How deadly is COVID-19, really?
It is now almost twenty months since COVID-19 crossed the ocean from China and arrived in the United States. When it arrived there was great fear as its true deadliness at that time was unknown. Though the sparse data from China, South Korea, and the Diamond Princess cruise ship suggested it was merely a variation of the annual flu and not something to fear, the computer models put forth by a variety of scientific institutions at that time instead predicted millions were about die from it.
No one really knew for certain. Some legitimately argued that the lockdowns, mask mandates, and oppressive restrictions on normal activities were necessary to limit its harm.
Almost two years have now passed, and we can now assess realistically which of those scenarios was accurate. To best understand these things I strongly believe is always best to look at the big picture, the larger and bigger the better. In this case, let’s look at the entire U.S. and measure COVID-19’s impact by noting the total number of people in the United States who have become infected by COVID since its arrival and comparing that with the total number who have died. These actual numbers will tells us truly how deadly COVID has been, and whether our continued fear of it is justified.
CDC’s COVID-19 estimates as of May 2021
According to CDC estimates, as of May 2021, 120.2 million Americans had been infected by COVID, of which 101.8 million experienced actual symptoms. The CDC in these same estimates in May calculated that 767,000 people had died from COVID.
These CDC estimates were further supported by a Nature peer review study published in August 2021, which estimated that by the end of 2020 100 million Americans had been infected with COVID.
When we run the CDC numbers, we find therefore that 99.4% of those infected with COVID survived. Moreover, of the tiny percent who did die, almost all were either elderly (average age 78), or already very sick with one to three serious morbidities.
Moreover, these CDC estimates were made in May, five months ago. Since then many more have probably become infected, possibly as many as twenty to fifty million more. While the number of actual deaths at this moment, 734,000, is actually less than the estimate that the CDC made in May, the difference is not significant.
Using an estimate of 150 million infected and 734,000 dead, we find that 99.5% of the population survives COVID with no problem. And once again, remember, that half percent who died were generally all either sick or elderly, usually both, and with many sadly in their last year or so of life anyway.
Now, these infection numbers are estimates. Some will certainly be justified in dismissing them because they really don’t reflect the actual numbers.
The New York Times confirmed COVID numbers
The CDC’s confirmed COVID numbers
I agree. So let’s use the actual numbers of confirmed cases and deaths, as of today. Based on data issued by the New York Times, Johns Hopkins University, and the CDC, there have been between 45.3 to 45.5 million confirmed cases of individuals who have been infected with COVID. All three sources list the number of deaths ranging from 734K to 737.3K.
For the sake of argument, let’s use the lowest number of confirmed cases, 45.3 million, and the highest number of deaths, 737.3 thousand. With those numbers we find that 98.4% of the population who contracted COVID survived the virus. Once again, of the 1.6% that died, the large majority were in that elderly and sick population. Very few people who were young or healthy have succumbed to the disease.
These actual numbers do suggest that COVID-19 was more dangerous than the common flu, but not significantly so. In fact, they show that it was comparable to many other new respiratory diseases, such as the Hong Kong flu and Spanish flu, which when each first arrived in the U.S were more deadly but within one or two flu seasons lost that potency. In all cases however that early potency has always, and still does, strike those who are already vulnerable. The healthy population is not threatened in any significant way by the disease.
So, what should we finally conclude, based on this data. What they tell me is that — beyond a shadow of a doubt — if you are young or not sick with a chronic illness, which describes practically the entire population, COVID simply cannot kill you. It will make you sick for a few weeks, after which you recover. In some cases the recovery takes longer, with some rare individuals having longer term health consequences, but for almost everyone, the virus comes, goes, and leaves no harm behind.
Furthermore, there is strong evidence that if you immediately take measures to treat the virus when you get symptoms, such as taking hyrdochloquine plus zinc, or ivermectin, you lower the disease’s potency even more.
In other words, COVID-19 is essentially identical to every other flu-like respiratory illness. There is no need to fear it like the plague, because it is not the plague. It is nothing like it.
While extreme measures might have been justified at the very beginning of this epidemic — based on the paucity of available data — the facts no longer justify such actions. It is time to take a breath, remove the mask, open the stores and bars, and resume normal life. Other countries, like Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, have. There is no reason the U.S. shouldn’t as well.
