Covid FailureWhat we did didn't work. Let's learn from that.
MAY 16, 2022
PETER VAN BUREN
We were swindled, fooled, bamboozled, and lied to during the pandemic. The public-health establishment misled the American people about the value of masking, closures, and social distancing. No one has accepted blame. Understanding how badly we failed is not only an inevitable part of the “told you so” process, but, more importantly, a lesson for next time. Just ask the Swedes.
Sweden had zero excess deaths associated with Covid-19. The U.S. had the most excess deaths of all nations. New York had more than Florida. That’s the whole story right there in a handful of words.
Let’s unpack it.
The key element of misdirection in the American swindle was case counts, those running numbers on screens telling us how many Americans had tested positive for Covid. If you’re curious, it looks like some 60 percent of us have had Covid at some point, with most of us experiencing mild or no symptoms.
How high the case numbers went in your neck of the woods depended a lot on the amount of testing taking place. More testing meant more “cases.” For me, when I had a very mild set of symptoms all clearly in line with Covid, I never even bothered to test. Like most people, I just sat around the house for a few days until I got better. My spouse, who had no symptoms, never got tested, either. Neither of us were included in the ever-growing case counts that dominated the headlines for years.
Not that it matters. The case count tells us very little. Hospitalization totals are useful for managing caseload, but often are indicative of protocols like testing patients upon entry to the hospital. Many hospital treatments changed, too. Initially, many Covid-positive people were hospitalized and put on respirators. Before long, many doctors realized infections associated with long-term respirator use were killing people, too.
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The only statistic that really matters then when talking about the roughly two years of the pandemic is “excess deaths,” deaths beyond the usual couple of million that occur every year.
Sweden had zero excess deaths. The U.S. had the most excess deaths of all nations. New York had more than Florida.
Sweden did very little in terms of halting work and school, or forcing masking and social distancing. The U.S. did quite a bit more. The U.S. states known for their Covid “efforts,” particularly New York, had excess deaths worse than or similar to do-little Florida. These states expended an awful lot of effort and angst, and suffered great collateral damage (addiction, suicide, unemployment, social unrest, failing grades), for very little benefit.
And we were lied to by the Covidians. In July 2020, the New York Timesstated Sweden’s “decision to carry on in the face of the pandemic has yielded a surge of deaths without sparing its economy from damage. Sweden’s grim result—more death, and nearly equal economic damage—suggests that the supposed choice between lives and paychecks is a false one: failure to impose social distancing can cost lives and jobs at the same time.”
Tsk, tsk, said the media. And they’re still saying it. Despite Florida having 148 excess deaths per 100,000 to New York’s 248, Politico‘s May 1, 2022, headline read: “Florida lost 70,000 people to Covid. It’s still not prepared for the next wave.”
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/covid-failure/
