by Glenn N. Holliman
Our regular correspondent from Florida and France, now in Normandy tending his spring garden and planting strawberries and vegetables, has been musing since a hurried flight in March from the USA, catching one of the last international flights available. His comments challenge the consensus of health professionals but make for interesting reading. - GNH
The Covit-19 Issue
by Terry Field
Covid 19 is NOT what we all were told it was. Accepting this will be the challenge.
Where did the initial perception of Covid 19 come from?
Below, Terry in his magnificent vegetable garden during a summer in Normandy.
The operative point in this story is the G7 discussions a couple of months ago. There, the governments were presented with two sets of projections, one from the CDC and the other from a London based university. Both suggested an apocalyptic death rate, with accompanying COPD for many survivors that would partially disable a good proportion of the population, perhaps permanently.
The governments hit the panic button. The British government, a little later than the rest, was forced to fit in with the consensus.
Given what they were told would happen based on the then projections, that was understandable.
Other policy options were employed in panic mode.
Hospital ITUs were converted to dead with Covid 19. Theatre wards were converted. General hospitals and teaching hospitals were used for Covid as well as a reduced load of other treatments.
A gigantic wave of mass deaths was anticipated.
How to test if the virus is there - test only for the living virus infecting the host.
Then only one form of test was available, a test of the presence of the virus infecting the host and the only one employed - the test for the disease. This test was so rationed it was for most part only used used on the sick. A tiny subset of the total population.
None else were tested. Except for Germany, where more were tested, but until the sero positive test was employed, health professional could only look at those carrying the live virus.
The data gathered was composed of two elements, one rational – the numbers of dead, the other a pointless statistic to use as a denominator. The latter used as a denominator produced the impression of a horrifying death rate, and the hysteria engendered by the initial models became the backdrop to reinforce this observation.
Absurd and wrong. But now believed.
It is important to understand that, in all this, the nature of the disease itself was not known, and there was not a memory of the old 'isolation hospitals' we had always employed for communicable diseases with no effective treatment.
The TB isolation hospitals, always remote and isolated, never part of the general hospital, were long forgotten.
In the place of the rapid creation of isolation centres of treatment, with discrete teams of clinicians who never interacted with other patients, the Covid patients were in in general blended into the general hospital centres.
Cross infections amplified the death rates since the old, the frail and the very ill are disproportionately represented by their presence in the general and teaching hospitals. Obviously, the disease is more dangerous for some of them.
The exposure of patients in hospitals suffering from non-Covi-19 maladies led to the inadvertent spreading of the virus within the general hospital and teaching hospital setting.
Two regions in Italy approached the treatment of their Covid-19 infected patients very differently, and the different consequences of the different approaches are stark.
In Lombardy, the numbers of deaths have been very large indeed. AN Italian epicenter of suffering and death, where, in some little villages an entire generation of older people have died. There, the noble intention was to offer the best possible treatment to Covid patients, offering rapid treatment in a hospital setting. The good intentions in Lombardy produced a perverse and dreadful result. Large numbers of medical staff were infected in the hospitals, many died, and in addition, significant numbers of non-Covid patients within the hospitals contracted the virus.
In marked contrast, in the Veneto, (which itself created the concept of the quarantine in the Middle Ages, keeping ships offshore for 40 days to prevent the plague entering the city) , the approach was very different, keeping the Covid patients separate from the hospitals, often treated at home.
Because of this approach, the lack of a similar concentration of treatment of infectious disease and also diseased and cross-infected patients, prevented a similar density of disease transmission, and the number of deaths were sharply less.
Lock Down – Shelter in Place.
Right, Terry shelters for a time in his
French wine cellar, no doubt checking on his calvadous supply.
The policy prescription of lock down was intended to slow down the rate of transmission of disease, whilst clinicians got to grips with understanding the virus, tested possible treatments from re-purposed drugs, and whilst capacity to treat the disease was ‘ramped up’ in the countries affected.
