Stop the “hair-on-fire” fear; Covid-19 is a highly contagious virus, but not nearly lethal as originally suspected.
Three months into coronavirus, the greatest disservice to the public has been the misleading and hysterical reporting on the new number of “cases,” or which celebrity has “tested positive,” or where are the new “outbreaks,” because survivability is high.
The time has arrived without equivocation to end the lockdowns and move to a risk management model that includes isolating vulnerable people and everyone else participating in daily life as quickly as possible, including children and college students returning to school.
Covid-19 is on the wane in the United States
Covid-19 is on the wane in the United States, but a poisonous fear has been unleashed into the bloodstream of too many Americans and it must stop. This fear has caused ordinarily normal, healthy, intelligent citizens to think they and their children are going to die imminently from Covid-19 when the chances of that happening are extremely unlikely. The promulgation of this fear has allowed unscrupulous governors to usurp the liberty of the Americana people, costing 40 million Americans their jobs, destroying businesses, and ruining countless hopes and dreams.
How ironic that three weeks after the New York Times ran its “Incalculable loss” front page on the United States nearing 100,000 deaths from Covid-19, the fatalities have slowed to a crawl, perhaps revealing a seasonable nature to the virus. When has the New York Times ever run a similar sensationalist front page about the more than 600,000 people who die each year from cancer, for example, much less other causes of unintentional deaths? Answer, never.
The nurses and doctors who have responded to treat Covid-19 patients are heroes, but the scientists and researcher who predicted that as many as two million Americans would die from Covid-19 were incorrect. We need the dedicated people that have made American medicine the envy of the world and we are grateful to them. However, “science” as a whole, now only warrants a vote, and not a veto. Even after three months of experience with the virus, the scientists admit they do not know everything about Covid-19. They have been inconsistent in judgment. On Friday last week, for example, Dr. Anthony Fauci said that attending protests and political rallies is “risky,” only several days after he said that a “second wave” of Covid-19 infections is not “inevitable.”
The right Covid-19 response model is risk management
Last Monday, a World Health Organization official said that the asymptomatic spread of coronavirus is “very rare,” before being forced to retract her statement. “We actually don’t have that answer yet,” she said Tuesday. In fact, there has been no substantive study on the matter.
Science’s “zero-sum game” demands we must contain the virus at all costs. We have gone full bore on “keeping people safe and if we can save one life, it will all be worth it,” despite that millions of Americans, especially children who have been prevented from going to school, are having their lives ruined by the draconian lockdowns.
The right Covid-19 response model is risk management. Without acknowledging risk and reward, science can never be wrong, because to minimize exposure to coronavirus with a complete shutdown works, but the consequences are catastrophic to the country in terms of disruption and depths of despair.
Dr. Fauci, who has worked in government his entire professional life, embodies the fallacy of only considering science in the Covid-19 equation. According to Wikipedia, he graduated medical school in 1966, completed internship and residency in 1968, and then joined the National Institutes of Health, working in public health ever since. As recently as March this year, Dr. Fauci described the coronavirus as "very low risk", and that "there is no reason to be walking around in a mask" and that only those with underlying conditions have reason not to go on a cruise. Fascinatingly, Dr. Deborah Birx, President Trump’s right-hand woman on Covid-19, she of the signature scarves, was a working doctor, and her guidance has proved far more reliable than Fauci’s.
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The lockdown model for Covid-19 and waiting for a vaccine, must end
The lockdown model for Covid-19 and waiting for a vaccine, must end. We need vaccines, and they will be here soon. But until then, all healthy individuals under 65, including children, ought to be allowed to contract Covid-19 and survive it with severe or minor symptoms, as nearly 100 percent in this section of the populace do. Some will die, and that’s tragic, but the most effective strategy will be allowing people to survive Covid-19, developing herd immunity, harvesting antibodies for vaccine research, and isolating the vulnerable.
At this point, it does not matter whether Covid-19 was biological warfare by China’s Communist Party or a planned Democrat Party initiative to ruin President Trump’s certain re-election. What’s relevant, though, is United States Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin saying last Thursday that the country cannot shut down the economy again if a second wave of the coronavirus occurs. “I think we have learned that if you shut down the economy, you're going to create more damage, and not just economic damage," Mnuchin said on CNBC. "There are other areas...of medical problems and everything else that gets put on hold."
We need to end the “soft” martial law in Democrat Blue States, too. Everybody is taking reasonable precautions and anybody else concerned for their safety, specifically the elderly and people with underlying medical conditions, ought to quarantine.
The lethality of Covid-19 can only be estimated because so many people are asymptomatic. Worldometers.com calculates only one death for every 10,000 for people under 65, and 89 percent of the time, that person was sick already with either diabetes, lung disease, cancer, immunodeficiency, heart disease, hypertension, asthma, kidney disease, gastrointestinal/liver disease, or obesity.
The great majority of Covid-19 deaths are from people over 65 years old with an average age of death of 75 years old
The great majority of Covid-19 deaths are from people over 65 years old with an average age of death of 75 years old, according to the CDC’s national center for health statistics. If we had isolated older Americans immediately, so many more would be alive today.
Even publications on the Left recognize the mounting evidence that suggests the coronavirus is more common and less deadly than it first appeared. On May 28, NPR reported that “tests are finding large numbers of people in the U.S. who were infected but never became seriously ill. And when these mild infections are included in coronavirus statistics, the virus appears less dangerous.” NPR also noted that the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security estimated the infection fatality risk at being between 0.5 percent and 1 percent. A story appearing in USA today on June 5, reported on a CDC document that estimated the Covid-19 fatality rate for those showing symptoms between 0.2 percent and one percent, with a "best estimate" of 0.4 percent.
Yes, Covid-19 is highly contagious, but nearly 100 percent of healthy people under 65 years old will not die from it, and for those under 44 years old, the death rate is infinitesimal, even when including people with co-morbidities.
Let’s be smart. Let’s take necessary precautions to protect the elderly who are the most at risk. Let’s send kids back to school. Let’s collect the antibodies, work on medical cures, and remember even with vaccinations, 60,000 Americans often die each year from the flu for which we don’t shut down the country. Let’s examine risk and reward, and not succumb to fear. Let’s also give science a vote on what to do next, but not a veto.
Daniel Wiseman is an independent political commentator, who focuses on national and international affairs. He spent nine years as a professional journalist in Wyoming before working in fund-raising, non-profit management, and is now working in New York City. Wiseman focuses his writing on how to bring the United States back to its Constitutional moorings. He writes exclusively for Canada Free Press.
