[ExI] next county

[Keith Henson]

<spike at rainier66.com>
T
> On Behalf Of Keith Henson via extropy-chat

Subject: Re: [ExI] next county

<spike at rainier66.com> wrote:

snip

>> ...  Both sites acknowledged that the data sources are the county health
departments, neither site included a disclaimer on how the deaths are
counted, even though caveats are clearly spelled out on the county sites.

>...If deaths were half or two x, would it make any difference?

Keith

> Ja sure would.  If the mortality rate for covid really is about half a
percent, then covid isn't all that different from other flu epidemics.  Then
the whole shutdown notion was a huge epic failure, with enormous cost and
consequences.  If we decide we are going to shut down the economy for every
flu epidemic, many businesses are not feasible and many investments are no
longer profitable.

The COVID-19 death rate will not be known until the pandemic is over.
That makes it hard to fault the public health shutdowns, which in any
case were targeted to keeping the hospitals from being swamped.  They
were swamped in Ecuador, people died at home and their bodies were
left out on the streets.

> here's more to it.  If the covid mortality rate is similar to other strains
of flu, we have been mass manipulated and deceived.

That implies intent, I can't buy that.  It's far more likely that the
health officials were doing the best they could on incomplete
information.  For example, the main accepted mode of transmission has
shifted from picking up the virus from a surface to aerosol, the
superspreader events.  Had this been known since the start, masks
would have been recognized as vital.

Also, the aerosol transmission route is disrupted by being out of
buildings.  Big experiment, the demonstrations were not followed by a
jump in COVID infections.  Opening the indoor bars has turned out to
be a disaster.  So have church services.

There is an additional factor that the health people have not worked
into their accounting.  Some of the people who get COVID-19 have
lasting after effects, particularly heart damage.  Permanent damage or
a long recovery time was seen in the people who got the original SAR
infection.

> The level of societal
destruction directly or indirectly responsible for the induced hysteria is
difficult to estimate.

> If the mortality rate really is about 3%, everything humanity did in
response makes sense.  If it is half a percent, nothing this species did
makes sense.

"From a blog I am reading:

"Exactly, crashing the economy and ruining millions of lives for the
sake of a slight retardation in the deaths of the very elderly. Simply
insane."

For my age, the death rate is around 10%.

If there is a vaccine soon, the shutdowns will be seen as a
life-saving idea.  If not, the "area under the curve" will be much the
same.  The indirect effect on hospitals may be worse than people on
ventilators filling the ICUs   To a large extent (as you have noted)
people have been avoiding hospitals if they can.  This is individual
decisions, not advice of the government.  Sometimes this is fatal.

As far as economics goes, I didn't eat out more than a few times a
year.  My expenses for groceries and related things have gone up by
about 20% partly because of delivery charges.

A bit from The Gardian.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/04/coronavirus-pandemic-wave-wildfire

"Like a wildfire, the virus relentlessly seeks out fuel (human hosts),
devastating some areas while sparing others. It will continue
spreading until we achieve sufficient herd immunity – when 50 to 70%
of the population has developed protective antibodies – to
significantly slow transmission. We will achieve herd immunity either
through widespread infection or an effective and widely available
vaccine. No amount of official happy talk will change that course."

Keith