The imperative that galvanized governments was the modeling projections that suggested there would be a particular very high level of morbidity and mortality should there be no lock down, and a very significantly lower death rate could be expected if lock down was enforced.
Until the last week or thereabouts, there has been no estimation of the total level of penetration of the viral disease into the general population . It was assumed the penetration was still light, and lock down, or shelter-in-place would avoid a widespread infection spread, thus avoiding the hospitals from being overwhelmed.
So what data did the British government access concerning the spread of the virus?
The only testing available was the test of the presence of the virus, and that from tiny numbers of available tests.
Because of this, the estimation of infection by testing could only identify some of the infected- the ill who were selected to have the rare tests used upon them. In consequence, the data simply counted some of the sufficiently ill to warrant testing. There were few tests to discover the currently infected and asymptomatic, and no capacity to identify the numbers of the population where the virus had infected, but the infected person had beaten the virus, the virus was no longer present, sero-positive status in the previously infected person was present, and the condition of the infected person, when infected, had been either symptomatic or asymptomatic.
In other words that data from tested ill was useful for medical treatment purposes, but of no value and very misleading indeed as any sort of estimate of total infection in the body of the population.
The testing of the ill was an extremely bad indicator of the reality of the infection however, and that is coming to light now.
Yet that figure has been used as the denominator to calculate the estimates of mortality rates; and of course such a tiny denominator suggested to so many that the mortality rate is much greater than influenza, and warrants this extreme interruption in business and the immense debt now being incurred to support the population no longer working. This inadequate, incorrect and highly misleading mortality calculation supported the initial horrifying model projection calculations; the terror appeared to be reinforced, as has been the approach of total lock down.
But all this has now been shown to be an illusion. The projections of death rates have not been experienced in reality. The numbers simply do not begin to correspond to the numbers as projected. This is not in any way to diminish the dreadful reality for the people and their families so affected. But the projections, and the reality are entirely different.
So why? Because so few were infected and the lock down worked?
Well that could have been an explanation, but illuminating new data – this time of actual total infected persons and post infected persons in the populations puts to such a possibility. The University of Stanford department of epidemiology, in the person of Dr. Ioannidis has conducted an investigation in Santa Clara to see not what only the live infected ill numbers were, but what the total infection in the population had been, including the recovered with no virus remaining and antibodies present, and where the people so infected had been ill, or entirely asymptomatic.
Thus the full picture in population infection was identified for the first time. What was the result of this data? The data shows a total infectivity 100 times the level of the tested-for-the-live-virus-and-ill.
So: 100th of the mortality rate previously estimated!
From which Dr Ioannidis identifies that the virus is, for the whole population carrying a mortality rate and risk similar or less than influenza. Only for specific require small population subgroups is the Covid-19 virus a significant risk of severe illness and death. He is quite clear that the real risk bears no relationship to the risks suggested in the models that propelled the governments to their present restrictions and controls.
I repeat, an overall mortality rate no higher than the flu.
To repeat, since this is vital to understand, he identifies that the disease is safe for the vast majority of the total population, who have and if not yet infected then will have the disease completely symptomatically, as the virus enters the body and is killed by the immune response.
This data has been supported by very similar methodology, now used in Germany, where in the area described as the ‘German Wuhan’, the total infection penetration of the population there is a massive 15%.
Dr. Ioannidis of Stanford University is clear from this data that mortality and morbidity risk is only significant for specific groups, including old people over 65 and those with serious pre-existing conditions.
It is dangerous for them, but not for the generality of the populations of the world.
The virus, it was originally suggested, would attack the immunocompromised, yet the experience suggests the picture is more complex, It is not certain that it attacks the immunocompromised, since many deaths seem to be coming from a cytokine storm, where the immune system attacks the lungs and organs, causes blood to clot all over the body, and precipitate strokes and heart attacks.
This is not the action of the virus itself. Accordingly it is not yet certain that the immunocompromised are at significantly enhanced risk. Similarly, asthmatics, originally stated to be in particular danger, are shown not now to be statistically significantly in danger from Covid 19.
