Tweet [1]
Sohrab Ahmari eloquently decries the Covid-derangement-induced destruction of New York City [2]. A slice:
When I got home, I told my wife that I wished to launch a civil-disobedience movement against the lockdowns. She blessedly talked me down, and I slept off the strong drink and inspired resolution. Still, I’m angry, as an American and a New Yorker, and have been angry since this all began. I can’t avoid holding in contempt the virtue-signaling double-masking types on the Upper East Side (“I’m one of the good ones, Dr. Fauci!”); the moms at my son’s Catholic school who pull Junior away from touching a metal railing (“Watch out! The virus!”); the young professionals who seem to take a perverse pleasure in the possibility that we are unlikely to socialize in person ever again and must learn to love the Clubhouse voice app.
Ben Domenech talks with Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff [3].
Knut Wittkowski talks with Bretigne Shaffer about the ravages of lockdowns [5].
Lenore Skenazy writes rationally about the irrationality of Covid hysteria [6].
Kick this tyrant and hypocrite from office [7].
Karol Sikora calls for a return in Britain, not to any ‘new normal,’ but to the true normal [8]. A slice:
Having concerns about the cost of lockdown does not make you a ‘Covid-denier’, I would never dream of labelling someone a ‘cancer-denier’. The personal attacks and vicious insults have been relentless, but it’s important to rise above it. I refuse to smear and deride anyone in the search for Twitter ‘likes’.
It’s a sad truth that the severe negative consequences of lockdown have been largely ignored, presumably for political reasons. In cancer alone, the damage has been significant. Diagnosis, treatment, research and more have suffered enormously. There are no daily updates or ministerial press conferences, but this is a major public health crisis which will take years to recover from.
Ethan Yang compares Covid to the Spanish 1918 flu [9]. A slice:
Furthermore, the two diseases are vastly different in terms of who is vulnerable. Covid-19’s severe outcomes almost exclusively affect the elderly and the immunocompromised, particularly those over the age of 65, which is also approaching the life expectancy of a human. Furthermore 94 percent [10] of Covid deaths occurred with preexisting conditions. It poses virtually no risk to children, minimal risk to young adults, and only seems to kill more than 1 percent of victims with those over the age of 65.
On the other hand the Spanish Flu was devastating to virtually all age groups and did not discriminate between the healthy and the unwell.
“Covid Marshalls”? [11]
Reactions such as this one are why I call it “Covid Derangement Syndrome.” [12]
Harry Dougherty puts Indian Covid into perspective [13]. Two slices:
It’s wise to be sceptical when faced with emotive journalism that expects readers and viewers to take what they see at face value. Images from Italy last March of coffins piling up in churches and being transported by military vehicles through abandoned cities sent the world into hysterics. It looked like something out of the pandemic thriller Contagion, but the reality was a lot less scary, if more infuriating. The disturbing scenes were simply the result of the Italian government’s decision to ban funerals [14], but the facts were redundant at this stage.
The global alarm in spring 2020 was boosted when aerial footage of the Hart Island public graveyard in New York City was lapped up as a ‘mass grave’ by many major broadcasters in the UK and US. It remains true that the graveyard was much busier than normal, but the whole truth was less scary, if much sadder. The site [15] had been used by the city since 1869 as a burial place for deceased individuals who were either unclaimed or whose families didn’t plan funerals for them, and the increase in bodies arriving at Hart Island was largely due to a change in New York’s storage policy [16], which shortened the maximum amount of time a medical examiner could keep a body in storage.
…..
If we are generous to the catastrophists and act as if India’s population hasn’t risen considerably in the last two years (which would make any death toll appear to claim a higher percentage of the population then it actually has, and might compensate for any Covid deaths that may not be accounted for), and even more generously assume that every one of these officially labelled Covid deaths was directly caused by Covid, not heart disease, old age, road collisions [17] or gunshot wounds [18], then roughly 0.0002 per cent of India’s population was lost to Covid on Sunday. But Hungary’s 205 new Covid deaths account for 0.002 per cent of their population, meaning April 25 was proportionally a deadlier day for Hungary than it was for India.
The latest number from India is roughly the equivalent of 120 Covid deaths in a day in England and Wales, which would not be regarded as a particularly grim milestone even by the doom-mongers in Whitehall and Fleet Street.
Here’s a bit of good news out of Canada [19].