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COVID-19: Who Is at risk? By How Much? And Why It Matters.
PowerLine blog has a post about an analysis of “Covid deaths” in Minnesota and how the public health officials vastly overstated the risk:
Having reviewed all 10,903 such certificates, Greg’s analysis supports the conclusion that the vast majority of Minnesotans was not at serious risk of death from COVID-19 and that the campaign of fear and intimidation was simply wrong. Greg’s viral Alpha News column setting forth his analysis is “Who died of COVID-19 in Minnesota?” Subhead: “Only 291, or 2.67% of the 10,903 certificates we examined, were ‘COVID only’ with no comorbidity listed.”
The government response to Covid has highlighted a tension between protecting “public health” and protecting individual liberties. I think we can generally agree that a person maliciously yelling “fire” in a crowded theater when there is no fire and causing trampling deaths has certainly abused the First Amendment. That doesn’t make it open season on the First Amendment whenever anyone can envision widespread harm from the use of that freedom.
And yet, that is what happened in America. “Public health” was elevated by overheated claims of public harm if officials lacked extraordinary control over citizens and residents of America. That we have a federal system enables us, retrospectively to evaluate how relative treatment of individual liberties in the several states had any differential effect on public health outcomes. The results demonstrate that depriving persons of their fundamental rights does not save lives.
And other studies, such as the one referenced in the PowerLine post, demonstrate that the claims of the public risk were overblown. But can we rely on this? Do we understand any better today who is at risk and how?
The researchers may know. The medical community has its public health guidance (orders). But the average layperson remains either uneducatedly fearful or unreasonably complacent. We still don’t know in any practical way what our risk from Covid is. “Pure” Covid deaths — fatalities among healthy persons who contracted Covid without co-morbidities — are not zero but very small. The CDC at one point admitted that most Covid deaths involved people with several co-morbidities, not just a single one or maybe two. And then there is the question about some co-morbidities being more significant than others. And, finally, where you are on a co-morbidity spectrum moving your personal risk from the same odds of death from a vehicular death to something greater.
These are not trivial questions. America was organized around the belief that individuals, not government, control their lives; that the use of our natural rights would help inform us of how to live in relative harmony with due respect for the rights of others, with government intervention only in the more extreme situations. Our freedoms of speech, press, religion, and association would help educate us on the critical matters in our lives. But every single one of these liberties was disrupted during the pandemic and we continue to remain unable to personally evaluate our risk. And this appears to be intentional.
Knowledge is power. A government that wants to control you must control what you can know. When a government keeps the people willfully ignorant it is rolling the dice. Since the people cannot make educated decisions, they can only make rash decisions. And limiting the people to rash decisions risks revolution.
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Indeed. Well said, I could not agree more. The last two years have been a farce, but truly revealing about the elites.
Rule of thumb: Whatever the CDC and NIH say is the opposite of the truth. Listen to the doctors successfully treating it, then work your way backward to find out what it is and what it does.
I agree @vinceguerra, but we really need useful information about risk not just about treating it. They say “obesity” is a co-morbidity. What BMI? They say diabetes is a co-morbidity. Type I, Type II, insulin injections, pill-managed, unmanaged? They say hypertension is a co-morbidity. Managed? Unmanaged? And on and on.
They say “get healthy”. Good advice, but what targets get you out of a high risk zone for covid mortality? If it turns out that the true risk profile for 90% of the mortalities applies to 10% of the people, then that is a very different matter than what has been “prescribed” by Dr Fauci.
Back to rule #1.
Think of it as reverse engineering. We’ll never get accurate information on who’s at risk because they poisoned the statistics. That cat can never get back in the bag, I’d argue intentionally. The same thing is true about the tests, that are inaccurate and also, intentionally so. Again with the death statistics, again intentionally.
So throw all of that out.
What we can get accurate information on is current cases from people who had it (or all of the symptoms of it) and who were successfully treated for it. If symptom A occurred and it was cured by treatment A1 then that tells us something about A. Eventually we can look and see A, B, C, and D is cured by treatment A1, B3, C1 and D5 for example. We can also see that treatment A4 and C3 makes it worse.
Put all of that together and eventually we’ll get a good picture of exactly what it does and we can get to the bottom of exactly what it is. We may be there now.
If we had a competent Center for Disease Control, we would have had individualized risk assessments done on a phone app. Given your age, location, height & weight, and short disease history, your risk factor and recommendations could be made. I and many, many others could make an app like that in a day. Recommending people drop 50 pounds is a tough ask. Asking people to get 10 to 30 minutes of sun exposure 3 days a week is an easy ask. But alas, we are stuck with a government that is corrupt, incompetent, and politicized. Pray for change and then get involved in politics.
As to “Who’s at Risk?” We all are if they institute more lockdowns in time for the midterms so they can have an excuse for mail-in ballots.
You are correct.
But there was also a tension between public health and some public health bureaucrats’ obsession with one tiny sliver of public health.
The only thing they did that did any real good was vaccines for the vulnerable.
Everything else they did was bad for public health. Poverty, despair, anxiety, and delays in all other medical care–that kills too.