In sum, the original expectations of the scale and nature of the virus are not born out by experience.
A disturbing number of doctors nurses and other medical staff have died and been infected, but again, the specific method of treating a concentration of the virus infected in small areas may be the cause by drenching the medical staff in virus, where, in additon to sometimes inadequate PPE, their immune systems are overwhelmed.
Treating patients with a highly contagious disease for which, if the patient is made very ill here is no effective treatment in the midst of general hospitals, taking over ITUs, taking over hospital theatre facilities and not using remote infectious disease centres for such treatment has greatly added to the death rate.
Sending recovering covid patients to retirement homes is a policy beyond the imagination for any rational responsible plan. The deaths in retirement homes have been scarring for all. They should have the highest possible protection. That policy did not offer such.
The reality of policy failure, even where instituted with the best of intentions, but born of a lack of understanding.
The Stanford work identifies the need to be run by data. But now we are run by terror.
Terror caused by three things:
1 The absurd science fiction projections of mass death and disabling illness. This is now described by Stanford epidemiologists as being 'science fiction'.
2 The absurd denominator of tested people positive with the live disease AT THE POINT OF TESTING producing a ridiculous mortality rate to support the original, absurd projections.
3 The incapacity of governments to alter course after an initial, truly disastrous set of policy decisions have been adopted, thus continuing to drive the economies of the west into collapse.
The consequences of the comprehensive policy failures:
- the lock down,
- the concentration of disease in the body of the general hospital system,
- the acceptance and continued support of wrong data,
- and now the refusal to respond to the new sero positive data of TOTAL infection history in the population, where the disease has appeared, been killed by immune responses.
In China it now appears that the virus has 'been and gone' and where asymptomatic experience is the reality for the overwhelming majority.
The refusal to respond to this new situation is ruinous, as the lock down continues on a false premise.
The Chinese were not successful in suppressing it, it is suggested by qualified people, but it ripped through the population so quickly it had peaked before any idea of lock down happened, and then the disease collapsed naturally. As pandemics do. They were not cleverer the the rest; they just caught the curve when it was about to collapse anyway.
The distorting effect of time preconceptions and false expectations.
The virus replicates at lightening speed compared to flu and most other experience. The result is a rapid appearance of large numbers of the ill, and the dying, in hospitals.
This is part of the illusion. We instinctively expect that rate to continue as it would for flu, but flu infects over a long period. This, left to itself, flies through the population very quickly, then collapses. Thus the appearance of large numbers of the sick only makes any sense if the level of infection in the general population is understood. It was not. Now it is becoming so.
In Santa Clara, Germany ,and now in China via the work of Scandinavian epidemiologists using proper testing with resultant data, the depth of the infection that has produced the cases of the ill is becoming known.
The reality is that this disease is present throughout the populations, in very large numbers, and the death rates that we see are in fact comparable to or perhaps less than seasonal flu. The truncation of the effect in time is what gives the false impression of something far worse, but that is all it is, a subjective impression.
Why this matters.
From the beginning until now, all are terrified, locked down and see TV images of the dying in ITUs everywhere. That reinforces the illusion of high total-population death rates and massive personal risk.
The reality, shown by Ioannidis of Stanford, and now also by others in Germany and China, shows something very different, and for nearly everyone save the very old and frail, is a disease that is, quite simply, not dangerous.
The learning curve of the disease suggests some treatments may be effective, but the policy choices taken, even for the best of reasons , are inappropriate, and now are pointlessly disastrous to the economy. They impoverish the tax base, cause huge suffering and death from the non or inadequate treatment of all those suffering from other diseases whose treatment is stopped, and/ or who are cross infected with Covid 19 in general hospitals and die where a policy of isolation hospital treatment would have save them.
The lock down also has another, very dangerous effect.
