Date: Wednesday June 10, 2020
Covid Hysteria And The Pimps Of The Virus Patrol
Dr. Fauci and the Scarf Lady are not the only Virus Patrol miscreants spreading the Covid Hysteria and thereby empowering the authorities to keep suffocating everyday economic life and personal liberty in America.
In fact, there is a whole camarilla of current and former health officials, purported disease experts, all-purpose talking heads and other Washington apparatchiks who continue to appear on mainstream media, peddling the hoary tale that coronavirus is some kind of horror flick monster: It purportedly just keeps springing from its Lockdown grave—whack-a-mole fashion—the instant officialdom relaxes its quarantine edicts.
Call these people the “groomers” of Big Pharma, and their job is to keep public fears on the boil so that the demand for high-priced treatments, cures and preventative vaccines becomes overwhelming. And given that the Covid is now rapidly succumbing to the exhaustion of its infection cycle and the summertime sun, their exact current mission is one of bridging the gap.
That is, finding and publicizing local outbreaks and “hot spots” during the months just ahead so that the Virus Patrol will remain in full control of policy and the narrative until the Covid makes its forecasted second wave rebound during next fall’s flu season.
One of the most mendacious of these groomers is Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who was the Donald’s first FDA commissioner and is an alleged pedigreed “conservative” with a berth at the American Enterprise Institute to burnish his numerous sinecures with Big Pharma.
Gottlieb is also a CNBC regular, and yesterday, sitting astride a screen crawler which read “Texas reports second day of record hospitalizations”, he was busy promulgating the “hot spot” news about two red states, whose merely semi-craven GOP governors have belatedly attempted to get their economies back in business:
When you look at hotspot regions like Arizona and Texas, they have to be concerned, particularly areas around Houston right now. They could lose control of this very quickly,” says @ScottGottliebMD on balancing re-opening with public health.
We call bullshit!
Gottlieb was peddling a pimple on the elephant’s ass because, apparently, cable TV audiences generally and bubble vision’s especially, were born yesterday. That is, they are infantile victims of recency and confirmation biases and will apparently believe anything served up in a context-free modality.
The truth is, there is nothing worrisome whatsoever going on in Arizona and Texas beyond the fact that the coronavirus started its inexorable spread in these interior states later than on the East and Left coasts, and is therefore cresting slightly later, as well.
But as of June 8, the count of infected cases and WITH Covid deaths[i] in Arizona stood at 27,678 and 1,047, respectively. Those figures a hot spot do not make, nor do they offer any reason for not getting the state’s boot-heel off the economy ASAP.
Relative to
the US as a whole and the New York epicenter, Arizona’s figures
per 100,000 population compare as follows as of
June 8:
In other words, Arizona’s mortality rate is less than half of the US average and only 11% of that for New York. So why is it a worrisome “hot spot” by the lights of Virus Patrol shills like Gottlieb?
Indeed, the WITH-Covid mortality rate in Arizona stands at nearly rock bottom, clocking in at at just one-fifth to one-half of the mortality rates in much of European Christendom. To wit, current rates per 100,000 include:
But when context doesn’t matter, of course, any pimple can be depicted as a large boulder. Thus, the number of new cases in Arizona is allegedly soaring, suggesting that the state has jumped the gun letting its citizens out of house arrest too soon.
In fact, during the first 8 days of June, Arizona reported 7,742 new cases—a figure which is sharply higher than the 2,189 new cases reported for the last eight days of April, for example.
But that gain is entirely a function of the testing rate and then some. Thus, during the June 1 to June 8 span, the state reported 62,825 new tests, implying an infection rate of 12.3%.
By contrast, during April 22 to April 30 the state reported only 15,185 new tests (one-fourth of the June figure), implying an infection rate of 14.4%.
So the state is testing a lot more, as it has been instructed to do by Washington, and such accelerated testing is generating a falling infection rate!
And that’s not the half of it. By now there are more than enough anti-body tests of different US populations to be reasonably certain that in a state like Arizona with a population of 7.38 million that there have been far more infected cases than the 27,678 cases reported through June 8.
