A Purposely Politicized “Pseudo-pandemic”

'A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.'  Thomas Jefferson

George Rebane

Today reporting on the corona or Covid-19 virus (C19) resembles a chaotic cacophony.  I wanted to pull together some salient factors that help me sort things out in this blizzard of mostly junk journalism, agenda driven by election year politics.  So, with apologies where needed, I offer the following potpourri.

We have analyzed the science and response policies invoked by the C19 outbreak twenty ways from Sunday, and the evidence continues to mount that this year the globe has been subjected to a “pseudo-pandemic” driven by politics and political/ideological agendas.  The science behind C19 is complex and has been mostly banished to be brought up when a political statement needs some additional support.  Then the science is almost always misrepresented or abbreviated beyond recognition (more below).  And there’s the real problem, the science is beyond the attention spans and comprehension of 99.99% of the people who just listen to the loudest and oft repeated voices.

To start, it might be useful to just list the major technical factors impacting the spread, extent, and treatment of C19. 

• Pathogenicity: how does it spread, and what is its R0 (reproduction rate), in variously populated regions and age-groups, how long is an individual contagious;
• Virulence: what is its physiological impact on various population segments described by age and prevalence of comorbidities, asymptomaticity, progress of disease, case fatality rate (CFR), mortality rate (MR), ultimately how much of it is required to kill whom;
• Herd immunity: what is it, how it works, historical prevalence in epidemics;
• Testing: the function and application of infection and immunity tests and testing policies, how a test’s time-late diagnoses, reliability numbers, and tested samples affect results that can support response policies;
• Therapeutics: Remdesivir, HCQ, etc effectiveness, standard of care;
• Vaccines: Availability, effectiveness, long-term immunity, risk;
• Response policy effectiveness: Quarantines (lockdowns), masks, social distancing, testing,
• Collateral damages of response policies: to economy, society segments, vulnerable individuals, ability of damaged economies to continue care for the diseased;

All of these C19 factors are complex and hard to understand, even by ‘experts’, about how they relate within a population occupying an extended region comprised of a variety of environments (city, suburban, rural, …).

In light of this, the first question that comes to mind is how did epidemics and pandemics peter out, terminate, or extinguish themselves before the relatively recent advent of public health knowledge and coordinated policies.  The answer is clear – through the onset of herd immunity.  Infected people either died or recovered (were ‘released’ epidemiologically) and were no longer contagious.  Depending on the R0 and CFR of a disease, it will ultimately achieve a MR in a population before it disappears.  (CFR is the percent of those who die after contracting the disease; MR is the percent of the total population that dies from the epidemic.)  CFR depends on the state of medical knowledge and availability of healthcare facilities

• Scientists in most specialty areas are not qualified to talk about things like an epidemic’s infection rates, reproduction rates, and most certainly not herd immunity. These are all probabilistic phenomena, and probabilistics is not a strong suit for most scientists simply because, at best, their exposure to probability has been dealing with cook-booked ‘design of experiments’; they don’t deal with stochastic systems whose dynamics are defined by non-linear partial differential/difference equations.    Therefore, their statements and/or opinions about, say, herd immunity are completely faith-based – that is, believing in the opinions of other scientists, more likely similarly hampered.  (Perhaps, we can label such a process ‘herd consensus’.)
• The Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) hit job seems to have stuck. The medicine has clear therapeutic value when administered with zinc.  Even though with its benefits suppressed, it continues to be used, if somewhat surreptitiously, to great benefit with early onset C19 patients.  The good news is that at least Remdesivir has finally been approved by the FDA. (more here) 
• The Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) surpassed 50K signatures, with 10K scientists and healthcare workers. It eschews broad-based lockdowns in favor of a ‘focused protection approach’ while letting herd immunity do its job.  The liberal media highlights those who dun herd immunity, and suppress those who promote the GBD recommendations. (more here and here)   
• Dr Fauci is against the GBD (here) – “He estimated that about one-third of the population is vulnerable to serious complications from COVID-19 disease, arguing it would be impossible to protect these people who live outside of nursing homes.” But then two of the three GBD authors respond (here) with substance.
• The benefit of wearing masks remains in dispute. There is significant evidence from large studies that masks are not good for our health and pose a dangerous risk to wearers (here and here).  The reports of these findings are actively suppressed, even by the medical journals like Lancet and JAMA (here). (H/T to reader) 

Litmus test: When two sides disagree about the truth of a matter, the side that attempts to silence the other is the one promoting falsehoods.