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
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LETS EXPERIEMNT WITH YOUR CHILDREN
“FDA Panel Approves Pfizer Covid Vax For Kids Ages 5-11, Concedes it Doesn’t Know Long-Term Risks to Children”
Children are at virtually zero risk from dying of Covid and the FDA admitted they don’t know the long term risks to children. Zero risk from dying, and zero choice about injecting an experimental drug into your child?
“We’re never gonna learn about how safe the vaccine is until we start giving it,” one of the FDA’s voting members said on Tuesday. Its just your child.
Its the government, what could go wrong?
https://ecp.yusercontent.com/mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fth.bing.com%2Fth%2Fid%2FOIP.H34yhMGNpvHBk9GPUkWcEgHaE7%3Fw%3D284%26h%3D188%26c%3D7%26r%3D0%26o%3D5%26dpr%3D1.25%26pid%3D1.7&t=1635286726&ymreqid=dc7face7-d905-7706-2f2c-5a16a3012c00&sig=hXYPBrRmHwePVAA6oSGgWg–~D
“We’re never gonna learn about how safe the vaccine is until we start giving it,” one of the FDA’s voting members said on Tuesday.
Ah yes … the Nancy Pelosi paradigm of learning.;
Back in May, my age/co-morbidities/family situation, combined with what I knew of the history of respiratory viruses like the flu (where natural immunity does not last in the face of mutation), my wife and I both decided to take the Moderna series, even though we both had WuFlu in early January.
That was our choice – a choice we have to live with, now that we know that natural immunity is more long-lasting than what we thought. Had I to do it over again, knowing what we know now, it is not likely that either of us would have submitted to an irreversible procedure like this.
Even if our skepticism was not the case today, I would still have to respect the choice of others not to endure the Pelosi paradigm above, such as the young lady from our church who just recently got married and is contemplating having children. Along with the vast majority of people for whom WuFlu is not a death sentence, or even close to that.
I will not have it on my conscience, that I forced – or supported others to force – people to get this vaccine, if it turns out to be the next thalidomide or Cutter Labs polio vaccine.
BTW …. Trump gave us the choice to have the vax. It is his opponents, who seek to force it on us. Remember that, when they try to hang this on Trump if it goes bad, And remember, such coercion is how social technocracy rolls … which is why respect for individual liberty must be the Prime Directive of any government.
The question that Bob asks in the Title of his Post should not be a controversial question in a mature and stable civilization.
But there has been a massive amount of Media Misinformation on the origin of the Virus, how it spreads, Natural Immunity, Herd Immunity, Age related Risk, Treatments, and on and on.
So while I agree with Bob’s answer, the fact remains that the question Bob asks is Controversial in today’s America.
I like how Alex Berenson characterized the spread of COVID. On his substack site, Alex stated earlier this week that “government strategies have made NO DIFFERENCE to the spread of this highly contagious but only moderately dangerous respiratory disease.” The title of that article is ‘Virus gonna virus-
Gonna virus gonna virus gonna virus gonna…’.
Here is the link to that article and I recommend Alex’s Substack:
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/virus-gonna-virus
“COVID-19 was more dangerous than the common flu, but not significantly so”
This simply isn’t true. The most deadly influenza season for the past 10 years is estimated to have killed around 61K in the US. COVID-19 having killed more than 10 times that number should certainly be considered ‘significant’. Moreover, it did that with mitigation strategies and lockdowns that essentially eliminated last year’s influenza season.
It is true that it didn’t turn out to be the killer that was feared, but to call it no worse than a bad influenza season is to simply ignore your own numbers.
I did NAZI this coming.
Tallman: I was comparing this virus to other new viruses, like the Hong Kong flu and the Spanish flu. If you run those numbers COVID is not much different, especially because the totals now are actually for two-plus seasons, and sadly are likely inflated for a number of unfortunate reasons.
The Spanish flu was much more deadly! The people getting killed by Covid-19 mostly die because of underlying conditions. These people were not around (alive) in 1919. If they had been, we would see staggering numbers for the Spanish flu!
Phill O:
[5:05pm] — Good one!
