Article by Mike Walsh – Originally posted on 25-April-2020 at https://europeansworldwide.wordpress.com/2020/04/25/lift-the-lockdown-the-facts-are-out/
COVID-19 and the emerging war is Truth vs. Political Opportunism, the latter assisted by media’s pursuit of click-bait by posting flawed and fraud COVID-19 statistics. Mainstream media simply reprints government handouts and never questions them or government ministers.
Governments are increasingly forced to backtrack or face the anger of millions of people humiliated and scammed. Regimes brazenly carry on with the Big Lie or face up to the fact that they have been consistently wrong.
The lockdown, rather than solving the problem are aggravating the situation whilst simultaneously destroying national economies. FACT: the Coronavirus has been officially downgraded to a status similar to that of the common flu.
Media continues to pursue ‘if it bleeds it leads’ click bait. Governments must now base their reaction on genuine accumulated data to see what has actually happened, rather than keep emphasising hypothetical projections.
Five key facts are being ignored by those calling for continuing the near-total lockdown.
Fact 1: The overwhelming majority of people do not have any significant risk of dying from COVID-19. The recent Stanford University antibody study and others now estimate that the fatality rate if infected is likely 0.1 to 0.2 per cent, a risk far lower than previous World Health Organization estimates that were ludicrously 20 to 30 times higher and that motivated isolation policies.
In New York City, an epicentre of the pandemic with more than one-third of all U.S. deaths, the rate of death for people 18 to 45 years old is 0.01 per cent or 11 per 100,000 in the population. On the other hand, people aged 75 and over have a death rate 80 times that. For people under 18 years old the rate of death is zero per 100,000.
Of all fatal cases two-thirds were patients over 70 years of age; more than 95 per cent were over 50 years of age, and about 90 per cent of all fatal cases had at least one but usually several underlying illnesses. FACT: Many deaths from old age are classified as COVID-19 caused.
Of 6,570 confirmed COVID-19 deaths fully investigated for underlying conditions to date, 99.2 per cent, had an underlying illness. In other words, if you do not already have an underlying chronic condition, your chances of dying are small, regardless of age. And young adults and children in normal health have almost no risk of any serious illness from COVID-19.
Fact 2: Protecting older, at-risk people eliminates hospital overcrowding. We can learn about hospital utilisation from incoming global data. For those under 18 years of age, hospitalisation from the virus is 0.01 per cent per 100,000 people; for those 18 to 44 years old, hospitalisation is 0.1 per cent per 100,000. Even for people ages 65 to 74, only 1.7 per cent were hospitalised.
Of 4,103 confirmed COVID-19 patients with symptoms bad enough to seek medical care, Dr Leora Horwitz of NYU Medical Centre concluded ‘age and underlying health issues are far and away from the strongest risk factor for hospitalisation.’
Even early WHO reports noted that 80 per cent of all cases were mild and more recent studies show a far more widespread rate of infection and a lower rate of serious illness. Half of all people testing positive for infection have no symptoms at all. The vast majority of younger, otherwise healthy people do not need significant medical care if they catch this infection.
Fact 3: Vital population immunity is prevented by total isolation policies, prolonging the problem. We know from decades of medical science that infection itself allows people to generate an immune response, antibodies so that the infection is controlled throughout the population by ‘herd immunity.’
Indeed, that is the main purpose of widespread immunisation in other viral diseases, to assist with population (herd) immunity. In this virus, we know that medical care is not even necessary for the vast majority of people who are infected. It is so mild that half of the infected people are unaware they are positive.
That has been falselyportrayed as a problem requiring mass isolation. In fact, infected people without severe illness are a necessary antidote to establish widespread immunity. By transmitting the virus to others in the low-risk group who then generate antibodies, they block the network of pathways toward the most vulnerable people, ultimately ending the threat.
Extending whole-population isolation would directly prevent that widespread immunity from developing. In other words, Nature knows better than lightweight political opportunists
The lockdowns actually worsened the problem by preventing the onset of herd immunity whilst bankrupting entire nations’ economies.
Fact 4: People are dying because other medical care is not getting done due to flawed and fake overhyped forecasts. Critical health care for tens of millions is being ignored. People are dying to accommodate ‘potential’ COVID-19 patients and for fear of spreading the disease.
Most nations and many hospitals abruptly stopped nonessential procedures and surgery. This has prevented diagnoses of life-threatening diseases, like cancer screening, biopsies of tumours now undiscovered and potentially deadly brain aneurysms. Treatments, including emergency care, for the most serious illnesses, were also missed.
Cancer patients suffer and die from postponed chemotherapy. An estimated 80 per cent of brain surgery cases were put to one side. Acute stroke and heart attack patients missed their only chances for treatment, some dying with many now facing permanent disability.
CREDIT: Scott W. Atlas, MD, is the David and Joan Traitel Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the former chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Centre.
BREAKING NEWS: INCONVENIENT FACTS: Almost 18,000 more people could die from cancer over the next year in England because of the impact of COVID-19, new research suggests. The report finds a reduction in attendance for chemotherapy of 60% and a 76% average drop in cancer referrals for early diagnosis. The study from University College London (UCL) and DATA-CAN, the Health Data Research Hub for Cancer, examined real-time weekly hospital data for urgent cancer referrals and chemotherapy attendances during the epidemic. It found that the majority of patients with cancer or suspected cancer are not accessing health services.
POINT TO PONDER: In 2017, the number of people who died of malaria was 620,000. That is almost all in Africa. That’s three times the number of people who’ve died of Covid-19 so far worldwide. In 2018, 1.5million people died of tuberculosis. And TB is especially dangerous because it’s developing a resistance to our treatment to it. So it’s actually more terrifying than Covid-19. Again, we forget about it.
Typhoid, which we think of as a disease of the past, still kills up to 160,000 people a year. Cholera is the same; it kills about 140,000 people a year. Influenza, which COVID resembles in many ways, kills up to 650,000 people every year. It took me five minutes to find those statistics. Why don’t I ever see them reported? ~ Lionel Shriver.
Tanzanian President Magufuli ordered a quality check of imported kits. They randomly obtained several non-human samples, such as pawpaw, a goat and sheep, but the test kits assigned them human names.