Georgia (USA) COVID-19 Crisis Deepening

Faith & Science Conversation
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Donald John Trump and politicians/pundits who echo him are the only folks I am aware of who publicly claim that increasing cases are the result of increasing testing.

So go ahead, Vance, tell us which epidemiologists you were relying upon to refute the epidemiologists at the CDC* and Johns Hopkins.

Or were you claiming epidemiological expertise for yourself?

You explicitly claimed that the statement I made was echoing those who (often) are deliberately engaged in deceit. Here, I will repeat your reprehensible statement verbatim:

Your statement is a pernicious and indefensible character assassination, Vance, and it should not even enter your mind, much less this forum.

Peace,
Chris

*I can provide a link, but it would take a bit of research.

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I made no statement on your character, Chris.

I made a general statement.

You, on the other hand, made a specific and untrue claim about me.

Perhaps you are too invested in this to see what happened and I need to give you time to reflect.

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Your protestation is a textbook exemplar of gaslighting. Your post was a reply to my statement, and your post targeted my statement and the epidemiologists (such as those at the CDC and Johns Hopkins) upon whom I relied when I made that statement. You specified that your character assassination was often true of those who make that statement, and I am one of those who make that statement. Your character assassination was indefensible when you first wrote it, whether it was about me or about epidemiologists who are serving the public, and your gaslighting about it is reprehensible.

You have left unrefuted the fact that you were relying on a biased and lagged sample about Georgia hospitalizations.

You have left unrefuted the fact that epidemiologists demolish your unsourced assertion that increasing cases are attributable to increasing tests.

You have left unrefuted the fact that epidemiologists directly contradict your unsourced assertion that increasing test positivity is unrelated to disease incidence.

I have invited you to provide a reliable source for your assertions that fly in the face of epidemiological wisdom, and you have refused.

So as I look back at this thread, Vance, I don’t think that I’m the forum participant who has a problem.

At the end of the day, I remain glad that you are hale and hearty, my friend. And I am sincere in that sentiment.

Chris

P.S. My statement about Trump the epidemiologist was intended as irony. I thought it was so obvious that I didn’t need to specify it was irony. Evidently I was wrong. So I hereby acknowledge that you have provided no basis whatsoever for your assertions about case counts and testing, Vance.

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Did I assert that?

I will look back to see, but I don’t think so.

Likewise with this.

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Chris, I have read my posts a couple of times on this thread and see neither assertion.

Could you point them out to me?

Perhaps you read things into my posts that were not said.

Have you misread my words “X is a function of…” to be “X is solely a function of ___ with no other factors involved and is unrelated to everything else?”

That misreading would be very different from what I actually wrote.

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(Paraphrasing) You claimed those who point to increasing cases as evidence of greater coronavirus spread are misleading, often deliberately.

You also seemed to disagree with the statement that increasing test positivity is a function of increasing disease incidence.

Do you actually agree that increasing test positivity reflects increasing disease incidence? If so, please state so clearly instead of saying “But also…” I am trying to parse your words and implications as best I can.

Instead of saying I haven’t understood, you could instead state clearly what you agree with in what I have posted and what you disagree with.

As it is, you give the appearance of disagreeing, then you claim to be misunderstood, but you fail to offer any clarification.

I would welcome any clarity you care to shine on what parts you agree with and what you disagree with.

Best,
Chris

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Wow, Chris, if you compare my posts to your claims you will see that your posts are inaccurate and my posts are true.

In your first inaccurate paraphrase, you left out the important caveat of “without noting…”

I did not say or imply that everyone reporting those statistics without the important caveats is trying to mislead.

Your second inaccurate claim is not even a paraphrase but is an imaginary claim, one I never made. I did not deny a relationship between disease incidence and positive tests.

No. Reflects is a word too strong. If you add the caveat “all other things being equal” or change the word reflects to “likely indicates,” then we may be closer to agreement.

The decisions of who is tested and how those test are counted makes a difference.

Please do not reword my posts in the image of your interpretation. You did not make accurate conclusions of my own words.

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Have a good day and stay safe, Vance.

Chris

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You have a good day too.