This disease is proceeding through the population, infecting all these working in the general economy, maybe slower because of social distancing, a sensible policy, but when the economy is released from lock down, it will accelerate, and, for nearly everyone, infect them and be defeated by their immune systems.
Since the death rate expectations are fantasy projections, there is NO justification for the lock downs.
None. The co-morbidities of such as kidney disease and the need for dialysis made difficult given the spike in demand and the inadequate supply of dialysis machines for these Covid patients is no justification for lock down. It is an argument for building many dialysis machines now, or trans-shipping them from areas where they are in surplus. Nothing more.
This disease has been grossly mis-characterised, initially by modelers, from which panic decisions were taken, then by the inadequacy of data, limited only to the tested 'live'-infected.
The failure to isolate recovering patients and sending them to convalesce in retirement homes has in all probability had the result of introducing the disease, in a number of occasions, into the concentration of the most vulnerable patients, many of whom have died.
This disease has been comprehensively misunderstood, and the infection rate in the community, until the last few days, not tracked.
We have only now begun to see, by the use of appropriate testing of whole populations the extend to the infection. Now we can see it is not at all what we feared.
The politicians in Britain and elsewhere do not yet see this. Why?
Well if I had advised government of 'science fiction' projections
(Dr Ioannidis of Stanford's description, not mine), and if I had even an inkling of the reality were I to have to sharpness of mind to read the Santa Clara data and now the German data, I would very probably keep my head down!
Now the question will be raised – so where are the vast numbers of the dead; are we to believe it was simply the lock down that stopped it????? The answer to that will come when the economy is opened up.
And if I were a politician and I had comprehensively smashed the economy, and I now knew it was based on science fiction projections, and it was actually done for no good reason, and the reality shows the death rate for the infection levels is modest, I would have the biggest political problem I could begin to imagine. As they now have.
So here we are – populations utterly terrified for not sufficient good reason, paralyzed to continue with ruinous and absurd policies, and no sign of even building isolation hospitals for infectious disease, as our wise ancestors did. The TB hospitals only closed after Streptomycin was discovered and used.
The problem now is acute – if the mortality rate did not justify the full lock down, then releasing its grip on the population will inevitably see a rise in the daily death rate after a short period. That death rate will not be sufficient to justify the lock down since the other ‘side of the coin; will be the high level of asymptomatic infection in the general population, but relatives and media will scream that government policy has resulted in increased deaths. As an illustration of the political problem, and the inability to modify policy, today this was the statement of the British Prime Minister:
‘In a surprise statement outside 10 Downing Street - his first public appearance in weeks - the PM said we are now 'wrestling' Covid-19 to the ground but ending restrictions now would cause 'a new wave of death'.
Policy should be driven by data, as Dr Ioannidis has rightly stated. I sense Johnson may know some of the data by now, but he is not driven by it. Indeed he refers to death, not data. No surrender to the terror yet.
Johnson refers to ‘a wave’ of death. Well, there is a ‘wave‘ of death from flu. From driving vehicles, from male suicide, from a any number of things, and such is accepted as the framework of risky life and death. The new data for Covid 1119 suggests it should join that group of background realities that stalk us particularly in old age, but does not overwhelm us as was originally feared. Ioannidis is, in my view, correct in suggesting that we should do the same with Covid, whilst seeking effective treatments and appropriate isolation of the very vulnerable.
As does Lord Sumption, looking at our ‘terror of death’ as the driver of irrational behavior.
There is a ‘wave’ of death from not treating old people with antivirals in winter. We choose not to because it is unaffordable. And yet is destroying the totality of the economy ‘affordable’???
With the unimaginable death rates that social and economic collapse across the world would bring in its wake????
He is representing the emotional response. The one that drove the original policy fueled by terror and horrific projections.
Johnson is a populist who appeals to emotion, not reason.
The west has indulged in an orgy of inappropriate emotion concerning ‘rights’ and candy-floss attitudes to the realities of human life for well over fifty years. Johnson is milking it today. That will have to end, but he is in a hole and he refuses to stop digging.