Fawlty Towers
“Don’t Mention the War”
https://youtu.be/Tms0yk9kqVM
3:08
That is a lot of people who have died. And does not include the presumably larger number who became seriously ill, with permanent harmful effects. The lockdown and masking in places like NYC have worked The delta variant did not run thru NYC like it did in other parts of the country.
And the vaccine clearly works. Works very well. Especially Moderna. But vaccine mandates are so unfair, so intrusive. What about Fauci and others just meeting with people in townhall type settings, answering questions, addressing concerns?
It looks like the vaccine does do harm when it accidently gets into the bloodstream. Here is John Campbell saying the needle should be aspirated before the actual injection. https://youtu.be/KgVsd6qoyU4 I guess the CDC figures that admitting the vaccine can cause problems will make people even more skittish. But clearly a person’s odds of harm from the virus far outweigh harm from the vaccine.
I am curious. Let’s look at the total deaths (all causes) in the US for each of the ten past years. If Covid is the killer the media claims, we should see a clear spike for 2020 and 2021.
Robert wrote: “COVID-19 was more dangerous than the common flu, but not significantly so” Tallman replied: “This simply isn’t true.”
Then Tallman had to cherry-pick data in order to make his point.
Robert wrote: “Using an estimate of 150 million infected and 734,000 dead, we find that 99.5% of the population survives COVID with no problem.”
Keep in mind that this is the rate that we have even after many of the government reactions to Wuhan flu were actively counterproductive, such as governors requiring nursing homes to take Wuhan-ailing patients even when the homes could not prevent spread to the other residents, governors banning the therapeutics that end the infection and prevent deaths, and the two-month ban of elective surgeries and the current refusal of treatment of unvaxxinated patients. Look at that; Tallman’s point is further weakened.
If I thought that government didn’t treat each and every one of us as though we were their own child then I would think that government was trying to make this disease more deadly than it actually is.
Oh, did I mention the national government’s financial incentives for hospitals to report Wuhan flu deaths? The hospital administrators may be acting like those governors and actively working to cause more Wuhan flu deaths than there should be, which would explain the lack of therapeutic use. We already know that hospitals have been caught passing off as Wuhan-related deaths those who died in automobile accidents, so they undoubtedly report as wuhan deaths anything that they can — which would explain why reports of regular flu deaths and pneumonia deaths have dropped to such very low numbers, these past 20 months. How many other deaths have been reported as Wuhan deaths?
The reported number of Wuhan deaths is inflated so much that it is useless in any kind of analysis and has resulted in dangerous and terribly damaging decisions. It falls in line with the government’s “noble lies” that they use in order to try to get us to do what they want us to do. However, we already know that they want us to follow counterproductive commands.
It is a cluster let’s.
Steve, the lockdown in NYC didn’t work as described, in fact they pretty much didn’t work anywhere. The more likely explanation is the delta variant spread was muted by the fact that so many NYC residents had already been infected by and recovered from C19 in 2020, and had developed acquired immunity which has been shown to be much more effective than the vaccines at protecting against the C19 variants.
Our Personal Care Physician last week stated when asked about the booster “might as well, have you had the flue shot yet?”. No absolutely!, no protect yourself!, just “might as well”. Now Moderna says the shots are here to stay, needed annually (or every few months depending on the need for quarterly profit). So multi-millionaires becoming zillionaires (government allowed tax shelters) all from our arms. BTW, if the vaxines are the perfect solution, why are so many fully vaccinated people getting COVID and some dying.
We need to stop calling them “vaccines”. They are not, at least not according to the old definition. They are akin to the yearly “flu shot”; a guess, won’t prevent you from contracting the flu, but “should” reduce the severity of your symptoms.
That is what the C-19 things do (as stated in their labelling and from the government sources)
The other thing about all the numbers, especially the death numbers:
“Die From” or “Die With”
Reporting had the official government guidance as “if there is a positive C19 test, mark it as die from even if the actual cause was something else”.
There were a few things like “motorcyclist hit by car but had a positive C19 test so it was die from even though the actual cause was traumatic injury from the accident”.
How many suicides were counted as “die from”?
