Face Masks Kill

This is a diagrammatic summary of a peer-reviewed journal article by Dr. Zacharias Fögen just published in the journal Medicine.

The Daily Sceptic has a non-technical summary of the article.

Related:

Another Way Canada Kills Its Own People: Euthanizing the Poor

Why is Canada euthanising the poor? Why not? What good are they? Who wants them? Justin Trudeau sure has no use for them at all.

Coronavirus Not As Deadly As Flu? Oops Did We Wrecked the Economy By Mistake?

Ross Clark

The Spectator, May 20, 2020: One of the great unknowns of the Covid-19 crisis is just how deadly the disease is. Much of the panic dates from the moment, in early March, when the World Health Organisation (WHO) published a mortality rate of 3.2 per cent – which turned out to be a crude ‘case fatality rate’ dividing the number of deaths by the number of recorded cases, ignoring the large number of cases which are asymptomatic or otherwise go unrecorded.

The Imperial College modelling, which has been so influential on the government, assumed an infection fatality rate (IFR) of 0.9 per cent. This was used to compute the infamous prediction that 250,000 Britons would die unless the government abandoned its mitigation strategy and adopted instead a policy of suppressing the virus through lockdown. Imperial later revised its estimate of the IFR down to 0.66 per cent – although the 16 March paper which predicted 250,000 deaths was not updated.

Epidemiology versus reality: Uppsala University model —predictions of Covid deaths in Sweden under various management scenarios including doing nothing (Lowermost line). Source

In the past few weeks, a slew of serological studies estimating the prevalence of infection in the general population has become available. This has allowed professor John Ioannidis of Stanford university to work out the IFR in 12 different locations.

They range between 0.02 per cent and 0.5 per cent – although Ioannidis has corrected those raw figures to take account of demographic balance and come up with estimates between 0.02 per cent and 0.4 per cent. The lowest estimates came from Kobe, Japan, found to have an IFR of 0.02 per cent and Oise in northern France, with an IFR of 0.04 per cent. The highest were in Geneva (a raw figure of 0.5 per cent) and Gangelt in Germany (0.28 per cent).

The usual caveats apply: most studies to detect the prevalence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the general population remain unpublished, and have not yet been peer-reviewed. Some are likely to be unrepresentative of the general population. The Oise study, in particular, was based on pupils, teachers and parents in a single high school which was known to be a hotspot on Covid-19 infection. At the other end of the table, Geneva has a relatively high age profile, which is likely to skew its death rate upwards.

But it is noticeable how all these estimates for IFR are markedly lower than the figures thrown about a couple of months ago, when it was widely asserted that Covid-19 was a whole magnitude worse than flu. Seasonal influenza is often quoted as having an IFR of 0.1 to 0.2 per cent. The Stanford study suggests that Covid-19 might not, after all, be more deadly than flu – although, as Ioannidis notes, the profile is very different: seasonal flu has a higher IFR in developing countries, where vaccination is rare, while Covid-19 has a higher death rate in the developed world, thanks in part of more elderly populations.

The Stanford study, however, does not include the largest antibody study to date: that involving a randomised sample of 70,000 Spanish residents, whose preliminary results were published by the Carlos III Institute of Health two weeks ago. That suggested that five per cent of the Spanish population had been infected with the virus. With 27,000 deaths in the country, that would convert to an IFR of 1.1 per cent.

     Related:    
DM: Lockdowns failed to alter the course of pandemic and are now destroying millions of livelihoods worldwide, JP Morgan study claims
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Israel Shamir: Corona conspiracies
Gilad Atzmon: Is this controlled demolition all over again
ZH: San Francisco area suicide rate exceeds Covid death toll
Trauma surgeon, Dr. deBoisblanc:

"We've never seen numbers like this, in such a short period of time," he said. "I mean we've seen a year's worth of suicide attempts in the last four weeks."

ZH: "Grandma Killer" Cuomo Sent 4,300 To Nursing Homes Despite Positive COVID-19 Tests
Dr.  Andrew Bostom: Covid19 Lethality: Unhysterical Data Are Emerging
Rutherford Inst: The Slippery Slope to Despotism: Paved with Lockdowns, Raids and Forced Vaccinations
Washington Times: 500 doctors tell Trump to end the coronavirus shutdown, say it will cause more deaths

ZH: Harvard Sued Over Replacing On-Campus Face-to-Face Teaching with Online Courses

Covid-19, and the Weird World of Ron Unz

Ron Unz, publisher of the Unz Review, a web-based collection of articles -- many by odd-ball Hitler admirers, anti-Semites, and advocates of Communism -- has run a series of posts concerning Covid-19 in which it is asserted (a) that Covid-19 is a biowarfare agent directed by the US at China, and (b) that Covid-19 is a truly terrifying disease, and that those who compare it with the seasonal flu are hoaxers. Furthermore, comments of said hoaxers are mostly, if not always, deleted from Ron's Review.