Generally, antibody tests show infection rates of 5-20% in the general population, which would imply total cases—most of which remained asymptomatic or resulted in mild illnesses—of between 370,000 and 1.5 million for Arizona.
So, actually, higher reported cases daily may mean nothing at all as to the current status of the virus among the population. More likely, it actually means that what is already there is being slowly discovered after the fact; it’s stale, irrelevant old news, not an alarming new development, to say nothing of evidence of a hot spot.
Indeed, the latter [(hot spot)] is a meaningless but loaded term, honed for TV talking points, but is incapable of conveying any meaningful information about context at all. That is, the real test is how does what’s happening with the coronavirus now compare with year-in-and-year-out illness, hospitalization, disease and mortality trends?
Self-evidently, you do not empower the state to put its citizens under house arrest and destroy the livelihoods of millions of workers and tens of thousands of small businesses on account of a bad run of seasonal illnesses that leaves more people than usual home in bed or even heading to the hospital for treatment.
To the contrary, this whole Lockdown Nation thing is about the modern equivalent of the Black Death—-the presence of a virulent killer that can take-down the young, the old, the healthy, the sick and all categories between with equal alacrity.
But, again, there is nothing to support that Grim Reaper notion in the data, and most especially not the “hot spot” flavor of the week in Texas and Arizona.
The mortality rate from all causes for Arizona for the four months from January through the end of April (latest available) is shown below.
Naturally, the total mortality rate surmounts the cause of death attribution and coding issues.
Unless a total mortality rate is significantly elevated from the norm, then nothing unusual—or at least worthy of drastic quarantine policies–is actually going on.
On a per 100,000 basis, the Arizona’s total mortality rates for the first four months of the year have been as follows:
The above does not indicate the Black Plague at loose. The tiny elevation in 2020 relative to the previous four years is just statistical noise!
Moreover, there is no new signal coming out of this “noise” owing to the higher testing and infection rates being reported in recent days. Again, the evidence for that is in the state’s own published data on hospitalization rates, among others.
Between March 23 and June 1, Arizona consistently reported new WITH-Covid hospitalization cases of between 40 and 60 per day on a statewide basis.
During June 3 through June 8, however, the number of new hospitalizations daily has dwindled to 34, 19, 17, 10, 4 and 5, respectively.
The last few days, in fact, have had the lowest new hospitalizations since before the Donald’s malpracting doctors triggered the Covid Hysteria on March 13.
So, hot spot my eye!
In this connection, they also keep trotting out the hoary old claim that the hospitals are in danger of being over-run with new cases—per the crawler on the screen yesterday during Gottleib’s appearance on bubble vision.
Alas, it never happened previously in Arizona and is not remotely in danger of happening now. Even during the peak of new hospitalizations between April 20 and May 8, the utilization rate of hospital intensive care beds rose from 72% to 78% and has remained at that level ever since.
Finally, it is worth noting that Arizona’s WITH-Covid mortality data show the same dramatic skew toward the elderly, as is true with the rest of the country. Fully 77% of the Covid deaths in Arizona have been among the 65 and older population, which comprises just 17% of the state’s overall population.
That fact alone, of course, militates strongly against the across-the-board stay-at-home and general quarantine orders in the first place.
The Arizona WITH-Covid mortality rate through June 9 breaks out as follows by age cohorts. That is to say, anyone under 55 years old driving to the Scottsdale Fashion Mall would have had a greater chance of being killed in an auto accident than being felled by the Covid:
Deaths Per 100,000 population:
With respect to Texas, it’s the same story. There is no “hot spot”, period.
Its reported cases and deaths through June 8 are actually far lower than those for Arizona and in the sub-basement relative to the overall USA figures, to say nothing of the nursing-home based disaster-data reported for New York and New Jersey.
That is, the number of infected cases in Texas amounts to 256 per 100,000 or 68% of the Arizona rate, 42% of the overall USA rate and just 13% of the rate of infected cases among the New York state population.
