It's now September 2021, some 18 months after the start of the "pandemic" (see below), and over 15 months since my last post. I had hoped something approaching normality would have returned by now along with an understanding of the SARS CoV2 virus, the associated disease COVID-19 and how best to treat /contain it from a medical and public health policy perspective. Alas that is not the case and while many aspects of the virus and associated disease are now relatively well understood many remain contentious e.g. the extent of asymptomatic spread, the level of transmission by touch, the effectiveness of social distancing and so called "lockdowns", the effectiveness of vaccines in preventing the spread of COVID-19, concerns over vaccine side effects and many more. Since my first post many of the polices adopted in early 2020 to try and deal with COVID-19 e.g. masks, restrictions on travel, work at home orders, forced isolation etc remain in place to some extent while others, compulsory testing, forced vaccination (for some), quarantines for travellers have been introduced.
What is however clear is that governments, many scientists and medical professionals and the majority of the mainstream media have not provided the public with clear, accurate and balanced information on the situation. The mainstream media have largely acted as both an uncritical and supportive mouthpiece for the prevailing government narrative and as click-bait alarmists providing endless highly emotive stories of individual suffering, ever rising death tolls", "spikes" "surging", highly deadly variants of the virus etc etc .
I consider that it is self evident that Governments and their uncritical supporters remain firmly in the grip of "groupthink" whereby they are so convinced of their own "rightness" they refuse to consider, and in many cases try to suppress and discredit, anyone and anything that questions or challenges the position they hold and policies they are implementing. A key element of groupthink is an "end justifies the means" mentality whereby those stuck in groupthink believe that any negative consequence of their actions however terrible are both morally and practically justified i.e. a price worth paying.
My aim remains to try and provide a more accurate and balanced view of what has happened over the last 18 months by analysing the main elements of the mainstream position and in some cases the counter narratives e.g. it’s all a fake "scamdemic". To start however it is essential to try and characterise the true extent of COVID-19 crisis - a term I will use as, whatever the true causes, there has been and remains a crisis - to help assess to what extent the polices imposed to deal with it were and remain justified.
Pandemic or Scamdemic? - Definitions
If asked last last year what I considered a pandemic I would have said something like the medieval black death or the Spanish flu of the early 1900s that killed 10's of millions of otherwise healthy people world-wide. This understanding would probably be held by many others. A typical dictionary definition:
Definition of pandemic (Entry 1 of 2)
: occurring over a wide geographic area (such as multiple countries or continents) and typically affecting a significant proportion of the population
with an examples of usage being;
"The 1918 flu was pandemic and claimed millions of lives".
The definition of a flu pandemic used by the WHO until 2009 was: .
“An influenza pandemic occurs when a new influenza virus appears against which the human population has no immunity, resulting in several simultaneous epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and illness.”
This definition was altered in 2009 by WHO to:
“An influenza pandemic may occur when a new influenza virus appears against which the human population has no immunity.”
The current COVID-19 crisis does meet the first criterion of the 2009 onwards WHO definition of a pandemic i.e there is a consensus [see later posts on disputes about this] that SARS CoV2 is a new (corona) virus. However, as immunity to any given disease is in reality a complex and variable phenomenon and I can't see how a total lack the immunity of the "human population" could ever be proven, meeting the second criterion of the WHO definition can never be determined in practise.
Taking the earlier WHO definition and generic dictionary definition of a pandemic in addition to having to be novel and for no prior human immunity to exist, to be considered a pandemic COVID-19 has to affect a "significant proportion" of the population and/or cause "enormous deaths and illness" - to what extent is this true?
Pandemic or Scamdemic? - The numbers
If we ignore for the moment concerns over the reliability of COVID-19 deaths statistics from Our World in Data site the numbers of people who died in UK during 2020 were :
All causes: 604,045
Confirmed COVID-19 73,622
So, from a UK population of 66.65 million 73,622 deaths represent just over 1 in 900 people with COVID deaths accounting for about 12% of the deaths on 2020.
Looking at worldwide statistics:
All causes 58.32 Million
COVID-19 1.88 Million
From a world population of 7.674 billion the 1.88 million attributed to COVID-19 represents 0.02% or about 1 in 4000 people and about 3% of all deaths in 2020. Before considering these numbers, one must also consider to what extent COVID-19 affects the "human population” i.e affects everyone equally.
It was established early on in 2020 from Italy that the distribution of COVID-19 deaths was massively unequal. The vast majority of deaths being in the elderly and those with one or more existing serious conditions (comorbidities). According to the ONS for England and Wales the average age of people dying from COVID-19 was 80.3 years whereas the average of people dying from all causes was actually two years younger i.e 78.2 years. The number of people under 24 who died in 2020 whose death involved i.e some may not have been caused by, COVID was some 55 out of a total of 4579 deaths whereas the number of 65 year olds and over whose deaths involved COVID was 77,987 which is 1400 times greater.
Pandemic or Scamdemic? - Analysis
From the above :
It is arguable whether COVID-19 is truly a pandemic in the sense of the term generally understood and the definition by the WHO, prior to 2009
Given that most people know less than 900 people it is actually unlikely that the average individual in the UK - a country with one of the highest level of infections and deaths due to COVID-19 - will personally know someone who has died from COVID-19. If they do it is highly likely that person will have been “elderly” and /or with other comorbidities
Given the above some have concluded, perhaps not that unreasonably, that as they and possibly many of their friends' and family don't know anyone who has died of COVID this is somehow all a “scam” or fake issue - this is not a valid conclusion to draw. Despite the true impact of COVID-19 being deliberately exaggerated and serious questions about the accuracy of the official statistics regarding deaths attributed to COVID (see post on PCR tests) excess mortality statistics confirm that many hundreds of thousands of people around the world have died due to some new cause and SARS COV2 is the only credible cause I am aware of. Attempting to claim therefore this is all "fake", a "scamdemic" is simply not true.
European published excess mortality clearly show the impact across Europe of the “first wave” of SARS COV2. The first wave was largely over by week 20 of 2020 yet resulted in an increase in excess mortality across Europe relative to 2018 of some 50 thousand deaths.
Source https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps
I must be noted that, particularly for the second wave, it is impossible to accurately determine from excess mortality statistics alone how much of the increase was caused directly by COVID-19 and how much was due to other factors e.g the policies implemented in early 2020 to deal with it e.g massive cancellation of operations, vastly reduced GP and A&E services, curtailment of screening for diseases like cancer, shortages of medical staff due to enforced isolation, reluctance to visit hospitals and GPs due to fear of infection. Even some mainstream news outlets (but of course not the BBC) reported on a UK ONS public health modelling study carried out in 2020 where the percentage of excess mortality due to the lockdown policies themselves rather than the virus could be as high as 40%.
Even assuming 40% of excess deaths resulted from government policies rather than the virus by the end of 2020 COVID-19 would have been the cause of 150,000 excess deaths across Europe relative to 2018. [i.e 60% of the 250,000 difference at week 52 - see graph above]
Conclusion
The use of the terms pandemic and scamdemic are both to some extent flawed and to differing extents misleading characterizations of the true situation and continue to have serious consequences. Future posts will take a critical look at the consequences of these flawed characterisations.
Notes / References
Groupthink https://www.britannica.com/science/groupthink
Our World in Data Example Plot
