• Posted July 5, 2020

Since first seeing the videos coming out of China in January 2020, there was reason for alarm concerning the coronavirus / covid-19 /
SARS-CoV-2 threat to the world. Later, seeing Senator Tom Cotton addressing the Senate, and subsequent cases and spread… we knew our way of life was about to change.

Now, months later, we have the luxury of time and data in which to gauge our actions and perceptions regarding the coronavirus. How much change was warranted? Was the negative impact of the changes more or less than what the negative impact would have been without them…or with different changes altogether? When did “Flatten the Curve” and “SLOW the spread” morph into the very different “STOP the spread”? And so more questions arise….

Between hysteria and reason, where does the truth rest?

What is the actual “Infection Fatality Rate”? How much lower is it than the “Case Fatality Rate”? Why use the flawed “Case Fatality Rate” as the only metric?

Are masks a net benefit or net detriment? Are those people who don’t wear masks the selfish and indecent people? Are those who wear masks the brainwashed sheeple?

There are many answers to these questions. This post will hopefully serve to give reason as the antidote to the hysteria….and the more healthy an individual is, especially mentally, the more likely that individual is to conquer a disease. So hopefully this post can be an antidote to the coronavirus itself in some small way.

Lockdown Lunacy

In May, Lockdown Lunacy was published in which 16 facts were presented in order to give a thinking person the data and studies necessary to reason their own response to coronavirus. This was followed by a Lockdown Lunacy 2.0 a month later. I will post the 2.0 version first, as it is more current, and the first version will be just after it. Much time can be spent on all the links and studies, so reason can triumph over hysteria.

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LOCKDOWN LUNACY 2.0: Second wave? Not even close.

By J.B. Handley

Why did politicians ever lockdown society in the first place? Can we all agree that the stated purpose was to “flatten the curve” so our hospital system could handle the inevitable COVID-19 patients who needed care? At that point, at least, back in early March, people were behaving rationally. They accepted that you can’t eradicate a virus, so let’s postpone things enough to handle it. The fact is, we have done that, and so much more. The headlines are filled with dire warnings of a “second wave” and trigger-happy Governors are rolling back regulations to try to stem the tide of new cases. But, is any of it actually true and should we all be worried? No, it’s not a second wave. The COVID-19 virus is on its final legs, and while I have filled this post with graphs to prove everything I just said, this is really the only graph you need to see, it’s the CDC’s data, over time, of deaths from COVID-19 here in the U.S., and the trend line is unmistakable:

If virologists were driving policy about COVID-19 rather than public health officials, we’d all be Sweden right now, which means life would effectively be back to normal. The only thing our lockdowns have done at this point is prolong the agony a little bit, and encouraged Governors to make up more useless rules. Sweden’s health minister understood that the only chance to beat COVID-19 was to get the Swedish population to a Herd Immunity Threshold against COVID-19, and that’s exactly what they have done, so let me start there.

The Herd Immunity Threshold (“HIT”) for COVID-19 is between 10-20%

This fact gets less press than any other. Most people understand the basic concept of herd immunity and the math behind it. In the early days, some public health officials speculated that COVID-19’s HIT was 70%. Obviously, the difference between a HIT of 70% and a HIT of 10-20% is dramatic, and the lower the HIT, the quicker a virus will burn out as it loses the ability to infect more people, which is exactly what COVID-19 is doing everywhere, including the U.S, which is why the death curve above looks the way it looks. Scientists from Oxford, Virginia Tech, and the Liverpool school of Tropical Medicine, all recently explained the HIT of COVID-19 in this paper:

We searched the literature for estimates of individual variation in propensity to acquire or transmit COVID-19 or other infectious diseases and overlaid the findings as vertical lines in Figure 3. Most CV estimates are comprised between 2 and 4, a range where naturally acquired immunity to SARS-CoV-2 may place populations over the herd immunity threshold once as few as 10-20% of its individuals are  immune.

Calculations from this study of data in Stockholm showed a HIT of 17%, and if you really love data check out this great essay by Brown Professor Dr. Andrew Bostom titled, COVID-19 ‘herd immunity’ without vaccination? Teaching modern vaccine dogma old tricks. I’m going to share his summary with you, because it’s so good:

Naturally acquired herd immunity to COVID-19 combined with earnest protection of the vulnerable elderly — especially nursing home and assisted living facility residents — is an eminently reasonable and practical alternative to the dubious panacea of mass compulsory vaccination against the virus. This strategy was successfully implemented in Malmo, Sweden, which had few COVID-19 deaths by assiduously protecting its elder care homes, while “schools remained open, residents carried on drinking in bars and cafes, and the doors of hairdressers and gyms were open throughout.”

One of the most vocal members of the scientific community discussing COVID-19’s HIT is Stanford’s Nobel-laureate Dr. Michael Levitt. Back on May 4, he gave this great interview to theStanford Daily where he advocated for Sweden’s approach of letting COVID-19 spread naturally through the community until you arrive at HIT. He stated:

If Sweden stops at about 5,000 or 6,000 deaths, we will know that they’ve reached herd immunity, and we didn’t need to do any kind of lockdown. My own feeling is that it will probably stop because of herd immunity. COVID is serious, it’s at least a serious flu. But it’s not going to destroy humanity as people thought. 

Guess what? That’s exactly what happened. As of today, 7 weeks after his prediction, Sweden has 5,280 deaths. In this graph, you can see that deaths in Sweden PEAKED when the HIT was halfway to its peak (roughly 7.3%) and by the time the virus hit 14% it was nearly extinguished. (Shoutout to Gummi Bear on Twitter, a scientist who makes great graphs.)

How could Dr. Levitt have predicted the death range for Sweden so perfectly 7 weeks ago? Because he had a pretty solid idea of what the HIT would be. (If you’d like to further geek-out on HIT, check out: Why herd immunity to COVID-19 is reached much earlier than thought.) I absolutely LOVE Dr. Levitt (and as a Stanford alum, so proud he is a Stanford professor), watch this incredible video from just yesterday, go to 10:59 and just listen to this remarkable man!! Thrilled with his brand-new paper, released today, Predicting the Trajectory of Any COVID19 Epidemic From the Best Straight Line.

By the way, as a quick aside, and something else the press won’t touch: COVID-19 is a coronavirus, and we have ALL been exposed to MANY coronaviruses during our lives on earth (like the common cold). Guess what? Scientists are now showing evidence that up to 81% of us can mount a strong response to COVID-19 without ever having been exposed to it before:

Cross-reactive SARS-CoV-2 T-cell epitopes revealed preexisting T-cell responses in 81% of unexposed individuals, and validation of similarity to common cold human coronaviruses provided a functional basis for postulated heterologous immunity

This alone could explain WHY the HIT is so much lower for COVID-19 than some scientists thought originally, when the number being talked about was closer to 70%. Many of us have always been immune! If that’s not enough for you, a similar study from Sweden was just released and shows that “roughly twice as many people have developed T-cell immunity compared with those who we can detect antibodies in.” (We kind of knew this from the data on the Diamond Princess when only 17% of the people on board tested positive, despite an ideal environment for mass spread, implying 83% of the people were somehow protected from the new virus.)

Quick Update: This article came out one day after I wrote mine, and validated everything I just said, except the author is wrong about COVID-19’s HIT, it’s 10-20%, not 60%, which is even better news:

“However, it does provide a possible explanation for why the Covid-19 epidemic seems to have died away in many places once it had infected around 20 per cent of the local population (as judged by the presence of antibodies). If people are developing some kind of immunity to Covid-19 via their T cells then it could mean that a far higher percentage of the population has been exposed to Covid-19 than previously thought. Antibodies and T cells combined, it is conceivable that some places such as London or New York are already at or near the 60 per cent infection level required to achieve herd immunity.”

Back to death rates over time. We actually have our own Sweden here in the U.S. It’s called New York City. In our case, we accidentally created a Sweden scenario, in that we took our medicine quickly, because: 1) New York locked down so late that they didn’t flatten anything, 2) they have the highest population density in the U.S. in NYC, and 3) the public health officials and Governors there made the bone-headed decision to send COVID-positive nursing home residents back to their nursing home, accelerating deaths of the most vulnerable. What’s their death curve look like today? In this case, I borrowed the graph from the NYC public health website:

Hmm…notice anything about the chart or its slope? The reason deaths from COVID-19 are dwindling down to nothing isn’t because Governor Cuomo is a policy genius (in fact, he likely created more unnecessary deaths than any other Governor with the nursing home decision), it’s because the virus—like every virus in the history of mankind—is running out of people to infect. The virus has a HIT of 10-20% and 70% of people are likely naturally immune. Hosts are in short supply! That’s what viruses do, and wait until you see what New York’s likely HIT is today.

We can get a crude, but helpful proxy for whether or not a state (or region) has achieved their own Herd Immunity Threshold if we know the following things: the size of the population, the number of deaths from COVID-19, and COVID-19’s IFR, or Infection Fatality Rate. In my first blog post late last month, LOCKDOWN LUNACY: the thinking person’s guide, I discussed Infection Fatality Rate in detail, so I am just going to give a very quick summary here. Stanford’s Dr. John Ioannidis published a meta-analysis (because so many IFR studies have been done around the world in April and early May) where he analyzed TWELVE separate IFR studies and his conclusion lays out the likely IFR for COVID-19:

The infection fatality rate (IFR), the probability of dying for a person who is infected, is one of the most critical and most contested features of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The expected total mortality burden of COVID-19 is directly related to the IFR. Moreover, justification for various non-pharmacological public health interventions depends crucially on the IFR. Some aggressive interventions that potentially induce also more pronounced collateral harms1 may be considered appropriate, if IFR is high. Conversely, the same measures may fall short of acceptable risk-benefit thresholds, if the IFR is low…Interestingly, despite their differences in design, execution, and analysis, most studies provide IFR point estimates that are within a relatively narrow range. Seven of the 12 inferred IFRs are in the range 0.07 to 0.20 (corrected IFR of 0.06 to 0.16) which are similar to IFR values of seasonal influenza. Three values are modestly higher (corrected IFR of 0.25-0.40 in Gangelt, Geneva, and Wuhan) and two are modestly lower than this range (corrected IFR of 0.02-0.03 in Kobe and Oise).

The data on IFR has now been replicated so many times that our own Centers for Disease Control announced that their ‘best estimate’ showed an IFR below 0.3%. In this article on the CDC’s new data, they also highlighted how the cascading declines in IFR has removed all the fears of doomsday:

That “best estimate” scenario also assumes that 35 percent of infections are asymptomatic, meaning the total number of infections is more than 50 percent larger than the number of symptomatic cases. It therefore implies that the IFR is between 0.2 percent and 0.3 percent. By contrast, the projections that the CDC made in March, which predicted that as many as 1.7 million Americans could die from COVID-19 without intervention, assumed an IFR of 0.8 percent. Around the same time, researchers at Imperial College produced a worst-case scenario in which 2.2 million Americans died, based on an IFR of 0.9 percent.

In order to be as bullet-proof as possible, and because the IFR is an important part of the math I will do right now, I’ve decided to pick a simple and defensible number, the final number pegged by the CDC for COVID-19’s IFR: 0.26% (As an aside, if we’d known this 3 months ago, no one in the public health world would have panicked. It’s a bad flu, and the rates for younger people are dramatically below 0.26% and approaching zero for children.) Now that you understand COVID’s IFR and the likely HIT, it’s much easier to talk about the second wave, the data, and the implications. Here’s the deal:

Yes, certain states are having an uptick in three measurements: COVID-19 tests administered, positive COVID-19 tests, and hospitalizations. All three of these measurements are dubious. Hopefully, some of the rise in cases is REAL, because then the U.S. will arrive at Herd Immunity Threshold (“HIT”), which has been slightly delayed by lockdowns, sooner. Based on the “death curve” in the US, we are very close to being done.

Take population, COVID Deaths, and IFR to find HIT

C’mon stay with me! This math is basic, junior high level stuff. And, it’s going to give us the most important, but very crude, number we need to understand all this second wave nonsense: the approximate HIT already attained by state and by the United States. If you know how many people have died from COVID-19 in any one region, you can quickly calculate how many people have had COVID-19 in that same region. All you do is divide deaths by the IFR. Let’s use NY as the example. As of today, there have been 31,137 deaths from COVID-19. Take 31,137/.0026, you get 11,975,969 people infected with COVID-19. Take those 11 million people divided by New York’s population of 19.45 million, you get a HIT of…65%. (Data geek comment: New York’s HIT is clearly OVER-stated, because total deaths drives HIT, and NY has a much higher rate of nursing home deaths due to bad policy.)

Huge disclaimer: This math is crude, but it’s also directionally accurate, and the comparisons BETWEEN states helps explain what’s going on. Importantly, the HIT required to snuff out the virus in any one region could be lower than Sweden’s number of 17%, for a million reasons, most notably better medical knowledge today than a few months ago about how to keep a vulnerable person alive. Still, just look at this table I created using the math above:

Notice anything? New York is WELL PAST Herd Immunity Threshold (as is New Jersey), the southern states in the news are BELOW the implied HIT, while the U.S. overall is nearly there with 15%. This is why the death curve from the CDC (and NYC!) that I opened this blog post with looks the way it looks: we are basically done with the virus. Just like Sweden. Oh, and Italy:

Quick update: Mount Sinai doctors just released a study showing a seroprevalence study of a random sample of 5,000 New Yorkers, it states that “by the week ending April 19, the seroprevalence in the screening group reached 19.3%.” If you take that 19.3% number, and consider what we just learned from Sweden—that half of people with immunity won’t show it with this test—and then consider how many more people have been exposed since April 28, it’s entirely plausible that NY is well past 40% or more people, which starts to look closer to the 65% number my math shows. Either way, let’s just keep it simple: New York, and especially NYC, are WELL PAST HIT of 10-20%, which explains why their death curve looks the way it looks.

Florida details

While HIT matters more than anything else in explaining the trajectory of the virus, and tells us that the U.S. is very close to being done with COVID-19, I wanted to take a closer look at one state, Florida, the current whipping boy of the press. They also have great data. No one seems to be listening to the Governor, the health department, or the hospitals in Florida, who all seem to be saying the same thing, which is basically that everything is fine. On June 20, Florida’s department of health produced a presentation that explained how their testing had changed over time. Check out this slide:

So, as the state re-opened, they began to test everyone, “regardless of age and symptoms.” What do you think would happen when they did that? Obviously, more positives. So, here’s my first fact:

Fact #1: All of the “second wave” states have dramatically increased their testing. This alone causes cases to rise, and is the single biggest reason they have.

