Covid Math Doesn’t Add Up
As fifteen weeks turn into a year, there have been just over 30 million positive Covid cases and just under 550,000 Covid deaths for the United States. Those figures seem high, but what do they mean? In a country of 350 million, having less than 10% of the population test positive seems statistically unimpressive, and in the same country where hundreds of thousands more die from lifestyle-related causes like heart disease, cancer, respiratory failure, and stroke, the total number of alleged deaths is sad, but also perplexing. The suddenly bizarre fixation on personal choice – like choosing to not wear a mask, to not vaccinate, or to not shut down a nation’s economy – renders much of the newly-minted concern insincere.
Whatever the case, the figures of 30 million cases and 550,000 deaths engender legitimate questions about the nature of our nation’s statistics, the hype those statistics produced, and also the systemic responses toward the pandemic. For another, they engender veritable confusion, because none of the math adds up.
Among the most important questions communities should be asking themselves, one is: If Covid is so contagious, how have only 30 million Americans been infected after an entire year? Another is: How many people have actually had Covid? A third is: How many people have been killed by Covid? These seem like essential questions. After a year of locking down, forcing masks on every face, closing businesses, frightening and sequestering people, eroding freedoms, and printing 25% of all U.S. currency in the history of the country, at the very least we should be able to ascertain basic truths. Unfortunately, it’s easier said than done.
One huge enigma has been the veracity of figures surrounding Covid cases. On the one hand, the omnipresent ticker (that is, until Biden was inaugurated) on cable news outlets presented the figures as alarming fact. 30 million is indeed a large number, but the status of “alarming” would have been applied to 1 million or 100 million just as easily, especially with a Republican in office. The term million is malleable like that in the sheeples’ feeble minds. Regardless, the figure of thirty million is suspect for a few reasons.
First, the amplification threshold in PCR tests was known to be too high to accurately detect Covid. Even the New York Times, not a bastion of underplaying the fear factor, reported back in August of 2020 that up to 90% of all positive tests, when tested against 37-40 cycles, would have otherwise gone undetected and not required the stringent adherence to Covid protocols. At the time of that article, the United States had just topped 6 million positive cases. By following the New York Times’ math, it is fair to wonder if the United States had topped just 600,000 instead. Of course, that isn’t very sexy and certainly wouldn’t have been enough to frighten voters toward Biden. And, while the public was told that each positive needed to be treated the same, this simply isn’t true. False positives have also been a reality, and estimates suggest that as many as 5% of all positives are not accurate. That would also lower the overall positive case count. The issue of magnified cycles have supposedly been reduced, per a W.H.O recommendation that came out on January 20th, which could mean that current positives more accurately reflect true positives. Since case counts have decreased dramatically in the cold, winter months since Joe Biden’s inauguration, this could very well be true.
Of course, each of those figures represent confirmed cases. While the general public was scared with a growing ticker based on testing, the reality is that even more Americans likely had exposure to Covid. This makes sense for the simple reasons that not everyone got tested when sick and many more were asymptomatic. Back in late November, the Wall Street Journal pegged the number of total cases at 53 million based on available estimates and studies. The Washington Examiner came in lower at 41 million. Either way, those are both significantly higher than the reported 12 million positive cases around the same time. Even before that, in September Forbes was suggesting that 60 million Americans had already had already experienced Covid.
The much higher estimates of total versus confirmed cases can be seen coming from a few different sources. The CDC had hypothesized in late June of 2020 that as many as ten times the number of confirmed cases was a more likely figure. That means by June, there could already have been anywhere between 20-25 million cases. What are we to believe? That’s basically saying that the number being used today was actually the number we should have been heeding, all the way back at the height of the George Floyd riots. Most recently, some research proposed that the figure could still be as high as four or five times higher than reported figures for the past several months.
Fast forward to the present day. If the reported figure stands at 30 million, multiple research arms and common sense both suggest that the actual figure is far higher. Ratios ranging from 1:4 to 1:10 produce a low-end count of 120 million total exposures and a high-end count of 300 million. Even if estimates settle closer toward the theorized bottom, that still means over 100 million Americans have developed natural immunity.
Of course, nothing is readily apparent because honesty about what constituted a meaningful positive case was shrouded by political agendas. An amazing aspect of counting Covid cases came from the sleight of hand played by the medical establishment. In their jargon, a “positive” case of anything had always required both a positive test and confirmation through observation. According to the CDC, the exact language around this was “presumptive laboratory evidence AND either clinical criteria OR epidemiologic evidence.” For Covid, a positive case was determined only by a positive test result, high cycles, false positives, and absence of other indicators be damned. The cited article in this paragraph is worth reading in its entirety for the clarity of the entire scam.
Just for the record and as a comparative aside, China is reporting a total of 100,000 Covid cases and 4,500 deaths after an entire year. This, in a country of over 1 billion people. If the Chinese figures don’t give pause as to the untrustworthy nature of any Covid reporting, nothing will.
In short, there are more questions than answers. Are the confirmed cases accurate? Are the estimates of total cases accurate? Where did the seasonal flu go this year? This is all compounded by the contradictory narrative of more contagious variants alongside rapidly decreasing Covid cases. At the height of the 7-day moving average in mid-January, the United States was experiencing 250,000 confirmed cases. Two months into the Biden presidency, the 7-day moving average has dropped precipitously to 50,000 new cases. Again, such fear porn around these new, white-nation-named strains (U.K. strain, South African strain) doesn’t add up when testing reveals decreasing viral transmission.
