Recovery

The goal of the trained hamsters in the main stream media is to promote one and only one narrative—COVID-19 will kill you and for that reason we MUST keep the country shut down for an indefinite period. The media's collection of dishonest, unethical and biased hacks will avoid context, disregard any hard scientific data that challenges their narrative, use only words and images that are designed to promote fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and worst of all, attack anyone who challenges their false narrative by implying those with opposing views have "blood on their hands."

Instead of constantly questioning the prognostications of the catastrophists whose policies just might destroy our economy and the lives of tens of millions of working people, the hamsters work overtime to amplify the fear that allows those policies to remain in place. But science and statistics are inexorable, and as more and more data comes in and is analyzed, the shut-down narrative is increasingly being shown to be a highly questionable, extremely high risk strategy.

T.J. Rodgers reports on a correlation analysis:

To normalize for an unambiguous comparison of deaths between states at the midpoint of an epidemic, we counted deaths per million population for a fixed 21-day period, measured from when the death rate first hit 1 per million—e.g.,‒three deaths in Iowa or 19 in New York state. A state’s “days to shutdown” was the time after a state crossed the 1 per million threshold until it ordered businesses shut down.

We ran a simple one-variable correlation of deaths per million and days to shutdown, which ranged from minus-10 days (some states shut down before any sign of Covid-19) to 35 days for South Dakota, one of seven states with limited or no shutdown. The correlation coefficient was 5.5%—so low that the engineers I used to employ would have summarized it as “no correlation” and moved on to find the real cause of the problem. (The trendline sloped downward—states that delayed more tended to have lower death rates—but that’s also a meaningless result due to the low correlation coefficient.)

No conclusions can be drawn about the states that sheltered quickly, because their death rates ran the full gamut, from 20 per million in Oregon to 360 in New York. This wide variation means that other variables—like population density or subway use—were more important. Our correlation coefficient for per-capita death rates vs. the population density was 44%. That suggests New York City might have benefited from its shutdown—but blindly copying New York’s policies in places with low Covid-19 death rates, such as my native Wisconsin, doesn’t make sense.

Hmmm. I wonder if one of the trained hamsters will ask Fauci or Birx about that. I'm not holding my breadth.

And then there's this little factoid. Tokyo and New York City are among the most densely populated cities on the planet. Both encountered COVID-19 at approximately the same time. To date Tokyo has had approximately 100 deaths, while New York city has had approximately 12,000. Oh, by the way, Tokyo invoked only a limited business shutdown, allowing many business to remain open (thereby doing relatively little damage to the city's economy). New York City invoked a full, draconian shutdown with predictable damage to all businesses. Possibly the trained hamsters will ask Fauci or Birx or DeBlasio or Cuomo why New York's death rate was 120 times that of Tokyo when NYC shutdown completely and Tokyo did not. You'd think the hamsters would be curious about what appears to be a rather significant difference. Nope.

And finally, the obsession with "testing!!!!" and then the handwringing about a continuing increase in the number of cases uncovered because we're doing significant "testing!!!!" If the hamsters did even a little research into the progression of all SARS-like viruses they would learn that at the end of the day, COVID-19 will likely infect tens of millions of Americans (approximately half will be asymptomatic and the vast majority of the remainder will have minor symptoms) regardless of whether we shut-down or not, so the increase in the number of "cases" is both predictable and even a good thing (think: herd immunity). You'd never know any of that listening to the dishonest, context free coverage that the hamsters present.

There is no doubt that the virus is a threat to our collective health, but the media's coverage of it may ultimately be seen as a far greater threat to our country's rapid recovery.