Tuesday, July 28, 2020

July, 2020, Part 10, Political Class Insanity: How Government Cannot Count When It Comes To The Coronavirus, Chapter 3

It is the beginning of another month which means it is time again to review the latest political class insanity from the American political class. Each month it takes us multiple posts to cover the wasteful spending, incompetent government organizations and employees, government programs that usually make a problem worse than resolving it, inane and idiotic politician comments, etc.

To review past posts on this insanity and idiocy, just click on the first few posts in each month listed to the right of this page. After reviewing just a handful of these insanity posts we think you will agree that we are currently being served by the worst set of American politicians ever to hold office in our entire history.

1) Today we will still be focusing on the coronavirus. Not because it has sickened and killed so many people around the world but because it illustrates the pure incompetence of government and the politicians that operate that government and their inability to simply be able to count effectively. You cannot solve a problem unless you understand the reality of the problem and almost always the reality of a problem is determined by the data and numbers that describe the problem. 

But if you cannot even collect that data and numbers correctly then your ability to solve a problem is almost nil. You are basing any solutions on faulty data and premises and only pure luck will ever get you to the right solution, as we pointed out in our previous post:
  • A man in Tennessee was classified as a positively tested coronavirus person even though he had NEVER taken a coronavirus test.
  • Multiple virus testing labs in Florida were found to have over counted the number of virus cases by up to ten fold.
  • In Colorado, a man was classified as a virus death even though subsequent medical analysis showed he clearly died from acute alcohol poisoning, not the virus.
  • We also cited other cases in Colorado where nursing home patients were classified as virus deaths but more testing showed that the virus had nothing to do with their deaths.
  • In Connecticut, the board of health found that in a sample of 140 cases that they had classified as positives after testing was really comprised of 50 true positive cases and 90 false positive cases, i.e. 90 out of 140 who were told they had the virus really didn't have it.
But it is not just the states who screw up virus statistics and tracking, apparently according to the United Patriots News website on July 20, 2020, the Federal government’s CDC also screwed up royally when it comes to counting accurately:
  • The CDC admitted that it had mistakenly co-mingled two different sets of virus deaths when complaining the statistics for the virus which screwed up the overall counting of the number of people who had the virus.
  • According to the article: “The Centers for Disease Control fused the data of genetic tests that spot individuals who were infected, by utilizing a process known as P.C.R., Polymerase Chain Reaction, with results from serology testing, which searches for antibodies in the blood— the antibody testing is used to determine if people were previously infected.”
  • So, they were mixing together a group of people who were recently infected with the virus with other people who already had the virus which obviously screws up the statistics of how many people recently tested for the virus.
  • Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University was not happy about this seemingly simple screwup: “Reporting both serology and viral tests under the same category is not appropriate, as these two types of tests are very different and tell us different things.”
Great, another government agency that does not know how to count. The obvious outcome is that it may be that the number of infections is over counted since the initial CDC policy was to combine those being tested to see if they were currently infected with those that may have already had the virus and were counted back then in the other test i.e. some people were counted twice as new infections when they should have been counted once as a new infection and once as someone who once had the virus.

2) James Barrett, writing for the Daily Wire website back in May, described the opinion of a Stanford University expert who felt that the country was severely overreacting to the virus:
  • John P.A. Ioannidis is the co-director of Stanford’s Meta-Research Innovation Center and is a professor of medicine, biomedical data, statistics, and epidemiology and population health.
  • His analysis back in May suggested that the reaction to the virus could be “a fiasco in the making” since the country was making big decisions on “utterly unreliable data.”
  • His conclusion is that the country is severely overreacting to the virus: “The current coronavirus disease, Covid-19, has been called a once-in-a-century pandemic. But it may also be a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco.”
  • Furthermore: “Draconian countermeasures have been adopted in many countries. If the pandemic dissipates — either on its own or because of these measures — short-term extreme social distancing and lockdowns may be bearable. How long, though, should measures like these be continued if the pandemic churns across the globe unabated? How can policymakers tell if they are doing more good than harm?”
  • He believes that based on the bad data available, most countries have taken extreme measures way out of proportion to what is needed and will cause much more damage than good.
  • He believes that a lot of the statistics are bad because the testing bias misses many, many healthy people that if they were included in the testing process, the fatality and infection rate of the virus would fall dramatically.
  • Ioannidis did an in-depth study of the Diamond Princess cruise ship, an early victim of the virus where 7 out of 700 people on the ship died from the virus.
  • This provided him a closed environment where he could study the entire population in detail and analyze the results in this closed system.
  • His conclusions are based on the ship’s infection and fatality rate once adjusted for the age of those on the ship.
  • Rather than go through his entire analysis here, the bottom line is that the fatality rate from the coronavirus is estimated by him to be statistically ranging from .05% to 1% which would be less than the death rate of many seasonal flu outbreaks.
  • If true, he makes the analogy that we shut down the world economy because an ordinary house cat was attacking an elephant.
So, we have one expert in California who actually did some real live analysis based on a closed system and concluded that the extent of the virus’s potency is likely grossly overestimated. And we have a wing of the Federal government who mistakenly double counted and misclassified test results which likely overestimated the reach and potency of the virus. 

Combine these results with the discussions from the previous two posts and we can make a strong case that we have done a lot of economic damage to this country for no good reason because the government and the politicians that operate it simply do not know how to count. Insanity.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:





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