CDC's misleading COVID-19 numbers — should we join prepper militias?

© 2020 Peter Free

 

20 March 2020

 

 

A helpful aphorism

 

When Humanity's Mob starts sprinting in one direction, it is always the wrong one.

 

 

Is "Lefty Me" turning into a libertarian Militia-Man?

 

Consider the following facts and see whether — in the interest of holding onto our Constitutional freedoms — you might be also.

 

 

CDC's stupidly behaving top-level professionals are driving me up the wall

 

Today, I address the CDC's misleading MMWR, issued 18 March 2020.

 

MMWR stands for "Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report".

 

This latest issue talks about COVID-19 in the United States:

 

 

This report describes the current epidemiology of COVID-19 in the United States, using preliminary data.

 

© 2020 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report: Severe Outcomes Among Patients with Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) — United States, February 12–March 16, 2020 (Early Release Volume 69) (18 March 2020) (at page 3)

 

 

Several disclaimers follow the quoted "epidemiology" statement

 

Not one of those, however, explicitly addresses the single most important missing quantity. That is, the total (and completely unknown) number of SARS-CoV-2-infected people in the United States.

 

Thus, the Report overestimates coronavirus morbidity and mortality rates.

 

It fails to take into account that no one has a clue, regarding the true size of the infection-carrying group of people that is necessary to come up with real rates of bad outcomes.

 

Instead, the CDC report's included Table calculates mortality based only on 2,449 identified cases.

 

Here is a picture of the Table included in the MMWR paper:

 

Photograph of CDC MMWR table in its 18 March 2020 issue. 

 

 

The Centers publish these results, using semantics that implicitly suggest that they are for the entire (seen and unseen) illness base.

 

This short-cutting of Reality's true numbers greatly overestimates COVID's actual bite.

 

Unless, of course, people are falling over in droves in American homes, streets and byways. Which they are (emphatically) not.

 

 

Stated another way

 

When we have tested comparatively-speaking "no one" in the American population for a virus that:

 

circulates almost entirely unseen

 

and

 

without displaying distressing symptoms —

 

and

 

is also highly contagious in that unrecognized state . . .

 

. . . we cannot, under any justifiable medical or scientific logic, come up with purportedly accurate rates of deadly occurrence.

 

 

Why these mathematical semantics matter

 

As I wrote two days ago, we are overreacting to this illness.

 

Sensationalizing sloppiness, like the CDC's, is needlessly scaring the American public.

 

This blazing lack of scientific accuracy is driving Government policies that are killing the American economy for no well-considered reasons.

 

 

In this — I cut the CDC and the Trump Administration no slack because . . .

 

These are the same dopes, who failed to make and distribute properly constructed SARS-CoV-2 tests — in sufficient numbers — when those tests were absolutely the most necessary.

 

Meaning, at the beginning of China's 3 to 4 month fight to contain the illness. And well before COVID massively spread to the United States.

 

All this delay took place during exactly the same period that other "smarter" nations effectively came to grips with the disease.

 

Think — Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Bahrain and (reportedly maybe) Hungary.

 

The CDC's inexplicably unjustifiable failure — in this early testing regard — will eventually be responsible for killing thousands of Americans.

 

When I think about this, as a scientifically and medically trained person myself, I get so angry that I figuratively can hardly speak.

 

 

Returning to my Militia-Man reference

 

Is our increasingly Constitution-flouting (arguably fascist Government) trying to scare everyone so much — by reporting falsely high COVID morbidity-death rates — just so that it can impose martial law — and pen us all up forever?

 

America's oligarchs would (indeed) love that.

 

Consumer-sheep effectively locked into cages. Like Tyson chickens.

 

No more anti-corporatist backtalk from the Rabble that way.

 

 

The moral? — You tell me

 

Right now, I wouldn't give you a cup of warm piss for either:

 

 

US national governmental competence

 

or

 

its allegedly Freedom-protecting integrity.

 

 

You probably should not either.

 

If you disagree with me, and:

 

 

after y'all lose your livelihoods

 

due to economic shut-downs

 

and

 

taxpayer-funded corporate bailouts —

 

and/or

 

you lose relatives and friends

 

to this mismanaged and unprepared-for disease

 

which, in turn, is exclusively due to

 

decades of abysmally lousy American Leadership's 100 percent failure

 

to protect the public against pandemics and biological warfare —

 

not to mention

 

this same Government's

 

bull-headed determination not to make American health care

 

reasonably accessible

 

and

 

reasonably priced

 

. . . well then . . .

 

come back to argue with me.

 

 

Until you successfully do that, I will probably be thinking like a libertarian prepper Militia-Man.

 

The irony to all this is that American Government and COVID-19 are daily demonstrating:

 

 

how important competent governance is to society

 

and simultaneously

 

how harmfully useless

 

and

 

societally damaging

 

American Oligarchy and Leadership are at it.

 

 

Americans really should demand a change.