Still not convinced? Check out this eye-opener of a chart that shows per-capita testing in the U.S. versus other countries. Notice anything about June? Not only do we do MORE testing than any other country, but our testing spiked in June, right as all the headlines about more cases came out. Hmmm…

It’s not quite that simple. Yes, cases are up because more testing is being done. Cases have never, ever been a reliable indicator of ANYTHING. But, hospitalizations have been a reliable indicator. And, unexpectedly, there was an uptick in hospitalizations for COVID-19 beginning around June 6th in Florida, as you can see here:

The most obvious reason COVID-19 hospitalizations are going up is because of what’s happening in the hospital system. Patients are returning to the hospitals for elective surgery that were all delayed during the lockdown. EVERY patient is screened for COVID-19. A patient who is undergoing elective knee surgery and tests positive for COVID-19 even though they are asymptomatic will be classified as “hospitalized with COVID-19.” This was explained in a recent NY Times article:

One-third of all patients admitted to the city’s [Miami] main public hospital over the past two weeks after going to the emergency room for car-crash injuries and other urgent problems have tested positive for the coronavirus.

Fact #2: Hospitalizations for COVID-19 are up slightly because of how COVID-19 positive patients are tracked. They will be in the number even if they didn’t go to the hospital BECAUSE of COVID-19.

Still, there is something else going on. It’s not just more tests and the way hospitalizations are happening. Many states re-opened on May 1 and their trend lines were flat to down for weeks. It’s as if some super-spreader event happened in certain states towards late May/Early June. It’s really clear that something unique is going on if you look at data from Minnesota, the state where George Floyd was tragically murdered, where positive cased are stratified by age:

As you can see, in Minnesota, the percentage of positive cases by people age 20-29 really spiked in mid to late June, which means infections likely happened in early June or late May. Yes, obviously, the densely-packed protests for racial equality and social justice—which *JB Handley personally applauds —appear to have caused a REAL uptick in cases and hospitalizations. See this article, Houston Protesters Begin to Fall Ill With Coronavirus After Marching for George Floyd. Just look at the median age of NEW cases in Florida for mid-June (used to be in the mid-60s): (*denotes slight edit for clarification)

Fact #3: A REAL rise in both cases and hospitalizations perfectly matches the timing of the nationwide protests which included many densely-packed crowds together for many hours and even days.

Not convinced? Check out this great graph that overlays the timing of the protests, lockdowns, social mobility, and hospitalizations using data for the entire US. Note there is a time delay between exposure and hospitalizations (between 8 and 15 days), and look at when the yellow hospitalization line goes up.

However, the good news about all of this is that there has been no impact on the number of COVID-19 patients in ICUs, which is consistent with the fact that we know younger patients are less impacted by COVID-19, check out this chart:

Fact #4: Despite a small uptick in hospitalizations, the number of COVID-19 patients in the ICU continues to decline.

IT’S DEATHS, NOT CASES

You’ve been hearing about a handful of states with rising cases, here they are on a chart, cases are clearly rising:

But for those states, what about deaths? They appear to be going the other way:

And, finally, perhaps the most important slide, using Florida as the example, there is NO correlation between more tests, more positive tests, and DEATHS (red line in the graph). The fact that these three measures are not linear means Florida has a low and stable death rate, and the recent uptick in positive cases—which happens to be perfectly timed to the nationwide protests—means nothing:

Fact #5: There is NO correlation in Florida—the state taking the most heat in the press about a second wave—between positive tests and deaths.

Of course, anyone who has been paying attention to the data could have told you that, because the national data on COVID-19 deaths is looking more and more like Sweden’s, as we already discussed. Today, our national HIT is roughly 15%, which means we are almost done, no matter what any Governor does.

I’ve seen discussion about how the protests caused an uptick in infections amongst younger people. Some in opposition to that fairly obvious reality point to New York, which also had densely-packed protests but has NOT seen an uptick in hospitalizations—how do you explain that? By now, you know the answer: New York’s HIT is already 65%!

Notably, in the math I used, Florida only had a Herd Immunity Threshold number of 6%, well below the target of 17%. So, yes, they MAY WELL have to endure a few more deaths before they achieve HIT. But, it’s highly likely that 1) it won’t need to be as high as 17% because the people being infected are much younger (where death rate is much lower) and 2) that it will happen in the next few weeks, and policy will have nothing to do with whether it happens or not. Either way, because we know the national number is 15%, the virus is almost gone, no matter what anyone says or does, and all you need to do to verify that is look at the CDC’s death curve.

A FINAL THOUGHT ABOUT FLORIDA

John Thomas Littell, MD is a family physician in Florida. I was going to publish an excerpt from his Letter to the Editor of the Orlando Medical News, but it’s so good and so wide-ranging, I want you to read the whole thing, and then we can wrap this up:

Several times a day, on every possible news outlet, we are bombarded with updates as to the new number of “cases” of COVID-19 in the U.S. and elsewhere.  News analysts then use these numbers to justify criticisms of those who dare to reject the CDC’s recommendations with regards to mask wearing and social distancing.   It is imperative that all Americans  – and especially those in the medical profession – understand the actual definition of a “case” of COVID -19 so as to make informed decisions as to how to live our lives.

Older Americans remember all too well the dread they experienced when a family member was diagnosed with a “case” of scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough (pertussis), or polio.  During my career in family medicine, including several years as an Army physician, I have cared for patients with chickenpox, shingles, Lyme disease as well as measles, tuberculosis, malaria, and AIDS.   The “case definition” established for all of these diseases by the CDC requires the presence of signs and symptoms of that disease.  In other words, each case involved a SICK patient.  Laboratory studies may be performed to “confirm” a diagnosis, but are not sufficient in the absence of clinical symptoms.

Having now been privileged to care for sick patients with COVID-19, both in and out of the hospital setting, I am happy to see the number of these sick patients dwindle almost to zero in my community – while the “case numbers” for COVID-19 continue to go up.  Why is that?

In marked contrast to measles, shingles, and other infectious disease, “cases” of COVID-19 do NOT require the presence of ANY symptoms whatsoever.   Health departments are encouraging everyone and anyone to come in for testing, and each positive test is reported as yet another “new” case of COVID-19!

On April 5, 2020, a small number of state epidemiologists (Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE) Technical Supplement: Interim-20-ID-01) came up with a “surveillance” case definition for COVID-19.  At the time, there was uncertainty as to whether or not completely asymptomatic persons could transmit COVID-19 sufficiently enough to infect and cause disease in others. (This notion has never been proven and, in fact,  has recently been discounted – cfr “ A Study on the Infectivity of Asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 Carriers,  Ming Fao et al, Respir Med, 2020 Aug – available online through PubMed 2020 May 13, as well as recent reports from the WHO itself).   The CSTF thereby justified the unconventional case definition for COVID-19, adding  “CSTE realizes that field investigations will involve evaluations of persons with no symptoms and these individuals will need to be counted as cases.”

Hence, anyone who has a positive PCR test (the nasal swab, PCR test for COVID Antigen or Nucleic Acid) or serological test (blood test for antibodies –IgG and/or IgM) would be classified as a “case” – even in the absence of symptoms.   In our hospitals at this time, there are hundreds of former nursing home residents sitting in “COVID” units who are in their usual state of good health, banned from returning to their former nursing home residences simply because they have TESTED Positive for COVID-19 during mass testing programs in the nursing homes.

The presence of a positive lab test for COVID-19 in a person who has never been sick is actually GOOD news for that person and for the rest of us.  The positive test indicates that this person has likely mounted an adequate immune response to a small dose of COVID-19 to whom he or she was exposed – naturally (hence, no need for a vaccine vs. COVID-19).

It is important as well to understand that the presence of lab testing is not the ONLY criterion that the  the CDC uses to established a diagnosis of COVID-19.  The presence of only 1 or 2 flu-like symptoms (fever,chills, cough, sore throat,  shortness of breath)  – in the absence of another proven cause (e.g., influenza, bacterial pneumonia) is SUFFICIENT to give a diagnosis of COVID-19 – as long as the patient also meets certain “epidemiological linkage” criteria as follows:

“In a person with clinically compatible symptoms,   [a “case” will be reported if that person had] one or more of the following exposures in the 14 days before onset of symptoms: travel to or residence in an area with sustained, ongoing community transmission of SARS-CoV-2; close contact (10 minutes or longer, within a 6 foot distance) with a person diagnosed with COVID-19; or member of a risk cohort as defined by public health authorities during an outbreak.”  Note that the definition of a “risk cohort” includes age > 70 or living in a nursing home or similar facility.

So, in essence, any person with an influenza- like illness (ILI) could be considered a “case” of COVID-19,  even WITHOUT confirmatory lab testing.  The CDC has even advised to consider any deaths from pneumonia or ILI as “Covid-related” deaths – unless the physician or medical examiner establishes another infectious agent as the cause of illness.

Now perhaps you see why the increasing number of cases, and even deaths, due to COVID-19 is fraught with misinterpretation and is NOT in any way a measure of the ACTUAL morbidity and mortality FROM COVID-19.   My patients who insist upon wearing masks, gloves and social distancing are citing these misleading statistics as justification for their decisions (and, of course, that they are following the “CDC guidelines”).  I simply advise them, “COVID-19 is NOT in the atmosphere around us; it resides in the respiratory tracts of infected individuals and can only be transmitted to others by sick, infected persons after prolonged contact with others”.

So you may ask – why are we continuing to report increasing numbers of cases of COVID as though it were BAD news for America? Rather than as GOOD news, i.e, that the thousands of healthy Americans testing positive  (also known as  “asymptomatic”)  are indicative of the presence of herd immunity – protecting themselves and many of us from potential future assaults by variants of COVID?

Why did we as a society stop sending our children to schools and camps and sports activities?  Why did we stop going to work and church and public parks and beaches?  Why did we insist that healthy persons “stay at home” – rather than observing the evidence-based, medically prudent method of identifying those who were sick and isolating them from the rest of the population –   advising the sick to “stay at home” and allowing the rest of society to function normally?  And, while we witnessed the gatherings of protestors in recent days with little concerns for COVID-19 spread among these asymptomatic persons, most certainly many are hoping  that the increasing “case” numbers for COVID-19 will discourage folks from coming to any more rallies for certain candidates for political office.

Fear is a powerful weapon.  FDR famously broadcast to Americans in 1933 that “We have nothing to fear, but fear itself”.  I would argue that we have to fear those who would have us remain fearful and servile and willing to surrender basic freedoms without justification.

John Thomas Littell, MD, is a board-certified family physician. After earning his MD from George Washington University, he served in the US Army, receiving the Meritorious Service Medal for his work in quality improvement, and also served with the National Health Service Corps in Montana. During his eighteen years in Kissimmee, FL, Dr Littell has served on the faculty of the UCF School of Medicine, President of the County Medical Society, and Chief of Staff at the Florida Hospital. He currently resides with his wife, Kathleen, and family in Ocala, Florida, where he remains very active as a family physician with practices both in Kissimmee and Ocala. 

Dr. Littell brings up many more issues than I have chosen to address in this post, because I already wrote about them in my previous blog post on May 30.

Wasn’t this supposed to be about hospitals?

The only reason ever given for locking down in the first place was space availability in hospitals. Here’s what Florida said about their hospitals last week:

And here’s what doctors in Houston, Texas said last week:

Hospital CEO’s including, Dr. Marc Boom with Houston Methodist, Dr. David L. Callender with Memorial Hermann Health System, Dr. Doug Lawson with St. Luke’s Health, and Mark A. Wallace with Texas Children’s Hospital, held a zoom conference, June 25, out of concern, “that recent news coverage has unnecessarily alarmed the Houston community about hospital capacity during this COVID-19 surge.” The two key major takeaways from today’s discussion: The Houston health care system has the resources and capacity necessary to treat patients with COVID-19 and otherwise…

Sigh. So why is the press making such a big deal out of the “second wave”? I don’t do politics, but if I did I would probably mention that here.

What are Governors doing?

In a quick word: nothing helpful. I think this guy summarizes how I feel:

Seriously, though, the rollbacks of openings are simply ridiculous, and simply compounding a terrible idea, and delaying the inevitable process within each region of achieving a proper Herd Immunity Threshold. If you want to get angry about lockdowns all over again, like I did in my article in May, just read this: The lockdown is causing so many deaths. Here’s an excerpt:

How many people aged 15 or under have died of Covid-19? Four. The chance of dying from a lightning strike is one in 700,000. The chance of dying of Covid-19 in that age group is one in 3.5million. And we locked them all down. Even among the 15- to 44-year-olds, the death rate is very low and the vast majority of deaths have been people who had significant underlying health conditions. We locked them down as well. We locked down the population that had virtually zero risk of getting any serious problems from the disease, and then spread it wildly among the highly vulnerable age group. If you had written a plan for making a complete bollocks of things you would have come up with this one.

In Conclusion

Dr. Michael Levitt and Sweden have been right all along. The only way through COVID-19 is by achieving the modest (10-20%) Herd Immunity Threshold required to have the virus snuff itself out. The sooner politicians—and the press—start talking about HIT and stop talking about new confirmed cases, the better off we will all be. Either way, it’s likely weeks, not months, before the data of new daily deaths will be so low that the press will have to find something new to scare everyone. It’s over.

A quick note:

Haters of this article will post articles about Sweden saying their approach has been a failure. They will point to recent press about Sweden having higher rates of COVID-19 positive tests lately—Sweden has pushed back strongly—so here’a chart for the haters, it shows positive cases in Sweden, tracked against deaths. There’s no correlation.

For my truly committed readers who made it this far:

“The death rate is a fact; anything beyond this is an inference.”

William Farr (1807 – 1883)

William Farr, creator of Farr’s law, knew this over 100 years ago. Viruses rise and fall at roughly the same slopes. It’s predictable, and COVID-19 is no different, which is why, after looking at all these death curves, it’s not very hard to declare that the pandemic is over. Oxford’s center for Evidence Based Medicine has a wonderful explanation of Farr’s law, and it’s well worth a read. Some of my favorite quotes:

“Farr shows us that once peak infection has been reached then it will roughly follow the same symmetrical pattern on the downward slope.”

“In the midst of a pandemic, it is easy to forget Farr’s Law, and think the number infected will just keep rising, it will not. Just as quick as measures were introduced to prevent the spread of infection we need to recognise the point at which to open up society and also the special measures due to ‘density’ that require special considerations.”