This will not end without economic impoverishment if he and others continue like this.
Time for sanity, truth, policy born of good data, and a rapid dumping the manufactured terror and hysteria. IN other words real leadership. - Terry Field
Where did the initial perception of Covid 19 come from?
Below, Terry in his magnificent vegetable garden during a summer in Normandy.
The operative point in this story is the G7 discussions a couple of months ago. There, the governments were presented with two sets of projections, one from the CDC and the other from a London based university. Both suggested an apocalyptic death rate, with accompanying COPD for many survivors that would partially disable a good proportion of the population, perhaps permanently.
The governments hit the panic button. The British government, a little later than the rest, was forced to fit in with the consensus.
Given what they were told would happen based on the then projections, that was understandable.
Other policy options were employed in panic mode.
Hospital ITUs were converted to dead with Covid 19. Theatre wards were converted. General hospitals and teaching hospitals were used for Covid as well as a reduced load of other treatments.
A gigantic wave of mass deaths was anticipated.
How to test if the virus is there - test only for the living virus infecting the host.
Then only one form of test was available, a test of the presence of the virus infecting the host and the only one employed - the test for the disease. This test was so rationed it was for most part only used used on the sick. A tiny subset of the total population.
None else were tested. Except for Germany, where more were tested, but until the sero positive test was employed, health professional could only look at those carrying the live virus.
The data gathered was composed of two elements, one rational – the numbers of dead, the other a pointless statistic to use as a denominator. The latter used as a denominator produced the impression of a horrifying death rate, and the hysteria engendered by the initial models became the backdrop to reinforce this observation.
Absurd and wrong. But now believed.
It is important to understand that, in all this, the nature of the disease itself was not known, and there was not a memory of the old 'isolation hospitals' we had always employed for communicable diseases with no effective treatment.
The TB isolation hospitals, always remote and isolated, never part of the general hospital, were long forgotten.
In the place of the rapid creation of isolation centres of treatment, with discrete teams of clinicians who never interacted with other patients, the Covid patients were in in general blended into the general hospital centres.
Cross infections amplified the death rates since the old, the frail and the very ill are disproportionately represented by their presence in the general and teaching hospitals. Obviously, the disease is more dangerous for some of them.
The exposure of patients in hospitals suffering from non-Covi-19 maladies led to the inadvertent spreading of the virus within the general hospital and teaching hospital setting.
Two regions in Italy approached the treatment of their Covid-19 infected patients very differently, and the different consequences of the different approaches are stark.
In Lombardy, the numbers of deaths have been very large indeed. AN Italian epicenter of suffering and death, where, in some little villages an entire generation of older people have died. There, the noble intention was to offer the best possible treatment to Covid patients, offering rapid treatment in a hospital setting. The good intentions in Lombardy produced a perverse and dreadful result. Large numbers of medical staff were infected in the hospitals, many died, and in addition, significant numbers of non-Covid patients within the hospitals contracted the virus.
In marked contrast, in the Veneto, (which itself created the concept of the quarantine in the Middle Ages, keeping ships offshore for 40 days to prevent the plague entering the city) , the approach was very different, keeping the Covid patients separate from the hospitals, often treated at home.
Because of this approach, the lack of a similar concentration of treatment of infectious disease and also diseased and cross-infected patients, prevented a similar density of disease transmission, and the number of deaths were sharply less.
Lock Down – Shelter in Place.
Right, Terry shelters for a time in his
French wine cellar, no doubt checking on his calvadous supply.
The policy prescription of lock down was intended to slow down the rate of transmission of disease, whilst clinicians got to grips with understanding the virus, tested possible treatments from re-purposed drugs, and whilst capacity to treat the disease was ‘ramped up’ in the countries affected.
The imperative that galvanized governments was the modeling projections that suggested there would be a particular very high level of morbidity and mortality should there be no lock down, and a very significantly lower death rate could be expected if lock down was enforced.