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I thought this was a great podcast which bases everything they say on scientific AND historical data. It calls into question much of the mainstream narrative. There are a few points of speculation but they readily admit when they are speculating. Ivor Cummins On Lockdowns, Immunity, Curves, Mortality Rates, & Analyzing the World's COVID Data - The Energy Blueprint

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I read a few pages of the transcript. It looks like the usual misleading stuff from the handful of scientists who are intent on minimizing COVID-19. If you want to raise specific points you think are important in the podcast for discussion, please do – I don’t have time to critique the whole thing.

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Hi Jessica,

Welcome to the forum again! Glad you’re here to share your thoughts.

Cummins made some good points about the importance of vitamin D and weight control to reduce the impact of COVID-19. They are a useful reminder for all of us. He is also correct that a majority of those who are infected are not seriously affected.

In my opinion, however, it’s important to remember that the minority who are seriously affected represent an enormous toll in deaths and long-term debilitation. “85% are not seriously impacted” does not at all mean we can afford to disregard public health measures. The converse of that statistic is that 15% of those infected are seriously impacted, which is an enormous problem during a pandemic.

Cummins’ recommendation to rely on “the natural curve” of herd immunity while protecting the elderly has proven ineffective both for the general population and for the elderly. The elderly typically have no choice but to interact with staff members (at residential facilities) and/or family members (in homes), who in turn are affected by community spread of the virus. Almost 200,000 elderly have died in the US alone in spite of significant efforts to shield them from the spread of the virus. It would be a much better policy, in my opinion, to minimize the spread of the coronavirus over the next few months while we ramp up the distribution of vaccines. We can achieve herd immunity without resigning ourselves to widespread death and debilitation attributable to this pandemic.

Cummins relies on comparisons to Spain, France, and Italy to assert that Sweden’s policies should be followed. However, there are other countries that should be considered as well. Consider this snapshot of coronavirus infections across a broader range of countries as of November 3:

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Sweden is not even doing as well as the United States in this comparison. I would direct your attention to the effectiveness of public health measures in South Korea and Singapore; would you agree with me that those 2 countries provide better examples for public health policy?

Cummins is correct that previous studies of mask policies have shown them to have little utility in preventing the spread of influenza. He is, however, incorrect that the studies should inform policy regarding coronavirus. The critical difference, as epidemiologists at the CDC and universities point out, is that anyone who is sick with influenza is symptomatic before they become infectious; thus flu sufferers can easily and effectively quarantine, maintain social distance, etc. to prevent its spread. However, most of those who are infectious for coronavirus are not symptomatic. Masks are effective for coronavirus because they reduce the spread of coronavirus by those who are asymptomatically infectious. I provide these references to the scientific literature so you can verify this conclusion for yourself:

Cummins makes a fundamental statistical mistake in comparing 2019 flu season mortality to 2020 coronavirus mortality:

Europe in general, from the excess mortality database, 2019, we had 140,000 excess mortality. A hump during respiratory and that’s around November, through to around April is the season. You always see a hump in excess. 140K and just for comparison, 2020 is concentrated into Corona in March, April, and it’s 185,000.

His error is that he double-counted coronavirus mortality in March and April in both the flu season mortality (“November through to around April”) and coronavirus mortality.

Cummins makes many other errors large and small in his presentation, and I do not have time to address them all. I do not find this surprising because Cummins is a chemical engineer with no training in public health or epidemiology. He has worked hard to gain expertise in weight management and physical training, fields where I would no doubt find his advice to be quite helpful. However, his methods in epidemiological analysis show a lack of insight into a field which is admittedly quite complex.

Finally, I find his speculations about a conspiracy among public health authorities and pharmaceutical companies to be quite toxic. The WHO, the CDC, and AstroZeneca are not divinely inspired, and it’s worth double-checking them as we would any organization about any matter of importance. That said, given the current information about coronavirus and about their efforts, I harbor no doubts about the importance of their work. Given Cummins’ profound misunderstandings about coronavirus and public health measures, I see no reason to trust his conspiracy allegations.

I hope you have found these comments to be helpful, Jessica. If you have any feedback, questions, etc., please do not hesitate to share.