As if determining the number of Covid cases was complex, the math surrounding alleged Covid deaths is harder than calculating, in your head, the logarithmic inverse of the integral of a Riemann sum. That might not even be a real thing, but the Covid math on deaths is still harder.
In the early days of the pandemic, the CDC issued guidelines about reporting deaths among real or suspected Covid patients. As with just counting positive cases, the medical community was creating new norms on the fly when it came to recording actual deaths. Among other novel changes, doctors were tasked with identifying Covid as a factor in a patients’ death regardless of causality to the death itself. In other words, Covid just needed to be present, or even assumed present, to qualify as a Covid death. The distinction of death by Covid versus death with Covid should have been treated as sacrosanct. After all, entire states locked down and the media ran a campaign against the incumbent president by basing their responses on these hyped numbers.
Relatedly, it was learned that hospitals received enormous compensation for treating Covid-infected patients and, very often, issuing their death certificates. Each Covid admission resulted in a $13,000 reimbursement while each Covid use of a ventilator netted hospitals $39,000. While perhaps benign in its intent, the measure unquestionably spawned looser counting measures by hospitals whose main streams of revenue were shuttered when all non-urgent procedures were cancelled. How could it not?
More irregularities in death counting appeared, bolstered by revelations that victims of motorcycle accidents and other tragic demises were being coded as Covid deaths (though not George Floyd; he was a murder victim). The state of Colorado issued some of the earliest revisions to their methodology, eventually reversing 25% of their total tally last May. Around the same time, Dr. Deborah Birx also reaffirmed the miscount of around 25%.
Other reports were made, but none made serious traction. In late December, two Minnesota politicians (one a physician), reviewed almost 3,000 death certificates from their home state. Their limited review found that almost 800 death certificates were improperly managed, with deaths ranging from drownings, dementia, and ejection from an automobile. Again, these reports were not new, but they once more went widely unnoticed. As with cases, none of the decreased figures would have deterred the media from sensationalizing Covid; the same alarm raised when we crossed 100,000 deaths would have been the same alarm raised when the figure was eventually realized a few weeks or months later. However, honest information is the least the American public deserves.
Even for verified Covid mortalities, the CDC released astonishing data as far back as August of 2020 that 94% of all deaths could be attributed to the presence of preexisting, underlying health conditions. Put another way, the average Covid death included the presence of an average of 2.6 comorbidities. Healthy people simply do not die from Covid.
Relatedly, young people do not die from Covid either, but who would know that with the panic facing school reopenings? The CDC published its overall fatality rates in early fall of 2020, disclosing that for people between the ages of 0-19, the survival rate was an astounding 99.997%. For infants and children, there were odds multiples higher of even dying from pneumonia or flu. When has there ever been a national suit down for pneumonia or flu, let alone a national campaign by teachers’ unions to restrict access to learning? Even for Americans under 50, the survival rate has stood consistently at 99.98%. Essentially, the statistical likelihood of dying from Covid was better than walking down stairs, climbing a ladder, or driving to work. And, it is almost certainly better than eating junk food, drinking, smoking. Not that anyone should celebrate more government overreach and deny people access to those items, but has there ever been serious concern over personal lifestyle choices with worse health risks?
Of course, the patently obscene hypocrisy in every Covid conversation, should frightful paranoia present itself, must always return to the BLM protests that took place in June of 2020. On the heels of mandated shut downs and mask mandates, millions of Americans took to the streets in arrogant anger. While church services, schools, places of business, and countless establishments were forcefully closed, an honest medical establishment would have preserved its entreaties of the masses and suggested people not gather. Likewise, government officials would have cleared out the streets, much like they cleared out businesses that defied executive orders. Instead, doctors declared that racism was worse than Covid, requiring the protests. And it goes without saying that politicians are spineless and therefore did nothing. Either Covid isn’t transmitted when the purpose of congregating relates to fighting invisible acts of systemic racism, or the entire political left played the country like a malleable, ignorant fiddle.
In terms of justification for the illegal overreach of the government to shut down the whole country, at best Covid could be seen as an accelerant in otherwise unhealthy people, while at worst it can be seen merely as an excuse to ruin the American middle class. Not even the “vaccines” produce efficacy approaching 94%. The average American willingly accepts whatever mainstream narrative is portrayed the loudest and most frequently. In the case of Covid coverage, the overwhelming majority of voices convinced these programmed Democrats that Covid was existentially scary and depended on drastic measures. Included in these measures was removing Donald Trump from office, which is not at all a medical decision. For that matter, none of the talking heads on television hold medical degrees.
George Orwell, in the much-referenced 1984, concluded the novel by having Winston accept 2+2=5. The protagonist, like the others, knew it to be wrong until they eventually accepted an untruth as real truth. Not only did they say it, they believed it. Right now, Covid math feels very Orwellian. We repeat the publicized equations regardless of veracity. A sadder fact is that even if the numbers were true, too many among the American public have lost all faith in the medical and government establishments. It’s not hard to see why.
Content syndicated from TheBlueStateConservative.com with permission.
