The second Comment of the Day to come out of Part 1 of the pandemic analysis ethics conflict analysis, like the first, does a lot of the work I would otherwise have to do to complete Part 2. A couple more like these, and the issue might be thoroughly covered without any input from me at all!
Here is Michael R’s Comment of the Day on the post, “The Pandemic Creates A Classic And Difficult Ethics Conflict, But The Resolution Is Clear, Part I: Stipulations”:
The global warming cult has conditioned leaders and the media to trust models over data. If the data doesn’t match the model, it is the DATA that must change, which is why they keep adjusting the temperature measurements more and more to match the model. As with global warming, the model does not match reality and we are being told to trust the model, not the data.
Just to put things in perspective:
—Roughly 2.8 million Americans die each year. Around march, that is roughly 8000 people/day.
—If 5% of the population has asymptomatic coronavirus, that means that 400 dead people with test positive for coronavirus each day, even though it did not contribute to their deaths. Under current practice, that means 400 coronavirus deaths that really weren’t coronavirus deaths (or 12,000/month).
—It is hard to tell, but the number of deaths/month does not seem to be rising over previous years. It seems that most ‘coronavirus deaths’ are due to reclassifying cause of death, not actual effects of the virus. You can view the California doctor’s censored interview about that somewhere, if you can find it anymore.
—The number of actual extra deaths from coronavirus appears to be within the yearly standard deviation of deaths. Meaning: Deaths from coronavirus are not statistically significant yet.
—The fatality rate appears to be less than 0.1%. The flu is about 0.1% and the flu without the flu vaccine is about 0.3%, so this appears to be not as dangerous as the flu. More people are getting it, however, because it is new and people don’t have an natural immunity to it yet. This is why everyone needs to get it.
—Roughly 500,000 people die each year from medical mistakes.
—Places that had more restrictive lockdowns did not suffer from worse outcomes. They seemed to have suffered less.
Verdict: It seems that our ‘experts’ are morons. Let’s look at some of the policies from those ‘best people’.
1. We need people to spread out and ‘social distance’. So, let’s close half the stores, concentrating people in the remaining stores. Then, let’s cut the hours those stores can be open, further concentrating the people in the stores.2. We need to protect the elderly. Let’s close schools and daycares. If the parents have to go to work, who watches the kids? The grandparents do.
3. We need to protect the elderly. So, let’s forbid the nursing homes from rejecting COVID-19 patients. This will result in hospitals dumping as many contagious COVID-19 patients in nursing homes, infecting the entire system and resulting in sky-high deaths. Good job, New York!
4. The plan of ‘flattening the curve’ was to get to herd immunity (70+% infected) WITHOUT overloading the medical system. We have underloaded the medical system to the point that we are destroying our health care system. We are doing it wrong. We need MORE people to get it each week, not less.
It is probably an even bet at this point that the real death toll would not have changed (or been less) had we done nothing about this. It seems that this coronavirus has been rampaging through the country since November and we didn’t even notice it. We currently have a 40% reduction in cancer diagnoses because we aren’t doing cancer testing (we are getting more coronavirus cases because we are doing more testing). Elective procedures have dramatically slowed. Elective procedures are not just plastic surgery, they are all procedures that aren’t emergency. Regular cancer treatments, cardiac surgeries, etc are elective and are not being done. A lot of people are going to die from that. More will die because we have run hospitals out of business and laid off hundreds of thousands of nurses (a guess, but 43,000 healthcare workers had been laid off by April 8, it is likely well over 100,000 by now).
I say open everything up now. Everyone go back to work, school, etc. This is looking more like mass hysteria than a dangerous virus.
Ethics Alarms 
The Chicken Little contingent is using all the same tropes on the coronavirus situation they use on the “climate crisis,” so-called. “Science!” is again, their shibboleth, even though they don’t know that these computer models are hypotheses that have yet to be proven (or determined to be incapable of being disproven by any competing hypotheses). You know, the scientific method? Anyone who questions climate hysteria is a denier. Anyone who dares to question coronavirus speculation is a murderer. Different “crisis,” same playbook. Incredibly transparent and annoying.
