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By: Richard Finger
August 9, 2020
The disease may recede, but the stigma lingers. I have experienced it first hand as earlier this summer; my twenty-one-year-old daughter tested positive for COVID-19. Placing this data bit in the atmosphere receives hushed condolences as if revealing the contraction of an incurable venereal disease. Exile to a leper's colony purged her Mark of Cain. She remained asymptomatic throughout her convalescence.
Paradoxically, neither my wife nor I tested positive, despite close contact with her in the days preceding. Over a month later, I cheerfully introduce her as a recent COVID survivor. The mood changes, the unease is palpable, and all confirm face coverings are hermetically sealed.
Humanity has fallen into dystopian existence. Incessant media bombardment convince COVID to be the Armageddon that will forever redefine the human race. Permanent radical behavioral shifts, masks, social distance, no restaurants, bars or theaters, social seclusion, become the new future. Methodically, through all the redundancy, a tectonic reposition of thought patterns occur.
Bike riders secure their face coverings, yet no humans stray within a hundred feet. Ditto to the shrouded fools riding alone in their cars or solitary women with strollers. Masked hikers on the mountain trails of Colorado assiduously avoid my uncovered appearance.
My advance reeks panic of approaching death. They move aside, bow heads in prayer-like posture, and for extra protection, place their hands over already camouflaged faces.
Such demeanor presupposes COVID disperses from the trees, the rivers, and mischievously lurks in crisp mountain air. People transform to vapid souls listlessly wandering the landscapes now devoid of internal electrical impulses remotely prompting they might question, much less rebel against, directives mandated by public officials. Shunning or worse for the pariah who dares resist the new orthodoxy. A complete indoctrination.
What if it's all orchestrated misinformation?
CDC statistics show through August 1, there were nationwide, a total of 45 deaths of children 14 years old and younger. With 60.7 million children in this population demographic, the odds of dying from COVID calculate to about 1 in 1.35 million, well outside the top ten causes of death for this age group. I hypothesize most of these unfortunate 45 suffered from previous underlying medical issues.
Conversely, during the past four years, over 100 children younger than five years old annually died of seasonal flu. In the 2017-18 season, influenza deaths for this age group were as high as 600; yet no schools closed. More than halfway through 2019-2020, officially 186 have succumbed. Yet COVID has claimed only 25 lives of those less than five years old, or 14 percent of seasonal flu numbers. The fifteen to twenty-four-year-old group remains nearly as bulletproof with a loss of around 225 people on a 42 million population base.
California, breaking through 10,000 COVID deaths, recently reported its first death of a "young person" with the passing of a 17-year-old male. Like most, he suffered from a preexisting health condition. Approaching six hundred thousand cases, yet only one confirmed school-age death, disingenuous teacher's union's and politicians miraculously deflect "safety of children" as one justification to keep schools shuttered.
The CDC discloses in only six percent of all coronavirus deaths, "COVID was the only cause" mentioned. For the other ninety-four percent, "there were 2.6 additional conditions or causes per death." There were 115,495 fatalities where patients got admitted to the hospital with "influenza and/or pneumonia." Another 93,393 checked in with respiratory failure, while 35,167 arrived amid cardiac arrest. Yet hospital administrators sign COVID on death certificates one hundred percent of the time. Early on, Dr. Deborah Birx publicized the probability that medical facilities overstate numbers of actual coronavirus fatalities.
Of U.S.165,000 casualties attributed to COVID, six percent translates that less than ten thousand fatalities were otherwise healthy. Eighty percent of all deaths occur in those over 65. One-third of the deceased is over 85, even though this group represents only around four percent of the total population. With 165,000 dead, approximately 133,000 have been these older adults. It is impossible to know the precise age breakdown of the unlucky ten thousand victims in robust health, but the CDC published that half of all eighty-year-olds entered hospitals free from other maladies. Given the asymmetric sacrifice the elderly have made, many of these victims must have been previously in sturdy condition. Therefore, probably more than eighty percent of healthy deaths were also over sixty-five. This leaves 2,000 or fewer vigorous individuals killed by COVID under sixty-five. The under 65 population represents 272 million or 84 percent of America's total. That's outstanding odds you will be a survivor.
American behavior now far transcends sensible risk aversion sliding toward a surreal Twilight Zone.
Hospitals have every incentive to treat every admission as a coronavirus patient. Medicare will make a lump sum payment of $5,000 to a hospital for a pneumonia diagnosis, but the amount ricochets to $13,000 if the doctor determines COVID with pneumonia. Stick that COVID patient on a ventilator for 96 hours, and the reimbursement skyrockets to $39,000. How many manipulated for-profit death certificates signed "COVID" were in actuality from other medical issues? I confirmed with a doctor at a major Houston hospital pressure tactics exist, that, if a patient has COVID, to designate COVID as the cause of death, regardless of whether the victim was a 500-pound diabetic with cancer who had a heart attack.
Hospitals become even more motivated since many locations have continuing restrictions on elective surgeries, depriving a significant income source. In another questionable practice, to "earn" more federal dollars, some states, most notably N.Y., allow for "presumptive COVID cases." On April 14, New York magically added 3,700 COVID fatalities to include "people who had never tested positive for the virus but were presumed to have it." That equates to tens of millions in additional federal funds with the stroke of a pen. Andrew Cuomo maliciously carried out death sentences of thousands of New York nursing home residents consigning infected patients to join healthy populations. At nearly 33,000 victims, New York alone, with less than six percent of the country's people, accounts for 20 percent of U.S. fatalities.