DJ:
So far the the official guidance on boosters has been “if you are at risk”. Are you? That would be my criteria.
Bob – what is your process for dealing with two posters with the same name (Mark)?
I am the original Mark who posted above at 4:16 yesterday, and whose email you replied to earlier this week on The Space Show. I can take my sometimes unconventional and challenging thoughts elsewhere if you would prefer, or I can change my moniker to BtB’s Original Mark.
According to these data, the Covid mortality is 0.6% (0.767 million dead / 120.2 million infected), which is about 3-4 times as high as calculated by the leading scientist John Ioannidis in the field of medical statistics.
So something is wrong here. Any ideas? Example: How reliably can the PCR test even detect an infection if, for example, the CT value is over 30? We know from experience that Covid is the cause of death on many death certificates, although it can be proven in these cases that the death was not caused by Covid. Were these things considered in this study?
The survivability is actually much, much higher when you take into account the millions who had it but never knew they had it or the millions who had it, thought they had it but just treated it like the flu and never reported it to the health authorities or their doctors.
When you account for those missing statistics, almost nobody dies from Covid even with some comorbidity. If the entire population has had Covid, the actual fatality rate is less than 0.25%, using the above government numbers.
When you start to question the government numbers, such as heart attacks being listed as a Covid deaths because they had Covid, the actual fatality rate is even less.
The government knows this of course, which begs the question “Why are they doing this mandate malarky and still pushing ridiculous unscientific data?”
Robert:
Your quote from the original post:
“These actual numbers do suggest that COVID-19 was more dangerous than the common flu, but not significantly so.”
This statement is clearly not a comparison to the influenza pandemic of 1918 as nobody would have called that a year with ‘the common flu’. Your own numbers and the context of your own post clearly contradict this statement. With regard to COVID-19 now having lasted for more than a year…fine – let’s spread those 700K+ deaths out over two years rather than one. We still end up with a death count that is more then six times higher than the worst influenza season of the past ten years. Still ‘significant’ by any measure. If you meant to say that the deaths from COVID-19 were no worse than the worse influenza pandemic in recorded history, then you would be correct and I suggest that you edit the original post.
Edward:
“Then Tallman had to cherry-pick data in order to make his point.”
Exactly how did I cherry pick any data? I took the numbers that Robert quoted and compared them to the single worst year of influenza deaths in the past ten years. Perhaps you didn’t understand the context of my comment – by picking the worst year of influenza deaths that makes the COVID-19 deaths look more favorable by comparison. I made the most favorable comparison possible with regard to the deaths from COVID-19 and annual influenza deaths to demonstrate that Robert contradicted himself even by the most extreme comparison.
And with respect to other comments stating that the reported deaths are not accurate, I am not arguing that point. In his original post Robert appears to be making comments with the presumption that the reported deaths of 700K+ is accurate. He then goes on to make the comments:
“In other words, COVID-19 is essentially identical to every other flu-like respiratory illness. ”
“These actual numbers do suggest that COVID-19 was more dangerous than the common flu, but not significantly so.”
Which are simply not true based on the historic data for annual influenza deaths in the US. Not true by at least a factor of six in the best case scenario. You can certainly say that things were not as bad as predicted. You can certainly make valid arguments regarding the survival rate of the virus and use this to make valid points regarding the mitigation measures that were put in place. But it is simply contradictory to present the numbers in the original post and then go on to claim that the deaths from COVID-19 were no different than the average influenza season.
Done.:
“The survivability is actually much, much higher when you take into account the millions who had it but never knew they had it or the millions who had it, thought they had it but just treated it like the flu and never reported it to the health authorities or their doctors.”
Good point.
At the end of the day you have to examine the real death statistics for abnormalities, sorted by age group, and then compare them with many other years. It will then likely show that nothing special has happened.
I believe that the China Wuhan Virus is “just another flu” but it is more deadly to the elderly and the weak.
Because of the politics involved, every statistic, case count, death count etc will forever be [deleted] When the government WANTS a higher death count and a higher case count and actually pays extra money for handling CWV cases, of course there is going to be inflation of the numbers. Also, the testing for cases is all but worthless.
