Never let a crisis go to waste

Well, they’ve got their financial reset, muzzled us and frightened us into obsequiousness. Unfortunately, as this CV-19 ‘pandemic’ develops, a chasm is opening up between Government policy in some countries and what is actually supportable by the IFR data. What might have been reasonable in the fog of the March panic is increasingly less so into Christmas, particularly in the UK. Without a rapid re-think we are therefore in great peril of increasing social unrest, not just against an incompetent yet authoritarian Government, but from a younger generation that has been cruelly betrayed by the previous one

When SARS-CoV-2 was declared a pandemic, this ‘novel’ virus was projected to infect possibly 80% of us. Notwithstanding that the initial estimates for the infection fatality rate (IFR) were brought down from around 3.5% to approx 0.9%, this was still enough to excite estimates of deaths topping 2 million in the US and over half a million in the UK. At this stage, a radical policy of containment and lockdowns by Governments was perhaps unsurprising and were broadly supported by a populous that was having the crap scared out of it by the MSM on a daily basis.

What may have seemed reasonable back in March however, is becoming less so as we learn more about the virus and some of the flawed models and flimsy assumptions on which some of the ‘experts’ based these. For instance, the assertion that as this was a ‘novel’ virus meant that there would be no pre-existing immunity in the community, seemed to have ignored the role reactive T cells in building herd immunity, while the simplistic mathematical extrapolation of the progression of infection also ignored the role of social networking – both factors that should have been evident from the progress of H1N1 (swine flu) in 2009.

While reliable testing data remains elusive, not helped by false-positives and a possibly high proportion of asymptomatic cases, what has become increasingly clear from the data is that not only is the overall IFR rate probably considerably lower than the 0.9% original modelling assumption, but that it is heavily skewed against the sick, with 94% of the 196,639 CV-19 related deaths reported by the CDC in the US (to 7 October) to have comorbidities. Deaths reported with only COVID-19 as the cause therefore represented only 6% of this total, or under 12k. Incorporate this with the heavy weighting of mortality to the over 65 year olds, that we discussed in our post of 9 July 2020, and the risk of death to healthy youngsters is very low. Even assuming a relatively low rate of comorbidity of only 16% on the cumulative 437 of CV-19 related deaths in the 0-24 age range (which would not even cover accidents and the obese), this would suggest only approx 367 of actual CV-19 deaths for this age range, or 3.1% of the total, compared to the 31.7% of the population that this demographic represents in the US. Notwithstanding a probably higher proportion of asymptomatic infections in this age range, this would suggest an underlying IFR risk to healthy 0-24 year olds from CV-19 of perhaps less than 0.001%, or 1 per 100,000 infections. Include the above asymptomatic issue together with a possible pre-existing reactive T cell immunity and one is probably looking at a CV-19 fatality rate that may be only one tenth that of the suicide rate for that age group, totalling 6,807 last year versus what might be less than 370 deaths from CV-19 so far this year. To put this into perspective, it would take only a 5% increase in the suicide rate from this vulnerable group to equal the total deaths from CV-19.

Notwithstanding this, Governments, such as in the UK, have shuttered schools for most of this year and now are imprisoning a number of university students in their halls of residence.

While this might seem a rational way of enforcing herd immunity on a proportion of the population that is largely immune from the worst ravages of this virus, it is hardly likely to endear the boomers to their children and grandchildren. Instead of bequeathing them riches from our labours and management, we’ve left them bankrupted with debt, an unfunded pensions kitty and a devastated economy with the double whammy of over-priced property values, but poor earnings opportunities as a consequence of our addiction of funny-money financing.

The next generation has every right to be pissed at us.