deaths”. Also the deaths due to other respiratory diseases and to cerebrovascular diseases is significantly reduced compared to the five year average, which also arouses suspicions. Therefore the raw data for the numbers of “deaths caused by Covid-19” are inflated.
Thirdly, in the category of deaths “caused by covid-19” the ONS has even included deaths where there was only a mention of the suspicion of Covid-19, with no test.
Posted by: BM | Apr 16 2020 16:32 utc | 399
|
