Not stupid, just observant

I got called stupid on X by someone I don’t know, again.  A doctor who lost her husband to Remdesivir posted this question.

Do you think that people would have known about COVID if the media had not told them about it?

I answered that if the media had not hyped it all anyone would have noticed was a bad flus year.  It certainly was not anything more than that in most countries, but the US was a notable exception.  Apparently, I am stupid for looking at global trends and not just the US.  So, this morning I decided to look at the US.

I found numbers for deaths due to all causes for the US going back to 2015.  I did the same quick analysis that I did for Canada several months ago.  The first step was to establish a pre-COVID baseline.  I had more back data for Canada so my baseline for the US could have significant error but without any more data this is what I got.

Just as with Canada deaths jumped up in 2020 and remained high afterward.

This is what the data looks like compared to the baseline.

So, when I do the same analysis, I get very similar results with a major difference.  Even When adjusted for population the increased deaths in the US were much higher than Canada.  Why was that?  Maple Maoists in Canada claim that it was because Canadian authorities did a better job with mitigation measures.  But is that really the explanation?

In 2021 after the first full season of lockdowns, I compared lockdown stringency vs excess deaths.  The comparison did not show lockdowns worked.  It showed the opposite.  Lockdowns kill.

Any Country that reacted sanely did not have much trouble.  COVID amounted to nothing other than a mild flu year.  COVID was only a problem in Countries where politicians made it a problem.  This cannot be stated too many times.  Lockdowns Kill.  That much is clear.  So is it the lethality of lockdowns that makes them so attractive to left wing politicians?

Canadians like to believe that the least intelligent person to ever lead a G8 country saved them from COVID with his brilliant mitigation policies.  The problem with that narrative is that lockdowns didn’t work.  Even if they did work it would still not explain the difference in results because the US largely did the same stupid things we did.  The only significant difference between the USA and Canada was that the US utilized a much more aggressive treatment protocol.

In 2020 only 61 Canadians received Remdesivir.  During the same period 28,855 Americans received remdesivir.  Even adjusting for population that is still 60 times more.  Same with ventilators.  During the entire pandemic only 38% of ICU patients in Canada were ventilated.  In 2020 alone 783,869 patients in the US were ventilated.  The financial incentive to ventilate patients in the US was just too large for hospitals to ignore in favor of patient safety.

Could this be all that it was?  Was it just the treatment protocols that produced so many more deaths in the US?  I think we can get a clue as to how large the problem was from the summer of 2020.  In the summer of 2020 Canadian deaths returned to the baseline.  Deaths in Canada did not stay elevated in the summer months until the people started to be vaccinated.  Not so for the US.  Deaths did not come back to the baseline in the summer of 2020 before anyone was vaccinated.

When I take the 15-week period from June 13 to Sept 19, 2020.  There were nearly 140,000 deaths above the summer baseline.  It might seem implausible that 140,000 people die from medical misadventure but there is ample precedence for this all documented in a book called Virus Mania.  Sadly, the first response to new viruses is often a deadly over reaction.  We saw that with COVID when the cure was very often worse than the disease.  This does seem to have been the case in the US.  It appears that a significant % of COVID deaths were COVID treatment deaths.

The problem with any discussion about COVID is that the government has done the accounting.  That would not be a big problem if the government was not using accounting to hide their malfeasance.  I get called stupid for pointing out that the government can’t be trusted to do the accounting properly.  I am OK with that.  Strangers can call me stupid if they want.  But the name calling won’t change my conclusions.

• Lockdowns did not work
• The vaccines did not work
• Government were, are, and will always be far more dangerous than any virus.

And finally

• If the media and government had stayed out of it, no one would have noticed COVID.