Likewise, the WITH-Covid mortality rate through June 8 in Texas was 6.2 per 100,000. That’s just 43% of the Arizona rate, 19% of the USA average and only 5% of the New York state rate.
So Texas isn’t remotely a “hot spot” or some kind of warning about re-opening too soon, and is actually a thundering rebuke of the entire Lockdown Nation narrative.
That is, Texas was late and tepid about the lockdown, and among the first to begin “re-opening” in early May.
Yet its reported infected case rate of 256 per 100,000 is just 10% of the real “hot spot” rate of 2,477 per 100,000 in the five boroughs of New York City; and its mortality rate of 6.2 per 100,000 population is just 3% of New York City’s 196 per 100,000 rate.
So for crying out loud, with that kind of yawning gap and rock bottom absolute level, what is this clown, Scott Gottlieb, doing on bubble vision warning about Covid dangers in Texas?
Answer: He’s grooming the sheeples in order to keep the Killer Covid narrative alive and the money and legal immunities flowing to the drug companies chasing cures and vaccines.
It goes without saying, course, that the alleged surge in new cases reported in Texas during recent days is just as bogus as the claims about Arizona.
Yes, new cases reported during June 1 to June 8 averaged 1,416 per day or about 61% higher than the rate of 877 per day reported for April 22 to April 30. Except, the number of new tests also rose by about 60% from 113,500 to 168,500, leaving the infected rate virtually unchanged at a very low 6.7%.
Again, if you want to talk “hot spots”, try New York City. The infected rate per test has run north of 20% in the Bronx, for example.
So the question recurs. Why are people like Scott Gottlieb out pimping the Killer Covid story in the face overwhelming evidence that it it nothing of the kind.
Perhaps, it might be noted that Gottlieb went straight from medical school to various jobs at the FDA before becoming commissioner in 2017, and then heading out the revolving door to Pfizer’s Board of Directors in May 2019.
And, yes, here’s the list of the top five firms being supported by billions from Washington in the race for a Covid vaccine, which may or may not happen, but whether safe or not will be of no never-mind to Big Pharma.
After all,
1. Washington has already indemnified them against lawsuits;
2. pretty much guaranteed that they can name their charge per dose; and will be doing all it can to make getting a tap on the arm from one or more of the Big Pharma competitors
3. a mandatory duty of citizenship.
Call it what you will, but don’t call it honest capitalism. And chalk it up as still another blow to the idea of limited government and personal liberty.
The five companies are
1. Moderna, a Massachusetts-based biotechnology firm, which Dr. Fauci said he expected would enter into the final phase of clinical trials next month;
2. the combination of Oxford University and AstraZeneca, on a similar schedule; and three large pharmaceutical companies:
3. Johnson & Johnson,
4. Merck and
5. Pfizer.
Each is taking a somewhat different approach.
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[The Following is an Example of MSM Portrayal of the Arizona situation discussed by Stockman, above.]
From: https://www.lmtonline.com/news/article/In-states-across-the-U-S-cases-still-on-rise-15331521.php
When Gov. Doug Ducey allowed Arizona's stay-at-home order to expire on May 15, 340 patients were in intensive care units statewide due to the novel coronavirus - the largest number since the beginning of the pandemic. Public health experts at the University of Arizona spent the week before publicly pleading with Ducey to postpone reopening, suggesting cases in the state were still projected to grow.
About two weeks later, the maximum amount of time it takes the virus to incubate, Arizona began seeing a precipitous rise in cases and a flood of new hospitalizations, straining medical resources and forcing the state's top medical official to reissue a March order urging all hospitals to activate emergency plans.
What Arizona is experiencing could be an ominous sign. More than a dozen states are showing new highs in the number of positive coronavirus cases or hospitalizations, according to Washington Post data, a few weeks after lifting restrictions on most businesses and large gatherings.
The spikes provide disturbing data points for the ongoing tug-of-war between federal, state and local officials weighing the economic costs of restrictions meant to stop the spread of the virus with the human cost of lifting them.
"Worse times are ahead," said Joe Gerald, an associate professor and public health researcher at the University of Arizona who has been part of an academic team providing projections to the state health department. "The preponderance of evidence indicates community transmission is increasing."
