- Misdiagnoses, or You Find What You’re Looking For
Say, way back in 2019, somebody shows up in the ER having trouble breathing. In those dark times, the staff would start checking through a list of possible causes – in some order: asthma, allergies, pneumonia, heart attack, overexertion, and, no doubt, a dozen other things. In many cases, getting the diagnosis right is time-critical; in the best of times, getting it right and getting it right quickly is difficult.
Now fast forward to 2021. Guy shows up in ER with exactly the symptom described above. What happens? A COVID test, or perhaps a diagnosis without the test. If, as often happens, there are a number of causes for a particular symptom – I have asthma AND a cold AND (possibly asymptomatic) COVID – how much longer, if ever, before anything other than COVID is diagnosed?
Now multiply this across all medical care: you have the entire medical world whipped into a frenzy over COVID, such that it is very unlikely that anyone who presents with any symptom attributable to the Coof is not immediately tested, diagnosed, or both. Such a person is then above all treated as a disease vector and deprived of human contact and comfort, and only later, if ever, correctly diagnosed
Real numbers of people are going to have proper treatment delayed or skipped in favor of treating the virus – and die as a result. Anecdotes to this effect are numerous.
I say: it is Pollyanna-ish to imagine a very real number of deaths have not resulted from precisely the situation described above.
2. Removal of Oversight in Care Facilities.
I’ve written about this at length, most recently here. Summary: The old sick people who who make up the bulk of people incarcerated in care facilities are usually no fun to care for. As they decline toward their deaths, they require more and more – and more and more unpleasant – care. Further, while many who work in nursing homes are doubtless saints, that sort of work is going to attract a certain number of emotionally sick people, people who get off on lording it over helpless people, up to and including out and out sociopaths.
Back again to 2019. The constant trickle of visitors to nursing homes helped ensure some modicum of care was provided. Visitors notice messes that need cleaning up, unpleasant smells, inmates who have soiled themselves, etc. Good nursing homes are often described as ‘those where you don’t smell urine when you walk in” – and this state is largely due to the hell visitors raise when they do smell it. Yet somebody, usually a minimum or near minimum wage worker, is required to clean up the urine, the feces, the bedding and clothes and, indeed, the patient.
About 100 times a day.
This sort of work is no fun, and, I’m sure, gets less fun over time. Yet, if you are trying to provide a decent last few months and dignified death, it’s work that must be done. Visitors ensure it happens regularly.
Now terrify this minimum wage staff with the thought (unfounded, if they are otherwise healthy) that they are likely to catch and die from COVID if they interact with the patients. Then ban all visitors. What do you imagine is going to happen to the level of care? Even the people who are doing an honest job are going to be severely hampered by fear, and those who figure no one cares, especially if they never find out, if granny lives another few months, are just gets it over with now, are unchecked. Infections, dehydration, bedsores, hunger, filth – these are last straws that can kill old, sick people before their time. These are what happens when all civilian oversight is removed.
3. Stress.
I have not looked at the numbers for a while now – it is not good for my health to dwell very long on the CDC website – but, last I checked:
- Suicides – up
- murders – up
- fatal overdoses – up
- accidental deaths – up
Violence in general is up. Whipping a couple hundred million people into a state of irrational panic and fear is going to have consequences.
Yard Sale of the Mind 
Reblogged this on Head Noises and commented:
Other than fatal overdoses– due to fentanyl being cheap and very easy to accidentally kill yourself with, and that supply going up and going up in forms that make it easier to kill yourself unknowing– a depressingly accurate list of ways that panic over COVID has killed people.
To make it clear over here– doesn’t mean that suicides via ODing haven’t gone up, or folks just ODing because they are stressed hasn’t gone up, just means the data is too dirty to automatically assume the rise is user-based rather than supply based.
Sure. Similarly, I would suspect that a good number of nursing home deaths are simple murder (more than the usual number) – but that would be difficult to distinguish. Which is what the killers are counting on.
:Nods:
Somewhere I heard a story about the personification of Plague was sent out to a city but was told that he could only kill a thousand persons in that city.
When he returned, the being who sent him asked why he killed ten thousand persons in that city.
Plague replied “I only killed a thousand, panic killed the rest”. 😦
As I may have written elsewhere I had four beloved elders died in the fall of 2020. Three were killed to varying degrees by the Lockdown. One only, in a flyover state which still had a few hospitals that ignored so-called Covid regs for end-of-life hospice patients, died at a normal pace visited by beloved children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. One was tortured routinely.
It’s been a pretty rotten business all around.
Hi Joseph I’ve been following your blog for several months, and thought of you when I saw this “Spartacus Letter”: https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/damn-you-hell-you-will-not-destroy-america-here-spartacus-covid-letter-thats-gone-viral
I’m curious of your more scientifically literate perspective if a lot of this checks out, as parts are very technical, but the major points are easier to follow, and seem to be very well made and quite well sourced. I’m hoping this isn’t some big misdirection scheme or something of that sort, and is in fact a serious and somewhat credible paper. Let me know your thoughts, thanks!
I’ll check it out.
OK: First off, it will take me a while to read through his references, so this is going to be very superficial, comments on his approach and logic only. I’ll give reading his sources a shot, but that’ll take weeks (much of it spent looking up terminology and abbreviations on-line!).
