Why Lockdowns Spread Bugs Faster Than Liberty: Coronavirus Update XLVI
LOCKDOWNS KILL
Suppose a bug is 100% transmissible. Everybody in contact with somebody infected therefore gets it, and passes it on with certainty to the next person they meet.
A lockdown will spread this bug faster than allowing people to remain at liberty.
Lockdowns are not quarantines in the old-fashioned sense of that term, where infected people were isolated---kept separate in every way from the non-infected. If you think lockdown and hear quarantine your ears are busted. Quarantines can make sense; lockdowns never do.
Lockdowns are merely forced gatherings. People in lockdown are allowed to venture forth from their dwellings to do "essential" activities, like spending money at oligarch-run stores. These stores are collection points, where people are concentrated. Some are allowed to go to jobs, such as supporting oligarch-run stores.
Which stores are allowed to remain open which are forced to close are arbitrary. No standalone restaurants, for instance, but you can eat in oligarch-run company cafeterias, like at Costco. Google employees can eat in their own cafeterias or break rooms, too. Restaurants can still come to you, via delivery. Another concentration point. You can go to to grocery store, but some aisles, those containing forbidden items, might be closed off, thus forcing people into fewer spaces.
Lockdowns are not quarantines. Lockdowns concentrate people into fewer areas. Lockdowns are only pain.
Lockdowns allow people outside to mingle for a time, then it forces them back inside to mingle with a vengeance.
It's clear that our 100% transmissible bug will spread much faster when people are forced to spend more time indoors with each other. Once one person gets it, he will spread it to those at his home immediately. If people were at liberty, and therefore more separated, the bug would still spread to everybody, but more slowly (the speed here is relative).
Now suppose the bug only has a 1 in a 1,000 chance of spreading per contact. Low. Lockdowns will still spread it more quickly than liberty. And for the same reason. Lockdowns force people together. The venues they are allowed to venture to are restricted, and therefore concentrate contact, and they force people inside their homes where it's obvious contact time increases. Lockdowns concentrate contact spaces and times.
Transmission rate, then, has little to do with the efficacy of lockdowns. There is no efficacy of lockdowns preventing transmission, only in controlling where the transmissions will take place.
The opposite of the lockdown is quarantine-liberty. The ill are quarantined, kept entirely separate from the healthy until they are dead or no longer communicable. Because of cheating, transmission is still possible, but it's far less likely. Liberty of the healthy allows people to live their normal lives, which slows transmission. And does not concentrate power into the hands of the government or oligarchy.
It was obvious before 2020 that lockdowns (with then only weather forcing people to gather inside for long periods) not only did not stop the transmission of bugs, but helped spread them. A look (below) at the all-cause death numbers peaking every single winter without exception (this year, too) proved that. It was in no way controversial. It was so well known that forced contact spread bugs that mentioning it was like saying the sun rose in the east.
Then came 2020 and the "expert" idea of lockdowns would do the opposite of what everybody had always known they would do. Suddenly, instead of spreading bugs, as they always did before, they would stop or at least slow the spread. Experts said so.
Why?
Models. Specifically, the two-step Model Circular Jerk.
It works like this. A modeler says "X is true." He builds a model that assumes "X is true". He runs the model, which output consists of "X is true" and its variants. He then announces, "X is true, confirmed by my sophisticated computer model."
In our case, we have a Ferguson claiming some new variant of the coronavirus has a higher transmissibility, an assumption. He says to himself "Lockdowns slow and stop the spread of bugs". He builds a model that assumes "Lockdowns slow and stop the spread of bugs". He runs the models, which consists of "This lockdowns will slow and stop the spread of this new bug variant." And he announced he has confirmed the efficacy of lockdowns via his sophisticated model.
And he is believed.
This happens everywhere, not just with coronavirus.
All that being said, the only thing that makes sense in modern lockdowns are limiting mass gatherings where mass intimacy is expected, such as at riots. Even still, the higher the transmissibility, the less effects these bans will have.
Update
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2HZ5P-0rsU&feature=youtu.be
BOOK UPDATE
The book is still sold out! Yes, still. The Price of Panic.
