It is Time to Trim the Payroll

In March Jason Kenney bragged that Alberta had 1900 ICU beds but he was forced to shut the whole province down when we used 8% of those beds for Covid.  I guess we are supposed to believe that adding 8% over the usual total is more than the system can bear.  It seems odd that a wealthy province like Alberta can not handle a surge of 8%.

Hospital capacity has been a major focus and it is always given as the primary reason for lockdowns.  Apparently, unemployment eases hospital crowding.  Every day we are told how many people are in the hospital with Covid and frankly the number is ridiculously small.  We are never told the total number of patients that is causing all the overcrowding we cannot find.  Nor are we told how many people would normally be in the hospital with respiratory illnesses in the winter.

This year we are told there is no influenzas so covid accounts for all hospitalizations for respiratory illnesses.  Since the neither the government nor media will tell us how covid totals compare to normal winter hospitalizations, I looked for it.  I spent hours searching for the data and I could not find hospitalizations by week.  I would think this is a crucial piece of information when it comes to justifying a lockdown.  Maybe that is why the government will not let us see it.

While I have not been able to find data on hospitalizations I did come across some very interesting data on people who are not in the hospital.  No all sick people end up in the hospital most are treated by doctors as out patients.  This is also true of Covid.  The plot below is built from CDC data.

The blue line is the number of people treated for influenzas like illnesses (ILI) which includes Covid.  The grey line is people treated for all reasons except ILI.  I find this plot very interesting and I want to discuss each data group separately.  First let’s start with ILI.

The first thing of note is that Doctors in the US were already treating a high number of people for ILI one month before the first official covid case.  The number of people treated for ILI did no increase after Covid officially hit the US.  When did Covid really start?  Did we waste a whole month when we could have been running around panicking?

The next thing to note is the stark difference from season 1 to season 2.  I drew in flat lines to show the approximate averages.  Last Spring Doctors treated 50,000 patients as outpatients.  This winter there are only 15,000 outpatients being treated for ILI.  Why are doctors treating 1/3 as many out patients?  Are there less people requiring treatment or more people requiring hospitalization?  If it is the later where are all the overrun hospitals?

It is very curious that the onset of covid did not change the number of patients that doctors were seeing.  Even more interesting is that during the second season (commonly and erroneously called the second wave by masked covidiots) not as many people seemed to require medical attention.  That is not consistent with the story told nightly on the news.  To me, though, the non ILI visits tell a more ominous tale.

Before and during the early days of covid doctors were treating about 770,000 patients per week.  Then the media succeeded in sowing panic.  People were convinced that if they left their house either they would die or they would cause the death of every senior on earth.  The net result was that people stopped going to doctors.  The number of patients doctors were treating fell by almost 50%.

Being afraid to go to the doctor has serious long term consequences.  You can see from the plot that it did not take long before people returned to the doctor in even greater numbers.  1.05 million people are treated each week now.  That is an incredible 37% increase.  Stress, panic, and the postponement of medical treatment are not good for overall health.

The data could not be clearer.  Causing unemployment and enforcing draconian restrictions has adversely affected the heath of millions of people.  Senior public health officials like Deena Hinshaw are supposed to advocate for policies that benefit the largest number of people.  For the last 12 months they have done the exact opposite.  If these highly paid bureaucrats are doing the opposite of what they are paid to do, why are we still paying them?