The Covid-19 Epidemiological Models Are Wrong, Does Anyone Even Care?

Powerline ^ | 04/23/2020 | John Hinderaker

[SeekAndFind]

Everyone who has been paying attention knows that the epidemiological models on which the current shutdown mania is based have been proved to be wrong, wrong, wrong. Yet, zombie-like, they continue to influence our ill-informed policymakers.

A reader who prefers to remain anonymous despite her apparent qualifications writes:

I just want to follow up yet again on how extraordinarily wrong the projections for hospital demand have been, along with some detail about what’s going on in hospitals. In a number of states they’re about to reopen for nonemergency procedures. But over the past month they’ve been so empty that they’ve been laying off staff.

Here are some details I got from a friend at UNC-Chapel Hill this morning: “Less than 373 hospitalized with COVID as of yesterday. More than 800 empty ICU beds in the state & more than 7000 empty hospital beds overall. Close to 2000 ventilators not in use. Approximately 40% of deaths in the state have been in nursing homes/retirement homes/prisons.”

Again, the likely cause is that the disease is not nearly as deadly as was originally expected. Thinking about that study showing that 13.7% of pregnant women presenting for delivery at NYC hospitals in March-early April tested positive for COVID-19 AT THE TIME of admission. Unless one thinks pregnant women are more likely to have been exposed to the virus than other people in the population, surely must mean that ~15% of NYC has been exposed. (Recall also that the NYC study was only of active infections not of antibodies.) If so, then 10,000 deaths out of 15% of NYC (1.2 million) points to an infection fatality rate around .008, very much in the ballpark of seasonal flu.

Why these lines of analysis aren’t being pursued vigorously in the press is truly amazing. Empty hospitals during a pandemic?? Evidence that the disease may not be another Spanish Flu? The huge extent to which the disease is a bane of the very old, especially those in nursing homes, not of the whole American population? How many stories have you seen about the death rate in different age categories, as in the data shown in the tables in this analysis?

Having read that Massachusetts was experiencing a surge in COVID cases, I just checked the MA COVID dashboard and found the below. Shouldn’t this information be more readily available in the news? It strongly suggests that an isolation strategy focused on the most vulnerable would help a lot!

The American people are terrified, but all media seem to do is fan the flames of more terror, even though there is encouraging news out there on the health front (albeit not on the economic front).

Our correspondent is right as a matter of science, but she may not fully appreciate the extent to which unscientific coronavirus hysteria is a matter of sheer political power.

[Jim Robinson]

How can they possibly be wrong? It’s the exact same science as climate change.

[GnuThere]

The media certainly doesn’t care. They want high projections and panic.
Local hospitals have now vastly overbuilt COVID beds, mostly unoccupied but now used to “prove” we are ready for the “second wave” from reopening the area. They have maybe 3 patients in a 50 bed special unit.

[HollyB]

Global hysteria is nearly always overblown.

1970s: The earth is running out of food!
1980s: Nuclear winter!
1990s: There goes the ozone layer!

Now it’s climate apocalypse! And global pandemic!

We humans are suckers for being manipulated by the politics of fear.

Dinesh D’Souza

[krogers58]

It appears that we have been the victims of a sophisticated Chinese intelligence operation, which is causing us to commit economic suicide. Obviously, our media and the Democrats (Redundant) have been so corrupted that they are playing an active role in creating this frenzied hysteria that is paralyzing us. This is what assymetrical war looks like. Chinese intelligence has been working, hand-in-hand, with the Democrats, over the last few years to destabilize latin america, so as to cause an immigration crisis which in turn has destabilized our country. We can expect the entire asymetrical warfare playbook to be employed against us.

As a nation, we have curled up in the fetal position, instead of seeing what is really going on, and how evil the Chinese truly are. They are the modern day Nazis, and are actively operating death camps, complete with high capacity crematoriums.