A pretty good review of the current state of things, and a solid dose of reality, here: https://www.drjohnm.org/2020/05/can-we-discuss-flatten-the-curve-in-covid19-my-eight-assertions/?fbclid=IwAR0nO2aWrXIoUseSjgNbwqz73H5fJSZAcUkeCWTi5wSc_qjzbX7K0BYypv0
Key Points:
–The virus will not be contained.
–Tests will under-perform.
–US hospitals are now prepared.
–Americans are not stupid.
–Public-health surveillance has improved.
–Social distancing will not lower the infection fatality rate or IFR.
–The more we test, the lower the IFR goes.
For some reason, our elected leadership is not talking about the change that’s occurring in the goals of the initial programs to deal with the disease. It is allowing the goalposts to be moved by the press and certain elements in the body politic that see this as a perfect opportunity to defeat DT in the upcoming election and promote various social causes that people would reject out of hand in a non-crisis environment. I’m hoping for some clear thinking here, but the nationalism of some f my friends and family makes me doubt the accuracy of Point 4, above.
“emotionalism of some of my friends…” Sheesh.
The governor of NJ just extended the emergency by 30 days. Half of me wants to tell him, “Uh, Phil, you don’t have to go all the way to the election. Trump isn’t going to carry NJ and never was.” Yet he says no one wants to get the state up and running again more than he does. In the meantime, almost no one has gotten an unemployment payment because the system is so overwhelmed with claims. There are folks in this state who are without income since March 13. Does he really want to go into the summer, knowing full well that a lot of the Jersey shore businesses are never much more than one bad season away from closing for good, and just ordinary conditions like a rain cycle that keeps falling on either Saturday or Sunday can easily lead to a bad season?
The scuttlebutt now among the lawyers, which one judge, ahem, wouldn’t confirm or deny officially, is that civil jury trials won’t resume until January (criminal gets first crack due to constitutional requirements, and family gets second crack due to statutory ones), and then what? Will we all be expected to work double and triple time clearing the docket? Will the presiding judges suddenly all seem to not know how we got this backup, but know it has to be cleared, come hell, high water or heart attacks?
In the early 1990s a lot of businesses closed here because of the economic downturn and changes. In my first year after college I could drive along Hackensack Street or Park Avenue in Rutherford and see empty storefront after empty storefront. The liquor stores were still open. The drugstores were still open (although by now they were all chains, and even some of those like Genovese were about to get acquired by bigger outfits), Dunkin’ Donuts was still open. The jewelry shops that did watch repairs were still open. Some of the pizza places and sandwich places were still open. But the local shoe stores, toy stores, pet shops, bookstores, hobby stores, household goods stores, sweets shops, and sundry other businesses were GONE, never to return, although as the 1990s progressed some of the spaces were reoccupied by fitness places, restaurants, tax places, salons, and other services. Then, as the second Bush administration drew to a close, it was the highways’ turn. One after another the computer places, pool supply places, import places, plant places, independent home supply places, and so on folded. You could drive for miles on any highway any day of the week and think it was Sunday on Route 17, when Bergen County blue laws mandate closure of any store selling non-perishables. Eventually a lot of places were re-rented, as often as not by service places as any business actually selling anything.
