It’s important to note that COVID is a crisis of moderate magnitude:
The problem is that it’s been very hard to come up with a measured, moderate response proportionate to the dangers of an infection that spreads exponentially and thus tends to be either growing or shrinking.
As Tyler Cowen has pointed out, it’s very hard to fight coronavirus to a draw. It’s probably beyond our skill set. Instead, at any point in time, the place where you live is either winning over it or losing to it.
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Unfortunately, coronavirus is not like most problems where you can make fine adjustments in your response.
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The fundamental problem the USA has faced in winning against COVID is that we are a vast, continent-size country with no effective internal political boundaries for shutting down travel within the landmass. New Zealand could isolate itself from the world, Australia could politically separate its big cities because they are in separate states. And Europe could reactivate its pre-EU national borders. But in the U.S., where numerous metropolitan areas such as New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Cincinnati, Chicago, St. Louis, and Kansas City sprawl across state lines, it’s been virtually inconceivable to shut down internal travel. Borders have been out of fashion, but they are very useful in a crisis.
So we are now in a third wave.
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As you see, the shape of the COVID and non-COVID curves are nearly identical, with both peaking in April and mid-summer. This suggests that many of the excess deaths not attributed to COVID actually were related to COVID.
In the long run, we no doubt will pay a price in deaths due to hunkering down to avoid the virus, such as in cancer screenings canceled. But those would be expected to pile up later in the year. Instead this year’s peak for excess deaths not blamed on COVID came during the early-April COVID crisis that ripped through New York City, suggesting that most of the excess deaths were either undiagnosed COVID or, say, people suffering heart attacks who didn’t dare go to the hospital until too late.
Hence the official count of 300,000 COVID deaths so far is likely an underestimate, with the real number being between 350,000 and 400,000. Moreover, with a lag of roughly 22 days between cases and deaths on average, tens of thousands more people who are presently infected can be expected to die over the next month.
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As of late September, the CDC estimated that 53 million Americans, or 16 percent, have been infected. Back then there were about 200,000 confirmed deaths and likely a quarter of a million actual deaths, suggesting an infection fatality rate of almost 0.5 percent.
If achieving herd immunity the hard way requires nearly 250 million natural infections, that would mean about 1.2 million COVID deaths.
That’s a lot.
1.2 million out of 330 million is nothing. 3 million people die every year. COVID has increased the death rate by less than ten percent. If the news and government wasn’t screaming about it constantly, almost nobody that didn’t have contact with nursing homes would ever have noticed.
We’ve gotten through other, far worse epidemics in the past without all this bullshit. What was the difference, this time?
Idiots embraced lockdown, which was an idea that literally came out of a high-school student’s science fair project.
This whole thing has been political from start to finish; it was intended to damage Trump, and it did so by enabling all the fraudulent votes. There are reasons why Biden didn’t campaign, the key one being that he really couldn’t. COVID enabled his handlers to keep him out of the public eye, and provided a convenient excuse for the Democratic Party to work the system in the background to as to enable massive vote fraud.
I remain somewhat stunned that nobody could see this coming. I mean, you looked at the raw facts last year, and you knew that there was something going on, but the incredible over-reaction to it was bizarre. The various flu epidemics of my lifetime killed way more people, and yet there was limited to no real panic at the whole thing. Why did we react this way, this time? Politics.
And, in a broad sense, Trump let it happen to him. I had an inkling of what was planned about the time I observed them changing the election rules last summer, and I think that an astute political operative should have been able to work out what was going on in the background, then taken steps. Instead, because Trump is an outsider, he got blindsided. From what I can see, the establishment types in both parties made this happen, and are playing with fire. They think they run the country, but they really, truly do not. They only get to play games so long as the majority aren’t paying attention, and they’ve just raised their heads in the worst way possible.
They should have embraced Trump, co-opted him, and then given at least lip-service to working with him and the people who put him into office. Instead, they threw a tantrum and made it abundantly clear to the rest of us, the “marks”, what the hell is going on. That isn’t going to work out well, in the long run.
