via WUWT, Charles Rotter , Authored by Michael Fumento
The U.S. is staring at a Netflix-type apocalypse. You know, with feral animals eating human corpses, mutant plants reoccupying streets and buildings, empty restaurants and malls across the landscape….Well, that last part is true, anyway. Not because of the disease but rather hysteria.You’ve heard the apocalyptic claims. Imperial College in London – in a claim that would later get walked way back to far less fanfare* – estimated as many as 2.2 million U.S. deaths, depending on how drastically the population is locked down, locked out, and locked in. To reduce that figure to a “mere” 1.1 million, we would need to live a gulag life “until a vaccine becomes available (potentially 18 months or more),” they said. The CDC has issued an estimate of as many as 1.7 million American deaths.Yet with lesser measures in place now – and for a very short period – the market has crashed, we are experiencing more unemployment claims than at the height of the Great Recession, and there looms a real possibility of a worldwide depression. And there are those who say those measures aren’t nearly draconian enough.Do we really need to destroy the country to save it?Consider that China has had fewer than 3,300 deaths even though the virus struck a country with a lousy healthcare system wholly unaware. Their epidemic peaked over five weeks ago, with almost no new cases now. So with a vastly better health care system, the U.S. can expect a per capita death rate about 666 times higher than the Middle Kingdom? Seriously, Imperial College?You can quit reading right there. But please don’t. The utter insanity here is worth documenting, as well as knowing why even the lower bound U.S. estimates are nonsense.EPIDEMICS ALWAYS FLATTEN AND DECLINE ON THEIR OWNFact is, the epidemic worldwide, far from “growing exponentially,” is slowing. And that was to be expected per what’s called “Farr’s Law,” which dictates that all epidemics tend to rise and fall in a roughly symmetrical pattern or bell-shaped curve. AIDS, SARS, Ebola, Zika – all followed that pattern. So does seasonal flu each year. COVID-19 peaks have already been reported in China, South Korea, and Singapore.Importantly, Farr’s Law has nothing to do with human interventions such as “social distancing” to “flatten the curve,” and indeed predates public health organizations. It occurs because communicable diseases nab the “low-hanging fruit” first (in this case the elderly with comorbid conditions), but then find subsequent fruit harder and harder to . Until more or less now, COVID-19 has been finding that fresh fruit in new countries, but it’s close to running out. So while many people assume that China contained its epidemic with draconian regulations, we actually have no evidence of that. Even the New York Times admitted South Korea recovered far more quickly with measures nowhere on the scale of China, although of course the Times still attributes that to human intervention, which assigning no role to Mother Nature.When the coronavirus epidemic ends and the public health zealots inevitably slap themselves on the back for having prevented their own ridiculous scenarios, don’t buy it. This isn’t to say that thorough hand-washing several times a day and not sneezing and coughing in others’ faces won’t help: It will. But without the authoritarian and economically-devastating measures the U.S. and other countries are taking that are wrecking the world economy, there will be no Apocalypse Now or in the future. The streets are empty not because of direct effects of the disease, but from fear and from government dictates; as in a cognate of “dictatorship.”
Plenty more to read at top link. However, I will include the last paragraph:
*Note: As this article was being written, Neil Ferguson, the head of the Imperial College study, simply threw his model away. Along with the U.S. one of 2.2 million deaths, he predicted the U.K. would have as many as 510,000 deaths. In an oral presentation he reduced the U.K figure slightly… to 20,000. So the model that launched a thousand articles wasn’t worth anything more than the pixels it appeared with.
Neil Ferguson's huge modelling error was covered in the post below:
More on Farr's Law
Farr’s law
William Farr demonstrated that epidemics decline at a mathematically predictable rate, using empirical observations of a smallpox epidemic to confirm this. He later formulated several other mathematical equations and laws that apply to epidemics, e.g., that prevalence of a disease can be calculated from the mathematical product of incidence and the average duration.
In the mid-19th century, Dr. William Farr made the observation that epidemic events rise and fall in a roughly symmetrical pattern that can be approximated by a bell-shaped curve. He noticed that this time-evolution behavior could be captured by a single mathematical formula (“Farr's law”) that could be used for epidemic forecasting.
Very complimentary to the interview from earlier today:
Perspectives on the Pandemic | Professor Knut Wittkowski | Episode 2
Related:
US Had Intelligence Pointing to Public Health Crisis in Wuhan Nov. 2019?
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