Thus, on finding a statement in an article at Zero Hedge asserting, on reliable authority, that the Covid-19 death toll has been comparable to that of the seasonal flu, I was overcome by an irresistible impulse to post it at the Unz Review, as a comment on an article by Ron himself:

Here's a quote that Ron Unz will have to delete, unless, that is, he's an honest man: "... researchers at the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University estimate Covid-19 to have an infection fatality rate (IFR) of between 0.1% and 0.36%. Similar to seasonal flu. Source

Did Ron approve it?

Nah!

Here's another comment I attempted to make at Ron's Review, in response to a comment referring to a WHO tweet that was subsequently deleted:

"There is currently no evidence that people who have recovered from #COVID19 and have antibodies are protected from a second infection." First, to say that there is no evidence of X is no evidence of of not X. But in any case the tweet [by the WHO] was deleted, so it would appear that their claim (the WHO's claim, that is) was either unsupported by evidence or known to be false. Second, to claim, as you do, that antibodies for Covid19 are short-lived is not the same as saying they are non-existent. Third, if antibodies to Covid19 exist -- as they must or immunological tests for the disease would be impossible -- and as even the WHO now acknowledges, that implies a degree of immunity in those who have been infected. And remember, without an immune system response, every case of Covid19 would be fatal. The fact is, Covid19, like the flu, a virus of the same family*, is a relatively mild disease except in a minority of cases (chiefly the elderly afflicted by one or several other serious diseases). The usual mildness of the disease is evident from the fact that although a substantial proportion of the population where serological surveys have been conducted have been shown to have been infected, the death rate as a proportion of those with antibodies is low, in the order of no more than about 0.3%. However, the antibody tests are not known to be highly reliable and the actual death rate is likely much lower. So far, the reported US death toll is just over 60,000 of 328 million Americans, and with the daily totals trending down, the total is thus unlikely to exceed 120,000. If so, the disease will prove considerably less lethal than both the Asian flu of 1957/58 that killed 70,000 of 149 million Americans, or the 1968 Hong Kong flu (H3N2 virus) that killed about 100,000 out of 200 million Americans.

Does that sound like the comment of a hoaxer, or does it sound like the sort of comment that a hoaxer might delete in order to suppress the truth?

 Yes, the Unz Review is a weird world, which deserves further scrutiny.

Related:
Vox Popoli: Facebook bans The Unz Review

Ron Unz, has said he believes the reason for his being banned on Facebook is " 

Facebook’s plans to crack down on misinformation related to our ongoing Covid-19 epidemic."

Having been banned by Ron Unz for what I assume he considered to be "misinformation related to our ongoing Covid-19 epidemic," I am inclined to think that justice has in some way been served -- not that I would consider Facebook a reliable guide to what I personally should or should not read.

How Herd Immunity Is Supposed to Work: Pretty Cool — If It Works

This three-minute video explains how vaccination works to protect a population, even when many, perhaps most, are not vaccinated.



The same logic applies in the case of naturally acquired immunity within a population.

Here's the explanation of the UK Government's policy in response to the bat flu, as provided by Guido Fawkes:

The government’s internationally unique strategy is premised on the idea that the majority of us will inevitably get the coronavirus and for most of us it will be merely an unpleasant experience from which we will recover. Letting the healthy get it, with the more vulnerable kept physically separated from the majority, in the expectation Britons will develop herd immunity and because immune people cannot infect others. [Thus], in the long run, [there will be fewer] fatalities.

The British Government policy reponse to COVID19 benefits from the Chinese experience. What that experience shows is that the virus-caused demand for hospital care and mortality rises sharply with age, doing so strongly over the age of 60. The UK response reflects this fact.

Thus, the authorities are allowing the infection to spread throughout the population to the point it impacts a substantial number of the elderly. At that point, the elderly will be required to go into quarantine for four months for their own protection.

Quarantining the elderly will have two effects:

(1) it will prevent mass infection of those most liable to life-threatening disease symptoms, thereby limiting both mortality and demand for hospital care;

(2) it will reduce the average number of people each infected person will infect, i.e., the reproduction rate or R_nought. The latter effect, combined with the rise in the proportion of the under-65 population who by then will have acquired immunity, will drive the reproduction rate down, hopefully below 1.0, at which point the epidemic will die out.

Perhaps Britain's current crop of bureaucrats and government advisers are smarter than the old guard:



But: Did they get the timing wrong?

Related:
Buzzfeed: The UK Only Realised "In The Last Few Days" That Its Coronavirus Strategy Would "Likely Result In Hundreds of Thousands of Deaths"
Business Insider: People over 70 in the UK will be quarantined at home for 4 months in a 'wartime' effort to tackle coronavirus