But I believe a form of mass hysteria has spread through society in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic. Rational thought about costs and benefits has evaporated, and we have done more harm than good in our response.
Instead of a conspiracy theory, here is a plausible ‘good faith’ explanation for why this may have happened.
I don’t know about you, but what happened in NYC, Italy, and France was pretty attention getting. Sure we know more now, but if what happened in NYC were to have then happened in most of our major cities, it would not have been good. It’s extremely easy to nitpick using hindsight.
It’s also easy to pretend that given the skyrocketing death counts in places like NYC, people would have simply gone to the hospital as normal, especially at a time when masks etc were in desperate short supply and medical personnel were in some cases wearing garbage bags with holes for the head and arms as gowns, if the media had not “scared them.”
It’s easy to get hectored into the point of view of the kind of deniers who still refuse to wear masks even though it’s a rational way to shorten this thing, for example, because they are relentless in their bullying.
Just this morning I saw another comment on a different site where we should have ignored this because it only kills old people. Yeah, there are governments that have gone too far. Any mandate should be done with the lightest possible touch, but this article is just pretending that history we all lived through didn’t happen.
Even though I think the lockdowns were excessive and too prolonged, I agree. Just because a patient had comordidities it doesn’t mean they were on their deathbed, many of the covid dead had their lives shortened, significantly so. Dr Seheult of Medcram shows the 6% figure, recently touted in the media, is misleading.
The veneer between humanity and insanity is thin.
Sure! And therefore the CORRECT response was to isolate and protect the VULNERABLE and NOT to lock down our entire society and run our economy off a cliff in the process!
I have been searching for months now, for a reasoned argument against the position you state here. I have yet to find one. The fact that those professing to be looking out for our safety deflect and obfuscate when confronted with this issue, indicates mischief afoot.
We do not need the masks at this point, except in care homes, hospitals and public transport or if someone has obvious symptoms — such as coughing, in which case they should stay home. The virus is no longer significantly in the community. The masks are dehumanizing. At this stage, masks are essentially ptotectingnpeopke who do not have Covid from other people who do not have Covid. Forcing people to wear masks now that numbers of cases are way down is another example of mass hysteria and bureaucratic overreach.
Masks do not work in the way the ‘Covidian’s’ claim they do. A virus will float right through those cotton daisy print home made masks. Even the store bought masks barely keep dust out.
A spec of dust is like a giant boulder to a virus.
.125 microns. Kinda like putting up a chain link fence to keep the mosquitoes out of your yard.
Indeed. The proof that masks are largely unnecessary exists. It’s what society did from April through July, social distancing clearly works, with good hygeine, sanitizing you’re hands, all without the need for masks. As a result, the curve, that all the experts said must be flattened, was, and cases dropped.
The sheeple though, love their masks and love being cowed into submission. The sheep at Costco are all masked up, about 90% of them. Still, no Karens lipped off at me last night, though the usual rude shopping cart pilots were enmasse.
I scanned the article. Eh, my usual distain still applies.
“Crude, back-of-a-fag-packet calculations and hand waving arguments …”
How do you tell is someone is British?
He steps out of the shower to pee.
Cor blimey!
Beauty!
Quarantine the infected, not the entire country. Hard to understand why almost every country simultaneously raced to lockdown
the entire populace. There was no evidence it was running rampant across the land killing indiscriminately. Governments are entirely to blame for this disaster.
“Quarantine the infected, not the entire country. Hard to understand why almost every country simultaneously raced to lockdown the entire populace.”
Because the trick to quarantine is to confine the infectious, not the infected, and COVID-19’s extended pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic periods make it much harder to determine who’s a potential vector in the absence of mass testing. Hence the entire populace basically getting treated like potential Typhoid Marys.
Of course, mass testing using tests so sensitive that they report as “cases” people with so low a viral load they’re as good as virus-free is to err much too far in the other direction. This is the end result of living in an over-litigious and unforgivingly politicized culture — our decision-makers would much rather risk over-reacting than under-reacting, because they think they’ll pay far less of a price for the former.
Mass Hysteria…
Yea that part is evident: Tens of thousands wearing masks while walking outside and driving their vehicles acting like it was an airborne NCBW attack.
Mass Media induced hysteria coupled w/ moronic inconsistency from so called Govt Health “experts” …”wear a mask while ya pull yer pin” kind of idiocy.