Until the last week or thereabouts, there has been no estimation of the total level of penetration of the viral disease into the general population . It was assumed the penetration was still light, and lock down, or shelter-in-place would avoid a widespread infection spread, thus avoiding the hospitals from being overwhelmed.
So what data did the British government access concerning the spread of the virus?
The only testing available was the test of the presence of the virus, and that from tiny numbers of available tests.
Because of this, the estimation of infection by testing could only identify some of the infected- the ill who were selected to have the rare tests used upon them. In consequence, the data simply counted some of the sufficiently ill to warrant testing. There were few tests to discover the currently infected and asymptomatic, and no capacity to identify the numbers of the population where the virus had infected, but the infected person had beaten the virus, the virus was no longer present, sero-positive status in the previously infected person was present, and the condition of the infected person, when infected, had been either symptomatic or asymptomatic.
In other words that data from tested ill was useful for medical treatment purposes, but of no value and very misleading indeed as any sort of estimate of total infection in the body of the population.
The testing of the ill was an extremely bad indicator of the reality of the infection however, and that is coming to light now.
Yet that figure has been used as the denominator to calculate the estimates of mortality rates; and of course such a tiny denominator suggested to so many that the mortality rate is much greater than influenza, and warrants this extreme interruption in business and the immense debt now being incurred to support the population no longer working. This inadequate, incorrect and highly misleading mortality calculation supported the initial horrifying model projection calculations; the terror appeared to be reinforced, as has been the approach of total lock down.
But all this has now been shown to be an illusion. The projections of death rates have not been experienced in reality. The numbers simply do not begin to correspond to the numbers as projected. This is not in any way to diminish the dreadful reality for the people and their families so affected. But the projections, and the reality are entirely different.
So why? Because so few were infected and the lock down worked?
Well that could have been an explanation, but illuminating new data – this time of actual total infected persons and post infected persons in the populations puts to such a possibility. The University of Stanford department of epidemiology, in the person of Dr. Ioannidis has conducted an investigation in Santa Clara to see not what only the live infected ill numbers were, but what the total infection in the population had been, including the recovered with no virus remaining and antibodies present, and where the people so infected had been ill, or entirely asymptomatic.
Thus the full picture in population infection was identified for the first time. What was the result of this data? The data shows a total infectivity 100 times the level of the tested-for-the-live-virus-and-ill.
So: 100th of the mortality rate previously estimated!
From which Dr Ioannidis identifies that the virus is, for the whole population carrying a mortality rate and risk similar or less than influenza. Only for specific require small population subgroups is the Covid-19 virus a significant risk of severe illness and death. He is quite clear that the real risk bears no relationship to the risks suggested in the models that propelled the governments to their present restrictions and controls.
I repeat, an overall mortality rate no higher than the flu.
To repeat, since this is vital to understand, he identifies that the disease is safe for the vast majority of the total population, who have and if not yet infected then will have the disease completely symptomatically, as the virus enters the body and is killed by the immune response.
This data has been supported by very similar methodology, now used in Germany, where in the area described as the ‘German Wuhan’, the total infection penetration of the population there is a massive 15%.
Dr. Ioannidis of Stanford University is clear from this data that mortality and morbidity risk is only significant for specific groups, including old people over 65 and those with serious pre-existing conditions.
It is dangerous for them, but not for the generality of the populations of the world.
The virus, it was originally suggested, would attack the immunocompromised, yet the experience suggests the picture is more complex, It is not certain that it attacks the immunocompromised, since many deaths seem to be coming from a cytokine storm, where the immune system attacks the lungs and organs, causes blood to clot all over the body, and precipitate strokes and heart attacks.
This is not the action of the virus itself. Accordingly it is not yet certain that the immunocompromised are at significantly enhanced risk. Similarly, asthmatics, originally stated to be in particular danger, are shown not now to be statistically significantly in danger from Covid 19.
In sum, the original expectations of the scale and nature of the virus are not born out by experience.
