When is COVID policy nonsense going to be recognized as such?

© 2022 Peter Free

 

01 February 2022

 

 

Economically 'developed' society's inability to recognize facts and evidence . . .

 

. . . made a mess of COVID-19 policy for two years.

 

And even today — with mounds of data clearly demonstrating those policies' epidemiologically useless, yet very detrimental societal effects — we still continue with masks, quarantines, closed daycares, wailing teachers, and the essentially forced vaccination of the already immune. As well as increasingly mandated vaccinations of young children, who almost never-never became seriously ill in the first place.

 

Ours is (we can conclude) a culture run by a combination of the stupid, power-seeking and avaricious.

 

 

Even the often COVID-propagandizing Lancet has had (implicitly) to admit such

 

Last month, the following opinion popped up:

 

 

Surprisingly, IHME [Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation] models [see here] suggest that the transmission intensity of omicron is so high that policy actions—eg, increasing mask use, expanding vaccination coverage in people who have not been vaccinated, or delivering third doses of COVID-19 vaccines—taken in the next weeks will have limited impact on the course of the omicron wave.

 

IHME estimates suggest that increasing use of masks to 80% of the population, for example, will only reduce cumulative infections over the next 4 months by 10%.

 

Increasing COVID-19 vaccine boosters or vaccinating people who have not yet been vaccinated is unlikely to have any substantial impact on the omicron wave because by the time these interventions are scaled up the omicron wave will be largely over.

 

Only in countries where the omicron wave has not yet started can expanding mask use in advance of the wave have a more substantial effect.

 

These interventions still work to protect individuals from COVID-19, but the speed of the omicron wave is so fast that policy actions will have little effect on its course globally in the next 4–6 weeks.

 

The omicron wave appears to crest in 3–5 weeks after the exponential increase in reported cases begins.

 

A question remains in relation to the countries pursuing zero COVID-19 strategies, such as China and New Zealand. . . . Given the high transmissibility of omicron, it seems unlikely that China or New Zealand will be able to permanently exclude the omicron wave.

 

COVID-19 will become another recurrent disease that health systems and societies will have to manage.

 

For example, the death toll from omicron seems to be similar in most countries to the level of a bad influenza season in northern hemisphere countries.

 

The era of extraordinary measures by government and societies to control SARS-CoV-2 transmission will be over. After the omicron wave, COVID-19 will return but the pandemic will not.

 

© 2022 Christopher J L Murray, COVID-19 will continue but the end of the pandemic is near, The Lancet, doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(22)00100-3 (19 January 2022) [volume 399, issue10323, pages 417-419 (29 January 2022)]

 

 

I don't have much regard for models — in most of medicine

 

They are never any better than the ignorant, even silly, assumptions built into them.

 

Nevertheless, the last two years' COVID-19 data suggest that IHME model is almost certainly reasonably accurate. Masks, lockdowns, repetitive vaccinations, mandates and closed businesses have not appreciably slowed the spread of SARS-CoV-2.

 

Just compare data from places that mostly did and mostly did not.

 

CDC data has already proven, beyond reasonable doubt, that natural immunity works as well (or better) than COVID-vaccination in preventing serious COVID illness.

 

Evidence also suggests that COVID-19 is mainly 'bad' only to already unhealthy, or nearly dead, folks.

 

All of this has been obvious for more than a year. Yet manufactured hysteria, and its related COVID Maoism, have been prevailing government and media practice.

 

 

The moral? — Let's pull our heads out of colonic darkness and begin acting reasonably

 

Consider this a test of humanity's probable future.

 

As a purportedly happy aside, we Americans can draw some hope from China's self-evidently asinine attempt to zero-COVID themselves from that (now very-very) highly contagious respiratory virus. Adherence to the clearly impossible, on their part, demonstrates an apparently massive inability to deal with biologically based reality.

 

Perhaps we Americans will, in spite of our own seemingly unending list of perversities, perform slightly better in evolution's common sense competition.