“Once peak deaths have been reached we should be working on the assumption that the infection has already started falling in the same progressive steps. Using deaths as the proxy for falling infections facilitates the planning of the next steps for reopening those societies that are in lockdown.”

A reader just sent me this chart from the CDC. If you don’t think the COVID-19 virus has run its course according to Farr’s Law, I can’t help you!

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LOCKDOWN LUNACY: the thinking person’s guide

By J.B. Handley

For anyone willing to look, there are so many facts that tell the true story, and it goes something like this:

Knowing what we know today about COVID-19’s Infection Fatality Rate, asymmetric impact by age and medical condition, non-transmissibility by asymptomatic people and in outdoor settings, near-zero fatality rate for children, and the basic understanding of viruses through Farr’s law, locking down society was a bone-headed policy decision so devastating to society that historians may judge it as the all-time worst decision ever made. Worse, as these clear facts have become available, many policy-makers haven’t shifted their positions, despite the fact that every hour under any stage of lockdown has a domino-effect of devastation to society. Meanwhile, the media—with a few notable exceptions—is oddly silent on all the good news. Luckily, an unexpected group of heroes across the political landscape—many of them doctors and scientists—have emerged to tell the truth, despite facing extreme criticism and censorship from an angry mob desperate to continue fighting an imaginary war.

My goal is to engage in known facts. You, the reader, can decide if all of these facts, when you put them together, equate to the story above.

Fact #1: The Infection Fatality Rate for COVID-19 is somewhere between 0.07-0.20%, in line with seasonal flu

The Infection fatality Rate math of ANY new virus ALWAYS declines over time as more data becomes available, as any virologist could tell you. In the early days of COVID-19 where we only had data from China, there was a fear that the IFR could be as high as 3.4%, which would indeed be cataclysmic. On April 17th, the first study was published from Stanford researchers that should have ended all lockdowns immediately, as the scientists reported that their research “implies that the infection is much more widespread than indicated by the number of confirmed cases” and pegged the IFR between 0.12-0.2%. The researchers also speculated that the final IFR, as more data emerged, would likely “be lower.” For context, seasonal flu has an IFR of 0.1%. Smallpox? 30%.

As the first study to peg the IFR, the Stanford study came under withering criticism, prompting the lead researcher, Dr. John Ioannidis to note,

“There’s some sort of mob mentality here operating that they just insist that this has to be the end of the world, and it has to be that the sky is falling. It’s attacking studies with data based on speculation and science fiction. But dismissing real data in favor of mathematical speculation is mind-boggling.”

Like all good science, the Stanford data on IFR has now been replicated so many times that our own Centers for Disease Control came out this week to announce that their ‘best estimate’ showed an IFR below 0.3%. In this article on the CDC’s new data, they also highlighted how the cascading declines in IFR has removed all the fears of doomsday:

That “best estimate” scenario also assumes that 35 percent of infections are asymptomatic, meaning the total number of infections is more than 50 percent larger than the number of symptomatic cases. It therefore implies that the IFR is between 0.2 percent and 0.3 percent. By contrast, the projections that the CDC made in March, which predicted that as many as 1.7 million Americans could die from COVID-19 without intervention, assumed an IFR of 0.8 percent. Around the same time, researchers at Imperial College produced a worst-case scenario in which 2.2 million Americans died, based on an IFR of 0.9 percent.

If you’re still unconvinced that the IFR of COVID-19 is roughly in line with a bad flu season, the most comprehensive analysis I have seen comes from Oxford University, who recently stated:

“Taking account of historical experience, trends in the data, increased number of infections in the population at largest, and potential impact of misclassification of deaths gives a presumed estimate for the COVID-19 IFR somewhere between 0.1% and 0.41%.”

Finally, just last week, Stanford’s Dr. Ioannidis published a meta-analysis (because so many IFR studies have been done around the world in April and early May) where he analyzed TWELVE separate IFR studies and his conclusion is so good, I’ll just leave you with it:

The infection fatality rate (IFR), the probability of dying for a person who is infected, is one of the most critical and most contested features of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The expected total mortality burden of COVID-19 is directly related to the IFR. Moreover, justification for various non-pharmacological public health interventions depends crucially on the IFR. Some aggressive interventions that potentially induce also more pronounced collateral harms1 may be considered appropriate, if IFR is high. Conversely, the same measures may fall short of acceptable risk-benefit thresholds, if the IFR is low…Interestingly, despite their differences in design, execution, and analysis, most studies provide IFR point estimates that are within a relatively narrow range. Seven of the 12 inferred IFRs are in the range 0.07 to 0.20 (corrected IFR of 0.06 to 0.16) which are similar to IFR values of seasonal influenza. Three values are modestly higher (corrected IFR of 0.25-0.40 in Gangelt, Geneva, and Wuhan) and two are modestly lower than this range (corrected IFR of 0.02-0.03 in Kobe and Oise).

Opinion #1: Dr. Scott Atlas

Soon after the Stanford study released its data (he wasn’t a study author), Stanford’s Dr. Scott Atlas published an opinion piece in The Hill newspaper with the title, “The data is in — stop the panic and end the total isolation.” He wrote:

The recent Stanford University antibody study now estimates that the fatality rate if infected is likely 0.1 to 0.2 percent, a risk far lower than previous World Health Organization estimates that were 20 to 30 times higher and that motivated isolation policies…Let’s stop underemphasizing empirical evidence while instead doubling down on hypothetical models. Facts matter.

Facts do matter, but no one listened. Dr. Atlas’ article also helps frame Fact #2.

Fact #2: The risk of dying from COVID-19 is much higher than the average IFR for older people and those with co-morbidities, and much lower than the average IFR for younger healthy people, and nearing zero for children

In January 2020, Los Angeles had an influenza outbreak that was killing children, the LA Times noted that “an unlikely strain of influenza has sickened and killed an unusually high number of young people in California this flu season.” COVID-19 is the opposite of that. Stanford’s Dr. Ioannidis said, “Compared to almost any other cause of disease that I can think of, it’s really sparing young people.”

Italy reported three days ago that 96% of Italians who died from COVID-19 had “other illnesses” and were, on average, 80 years old. From Bloomberg:

“The latest numbers show that new cases and fatalities have a common profile: mostly elderly people with previous illnesses,” ISS chief Silvio Brusaferro said at a news conference Friday.

The best age stratification data I have seen comes from Worldometers.info. Here’s their chart estimating death rate by age group. Please note that death rate is MUCH higher than IFR because death rate uses confirmed COVID-19 cases as the denominator, but it shows you how different the fatality rates are by age:

While this data is “crude”, it’s safe to extrapolate that an 80+ year-old person has a serious risk of dying from COVID-19 while a child faces almost no risk. This fact should drive policy, as Dr. Atlas explains:

Of all fatal cases in New York state, two-thirds were in patients over 70 years of age; more than 95 percent were over 50 years of age; and about 90 percent of all fatal cases had an underlying illness. Of 6,570 confirmed COVID-19 deaths fully investigated for underlying conditions to date, 6,520, or 99.2 percent, had an underlying illness. If you do not already have an underlying chronic condition, your chances of dying are small, regardless of age. And young adults and children in normal health have almost no risk of any serious illness from COVID-19.

Consider this excellent article from the British Medical Journal, titled “Shielding from covid-19 should be stratified by risk” written by Cambridge University professors:

Protecting those at most risk of dying from covid-19 while relaxing the strictures on others provides a way forward in the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic, given the virus is unlikely to disappear in the foreseeable future.Such targeted approaches would, however, require a shift away from the notion that we are all seriously threatened by the disease, which has led to levels of personal fear being strikingly mismatched to objective risk of death.Instead, the aim should be to communicate realistic levels of risk as they apply to different groups, not to reassure or frighten but to allow informed personal decisions in a setting of necessary uncertainty.

As one simple example: closing schools makes almost no sense given what we know about COVID-19, while protecting teachers over the age of 60—to pick a somewhat defensible age boundary—may well make sense. This is why so many countries who seem to respect data more than we do here in the U.S. have already re-opened their schools. In fact, Denmark’s schools have been open since mid-April!! And, for those keeping score, Reuters just reported yesterday that, “Reopening schools in Denmark did not worsen outbreak, data shows.” Here’s a quote:

“You cannot see any negative effects from the reopening of schools,” Peter Andersen, doctor of infectious disease epidemiology and prevention at the Danish Serum Institute said on Thursday told Reuters. In Finland, a top official announced similar findings on Wednesday, saying nothing so far suggested the coronavirus had spread faster since schools reopened in mid-May.

Another great article on schools, titled, “It is fear – not science – that is stopping our children being educated” in The Telegraph newspaper last week, here’s a quote:

There is little about coronavirus we can be absolutely sure of – this is a brand new disease and our knowledge grows by the day –  but most of the available evidence so far strongly suggests that children are neither suffering from coronavirus nor spreading it. Studies in South Korea, Iceland, Italy, Japan, France, China, the Netherlands and Australia all concur that  youngsters are “not implicated significantly in transmitting Covid”, not even to parents and siblings.

Adult paranoia, stoked by over-the-top government messaging, union intransigence and media conniptions, is now being inflicted on the youngest members of our society to whom the virus poses a threat so tiny scientists call it “statistically irrelevant”. Instead of nursery rhymes, mixed infants may soon be invited to sing something called the “two-metre-song” as they stick their arms out to keep their friends at bay.

Brand new science (May 28) released from Northern Ireland clearly shows that schoolchildren do NOT serve as vectors for COVID-19. Titled, No evidence of secondary transmission of COVID-19 from children attending school in Ireland, 2020, the study could not be more clear:

These findings suggest that schools are not a high risk setting for transmission of COVID-19 between pupils or between staff and pupils. Given the burden of closure outlined by Bayhem [4] and Van Lanker [5], reopening of schools should be considered as an early rather than a late measure in the lifting of restriction.

Finally, Dr. Scott Atlas took on the topic of schools in this recent interview:

“There’s no science whatsoever to keep K-through-12 schools closed, nor to have masks or social distancing on children, nor to keep summer programs closed. What we know now is that the risk of death and the risk of even a serious illness is nearly zero in people under 18.

Quick update: after I wrote this, the Wall Street Journal published this article titled Is It Safe to Reopen Schools? These Countries Say Yes. To me, this reads as a bit of a litmus test for countries that have independent and data-driven public health officials, and I give the U.S. an ‘F” for our current approach:

But Denmark, Austria, Norway, Finland, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and most other countries that have reopened classrooms haven’t had outbreaks in schools or day-care centers…In Denmark, the opening of schools had no impact on the progress of the epidemic, said Tyra Grove Krause, a senior official with the State Serum Institute, the country’s disease control agency…Since Austria reopened on May 18, no increase in infections has been observed in schools and kindergartens, a spokesman for the government said…In Norway, the government won’t close schools again even if the number of cases starts rising in the country because there have been no negative consequences from reopening schools on April 20, said Education Minister Guri Melby.

How many more countries need to re-open before the U.S. follows? Seriously, it’s a little embarrassing to be American…IMO we look like total chumps.

Update #2: Dr. Scott Atlas doubled-down on June 1st with this great Op-Ed, once again in The Hill, titled Science says: ‘Open the schools’. As usual, he’s amazingly eloquent, here’s an excerpt but well worth the time to read every word, he simply slays it:

All of this borders on the absurd, when we now know that social distancing and face coverings for children are completely unnecessary. 

Never have schools subjected children to such an unhealthy, uncomfortable and anti-educational environment, so science cannot precisely define the total harm it will cause. But science does tell us that risks from COVID-19 are too minimal to sacrifice the educational, social, emotional and physical well-being – to say nothing of the very health – of our young people.   

(Special note: there’s a new boogeyman, Kawasaki disease, that some are trying to link to COVID-19. Here’s a great article about that, or see the website of the UK’s Kawasaki Disease Foundation where they discuss the “mishandling of information” about Kawasaki disease. Dr. Atlas’ most recent post discusses this, too: “What about the new threat similar to Kawasaki disease, recently sensationalized as a COVID-19 association? In fact, the association is extremely low, and the incidence of the disorder is itself rare, affecting only 3,000 to 5,000 children in the United States each year. Importantly, the syndrome is typically treatable and never has been regarded previously as a risk so serious that schools must be shuttered.”)

Fact #3: People infected with COVID-19 who are asymptomatic (which is most people) do NOT spread COVID-19

On January 13, 2020, a 22-year old female with a history of congenital heart disease went to the emergency room of Guangdong Provincial People’s Hospital complaining of a variety of symptoms common to people with her condition, including pulmonary hypertension and shortness of breath due to atrial septal defect (hole in the heart). Little did she know her case would set off a cascade of events resulting in a recently published paper that should have ended all lockdowns around the world simultaneously. Three days into her hospital stay, her condition was improving. Routine tests were run, and to the clinicians alarm and surprise, she tested positive for COVID-19. As the physicians noted, “the patient had never fever, sore throat, myalgia or other symptoms associated with virus infection.” Said differently, she was completely asymptomatic for COVID-19.

It’s not that easy to find people who are infected with COVID-19 but asymptomatic, because they don’t seek medical attention. Here in Oregon where I live, you can’t even get a COVID-19 test unless you have symptoms. So, the stars aligned to put this woman in a hospital with researchers studying COVID-19, and she became the subject of an extensive contact study published on May 13 in Respiratory Medicine, titled, “A study on infectivity of asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 carriers.”

The researchers wanted to find out whether this woman, with a COVID-19 infection but no symptoms, had infected anyone else, so they chose to look at every single contact they could identify within the previous 5 days prior to her positive test. So, how many people did they have to screen? 455. Not a small number, as the researchers explain:

455 contacts who were exposed to the asymptomatic COVID-19 virus carrier became the subjects of our research. They were divided into three groups: 35 patients, 196 family members and 224 hospital staffs. We extracted their epidemiological information, clinical records, auxiliary examination results and therapeutic schedules.

As you can see, being hospitalized led to the majority of the contacts this woman had, both with other patients and with many members of the hospital staff. Notably, all of these contacts took place indoors and one might argue many of the contacts—at least with hospital staff—would have involved relatively intimate contact. Amongst the patients, the average age was 62, arguably making them higher risk, and many of those patients were immunocompromised for a variety of reasons, including chemotherapy and cardiovascular disease. So how many of the 455 people were infected by the asymptomatic 22-year old woman?