We have gotten hold of some of their military leaders’ speeches discussing the need for a bio attack on the US, so that they can take our land. They have calculated that if they do nothing, 800,000,000 million of their citizens will die from the toxic waste dump they’ve made of their country. The Chinese have come to believe that if we were to respond with nuclear weapons, they have estimated their casualties at 500,000,000.

The Chinese have dropped their mask, and are now willing and capable of committing any crime against humanity to conquer the US. We can soon expect pestilence to destroy our food supply (blights on stored grains), disease of our farm animals, and eventually an EMP attack from an anonymous group. The Chinese, will by proxy (Iran or North Korea), soon deliver a death blow to our economy of an EMP strike.

It has been estimated that a simple High Altitude EMP strike will likely kill 90% of the American populace within 12 months simply from the disruption of our food distribution and transporation systems. Paranoid rantings maybe, but what if the COVID19 virus was a test run for how they will next attempt to attack us with a far more lethal virus.

Prepare yourselves for continuing viral outbreaks, pestilence, and God only knows what else. Read up on how to prepare yourself for an EMP attack by stockpiling food. You should also begin to prepare caches of food, so that if marauding bands of city dwellers come in search of your food, you will not be left high and dry if they steal what food you have around the house. Our government has shown itself to be completely incompetent insofar as protecting us from this bio-attack. We cannot allow our safety and that of our families to depend on the kleptocrats that now run this country. Prepare.

[tbw2]

A bad disease model cost us two trillion dollars and 22 million jobs. And liberals are screaming, “But give us more of this power, we’ve got climate models predicting the end of the world!”

[ALASKA]

So we were prepared for the worst (so far, so good) and you complain about it when the lockdowns work and we don’t need what we responsibly prepared for?

It doesn’t work that way.

[Bubba_Leroy]

The Global Cooling/Global Warming/Global Climate Change models have been consistently wrong for over 30 years and that doesn’t seem to bother liberals or the lamestream media. Never let facts get in the way of a left wing power grab.

[HollyB]

You wouldn’t happen to have links to the Chinese information regarding the 500/800 Million lives lost scenarios?

[HollyB]

Do is 5G safe from an EMP? May explain why this push to upgrade.

https://globalresilience.northeastern.edu/national-strategy-to-secure-5g-infrastructure-is-5g-infrastructure-safe-from-emi-emp-attacks/

[Drago]

It has cost us a lot more than $2 trillion (more like $6 trillion in lost GDP and “stimulus” spending), but I get your point.

[SoCal Pubbie]

You’re right, it doesn’t work that way. How it works is that incompetent leaders go all chicken little, wreck the economy, ruin people’s life work, and then when their doomsaying is shown to be wildly overstated, they crow how great a job they did staving off armageddon.

[Secret Agent Man]

i do

and i was critical of the models from the beginning.

we have crappy scientists creating grossly inaccurate models for globull warming, this crap, predicting which flus are coming next year, who’s gonna win elections, and just about everything else we base major decisions on.

When you can ignore their stupid shiite its one thing.

When azholes pass laws based on these craptacular pseudosfaux models, that won’t leave you alone or let you live your conscience, that’s the big problem.

That’s time for organized revolt for me. They’ve declared war on me and my personal God given rights.

[krogers58]

You wouldn’t happen to have links to the Chinese information regarding the 500/800 Million lives lost scenarios?

Yes, here you go:
Link

[familyop]

"The Covid-19 Epidemiological Models Are Wrong, Does Anyone Even Care?"

I don't care. Obsessing too much about politics is bad for the human immune system. There's much to do without loitering in public indoor spaces and getting sick. Let's produce and have fun without being stupid.

[wastoute]

LOL. The “Propaganda Channel” has so much shit in it flying in all directions it is a Blizzard of bullshit. And don’t think none of it is our own.

[icclearly]

“ they crow how great a job they did staving off armageddon...”

How true! We will be hearing that lie for the rest of our lives!

[mewzilla]

I’d say the 26 million jobless do for starters...

[HollyB]

Thank you