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Saturday, August 29, 2020

Let Me Be The First to Call Florida's Covid Outbreak Ending

With the disclaimer that I don't read enough other people to know if I'm the 900th to call it.  Probably not, though.  

I base this on a few numbers from the Florida state Department of Health.  I think the overall argument is easy to see.  Every single stat that I can get from the web site (and I'd like a lot more stats than I can get) is getting better.  This is the overall picture.  

Top left to bottom right: Emergency Department visits with influenza-like illness, then documented new cases.  Bottom left is Emergency Department visits with Covid-like illness and the bottom right is the Percent Positive for Laboratory Testing ("for" is a strange word there to me).  

Everything is getting better.  The ED Visits chart shows current numbers are under a third of what they were in early July.  New Cases are about the 35 or 40% of what they were.  

The time scale is different in the next plots, but the numbers are both moving in the right direction.  The two plots don't show the same sample; deaths seem to be from two weeks to months behind when a new case presents to the system, but the important characteristic is that deaths are declining rapidly.  

My county (Brevard) is in the lowest sixth of rates in the state, with a case rate of 1241 per 100,000, or 1.24%.  We haven't had a day with over 100 new cases since 8/8 and the last week has averaged 42 cases/day.  

The best read on this I've seen lately is one Irish posted several days ago - Lockdown Lunacy 3.0 - it's over on JB Handley's blog, but all the numbers in Florida are all pointed in the right direction.  Handley goes into Edgar Hope-Simpson's important work on influenza and seasonal patterns, which explain why the numbers in the northern tier of states were highest early in the year, and peaked later in the year in the southern tier.  The media made an enormous fuss over this trend, but it's what viruses do.  Irish biochemist Ivor Cummins gives a clear explanation of the seasonality in this short video.  Handley embeds the same video. 

Of course, lots has been learned in the last few months, both in our treatments of the virus and the knowledge of the virus itself.  Among the most interesting to me is the discovery that our T-cell immunity seems to be conveying immunity to this virus in most people.  That implies this coronavirus is genetically similar enough to other coronaviruses (mostly colds) we've been exposed to in our lifetimes.  That drastically drops the number of infections to achieve herd immunity to around the number of cases there have been.  The utter uselessness of the harsh lockdowns is interesting but not "new".  While that linked post is two months old, every study since then has reached the same conclusion.    

I also find it interesting that children apparently get the virus but don't spread it (more in Handley's post) and that so-called "super spreader" events have only occurred indoors.  One or two have occurred in events that had an indoor and outdoor component, but none are documented in outdoor events.  



15 comments:

  1. The CDC just revised its numbers: of the 153,000+ US deaths "due to COVID-19" that they and the media have been pushing, when push comes to shove only 9200+ were due to COVID-19 alone.

    They are going to eat some major crow, and some people need to be imprisoned over what happened to the US economy over this farce.

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    1. Fascinating.

      One of the things that Handley talks about is how badly people estimate how lethal it is. When asked what percentage of the population has died, the answer they chose was 9%. That would be on the order of 30 Million people. Compare the 30 Million to even the 153,000 and you see the effects of the news media feeding stories to keep everyone afraid of it.


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    2. And now the info has come out that 90% of the positives were 'exposed to, showing minimal signs of, not infectious and completely asymptomatic.'

      So, of all of the 'positive cases' only 10% were real asymptomatic or slightly active cases of Covid.

      We were played.

      Played by medical unprofessionals playing party politics.

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  2. Great post. As always, I have to go to a blog to get my good news.

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  3. I wouldn't call off the entire outbreak, but the recent second-wave spike is dwindling down appreciably, thank a merciful universe.

    But the idea that this only cost us 9200 deaths nationwide is risible, whatever moron or agency full of them is putting it out.
    We lost that many people in 4 days at the first peak of this, and those deaths weren't mislabeled motorcycle accidents, however comforting such farcical notions are to the tinfoil millinery contingent.

    The early word from medical forensic sources is that you're also going to see a spike of respiratory-related deaths 6-12 months hence of a goodly number of Kung Flu "survivors", as those who didn't die outright, now with both lungs entirely scarred from months of pneumonia, succumb from secondary and tertiary problems at a more leisurely rate in the coming months. Turns out breathing is kind of important.

    That won't be mislabeled motorcycle accidents either, but it's even odds whether they'll identify COVID as the cause, or try to palm it off on something else remains to be seen. Figures don't lie, but liars figure.

    Fully re-opening the schools will get us the next spike(s), and the holiday season from Thanksgiving to New Years' will likely bring the spike after that one (unless the two overlap).
    Which is about as difficult to predict as sunrise.