Peace,
Chris Falter

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33

Hi Steve- I would like to see the following specific points addressed in the podcast if possible:

-did the WHO, in fact, change their policies for the COVID pandemic in regard to lockdown/quarantine and why? If data from past pandemics showed no benefit from locking down- and this was their policy up until now- why did it change in 2020?
-now that we’re months into this, what does the evidence say about the effectiveness of lockdowns and mask wearing? (and not just purely in numbers of positives but percentages of cases & hospitalizations of those tested)
-do the deaths of the elderly correspond to the “softness” of each area’s influenza season in the last couple of years?
-why did the rhetoric change from “softening the curve” to “we must eliminate COVID altogether with a vaccine”? I understand softening the curve- hospitals can only accommodate so many people at once but it now seems the message is that we have to tough this out until a vaccine is available. What’s changed?

Thanks,
Jessica

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Thanks for your reply, Chris. I do, admittedly, share Cummins doubts about the motivations of the WHO, CDC and pharmaceutical companies. Anytime profit is involved in healthcare, I’m skeptical. The pharmaceutical companies lost (or should have lost) our trust when they knowingly pushed massive amounts of addictive, deadly opioids on Americans, leading to thousands of deaths and the destructions of lives through addiction. The government was not there to protect Americans in that instance so how can we trust them now? I also don’t understand the MASSIVE increase in the vaccination schedule since the 80’s. In the US, 12 shots were given to children in 1986. In 2019, this had increased to 54 shots. I was born in 1984 and did not know of any children dying or disfigured from childhood diseases. Is this massive increase really justified? Does the data show increased health in children since then? Or the opposite? And not just in the diseases supposedly prevented by the vaccines, but in overall health? I just think there are a lot of reasons to question what’s going on here, even if it gets me labeled as a conspiracy theorist or anti-vax or, worst of all, anti-science.
Best,
Jessica

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I don’t know what the WHO policy was prior to 2020, and I don’t think it matters much. There hasn’t been a pandemic anything like this one since 1918 and there simply was not enough information to know what would work and what wouldn’t. As a side note, I wouldn’t look to the WHO for guidance in the early stages of a viral outbreak. For some things they’re indispensable; for example, in malaria (which I work on) they convene expert panels to decide the best treatment and interventions to deploy, and they provide the gold standard for countries planning malaria control strategies. The WHO is also slow and highly political, in that they’re afraid of offending countries (including the US). In viral outbreak (which I also study), these characteristics mean they’re pretty much useless – something we saw early in the 2014 W. Africa Ebola outbreak.

The evidence that lockdowns reduce transmission and hospitalizations is overwhelming and the evidence that masks reduce transmission is quite strong. Note that a lockdown can only be temporary, and it’s a last, desperate measure: it means you’ve failed at more sustainable approaches. Countries that have successfully contained the covid-19 outbreak (Taiwan, Vietnam, S. Korea, Japan, New Zealand, for example) are not in lockdown, although some of them have resorted to lockdowns as emergency measures to get the virus under control.

I don’t know. I do know that everywhere that COVID-19 has become common among the elderly, deaths have increased dramatically.

The marketing has changed, mostly. There were always multiple reasons for slowing transmission (something I know I was saying last April). The reasons included: preventing health care system overload; reducing ‘epidemic overshoot’, in which more people end up infected in a rapidly spreading epidemic than in a slow one, even if both reach herd immunity; giving doctors time to figure out how to better treat a new illness; allowing time for better therapies, and hopefully even a vaccine, to become available. All are still valid.

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That is a good question, Jessica. I would suggest that we should evaluate each class of treatment independently, though. If the current vaccination schedule does indeed reduce the prevalence of deadly childhood diseases, I’m all for it. And I think that if you see such evidence, you would be all for it, too, right?

I worked with a Christian humanitarian organization in West Africa in the late 80s. Every day I saw dozens of young polio victims begging in the streets, wearing gloves on their hands so they could drag themselves around. Other diseases like measles, mumps, rubella, and hepatitis killed and disabled thousands.

Not many Americans have a personal understanding of the importance of vaccines, but my sojourn in West Africa convinced me. If you had been there, Jessica, I’m sure you would be convinced as well.