“In summary, all the 455 contacts were excluded from SARS-CoV-2 infection…”

Said differently, exactly zero people were infected. The scientists, in typically understated fashion, offer up a comment about the question I hope you are asking yourself right now (namely, why are we all on lockdown if asymptomatic people with COVID-19 can’t spread the infection?), stating, “the result of this study may alleviate parts of the public concern about asymptomatic infected people.”

If this study had been published in early March, the odds that the world would have locked down are very, very low. Yet, this study, published only two weeks ago, is nowhere to be found in the media, and is never mentioned by policy makers. It just sits there, sharing the truth for anyone willing to listen.

Quick Update on Fact #3: Of all the facts presented, this one has received the most pushback from skeptics who argue it’s based on a single published study. Of course, science is something that accumulates with time, so the criticism is legitimate, which is why this announcement from the World Health Organization today—June 8th—is so devastating to anyone who still contends asymptomatic people can spread COVID-19:

Unlike myself, the World Health Organization is privy to emerging data from all over the world of studies being done, which is why this quote from Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead for Coronavirus response, is such a big deal:

“From the data we have, it still seems to be rare that an asymptomatic person actually transmits onward to a secondary individual,” Van Kerkhove said on Monday. “We have a number of reports from countries who are doing very detailed contact tracing. They’re following asymptomatic cases, they’re following contacts and they’re not finding secondary transmission onward. It is very rare — and much of that is not published in the literature,” she said. “We are constantly looking at this data and we’re trying to get more information from countries to truly answer this question. It still appears to be rare that an asymptomatic individual actually transmits onward.”

Meanwhile, so many of the silly rules developed all other the place presume asymtptomatic people CAN spread COVID-19. In fact, I also read today that California’s superintendent has issued guidance for opening schools in the Fall, which will likely include all students wearing masks…it’s simply unbelievable how far public officials seem to be deviating from what the FACTS are telling us! Knowing that COVID-19 is not spread by asymptomatic people makes 99% of COVID-19 rules established completely useless and also makes public health guidance extremely simple: if you’re sick, please stay home. Everyone else? Carry on. When will the facts on the ground and the absurd imposition of random rules somehow confront each other? Hopefully soon, and I’m rooting for the facts.

Fact #4: Emerging science shows no spread of COVID-19 in the community (shopping, restaurants, barbers, etc.)

“There is no significant risk of catching the disease when you go shopping. Severe outbreaks of the infection were always a result of people being closer together over a longer period of time…”

– Professor Hendrick Streek , University of Bonn

We just learned that asymptomatic people infected with COVID-19 are very unlikely to be able to spread the infection to others. Emerging and published science shows transmission of COVID-19 in retail establishments is extremely unlikely. Professor Hendrik Streeck from the University of Bonn is leading a study in Germany on the hard-hit region of Heinsberg and his conclusions, from laboratory work already completed, is very clear:

“There is no significant risk of catching the disease when you go shopping. Severe outbreaks of the infection were always a result of people being closer together over a longer period of time.

“When we took samples from door handles, phones or toilets it has not been possible to cultivate the virus in the laboratory on the basis of these swabs….”

Uh oh. You mean closing parks, closing stores, wearing gloves and masks at the grocery store, fumigating our groceries, and just being generally paranoid wasn’t necessary? As Dr. Streeck confirms:

“It is important to obtain this data in order to make sure that decisions are taken based on facts rather than assumptions. The data should serve as a basis of information for the government so they can then think about their further course of action,” he said.

And he continues:

“People could lose their jobs. They might not be able to pay their rent anymore and staying inside for a longer time can lead to weakening of our immune system.”  

“The goal is not a complete containment of the virus. We need to know where the actual capacity limits of our hospitals are. How many infections are too many? What do intensive care medics say?”

And, finally:

“It is important to start thinking about a ‘rollback’ strategy and his hope is to “deliver the relevant facts so that people have a good foundation for their decisions.”

Fact #5: Published science shows COVID-19 is NOT spread outdoors

In a study titled Indoor transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and published on April 2, 2020, scientists studied outbreaks of 3 or more people in 320 separate towns in China over a five-week period beginning in January 2020 trying to determine WHERE outbreaks started: in the home, workplace, outside, etc.? What’d they discover? Almost 80% of outbreaks happened in the home environment. The rest happened in crowded buses and trains. But what about outdoors? The scientists wrote:

“All identified outbreaks of three or more cases occurred in an indoor environment, which confirms that sharing indoor space is a major SARS-CoV-2 infection risk.”

Said differently, there’s really no science to support all the outdoor bans that my home state of Oregon and so many other states have put in place. I’ll leave you with my favorite quote from the study because it’s really quite infuriating to read when you consider some of the ways Governors here in the U.S have behaved (and some still do) by banning all sorts of outdoor activities, arresting paddle boarders on the water, etc.:

“The transmission of respiratory infections such as SARS-CoV-2 from the infected to the susceptible is an indoor phenomenon.”

Quick Update: Apparently the health minister of British Columbia, Canada, got the memo about the lack of airborne risk, this article appeared on June 1:

The article says:

One of B.C.’s top health officials, however, says medical professionals have a pretty clear picture of how the virus is transmitted. “There is absolutely no evidence that this disease is airborne, and we know that if it were airborne, then the measures that we took to control COVID-19 would not have worked,” Dr. Reka Gustafson, B.C.’s deputy provincial health officer, told CTV Morning Live Monday.”We are very confident that the majority of transmission of this virus is through the droplet and contact route….”The overwhelming majority of (COVID-19) transmissions occur through close, prolonged contact and that is not the pattern of transmission we see through airborne diseases,” she said. 

I sure hope Major League Baseball, the National Football League, and the NCAA are all paying attention…not to mention all the people in Portland here still riding bikes and running with masks on.

Fact #6: Science shows masks are ineffective to halt the spread of COVID-19, and The WHO recommends they should only be worn by healthy people if treating or living with someone with a COVID-19 infection

Just today, the World Health Organization announced that masks should only be worn by healthy people if they are taking care of someone infected with COVID-19:

“If you do not have any respiratory symptoms such as fever, cough or runny nose, you do not need to wear a mask,” Dr. April Baller, a public health specialist for the WHO, says in a video on the world health body’s website posted in March. “Masks should only be used by health care workers, caretakers or by people who are sick with symptoms of fever and cough.”

Just before the COVID-19 madness, researchers in Hong Kong submitted a study for publication with the mouthful of a title, “Nonpharmaceutical Measures for Pandemic Influenza in Nonhealthcare Settings—Personal Protective and Environmental Measures.” Oddly, the study, just published this month, is actually housed on the CDC’s own website, and directly contradicts recent advice from the CDC about wearing a mask. Namely, the study states:

“In our systematic review, we identified 10 RCTs that reported estimates of the effectiveness of face masks in reducing laboratory-confirmed influenza virus infections in the community from literature published during 1946–July 27, 2018….In pooled analysis, we found no significant reduction in influenza transmission with the use of face masks…Our systematic review found no significant effect of face masks on transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza….Proper use of face masks is essential because improper use might increase the risk for transmission.”

English translation: there is no evidence that wearing masks reduces the transmission of respiratory illnesses and, if masks are worn improperly (like when people re-use cloth masks), transmission could actually INCREASE. Moreover, this study was a meta-analysis, which means it dug deep into the archive of science (all the way back to 1946!) to reach its conclusions. Said differently, this is as comprehensive as science gets, and their conclusions were crystal clear: masks for the general population show no evidence of working to either slow the spread of respiratory viruses or protect people.

This study is far from the only one to reach this conclusion (which makes the choice of a grocery store chain like my beloved New Seasons to make masks mandatory for all customers really quite unbelievable). The purpose of science is to arbitrate these thorny issues and while the science is clear, the hysteria continues. It turns out, the effectiveness of masks has a long history of debate in the medical community, which explains why so much science has been done on the topic. I will just highlight a few studies before you fall asleep:

My favorite article is actually a review of much of the science and it’s a great place to start for anyone who likes to do their own research. Titled, “Why Face Masks Don’t Work: A Revealing Review”, it was written to challenge the need for dentists to wear face masks, but all the science quoted and conclusions drawn apply to airborne pathogens in any setting. Some of the best quotes:

“The science regarding the aerosol transmission of infectious diseases has, for years, been based on what is now appreciated to be ‘very outmoded research and an overly simplistic interpretation of the data.’ Modern studies are employing sensitive instruments and interpretative techniques to better understand the size and distribution of potentially infectious aerosol particles…The primary reason for mandating the wearing of face masks is to protect dental personnel from airborne pathogens. This review has established that face masks are incapable of providing such a level of protection.”

And my favorite quote:

“It should be concluded from these and similar studies that the filter material of face masks does not retain or filter out viruses or other submicron particles. When this understanding is combined with the poor fit of masks, it is readily appreciated that neither the filter performance nor the facial fit characteristics of face masks qualify them as being devices which protect against respiratory infections. ”

Here’s an article published in ResearchGate by noted Canadian physicist D.G. Rancourt, written directly in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, published last month. Titled, Masks Don’t Work: A review of science relevant to COVID-19 social policy.

“Masks and respirators do not work. There have been extensive randomized controlled trial (RCT) studies, and meta-analysis reviews of RCT studies, which all show that masks and respirators do not work to prevent respiratory influenza-like illnesses, or respiratory illnesses believed to be transmitted by droplets and aerosol particles. Furthermore, the relevant known physics and biology, which I review, are such that masks and respirators should not work. It would be a paradox if masks and respirators worked, given what we know about viral respiratory diseases: The main transmission path is long-residence-time aerosol particles (< 2.5 μm), which are too fine to be blocked, and the minimum-infective-dose is smaller than one aerosol particle.”

To put this in simple terms: in order for a mask to really be effective that covered both your nose and mouth, you would asphyxiate. The minute the mask allows you to breathe, it can no longer filter the micro-particles that make you sick.

Finally, I often see this study from 2015 in the BMJ cited: “A cluster randomised trial of cloth masks compared with medical masks in healthcare workers“, and it bears repeating, since MOST of the masks I see people wearing in the community right now are cloth masks. Not only are these masks 100% ineffective at reducing the spread of COVID-19, but they can actually harm you. As the researchers explain:

“This study is the first RCT of cloth masks, and the results caution against the use of cloth masks. This is an important finding to inform occupational health and safety. Moisture retention, reuse of cloth masks and poor filtration may result in increased risk of infection. Further research is needed to inform the widespread use of cloth masks globally.” 

Increased risk of infection? Yes, that’s what it says. Other studies have also looked at the impact masks have on your oxygen levels (because you’re are forced to re-breathe your own Co2) and it’s not good. Scientists looked at oxygen levels of surgeons wearing masks while performing surgery and found: “Our study revealed a decrease in the oxygen saturation of arterial pulsations (SpO2) and a slight increase in pulse rates compared to preoperative values in all surgeon groups.”

Just this past week, this article came out in the New England Journal of Medicine, written my several doctors and public health officials with the title, “Universal Masking in Hospitals in the Covid-19 Era,” and this statement seems a perfect way to end my discussion of masks:

We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection. Public health authorities define a significant exposure to Covid-19 as face-to-face contact within 6 feet with a patient with symptomatic Covid-19 that is sustained for at least a few minutes (and some say more than 10 minutes or even 30 minutes). The chance of catching Covid-19 from a passing interaction in a public space is therefore minimal. In many cases, the desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic.

Fact #7: There’s no science to support the magic of a six-foot barrier

Iceland has already made the two-meter (6 foot) rule optional, according to this article. The reason for the recommendation to keep 6-feet of distance from your fellow citizens during the pandemic dates back to 1930, explained here by the BBC:

Where does the two-metre rule come from? Surprisingly, it can be traced back to research in the 1930s. Back then scientists established that droplets of liquid released by coughs or sneezes will either evaporate quickly in the air or be dragged by gravity down to the ground. And the majority of those droplets, they reckoned, would land within one to two metres. That is why it is said the greatest risks come from having the virus coughed at you from close range or from touching a surface – and then your face – that someone coughed onto. How conclusive is that? 

Are you impressed with that science? Me neither. As this wonderful article explains:

A few early studies suggest that contaminated droplets could stay airborne for a few hours and pose a risk. But that research comes with a caveat: “While this research indicates that viral particles can be spread via bioaerosols, the authors stated that finding infectious virus has proven elusive and experiments are ongoing to determine viral activity in collected samples,” wrote Dr. Harvey Fineberg from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine earlier this month.

It goes further:

And the commonly held fear that a random passerby will infect a stranger? Here’s more grade-school level talk from the CDC: “COVID-19 is thought to spread mainly through close contact from person-to-person in respiratory droplets from someone who is infected. People who are infected often have symptoms of illness. Some people without symptoms may be able to spread the virus [which science from China has proven is untrue].”

Not only would that sort of conclusion warrant a failing grade in any post-doctoral program, I am pretty sure the average eighth-grade science teacher would take a big red pen to that passage. “Thought.” “Some?” “May?” Keep in mind, there are no links to any scientific studies or papers for the average thinking person to review to decide whether those claims are legitimate.

The CDC also can’t quite make up its mind about the safety of large gatherings in the COVID-era. In mid-March, the agency asked Americans to limit gatherings of 250 people or more. A few weeks later, the White House, at the behest of the CDC, urged Americans to avoid gatherings of more than 10 people. There is no science, however, to support either number. (What is so fateful about 250 people? Why not 175? And why 10 people? Why not 16 or 17?)

The article takes dead aim at so many Governors who are absolutely running with these completely unsupportable recommendations:

Even that fuzzy advice has been bastardized by the petty tyrant lurking inside every big state governor, small-town mayor, and homeowners’ association president. Over the weekend, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer banned people from going to a neighbor’s house. “All public and private gatherings of any size are prohibited,” Whitmer announced. “People can still leave the house for outdoor activities . . . recreational activities are still permitted as long as they’re taking place outside of six feet from anyone else.”…There will be plenty of soul-searching after this crisis abates: demanding to know the scientific rationale for keeping us six feet apart when people needed each other most should be at the top of the list.

Recently, one of the top scientific advisors in the UK to Prime Minister Boris Johnson has made the same point, his statements covered in the Daily Mail last week in an article titled, Government scientific adviser says Britain’s two metre social distancing rule is unnecessary and based on ‘very fragile’ evidence. Professor Robert Dingwall stated:

‘I think it will be much harder to get compliance with some of the measures that really do not have an evidence base,’ he said. ‘I mean the two-metre rule was conjured up out of nowhere.’

