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In this year of lockdown, it is not just our movements, social lives and work that have been restricted. Big Tech has also stepped up its efforts at closing down what we can say and read. Two issues in particular have been central to Silicon Valley’s escalating war on wrongthink: the Covid-19 pandemic and the US presidential elections.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/12/28/the-year-big-tech-became-the-ministry-of-truth/
Around one-third of hospital deaths during the initial COVID-19 peak were due to inappropriate treatment.
“We were intubating sick patients very early. Not for the patients’ benefit, but in order to control the epidemic & to save other patients,” Dr. Iwashyna said “That felt awful.”
…As a safety precaution, doctors and hospitals limited the access of health-care workers to coronavirus patients on ventilators, giving them fewer opportunities to check on them. That meant patients required more powerful sedatives to keep them from pulling out throat tubes.
…Overall, survival for Covid-19 patients increased 28% from April to September at HCA hospitals.
…Before the pandemic, between about 30% to more than 40% of ventilator patients died, according to research. Numbers were sharply higher in Wuhan, China. As the pandemic grew, hospitals in the U.S. reported death rates in some cases of about 50% for ventilated Covid-19 patients.
Hospital pharmacists discovered Dec. 16 that some vials of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccines that are supposed to hold five doses actually contain six or seven, The New York Times reported.
The discovery may mean the U.S. supply of the vaccine is more robust than previously thought, but it has also caused confusion over whether to use the extra doses or throw them out, since the extra doses weren’t part of Pfizer’s guidance.
Federal officials have to carefully track the number of vaccine doses to make sure there’s enough for everyone who received an initial dose to receive a second dose three weeks later. The extra vials may complicate that effort, The Hill reported.
A hospital worker with no history of allergies was admitted to intensive care over a severe reaction she suffered 10 minutes after having Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine. The unidentified female worker suffered an anaphylactic reaction shortly after receiving the injection at a hospital in Juneau, Alaska, on Tuesday.
Two healthcare workers in the UK suffered an anaphylactic reaction to the Pfizer injection after being given it last week, although the vaccine has been widely tested and analysed, with government experts in both the US and Great Britain deeming it safe.
White House chief of staff Mark Meadows told the head of the Food and Drug Administration on Friday to either sign off on Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine by the end of the day or hand in his resignation, the Washington Post reported, another push by the White House to approve the vaccine as quickly as possible after a panel of scientists ruled it safe this week.
Results While model 1 found that lockdown was the most effective measure in the original 11 countries, model 2 showed that lockdown had little or no benefit as it was typically introduced at a point when the time-varying reproductive number was already very low. Model 3 found that the simple banning of public events was beneficial, while lockdown had no consistent impact. Based on Bayesian metrics, model 2 was better supported by the data than either model 1 or model 3 for both time horizons.
Conclusions Inferences on effects of NPIs are non-robust and highly sensitive to model specification. Claimed benefits of lockdown appear grossly exaggerated.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.22.20160341v3
Among Marine Corps recruits, approximately 2% who had previously had negative results for SARS-CoV-2 at the beginning of supervised quarantine, and less than 2% of recruits with unknown previous status, tested positive by day 14. Most recruits who tested positive were asymptomatic, and no infections were detected through daily symptom monitoring. Transmission clusters occurred within platoons.
The harmful consequences of public health choices should be explicitly considered and transparently reported to limit their damage, say Itai Bavli and colleagues
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has posed an unprecedented challenge for governments. Questions regarding the most effective interventions to reduce the spread of the virus—for example, more testing, requirements to wear face masks, and stricter and longer lockdowns—become widely discussed in the popular and scientific press, informed largely by models that aimed to predict the health benefits of proposed interventions. Central to all these studies is recognition that inaction, or delayed action, will put millions of people unnecessarily at risk of serious illness or death.
However, interventions to limit the spread of the coronavirus also carry negative health effects, which have yet to be considered systematically. Despite increasing evidence on the unintended, adverse effects of public health interventions such as social distancing and lockdown measures, there are few signs that policy decisions are being informed by a serious assessment and weighing of their harms on health. Instead, much of the discussion has become politicised, especially in the US, where President Trump’s provocative statements sparked debates along party lines about the necessity for policies to control covid-19. This politicisation, often fuelled by misinformation, has distracted from a much needed dispassionate discussion on the harms and benefits of potential public health measures against covid-19.
To judge from the evidence, the answer is clear: Mandated lockdowns had little effect on the spread of the coronavirus. The charts below show the daily case curves for the United States as a whole and for thirteen U.S. states. As in almost every country, we consistently see a steep climb as the virus spreads, followed by a transition (marked by the gray circles) to a flatter curve. At some point, the curves always slope downward, though this wasn’t obvious for all states until the summer.
