We Are in A World War

 

We are amidst a world war, the first since the last one ended in 1945. First the good news. Rather than having soldiers wage mortal combat against one another, instead we are having politicians and the major media making battle using propaganda enforced by our supposed “legal” system. Laws are being invoked based on nothing but what has turned out to be an outright fraud. Supposed “journalists” are supporting this fraud by engaging in what has been described as “panic porn”. Thankfully, this is a war of words rather than wholesale death. That last may appear ironic in that it got started with grossly pessimistic modelling estimates of the impact of a newly identified virus with those models predicting millions of dying from this virus.

It is sad to report that no one validated those models by inputting historical data and seeing if it would predict the actual trends. Admittingly at the time in January the models were based on widely speculative suppositions that have proven to be totally false. These include that the new virus was very deadly and that it easily spread such that a significant portion of the population of the world would be infected and an abnormally large number would die.

Then reality started to show itself but has been ignored by politicians and media who instead were encouraging this war on humanity. It was not helpful when China, the source of the virus, clamped down on the sharing of information which encouraged the panic that was then just arising. Then hard evidence began to appear. One of the first was the instance of the Diamond Princess cruise ship upon which this new virus appeared as an infected person had boarded. The ship was quarantined to contain the contagion. In the end, and this has been documented by the CDC among others, in a report published March 9 of the 3,711 people on the ship about 17% were found to have been infected and about 0.4% died. Of the latter all were over 70 in age.

Next to expose the actual face of this virus was that of the US aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt. Out of a crew of about 4,800 about 600 were found to have tested positive for this new virus, or 12.5% of all onboard. In the end 1 person died.

With this information beginning to pop up amongst the efforts to “flatten the curve” by imposing a lock down and the infringement of what we had, up till then, thought were “fundamental” rights and freedoms few took this contradictory information seriously. Instead this war on our freedoms was increased in intensity, all under the guise of “protecting our health”.

Here we are four and a half months after the lock down was imposed pretty much worldwide with few exceptions. One of those exceptions is Sweden. There the chief epidemiologist took an interesting path. Rather than forcing people to isolate themselves he recommended that, other than maintaining good hygiene and separation of at least a metre (as that is the approximate distance that saliva droplets can be expelled when speaking), nothing needed to be done and allowed  the human immune system do its job, just as we do for the common flu.

I have taken the time to compile the numbers from available sources (Statistics Canada, Heath Canada, BC Center for Disease Control, Ontario and Quebec Ministries of Health and the Public Health Agency of Sweden). The numbers focused on were deaths and cases. Admittingly the latter doesn’t mean much in that it reflects only those who were tested, or it was assumed they were infected. For comparative purposes I also located and downloaded data for the flu with the most recent numbers being for 2017 and 2018. These flu numbers provide a base line on how deadly Covid-19 is and how contagious one is compared to the other.

The results are conclusive; the lock downs and the fears being propagated by politicians and media alike, are totally unfounded! Here is a chart showing the results:

After normalising all data sets by relevant population resulting in numbers per million of population these data sets were combined into one chart. The first observation is that the flu, for both 2017 and 2018 has been more deadly across all age groups than Covid-19. Sweden, thanks to its absence of lock down, allowed the full population to become exposed to this new virus and the results show that, like the flu, the elderly are the most susceptible to dying as a result of being infected. Yet Covid-19 is not as deadly, even for the aged, as the flu. Here in Canada we managed to shield a significant number of people from becoming exposed to the virus such that the death rate is about a third due to the flu.

What conclusions can we draw? First keep in mind what we have always done to “fight” the flu. Other than recommending that the most vulnerable take a flu vaccine, no extraordinary measures were taken. The flu is an accepted risk. Covid-19 is not as deadly as the flu nor is it more virulent. Both are facts supported by real data, not an opinion. Yet we have had politicians thrust upon us unreasonable and, as has been shown, unwarranted restrictions to our freedom and this was encouraged by the media who did nothing to investigate if any of that was warranted! And what have we done ourselves? With rare exception we have acted like compliant sheep to the point that I for one am ashamed of my fellow human beings who show so little regard for what our forebearers fought and died for; our freedom.