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Friday, July 3, 2020

Can we stop the hysteria yet? We're well on the way to HIT!

Nobel Laureate Scientist Michael Levitt 
HIT = Herd Immunity Threshold 

As Mundabor says, "Spread the Sanity!" He links to a compelling article that begins with this:
Why did politicians ever lockdown society in the first place? Can we all agree that the stated purpose was to “flatten the curve” so our hospital system could handle the inevitable COVID-19 patients who needed care? At that point, at least, back in early March, people were behaving rationally. They accepted that you can’t eradicate a virus, so let’s postpone things enough to handle it. The fact is, we have done that, and so much more. The headlines are filled with dire warnings of a “second wave” and trigger-happy Governors are rolling back regulations to try to stem the tide of new cases. But, is any of it actually true and should we all be worried? No, it’s not a second wave. The COVID-19 virus is on its final legs, and while I have filled this post with graphs to prove everything I just said, this is really the only graph you need to see, it’s the CDC’s data, over time, of deaths from COVID-19 here in the U.S., and the trend line is unmistakable:


  The article quotes Stanford’s Nobel-laureate Dr. Michael Levitt who advocated in May for Sweden's approach. Protect the vulnerable, (Stay home if you're vulnerable and take vigorous precautions for those in long-term care facilities.) and let everyone else go about their business. Viruses will be with us always. Herd immunity and boosting the immune systems are the best responses. 

   According to the scientists, many of us already have immunity to COVID-19:
we have ALL been exposed to MANY coronaviruses during our lives on earth (like the common cold). Guess what? Scientists are now showing evidence that up to 81% of us can mount a strong response to COVID-19 without ever having been exposed to it before...This alone could explain WHY the HIT is so much lower for COVID-19 than some scientists thought originally, when the number being talked about was closer to 70%. Many of us have always been immune! If that’s not enough for you, a similar study from Sweden was just released and shows that “roughly twice as many people have developed T-cell immunity compared with those who we can detect antibodies in.” (We kind of knew this from the data on the Diamond Princess when only 17% of the people on board tested positive, despite an ideal environment for mass spread, implying 83% of the people were somehow protected from the new virus.)
Listen to the interview with the four scientists. "Politics pervades almost everything," Dr. Levitt says. "Our politicians are scientifically illiterate." He describes the "level of stupidity" of locking down including the "scared scientists" advancing the hysteria. "Politics has infected the scientists, especially in the USA." (Did he have Drs. Fauci and Birx in mind?)

My brother, a physicist, used to always challenge people to "check the data." This article is an opportunity to do that. It is chock full of data about the virus and the direction the virus is taking, the reason the cases are going up, etc. It's not Armageddon! 

1 comment:

  1. Thank you so much for this, Mary Ann!

    In Allegheny County, PA the Triblive reported a "spike in new covid cases" of [GASP!] 233, "more than doubling Wednesday’s case count, which had been a record high." BUT hospitalizations are at a whopping 4 (yes, four) and deaths, 0 (yes, zero). Do they bother to analyze those data in their article? No. Do they tell us how many of the new cases are asymptomatic? No. They do tell us that the ages of those tested ranged from 6 months (OH NO! Now babies get it!) to 99 years, with the median age being 29.

    The reporting on this is very frustrating to read. More frustrating is the fact that people aren't considering their own observations of people they know who have or had the disease. My experience: I know not one person who's tested positive, nor had covid. (Reminds me of the Global Warming reporting and people ignoring their own experience.)

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