When we try to understand the interaction of all these factors and connect the dots, we can generate an interlinked graph called an influence factors diagram. (for a primer see here, here, here, and here) For our purposes, I’ve drawn the one shown below.

Recall that the influencing factor, as it rises and falls, causes the influenced factor to also rise and fall when the arrow has a (green) plus sign.  And the influence is opposite when the arrow has a (red) minus sign.  For example, increasing ‘Overall lockdowns’ increases both ‘Correlated Mortalities’ and ‘Correlated Morbidities’, while decreasing ‘Economic Viability’ in the region of the lockdowns.  Given the incoming data from the EU countries, the impact of lockdowns on ‘Covid Deaths’ is now in great dispute.  These diagrams can be drawn in a number of ways.  Another version highlighting a slightly different set of factors was presented here.

Some obvious conclusions can be drawn from the diagram when we trace out some of the more impactive feedback loops.  These are also called virtuous (balancing) cycles and vicious (reinforcing) cycles; the latter type usually cause catastrophic failures of the processes they model.  I draw your attention to the one starting with ‘Susceptible Population’ that goes through ‘Infected Population’ to ‘Overall lockdowns’, all moving up and down in sync.  However, as lockdowns increase, the economic viability of the region decreases.  The development of ‘Prophylactics & Treatments’ is in sync with the health of the economy, and will therefore suffer as the economy shrinks.  When needed prophylactics and treatments are reduced or not available, then that causes the ‘Immune Population’ to shrink, which in turn causes the ‘Susceptible Population’ to increase.  This is a vicious loop because the overall positive feedback drives the beneficial factors in the wrong direction.  Other such loops, both balancing and reinforcing, can also be identified in this diagram that inform the interrelated influences of policies and their effects.

The takeaway to date from all this is that the Left’s political agenda is to promote the narrative that President Trump has mismanaged the nation’s C19 response.  And due to our lamestream media’s total subservience to supporting that agenda, it is almost impossible for the layman (i.e. typical voter) to determine what is true or not when accessing the usual news sources.  The information is out there, buried or partially accessible, but it takes more time/effort to dig it out.  But worse than that is that most people wouldn't recognize the information once they come upon it, and/or wouldn’t have the intellectual tools to make sense of it anyway.  So our beloved Republic approaches this election as was described in detail by Bryan Caplan in his The Myth of the Rational Voter (2007) which I summarized in ‘How Elections Really Work’.

Comments

[scenes]

"The takeaway to date from all this is that the Left’s political agenda is to promote the narrative that President Trump has mismanaged the nation’s C19 response."

It's hard to tell what the 'response' even is or was. It's a big place, national plans are silly, it's just an ad hoc affair.

The obvious moves (wash yer hands, hefty asthmatics and the old should probably stay away from crowds, outside is safer than inside) could have been written by a gas station attendant. While tugging at his nipple rings, Gov. Cuomo blew it be worrying so much about ventilators and shooing sick people into convalescent hospitals. People think that bandanas are super-magic talismans of health.

This man probably thinks that Trump killed 200 billion people...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoFrm69dgNA

...at least when he's not sniffing the help.

Our ancestors would have laughed their asses off at the lot of us, once they got over the wonderment of a man bun tree sitter.

