Are we being played??

Are we being played or what??

I confess that I don’t know. I also confess that I thought a quick shut down was a good thing. But I don’t think this phased start up will work. And I think the people who are pushing this are spouting statistics while we know that their first numbers were off by the millions and that failure trend follows.

Figures don’t lie but liars figure. Especially people who desperately want to be right because that is their claim to fame and key to power.

So, I started looking around.

Sweden, which has been roundly condemned, has never closed. You would think that their death rate would be at least equal to Italy, which is 376/per million/population, but its not. Or maybe Spain, which is 417. But it’s not. Okay, maybe twice what our rate is. But its not. Sweden’s death rate is 139 vs our 107.

Now I’m not down playing that 32 difference. With our population of around 320 million that’s 10240 (32 x 320) which is not a number to be sneezed at. With reported current deaths of 35500 the total would have been 45740 based on the Swedish model.

We have approximately 800,000 hospital beds, 2834 hospitals with a least 10 each acute care units and 1 ICU.  And, per John Hopkins on 4/1/20....“1 study estimated that US acute care hospitals own approximately 62,000 full-featured mechanical ventilators. Calculations suggest that about 28,883 of these ventilators (46.4%) can be used to ventilate pediatric and neonatal patients. The study also reported an additional 98,000 ventilators that are not full-featured but can still provide basic function in an emergency during crisis standards of care......... One study reported the clinical outcomes of 191 patients in Wuhan, China and found that 58 of 191 hospitalized patients (31%) required mechanical ventilation.”

When you consider that 99.999% of the  people who died,  did so in a hospital  then of the 35500, then about one/third, 11715, needed a ventilator if you use the Wuhan numbers.

When you use the Swedish numbers, 45740, the number becomes 15094.

Given that all of the need didn’t happen at the same time, the number drops to a much lower number. Much much much lower.

So, what happened? Again, from John Hopkins: “The study also reported an additional 98,000 ventilators that are not full-featured but can still provide basic function in an emergency during crisis standards of care. However, the need for ventilation services during a severe pandemic could quickly overwhelm these day-to-day operational capabilities.”

They panicked. And now they are unwilling to admit that their numbers are wrong. And instead of admitting that; we are knee deep in testing and phases. They are so wound up in the numbers they can’t see the forest.

And the fact is that in the forest there are, and will be, trees that the person tested clean this morning will be positive some days in the future and the cycle starts over.

https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/resources/COVID-19/COVID-19-fact-sheets/200214-VentilatorAvailability-factsheet.pdf

"Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them." - Karl Popper “It’s the presumption that Obama knows how all these industries ought to be operating better than people who have spent their lives in those industries, and a general cockiness going back to before he was president, and the fact that he has no experience whatever in managing anything. Only someone who has never had the responsibility for managing anything could believe he could manage just about everything.” - Thomas Sowell in Reason Magazine