There were major features of COVID that were total runaway successes: first was economic- the oligarchs got trillions in bailouts [like Boeing] while crushing the small businesses, Bezoes is personally $70B richer while any potential upstart lies in ruins. Testing is now a $300B industry and will be permanent. MMT is now firmly policy, which means they don’t need an actual ‘real’ economy any longer.
Modern Monetary Theory — you can create as much as you need or want — is now policy. No one cares if you work or not, the connected and compliant will never go bankrupt.
Second and more importantly political: Trump is out, elections will be fixed and Dem from now on, and the uppity small people are living on handouts and desperation. You will not fly, work, or be even a worker drone without the Vax stamp. Our peasant voting is now officially confirmed not to count. No, your vote doesn’t count. Confirmed.
COVID was the greatest thing to happen to the Democratic party since the Depression, possibly ever.
Sailer’s article is Establishment-driven fear-mongering.
The most cogent observation on the CovidScam came from England, where Project Fear has been cranked up to 11. (While the CovidScam has benefitted the Swamp Political Class in the US, its international ramifications have been even stronger).
The UK’s Office of National Statistics noted in September that Covid-19 was the 19th most common cause of death in England in that month. But there are no societal Lock-Dewns associated with more common causes 1 through 18. Why?
It is unfortunate that no-one looks at the data. Actual experience shows that 80% of those exposed to Covid-19 do not get infected. 80% of the minority who do get infected don’t even notice they have the virus. Well over 99% of the population survives this supposedly fearsome “pandemic”. And we know that the people who do need to be protected are the very old & the very sick — but we are not protecting them effectively; instead we are penalizing healthy children and working age people.
Now Sailer wants the peons to line up quietly for their dose of the untested vaccine which has already demonstrated near-term reactions and has unknown long-term effects
In the meantime, while US businesses go bankrupt, life in China is pretty much back to normal, and their factories are humming cranking out exports for the self-damaged West which is becoming even more critically dependent upon China thanks to the Lock-Downs. It makes one wonder, doesn’t it?
As an additional note, Sailer happily notes the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine: “Eight cases [of Covid-19] in the vaccine group, 162 cases in the placebo group”.
That is great. Now let’s have some context.
There were about 20,000 people in each of the vaccine group and the placebo group. So 99% of the unvaccinated group did NOT get infected. Perhaps more importantly, only 1 (one) of the infected individuals required hospitalization — 1 out of 20,000 people without the protection of a vaccine, versus 0 out of 20,000 with the vaccine.
https://www.fda.gov/media/144245/download
Covid-19 is a real disease, and real people have unfortunately died. However, governmental Lock-Downs have been an extreme over-reaction — and fairly ineffective too.
That observation about borders seems to raise an issue.
If you’re tracking numbers by bordered entities, then it stands to reason that border control will notably affect those numbers. But border control’s effects could give a false sense of control and hide better control mechanisms.
Imagine two bordered areas, both enclosing red and green areas. And the redness and greenness make a bigger difference in the numbers than the border. When we concentrate on the border, we might miss that red/green is more important.
“Imagine two bordered areas, both enclosing red and green areas. And the redness and greenness make a bigger difference in the numbers than the border. When we concentrate on the border, we might miss that red/green is more important.”
Obviously, but no one cares they don’t know enough. Basically people want just some sort of knowledge; it does not matter if it is 5% or 100%.
The deaths are real; the crisis is fake?
https://web.archive.org/web/20201028231808/blog.jim.com/science/wu-flu-manufactured-crisis-real-deaths/
“suggesting that most of the excess deaths were either undiagnosed COVID or, say, people suffering heart attacks who didn’t dare go to the hospital until too late.”
The first may be the other way around just as well. In the second case, the cause of deaths were elevated risks… not as much from the problem itself, as from handling it the way Cuomo did.
“…Modern Monetary Theory — you can create as much as you need or want — is now policy. No one cares if you work or not, the connected and compliant will never go bankrupt…”
I don’t believe this is an accurate portrayal of MMT. MMT at it’s base is much more about the actual National government creating cash as opposed to private interest who not only create the cash gather interest payments from every dollar they create. A total scam of monumental proportions and fiscally unsound as to pay off debt interest…you have to borrow more money which also it burdened with debt. This means it is mathematically impossible to pay off the debt . If you did so you would have NO MONEY. An obvious swindle.