When you digest all of the facts we now know about COVID-19, the simplest policy recommendation actually makes the most sense in my opinion: If you have COVID-19, stay home. If you must go out, wear a mask. Everyone else, wash your hands, and get on with your life. It should have been that easy, but instead we chose to lockdown society, an unprecedented step. Why?

Oh, and this is a real headline. God help us all.

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“The Lockdowns Were the Black Swan”

Indeed, why did we lockdown society, and has it worked?I stole the phrase above from an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal written by Editorial Board member Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., I believe he captured it perfectly:

We started off sensibly. “This is not something [American families] generally need to worry about,” said CDC’s Dr. Nancy Messonnier in mid-January. “It’s a very, very low risk to the United States,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci a week later.Bill de Blasio, mayor of New York, urged residents to go about their business normally as recently as March 11.As coldblooded as it seems, these were the right statements at the time. Under “flatten the curve,” changes in public behavior aren’t needed until they are needed. Roll that around in your mind a bit. The better we do at equipping local hospitals, the less we need to bankrupt local businesses and their workers to slow the virus as it runs its course through society. That was the idea we started with. Not even the U.K. Imperial College study that so alarmed the world’s policy makers recommended indiscriminate lockdowns and shelter-in-place orders. If we meant what we said, we’ve overshot in many places. Beds are empty. A ventilator shortage did not materialize. We failed to set aside enough capacity to treat other medical conditions like strokes and heart attacks. This is costing lives.

What happened? From Bill Gates to your local editorialist, a new priority waddled to the fore. We decided that, whatever contributes to killing Americans at a routine total rate of 8,000 or so a day, it shouldn’t be the coronavirus.

Accidents, yes—6% of deaths. Heart disease, yes—23%. Flu and pneumonia, yes—2%.

These deaths are allowed but not deaths from the coronavirus even at the cost of economic ruin for millions. Of course the media and public are free to decide now they never wanted flatten the curve; they wanted to be spared the virus altogether. But explain how this is to be done. And explain why. The Economist magazine says we can’t restart the economy without an “unprecedented” $180 billion testing regime. Unprecedented is an interesting word because China, a country of 1.4 billion people with eight cities larger than New York, either must have developed such a system with nobody noticing or hasn’t found it necessary.

Why did we lockdown in the first place? Here are the facts.

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Fact #8: The idea of locking down an entire society had never been done and has no supportable science, only theoretical modeling

In fact, the first time the idea was ever raised to lockdown everyone was in 2006, in this paper titled Targeted Social Distancing Designs for Pandemic Influenza. The paper detailed “how social contact network–focused mitigation can be designed” and modeled (more on that in a moment!) various outcomes based on how people behaved. At the time, cooler heads prevailed and criticized the ideas in the paper, notably this critique from Dr. D.A. Henderson, the man who led the public effort to eradicate smallpox. According to the New York Times:

Dr. Henderson was convinced that it made no sense to force schools to close or public gatherings to stop. Teenagers would escape their homes to hang out at the mall. School lunch programs would close, and impoverished children would not have enough to eat. Hospital staffs would have a hard time going to work if their children were at home.

The measures embraced by Drs. Mecher and Hatchett would “result in significant disruption of the social functioning of communities and result in possibly serious economic problems,” Dr. Henderson wrote in his own academic paper responding to their ideas.

The answer, he insisted, was to tough it out: Let the pandemic spread, treat people who get sick and work quickly to develop a vaccine to prevent it from coming back.

Soon after, Dr. Henderson and several other prescient colleagues penned an important paper encapsulating many of these ideas, Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza, including this astonishing (given what just happened) conclusion:

There are no historical observations or scientific studies that support the confinement by quarantine of groups of possibly infected people for extended periods in order to slow the spread of influenza. A World Health Organization (WHO) Writing Group, after reviewing the literature and considering contemporary international experience, concluded that “forced isolation and quarantine are ineffective and impractical.”2 Despite this recommendation by experts, mandatory large-scale quarantine continues to be considered as an option by some authorities and government officials.35,43

The interest in quarantine reflects the views and conditions prevalent more than 50 years ago, when much less was known about the epidemiology of infectious diseases and when there was far less international and domestic travel in a less densely populated world. It is difficult to identify circumstances in the past half-century when large-scale quarantine has been effectively used in the control of any disease. 

And they ended with a sentence so important I’m going to use really big font:

The negative consequences of large-scale quarantine are so extreme (forced confinement of sick people with the well; complete restriction of movement of large populations; difficulty in getting critical supplies, medicines, and food to people inside the quarantine zone) that this mitigation measure should be eliminated from serious consideration.

If you’d like to read more about the origins of the lockdown idea and how it continued to circulate in public health circles, check out, “The 2006 Origins of the Lockdown Idea.” If you’d like to read more about Dr. D.A. Henderson, check out, “How a Free Society Deals with Pandemics, According to Legendary Epidemiologist and Smallpox Eradicator Donald Henderson.” Both articles are awesome and will make you sick to your stomach when you realize how many good scientists knew that a lockdown would be a disaster, and cost more lives than it could ever save.

You’re likely equally shocked to see that as late as 2019, the World Health Organization DIDN’T EVEN LIST the idea of a total lockdown in their report titled “Non-pharmaceutical public health measures for mitigating the risk and impact of epidemic and pandemic influenza.” Here’s their table of 18 possible non-pharmaceutical measures for countries to take in a pandemic, note all the things listed under the “Not recommended in any circumstances” row that are now happening every day!

Obvious question: if there was no science to support a lockdown and we’d never actually done one before and many in public health said it would be a terrible idea, why did it happen? There’s really two answers as best I can tell. The first answer is that the World Health Organization, early on in the pandemic, chose to praise the Chinese response of locking down Hubei Province, which effectively served to legitimize the practice, despite the extreme limitations of data available to anyone about the Chinese lockdown’s actual effectiveness. This article discusses the issue, and raises the question:

What changed the WHO’s mind and prompted it to praise the response of the Chinese authorities in Hubei province, which included the virtual incarceration of 60 million people? It was this, more than anything else, that persuaded governments across the world to lockdown their citizens.

The second answer is that newly-created disease models scared the living daylights out of world leaders, and the modelers stood ready to offer a simple solution to their made-up numbers: lock everything down, NOW!

Fact #9: The epidemic models of COVID-19 have been disastrously wrong, and both the people and the practice of modeling has a terrible history

While many disease models have been used during the COVID-19 pandemic, two have been particularly influential in the public policy of lockdowns: Imperial College (UK) and the IHME (Washington, USA). They’ve both proven to be unmitigated disasters.

Imperial College: It’s safe to say that the reason the United States locked down, and the reason the White House extended their lockdowns was almost exclusively due to the models created by Imperial College Professor Neil Ferguson. As the Washington Post explained:

Officials have said the Imperial College’s eye-popping 2.2 million death projection convinced Trump to stop dismissing the outbreak and take it more seriously. Similarly, officials said, the new projection of 100,000 to 240,000 deaths is what convinced Trump to extend restrictions for 30 days and abandon his push to reopen parts of the country by Easter, which many health experts believe could have worsened the outbreak.

Oddly, Professor Ferguson has a history of massive overestimation of pandemics, but apparently no one bothered to consider that in taking his advice. The Spectatorspelled out his incredibly bad calls on three previous emerging diseases (he actually has more terrible calls, I’m just highlighting three):

2002, Mad Cow Disease:

In 2002, Ferguson predicted that between 50 and 50,000 people would likely die from exposure to BSE (mad cow disease) in beef. He also predicted that number could rise to 150,000 if there was a sheep epidemic as well. In the UK, there have only been 177 deaths from BSE.

2005, Bird Flu:

In 2005, Ferguson said that up to 200 million people could be killed from bird flu. He told the Guardian that ‘around 40 million people died in 1918 Spanish flu outbreak… There are six times more people on the planet now so you could scale it up to around 200 million people probably.’ In the end, only 282 people died worldwide from the disease between 2003 and 2009.

2009, Swine Flu:

In 2009, Ferguson and his Imperial team predicted that swine flu had a case fatality rate 0.3 per cent to 1.5 per cent. His most likely estimate was that the mortality rate was 0.4 per cent. A government estimate, based on Ferguson’s advice, said a ‘reasonable worst-case scenario’ was that the disease would lead to 65,000 UK deaths. In the end swine flu killed 457 people in the UK and had a death rate of just 0.026 per cent in those infected.

I don’t know, don’t you think that history should have mattered more before relying on his model to lock down our entire country? It actually gets worse. From the National Review:

Johan Giesecke, the former chief scientist for the European Center for Disease Control and Prevention, has called Ferguson’s model “the most influential scientific paper” in memory. He also says it was, sadly, “one of the most wrong.”

And more:

Jay Schnitzer, an expert in vascular biology and a former scientific direct of the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center in San Diego, tells me: “I’m normally reluctant to say this about a scientist, but he dances on the edge of being a publicity-seeking charlatan.”

One simple example of how wrong the Imperial College model was would be Sweden, here’s the details:

Indeed, Ferguson’s Imperial College model has been proven wildly inaccurate. To cite just one example, it saw Sweden paying a huge price for no lockdown, with 40,000 COVID deaths by May 1, and 100,000 by June. Sweden now has 2,854 deaths and peaked two weeks ago. As Fraser Nelson, editor of Britain’s Spectator, notes: “Imperial College’s model is wrong by an order of magnitude.”

And, finally:

Indeed, Ferguson has been wrong so often that some of his fellow modelers call him “The Master of Disaster.”

Oh, and Professor Ferguson recently resigned from his position because he broke lockdown curfew…to have an affair with a married woman. I’ll end with a quote from the man who I believe will emerge as the biggest hero of this whole mess, Sweden’s Anders Tegnell, the man who chose not to lock his country down:

One person who’s skeptical of Professor Ferguson’s modeling is Anders Tegnell, the epidemiologist who’s been advising the Swedish Government. “It’s not a peer-reviewed paper,” he said, referring to the Imperial College March 16th paper. “It might be right, but it might also be terribly wrong. In Sweden, we are a bit surprised that it’s had such an impact.”

IHME: If the Imperial College model was really the motivation for both President Trump, Boris Johnson, and then many other world leaders to lockdown, the IHME models have almost always been the “science” state Governors cite to demonstrate how many lives their lockdowns are saving. It’s a nice gig, really. Find a model that massively overestimates the deaths in your state, lock it down, and then have the modelers show you how many lives you have saved. Luckily, other scientists have been watching, and the IHME model has received one of the most ferocious beat-downs I have ever seen in the scientific literature from Professors at the University of Sydney, Northwestern, and UTEP. Titled, Learning as We Go – An Examination of the Statistical Accuracy of COVID-19 Daily Death Count Predictions and released last week, the study effectively says that the IHME model is dangerously inaccurate, but in a somewhat cordial, scientific way. The authors write:

Specifically, the true number of next day deaths fell outside the IHME prediction intervals as much as 76% of the time, in comparison to the expected value of 5%. Regarding the updated models, our analyses indicate that the April models show little, if any, improvement in the accuracy of the point estimate predictions.

And then they land the big punch:

Our analysis calls into question the usefulness of the predictions to drive policy making and resource allocation.

In English: the IHME models are so bad at forecasting they shouldn’t be relied upon for anything. Need more? National Review’s Andrew McCarthy was very eloquent all the way back on April 9th in criticizing the IMHE models’ inaccuracy and uselessness:

The model on which the government is relying is simply unreliable. It is not that social distancing has changed the equation; it is that the equation’s fundamental assumptions are so dead wrong, they cannot remain reasonably stable for just 72 hours. And mind you, when we observe that the government is relying on the models, we mean reliance for the purpose of making policy, including the policy of completely closing down American businesses and attempting to confine people to their homes because, it is said, no lesser measures will do.”

And how does Mr. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, think these models have performed?

“To describe as stunning the collapse of a key model the government has used to alarm the nation about the catastrophic threat of the coronavirus would not do this development justice.”

My own Governor here in Oregon, Kate Brown, is fond of invoking the phrase that she is “following the science.” Recently, a Circuit Court overturned her lockdown order after a lawsuit was filed from a number of churches. Governor Brown released this statement:

From the beginning of this crisis, I have worked within my authority, using science and data as my guide, heeding the advice of medical experts. This strategy has saved lives and protected Oregonians from the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

What “science” is Governor Brown relying upon? The IHME model. Still think that’s “science”?

Finally, Michael Fumento wrote an excellent article arguing that “After Repeated Failures, It’s Time To Permanently Dump Epidemic Models.” As he explains:

The models essentially have three purposes: 1) To satisfy the public’s need for a number, any number; 2) To bring media attention for the modeler; and 3) To scare the crap out of people to get them to “do the right thing.” That can be defined as “flattening the curve” so health care systems aren’t overridden, or encouraging people to become sheeple and accept restrictions on liberties never even imposed during wars. Like Ferguson, all the modelers know that no matter what the low end, headlines will always reflect the high end. Assuming it’s possible to model an epidemic at all, any that the mainstream press relays will have been designed to promote panic. 

Opinion #2: Roger Koppl, inside the mind of a disease modeler

I just thought this was such a great description of the human side of being a disease forecaster, written by Professor of Finance Roger Koppl from Syracuse:

Think if it were you. You’re an epidemiologist and the prime minister calls to ask you how many will die if we don’t have a lockdown. What do you tell him?  You can’t just look up the number. The pandemic is only now taking off and your knowledge of it is correspondingly sketchy. It’s hard to say. Every number is a guess. If you give the prime minister a low number, there will be no lockdown. What if he accepts your low number and we have no lockdown?  Maybe everything will be fine. But maybe there will be many more deaths than you predicted. You will get blamed. People will shame you as a bad scientist.  And, because you are a good and decent person, you will feel guilty. Blame, shame, and guilt. This is a bad outcome.

If you give him a high number, there will be lockdown. No one will ever be able to say that your estimate was too high, because your estimate assumed no lockdown. Even if a lot of people die during the lockdown you can say, “See? Think how much worse it would have been without the lockdown.” Thus, if you give the prime minister a high number, you will get credit for saving lives. You will be able to take pride in your sterling reputation as a scientist. And you won’t have to feel guilty about lost lives. Praise, pride, and innocence. This is a good outcome. The logic of the situation is clear. You have every incentive to predict doom and gloom if no lockdown is ordered.