Would it surprise anyone to find out that this attack on humanity by the “elites” was PLANNED? Think about how many ELDERLY and SICK people have been removed from society and medical cost!! Have you ever asked about what it costs for a semi-private room in a “Nursing Home”?? Three years ago it was going to cost $222 PER DAY for our Mother! That’s $81 THOUSAND per year! Now consider NY State’s $141k (2019 data) and there’s a “reduction” of $2.115 BILLION due to the “estimated” 15,000 VICTIMS of democrat leadership! Does anyone doubt that the “savings” was not considered in the PLAN to send infected patients back into NY Nursing Homes? Same goes for MI, PA, and the others! IF and that’s a might big IF all the LIES are proven and the world sees that this was a planned event to reduce populations and gain CONTROL, there might just be some repercussions!!
Mark: That there is another Mark who commented here who used the same nickname as you is probably the silliest reason I have ever heard for considering leaving. :)
I prefer people to use their real FULL names (as I do), but understand completely if they choose not to. If you use a nickname, then to make sure there is no confusion, pick a nickname that you are sure will not be copied (as you have here).
However, I insist everyone stick to that choice. Changing the nickname with each comment or periodically only causes confusion. I want other regular commenters to know the history of other regular commenters. It improves debate and discussion.
Matthew W: You are welcome to post here, but read the rules. No obscenities. I have deleted the one you used from your comment.
I expect commenters to act like mature adults. No insulting others, and to write using their brains. The use of obscenities short circuits that brain activity, which should explain why the modern nonchalant use of obscenities in our culture has marched in lock step with an increasing inability to think about things with depth.
A review of the Nebraska Attorney General’s letter at http://tinyurl.com/earlycovidtx is all a person needs to become a severe skeptic of the “figures” on covid deaths.
The combination of corruption and incompetence in our healthcare “system” it’s beyond the pale.
Bob – below is my explanation of why I’ll stick with changing my moniker to ‘BtB’s Original Mark’ (sort of like the original pancake syrup:) ).
Perhaps if WordPress provided you more functionality, I could have added an Emoji in my reply above to make clear ‘BtB’s Original Mark’ was meant to be a humorous suggestion, but then again my own family sometimes doesn’t get my deadpan humor.
When I wrote my reply pointing out the problem of duplicate names, I actually thought you were going to ask one or both Marks to change their knickname. But since you went forward with assigning me ‘BtB’s Original Mark’, I will stick with that because every time I use it in the future I will chuckle. For me this is the funniest thing that occurred this last month
When you have free time, you may want to read my reply to Wayne (with a side note to you) on your October 25th ‘On the Radio’ post.
Yes, it was planned. Read about “The Event 201 scenario” held October 18, 2019 and brought to you by The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, World Economic Forum, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation:
“Event 201 simulates an outbreak of a novel zoonotic coronavirus transmitted from bats to pigs to people that eventually becomes efficiently transmissible from person to person, leading to a severe pandemic. The pathogen and the disease it causes are modeled largely on SARS, but it is more transmissible in the community setting by people with mild symptoms.”
Describes (plans) what actually came to occur a few months later.
Link to article about this here: https://www.barnhardt.biz/2021/10/18/event-201-there-is-no-way-in-hell-that-this-is-a-coincidence/
John:
Care to comment? See a pattern? Coincidence?
“Global Guardian and the September 11 Attacks The September 11 attacks in 2001 occurred during that year’s Global Guardian and Vigilant Guardian joint exercises. That year, according to the 9/11 Commission Report, Vigilant Guardian ‘postulated a bomber attack from the former Soviet Union’ on North America. ”
“The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States investigated the possibility that Vigilant Guardian preparations compromised the military’s response to the attacks on September 11. They concluded that the exercise may have had, in fact, the effect of expediting the response to the attacks.”
Between “SARS-COV-2 is more dangerous than the seasonal flu” and “governments’ reactions to Winnie the Flu were ineffective and damaging,” why can’t I choose, “both?”
The fact that Covid deaths were 5-10x what we see from influenza should be QED for the debate on whether “it’s just the flu” is true. I know a number of internists and hospital-based specialists who have described what they saw over the past 18 months as unlike anything in decades of practice. While the flu can kill younger people, it is exceedingly rare: the 2018-19 flu season saw about 1600 deaths in the 18-49 age group, versus 28,000 for Covid. For ages 50-64, the numbers are even starker, with 4400 for flu and 95,000 for Covid.