A disturbing number of doctors nurses and other medical staff have died and been infected, but again, the specific method of treating a concentration of the virus infected in small areas may be the cause by drenching the medical staff in virus, where, in additon to sometimes inadequate PPE, their immune systems are overwhelmed.
Treating patients with a highly contagious disease for which, if the patient is made very ill here is no effective treatment in the midst of general hospitals, taking over ITUs, taking over hospital theatre facilities and not using remote infectious disease centres for such treatment has greatly added to the death rate.
Sending recovering covid patients to retirement homes is a policy beyond the imagination for any rational responsible plan. The deaths in retirement homes have been scarring for all. They should have the highest possible protection. That policy did not offer such.
The reality of policy failure, even where instituted with the best of intentions, but born of a lack of understanding.
The Stanford work identifies the need to be run by data. But now we are run by terror.
Terror caused by three things:
1 The absurd science fiction projections of mass death and disabling illness. This is now described by Stanford epidemiologists as being 'science fiction'.
2 The absurd denominator of tested people positive with the live disease AT THE POINT OF TESTING producing a ridiculous mortality rate to support the original, absurd projections.
3 The incapacity of governments to alter course after an initial, truly disastrous set of policy decisions have been adopted, thus continuing to drive the economies of the west into collapse.
The consequences of the comprehensive policy failures:
- the lock down,
- the concentration of disease in the body of the general hospital system,
- the acceptance and continued support of wrong data,
- and now the refusal to respond to the new sero positive data of TOTAL infection history in the population, where the disease has appeared, been killed by immune responses.
In China it now appears that the virus has 'been and gone' and where asymptomatic experience is the reality for the overwhelming majority.
The refusal to respond to this new situation is ruinous, as the lock down continues on a false premise.
The Chinese were not successful in suppressing it, it is suggested by qualified people, but it ripped through the population so quickly it had peaked before any idea of lock down happened, and then the disease collapsed naturally. As pandemics do. They were not cleverer the the rest; they just caught the curve when it was about to collapse anyway.
The distorting effect of time preconceptions and false expectations.
The virus replicates at lightening speed compared to flu and most other experience. The result is a rapid appearance of large numbers of the ill, and the dying, in hospitals.
This is part of the illusion. We instinctively expect that rate to continue as it would for flu, but flu infects over a long period. This, left to itself, flies through the population very quickly, then collapses. Thus the appearance of large numbers of the sick only makes any sense if the level of infection in the general population is understood. It was not. Now it is becoming so.
In Santa Clara, Germany ,and now in China via the work of Scandinavian epidemiologists using proper testing with resultant data, the depth of the infection that has produced the cases of the ill is becoming known.
The reality is that this disease is present throughout the populations, in very large numbers, and the death rates that we see are in fact comparable to or perhaps less than seasonal flu. The truncation of the effect in time is what gives the false impression of something far worse, but that is all it is, a subjective impression.
Why this matters.
From the beginning until now, all are terrified, locked down and see TV images of the dying in ITUs everywhere. That reinforces the illusion of high total-population death rates and massive personal risk.
The reality, shown by Ioannidis of Stanford, and now also by others in Germany and China, shows something very different, and for nearly everyone save the very old and frail, is a disease that is, quite simply, not dangerous.
The learning curve of the disease suggests some treatments may be effective, but the policy choices taken, even for the best of reasons , are inappropriate, and now are pointlessly disastrous to the economy. They impoverish the tax base, cause huge suffering and death from the non or inadequate treatment of all those suffering from other diseases whose treatment is stopped, and/ or who are cross infected with Covid 19 in general hospitals and die where a policy of isolation hospital treatment would have save them.
The lock down also has another, very dangerous effect.
This disease is proceeding through the population, infecting all these working in the general economy, maybe slower because of social distancing, a sensible policy, but when the economy is released from lock down, it will accelerate, and, for nearly everyone, infect them and be defeated by their immune systems.
Since the death rate expectations are fantasy projections, there is NO justification for the lock downs.