…The evidence suggests, then, that the sweeping, mandated lockdowns that followed voluntary responses exacted a great cost, with little effect on transmission. We can’t change the past, but we should avoid making the same mistake again.
A USA TODAY analysis shows the state’s positive case count among kids ages 5 to 17 declined through late September after a peak in July. Among the counties seeing surges in overall cases, it’s college-age adults – not schoolchildren – driving the trend, the analysis found.
Officials in Nashville, Tn. concealed from the media how few coronavirus cases had been traced to bars and restaurants in the city, according to emails sent between the mayor’s office and the city’s health department
Since the pandemic began, Goerke’s wife, Denise — 63 years old and afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease — had declined dramatically. Left alone in her nursing home, she had lost 16 pounds, could not form the simplest words, no longer responded to the voices of her children.
In recent weeks, she had stopped recognizing even the man she loved.
Goerke, 61, could tell the isolation was killing his wife, and there was nothing he could do but watch. “Every day it gets a little worse,” he said. “We’ve lost months, maybe years of her already.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/09/16/coronavirus-dementia-alzheimers-deaths/
When the postmortem is done on the media’s coverage of COVID-19 (and it will be), it will be clear that the virus was no Black Plague — it’s not even the flu on a bad year.
SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, has killed 56,749 Americans as of Tuesday.
That’s not good. But it’s not as bad as the 2017-2018 flu season, when 80,000 -plus perished. And it’s a long cry from what all the experts were warning about just a few weeks ago: First, they predicted 1.7 million Americans dead; then they redid the models (this time apparently entering a few more “facts”) and said 100,000-240,000 dead.
Fatality rate:
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/apr/28/covid-19-turning-out-to-be-huge-hoax-perpetrated-b/
“In the 14 days before illness onset, 71% of case-patients and 74% of control participants reported always using cloth face coverings or other mask types when in public.”
New data shows that ockdowns correlated with a greater spread of the virus.
Six months into the Covid-19 pandemic, the U.S. has now carried out two large-scale experiments in public health—first, in March and April, the lockdown of the economy to arrest the spread of the virus, and second, since mid-April, the reopening of the economy. The results are in. Counterintuitive though it may be, statistical analysis shows that locking down the economy didn’t contain the disease’s spread and reopening it didn’t unleash a second wave of infections.
Considering that lockdowns are economically costly and create well-documented long-term public-health consequences beyond Covid, imposing them appears to have been a large policy error. At the beginning, when little was known, officials acted in ways they thought prudent. But now evidence proves that lockdowns were an expensive treatment with serious side effects and no benefit to society…
Measuring from the start of the year to each state’s point of maximum lockdown—which range from April 5 to April 18—it turns out that lockdowns correlated with a greater spread of the virus. States with longer, stricter lockdowns also had larger Covid outbreaks. The five places with the harshest lockdowns—the District of Columbia, New York, Michigan, New Jersey and Massachusetts—had the heaviest caseloads.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-failed-experiment-of-covid-lockdowns-11599000890
Last weekend the CDC drastically downgraded the number of COVID deaths and noted that in truth less than 10,000 died of the virus.
The media is in love with the idea that 200,000 Americans have died of COVID-19, but last weekend the CDC drastically downgraded the number of deaths and noted that in truth less than 10,000 died solely of the virus.
As it turns out, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website recently reported that very few died solely of the virus. Out of the 161,392 deaths in the CDC data, just six percent (9,700) were attributed to the coronavirus alone. In all the rest of the deaths, COVID was either only one contributor to death or was merely present in the system at the end.
https://thewashingtonsentinel.com/cdc-quietly-admits-that-less-than-10000-really-died-from-covid-19/
More than 180,000 Americans have died of coronavirus as of Monday
The CDC’s latest fatality data shows that COVID-19 was listed as the sole cause of death for just 6% of those killed by the virus
94% of fatalities were in people who also suffered at least one chronic health condition, such as high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity or heart disease
On average, people who died of coronavirus had 2.6 additional underlying health conditions
While novel coronavirus cases have spiked across several parts of Europe, including Spain, France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, Sweden—where a countrywide lockdown was never issued—continues to report a downward trend in new cases and new deaths.
Source: Johns Hopkins University (as of August 2)
Source: Johns Hopkins University (as of August 2)
Source: World Health Organization (as of August 2)
A report from the Palm Beach County Medical examiner obtained by CBS12 News shows that a young Wellington nurse believed to have passed from COVID-19, was never infected with the virus at all.
The report shows that 33-year-old Danielle DiCenso died from “complications of acute pyelonephritis,” otherwise known as a kidney infection.