Makes sense, and I think most American Governors who locked down are running with this: the model said we’d have X number of deaths. Now the model says the lockdown ensured a fraction of X deaths—I’m your savior!

Fact #10: The data shows that lockdowns have NOT had an impact on the course of the disease.

This is certainly the fact that people will have the hardest time with: who wants to believe that all this suffering and isolation was for no reason? But, there are more than enough states and countries that didn’t lockdown, or locked down for a much shorter time, or in a much different manner, to provide plenty of data. Perhaps the simplest explanation for why lockdowns have been ineffective is the easiest: COVID-19 was in wide circulation much EARLIER than experts thought. This alone would explain why lockdowns have been so ineffective, but whatever the final explanation, let’s see what the data says.

I’m going to start with a source that you might consider unusual, the global bank JP Morgan. Of all the facts I have covered, this one about the ineffectiveness of lockdowns has become the most politicized, because it’s being used to begin playing the blame game. JP Morgan, on the other hand, creates their analysis to do something very nonpartisan: make money. Their analysts crunch data to see which economies are likely to restart first, and you shouldn’t be surprised at this point to discover three things: 1) the least damaged economies are the ones that did the lest onerous lockdowns, 2) lifting lockdowns has had no negative impact on deaths or hospitalizations, and 3) lifting lockdowns had not increased viral transmission. Reading the JP Morgan conclusions is profoundly depressing, because here in the U.S. many communities are STILL being put through many different lockdown mandates, despite overwhelming evidence to their ineffectiveness. Consider this chart from JP Morgan that shows “that many countries saw their infection rates fall rather than rise again when they ended their lockdowns – suggesting that the virus may have its own ‘dynamics’ which are ‘unrelated’ to the emergency measures.”

JP Morgan strategist and paper author Marko Kolanovic is another one of my heroes, because, well, he says everything I wish many other people were saying, consider this quote:

‘Unlike rigorous testing of new drugs, lockdowns were administered with little consideration that they might not only cause economic devastation but potentially more deaths than Covid-19 itself.”

Kolanovic and his team also show that transmissibility of the virus has actually DECREASED after lockdowns have been lifted in U.S. states, through the measurement known as “RO”. As the Daily Mail explains, “many states saw a lower rate of transmission (R) after full-scale lockdowns were ended.”

TJ Rogers, the founder of Cypress Semiconductor, and a team of his engineers also analyzed the data, and published their results in this piece in the Wall Street Journal titled “Do Lockdowns Save Many Lives? In Most Places, the Data Say No.” They explain:

We ran a simple one-variable correlation of deaths per million and days to shutdown, which ranged from minus-10 days (some states shut down before any sign of Covid-19) to 35 days for South Dakota, one of seven states with limited or no shutdown. The correlation coefficient was 5.5%—so low that the engineers I used to employ would have summarized it as “no correlation” and moved on to find the real cause of the problem.

Translation: something other than lockdowns must explain the course of the virus (see Fact #14). Thomas A. J. Meunier of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution released this report in early May titled “Full lockdown policies in Western Europe countries have no evident impacts on the COVID-19 epidemic.” Like JP Morgan’s report, his conclusion is depressing:

Our results show a general decay trend in the growth rates and reproduction numbers two to three weeks before the full lockdown policies would be expected to have visible effects. Comparison of pre and post lockdown observations reveals a counter-intuitive slowdown in the decay of the epidemic after lockdown.

And, the clincher:

Estimates of daily and total deaths numbers using pre-lockdown trends suggest that no lives were saved by this strategy, in comparison with pre-lockdown, less restrictive, social distancing policies. 

Bloomberg’s Elain He and colleagues also analyzed the data in this article titled, “The Results of Europe’s Lockdown Experiment Are In.” Their conclusion is unlikely to surprise you:

But, as our next chart shows, there’s little correlation between the severity of a nation’s restrictions and whether it managed to curb excess fatalities — a measure that looks at the overall number of deaths compared with normal trends.

Speaking of Europe, we should all thank God for Sweden. By choosing NOT to lockdown, the Swedes have proven that society can survive without a strict lockdown, and hopefully their results will prevent lockdowns from ever happening again. If you have followed this story closely, you know that naysayers were predicting doom for Sweden (and for Florida and Georgia, more on them in a moment), and none of that has ever come to pass. Conveniently, the World Health Organization went from praising the response of the Chinese lockdown in Wuhan—which likely ignited the lockdown mania—to holding up Sweden as the model for how to combat an epidemic. (Read: “WHO reverses course, praises lockdown-ignoring Sweden”.)

Fact #11: Florida locked down late, opened early, and is doing fine, despite predictions of doom

The best article I have read about Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis comes from this one on the National Review on May 20th. I was pleasantly surprised by what a rational student of history Governor Desantis was, as he explains:

“One of the things that bothered me throughout this whole time was, I researched the 1918 pandemic, ’57, ’68, and there were some mitigation efforts done in May 1918, but never just a national-shutdown type deal. There was really no observed experience about what the negative impacts would be on that.”

Unlike many of his peers, Governor Desantis found doomsday models to be unhelpful:

The DeSantis team also didn’t put much stock in dire projections. “We kind of lost confidence very early on in models,” a Florida health official says. “We look at them closely, but how can you rely on something when it says you’re peaking in a week and then the next day you’ve already peaked?” Instead, “we started really focusing on just what we saw.”

Instead, they took a rifle shot approach on the citizens most at-risk: nursing home residents, of which Florida has the most in the nation:

Inspectors and assessment teams visited nursing homes. The state homed in on facilities where, Mayhew says, “we had historically cited around infection control. We used that to prioritize our visits to those facilities, understanding that the guidance from CDC was changing frequently. So our initial focus was to be an effective resource education to provide guidance to these facilities to make sure they understood how to request personal protective equipment from the state.”

Florida, DeSantis notes, “required all staff and any worker that entered to be screened for COVID illness, temperature checks. Anybody that’s symptomatic would just simply not be allowed to go in.” And it required staff to wear PPE. “We put our money where our mouth is,” he continues. “We recognized that a lot of these facilities were just not prepared to deal with something like this. So we ended up sending a total of 10 million masks just to our long-term-care facilities, a million gloves, half a million face shields.”

Florida fortified the hospitals with PPE, too, but DeSantis realized that it wouldn’t do the hospitals any good if infection in the nursing homes ran out of control : “If I can send PPE to the nursing homes, and they can prevent an outbreak there, that’s going to do more to lower the burden on hospitals than me just sending them another 500,000 N95 masks.”

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of this insight, and how much it drove Florida’s approach, counter to the policies of New York and other states. (“I don’t want to cast aspersions on others, but it is incredible to me, it’s shocking,” says the Florida health official, “that Governor Cuomo [and others] are able to kind of just avoid real questions about their policies early on to actually send individuals into the nursing home, which is completely counter to the real data.”)

Which brings us to New York, the state that every other Governor who locked their people down points to, and says something to the effect of, “by locking down early, we avoided being New York.” Is that really true?

(Special note: there are MANY other states—and countries—with data similar to Florida’s, including Georgia, Texas, Arkansas, Utah, Japan, and of course, Sweden, to name just a few. In ALL cases, the media predicted doom, and even President Trump criticized Georgia’s early opening by their courageous Governor Brian Kemp, and Georgia’s numbers today look great.)

Fact #12: New York’s above average death rate appears to be driven by a fatal policy error combined with aggressive intubations.

Forbes recently published an article explaining just how concentrated COVID-19 deaths really are in a single population, titled “The Most Important Coronavirus Statistic: 42% Of U.S. Deaths Are From 0.6% Of The Population,”the article explains:

2.1 million Americans, representing 0.62% of the U.S. population, reside in nursing homes and assisted living facilities…According to an analysis that Gregg Girvan and I conducted for the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, as of May 22, in the 43 states that currently report such figures, an astounding 42% of all COVID-19 deaths have taken place in nursing homes and assisted living facilities.

Forbes also points out that the risk coronavirus-type illnesses represent to nursing home populations is nothing new:

The tragedy is that it didn’t have to be this way. On March 17, as the pandemic was just beginning to accelerate, Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis warned that “even some so-called mild or common-cold-type coronaviruses have been known for decades [to] have case fatality rates as high as 8% when they infect people in nursing homes.” Ioannidis was ignored.

In his recent meta-analysis on the real Infection Fatality Rate of COVID-19, Dr. Ioannidis explained the policy error in New York that likely contributed to thousands of preventable deaths:

Massive deaths of elderly individuals in nursing homes, nosocomial infections, and overwhelmed hospitals may also explain the very high fatality seen in specific locations in Northern Italy and in New York and New Jersey. A very unfortunate decision of the governors in New York and New Jersey was to have COVID-19 patients sent to nursing homes. 

Dr. Ioannidis also mentions the choice by medical personnel in New York to quickly put patients on ventilators, which doctors now realize likely does more harm than good (Read: 80% of NYC’s coronavirus patients who are put on ventilators ultimately die, and some doctors are trying to stop using them.):

Use of unnecessarily aggressive management (e.g. mechanical ventilation) may also have contributed to worse outcomes.

The New York Post was particularly harsh in criticizing New York’s nursing home policy:

The carnage started in March, when hospitals inundated with COVID-19 patients insisted on clearing out elderly patients, even if they were still infected, and sending them to whatever nursing homes had empty beds. To swing that, they had to get rid of a safety regulation requiring patients to test negative twice for COVID-19 before being placed in a home. The state Health Department willingly complied.

On March 25, Gov. Cuomo’s Health Department mandated that nursing homes had to accept COVID patients and barred requiring any COVID tests for admission. Facilities like Newfane had to fly blind, not knowing which incoming patients had it.

The American Health Care Association called it a “recipe for disaster.” The Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths urged Cuomo to change course…Bottom line: 11,000 to 12,000 nursing-home and assisted-living residents have died from COVID-19, half of all the virus deaths statewide…That awful death toll didn’t have to happen. It’s six times the number of nursing-home fatalities as in Florida or California, both more populous states.

When your Governor tries to tell you that their destructive decision to lock everyone down saved you from being New York, remember Florida and Sweden. Oh, and don’t forget the country no doomsday folks want to even discuss: Japan:

Japan yesterday [May 25th] declared at least a temporary victory in its battle with COVID-19, and it triumphed by following its own playbook. It drove down the number of daily new cases to near target levels of 0.5 per 100,000 people with voluntary and not very restrictive social distancing and without large-scale testing…The dwindling numbers of new cases led the government to start to lift the state of emergency for much of Japan on 14 May, ahead of the intended 31 May schedule. Yesterday’s announcement completed the lift, relieving Tokyo and four other prefectures.

Fact #13: Public health officials and disease epidemiologists do NOT consider the other negative societal consequences of lockdowns

If you asked me for how a suggestion for how to lose a few pounds and I said, “Stop eating or drinking anything,” would you take my advice? It would work to achieve your goals, but you may not like the side effects. That’s basically what has happened here. Rather than being ONE input on policy, public health officials were handed the keys to the convertible without their license, and off they sped! Look what Dr. Anthony Fauci said to Congress earlier this month:

I’m a scientist, a physician, and a public health official. I give advice, according to the best scientific evidence. There are a number of other people who come into that and give advice that are more related to the things that you spoke about, the need to get the country back open again, and economically. I don’t give advice about economic things. I don’t give advice about anything other than public health.

The Wall Street Journal actively criticized this single-dimensional thinking by American public health officials, noting, “Dr. Fauci is clear on the fact that Americans should not rely on him to conduct cost-benefit analysis of the policies he is recommending.” This excellent critique of the Imperial College model makes a similar point: “The Imperial College paper is a one-sided analysis. It looks at the benefits of a lockdown without going into the costs.”

So wait, all these models that predicted doom from COVID-19 didn’t consider deaths caused by the lockdowns from suicide, skipped doctors appointments, and unemployment? So who should be making these complex policy decisions? At least in the United States, I hold 51 people responsible: the President and 50 state Governors. And, if you expect any of them to issue a mea culpa for a terrible decision, don’t hold your breath, from the Issues & Insights Editorial Board:

Don’t expect anyone to admit they were wrong. The public health community – which has been peddling wildly exaggerated predictions of deaths – will never do so. Nor will Democrats and the press – which are committed to the narrative that every death in the U.S. is President Donald Trump’s fault. Trump isn’t likely to, either, since he agreed to shutting down the economy after he started taking his cues from public health doomsayers.

Opinion #3: Yoram Lass, former director of Israel’s Health Ministry

Unlike American public health officials, who seem wed to the idea of preventing COVID-19 no matter what the cost, I have been heartened to see public health officials in other countries with a much more complete understanding of the TOTAL cost to society than any public health decision causes. And of all the international straight-talking public health officials, no one puts it any more directly than my favorite: Yoram Lass of Israel. In this excellent interview with Spiked Online—which you should really read in full—Dr. Lass offers up the following nugget:

It is the first epidemic in history which is accompanied by another epidemic – the virus of the social networks. These new media have brainwashed entire populations. What you get is fear and anxiety, and an inability to look at real data. And therefore you have all the ingredients for monstrous hysteria….Compared to that rise, the draconian measures are of biblical proportions. Hundreds of millions of people are suffering. In developing countries many will die from starvation. In developed countries many will die from unemployment. Unemployment Is mortality. More people will die from the measures than from the virus. And the people who die from the measures are the breadwinners. They are younger. Among the people who die from coronavirus, the median age is often higher than the life expectancy of the population. What has been done is not proportionate. But people are afraid. People are brainwashed. They do not listen to the data. And that includes governments.

Fact #14: There is a predictive model for the viral arc of COVID-19, it’s called Farr’s Law, and it was discovered over 100 years ago

Dr. Lass, in his interview highlighted above, also made a point that we already knew, long before the lockdowns, how COVID-19 was likely to behave because, well, we’ve been dealing with new viruses since the dawn of man:

If you look at the coronavirus wave on a graph, you will see that it looks like a spike. Coronavirus comes very fast, but it also goes away very fast. The influenza wave is shallow as it takes three months to pass, but coronavirus takes one month.

