By The Numbers...Reality vs Irrational Fear

COVID-19: Who Has the Intellectual and Moral High Ground?

Jack Kerwick

In 2020, something dramatically changed—and not for the better.

The sloppy conventional rhetoric aside, it was most definitely not some “pandemic” that succeeded in undermining the economic, psychological, and communal well-being of hundreds of millions (possibly as high as 1.6 billion) of human beings around the planet.

And it was not some virus—“the Virus”—that wreaked havoc in the United States.

Rather, it is the mass hysteria over a virus fomented by materially, ideologically, and electorally-motivated political and media elites that accounts for the incalculable suffering of countless human beings.

In America, since March and courtesy of state governors and mayors, tens of millions of citizens were forced onto the unemployment rolls and numerous small business owners were forced to close their doors. As of May, at least 100,000 of them have had both their dreams and livelihoods shattered. About 40% of black-owned small businesses have had to close, with up to half of them expected to close for good.

More recently, it was determined that 55% of all small businesses have closed permanently.

Shocker of shockers, the internment camp into which Americans’ homes, towns, and states have been transformed in the name of “Flattening the Curve!” and “Saving lives!” proved itself a most unfriendly environment for business.

Unsurprisingly, this rapid, astronomical rise in unemployment brought about by The Internment of 2020 has correlated with similarly astronomical rises in rates of other social ills: domestic violence, specifically the physical mistreatment of women and children; drug and alcohol abuse; and suicide.

Accordingly, the Internment has led to a “mental health crisis,” as anxiety, depression, and despondency have also spread and deepened.

All of those “little platoons,” as Edmund Burked described those associations, those various communities to which we belong and that, constituting as they do our very identities as the unique persons that we are, invest our lives with meaning and purpose, have been ruptured. 

 In some cases, it’s quite possible that they have been permanently undermined, as neighbor has turned against neighbor and relative has turned on relative for failing to observe “Social Distancing” protocols. Family members who may live no more than a matter of minutes from one another have gone all of these months without physical contact and, most tragic—most criminal—of all, the oldest, frailest, and sickest among us have been made to spend their remaining days alienated from their loved ones.

It is not just cynical and opportunistic politicians and media figures who are responsible for all of this suffering. It is as well those millions who contributed to the hysteria by endorsing it that must shoulder some responsibility for the evisceration of people’s lives. As is undoubtedly the case for most of the True Believers (i.e. those to whom I have referred as “Corona Walkers”), that genuine fear of contracting the Virus motivates them to “mask-shame” and the like may suffice to mitigate their culpability, but only to an extent. There is a simple, straightforward, and readily demonstrable reason for this.

First, their fear is irrational. They should no more fear, to the paralyzing degree to which they do in fact fear it, contracting this virus than they should fear contracting any virus, or getting into a car accident on the way to work.

Yet the irrationality of their fear in this instance is not a sufficient condition for hanging around their necks the immeasurable harm to have been visited upon their fellow Americans via The Internment. Everyone, yours truly included, has irrational fears with which to contend. The possession of, even the possession by, irrational fear need not necessarily reflect poorly upon a person’s moral character.

No, what implicates the Masqueraders, we may call them, is that they are willing to impose upon others the costs, the cataclysmic costs mentioned above, of shouldering the Masqueraders’ irrational fears.

Consider the following summary of all of the relevant research to date that’s been conducted by distinguished immunologists, virologists, epidemiologists, and other medical specialists from around the world:

(1) As Big Media continues to keep the scare going by reporting upon alleged increases in COVID cases, given the partisan prejudices of the vast majority of “journalists,” it is unsurprising that it fails to note that these alleged increases are accompanied by a diminishing mortality rate.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) itself just last week estimated that the actual rate of infection in America is anywhere between six to 24 times the number of confirmed cases. Covidtracking.com informs us that, at present, there are 4.1 million confirmed cases in the United States and 137,655 COVID deaths.

Therefore, by the CDC’s own reckoning, there are anywhere between approximately 24 million and 98 million COVID cases.

And, thus, the mortality rate of COVID is anywhere between .0056 and .0014.

What this in turn means is that of those who contract the Virus, 99.44%-99.86% survive.

At the very most, the overall lethality rate (IFR) of the Virus is .1%.

One-tenth of one percent.

The lethality rate of the Virus is that of the seasonal flu.

Yet, because of this, America, along with other countries, has indefinitely shut down.

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