Critical thinking is a thing of the past, replaced by a 5 x 3 x half inch electronic tablet – we have created A world of drones…..evidently ready for the kampfs and the ensuing ovens….all will do so seemingly willingly.
I watched Stupid Joe yesterday addressing a handful of dorks in a large church where no one was within 20 feet of Joe and he wore a stupid mask the whole time. I could hear his labored breathing as he held the mic close to his face.
A ‘Hollow Ween Mask’ would be just as effective.
‘That was a Hollow Ween Mask’ I get scared every time I see Hiden Biden on the TV:)
steak, a friend who fled Hungary in 1958 stated recycling was just to condition the population, and now we see the extension of that conditioning. Gorebullwarming didn’t do it, sars, ebola, swine flue didn’t do, and now we have success, sars-cov-2. They used covid -19 to cover the fact that it was essentially sars all over again, and we had beet sars, so the same thing may, and do work with sars -2. And wop fauci, who was/is aware that HCQ worked then, and works now, so he should be charged with murder for not stating such. It’s all politics. But we did have a couple of panicked souls in here, Kate and R~4 his self, the spineless loud mouth
Tim in Vermont,
Many of us take convincing on whether masks, as you say, are a rational way to shorten this thing.
I use my experience in Calgary. Masks are acknowledged to not prevent one getting the virus. This is universally acknowledged, even by Health Canada and the CDC. If one is sick, whether its covid or not, one has to stay home. So the only possible use for masks is to prevent spread from people that are supposedly asymptomatic. This is another way to say “super secret covid”. Its highly questionable whether asymptomatic spread occurs, but its acknowledged that there are a multitude of opinions here.
Most importantly, we have a mandatory mask bylaw in Calgary. It, for instance, forces us to wear masks in grocery stores. Ask yourself – has there ever been a report of a spreader event at a grocery store, anywhere in the world? The answer is no. This is a case of governments providing a solution to a problem that doesnt exist.
Conversely, it seems that family and community gatherings are spreader events. However these functions are exempted from our mask bylaw.
It is thus natural to suggest that this mask bylaw is entirely useless.
Further, we continue to see reports about “spreader events” where, say, 10 or even 20 people get covid. Who cares? Seriously, who cares if 20 people get covid. Im sorry that someone is sick for a few days, but we dont really care if 10 or 20 people get the flu, so why do we care if that # gets covid? We have been told to only care about hospital numbers, which have been decreasing or flat for months here.
Lets move on. Our teachers’ union has warned that we would be lining up the tiny coffins when we re-open schools, which we did this week. When this doomsday does not come, Alberta can finally return to stage 3, as we define it, and get back to normal.
Thank you for your posting. With reference to the teachers’ union, I have posted here at previous times, that teachers are “on their way out”. Whenever a workers’ group strikes too often, their jobs are destined for the scrap heap of history. This is the teachers’ unions last stand. With modern technology, students can do remote learning and only come into actual classrooms/laboratories, should they need “hands-on” learning, such as with science experiments. Perhaps there is an argument for actual teachers for small children – say JK to Grade 4/5, but after that, students can learn from home. I know that pre-supposes that one parent stay at home to supervise, but is that such a bad thing? I know from personal experience that it is not. My design business hit the toilet fast in the early 90’s recession, just as I became a single parent. At the time, I cried a lot as I watched me bank balance go down and down. But the big upside was that I had lots of time to spend with my daughter, do nature walks, read to her and teach her how to read, how to do basic arithmetic and just enjoy watching her personality develop.
CGY guy, another YYC guy here. You are exactly right in your comments. I read the article and it is simply more bla, bla, bla. Living in YYC, I can tell you that shopping in Okotoks and Ardrie is very pleasant and almost mask free except for Walmart and Superstore. Our purple prince mayor told us yesterday that the mask bylaw is working because the numbers haven’t gone up… much. Just more BS. He and the medical community have dug a hole they cant get out of while still saving face and we are the people who pay for it. Expect the mask thing to be around all winter… just in case. We should be grateful for their continued concern for us. The fear and paranoia is continually stoked by the media and medical community and the public has bought into it… totally. The numbers say otherwise.