[George Rebane]

scenes 223pm - Agreed. Never meant to imply that "the nation's C19 response" was either unified or coordinated, it simply was the federated polyglot that the several states decided to implement. But what almost all people don't understand is that it will be ONLY herd immunity that stops this and all other infectious diseases in a population of any modicum density - vaccines or no vaccines. The only remaining decision is how exactly to let herd immunity develop.

[Gregory]

I've been having something of a tête-à-tête with Don Rogers on this very subject, out in the open on The Union viafoura comment pages.

Apparently, the evidence for masks is so ubiquitous that he can't possibly point to one place. And I'd see it if I'd just open my eyes.

[scenes]

"Apparently, the evidence for masks is so ubiquitous that he can't possibly point to one place."

I was looking at this...

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/10/20-0948_article

which is utterly full of 'we don't know', although of course cloth masks involve proper fitment, donning, and daily washing with soap and water....

but liked this paragraph from a different article:

" Two key findings are that (i) the surgical masks, unvented KN95 respirators, and, likely, vented N95 respirators all substantially reduce the number of emitted particles, but that (ii) particle emission from homemade cloth masks—likely from shed fiber fragments—can substantially exceed emission when no mask is worn, a result that confounds assessment of their efficacy at blocking expiratory particle emission. Although no direct measurements of virus emission or infectivity were performed here, the results raise the possibility that shed fiber particulates from contaminated cotton masks might serve as sources of aerosolized fomites."

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-72798-7

[Randy]

@2:23pm Not so sure Big Fredo blew it. I think Il Duche Cuomo knew exactly what he was doing. He's a media whore and saw an opportunity to damage the President's brand while at the same time getting NYS legislative lackeys to grant him unequivocal power and leverage pandemic fear for all it's worth for federal bail out.

[scenes]

I did like this article.

"When the coronavirus first reached Argentina, Andrés Bonicalzi steeled himself for the sacrifices to come. A lawyer in Buenos Aires, he started working from home, canceled his weekly visits with his parents and vowed to keep his son inside. The government announced one of the world’s strictest lockdowns. The next few weeks would be difficult.

But those hard weeks have turned into seven months, and much of Argentina’s quarantine, believed to be the world’s longest, is still dragging on.

So much sacrifice, Bonicalzi sometimes thinks, and for what? The South American country has become one of the coronavirus’s most explosive breeding grounds. In early August, fewer than 200,000 Argentines had contracted the virus. That number has since surged to 1.1 million — 1 out of every 44 people — and 28,000 are dead."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/coronavirus-argentina-million-quarantine-lockdown/2020/10/26/65eefde2-149c-11eb-bc10-40b25382f1be_story.html

Perhaps the KVMR Crack Virology Staff, the ones who think that D. Trump should have done some unspecified thing differently, could give some insight on this.

[Bill Tozer]

OREGON MAKES IT OFFICIAL: IT’S A CLOWN SHOW

Someone in Oregon’s Public Health Authority thought it would be a neat and nifty idea to dress up as a clown to announce the latest COVID statistics in the state. As Yogi Berra might say, you have to see it, not to believe it. You only need watch the first 20 seconds or so of this two minute video to grasp the scene:

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/10/oregon-makes-it-official-its-a-clown-show.php

[The Estonian Fox]

BT @ 3:16 PM.

How much crap would have been dumped on the Repubs had they done something as stupid as this 'presentation'? Do the Dems celebrate Halloween earlier than everyone else? Maybe the earlier you vote, the earlier you get to dress up in costume.

So Joe says to Hunter - "hey, you've always liked clowns, haven't you? Give her a call".

[scenes]

just something to consider.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/29/these-12-graphs-show-mask-mandates-do-nothing-to-stop-covid/

[George Rebane]

scenes 120pm - Before we get all excited about all this new evidence about the performance of masks, remember that in the 21st century, in addition to our opinions, we each can also have our own facts, evidence, ... . To progressives, this is all incomprehensible and meaningless, or at best, another rightwing ruse to have us stop following 'science' in the fight against C19.