There is also the canard about “young and healthy people almost never die of Covid” which is fine except that roughly half of the Millennial/GenX population is not considered “healthy” in terms of beating Covid. An American-sized waistline and hypertension are not major comorbidities for the flu in 40-year-olds, but they are for Covid.
As for the CDC’s 120m infected estimate, I am skeptical that it is biased too high. Where I live (Boston) we have an interesting data source which is wastewater surveillance testing at the Deer Island treatment plant, which serves ~3m people in the metropolitan area. This modality is interesting because while we know not everyone with Covid got tested, everybody uses the toilet (this isn’t San Francisco). Also, because DITP saves multiple years of daily water samples for analytical purposes, there is a robust record going back to pre-pandemic times to analyze.
I’ve been comparing the wastewater results to the PCR confirmed-case data, and they show a very consistent correlation over the past 18 months, even though the rate of testing went from a few thousand per day to nearly 100K/day over the course of the last year, partly due to the large number of colleges and healthcare facilities here doing 2-3x/week surveillance tests of students and staff. The story this data tells me is that we did not miss nearly as many infections as we thought, particularly in the spring of 2020 when testing was very hard to get. The high number of deaths and hospitalizations seen here in the Northeast was I think due to the virus getting into the extremely vulnerable population in nursing homes and spreading like wildfire there. I can provide citations and detail of this analysis if people are interested. With all that said, I believe the number of actual infections is more likely in the 50-75M range than the 120M CDC estimate.
It is a travesty that we have hosed trillions of “stimulus” dollars in every direction and not spent the few billions it would have cost to run a national-scale surveillance testing program for active infections and antibodies. We spent much of the past year guessing where the enemy might be when we could have gotten aerial imagery to narrow the range of possibilities.
And of course there has been far too little consideration given to the “cost” side of the risk-benefit analysis for lockdown policies. It is striking to me that while the US and Europe both followed broadly similar policies with regards to, say, mask mandates, movie theaters, and restaurants, the same cannot be said for in-person schooling. And as a card-carrying member of the “laptop class” I acknowledge that the lockdown I practiced until getting vaccinated this spring, was entirely a result of “privilege” as the left likes to say. Friends of mine who work in healthcare, law enforcement, and transportation did not have that choice, and their experience of 2020 is a world apart from mine.
So, almost two years into this and there are 45.3 million “confirmed” cases. Remember that cruise ship early on in the disease that was quarantined and people weren’t let off? 20% of the people got covid, the rest didn’t. The possibility exists that 80% of the population was/is already immune. For a population of 330 million, 45.3 million is 13.7%. If you are like me and suspect that at LEAST 25% of those cases are in fact false positives., meaning that the real number is closer to 34 million, or 10.3% so far. The vaccines would potentially account for the difference since the cruise ship people didn’t have one available. Yes, more will get it, but they mostly also will survive.
Well, I was just stepping out of the shadows and inadvertently ruffled some feathers. Didn’t realize that we could duplicate the usernames, so to avoid any confusion with the Original Mark, I will happily be heretofore know as Unoriginal Mark.
Heh. No significant feathers ruffled. But welcome.
You commented:
“the modern nonchalant use of obscenities in our culture has marched in lock step with an increasing inability to think about things with depth.”
A very important point, well stated.
what is your process for dealing with two posters with the same name
Hey! I’m “Mark”, too. There are (at least) three of us!
A PROGRESS SEES “PROGRESSIVES” FOR WHAT THEY ARE
https://youtu.be/GmO6ZL6AMIE ; 5 min.
The Liberal / Progressive Democrats primarily have become, like it or not, Jr. Nazi’s.
The entire movement is fraudulent self serving masturbatory happy talk and is meaningless.
“EVER it has been thus. Forever it shall be.”
Tallman,
You asked: “Exactly how did I cherry pick any data?”
Thank you for answering your own question in the very next sentence. You think that it wasn’t cherry-picked, but it was. You even cherry picked the range, during times of regular seasonal flu, so that you could pretend that you were being fair.