To the article though, I happen to work out of an office in northern Italy, near the epicenter of the “pandemic” and travel there a lot. The people who have lived there their entire lives (who I believe far more than ANY media) have told me that every winter/spring is exactly like this. The medical system is overwhelmed and many frail people unfortunately die. The difference this year was that they were locked in their homes for 3 months. Did the media tell you that? Of course not… it’s not exciting. Or how about that there are several direct flights from Wuhan to Milan every day to support the now largely Chinese owned garment industry in Italy?
How about just trusting people like us to use common sense, protect the vulnerable as much as possible, give medical care where required, but let people live their lives. We will do just fine.
The mask by-law is the Purple Jesus “doing something”. He basically lost his ability to throw his weight around Calgary when the province implemented the health emergency state, and he’s been feeling butt-hurt ever since. Nothing affects a narcissist like him as much as being made utterly irrelevant. I hope this is reflected in the next municipal election.
I don’t believe the masks do much at this point, but my wife is timid and paranoid when it comes to the pool of covids in which we swim, so I wear it when she tells me to. I wear one in public spaces, b/c that’s the law and I’m not that much of a dick to people who are just trying to get by. When my work calls us all back into the office over the next few weeks, I’ll follow the directives there as much as is feasible for me.
The second wave has been more like a ripple, so hopefully people will realise it’s not as bad as all that. Case Fatality Rate (deaths / cases * 100) in AB is about 1.6%, and infections as a percentage of people tested is about 1.8%. Deaths are 0.03% of the people tested. 46 cases in hospital this week, of which 9 are serious enough to be in ICU.
There’s no more health emergency, assuming there ever was one in the first place. It’s time for the state-induced panic to end, and our efforts focused on getting back to normal, rather than becoming accustomed to their “new normal”.
the number don’t lie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=5EppELuO4T0
The article still obfuscates the matter.
I think the author is too kind. On some level, this was not just an innocent mastake. When dissenting voices are systematically shut down, there is an agenda in play. I still do not see news sources talking about natural herd immunity. Part of the agenda is probably politicians covering their butts, but this was also a convenient, if not premeditated, bid to control the masses.
LindaL, I’m in full agreement with you on this. I’m not suggesting Covid is not real, but it’s way overblown. We should never have shut down our economy period. I’m still angry that Walmart and Costco and big grocery chains were allowed to operate, but Mom and Pop stores and other biz was shut down, and probably bankrupted. Yet we could still buy booze! It would also be far easier to “social distance” at a Mom n’ Pop place as well. To some extent, I think the Politicians went for broke, cuz other countries did, then they realized they could use it as a control experiment to see how difficult the peasants would be, when ordered around by their government. Tin foil hat on here, I really feel there is something much bigger happening, machinations being orchestrated out of sight. The elites want a reset, and this became an experiment for further controls later. They are probably upset that there are protests to the lockdowns now gathering steam, and Trump is in the way as well. The US November elections will be very telling.
Interesting to see him deny he is a Brexiteer or Libertarian., clearly Bad Things for him. Not ideological?
It may simply be a greengrocer’s sign, to use Havel’s image; it’s more about not giving people a reason to immediately dismiss anything you say because you happen to agree with people they happen to despise.
Of course, the assumptions we make about our audiences’ ideological blinkers can also reveal a lot about our own blinkers.
Wearing a mask is a minor inconvenience.
Masks reduce but do not eliminate transmission.
So wearing a mask will always be better than not wearing mask.
Societies where people don’t whinge about minor inconveniences have done better with virus control.
Obviously, everyone wants the economy to restart and if masks allows that to happen then we should wear masks. It is idiotic to fight this because it is not a big deal. There are many more important issues.
As for COVID vs the Flu:
COVID kills doctors and nurses. The flu does not.
COVID gets into a nursing home and kill 10+ – the flu may take 1 or 2.
COVID results in serious, possibly long term consequences, for even young people. The flu does not.
So it is completely irresponsible for people to suggest that getting COVID is no big deal.
We do not know enough about this disease to make such statements.
We may in the future but whatever we may find out in the future does not make precautions today unreasonable.
Not true. Prolonged mask wearing has adverse side effects, such that wearing them does more harm to the wearer than good.
The Norwegians, Danes, and Dutch all examined this question and determined that the harm caused by wearing masks was greater than the benefits, so they chose NOT to mandate mask wearing.
There’s also a study on the CDC website that shows that masks are ineffective at preventing the spread of influenza-type viruses.