Texas, Arkansas, South Carolina, Nevada, Arizona, North Carolina, Oregon, Florida and Utah all set new highs in seven-day rolling case averages Wednesday, according to Post data.
Montana, Arkansas, Utah, Arizona and Texas have all seen coronavirus hospitalizations rise by at least 35 percent in the weeks since Memorial Day.
Some states are pressing forward with reopening even as local officials point to data that suggests an increase, not a reduction, in the risk of transmission. The uptick may not directly correlate to reopenings in all states, as more robust testing or other localized factors could play a part.
Officials have also expressed concern that the virus could have spread among thousands of people protesting against police brutality, but experts said it is too early to determine the impact on case numbers.
Texas will begin allowing restaurants and businesses to operate at 75 percent of their normal capacity on June 12. The state set a new high in coronavirus hospitalizations for the third straight day on Wednesday and now has 2,153 patients hospitalized with the virus - more than at least 15 states have reported for the entire pandemic, according to The Post's data. [Er, could the population of these 16 states have anything to do with that?]
Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, let his state's stay-at-home order expire April 30. As he lifted restrictions, Abbott said he was keeping a close watch on hospitalizations and the rate of positive cases as the state rapidly expanded testing capacity.
"Every Texan who needs access to a hospital bed will have access to a hospital bed," vowed Abbott spokesman John Wittman.
Steve Love, president of the Dallas-Fort Worth Hospital Council, said the steady uptick in cases was likely linked to activities on Memorial Day.
"People need to be very careful and continue to social distance," he said.
Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, announced Wednesday that despite rising case numbers, his state will be moving into Phase 2 of its reopening beginning Monday.
"Americans are on the move, and they can't be tied down, and they can't be restrained unless they make a voluntary decision that this is right for me and my health or my family," said Hutchinson, who added "there is no evidence of a correlation" between reopening of businesses and the rising case rates.
Appathurai Balamurugan, the state's deputy chief medical officer, said Arkansas is moving forward with reopening because the hospitalization rate had not dramatically spiked and the state is relying on contact tracers to determine the effect of reopening. He said only a small percentage of new cases were in people who visited restaurants, salons or other businesses.
Arkansas has established a new high in coronavirus cases nine times in the past 15 days, according to Post data.
In Arizona, Ducey, a Republican, has insisted he and his team expected a rise in cases to follow reopening, in part due to the doubling of testing statewide since mid-May. Leaders in Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Texas and other states have also made similar statements in recent weeks.
"We have anticipated increased cases in June," said Ducey spokesman Patrick Ptak. "We've spent the last few months working to increase capacity to ensure every Arizonan has access to care, should they need it."
South Carolina, which reopened most businesses by the end of May, has more daily cases than ever before, higher than a previous peak in April. Nearly 15 percent of all coronavirus tests statewide have come back positive. Hospital bed use is also increasing, although public health officials say that could be attributed in part to elective procedures put off earlier this year. The state set a new seven-day average for new cases Wednesday, the 14th time in 15 days it has done so, according to Post data.
"I am more concerned about covid-19 in South Carolina than I have ever been before," said Linda Bell, the state epidemiologist, at a Wednesday afternoon news conference, referring to the disease the virus causes.
Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican, said the state would not reimpose any restrictions.
"Shutting down is not the answer," he said. "People have to be able to go and work for a living." He said South Carolina slowed the spread enough to "arm ourselves with the knowledge of what we need to do to be safe . . . We now need to practice what we have learned."
Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said drawing direct lines from reopening to increases in cases skips potential nuances that exist in each state. In Michigan, he said, a large influx of tests is contributing to a rise in cases. In other states, like Arizona, positive test rates are outpacing the increase in testing, suggesting testing is not behind the rise.
"It's not a question of opened versus closed. We were never fully closed and until there's a vaccine, we won't be fully open. It's a question of modulating," Frieden said.
Traditional public health strategies usually value the insight local authorities have and prioritize the decisions they make for those they serve. But as states like Arizona and Arkansas reopen, local officials have found their hands tied by state restrictions.