Robert explicitly said in his original post: “In fact, they show that it was comparable to many other new respiratory diseases, such as the Hong Kong flu and Spanish flu, which when each first arrived in the U.S were more deadly but within one or two flu seasons lost that potency. ”
Thus, your cherry-picked data was unfair.
In his original post Robert appears to be making comments with the presumption that the reported deaths of 700K+ is accurate.”
You have pretended that the term “confirmed cases” is an admission of accuracy. Robert did not say that they were correct or accurate, just that the estimates came from the CDC and other (possibly biased) sources. In fact, Robert even used the word “estimate” (or variations) eight times. Are estimates now to be considered accurate?
Since you ignored Robert’s reply to you as well as Robert’s original post, I will continue my own analysis without expectation that you will be persuaded, as you are too emotionally tied to your viewpoint: you pretend that the reported Wuhan flu data is as valid as seasonal flu years. It isn’t. You cannot make the comparisons that you make, because the data handling of the Wuhan flu information. From what is re-defined as a “case” (a case is now an infection, but in February 2020 a case was an illness so bad it required treatment by a doctor), to what was a cause of death (virtually any death accompanied by a positive Wuhan test is assigned as a Wuhan death, in addition a death can be suspected or even assumed to be a Wuhan death), to the incentives to report greater numbers of Wuhan deaths (tens of thousands of dollars given for each Wuhan death reported by the billing department), to the virtual disappearance of seasonal flu and pneumonia deaths, the data has been so badly corrupted as to be completely meaningless. Having worked all my life in the science and test fields, I am appalled that the people we depend upon for health expertise have performed so very, very badly. That other scientists fail to call them out on it is also appalling. With such poor reporting and such heavy incentive to over-report, it is foolish to assume the estimates almost come anywhere close to nearly representing reality, and it is foolhardy to believe our experts in anything that they say about this flu. The data is corrupt, and there are significant signs of confirmation bias throughout the reporting and analyses that these experts give to us. They change their reporting, advice, and directives often, leaving us in doubt as to what is actually correct. They behave in ways opposite to their recommendations and directives, confirming that they do not believe what they tell us.
When we treat science this badly and then claim to be following the science, then we are going to get tragic decisions, such as mandates for all to take a faux vaccine that merely makes us more vulnerable to the Wuhan flu’s mutations yet hardly protects us from the original disease. A vast majority have been pricked, but the death rate remains just as high, so taking the risks of fatal blood clots, enlarged hearts, and other long-term or fatal health consequences is shown to be folly.
We did similar stupidity with climate science, allowing our keepers of the data to get away with modifying the historic data without announcement or explanation (the definition of fudging the data), then continuing to rely on the science conclusions that depended upon the old data. If the old historic data is correct, then the modern research is wrong; if the new historic data is correct then the historic research (which the modern research references) is wrong. Climate science has been corrupted and destroyed, but no one calls them on it, just as Wuhan flu research has been corrupted and destroyed, and no one calls them on it — and you, Tallman, support it.
We are all glad that you, the climate scientists, and our medical community don’t build the airplanes that we fly on.
And let us not forget Deborah Birx at the podium announcing we are going to take a much more liberal approach as to how we count covid deaths. Unlike we have ever counted before.
Great analysis! I looked at the information put forth by Niall or Neil Ferguson from Great Britain and in my unmathematical mind, I could not assimilate the info. A few MILLION dead in just months? Even a Nuclear detonation takes years to tally the final death toll( Nagasaki, Hiroshima ). Finally, I remember the thalidomide debacle and a casual internet search shows 71 of the 222 prescription drugs originally Approved by the governing agencies were pulled due to unseen side effects. Using our Children as Guinea Pigs is totally unacceptable.
Profanity is the art of making ignorance audible
Interesting:
Ireland: Two Counties With 99.7% And 98%+ ‘Fully Vaccinated’ See Massive Covid ‘Outbreaks’ – The World We Live In (wordpress.com)
Take Notice: “According to reports, this latest surge in new “cases” of the Fauci Flu is igniting fears that Ireland might be on the verge of going through a fifth “wave” of the disease – even though people are obeying the government’s demand that they get jabbed.