    Whether subsequent spikes are bigger than the recent one, or smaller, remains to be seen, and vaccine progress may yet pan out. Or crap out.

    I wouldn't go counting chickens anytime soon.
    We aren't seeing the beginning of the end; more like the end of the beginning.

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    1. @Aesop - So everyone should hide in their homes forever. And starve.

      Don't try to force your irrational fears on everybody else. COVID is not a threat to society at all, and never was. The mean age at death is 74. The median is 82. and almost nobody is dying of it these days.

      https://wmbriggs.com/post/32316/
      https://wmbriggs.com/post/32232/

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    2. And, as for the mask insanity, here's a comprehensive breakdown of the data.

      (Suffice it to say, paper and cloth masks do exactly nada.)

      I was masking to placate the sheep, but I've since
      put paid to that nonsense.



      https://www.rcreader.com/file/denis-g-rancourt-phd-april-2020-masks-dont-work-review-science-relevant-covid-19-social

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    3. Homesteader - I think anyone who has had training on working with hazardous materials knows that instinctively but it's always good to see backup. If you compare what you need to wear to paint a car or cut through a concrete wall to a simple mask, I think you understand that in your bones.

      BTW, good to see you, Aesop. Don't think I've run across you since your last blog post and I've seen maybe a half dozen comments on various blogs asking if anyone has heard from you.

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    4. The mask issue is a great social gesture; but doffing, donning, and microbial concentration become real issues.
      (TRAINED medical personnel
      don't do it correctly; let alone untrained civilians.)

      Assume a COVID carrier is wearing a paper mask- their every exhalation is building the viral count of the mask; meanwhile the exhaled air is blowing by the sides of the mask. Their viral penumbra remains unchanged (~20 FEET); they just now have a piece of biohazardous material hanging off their nose. When they go to remove it- fomite city.

      As for INHALING, paper and cloth do NOT stop a 2 micron particle. PERIOD. As for N95s- they're better, but
      still let in particles larger than Corona-chan.


      TL;DR- Level 4 biohazard
      organisms CANNOT be contained OUTSIDE of a level 4 facility; but, humans will reach for their totems, no matter what.

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    5. CDC now says that only 9,210 people died of Chinkypox in the US.
      https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/08/shock-report-week-cdc-quietly-updated-covid-19-numbers-9210-americans-died-covid-19-alone-rest-serious-illnesses/
      It's not even a flu. Aesop is a fool, not because he was fooled by the Chicoms and the CDC - I was, and many of us were - but because he won't admit he was wrong.

      There is no shame in being wrong, but there is great shame in lying to cover it up.

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  4. I haven't looked up the CDC report yet, but what Malatrope is saying is that they're trying to isolate the number of people that have died without an existing condition. From the start, everyone knew that those most at risk had the most co-morbidities, which is almost always in the most elderly.

    When they say those most likely to die are those over 80 who are already sick or have a handful of conditions, that raises the question, "what diseases don't kill the most in that population?" What disease spares the old, frail and sick and kills the young and healthy?

    So everyone would implicitly know that the virus itself would kill far fewer people, but define "far fewer." Is it zero or 1k or 10k or what?

    Saying that a 100 year old fought off the disease or a 40 year old didn't is information-free. Unless you know what made that 100 year old resistant or the 40 year old susceptible there's nothing that can be gained from those facts to help the next patient.

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    1. Every flu season those who get reaped the most are those over 75yoa who are already sick or infirm. Then it hits those with serious immune deficiencies, from cancer treatments or from AIDS or other issue.

      Funny, before the Covidiocracy, both Cuomo and De Blasio wanted to restrict state medical services to those 75yoa or older to just palative care.

      And, yes, very few who were otherwise healthy actually croaked from Covid. It reaped those with already damaged or compromised immune systems.

      Again, just like every other flu season...

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    2. The measure that's easiest to keep track of is what they call "excess deaths". In one of Ivor Cummins' videos, he charts countries that had a mild flu season in '18/'19. Those countries had fewer deaths than they probably would have had in a more severe flu season. Along comes the Kung Flu and those countries had a high death rate. Gee, it's as if they had a higher number than usual "hanging on by a thread" and Covid took them out. Who would have guessed? Besides everyone.


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  5. The lockdown will be rescued in the nick of time by the upcoming cold weather starting a new flu season.

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  6. I am very skeptical of so-called "super spreader" events since as far as I've seen they are all politically unpopular events, like church gatherings, but politically popular events, such as riots, protests, and inner city house parties supposedly don't spread disease? Something stinks here...

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