Yet more evidence that Covid-19 is far less dangerous than thought: the real threat from Covid-19 is the government’s response.

More and more evidence is emerging that the Corona virus is far LESS dangerous than previously feared and the real threat is the hysterical (over)reaction of the world’s political elite to the virus itself.

The list of medical professionals and researchers questioning the official line on Covid-19 is growing daily.

On April 6^th Professor Klaus Püschel, head of forensic medicine in Hamburg, stated that:

“This virus influences our lives in a completely excessive way [which] is disproportionate to the danger posed by the virus… [likewise] the astronomical economic damage now being caused is not commensurate with the danger posed by the virus. I am convinced that the Corona mortality rate will not even show up as a peak in annual mortality.” He states that in Hamburg for example, “not a single person who was not previously ill had died of the virus: all those we have examined so far had cancer, a chronic lung disease, were heavy smokers or severely obese, suffered from diabetes or had a cardiovascular disease. The virus was the last straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak. Covid-19 is a fatal disease only in exceptional cases, but in most cases it is a predominantly harmless viral infection.” https://www.pressreader.com/germany/hamburger-morgenpost/20200403/281487868456736

Professor John Oxford of Queen Mary University London, one of the world’s leading virologists and influenza specialists, comes to the following conclusion regarding Covid19:

“Personally, I would say the best advice is to spend less time watching TV news which is sensational… I view this Covid outbreak as akin to a bad winter influenza epidemic… we had 8000 deaths this last year in the ‘at risk’ groups viz over 65% people with heart disease etc. I do not feel this current Covid will exceed this number. We are suffering from a media epidemic!” https://novuscomms.com/2020/03/31/a-view-from-the-hvivo-open-orphan-orph-laboratory-professor-john-oxford/

Renowned US statistician Nate Silver has commented that:

“[COVID-19 data] at best, is highly incomplete, and often the tip of the iceberg for much larger problems. And data on tests and the number of reported cases is highly non-random… if you’re not accounting for testing patterns, it can throw your conclusions entirely out of whack. You don’t just run the risk of being a little bit wrong: Your analysis could be off by an order of magnitude. Or even worse, you might be led in the opposite direction of what is actually happening.

According to two recent epidemiological studies, which tried to infer the true number of infected people from the reported number of deaths, there is roughly a 20-fold difference in case detection rates between the countries that are doing the best job of it, such as Norway and the worst job, such as the United Kingdom. That means, for example, that in one country that reports 1,000 COVID-19 cases, there could actually be 5,000 infected people, and in another country that reports 1,000 cases, there might be 100,000!..

[for example] countries that are doing a lot of testing also tend to have low fatality rates — not just low case fatality rates (how many people die as a fraction of known cases) but also lower rates of death as a share of the overall population. Germany, for example, which is conducting about 50,000 tests per day — seven times more than the U.K. — has more than twice as many reported cases as the U.K., but they’ve also had only about one-third as many deaths.”

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/coronavirus-case-counts-are-meaningless/

The National Review outlines the case of Sweden which has followed a policy of avoiding catastrophic economic shut down and the data shows that it is working.

“If social isolation worked, wouldn’t Sweden, a Nordic country of 10.1 million people, be seeing the number of COVID-19 cases skyrocket into the tens of thousands, blowing past the numbers in Italy or New York City? As of April 6th, there are 401 reported COVID-19 deaths in Sweden. The current COVID-19 death rate in Sweden (40 deaths per million of population) is substantially lower than the Swedish death rate in a normal flu season (in 2018, for instance, about 80 per million of population). Ironically Sweden is now coming under massive pressure from the other majority of countries following the “lock down” strategy for the obvious reason that it represents a dangerous counter point to their strategy of mass incarceration of entire populations on dubious data.

This is, in fact, the first time we have quarantined healthy people rather than quarantining the sick and vulnerable. As Fredrik Erixon, the director of the European Centre for International Political Economy in Brussels, wrote in The Spectator (U.K.) last week: “The theory of lockdown, after all, is pretty niche, deeply illiberal — and, until now, untested. It’s not Sweden that’s conducting a mass experiment. It’s everyone else.”

We’ve posed these simple questions to many highly trained infectious-disease doctors, epidemiologists, mathematical disease-modelers, and other smart, educated professionals. It turns out that, while you need proof beyond a reasonable doubt to convict a person of theft and throw them in jail, you don’t need any actual evidence (much less proof) to put millions of people into a highly invasive and burdensome lockdown with no end in sight and nothing to prevent the lockdown from being re-imposed at the whim of public-health officials.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-response-sweden-avoids-isolation-economic-ruin/

Even the New Zealand government’s own, public data demonstrates that Covid-19 is simply not anywhere near as dangerous as the hysterical mainstream media coverage suggests. New Zealand still has just one death (a woman in her 70’s with an underlying chronic medical condition) from a total of 1210 positive cases. That’s a 0.08% (simple) case fatality rate - LOWER than the seasonal influenza. It’s not even clear that this poor person died from corona virus, she may well have died with corona virus.

John Lee a recently retired professor of pathology and a former NHS consultant pathologist writes in the Spectator that

“Prof. Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London said that he now expects fewer than 20,000 Covid-19 deaths in the UK but, importantly, two-thirds of these people would have died anyway. In other words, he suggests that the crude figure for ‘Covid deaths’ is three times higher than the number who have actually been killed by Covid-19. (Even the two-thirds figure is an estimate – it would not surprise me if the real proportion is higher.”

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-to-understand-and-report-figures-for-covid-19-deaths-

Even the BBC https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51979654 has started to pick up on this point, challenging if the way data is being collected and reported is accurate. For hundreds of articles from esteemed researchers and medical professionals picking up on this theme please see this blog: https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/

Returning to New Zealand, even if ALL of the patients currently in ICU died (4 persons) and ALL were attributed directly and causally to Covid-19 then New Zealand’s Case Fatality Rate would still be 0.3% - roughly the seasonal flu.

Tough questions need to be asked by the mainstream media:

1.       Why is the government suspending parliament and enforcing the most draconian assault on New Zealander’s political freedoms for a disease that on their own data increasingly appears to be no more serious than the seasonal flu? See here for concerns voiced by more than one hundred human rights and civil liberties organizations warn that the world is currently sleepwalking into a surveillance state. 

2.       Why are we destroying our economy and going into debt to the tune of billions of dollars a week? https://www.beehive.govt.nz/feature/covid-19-economic-response-package

3.       Why are we following a policy that is causing tens of thousands of people to lose their jobs, their businesses, their livelihoods? https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=12318414

4.       Why is no one asking about the collateral damage, the increased (preventable) deaths due to cancelled or delayed operations (for example for cancer) or the increased rates of mental illness and depression? For example in the US state of Indiana, calls to the mental health and suicide hotline have increased by over 2000% from 1000 to 25,000 calls per day due to the lockdown and its economic impact. https://twitter.com/JesseKellyDC/status/1246449878219145216

The media needs to do its job and start asking these hard questions. “The only means to fight the plague is honesty.” Albert Camus, The Plague (1947)

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Both the NZ Herald and Stuff originally indicated they would publish my Covid-19 articles but then pulled the pin at the last moment, I suspect (with good reason) under political pressure.