The raw number of excess deaths is high. A lot of that has to be COVID. So even if the attribution to COVID was excessive (it was) COVID did cause a lot of deaths. That can’t be dismissed as a fabrication.
The problem was not just an inflated death count and the use of “cases” as a metric to generate scary numbers. It was that like every other aspect of the pandemic, the public was never given honest risk assessment and that policies were geared to address an intentional fear-based perspective.
Kids were at at substantially lower risk from COVID than from other flu bugs such as the 2018 strains. But we closed schools, masked up and did these futile things solely to advance the fear-narrative even if it hurt kids.
College kids were at also near zero risk. We knew this within months of the outbreak. The first 80,000 student positives resulted in 300 hospitalizations and no deaths according to CDC figures. Futile control measures were costly and unjust.
After the first eight months of the pandemic the most significant result was a 12% increase in the fatality rate for persons 70 and up.
Closures of various kinds and mask mandates were never going to prevent or even measurably reduce community spread. And the overall survival rate was over 98%.
Fomenting fear and exerting control has to have consequences for the perpetrators so this never happens again.
I have a different take. I don’t think they’re rolling the dice, ie, willingly increasing the risk of revolution — although that might be one eventuality. From their perspective, and from the perspective of a gambling establishment, they are rigging the table to minimize or eliminate the chances of anyone challenging their plans by getting big wins that overturn the narrative. The disparity between our thinking on what we think those goals ought to be (ie minimize loss of human life) and what we see as the inevitable outcomes of their policies of keeping people ignorantly proceeding toward the cliff does not mean that they do not have a plan that works for them. Remember what Yoda said to Luke, “Control, you must have control!” Keeping people ignorant so those people blindy follow their orders without raising suspicions about motives is how they get and maintain control.
I think one of the necessary preconditons that led to the ability of the world to blindly follow CCP/WHO prescriptions was for Google to acquiesce to the demands by China that Google filter searches in China. Once that was possible in China, it became the model the rest of the world could follow to control the narrative of any politically sensitive topic. This is one of the key reasons for China being on the World Economic Forum.
There are a statistically significant number of persons who have not taken and who have decided to never take the Covid EUA immunizations. Think of those people as the ‘control group.’ As long as a significant number of people remain significantly less vulnerable to the adverse effects of the spike protein inducing jabs, it will be possible to sort out truth from fiction, even if it takes years. For the safety of everybody — jabbed and unjabbed alike — we need a control group to be able to determine what works and what doesn`t. If the jabs are producing actual harms both short and long term, the way to cover it up is to eliminate the control group. This is one of the reasons behind the mandating of vaccines in many scenarios of a medicine that has proven unable to prevent the illness it is supposed to prevent and unable to prevent transmission to people it is not supposed to transmit the illness to.
– Proud Member of the Control Group since 2021
@raykujawa two takeaways from your comments, both are really dark but doesn’t mean they are untrue: (1) a technologized China is a testbed for global autocracy, and (2) the “control group” must be eliminated or at the very least the data regarding them must be made to be non-compilable.
I don’t see the relevance of comorbidities to the argument here. Sure, Covid appears to kill the old and the fat (and some others). But you know, we have old and fat people amongst us. Including me. Do we not matter?
Even if you’re old and fat, if you die because of Covid, then you’ve been killed by Covid.
I write this as someone who was opposed to the lockdowns from the start. I do think that we overreacted. But arguing that Covid isn’t a problem because it primarily kills the vulnerable seems, to me, like a bad argument, quite unsympathetic to people who aren’t young and fit.
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No I think the point of mentioning “comorbidities” was to point out that many if not most of the “Covid” deaths were actually caused by other things. For instance, at the beginning there was much made of the number of deaths in Italy, but an Israeli doctor who went there to help said that it was a lie. He said it was mostly elderly people dying, and that it was true they had Covid but that it wasn’t what killed them. He said they died WITH Covid rather than OF it. So the point is that deaths such as those were used to inflate the number of actual Covid deaths.
Just so.
About the kindest slant I can put on the actions of our public health experts’ actions is to quote the old saw, “If your only tool is a hammer, every problem… “
It is not that COVID was not a problem but that the political decision to pretend that risk was equally shared by all age groups and all medical conditions led to bad policies, executive overreach and actually undercut a proper policy focus on the vulnerable. Real science told us that blocking community spread was never going to be doable which is precisely why focused, localized strategies were key.
Anyone in an official capacity who dissed the Great Barrington Declaration signatories needs to be banned from social media and any and all policy jobs. They killed people.
This is a bit weird. Are comorbidities usually listed on a death certificate? I thought a death certificate listed contributing causes, not comorbidities. But I’m not the one who fills out those things, so what do I know.
Functionally any comorbidity can be a contributing cause. Dying of “stroke” can have contributing causes of hypertension and diabetes for examples, which are comorbidities.
Dying from having a stroke while driving a motorcycle is an iffy call, but I’d say cause of death would be motor vehicle accident with a contributing cause being the precipitating cerebrovascular accident.