That ALL viruses follow a natural bell curve, with slopes roughly equal on the way up and down, was discovered by Dr. William Farr more than 100 years ago, and it’s known as Farr’s law. Recently, Chinese and American scientists published a study to see if COVID-19 would behave according to Farr’s law, and here’s the chart from their recent paper:

As you can see, the predicted path of the virus in China (orange dotted line) and the actual path of the virus (blue dotted line) are a match. This paper, created all the way back on February 8th, could have saved policy-makers much heartache. A renowned Israeli scientist made this same point about the natural arc of the virus more than a month ago, in the middle of Israel’s lockdown:

A prominent Israeli mathematician, analyst and former general claims simple statistical analysis demonstrates that the spread of COVID-19 peaks after about 40 days and declines to almost zero after 70 days — no matter where it strikes, and no matter what measures governments impose to try to thwart it.

Prof Isaac Ben-Israel, head of the Security Studies program in Tel Aviv University and the chairman of the National Council for Research and Development, told Israel’s Channel 12 (Hebrew) Monday night that research he conducted with a fellow professor, analyzing the growth and decline of new cases in countries around the world, showed repeatedly that “there’s a set pattern” and “the numbers speak for themselves.”

While he said he supports social distancing, the widespread shuttering of economies worldwide constitutes a demonstrable error in light of those statistics. In Israel’s case, he noted, about 140 people normally die every day. To have shuttered much of the economy because of a virus that is killing one or two a day is a radical error that is unnecessarily costing Israel 20% of its GDP, he charged.

(Dr. Ben-Israell, FYI, is arguably Israel’s most famous scientist, read his resume for yourself.) I put the Farr’s law idea to the test with the local data I have here in Oregon, and what you can clearly see is that COVID-19 was ALREADY following a natural, expected viral arc BEFORE our Governor Kate Brown imposed a lockdown. (Note: Lockdown order issued on March 23rd, it would take 2 weeks to see a positive impact on hospitalization numbers, but the virus was already on the decline, much as both Dr. Lass and Dr. Ben-Israel predicted.)

I really enjoyed this explanation of Farr’s law by Michael Fumento:

The only “model” with any success is actually quite accomplished and appeared in 1840, when a “computer” was an abacus. It’s called Farr’s Law, and is actually more of an observation that epidemics grow fastest at first and then slow to a peak, then decline in a more-or-less symmetrical pattern. As you might guess from the date, it precedes public health services and doesn’t require lockdowns or really any interventions at all. Rather, the disease grabs the low-hanging fruit (with COVID-19 that’s the elderly with co-morbid conditions) and finds it progressively harder to get more fruit. 

Fact #15: The lockdowns will cause more death and destruction than COVID-19 ever did

My final fact is the most depressing. Of course, it’s impossible today to find all the data to show how destructive unnecessary lockdowns have been, but many people are already trying. Economically, the costs to the United States will be measure in the multi-trillions. It didn’t have to be this way, Sweden just reported that GDP grew in their first quarter!

I’ll highlight a number of different takes so you get the basic picture, and it’s really ugly. Last week, writing in The Hill, a group of professors from Stanford, Duke, University of Chicago, and Hebrew University penned a sobering piece titled, The COVID-19 shutdown will cost Americans millions of years of life, where they explained:

Although well-intentioned, the lockdown was imposed without consideration of its consequences beyond those directly from the pandemic…The policies have created the greatest global economic disruption in history, with trillions of dollars of lost economic output. These financial losses have been falsely portrayed as purely economic. To the contrary, using numerous National Institutes of Health Public Access publications, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Bureau of Labor Statistics data, and various actuarial tables, we calculate that these policies will cause devastating non-economic consequences that will total millions of accumulated years of life lost in the United States, far beyond what the virus itself has caused…Considering only the losses of life from missed health care and unemployment due solely to the lockdown policy, we conservatively estimate that the national lockdown is responsible for at least 700,000 lost years of life every month, or about 1.5 million so far — already far surpassing the COVID-19 total.

One of the lead authors of the study, the aforementioned Dr. Scott Atlas, went on Fox News to further explain the results of their analysis:

“I think one thing that’s not somehow receiving attention is the CDC just came out with their fatality rates,” Atlas said. “And lo and behold, they verify what people have been saying for over a month now, including my Stanford epidemiology colleagues and everyone else in the world who’s done this analysis — and that is that the infection fatality rate is less than one-tenth of the original estimate. The policy itself is killing people. I mean, I think everyone’s heard about 650,000 people on cancer, chemo, half of whom didn’t come in. Two thirds of cancer screenings didn’t come in. 40 percent of stroke patients urgently needing care didn’t come in,” Atlas said.

Remember how the lockdown was supposed to keep hospitals open to manage a surge of patients? Well, now the healthcare system is facing disaster: Doctors face pay cuts, furloughs and supply shortages as coronavirus pushes primary care to the brink CNBC reports:

It’s not just doctors’ offices in New York, the epicenter of the coronavirus epidemic in the U.S., that are experiencing financial hardship. Some 51% of primary-care providers are uncertain about their financial future over the next four weeks, and 42% have either laid off or furloughed staff, according to a survey of 2,700 practices across the U.S. by the nonprofit Primary Care Collaborative and Larry A. Green Center. In addition, 13% predict closure within the next month. 

Stanford’s Dr. John Ioaniddis penned an excellent article for the Boston Review, spelling out the catastrophic impact the lockdown is having on healthcare:

At the same time, we should not look away from the real harms of the most drastic of our interventions, which also disproportionately affect the disadvantaged. We know that prolonged lockdown of the entire population has delayed cancer treatments and has made people with serious disease like heart attacks avoid going to the hospital. It is leading hospital systems to furlough and lay off personnel, it is devastating mental health, it is increasing domestic violence and child abuse, and it has added at least 36.5 million new people to the ranks of the unemployed in the United States alone. Many of these people will lose health insurance, putting them at further risk of declining health and economic distress. Prolonged unemployment is estimated to lead to an extra 75,000 deaths of despair in the United States alone over the coming decade. At a global level, disruption has increased the number of people at risk of starvation to more than a billion, suspension of mass vaccination campaigns is posing a threat of resurgence of infectious diseases that kill children, modeling suggests an excess of 1.4 million deaths from tuberculosis by 2025, and a doubling of the death toll from malaria in 2020 is expected compared with 2018. I hope these modeling predictions turn out to be as wrong as several COVID-19 modeling predictions have, but they may not. All of these impacts matter, too. Policymakers must consider the harms of restrictive policies, not just their benefits.

Heck, more than 600 doctors recently appealed to President Trump to lift the lockdowns, according to Forbes:

More than 600 of the nation’s physicians sent a letter to President Trump this week calling the coronavirus shutdowns a “mass casualty incident” with “exponentially growing negative health consequences” to millions of non COVID patients. 

“The downstream health effects…are being massively under-estimated and under-reported. This is an order of magnitude error,” according to the letter initiated by Simone Gold, M.D., an emergency medicine specialist in Los Angeles. 

It’s no surprise that suicides are on the rise in localities that locked down, and that prescriptions for sleep and anti-anxiety medications have skyrocketed. And it was just reported that, “Social isolation can increase a person’s risk of dying early by up to 50 per cent, a new study has suggested.” Even Dr. Fauci, arguably the lockdown’s most enthusiastic supporter, has gotten religion recently, as CNBC reported:

Stay-at-home orders intended to curb the spread of the coronavirus could end up causing “irreparable damage” if imposed for too long, White House health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNBC on Friday.

“I don’t want people to think that any of us feel that staying locked down for a prolonged period of time is the way to go,” Fauci said during an interview with CNBC’s Meg Tirrell on “Halftime Report.”

Dr. Fauci, you are very, very late to the party. In fact, one of my biggest issues with this entire mess, is how Dr. Fauci and others like him have done almost NOTHING to educate the American public about the new science and information we now have about COVID-19, which would have not only meaningfully reduced panic but also perhaps given Governors more support to re-open more quickly…

Fact #16: All these phased re-openings are utter nonsense with no science to support them, but they will all be declared a success

I found this Wall Street Journal article about Washington’s Governor Jay Inslee to be particularly telling:

Mr. Inslee’s “Covid-19 dashboard,” which is supposed to provide a science-based path for Washington’s recovery, is much the same story. The online dashboard includes “dials” for five public-safety variables but gives no indication of how each is calculated or where the dials need to be to begin the various phases of reopening. When will builders be allowed to start new construction? When will small stores be able to open like Home Depot is open? The dashboard is designed to imply science but lacks meaningful data.

Yup, still waiting for your Phase 1 or Phase 2 re-opening? Trust me, whomever conjured up your state’s plan is quite literally making things up as they go along. And, given the extreme range of plans taking place—even in neighboring counties—the odds that they have ANYTHING to do with the arc of the virus is exactly ZERO, but you already knew that if you read this far. The good news is they will ALL succeed, because we never needed to lockdown in the first place—MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

(It’s interesting to look back to early May at the headlines where public health officials predicted disaster for Florida—Miami Herald: How safe is Florida’s reopening plan? Public health experts give a candid critique—are other Governor’s ever going to think for themselves the way Ron DeSantis did?)

How the hell did we get here?

This week, I was really struck by this headline from the Foundation for Economic Education:

As Sweden’s top infectious disease expert recently explained, Sweden’s approach to the pandemic is more orthodox than the current lockdown approach, at least compared to historical standards.

“Are the people closing society completely, which has really never been done before, more or less orthodox than Sweden?” Anders Tegnell asked recently. “[Sweden is doing] what we usually do in public health: giving lots of responsibility to the population, trying to achieve a good dialogue with the population, and achieve good results with that.”

Tegnell’s point deserves attention. While nations today appear comfortable instituting mass lockdowns to prevent the spread of a deadly respiratory virus, the practice appears to be unprecedented.

Stanford’s Dr. Scott Atlas is, IMO, one of the true heroes of this quagmire, and I found his essay about the lack of leadership by American public health officials during this crisis to be one of his best. While the public health officials have done a great job scaring the daylights out of Americans, they’ve done very little to update Americans on the emerging science that has proved many of our initial fears to be unsupported by science. We still have MILLIONS of Americans who are scared to leave their home, and my guess is that many think COVID-19’s IFR is closer to smallpox (30%) than to the seasonal flu. As Dr. Atlas wrote on May 3rd in The Hill:

The basis of reassuring the public about re-entry is repeating the facts about the threat and who it targets. By now, studies from Europe and the U.S. all suggest that the overall fatality rate is far lower than early estimates. And we know who to protect, because this disease – by the evidence – is not equally dangerous across the population. In Michigan’s Oakland County, 75 percent of deaths were in those over 70 years old; 91 percent were in people over 60, similar to what was noted in New York. And younger, healthier people have virtually zero risk of death and little risk of serious disease; as I have noted before, under one percent of New York City’s hospitalizations have been patients under 18 years of age, and less than one percent of deaths at any age are in the absence of underlying conditions.

I still struggle to make sense of how the hell we got here. I think one of the best essays you will ever read on this topics a 2-part series written by bioengineer Yinon Weiss:

Part 1: How Fear, Groupthink Drove Unnecessary Global Lockdowns. Excerpt:

In the face of a novel virus threat, China clamped down on its citizens. Academics used faulty information to build faulty models. Leaders relied on these faulty models. Dissenting views were suppressed. The media flamed fears and the world panicked. That is the story of what may eventually be known as one of the biggest medical and economic blunders of all time. The collective failure of every Western nation, except one, to question groupthink will surely be studied by economists, doctors, and psychologists for decades to come.

Part 2: How Media Sensationalism, Big Tech Bias Extended Lockdowns. Excerpt:

Epidemiologists created faulty lockdown models. The media promoted fear. Politicians assumed worst-case scenarios, and big tech suppressed dissenting views. This is how people’s fears grew disproportional to reality and how seemingly short-term lockdowns stretched into months.

I’ll end these thoughts with a final quote from Israel’s Yoram Lass, who neatly summarized what just happened (and is still happening in many places):

It is what is known in science as positive feedback or a snowball effect. The government is afraid of its constituents. Therefore, it implements draconian measures. The constituents look at the draconian measures and become even more hysterical. They feed each other and the snowball becomes larger and larger until you reach irrational territory. This is nothing more than a flu epidemic if you care to look at the numbers and the data, but people who are in a state of anxiety are blind. If I were making the decisions, I would try to give people the real numbers. And I would never destroy my country.

Now what?

What should be done is so damn simple, IMO, but it never will, because too many people would have to admit they were wrong. But, I’ll say it anyway. My policy recommendation: remove 100% of newly created lockdown rules, secure nursing homes using Florida’s approach, tell everyone with an active COVID-19 infection to stay home until symptoms resolve or wear a mask if they need to go out in public, and encourage everyone else to wash their hands. Done deal.

I saved one of my favorite quotes for last from Karolinska Institute’s Johan Giesecke (no surprise he’s Swedish), from an essay that appeared in early May in The Lancet:

These facts have led me to the following conclusions. Everyone will be exposed to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, and most people will become infected. COVID-19 is spreading like wildfire in all countries, but we do not see it—it almost always spreads from younger people with no or weak symptoms to other people who will also have mild symptoms. This is the real pandemic, but it goes on beneath the surface, and is probably at its peak now in many European countries. There is very little we can do to prevent this spread: a lockdown might delay severe cases for a while, but once restrictions are eased, cases will reappear. I expect that when we count the number of deaths from COVID-19 in each country in 1 year from now, the figures will be similar, regardless of measures taken.

Measures to flatten the curve might have an effect, but a lockdown only pushes the severe cases into the future —it will not prevent them. Admittedly, countries have managed to slow down spread so as not to overburden health-care systems, and, yes, effective drugs that save lives might soon be developed, but this pandemic is swift, and those drugs have to be developed, tested, and marketed quickly. Much hope is put in vaccines, but they will take time, and with the unclear protective immunological response to infection, it is not certain that vaccines will be very effective.

In summary, COVID-19 is a disease that is highly infectious and spreads rapidly through society. It is often quite symptomless and might pass unnoticed, but it also causes severe disease, and even death, in a proportion of the population, and our most important task is not to stop spread, which is all but futile, but to concentrate on giving the unfortunate victims optimal care.

If you made it this far, thank you. You now share my burden in knowing the facts about Lockdown Lunacy. And, thank you to the many courageous medical professionals and scientists who are taking serious risk to their careers to publicly tell the truth. If you’d like to stay abreast of this complex topic, I recommend the Twitter feeds of both Aaron Ginn and Alex Berenson, they are a welcome respite from “Team Apocalypse.”

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Masks, Cloth Face Coverings, Nothing

The above Lockdown Lunacy posts addressed masks… but here is another post which contains many, many more links… It may appear one sided because it is. He published his post, then posted the links in the comments. So I will copy the comments to here as well to present all at once. It serves to give the mind of reason the studies to combat the narrative of authoritarians and hysteria.