Back in California, with cameras rolling, Dr. Rais Vohra, Fresno County's interim public health officer, tearfully recounted the 17-year old's death. "It's a huge trauma for everyone…., including the hospital workers who are still coping on this case. I am speechless when it comes to anything that I could say to the family……It just brings home the reality that this is not sparing even the youngest members of our community." Really. One dead of over 8.5 million California kids 17 or younger. While nothing can equal the catastrophe of losing a child, the doctor's tone sounds as if COVID confers exponentially more tragedy than death by mundane seasonal flu, cancer, or getting hit by a city bus.
Would a cancer death have warranted an equally hyperbolic and apocalyptic press briefing highlighted with sensationalized melodrama? A politicized COVID end translates to being victimized by the willful malfeasance of wicked Donald Trump. Liberals narrate that without the White House bungling, all of this cataclysm and economic destruction would have been avoided. Yet when Trump announced the very early January 30 China travel ban, Joe Biden and ilk were swift with stale cries of "xenophobia and fear-mongering."
Dying by coronavirus becomes a symbol, a logo of martyrdom to rid our country of the real virus, Trump. Hence, leftists and media collaborators promote ideas of "second waves," tacitly cheer rising fatality counts, and demand ever more economic lockdowns.
Over the past couple of weeks, the media, with lackey doctors Fauci and Gottlieb providing imprimatur, double down on hysteria as for several days, COVID cases spiked above 70,000. Even Republican governors cowed under pressure as many states slow or halt reopening economies. For perspective, for the six-month Oct-April 2020, CDC reports up to 56,000,000 seasonal flu cases.
This calculates to over 300,000 per day. Currently, the official COVID count stands just over 5 million. Does anyone, ever, refer our annual flu "tradition" as a pandemic? During the recent case spike, deaths never got above 55 percent of the April peaks.
This recent case uptick comes from more testing, now approaching twenty percent of Americans. The muted death rates stem that most of the new cases are from the younger demographics that went back to work and mingled in reopened restaurants and bars. In California, 18-49-year-olds encompass over 60 percent of cases, yet comprise a little over 43 percent of the population.
Significant numbers, 35 percent or much higher in some studies, of those infected with COVID, show no symptoms. With such a high prevalence of asymptomatic virus response, the number of coronavirus cases certainly is much higher, perhaps by orders of magnitude than official reports. The CDC estimates the real numbers at six to twenty-four times larger. If 50 or 60 million people have been exposed, then realized death rates must be adjusted commensurately downward.
The fourteenth-century Bubonic Plague classifies as a genuine pandemic. Forecasts that 100 to 200 million perished, erasing perhaps 50 percent or more of all inhabitants of Europe. Some guess it eclipsed 20 to 25 percent of the world's total residents.
Proportionally overlay these numbers to the twenty-first century and visualize over 100 million dead Americans and billions vanished worldwide. Yet the current 735,000 worldwide coronavirus fatality census corresponds to less than a 100th of one percent of all people on the planet.
For this, governments worldwide, deprive millions of businesses and perhaps hundreds of millions of individuals a right to earn a living. With death rates among most demographics far less than one-tenth of one percent, the world economy gets forced into collapse.
Other Things To Worry About
While we hyperventilate over COVID, around the world, humans continue dying, sometimes in much higher numbers, from other things. So far this year:
---over a million dead by HIV/AIDS
---over 3 million dead from smoking
---over 1.5 million dead from alcohol
---nearly 5 million dead from cancer
---over 630,000 dead from suicide
---nearly 600,000 dead from malaria
---over 7 million dead from communicable diseases (not including COVID)
---nearly 4.6 million dead children under five years old
---25 U.S. deaths from COVID for children under five years old on a population of 19.7 million
---over 6.5 million dead from starvation
---over 500,000 dead by water-related diseases
Every year over 450 million worldwide cases of pneumonia end around four million lives. Headlines seem sparse on almost all the above disasters. These figures transform COVID into an afterthought.
The newly radicalized proxies of the Democrats, teachers' unions nationwide keep the education system hostage to specious safety concerns. Twitter and Facebook both removed a Donald Trump video clip announcing children are "almost immune from the disease." While not immune, the above numbers reveal they rarely get sick, and it's seldom fatal. Such universal coordinated censorship shields truth from the public. Empirical evidence from both a German study and a French survey found school settings not to be hotbeds of transmission. They bore out the hypothesis that kids are much less prolific transmitters of the virus than adults.
With all the pecuniary incentives for hospitals to bilk the federal government, I believe the number of COVID deaths vastly exaggerated. Given eighty percent of fatalities are over those over 65 and 94 percent have underlying health problems, young, healthy people have little to worry about.
So, if you're over 85, take a leave of absence from work, or if you chose, just keep on living; at the end of the day, no one's getting out of here alive. If your're over 65, obese with diabetes, perhaps you should tread lightly as well. Everyone else should use common sense. But unsavory Democrats drill into heads an evil ethos of government as a benign omniscient protector. American society has long abrogated any concept of personal responsibility.
The recent multi-trillion-dollar COVID rescue or stimulus packages with another brewing further inculcate Democratic welfare ideology.
Coronavirus represents a culmination of a generation of leftist warfare to deracinate two and half centuries of American spirit. History might look back at this media-driven fabrication as the nail that irretrievably shut the coffin.
Open the hood of the car and discover there is no engine. Read all the numbers, not just those curated to dissemble. COVID is a flu, not a bubonic plague-like killer pandemic the media has programmed us to believe.
