Template:Corona
The current gamble seems to be to shut down the nation indefinitely to suppress a virus that is especially deadly to some demographics and experts agree cannot be contained, only slowed.
By the Ides of March 2020 "More than 99% of Italy’s coronavirus fatalities were people who suffered from previous medical conditions, according to the country’s national health authority.”
People seem to want to believe that if we merely quarantine sick people and those at risk, a “mitigation” strategy being used in Denmark, one computer model projects the U.S. death toll at about 2 million, again half from lack of ventilators, not depth of disease. But, the Hoover Institution, suggests “the total number of cases worldwide will peak out at well under 1 million, with the total number of deaths at under 50,000″ which is near the annual death rate due to flu in the United States.
So, what is the truth?
John P.A. Ioannidis, a professor of medicine, epidemiology, and statistics at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford’s Meta-Research Innovation Center.
"If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from the Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths."
Reports from the Diamond Princess cruise ship should make it clear that the virus is highly contagious under ship conditions but we also know that many people though they get the virus show little or no symptoms. Anywhere from 80 percent of infections in adults to 95 percent of infections in children that are observed or detected appear to be mild to moderate cases overcome in about two weeks with rest at home. Since death rates are calculated only from those who get severely ill and are tested we can assume the death rate from this virus is actually very low.
As fast as it is spreading we can assume that society is well on its way to herd immunity so many people have likely been exposed and gotten better and are now immune. Why are we risking a wrecked economy and welfare expansions beyond FDR’s wildest dreams?
Richard Epstein at the Hoover Institution writes of serious flaws in predictions of 1 million or more Americans dead from coronavirus:
- “Clearly, the impact on elderly and immunocompromised individuals is severe, with nearly 90% of total deaths coming from individuals 60 and over. But these data do not call for shutting down all public and private facilities given the extraordinarily low rates of death in the population under 50.”
- “Of course, every life lost is a tragedy…but those deaths stemming from the coronavirus are not more tragic than others, so that the same social calculus applies here that should apply in other cases... A Depression Will Ruin 330 Million Lives, Not 4 Million”
Victor Davis Hanson was a professor of classics at California State University, Fresno, and is currently the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004:
“[T]he massive curtailments of the U.S. economy can have as many health consequences as the virus itself—if millions lose income and jobs, become depressed in self-isolation, increase smoking, and drug and alcohol use, and postpone out of fear necessary buying and visits to doctors and hospitals for chronic and serious medical conditions unrelated to the virus,”
David Crowe an expert in global infections such as SARS, Ebola, and flu), sees the coronavirus panic is an irrational panic, based on an unproven RNA test called “polymerase chain reaction” (PCR).
- "The coronavirus test is based on PCR, a manufacturing technique. When used as a test it does not produce a positive/negative result, but simply the number of cycles required to detect genetic material. The division between positive and negative is an arbitrary number of cycles chosen by the testers. If positive means infected and negative means uninfected, then there are cases of people going from infected to uninfected and back to infected again in a couple of days."
- "The world is suffering from a massive delusion based on the belief that a test for RNA is a test for a deadly new virus... but that is not proof that the RNA is from a virus. Without purification and characterization of virus particles, it cannot be accepted that an RNA test is proof that a virus is present."
In a new scientific paper that calculated the false positive rate with the PCR Test for asymptomatic patients at 80%! The data is little more than a guess and the statics tell you nothing since so many people without symptoms or mild cases are never even tested with a test that is wrong far more than it is right.
Why are so many willing to plunge the nation and even the world into a depression that kills many businesses and shoves millions onto welfare for what could be the next several generations?
Millions more will be transformed from productive workers to bitter takers, causing a faster implosion of our already mathematically impossible welfare state. In the subsequent depression, many people may die due to poverty, and despair with suicide rates and crime rising even higher.