Ducey's executive order lifting restrictions includes language that prohibits mayors and county officials from imposing further restrictions to help limit the spread of the virus locally.
"I can no longer put in place restrictions, for example, on nightclubs. We can't do additional health restrictions on things such as masking," said Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, a Democrat, who is prioritizing messaging urging people to wear masks and social distance.
"But we do still have control over our city facilities. Our senior centers are still closed. Our libraries are curbside only. With our city services, we're trying to send a message that we can't go back to normal."
Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott Jr., a Democrat, has experienced similar challenges in Arkansas. As state officials resisted implementing a state-at-home order, Scott and his administration used executive orders to create what he called a "modified shelter-in-place policy" that included nighttime curfews, closing city parks, and limiting restaurants to delivery and takeout. But Scott said he eventually had to rein in curfews and other restrictions to comply with state law allowing bars and restaurants to open.
"That's the reason we've ramped up even more testing, data and mask distribution," Scott said. "And we're going to continue to find ways to get creative from a communications standpoint to try to continue to slow the community spread."
Different states have touted different metrics, making it difficult to assess local conditions.
Florida has not reported hospitalizations for influenza-like illness since the end of May, when the rise in cases began. In Utah, Republican Gov. Gary Herbert and members of his task force have emphasized the low fatality rate among those sickened with the virus, which is about 1 percent, according to Michael Good, CEO of University of Utah Health.
Health and emergency operations staff have pressed for further analysis about the impact of the rising case load on Utah hospital capacity, according to an official privy to the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal internal deliberations.
Herbert's office did not return a request for comment.
In Arizona, Gerald argues the spike is not due to increased testing. He says the statistical impact of a testing blitz toward the end of May has subsided, and two weeks of relatively stable levels of testing have still seen a surge in new infections. Mounting caseloads, combined with a corresponding increase in coronavirus-related hospitalizations and ICU care, he said, roughly correspond to the state's relaxation of distancing requirements.
"At the current pace of viral spread, we risk reaching or exceeding our hospital capacity sometime in July," he said.
Banner Health, Arizona's largest hospital system, sounded a similar alarm in a news briefing last week when Chief Medical Officer Marjorie Bessel showed data that the number of coronavirus patients in Banner hospitals had tripled in the past three weeks.
Banner Health told the state Tuesday it is unable to take any new patients requiring extracorporeal membrane oxygenation - a machine that helps patients whose lungs are so damaged that a ventilator is not enough. Bessel said her hospitals still have ventilator and ICU capacity for now.
Hospital capacity continues to be a concern in many states with spiking cases, according to local officials in the South and West who point to hospitals near nursing home outbreaks as most immediately at risk of becoming overwhelmed. Other at-risk facilities include those near rural areas without adequate health-care facilities of their own.
The White House has expressed concern about rising cases in North Carolina, where hospitalizations continue to rise and the state reported 1,011 new cases Wednesday. The state reopened restaurants, salons and swimming pools at half capacity on May 22.
"Our metrics have moved in the wrong direction," Mandy Cohen, the state's top health official, said Monday.
- - -
The Washington Post's Jacqueline Dupree contributed to this report.
· In a Thursday appearance on MSNBC, America's top Covid official, Dr. Anthony Fauci, [finally, 19 months after this David Stockman article] admitted to a distinction between the number of children hospitalized with Covid as opposed to because of Covid.
"And what we mean by that: If a child goes into the hospital, they automatically get tested for COVID and they get counted as a COVID-hospitalized individual, when, in fact, they may go in for a broken leg or appendicitis or something like that. So it’s over counting the number of children who are, quote, hospitalized with COVID as opposed to because of COVID," said Fauci.
[i] Stockman has been trying, unsuccessfully so far, to encourage analysts and readers to add the adjectival WITH to COVID-19 deaths as in WITH-COVID-19 deaths as opposed to COVID-19 deaths. - This to keep us mindful that the apparent significance of COVID-19 can be elevated by a policy bias, when several otherwise co-equal factors were involved in a death.