None. The co-morbidities of such as kidney disease and the need for dialysis made difficult given the spike in demand and the inadequate supply of dialysis machines for these Covid patients is no justification for lock down. It is an argument for building many dialysis machines now, or trans-shipping them from areas where they are in surplus. Nothing more.
This disease has been grossly mis-characterised, initially by modelers, from which panic decisions were taken, then by the inadequacy of data, limited only to the tested 'live'-infected.
The failure to isolate recovering patients and sending them to convalesce in retirement homes has in all probability had the result of introducing the disease, in a number of occasions, into the concentration of the most vulnerable patients, many of whom have died.
This disease has been comprehensively misunderstood, and the infection rate in the community, until the last few days, not tracked.
We have only now begun to see, by the use of appropriate testing of whole populations the extend to the infection. Now we can see it is not at all what we feared.
The politicians in Britain and elsewhere do not yet see this. Why?
Well if I had advised government of 'science fiction' projections
(Dr Ioannidis of Stanford's description, not mine), and if I had even an inkling of the reality were I to have to sharpness of mind to read the Santa Clara data and now the German data, I would very probably keep my head down!
Now the question will be raised – so where are the vast numbers of the dead; are we to believe it was simply the lock down that stopped it????? The answer to that will come when the economy is opened up.
And if I were a politician and I had comprehensively smashed the economy, and I now knew it was based on science fiction projections, and it was actually done for no good reason, and the reality shows the death rate for the infection levels is modest, I would have the biggest political problem I could begin to imagine. As they now have.
So here we are – populations utterly terrified for not sufficient good reason, paralyzed to continue with ruinous and absurd policies, and no sign of even building isolation hospitals for infectious disease, as our wise ancestors did. The TB hospitals only closed after Streptomycin was discovered and used.
The problem now is acute – if the mortality rate did not justify the full lock down, then releasing its grip on the population will inevitably see a rise in the daily death rate after a short period. That death rate will not be sufficient to justify the lock down since the other ‘side of the coin; will be the high level of asymptomatic infection in the general population, but relatives and media will scream that government policy has resulted in increased deaths. As an illustration of the political problem, and the inability to modify policy, today this was the statement of the British Prime Minister:
‘In a surprise statement outside 10 Downing Street - his first public appearance in weeks - the PM said we are now 'wrestling' Covid-19 to the ground but ending restrictions now would cause 'a new wave of death'.
Policy should be driven by data, as Dr Ioannidis has rightly stated. I sense Johnson may know some of the data by now, but he is not driven by it. Indeed he refers to death, not data. No surrender to the terror yet.
Johnson refers to ‘a wave’ of death. Well, there is a ‘wave‘ of death from flu. From driving vehicles, from male suicide, from a any number of things, and such is accepted as the framework of risky life and death. The new data for Covid 1119 suggests it should join that group of background realities that stalk us particularly in old age, but does not overwhelm us as was originally feared. Ioannidis is, in my view, correct in suggesting that we should do the same with Covid, whilst seeking effective treatments and appropriate isolation of the very vulnerable.
As does Lord Sumption, looking at our ‘terror of death’ as the driver of irrational behavior.
There is a ‘wave’ of death from not treating old people with antivirals in winter. We choose not to because it is unaffordable. And yet is destroying the totality of the economy ‘affordable’???
With the unimaginable death rates that social and economic collapse across the world would bring in its wake????
He is representing the emotional response. The one that drove the original policy fueled by terror and horrific projections.
Johnson is a populist who appeals to emotion, not reason.
The west has indulged in an orgy of inappropriate emotion concerning ‘rights’ and candy-floss attitudes to the realities of human life for well over fifty years. Johnson is milking it today. That will have to end, but he is in a hole and he refuses to stop digging.
This will not end without economic impoverishment if he and others continue like this.
Time for sanity, truth, policy born of good data, and a rapid dumping the manufactured terror and hysteria. IN other words real leadership. - Terry Field