Corona is obviously real. I know someone who had it and it’s possible I may have had it. I felt the symptoms so I took a several doses of Ivermectin, Quercetin, Liposomal vitamin C and zinc over a week and it went away. I can’t say for sure if I had it because I didn’t want to be tested and interned in a hospital where they would not let me have anything remotely able to cure me.
I have a friend a few weeks ago who shot himself. He before corona spent several months opening a restaurant and right after he opened…corona, so he shot himself. He was very competent. I suspect very strongly without corona he would have made a rousing success of it. He had run restaurants before and was successful.
“MMT at its base is much more about the actual National government creating cash as opposed to private interest who not only create the cash gather interest payments from every dollar they create.”
If I have a license to print as much money as I deem necessary for economic health, I do not care if you call me “public” or “private”; those words mean nothing. I also don’t care if anyone pays interest on that money, because if they don’t, I can always print more.
Dave says,”…If I have a license to print as much money as I deem necessary for economic health, I do not care if you call me “public” or “private”…”
Well I damn sure care. The bankers have been given a golden ring by the FED of over $40 trillion in as close to zero interest loans as can be arranged. Now where are MY zero interest loans? Were is my big ass loans. At the interest rates they are getting loans I could have just stuffed it away in the stock market and made a fortune. You talking just for me alone that’s $133,333, Now maybe you’re so rich you can laugh at this kind of free money but I won’t. And multiply that times 300 million people in the US and we’re talking an absolute steal by the financial class.
I personally can not believe you could so mindless as not think that this mass of fuel to the already rich is of no value. Maybe we should just take EVERY DAMN THING they bought with and put it in our pockets as it’s obviously of no use at all.
All the people bitching and moaning about Modern Monetary Theory well where the hell were you when they were piling the cash as high as the Moon and giving it to the financial class? I mean if giving them this much money is good then why is it bad to give it to the dirt people who have suffered so much in the downward spiral they have engineered for the American worker?
If you’re so against MMT then then why don’t you explain in detail why exactly it is a good thing to give a private corporation interest on any and all money issued from the US Treasury when they don’t give us one damn thing. Not a thing. They are of no use to the average person at all. Not even remotely but we should give them billions in interest? Please explain. I’m sure I’ll change my mind with your erudite murmurings of elocution. Enlighten us.
If they gave you the money, you would be unable to work for it.
Not only would you be deprived of the satisfaction of work, but the money you would receive would have no value, to you or anyone else.
Do you want to destroy the value of money?
Do you want to destroy the economy?
Why do you hate capitalism?
Why do you hate America?
Why doesn’t every single objection you have apply to corporate insiders? Explain why we should pay interest to a private bank that gives us nothing? You conveniently skip over that because you have no coherent answer to that. The reason we do this is our politicians were and are bribed to do so.
“Do you want to destroy the value of money?”
The FED doesn’t need my help for that they’ve got that under control already.
“Do you want to destroy the economy?
Why do you hate capitalism?
Why do you hate America?”
All the rest is a worn assed out Jew trick to turn the question onto some not even close to the meat of the problem into some niggling nonsense. In fact none of what you say has any validity all. It’s basically all we get these days. Nonsense and gas Lighting.
The Bank gives you the gift of a life’s calling. You can’t put a price on that.
“The Bank gives you the gift of a life’s calling. You can’t put a price on that.”
HAHHAHA
Serving the Jews. Only a serious sociopath could consider this a benefit.
If you’re Jim of the former Jim’s blog wouldn’t your time be better served trying to convince people to beat Women, as you recommend, instead of trying to convince people that their life calling is to serve the central bank?
I would love to see you go to antifa meetings stand up and proclaim,”your life is all figured out for you, all you have to do is serve the banks!”. I don’t pay for movies or any sort of pozz but I might be willing to unloosen some coin to see that. Why don’t you try it and send us a preview.
LET THEM EAT ECONOMY.
Sorry couldn’t resist.