I only did IT and program management; the real heroes were our medical and health staff and the Africans who worked alongside them.

I am not an expert, but I do know that many vaccinations such as hepatitis A, hep B, and rotavirus have been introduced into the standard schedule recently. Additionally, 18 of those 54 are for an annual flu shot, which did not even exist back in the day. These all seem like useful advances to me, and I am glad that they have become available for my grandkids and for their (future) kids.

Also, could you provide some documentation for the numbers you quote, Jessica?

Additionally, I would like to invite some physicians to give their expert analysis. @Randy and @jpm, do you have anything to add?

The overall health question should not be conflated with the vaccine question, in my opinion, because overall health has many causal factors other than vaccines. For example, if kids are consuming more carbs and sugar and getting less exercise these days, they will be more susceptible to obesity, metabolic syndrome, and type 2 diabetes regardless of vaccinations. Does that make sense?

Peace,
Chris

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Well put, @Chris_Falter. @jessica, good to see you again. As you may recall, we’ve had a good discussion over these subjects in rather good detail earlier. Let me know what specifically more you would like to discuss.

Health and mortality have improved tremendously in the last 2 centuries. Whereas in the “natural” age of the 1800s, half of all children under 5 died, and a writer from the 1600s noted that was indeed rare to die of old age, as Atul Gawande in “Being Mortal” wrote, we now have to contend with knowing how to grow old peacefully and comfortably. In the Roman Empire, the average lifespan was 28; it is now in the upper 70s and 80s in the West. I was born and grew up in West Africa. I vividly recall watching a 10 year old school girl die of meningitis there, who was well in the morning (she had not been vaccinated). One-third of all adults in Niger have Hepatitis B, an easily preventable disease that causes cirrhosis and death in a huge percentage of people by the age of 50 (my last patient was a 34 year old father who hemorrhaged into his abdomen from liver failure from Hep B. The family could only take him home to die). The vast majority of Americans (except those who refuse the shot) are protected against Hep B. In the link we attached, we talked about the dramatic decrease in mortality from various vaccines, as well as the unfortunate outcomes from the well meant opioid liberalization.

Medicine is a complex discipline. It’s said that the difference between primary doctors and specialists is that primary care doctors know less and less about more and more till they know nothing about everything; and specialists know more and more about less and less, till they know everything about nothing.

That about sums up how difficult it can be to discuss a huge field. However, like any complex science, people learn from mistakes. The scientific method is supposed to prevent suffering. . Opioids were part of a well meant effort by non-scientific method to provide relief to people who were really suffering. The studies did not support the method to help relief. In retrospect, there was tremendous suffering as a result.

You can still see people in their 70s and 80s who have permanent disability from polio (the ones who survived without lung paralysis, or used the Iron Lung to do so). Many in the Third World still suffer from worse outcomes.

Vaccines, on the other hand, follow rigorous regimens on the path to approval. They have saved literally millions of lives.

I agree that the Covid vaccines need close monitoring, especially as they are new and followed a rapid process. As a primary care physician, I will take a vaccine so as to prevent spreading it to others (I am a primary care physician who has contact with lots of vulnerable people). I admire @Boscopup and @DeborahHaarsma for participating in the trials.

Blessings.
Randy

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I know a guy in his 40’s who has to walk with crutches all his life because of polio. He grew up in India and had not been vaccinated. Here in the US, just about every kid got vaccinated for polio prior to the anti-vaxx misinformation movement ramping up.

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Yes, it’s a terrible disease. I personally know several folks who still have partial paralysis from polio as children, when it was so common people never questioned the need for a new vaccine, and lined up in droves to get the Salk/Sabin ones. We don’t see new cases in the US because it’s been eradicated by vaccine–but there are hot spots in Africa and Asia on occasion of resurgence.

Smallpox is another that killed millions–many in the colonial times of the US, for example, including children of famous folks like Cotton Mather. Vaccines eradicated that. We have so much to be thankful for!

It’s got to be the most “natural” way of preventing illness–using our bodies’ own natural defenses, instead of adding chemicals to treat a deadly or disfiguring disease that already started.

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Just Asia now.

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