“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.”—Origin unknown, popularized by Mark Twain
As the world begins a second month of lockdown in response to the nightmare known as the coronavirus, it is essential to examine how this mess developed and how we return to some semblance of normalcy.
As part of the quest for truth, the three types of lies must be identified: lies, damned lies and statistics.
Obviously, the communist Chinese had an interest in creating world havoc. At the time the virus began to spread, there were pollution protests in Wuhan and anti-government protests in Hong Kong. Not coincidentally, both of those protests have ended with the coronavirus lockdown.
Under pressure from United States President Donald Trump, China was forced to accept tariffs on their goods and a new trade deal that was fair, but not unduly favorable to their country. Trump was the first U.S. President in decades to stand up to the Chinese communists and advocate for the American taxpayer.
Sadly, with the pandemic, the United States economy has been severely impacted. This result may very well please the communist Chinese government. During the last four weeks, only essential businesses have been able to operate. With a massive increase of 16.6 million unemployed workers, a gargantuan explosion of the national debt and a historic drop in the stock market, the once solid economy is very shaky.
The statistical lies are easily apparent to identify as this crisis has continued. The first models predicted over 2 million deaths in the United States. Not surprisingly, this estimate created hysteria in the country. Fortunately, it was wildly inaccurate.
In recent weeks, the estimates have been revised downward. The latest figure indicates the country will suffer approximately 60,000 deaths. If this total is realized, as horrible as it may seem, it will be much lower than the death toll from the flu pandemics of 1918, 1957 or 1968.
Even the new mortality estimate is questionable for many deaths are being wrongly attributed to the coronavirus.
If a person has the coronavirus, but dies from a heart attack or cancer, their death will be counted. At a recent news conference, Dr. Deborah Birx, the Coronavirus Response Coordinator, crowed about the “very liberal approach to mortality.” Thus, the coronavirus death numbers will increase, and it may be done to generate more hysteria or more federal funding, or to continue the lockdown for a longer period.
In an April guideline, the CDC admitted that the coronavirus mortality numbers are being bolstered. If a “definitive diagnosis of COVID-19 cannot be made, but it is suspected or likely, it is acceptable to report COVID-19 on a death certificate as ‘probable’ or ‘presumed.’”
In the past few weeks, initial reports for deaths due to non-coronavirus causes show a dramatic decrease. It may be due to inaccurate accounting of these deaths as COVID-19. As we know, statistics can be manipulated to fit a certain agenda. In this case, the agenda seems very clear.
As COVID-19 continues to keep the world in lock-down, there are signs that panic sparked by dire early predictions was hugely overblown, as were the draconian political actions that followed. Predicted death totals are plunging, not merely slipping, and somewhere in the discrepancies between then and now lies an important lesson for the entire world. Pray we learn it.
The worst-case scenario came from world-class university Imperial College London, who, in mid March, suggested a staggering 2.2 million deaths in the U.S. and 500,000 in Great Britain if neither society took any mitigation efforts at all.
On March 31, Global News ran a story suggesting the number of US deaths could range from 100,000 to 240,000, though this time those numbers considered Americans staying home and practicing social distancing.
On April 8, the key forecasting modelused by the White House revised its prediction to a peak of 60,415 by early August. So, the most recent prediction is less than 3% of the worst-case scenario from mid-March and 25% to 60% of the total in Global News’ one-week old report.
The COVID-19 predictions show a marked drop for a reason. Early models were assumption heavy and data poor, so the resulting predictions were little more than wild guesses. As time goes on and actual data is incorporated into the models, the predictions understandably shift towards a more realistic reality. The trend is consistent and, to not put too fine a point on it, massive.
There is a good chance that the COVID-19 model’s death predictions will continue to drop over the next few weeks as further data is factored into them, unless, and don’t count this out, deaths caused by other factors such as diabetes or cancer are incorrectly attributed to COVID-19. The use of correlated numbers to pad causal totals is fraudulently misleading.
Early COVID-19 models are the equivalent of running sports analytics on next season’s estimated statistics, and we’re being forced to bet heavily on them.
In the political realm, self-fulling prophecies are associated with life-and-death situations and, when followed, eventually create the conditions that generate the very problems the prophecy warned against.
Climate Models have the media, schools, and governments waging all-out war on the primary source of our energy needs, efficient and affordable oil-and-gas, without consideration to the deadly effects that imposed solutions force upon the world. Solar plants and wind farms are inefficient energy producers whose power output is difficult to incorporate onto our current grid. Our increasing reliance on them could put the country into energy poverty, a deadly condition in freezing temperatures.
COVID-19 models have vaccinated the world with insane panic, leading to extreme life-style changes and extraordinary economic harm that has the potential to ruin millions of families for years.
The purpose of policy solutions in both cases is to prevent the unnecessary death of the rank and file and, of course, the planet. However, poor countries filled with poor people are less able to protect against environmental degradation because they lack the resources to do so. In addition, the social consequences associated with poverty are also well known and include increases in violent crime, family breakups, bankruptcies, and suicides.
The human species is as vulnerable to logical manipulation as it is to emotional exploitation, maybe more so because while we understand we make mistakes in “the heat of the moment”, we implicitly trust our logical conclusions due to their rationality. Setting intellect aside, the problem here is that our general conclusions are only as good as the data or information we use to make them.
By treating model predictions as factual truth, we logically conclude that fear and panic is warranted. In doing so we not only justify quick and drastic political action that will cause harm; we clamour for it. Data challenged model predictions are a terrible source of critical information.
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