Keep this up, and you’ll have an encore performance of both, but worse this time. No one will go to the gyms because they can’t open. No one will go to the salons because they can’t open. No one will go out to dinner because they can’t sit down for a simple meal. The chains will close the locations because they aren’t making a profit, and those employees who can’t or won’t transfer to other locations will get laid off. The local businesspeople who can retire will, those who can pick up and leave to begin again will, those who can do neither will go bankrupt. You’ll be able to drive east on Route 4 toward the George Washington Bridge and you will see nothing open at all but fast food drive throughs, banks, law offices, accounting offices, and a few other professional offices, a lot of the last three “by appointment only.” If this doesn’t do it for you you can turn off at River Road, right around where the now-empty Riverside Square Mall stands, and go south, where you’ll see nothing but the drugstore and maybe the tire place open. I’d say turn onto Main Street, where you’ll see the law offices open by appointment, and maybe a few of the restaurants still open for lunchtime takeout only, but you can’t do that since it’s a one-way street. Eventually you’ll see the towering dome of the Justice Center, empty but for a few sheriff’s officers. Although the judges still conduct hearings remotely, jury trials aren’t possible. Finally you’ll pass the bleak jail, empty except for a few corrections officers and those jailed for violating social distancing. One thing you won’t see very much of is prosperity. You also will see barely any people. It will look like the scene after the War of the Worlds, or The Day After, where the human race is mostly gone. Oh yes, this is definitely the place that the governor, ensconced in Drumthwacket two hours away, still drawing his full paycheck, wants to get “up and running.” Except he can’t, because he waited too long. Maybe that was his plan all along. He’s not even from NJ, he grew up in Massachusetts and went to Harvard undergrad and UPenn graduate. He has houses in Europe and more money than probably everyone on this site combined. A lot of his major initiatives, trying to make NJ “California East (his words not mine)” have stalled here, because even his own party doesn’t like him. Maybe he just sees this as a stepping stone to a place in the Biden cabinet or maybe to a presidential run himself. Why should he give much of a damn about this place that won’t get with his program or do as he says? He knows Biden will carry the place no sweat, Newark, Trenton, Paterson, Jersey City, New Brunswick, and all those other not very big but VERY reliably liberal cities will see to that. No GOP presidential nominee has carried the state since 1988, and no such person will ever again. Come this November his mission here is done and he’s ready to get back on the road or back to DC, this January if all goes well, 4 years down the road if not, just to finish out his career before he takes his vast wealth and retires. Hey, NJ, thanks for the memories, I’ll send you a quick postcard from Lake Como before I head over to George and Amal’s for drinks and canapes.
Bravo! The lack of logic and sound science favor of panic and fear is astounding. If the conclusions of Dr. Dan Erickson and Dr. Artin Massihi were so easy to dismantle there wouldn’t have been a need to take down the video. There wouldn’t have been a need to find as many contrary voices as possible. Also ignoring any scientists who agree with them.
Why can I go to a tanning salon, but not get my hair cut? Why does my church, that can comfortably hold 900 people in the main sanctuary, have to limit Mass attendance to 10? We can comfortably social distance 300 people, plus live stream to our two parish halls. My county has had zero, 0, none, nil deaths from COVID-19. Yet, we’re held to the same restrictions as large cities. A cookie cutter approach is not appropriate.
Mayors and governors seem anxious to bankrupt their cities and states fighting lawsuits. Many police departments, which had built a solid support base, have thrown it away. I’m grateful that we have had police chiefs and our state attorney general state there will not be arrests at churches or businesses.
I tried to post this earlier today, but from some reason Word Press didn’t like my comment. Perhaps because I included an alternative link to the doctors’ video? I would worry I was paranoid, but many of the social media and online publishing platforms seem to be busy pushing an agenda.
I don’t see where this number is coming from. A simple look at the total deaths verses total cases shows the observed death rate to be 6% (73K deaths out of 1.2M cases as 5/5/2020). While I agree that untested mild or asymptomatic cases may make the total case count significantly higher – thus potentially reducing the real death rate – there is very little hard evidence of this currently. There is not enough population wide testing to show how prevalent mild/asymptomatic cases are, and I can only assume that these are being estimated using an undisclosed model.
It is hard to argue that “it appears” to directly comparable to seasonal flu with a significant discussion as to how the significantly lower fatality rate was estimated.
