Perspective is important. One constant gotcha is scale. Saw something like this once, couldn’t find it, so I mocked it up myself:
On the very, very small chance anyone tries to look at the numbers, they are most likely to see something like this:
What you are supposed to notice: that scary red line way up over the weekly death totals from previous years, starting in March, 2020.
(What you are not supposed to notice: the dotted green line, which shows deaths from all causes other than COVID in 2021. That dotted green line should be – should be, by all common sense – ABOVE all previous years except 2020. The population has risen and aged significantly over this period; we should expect year over year death numbers to be higher. Yet, by some miracle, if it weren’t for COVID bringing the total 2021 solid green line up to where it might reasonably be, significantly fewer people have died in 2021 than history and common sense would have predicted. Makes a fellah wonder…)
What do these numbers look like if we put the deaths on the same scale as the population? They look like this:
What this chart shows is the gradual increase in US population over the last decade, and a death rate consistently just under 1%. That means around 3M people die in the US every year in the normal course of things no matter what we do. Next, we will add in the attributed number of deaths ‘involving ‘ COVID in 2020. (2021 has been effectively flat, so I’m ignoring it). Note, not the number of excess deaths claimed by the CDC, which is about 360,000, but the 500,000 number of COVID deaths that is still getting tossed around. In other words, I’m following the ‘use the worst numbers in the worst way’ practice used incessantly by the media and government:
If you have good eyes and look very carefully, you can barely detect a tiny bump up for 2020. As tragic as any particular death may be, on a population basis of 333 million, even 500,000 additional deaths doesn’t change the big picture at all. If this seems cold, first, note that numbers don’t care.
As pointed out by many, many people, what a sane layman means by a disease killing somebody bears little resemblance to how the press has reported the CDC ‘death involving’ numbers. Most likely, at least 2/3rds of the deaths attributed to COVID are elderly, sickly people who were already dying of something else. People in nursing homes are there for a reason, and are most likely going to die soon, COVID or not. Yet we count them and panic while simply ignoring into oblivion the INEVITABLE, INESCAPABLE death toll of the lockdowns themselves.
Next let’s consider a pandemic about the existence of which there is little dispute: the Black Death. The numbers are not hard, as people at the time were too busy burying the dead and trying not to die to do any large-scale demographics for our benefit. Roughly, 30%-60% of the population of Europe died over the years 1347-1351. The population may have been as high as 75 million. Since we’re just ballparking here, and have to guess anyway, we’ll use a mathematically reasonable 4% annual death rate, which is about the guesstimate for agricultural pre-modern societies. I’m open to better suggestions here, but I merely point out that up or down a percentage point or two won’t make much difference to overall picture I’m painting.
Putting this into a graph, and making the simplifying assumption that the Plague killed about the same percentage of people from 1347 to 1351 so that the total adds up to about 60%, the graph looks something like this:
The first point is that you can actually see changes in deaths: from about 3 million a year as a baseline to almost 10,000,000 deaths in 1347, and the about 40 million who died over the duration of the Plague.
The second thing to note: the population went down, and went down drastically. It was centuries before the overall population of Europe again reached 1300 levels. Meanwhile, under COVID, the US population ROSE, and continues to rise.
The CDC is claiming COVID increased the death rate in America by about 10%, from about 2.9 million to about 3.2 million. That’s counting every ‘death involving’ COVID as a COVID death and ignoring INEVITABLE, INESCAPABLE deaths due to the lockdowns and masks. The The Black death increased the death rate about 300% annually, from about 3 million deaths to about 10 million deaths per year.
I have heard more than one person compare Sars2 to the Black Death. No. To get in the ballpark, a hundred million Americans would have to die, 20 times even the wildest overestimations floating about.
