Yesterday's headlines announced Donald and Melania Trump "tested positive" for covid-19.
Another claimed nineteen thousand Amazon workers "got" covid-19 on the job.
Both of these pseudo-stories ignited another absurd frenzy of morbid speculation and finger-pointing.
As always, the story keeps changing:
- Remember ventilators, flatten the curve, the next two weeks are crucial, etc.?
- Remember Nancy Pelosi in Chinatown back in February, urging everyone to visit?
- Remember Fauci dismissing masks as useless?
Why should we believe anything the media tells us now?
So what do these headlines really mean?
What exactly is a covid "case"?
Since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, most US media outlets have been exceedingly credulous and complicit in their reporting.
"Journalists" almost uniformly promote what the "pro-lock-down" narrative, which is to wildly exaggerate the risks from covid-19.
They may be motivated to hurt President Trump politically, to promote a more authoritarian "new normal" society, or simply to drive more clicks and views that add up to revenue. Bad news sells advertising.
This explains why media outlets use the terms "case" and "infection" so loosely, to the point of actively misinforming the public.
All of the endless talk about testing, testing, testing served to obscure two important facts.
First, the tests themselves are almost laughably unreliable in producing both false positives and negatives.
And what is the point? Are we going to test people again and again, every time they go out to the grocery or bump into a neighbor?
Second, detecting virus particles or droplets in a human's respiratory tract tells us very little. It certainly does not tell us if the person is sick.
Take a perfectly healthy person with no particular symptoms and swab the inside of their nose.
If the culture shows the presence of staphylococcus aureus, do we insist they have a staph infection?
—A virus is not a disease. Viruses are microscopic parasites that lack the capacity to thrive and reproduce outside of a host body.
Only a very small percentage of those exposed to the virus itself—SARS-CoV-2—show any kind of acute respiratory symptoms, or what we can call "coronavirus disease."
The only meaningful statistics show the incidence of serious illness, hospitalizations, and deaths.
The single most important statistic among these is the infection fatality rate (IFR).
Data collected through July shows that the IFR for those under age forty-five is actually lower than that of the common flu.
The covid-19 IFR rises for those over fifty, but it is hardly a death sentence.
The data does not segregate those with preexisting health issues caused by obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.
Mild or asymptomatic covid cases are meaningless.
The world is full of viruses, and sometimes they make people a bit sick for a few days.
There are millions of them in the world all around us, on our skin, in our nose and respiratory tract, in our organs.
We are meant to live with them, which is why we all have immune systems designed to help us coexist and adapt to ever-changing organisms.
We develop antibodies naturally, or we attempt to stimulate them through vaccines, but ultimately our own immune systems will have to deal with covid-19.
The virus will always be out there waiting, on the other side of any lock-down, mask, or virus — so we might as well get on with our lives.
From day one the focus should have been on boosting immunity through exercise, fresh air, sunlight, proper dietary supplementation, and the promotion of general well-being.
Instead some politicians, many bureaucrats, and the opportunistic media insisted on lock-downs, school closures, distancing, isolation, masks etc.
As with almost everything in life, government intervention made the situation worse.
We can only hope many of the inept, unscientific despots are removed from office at the next election.
Several, including Tom Wolfe in Pennsylvania, Andrew Cuomo in New York and Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, should face expulsion from office for their incompetence.
Lock-downs were never medically justified, either in terms of the covid-19 risk or the staggering economic tradeoffs.
They certainly are not justified now, given seven months of additional data showing that the transmission and lethality of covid-19 are not particularly worse than previous SARS, swine flu, or other pandemics.
We still don't know how many of the supposed two hundred thousand US covid-19 deaths were actually caused by the SARS-CoV-2 respiratory disease, or were just people who died of other causes after exposure to covid-19.
And we never will.
https://mises.org/wire/absurdity-covid-cases