“COVID kills doctors and nurses. The flu does not.”
Yeah? So much for the efficacy of masks and hand washing.
Tim, you idiot, this is sars-2, and I had sars-1,back in sept 2001, and survived that, and survived it this time, and the mask is much more than just an inconvenience. It can and has killed people. Or do not you watch or read news, just CNN and CBC, which do not report news? I for one should not be wearing a mask, so I take mine off as soon as I can.
Article is a rouse… scamdemic. How easy we submitted to a hoax. That is what is scary. We need Nuremberg type trials for this fk up. And Scott Moe is a big pussy who believes climate change is real. I am a conservative thru and thru
” Covid-19 hysteria is an emotional, identity-driven position masquerading as a set of facts.”
Pretty hard to argue against that.
But I’ll agree with LindaL at 10:10: the author is too kind. Far too kind.
Agree. From the comments:
What will these infantile fools (both “establishment” and masked believers) actually do when the next “deadly killer bug” pops up?
Judging by the replies here, still a lot of panic and fear porn morons unwilling to mend their ways.
Since Tim in Vermont was the first such person, I will pick on him. Apparently, he thinks that death had never before occurred in the world, before COVID-19.
150,000 people die, on average, everyday, worldwide. COVID-19, in total, is a week or two of average worldwide deaths, in its 6 or 10 month run. And we know its numbers have been deliberately inflated.
So, like any virus, I would prefer not to catch it. But it’s 99% not going to end my life. Just like every other virus I ever caught.
Worldwide, on average, before COVID-19, respiratory diseases (non communicable) killed 10,724 people everyday.
Lower respiratory infections 7,010. This is where flu, and other infectious diseases would be counted. According to Tim in Vermont, this number went to 65 trillion a second for COVID-19.
7010 per day
292 per hour
5 per minute
Worldwide, average, for lower respiratory infections.
World population, currently 7.8 billion.
0.00000000064% chance every minute of dying from a respiratory infection.
LOCKDOWN FOR PEOPLEKIND’S SAKE!!!!!
In March we were all told to flatten the curve to keep the ICUs/hospitals from being overwhelmed. The expectation was that even with lockdown strategies, we were in for a rough ride. Well, here we are 6 months later and we didn’t reach anywhere close to what the estimates showed. Nor did any hospital become overwhelmed. Not even in NYC, which had the biggest and deadliest outbreak (thanks Cuomo).
I’m not saying precautions shouldn’t be taken. I visited my 95 year old grandfather last weekend, we were very careful around him, stayed outside and kept our distance.
Protect the most vulnerable, but at the same time, reach herd immunity sooner.
Just to name a few:
Daily inbound Intl flights from China and everywhere else into major Canadian airports.
Grossly inflated Covid death numbers. And btw…that’s not a conspiracy, it’s a goddamned fact, so stop stating otherwise because it’s insulting.
Politicians not abiding by the rules they insist others live by That tells me even they don’t believe the B.S.
“Masks don’t work …oh wait, I changed my mind, now they do” So which is it all you health experts?
Sweden is doing everything wrong and I have the “rolling 7 day average to prove it!!”. Nonsense. They did everything right, but nice try.
Constant 24-7 media driven panic porn, complete with pictures of caskets and refrigeration trucks lined up at the ready. Just stop already!
The latest Tam pronouncement of wearing masks during sex should tell everyone we’ve gone from the sublime to the ridiculous.
Was the virus real and did it kill? Absolutely. Did we overreact? Yes. And by the looks of it we still are.
Well said Mr burton!
The sustaining of the fear and pushing the mask is a visual reminder for the people that there is something out there that will kill you.
It is there so the sheeple get frustrated and we can see the demand for a vaccine increasing week by week. The MSM have been pushing stories about the latest breakthrough and yet another company working on and getting approval for a patent.
This is all about the ” vaccine”.
This is not about CV19.
This is about population management and reduction. Gates and Faucci and Soros have been working this plan for a long time.
Just watch the sheeple queue with self-righteous glee as they stand there holding their arms out to take the needle.
