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Given that an estimated 469,982 under 18s were infected with the virus up to February of 2021, the survival rate in this age-group (the inverse of the IFR) was 99.995%. What’s more, 99.2% of total deaths were caused by things other than COVID-19.
Smith and colleagues’ findings underline just how small [3] a risk COVID-19 poses to young people, and hence – I would argue – why a focussed protection strategy was preferable to blanket lockdowns.
As early as 10th April 2020, Martin Kulldorff – co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration – published an article [4] on LinkedIn titled ‘COVID-19 Counter Measures Should be Age Specific’.
A day in the life under the reign of Covid Derangement Syndrome [5].
David McGrogan writes insightfully [6]. A slice:
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic highlights the dangers in starkly luminous yellow paint. The piecemeal expansion of the State that we have seen take place over the last 150 years or so was often built, as we have seen, on conceiving of sections of the population – the poor, the old, children, minority groups, and so on – as vulnerable and in need of help. We are now seeing what happens when the State is able to conceive as vulnerable not just a section of the population, but its entirety. Suddenly, potentially nothing is outside of the purview of public power, because every single interpersonal human relationship relates to the overriding goal of ‘stopping the spread.’ The family, the church, the community group, the workplace, even the sexual act – the State has now seen fit to put itself between individuals wherever they are, in whatever context, even in their own homes.
Peter Earle decries some of the bitter fruits of lockdowns [7].
Covid Derangement Syndrome continues to serve as a welcome mat for the straw man in Australia [9].
Daniel Hannan laments the increased willingness among the Brits to accept authoritarian rule [10]. A slice:
No, what changed, frankly, was the public mood. Ever since the first lockdown was imposed, this column has been mournfully predicting that we would see an upsurge in authoritarianism that went well beyond the response to the disease. And so it has come to pass. The sense of a collective threat has made us more tribal, readier to compel and submit and regulate and ban. We demand closed borders. We back ID cards – at least in the form of vaccination certificates. We want (or say we want) higher state spending.
Jonathan Sumption describes “Freedom Day” in Britain as “yet another false dawn.” [11] A slice:
He [Boris Johnson] declared that the vaccine had transformed the situation. The reality is that we have more restrictions on our freedom now than we had a year ago before vaccines became available.
He pointed out that we must open up for the sake of the economy. Yet hundreds of thousands are being pushed into self-isolation every week by the pings of the Test and Trace app [12]. The great majority of them will not test positive for Covid, let alone suffer serious symptoms. Yet numerous businesses are grinding to a halt.
He acknowledged that we must learn to live with Covid. Yet it seems that he is not prepared to live with the one feature of viruses that is all but universal, namely that they mutate.
At his Facebook page, Phil Magness uncovers more nonsense about so-called “long Covid” [13]:
The Lancet-owned journal EClinicalMedicine just published this “study” purporting to document over 200 symptoms associated with so-called “Long Covid.”
Dig a little deeper and you’ll find that this is yet another self-administered survey study conducted by the Body Politic Support Group – the alternative “wellness collective” organization that’s run by a professional psychic healer out of Boston who claims she can detect medical ailments by speaking to your dead ancestors.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(21)00299-6/fulltext?fbclid=IwAR1sde2NRfy4mU4tudSvc8KPGWxSaljRbR-ugjhAgT3OhORaYk5NhHjvcig