1. Description of the pathology – “COVID-19 Pathophysiology and Treatments:” Spartacus starts here with a detailed description of what the virus does, and what medical treatments of it do. Insofar as this section is merely descriptive, I have no expertise here and no opinion. When I look at the sources, I’ll merely be checking to see if they are following scientific protocol and being logical, and spending hours looking up terminology. I suspect they’ll be fine – think of it this way: somebody has to take notes on patients, look at cultures, look at samples through microscopes, run tests, and so on. This process requires much very specific technical expertise that I’d never pretend to have. The main risks, scientifically speaking, are not technical, but rather related to confirmation bias – are there any steps taken to separate the observer from what he might want to find?
Super-preliminary opinion: other than simply being aware that confirmation bias has almost certainly not been accounted for, all this sounds reasonable enough. So far, my observations and objections haven’t been nearly this deep. That COVID is a real disease that really kills people has never been challenged here; instead, it’s the frequency, severity, and measurements of the disease, and the steps proposed to mitigate it, that have concerned me. That said, it would be a relief to dig through some real science, however painfully slow due to my near-complete ignorance of medical terminology.
“The majority of the public are scientifically illiterate and cannot grasp what any of this even means, thanks to a pathetic educational system that has miseducated them. You would be lucky to find 1 in 100 people who have even the faintest clue what any of this actually means.” Right. How about 1 in a thousand once you get this technical.
2. “COVID-19 Transmission:” Here he is repeating common claims – that masks as used in the real world don’t help and that social distancing rules are pointless as used in the real world. The numbers – the part I’m good at – back him up, as there is no consistent measurable differences in deaths related to use/non-use of these steps. I’ll be interested to see if he has any good sources for this.
3. “COVID-19 Vaccine Dangers:” Here, Spartacus goes into detail about the possible effects of the current round of vaccines, which is interesting and mostly way out of my league, except: “All of the COVID-19 vaccines currently in use have undergone minimal testing, with highly accelerated clinical trials. Though they appear to limit severe illness, the long-term safety profile of these vaccines remains unknown.” As I’ve said all along, if you test for 3 or 4 months, the absolute most you can know is the effectiveness and safety over 3 or 4 months. That’s it. It is simply logically impossible to know anything more, which is why drugs are routinely tested for 8 or 10 years before being approved. All claims that the vaccines have been proven to be safe and effective are simply logically impossible to support.
4. “COVID-19 Criminal Conspiracy:” No comment until I’ve looked at his sources, if any.
5. “COVID-19 Vaccine Development and Links to Transhumanism: This section deals with some more speculative aspects of the pandemic and the medical and scientific establishment’s reaction to it, as well as the disturbing links between scientists involved in vaccine research and scientists whose work involved merging nanotechnology with living cells.” Ditto.
Aaaand – the link to his references is all “404”. So. I’ll see if I can track them down elsewhere.
In principle, someone who knew a lot of about the fluid mechanics of aerosol transport could work out effectiveness of social distancing from first principles.
In practice, fluid mechanics is a sketchy discipline theoretically speaking. This means that actual knowledge needs a very specific grounding in experiment. Good luck finding someone who really understands aerosol transport, and knows the full pattern of flows from human breath, and has a trustworthy model of viral particle activity!
Okay, I suspect it makes sense.
But it seems harder to conclusively show this than it is to show that the masks that don’t seal are a transparent fraud, and a hazard from bacteria.
Thanks- if I can help you try locate some sources let me know- if I have time later today I’ll start trying to validate which are and aren’t offline (the original upload location of the Spartacus Letter does already seem to have gone 404 as well).
And, other forms of violence may develop from this effort to weaponize fear.
Some people are pretty clearly sincere. Others, have claimed to be paying attention to evidence, and are in a position to know better, clearly extremely political in other ways, and killing them may prove the only way to prevent this willful and knowing malice.
Every additional person they kill this way risks angering others. Now, some of those will get angry at those who resist covid alarmist lockdown extremists. Others can very well see here who is really at fault.
The lack of effective restriction on international travelers shows that this is not serious. There are basically three paths to not being in permanent lockdown due to ‘new strains of corona’ if we accept the ‘new normal’. Restricting international travel is the sane option of the three, and applies for both possibilities of the origin of the Covid-19 strains. If covid-19 was a bioweapons release, then you could instead exterminate the population of the PRC to end the PRC’s bioweapons programs. If covid-19 was naturally occurring, then you could exterminate the PRC to the practice of Southern Chinese living in such poverty in close contact with animals. Unrestricted international travel absolutely is not more valuable the the costs of the ‘new normal’.
Each individual episode of masking may have a trivial health impact. But, a prolonged masking episode gives time for bacterial build up, and for more physical stress from labored breathing. And, a two week or six month series of episodes may not show any obvious aggregate effect.
If you have a ten year series of episodes, the aggregate effect of bacterial infections, physical stress, and mental stress from fearmongering is definitely going to hit a point where it exceeds the risk from getting corona infections after ignoring /everything/.
At this point, people have the information to work this out. If they have not worked it out, they are in denial.