To put it in personal terms, every European during the Black Death saw his chances of dying a horrible death soon go up astronomically; COVID adds a tiny fraction of a percent more risk to an average, reasonably healthy American. During the Black Death, people had not just heard about a fatal disease, but saw many, many people in their families and villages die before their eyes. Mass graves, containing hundreds or even thousands, were needed to dispose of the dead. Death was an immediate, irrefutable fact for all but the most isolated Europeans. In America, while everyone who listens to the media has heard of COVID deaths, almost nobody personally knows an otherwise healthy person who died of COVID. Not elderly, not obese, not diabetic, not having underlying heart or lung issues, not having survived cancer (the the damage to their immune systems and overall strength surviving cancer usually entails).
Claiming a person so ill that they were consigned to a nursing home was killed by COVID defies common sense. Mortuaries are not and never were overworked any more than usual; hospitals are not and never were overwhelmed any more than usual. A cold is as much or more a threat than COVID to about 99% of everybody.
Footnote: I was so pleased and relieved to see back at church today someone who could have become, if she had died, the first person I personally knew to die of COVID. She’s a wonderful lady, 87 years old, generally vigorous but having had a couple falls in the last few months. She refused to wear masks or otherwise go around terrified. She is said to have caught the disease, ended up in the hospital – and then recovered just fine, like 99.9%+ of reasonably healthy people who catch it. Something is going to get her – something is going to get all of us! – but I’m so thankful it wasn’t the Coof in her case. May she live another decade! Everybody else I know who has had it has recovered promptly. A few had lingering symptoms. People seem to have forgotten catching that flu that just won’t go away, takes a couple months before we feel truly right. Used to be a sign you were human. Now, it’s a sign of the Apocalypse.
Yard Sale of the Mind 
I had three elderly beloved die during CoronaDoom2020* . One was tortured to death by the lockdown. One died of grief from the lockdown, and one (in a relatively “open” state) just died in hospice. As you do.
It is all lies and gaslighting all the way down.
*How wrong is it of me to think that is an excellent band name, right up there with Nonabrasive Wet System?
P.S. How you are looking at the Coronachan numbers is how the PTB are looking at the “vax” aka Corona-virus genetic therapy (95% effective in preventing *clinical* Came “Covid19” cases)
That’s the can of worms we’re dealing with.
In the meantime can you come up with pithy literary quotes for my mask? I’m being punished for refusing to share my medical records (I agreed to do it if my employers would harvest the full vaccination and HIV status of all employees. Hah.). It’s a nice conversation starter with customers. So far I have:
Then they came for the trade unionists
I must not tell lies
Some pigs are more equal than others.
Suggestions welcomed.
It’s refreshing to hear some common sense on this subject.
It’s depressing to realize just how rare common sense is these days.
Over at D&D Memes on reddit, some idiot posted a D20 with something about how gamers are vaccinated because they understand that a 2% chance of death is not that uncommon.
I considered, but did not, make an account just to point out that he’d moved the dot over one.
Mostly because I didn’t want to have to dig up the stuff that boiled down to “you have a roughly 2% chance of getting flu level sick, if you get flu level sick you have a 2% chance of getting hospitalized, if you are hospitalized you have a 2% chance of death.”
Not popular, since it was comparing those not already in the hospital rather than “only those sick enough to be hospitalized are looked at for fatality rate” stuff.
Just… know it wouldn’t be listened to by anybody who doesn’t already know.
I don’t buy the idea that the vaccine is somehow malicious or terrible: it seems to me more like the companies under Operation Warp Speed rolled out a Public Beta of the sort of product usually only announced as “in the works” before full release. On the one hand, the odds of getting the disease and getting knocked on my arse by it are slim enough to make the vaccine basically unnecessary for a healthy adult without underlying conditions. On the other, if I’m to get disease immunity, it’ll be either from a vaccine or the disease itself, and I’d rather have three days or so of being knocked on my arse by a beta-released vaccine than a week or three from the disease itself.
There’s a reason I say nothing of my chances of death-from-C-19: the odds of THAT happening, while nonzero, are only slightly above those of a respiratory illness being prevented by wearing a dirty t-shirt scrap over my nose and mouth.