Dale

And I hate it when people diminish, no, chortle at the suffering of the multitudes, crushed by the effects of a monomaniacal focus, on one health concern, to the exclusion of all else.

I keep close track of the U.K. Their numbers so mirror our own. And their ONS is quicker to the mark with hard data. Joel Smalley, on Twitter, has been parsing excess deaths for the U.K. in 2020 47,011 from Covid. 54,208 from denied healthcare and unexplained reasons. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if our percentages lined up accordingly.

I could post literally dozens of studies that point to the futility of lockdowns (this is a submicroscopic particle) but I’d rather focus on the human rights aspect. Think about it. Along about March ... You are not permitted to open your own business. You can’t send your kids to school. You cannot attend church. You can’t eat out. You can’t go to a movie. You can’t leave the country. You can’t sit on a park bench. Forget sports and concerts. You have to push back that cancer screening. You can’t comfort your dying. You can’t bury your dead. Life entails risks. And inevitably we die. We all die. Really, the only way to avoid risks is to commit suicide. And that’s basically what we did in 2020. Oh, the theory on traffic fatalities I’ve heard is, fewer cars on the road = riskier driving. But they are up.

And over the rest of the year, lockdowns have likely accelerated deaths of despair. And clearing hospitals, for Covid, have resulted in vast numbers of vital treatments deferred or foregone. I’ve already referenced a woman I knew who was receiving treatments for cancer. Her family related that her treatments kept getting pushed back. Homicides also surged. Even traffic fatalities increased! Lots of dying across the board this year.

Thanks for the opportunity to (re)clarify. There have been SIGNIFICANT ‘excess deaths’ this year. The first graph, on your reference, point to back-to-back mild winters, when respiratory viruses are most lethal. Notice how the curve is reducing in March, as you would expect ... then the anomalous and precipitous ‘Covid peak’ manifests. I am slightly fixated on the fact the real dying accelerates just days after the ominous WHO declaration of March 11. You see spikes like this, all over the world, at the same time, but not in every jurisdiction. In fact, not in most jurisdictions. It is my strong suspicion that the spike represents what we were doing to people, in certain jurisdictions, more so than any virus running through the population. I’m envisioning an environment of stark terror, over-treatment and policies which ensured that the most vulnerable were exposed to any number of infections and also dying from neglect, isolation and despair. Add to that a disturbing spike in people dying at home ...

I’m simply commenting on one of the saddest aspects of this moral panic, the tendency to view others as disease vectors, first and foremost.

And since you seem to want to blame your uncle’s death on other people, I’m going to continue to keep that issue in view.

We are essentially at the end of what looks like a normal winter burden of deaths. The anomaly was the panic spike of March and April. Did anti-maskers murder your uncle ? Or you could just go to church, restaurants, theatre, etc., now.

Lockdowns are why we can’t have nice things ... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-24/two-thirds-of-new-york-city-s-arts-and-culture-jobs-are-gone

Deaths and cases dropping all over the world. Lockdowns and no lockdowns. Masks and no masks. Vaccines and no vaccines. In any other time we’d consider this winter burden of death winding down.

Oh yes, makes a huge difference when you adjust for age. Americans are getting older. And back-to-back mild flu seasons left a sizable cohort of frail elderly.

0 snow is not exactly what I moved from FL for.

Yeah, but come on. It looked like that flag was blowing in the wind.

Which site ? www.rationalground.com ? I’m actually a holocaust denial denier. Basically, Holocaust denial doesn’t exist. My non-warmongering views do tend to land me in hot water.

And for Pete’s sake, I’m not genuflecting to Trump in all this. Even if it ran against his instincts, to shut down the economy, fear of ‘blood on hands’ caused one head-of-state after another to crumble, especially in the face of terrifying computer models and fake videos of Chinese dying in the streets.

I think the long-standing disdain started when I scoffed at the notion of Germany invading and subjugating the US. “The risk [of Covid] is minuscule; wash your hands and skip the mask.” — Fauci Feb. 17 —

To be fair, I’ve seen this sort of piling-on, on right-leaning sites, and find it distasteful there too. It’s always the same. Any sort of incursion fosters a reaction-loop, a sort of “You must be some kind of flat-earther! And don’t return snark for snark or we’ll say you’re snarky!” Fun fact: Covid is rampant because people have been distressingly negligent about wearing masks. At the same time, the flu has all but disappeared because people have been amazingly compliant with wearing masks. Nightly news in March: “As the US achieves a GRIM MILESTONE, more Americans lost Covid than in 9/11, we take you to New York City ... now we go to New York City ... finally, in New York City ...”. I honestly don’t get people. After weeks of “You could get this and DIE. So stay home and save lives” I was sensing we were being marinated in availability bias and began to grope for other perspectives. Oddly, I found them on the infamous cesspool known as Twitter. Here, I found (or was reminded of) actual science. So, long live social media as far as I’m concerned. Thing about Fauci: regardless your views on the virus, at some point he’s agreed with you. Also, is it too early to start one of those morbid daily death tickers, this time for vaccine deaths ?

My inaugural post on this thread, dating back to April, I lamented Trump’s most grievous mistake: giving voice to the likes of Fauci and Birx. That said, it was Democrats who politicized the virus. It is in the nature, of the disaffected party, to use any sort of calamity against the party in power. Every Covid death was attributed to Trump. Every Covid death, after Jan 20, to viral trajectory. And for all of Trump’s sophomoric observations, the level of rigor, on the left, was at the level of the cure can’t be worse than the disease because Trump said the cure can’t be worse than the disease and if Trump is seen, without a mask, we wear two. Knee-jerk reaction when I say Covid counts are inflated. I readily acknowledge excess deaths in 2020. A cursory examination, of death certificates, renders the argument for undercounting Covid deaths highly dubious. And after having Covid for breakfast, lunch and dinner, months on end, it’s time to show a little empathy for the multitudes crushed under the weight of our wildly disproportionate reaction to a respiratory virus. Spare me your faux indignation. I’m calling for a moment of silence for the over three-million Americans who were not privileged to have succumbed to Rock Star Virus. Oh, and my frontline heroes were grocery store workers. In the early weeks they toiled, with special PPE, without fanfare, for modest pay ... and they never lectured the rest of us to stay home.

In 2017 a Spanish study, two morgues, showed 47% of decedents with viruses in their system, even though viruses were only diagnosed in 15% prior. Deaths ranged over various causes. This isn’t that difficult. We never looked for a virus the way we do now. We look for it everywhere and in everybody. One analyst has calculated that, if we tested and coded, for the common cold, the way we test and code for Covid ... we’d be looking at 450,000 common cold deaths a year. The larger problem: Mark 2020 as the year the world decided we could no longer live with viruses.

Now picture Trump having said THE BOLD in the early going.

Okay Doc, you tell me how to frame the question.

Uh, that’s what Biden recently said. After hanging every Covid death, around Trump’s neck, in the run-up to the election. Oh, was your loved one murdered by people not wearing masks ? Did you answer that question ?

You’re welcome.

Peer review is an old boy’s club. “Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts.” — Richard Feynman — If I were to guess - and that’s all it is - at least 50%. That’s just squaring the difference between estimates I’ve seen.

To the contrary, I fairly answered it. We know it’s inflated but cannot know the number. Do you want me to just throw something out ? And if you do, give me fair warning. How low can I go without getting one of those tearful laughing videos or a tin foil hate GIF ?