Very well said Mr Glaccierman! ++++
Glacier, actually it’s big business that’s mostly behind this, they were also behind JFK’s killing, and Nixon’s take down. When threated, they react. Kennedy was going to implement some changes that would effect Texas big oil, , Nixon was also going to make some changes that would effect big business, and Trump is a huge problem for them, so they, in conjunction with those you mention, and the CCP are in cahoots on the flue shit. As I posted in here, back in Jan, or Feb, the communists have their model, but so does big business.
Death with COVID means that George Floyd is counted a COVID death because he tested positive at autopsy. This is similar to the case of a Colorado man dying of alcohol poisoning but the death was later blamed on COVID. Washington public officials counted gunshot fatalities as COVID deaths.
from:
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/09/the_big_covid_con_exposed.html
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website disclosed the shockingly small number of people who died from only the Wuhan coronavirus, with no other cause of death mentioned. Hold on to your hat because here it is: out of the 161,392 deaths in the CDC data, just six percent, about 9,700 deaths, were attributed to the coronavirus alone. According to the CDC, the other 94 percent had an average of 2.6 additional conditions or causes of deaths, such as heart disease, diabetes, and sepsis.
from:
https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/essays-and-commentaries/covid-19-is-simply-not-life-threatening/
Both of the above are fairly short and worth reading. COVID19 is mainly a political con job.
To elaborate and hopefully forestall the normal objection: this does not mean that the SARS-nCoV-2 victims with comorbidities “would have died anyway” of those conditions in that time frame; there’s no doubt that the virus was a significant and likely even primary contributor in many of the mortality cases, quite likely serving as the thing that pushed a situationally stable but fragile state of health over the edge into mortal decline and robbing many of these victims of a good few more years, possibly even decades, of life.
The point is that the extremely crude figures popularized by the media, and the established habit of medical institutions to count any death with the virus as a death from the virus, don’t allow people to make meaningful assessments of this risk, either personal or social. While the virus may have been a primary factor in many deaths, we have no way to know just how many, or to know how many deaths were essentially “coincidental” rather than pathological. As a result, the primary-cause viral death rate is inflated to the maximum possible for sake of erring on the side of caution, thus distorting the actual danger assessment of the disease and leading to the kinds of policy overreactions we now see.
“the primary-cause viral death rate is inflated to the maximum possible for sake of erring on the side of caution”
No, not for the sake of caution. This government nor any other deserves a good faith interpretation of it’s motives.
Which government is it that is denouncing the Global Warming Swindle? The government that does so can be assumed
to be acting in good faith. All the others must not be.
It has less to do with assuming good faith than with lack of belief in this administration’s competence to do any such thing. The vast majority of politicians operate on the basis of, “What’s least likely to make me and my party look bad for the next election?”, not “What will allow us to execute a grand nefarious scheme without getting caught?” This is the same government that’s blundering its way through the WE scandal right now, after all.
I think I will go out and buy a lottery ticket.
I heard that there is a very good chance that I may win the big prize.
It’s scary how libertarians and “Brexiteers” would find all of his factual statements accurate, but the writer can’t get past his own preconceptions about what libertarians and Brexit supporters believe.
Sad. We all have our blinders, I suppose. I’m sure I have some that I won’t admit.
“We all have our blinders, I suppose. I’m sure I have some that I won’t admit.”
By definition, you would be “blind” to them. Not to worry, it’s a blindness asking your wife or girl friend can instantly cure.
The over-reaction here in Canada can be attributed to 3 things:
(a) a coverup for (defacto admission that) the fact that provincial health care systems are incapable of dealing with normal health care loads in timely fashions, let alone any kind of an outbreak. This despite the several pandemic scares over the past 20 years and the blatantly obvious fact that aging boomers would increasingly stress the systems.
(b) a distraction from the negligence of politicians from all levels of government who lacked the courage to do that should have been done in the early stages. The gutless ones who stayed quiet are just as complicit as the mouthpieces who berated as racist those who called for the common sense things – such as cessation of flights from China.
(c) a lazy, bought-and-paid-for media – as lacking in curiosity as in ethics
“A brand new TV show has just been announced called Hancock’s Half-Hour. Over the course of 30 minutes the main character, Hapless Hancock, playing the part of the Health Secretary, will highlight all the government’s absurd policies and fake facts and figures surrounding the covid situation. ”
https://www.sott.net/article/440830-Hancocks-Half-Hour
In his book “The Ominous Parallels”, Leonard Peikoff labled Weimar Germany “the irrationalist republic”. But it can’t happen here, right?