How Deadly is COVID? Real Science vs Media Hype
By Chris Lonsdale | 21st Century Wire | June 19, 2021
I tend to be very curious about the world. I always have been. It’s probably what brought me to Asia in the first place. I get especially curious when things don’t make sense, in which case I find myself drawn into exploring what might be really going on. So, in early 2020 when the panic about COVID-19 started to spread around the world, like most other people I accepted the logic that we needed to “flatten the curve” so that hospitals would not be overwhelmed.
After all, nobody really had enough information to know what was going on, or how serious this new disease might be. And reports from front-line medical staff about the symptoms being experienced by COVID-19 patients made for gruesome reading. At the beginning it made sense to be very careful.
But, as the months went on, it became increasingly difficult to match what was being reported in the media with what we could observe using our own senses. I knew of no-one who had died of COVID-19. No-one who had even gotten sick with COVID-19. There certainly weren’t any dead bodies piling up in the streets. This now makes sense because mortality data for Hong Kong, and other Asian countries where I also spend time, show that 2020 was a very normal year as far as overall mortality levels were concerned.
Globally it was a little different. Most of the people I connect with around the world also didn’t know anyone who had died of COVID. One neighbor knew someone (in Russia) who got very sick but then recovered. One person I follow on Twitter, who is in his 70’s, was put into intensive care for several weeks and a few other people I follow on twitter had a family member who got very sick or died. Clearly there was an issue, but the data coming in about the scope and severity did not mesh with what we were being told through the media.
Importantly, the predictive models coming out of Imperial College in the UK assumed that almost no-one was immune to COVID-19, that it was both incredibly infectious and very deadly for everybody, and that millions would die.
We must remember, of course, that the author of the Imperial College report, Neil Fergusson, has a history of extreme overestimations. In 2005 as just one example, Ferguson predicted that up to 150 million people could be killed from bird flu. In the end, only 282 people died worldwide from the disease between 2003 and 2009.
Never mind Fergusson’s “checkered history”, immediately after the Fergusson models were published the media around the world began screaming that something like the “black death” was about to crush us, and that deaths from COVID-19 were mounting up at a terrifying rate. We were told that we had to be afraid …. Very afraid.
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Via https://alethonews.com/2021/06/20/how-deadly-is-covid-real-science-vs-media-hype/
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