They just did spot checks in a county in California where they swabbed cheeks of people walking up and down the street and did antibody testing. Somewhere between 3 and 5 percent of those tests came back positive for antibodies…. That is, a whole lot of people got sick, recovered, and either didn’t know about it, or their symptoms were mild enough that they didn’t present at a hospital to become a statistic.
I’m just going to middle of the road here….. If you assume that 4% of the population has antibodies…. In California alone… that means that the denominator (number of cases) for California is 1,520,000 and the numerator (COVID deaths) is 2254.
2254/1520000 = 0.148%
Even in New York, they’re saying that about 25% of the population has antibodies…. Well
19,415/(19,450,000*.25) = 0.399%
Which is a whole lot worse that 0.1%, but it’s nowhere near 6%.
The average chance of surviving an infection is about 99.5%, although 99% is a lower bound.
My father died a couple years back, and just like the rest of his life, he died the hard way.
To put this into perspective; Dad retired from a work of hard labour at the Post Office to work more than full time as a contractor. While on site, he had a heart attack. He finished what he was doing, and drove home about 40 minutes later. When he got home, mom wasn’t there yet, so he waited another hour or so for her to get home so she could drive him in. When they got to the hospital, mom stopped the car at the door and told him to get in, he told her to park so they could go in together. Despite trying very hard to die, he actually pulled through OK.
Then he was diagnosed with Cancer. Lymphoma. That bitch. He wanted to fight it, and he did a damned good job. The cancer went into remission.
And damned good thing it did too! Because immediately following one of his last Chemotherapy treatments, he had a second heart attack! This time, he was better about getting to the door quickly at least. Lived through that.
Then the cancer came back, we were sure the cancer was going to do him in, but no. What got him first was congestive heart failure. Google that, I don’t want to explain it. We came to terms with it, dad was older, and not exactly a prime candidate for a transplant (cancer really hurts those kinds of things), so we brought him home and let him spend his last year at home. Eventually, we had to take him in to palliative, and we called the family in.
Well, you might be asking yourselves “Jeff, this is all very touching, but the hell do we care?” Well, it’s topical; What do you think Dad died of; The cancer, or the heart failure? Give you a second…. Trick question! On day four of being in palliative in the respiratory ward, he was diagnosed with influenza, and died on day six. The official cause of death, the doctors said, was the flu.
Now…. We didn’t give a rat’s ass what they put on the paper, there’s no pride in death, but it hits me that if dad had died three years later and have COVID-19 instead of the flu, you’d bet your ass he’d be a statistic. Now… is it possible that dad died 48 hours before he otherwise would have because he caught the flu? Maybe. But it was a miracle he’d made it as far as he had. Something like 70%-80% of COVID death cases had serious underlying health issues. Pretending that COVID has actually killed a quarter million people is asinine.
I don’t know what we do with that… But the fact remains that as a moderately healthy 35 year old, I’m not afraid of getting this.
Wait, your name is JEFF???
When my Dad died on my birthday, during a nap, just short of his 89th birthday, I called his doctor and asked what could have killed him. The Dr. said, “Oh, lots of things. He had cancer. His heart was failing. There was other stuff he never told the family about. He was old and knew he was running out the string. Pick one you like, or we’ll just say “natural causes.”
The night before my Dad died aged 90 having lost one lung and 13 years in a sanitorium to TB before he was 30 and having been in nursing homes for about three months and failing mightily, I went to see him at his then current nursing home. He was in a straight-backed chair, asleep, but lashed in so he was sort of upright, but listing greatly to one side. I asked one of the attendants, not very politely, what the hell they were doing to my father, and she responded, “Oh! We need to keep him upright. We don’t want him to catch pneumonia!” To which I responded, “Are you kidding me? That would be the best thing that could happen.” He died peacefully in his sleep the next afternoon.
I remain convinced the facility’s primary objective was to keep that bed full and producing income as long as humanly possible.
My RN sister in law says doctors are loath to fill out death certificates specifying a cause or causes of death. Somewhat preposterously, my Dad’s doctor listed Alzheimer’s as the cause of death.