By Bill Richbourg

“Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”; CoronaVirus and Us!

I am not sure yet if the worst is over but I can certainly say that our society is on the verge of collapse and that hysteria is still rampant!

Even as some states gradually reopen, the consternation of the virtue-signaling left is readily apparent. One of the most egregious examples of this is a putrid piece in the Atlantic called “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice”. Yet after three-plus weeks, Georgia is opening like a “well watered blossom”.  Guess what? No holocaust!

Pretending that we face a choice between the economy and human lives is bogus! If you care about human lives then what about the prediction that hundreds of thousands of children worldwide may die because of governments’ overreaction to the Virus. This is part of a prediction made by the United Nations. “Economic hardship experienced by families as a result of the global economic downturn could result in hundreds of thousands of additional child deaths in 2020.” In addition, “an estimated 42 million to 66 million children could fall into extreme poverty as a result of the coronavirus crisis this year.”

Note that all this suffering and death is not a result of the virus but of our insane hysterical and antiscientific reaction to the virus. The body blow we delivered to ourselves has left us stunned and disoriented. However here are a few facts from a new report from Swiss Policy Research, an independent nonprofit group investigating geopolitical propaganda.

1. The lethality of Covid-19 averages 0.2%, which is in the range of a severe influenza and about 20 times lower that originally assumed by WHO.
2. The risk of death for the general population of school and working age is typically in the range of a daily car ride to work.
3. Up to 80% of all test-positive persons remain symptom-free. Even among 70-79 year-olds about 60% remain symptom-free. Over 95% of all persons show mild symptoms at most.
4. Up to one-third of all persons may already have a certain background immunity to the virus due to contact with previous coronaviruses (common cold viruses)
5. The median age of the deceased in most countries (including Italy) is over 80 years old and only about 1% of the deceased had NO serious preconditions.
6. In most western countries, 50-70% of all extra deaths occurred in nursing homes. It is also not clear whether these people died from the Virus itself.
7. Up to 50% of all additional deaths may have been caused by the lockdown, panic and fear. For example, treatment of heart attacks and strokes decreased by up to 60% because many patients did not dare to go to the hospital.
8. Even though counted as Virus deaths, it is often not clear whether people died from, or with, the Virus. However official figures usually do not reflect this distinction.
9. There is no evidence of the virus spreading through the air or from infected doorknobs, etc
10. There is no evidence for the effectiveness of facemasks for healthy people. On the contrary, the masks may themselves be carriers of the virus.

Our political masters, specifically state and local officials, drunk on their newfound powers of intimidation, have abandoned honesty and embraced panic. They claim to be following the science, but, in fact are following arbitrary projections from a discredited model. In fact one of the “lead-off” models, the Imperial College model, has now won the distinction of being the “most devastating software mistake of all time.”

Someday soon, we will wake up and wonder why we were prevailed upon to commit collective suicide because of a disease that affected mostly the elderly and infirm and whose lethality was that of a bad flu. The sad, but true, answer, we did it to ourselves!