Let me get this straight
US-based rant here...
1) The CDC has NEVER published clean stats on flu deaths. They are always combined with another, related illness. If they aren't hiding anything, we do not have any real knowledge of what the usual mortality rate of the seasonal flu is.
2) Every year, the government "experts" go on TV & warn about how we "might" be looking at the Spanish flu this year--or perhaps next.
3) In 2009, we had a swine flu variant which was highly infectious, but with a mortality rate so low that the actual death rate was lower than most years. In response to this, WHO changed the definition of epidemic & pandemic so that they could say that 2009 was a pandemic.
You could say that given the above, I've become rather cynical when it comes to the flu-industrial complex. Let's look at what we have now...
4) A novel virus appears, it's mortality rate is higher than usual. How is it described? "Ten times as bad as the seasonal flu." Not "1%".
5) "Experts" go on TV, and show exponential growth rates. These are impossible, except in the very early stages, as our population is finite. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidemiology for more realistic models.)
6) We are warned to get supplies for two weeks, triggering panic purchasing.
7) "Experts" condemn people for buying face masks, saying, "it won't keep you from being infected" as if that it why we would wear masks. Then, they come out and say, "only sick people should wear them", AFTER admitting that, especially for the young and healthy, you can have the disease and never know it. If the masks are ineffective, why should sick people wear them? Since we now have proof that most infections are from people who are asymptomatic (which is the same for almost all airborne diseases), what is the basis for this?
And just in case the tin-foil hat crowd was not completely berserk:
8) State governors start decreeing that we no longer have freedom of association. (County level political conventions are being forbidden.) And that we are to isolate ourselves and await further instructions.
I have long held that we need to be able to declare states of emergencies to deal with severe health crises. I just don't see what we actually have as being to the point of shredding the First Amendment.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
