Assume They Are Lying

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2 mins read

Yahoo’s Beauty and Style Editor offers a little medical advice:

An estimated 19 million Americans have been infected with the flu so far this season, and 180,000 of them have been hospitalized because of the illness, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The flu virus has already killed an estimated 10,000 people across the U.S., including 68 children, according to the CDC. In fact, the 2019-2020 flu season is shaping up to be one of the worst in years.

In contrast, the Wuhan coronavirus has infected more than 28,000 people and killed 565, according to data gathered by Johns Hopkins University — though those numbers continue to rise.

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/the-flu-has-killed-10000-americans-as-the-world-worries-over-coronavirus-221101770.html

“Stop thinking about coronavirus and worry about the flu” is a powerful meme, if only because most Americans are not going to worry about the flu. We get it every year. It’s a familiar enemy. And by playing off the huge number of mostly harmless flu cases, beauty and style editors across the fruited plain follow the advice delivered to them by governments across the world: don’t scare the horses.

I’m not going to scare the horses, either.  But I would like to give the stallions two things to think about. 

Firstly: we already know that politicians and governments lie.  They do not tell you the truth, they tell you what they want you to believe. It’s therefore a wise decision to completely ignore what governments say and instead watch what they do.

China has now locked down 400 million people – more than the entire population of the United States – into internal quarantines of various types.  How likely is this to be the case if there are only ~28 thousand sick people and less than 700 deaths?

There are really only two explanations for this seemingly monstrous overreaction. Either the communist government is using the flu to do some internal political housecleaning – not unlikely in any case – or there are far more than 28 thousand cases. Like millions more cases.

Ten thousand Americans die of the flu each year and we go about our business. But you’re supposed to believe that governments worldwide are shutting borders and setting up field hospitals because 700 people likewise died? Think it through, folks. The numbers are completely bogus.* What they are doing does not remotely match what they are saying.

Secondly, let’s just for a moment assume the numbers somehow reflect reality. The beauty and style editors are still using them incorrectly.

Every illness, no matter how many sufferers there are, will end in one of two ways: either the person will recover or he will die. One of two results. And you can’t count how bad a case is until it’s resolved.

19 million people in the US will get the flu, 18.99 million of them will probably recover. We base an estimate that 99.9+% will be fine on resolved cases from this year and years prior. It is the proportion of resolved cases – death versus recovery – that tells you whether to worry.

Now, look at the aforementioned Johns Hopkins “live” numbers. Ignore the number of cases that are ongoing and do a proportional calculation on the cases that are “resolved”. Death versus recovery. Two thousand flu victims recover for every one who dies. 2000-1. How does the coronavirus compare?

This number is why governments are isolating millions of people by force.

It’s safe to assume the Chinese are lying about the numbers. Therefore every story and every conclusion based on Chinese numbers is worthless.

That doesn’t mean we are all going to die. It doesn’t even mean that anyone you know is going to get sick. It means that just about everything you’ve been told in the mainstream press has been said not to inform you, but to calm you.

That they are not going to tell you the truth is just one more reason to be prepared for anything.

*For an explanation of where they come from, Chris Martenson has a model that has predicted Chinese numbers for almost a week now – it’s a simple quadratic equation, not an actual count.

El Borak is an historian by training, an IT Director by vocation, and a writer when the mood strikes him. He lives in rural Kansas with his wife of thirty years, where he works to fix the little things.

1 Comment

  1. This harping on “the flu” has made me notice something: I have never known or heard of, anyone who died of flu. I’ve known or “known of” people who died of every other cause of death usual for Americans, but never flu. I’ve known or known of people who died of one of the other 18 causes of pneumonia that the CDC lists, including viral pneumonia, – but NOT after or during the flu. And this is not only in my wide circle… I also worked in elderly housing for 10 years. Flu never killed anyone I knew or knew of.

    Yes, I realize that’s anecdotal, but one would think that over 50 or 60 years, someone – a friend’s aunt, a distant cousin, a “local man”, a baby we pray for in church – one would think if there are 10,000 deaths from flu in the US every year that eventually I’d have heard of at least one. But none.

    The other thing I’ve noticed is that even though the CDC says pneumonia has 18 major causes, 17 of which are Not-The-Flu, in their causes of death statistics they have lumped influenza in with pneumonia.

    Not suggesting they are “lying” but wondering if perhaps the inferences being used to generate the statistics are less than accurate.

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