E-book and audio book versions are still available.
https://twitter.com/JenHarr01139726/status/1343219250010480643
https://twitter.com/MichaelSReith1/status/1341862993450057728
Website of similar name: price of panic.
THE NUMBERS
Sources: daily tests, CDC official toll number one, number two (the old weekly file, now suspect). Deaths by age. Covid & flu. WHO flu tracker. All current as of Monday night.
Daily tests:
This is the number of daily tests. The date of the CDC's peak attributed deaths is noted. Christmas really knocked these numbers down, thank God.
More tests lead to more positives. Each positive test in the media is counted as a new "case". These are almost all not cases, but merely positive tests, which indicate past infections, current by mild infections, asymptomatic infections, and even no infections at all. False positives.
We need to break people of the testing habit. New Years will also keep the numbers lower. So maybe a few will give up their routine testing.
Here's the CDC weekly ALL CAUSE death counts, or the Perspective Plot. The late drop off is late counting, which takes up to eight weeks to get all, but most are in by three. We need to look at all cause deaths because we can't quite trust the COVID numbers.
The black line is all deaths, including COVID. The dashed is all deaths minus attributed COVID, and the red, for perspective, is COVID. (Again, the drop off is late counts.) The blue line, about the same order as the doom, is flu+pneumonia (it's the pneumonia that kills most flu patients).
IT IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND DEATHS ALWAYS INCREASE RIGHT AT THIS TIME OF YEAR, PEAKING IN MID JANUARY. DO NOT BE ALARMED. PLEASE PASS THIS INFORMATION ON!
The January peaks are caused when we enter our voluntary lockdowns in winter, spreading bugs. This is also the "solution" governments hit upon to stop the spread of bugs. Lockdowns kill, as we saw above.
The CDC (important!) stopped reporting separate flu and pneumonia deaths midway through 2020, but I estimate them after by subtracting deaths "involving" COVID from those "involving" (their word) pneumonia or flu or COVID. That's the dashed blue line.
Here is another way to look at the same data, week of the year all cause deaths, along with a model (black line) of what deaths would look like without COVID.
CDC has their own "excess" death model with which I do not agree. I've explained that in other posts; briefly, the black line is my model, based only on extrapolating population increase. That allows us to produce this figure, which is the cumulative estimate of the 2020 total "excess" deaths.
Ignore the last three points or so, which are due to late counts. We're proportionally about the same number of "excess" deaths we saw in the '57-'58 Asian flu.
Understand: these "excess" are not just COVID, but all the deaths caused by the "solution" to COVID, caused by the lockdowns, missed diagnoses, suicides, iatrogenic deaths, and on and on. Panic kills.
Flu is still missing. CDC found one pediatric death for flu this year. One. Here is the WHO's global flu tracker, showing the same thing:
These, like the CDC flu picture are not deaths or illnesses, but counts of tests made. Testing has disappeared, because all tests are COVID tests now.
If we focus only on COVID deaths, we lose all perspective. We can see above that deaths peak every January, because of our self-enforced wintertime lockdowns, when we all hunker down inside and spread bugs among ourselves.
Here is the CDC official population mortality rates for the all causes other than COVID, and "involving" COVID (with and of).
Here are the same population fatality rates in tabular form:
POPULATION FATALITY RATES
Age COVID OtherCause
1 Under 1 year 0.0000082 0.00420
2 1–4 years 0.0000011 0.00018
3 5–14 years 0.0000012 0.00011
4 15–24 years 0.0000110 0.00070
5 25–34 years 0.0000440 0.00130
6 35–44 years 0.0001300 0.00200
7 45–54 years 0.0003500 0.00360
8 55–64 years 0.0008200 0.00790
9 65–74 years 0.0020000 0.01600
10 75–84 years 0.0050000 0.03800
11 85 years and over 0.0140000 0.12000
No matter what age, there is at least about a 10 times or larger chance of dying from something else then COVID. If you're under 44, the COVID risk is vanishingly low. Our level of fear is in not in line with the actual risk.
About masks in depth, see this article and this one.
To support this site and its wholly independent host using credit card or PayPal (in any amount) click here