Since TomNT and OzD been posting links thought I would put up a few of my own. All from the American Institute for Economic Research.
Singapore’s Accidental Covid Experiment: Reaching Herd Immunity Safely
It is a long article but I have cut and paste some of the more interesting paras. This was toughest of lockdowns in crowded environment.
On December 14, 2020 Singapore’s Ministry of Health communicated a summary of the steps it took to contain a raging Covid-19 breakout in its migrant worker living facilities. The report itself claimed that the city-state had over 320,000 migrant workers living in cramped dormitories and around 47% or a little over 152,000 contracted Covid-19.
What has happened in Singapore is certainly a human rights violation but it has also acted as an
unintentional controlled experiment that has yielded interesting information about Covid-19. There are few if any places in the world that such a controlled and thorough natural experiment occurred. The virus was let to spread rapidly through a population of low socioeconomic status, in universal as well as unsanitary living conditions, and what can be assumed to be working age. The result was only two deaths and 25 ICU admissions out of an infected population of over 152,000. Such an occurrence runs entirely counter to the prevailing narrative surrounding Covid-19.
The fatality rate for Covid-19 above the age of 70 should be seen as a controversial number, as the average human life expectancy is around 70 years old and reclassification of deaths due to comorbidities may be a strong confounding variable. The infection fatality rate was largely overestimated at the onset of the pandemic (as high as 1.6%) and more accurate estimations of that rate are now widely accepted, placing it at a much lower rate. For reference, the mortality rate for the seasonal flu put out by the WHO is under 0.1%. Obviously results can vary based on factors such as testing, access to healthcare, and so on. However, in light of this new information, it is clear that the mortality rate is nowhere near the estimation that was given to Congress on March 11, 2020. There it was stated that Covid-19 would be around ten times more deadly than the flu. (see my 2nd link below)
Although it was unfortunate that the migrant workers of Singapore had to endure such appalling conditions amid a global pandemic, the data from the incident is as precise as it gets and shouldn’t be ignored. Close to half of the over 320,000 workers locked away in crowded and unsanitary facilities were exposed to Covid-19 but endured only 2 fatalities. With an infection fatality rate near zero, perhaps the greatest danger wasn’t Covid-19 but the lockdown they had to endure.
https://www.aier.org/article/singapores-covid-experience-and-overestimated-death-rates/
Another interesting article is
Twelve Times the Lockdowners Were Wrong
No 1 is Anthony Fauci says lockdowns are not possible in the United States (January 24)
No 3 Anthony Fauci’s decimal error in estimating Covid’s fatality rates (March 11) (see Singapore comment above)
Fauci testified before Congress in early March where he was asked to estimate the severity of the disease in comparison to influenza. His testimony that Covid was “10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu” stoked widespread alarm and provided a major impetus for the decision to go into lockdown.
The problem, as Ronald Brown documented in an epidemiology journal article, is that Fauci based his estimates on a conflation of the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) and Case Fatality Rate (CFR) for influenza, leading him to exaggerate the comparative danger of Covid by an order of magnitude. Fauci’s error – which he further compounded in a late February article for the New England Journal of Medicine – helped to convince Congress of the need for drastic lockdown measures, while also spreading panic in the media and general public. As of this writing Fauci has not acknowledged the magnitude of his error, nor has the journal corrected his article.
No 5 is Neil Ferguson predicts a “best case” US scenario of 1.1 million deaths (March 20)
The name Neil Ferguson, the lead modeler and chief spokesman for Imperial College London’s pandemic response team, has become synonymous with lockdown alarmism for good reason. Ferguson has a long track record of making grossly exaggerated predictions of catastrophic death tolls for almost every single disease that comes along, and urging aggressive policy responses to the same including lockdowns.
Covid was no different, and Ferguson assumed center stage when he released a highly influential model of the virus’s death forecasts for the US and UK. Ferguson appeared with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson on March 16 to announce the shift toward lockdowns (with no small irony, he was coming down with Covid himself at the time and may have been the patient zero of a super-spreader event that ran through Downing Street and infected Johnson himself).
Across the Atlantic, Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx cited Ferguson’s model as a direct justification for locking down the US. There was a problem though: Ferguson had a bad habit of dramatically hyping his own predictions to political leaders and the press. The Imperial College paper modeled a broad range of scenarios including death tolls that ranged from tens of thousands to over 2 million, but Ferguson’s public statements only stressed the latter – even though the paper itself conceded that such an extreme “worst case” scenario was highly unrealistic. A telling example came on March 20th when the New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof contacted the Imperial College modeler to ask about the most likely scenario for the United States. As Kristof related to his readers, “I asked Ferguson for his best case. “About 1.1 million deaths,” he said.”
https://www.aier.org/article/twelve-times-the-lockdowners-were-wrong/
For a
more detailed article on Fauci’s evidence to Congress and the decimal point issue see link below. Summary here :
A statistic that bears repeating, Covid – based on infections vs deaths – has close to a 99.9% survival rate. Imagine how the world would have been different had Fauci told that to the Congress on that fateful day of March 11. Or what if Fauci had revealed that the average age of death from Covid would almost equal the average lifespan in the US and exceed it in most parts of the world? People present might have wondered why they were holding hearings at all.
There is a good John Hopkins / Our World Data graph showing cases v deaths for the world and countries in the article.
https://www.aier.org/article/the-decimal-point-that-blew-up-the-world/
My note : Remember most Covid death stats include dying
with not of Covid. Contrast with Singapore article above where there was pretty much no way to avoid the virus and how few actually died.
Food for thought.