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131 Scientific Articles and Reasons to Refuse

Posted byJason Hommel

Why I Refuse to Wear a Mask (And You Should Too)

Mask wearing is only a CDC recommendation, not a law.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/cloth-face-cover.html

The CDC is a cesspool of liars.

The CDC has a top ten list of things people die from. The list is grossly incorrect, and neglects deaths from medical causes. https://revealingfraud.com/2019/08/health/cdcs-leading-causes-of-death-list-is-fraud/ This proves they are horrible liars, and grossly incompetent.

As further proof that the CDC lies, the CDC recently agreed to settle a lawsuit where the CDC was refusing an information request to provide studies upon which they based their claim “vaccines do not cause Autism”. They failed to provide any studies to show that the vast majority of vaccines do not cause Autism. They mostly only studied MMR, and the study they rely upon was shown to be fraud by a whistleblower. https://revealingfraud.com/2020/03/health/vaccines-may-indeed-cause-autism-cdc-fraud-exposed/

Believing the CDC, as per the above, can literally get you killed, in many ways. Mainly, you would grossly underestimate the deadliness of the medical establishment.

Mask wearing, can literally get you killed. It’s already killed several people who were running while wearing masks. Their lungs exploded, and they died. https://www.nydailynews.com/coronavirus/ny-coronavirus-two-chinese-boys-die-face-masks-gym-class-20200507-ruyinz7czjbqde3tprx647q3dm-story.html and https://nypost.com/2020/05/15/wuhan-man-suffers-collapsed-running-while-running-with-face-mask/

The CDC reason for wearing a mask is fraudulent, and based on an illegal false accusation, and/or slander and/or unproven science. The reason is “to protect others”. This fraudulently assumes and falsely accuses everyone is an asymptomatic carrier. This fraudulently assumes, and falsely accuses that asymptomatic carriers can spread the disease, even though there is no science to suggest that is true. (See point about false CDC claims on autism not backed by science above.) This also inverts the legal maxim, “innocent until proven guilty”. Where is the proof of asymptomatic transmission?

The World Health Organization has stated that “to date there has been no documented case of asymptomatic transmission”. As of April, 2020. https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200402-sitrep-73-covid-19.pdf In case they change their form, it has been downloaded and uploaded here:
https://revealingfraud.com/2020/05/silver-gold/who-no-asymptomatic-transmission-april-2020/

This should be a far more than sufficient counter argument:

1. Masks kill.
2. And there is utterly no reason to wear one.

Anyone who is smart enough to evaluate two things at once, and compare risk vs. reward, can instantly see that wearing a mask is a very very bad idea.

There are many, many more reasons to avoid wearing a mask, but the above are so sufficient, the below need not be substantiated at this time.

1. It used to be illegal to wear a mask in public, because it intimidates others, and criminals often wear masks to conceal their identity.
2. It can reduce oxygen, and increase harmful CO2.
3. It can cause you to have more respiratory distress.
4. It can lead to more respiratory illnesses.
5. It is uncomfortable, and causes harm to the wearer.
6. It breeds bacteria, and is disgusting, and unhealthy.
7. Compliance is a loss of freedom.
8. Compliance is like setting the stage for the Biblical Mark of the Beast of Revelation 13.
9. Allowing others to steal our rights, when there is no evidence, is absurd.
10. Bowing down to arbitrary dictates is UnAmerican.
11. It is antisocial.
12. You can’t smile at people, nor see their smiles.
13. It is not a crime to not wear a mask. Those who say it is, did not pass their laws through democratic processes, but through executive dictates that have already been struck down by the Supreme Courts of two states.
14. The tests for COVID19, are themselves fraudulent, and have many problems. https://revealingfraud.com/2020/03/health/test-kits-do-not-work/
15. There is no way to tell the difference between a false positive on a test, and an asymptomatic carrier; both are healthy people who test positive. If the test is wrong, then there are no asymptomatic carriers; they are all simply false positives. https://revealingfraud.com/2020/04/health/what-is-the-difference-between-a-false-positive-and-an-asymptomatic-carrier/
16. Some people cannot wear masks for medical reasons, because they are so dangerous. (They kill through oxygen deprivation.) A small, but not totally exhaustive list, some of the things I’ve seen claimed would be: asthma, allergies, anemia, fungal infections, blood clotting disorders, diabetes, PTSD, autism, pre existing lung problems, “being a human”, and needing to meet basic OSHA air quality requirements of more then 19.5% oxygen, and less then 400 to 5000 parts per million CO2. And HIPPA law says people do not need to disclose their personal medical history such as “being human” to anyone.

Those were my initial 16 reasons. Below, in the comments, are 115 links compiled by others, most are links to scientific articles, showcasing the dangers of wearing masks, and their ineffectiveness.

 37 Comments

1. A.R.L.says:20th May 2020 at 1:52 pmIts a fashion statement to wear a mask now, they have the designer ones out. Someone snuck up on me at work with a mask on and startled me, my reflex caused me to throw something at them, I thought it was an attacker for a split second… but yes this article, I cannot say it vehemently enough how ridiculous it is to wear a mask, it provides zero protection and causes harm, so you have to be triply brain dead to wear it.Reply
2. Jason Hommelsays:20th May 2020 at 3:46 pmhttps://www.stopmandatoryvaccination.com/covid-19/los-angeles-ordered-indefinite-masking-so-i-sent-a-complaint-to-the-us-dept-of-justice/Reply
3. Jason+Earl+Hommelsays:20th May 2020 at 9:22 pmDr. Fauci, a health expert, just a few months ago telling us masks were harmful & unessential to those of us who aren’t infected:https://mobile.twitter.com/ttp13526/status/1263151872812040193Reply
4. Jason+Earl+Hommelsays:21st May 2020 at 7:10 amEmployers must provide reasonable accomodation to refusers under the ADA. https://ehsdailyadvisor.blr.com/2020/04/can-employers-mandate-the-use-of-facemasks-and-what-if-employees-cant-or-wont-wear-them/Reply
5. A.R.L.says:21st May 2020 at 9:14 amThe whole thing seems fishy, it seems like it’s more of a control mechanism to destroy economy and liberties…NWO BS. We dont wear masks at work unless the individual wants to. The whole thing seems to be a ruse. High recovery rate without intervention and not worth destroying the economy.Reply
6. Jason Hommelsays:22nd May 2020 at 4:58 pmhttps://komonews.com/news/consumer/cdc-says-surgical-masks-wont-protect-you-from-the-coronavirusReply
7. Jason Hommelsays:22nd May 2020 at 4:59 pmhttps://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article241845881.htmlReply
8. Jason Hommelsays:22nd May 2020 at 5:05 pmAh, facebook says they want to block all information that conflicts with the CDC and WHO.https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/348722/facebook-fights-covid-19-misinformation-promotes.html“The goal here is going to be to put authoritative information from organizations like the CDC and WHO in front of everyone who uses our services, as well as prominent links to the websites of those organizations,” he said”But what if they contradict each other?CDC says to wear face coverings in public. WHO says don’t bother. What’s going on?
   https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article241845881.htmlReply
9. A.R.L.says:23rd May 2020 at 12:26 pmIts getting so corny out there over the masks and the Hoax, its the worst reality Ive never wanted to see. I truly try my best to check out of mainstream anything to avoid hearing about it… its dumb. I said on my fb page, that someone needs to build a statue of Covid so people can bow down and worship it… its a false idol. Germs, bacteria, risks have always been part of life on earth, now suddenly Government has become like a God and can keep you safe with its inadequate information on health? Praise God for Jesus Christ, its the only good thing we have going these days.Reply
10. Jason+Earl+Hommelsays:24th May 2020 at 1:51 amhttps://www.technocracy.news/blaylock-face-masks-pose-serious-risks-to-the-healthy/?print=print&fbclid=IwAR3TTkCgtOtOxL4TSkZi80se1lPzD6yqq-X5IekiFOu8bvqY36EDWVLplUYReply
11. Jason+Earl+Hommelsays:24th May 2020 at 1:52 amYou can shut it down with this. “As a WHO Health Professional, it is a proven fact, and has been for years, that masks are unreliable where viruses are concerned. Unless your wearing an N95 or above, they will not protect you from any disease and will only stop 11 to 18 percent of spreading your contaminants while your mask is dry. Once you start breathing through the cotton fabric, the moisture collected begins the degradation process. After roughly 20 minutes, the mask is rendered worthless. Wearing a mask in the US is viewed as “window dressing;” masks are worn to help others feel secure in an environment where there simply is none, or very little. While in a well ventilated store, nCoV droplets can be carried well beyond 6 feet. It has been proven scientifically, that airborne droplets can be carried from one end of the store to another. Unless the disease is irradicated, the US will need to learn how to live with this, and many others coming our way. The Kawasaki Syndrome is going to get a lot worse because nCoV has now become prevalent here. Unlike Influenza A and B, Covid, similar to H5N1, has evolved to live in hotter climates.Once your mask has become wet from breathing, it becomes a magnet for droplets in the air to stick to it more. The more you walk and breath, in well ventilated areas, the more likely you are to have droplets stick to the wet area around your mouth. This makes the mask a collection point for contaminants. nCoV, may stay dormant in the body for long periods. Certain antigens trigger the immune response thereby causing some people to show positive and then negative again. For many people, resistance may be high because of their autoimmune response
    Whereas others may be simply receptive becuase they let their resistance get depleted. H5N1 reacts the same way with certain animals, as well as, humans.”
    Retired, 1991 to 2014, Classified Level IV disease first response health professional (87 countries, over 200 deployments). I cannot verify, other than Margaret Chan (Director General 1996-2017), our boss who could; however probably wouldn’t. My team’s classification was beyond “Top Secret.” My knowledge, and experience as a nurse, in the world of disease first response surpasses many of CDC, HHS, and US Army first response. There were 15 members on my team. However, I was the Deputy, and later, the Incident Commander for the US H5N1 outbreak (2015), in Minnesota, Nebraska, Iowa and Louisiana, which can be verfied by the USDA, and Witt O’Brien.Reply
12. Jason+Earl+Hommelsays:24th May 2020 at 2:17 amhttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/340570735_Masks_Don’t_Work_A_review_of_science_relevant_to_COVID-19_social_policyReply
13. Jason+Earl+Hommelsays:24th May 2020 at 8:08 am455 asymptomatic carriers…
    1. They never developed it.
    2. They never infected others.
    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32405162/?fbclid=IwAR2UlNFWFlYL75IRzjb0fnVCFtsfUmQvAIUSZfykdbpD5y_ICs6XwiEgsHUReply
14. Jason Hommelsays:24th May 2020 at 10:25 amThe meaning of wearing a mask. It appears to have ancient and deep roots into the demonic.https://www.britannica.com/art/mask-face-covering/The-wearing-of-masks“The wearing of masks
    The person who wears the mask is also considered to be in direct association with the mask’s spirit force and is consequently exposed to like personal danger of being affected by it. For the sake of protection, the wearer, like the mask maker, is required to follow certain sanctioned procedures in using the mask. In some respects he plays the role of an actor in cooperation or collaboration with the mask. Without the dance and posturing routines that the mask wearer performs, often to the accompaniment of music, the mask would remain a representation without a full life-force. The real drama and power of its form is the important contribution of the wearer. Covered by the mask and costume, the performer loses his previous identity and assumes a new one. Upon donning the mask, the wearer sometimes undergoes a psychic change and as in a trance assumes the spirit character depicted by the mask. Usually, however, the wearer skillfully becomes a “partner” of the character he is impersonating, giving to the mask not only an important spark of vitality by the light flashing from his own eyes but also bringing it alive by his movements and poses. But often the wearer seems to become psychologically one with the character he is helping to create. He seems to become an automaton, without his own will, which has become subservient to that of the personage of the mask. At all times there remains some important, even if sub rosa, association between the mask and its wearer.”Reply
15. Jason Hommelsays:24th May 2020 at 11:44 amHow would wearing a mask, somehow increase the accuracy of the fraudulent COVID19 test kits with that 80% false positive rate?How would wearing a mask, somehow make ventilators work better, that kill 88% of the people put on them?How would wearing a mask, prevent the censorship of actual cures that work?How would wearing a mask, prevent the overdiagnosis of COVID19 by doctors to get more money from the government?How would wearing a mask, prevent a coroner from fraudulently adding COVID19 to death certificates?How would wearing a mask, prevent those five major kinds of COVID19 fraud, which all act to fraudulently increase the low threat from COVID19?How would wearing a mask “protect others” when, in fact, wearing a mask would reinforce the frauds above?How would wearing a mask “protect others” when, in fact, the mask is like trying to stop a mosquito with a chain link fence, that the virus can fly right through?Reply
16. A.R.L.says:24th May 2020 at 12:49 pmYeah demonic symbolism and ritual. It’s a dark time in history. I want to be hopeful for the future, but heaven is looking really good compared to this faux reality. Seems like darkness has invaded the scene and its going to be hard for Gods people for a while. We haven’t begun to get a taste of the results of the economic collapse yet. We must hold on tight to the Lord to see us through.Reply
17. Jason+Hommelsays:26th May 2020 at 1:29 pmhttps://www.facebook.com/Jensgems/posts/10222689065442465Why masks are harmful.My neighbor is 6’3″ and total muscles, strong as an ox.He was forced to wear a mask in Lowe’s and he ended up passing out because he couldn’t breathe, and fell and hit his head on something.He was unconscious for a while and they called the cops.The black eye showed up the second day.And you think masks actually protect people?Reply
18. Jason+Earl+Hommelsays:27th May 2020 at 7:17 amhttps://www.globalresearch.ca/studies-show-dehumanizing-masks-weaken-you-dont-protect-you/5713580Reply
19. Jason+Earl+Hommelsays:28th May 2020 at 5:41 amhttps://www.facebook.com/notes/heather-leigh/the-psychological-manipulation-of-universal-masking/10159673405413146/Reply
20. Jason+Earl+Hommelsays:28th May 2020 at 8:20 amI’m a retired healthcare professional and I have been exposed to much worse than coronavirus. There is so much conflicting information that it is becoming increasingly more difficult to make an informed decision that is based on science and not politically driven. Masks block particles down to 3 microns. Coronavirus is 0.06 to 0.14 microns. Using a mask to prevent exposure to a virus such as SARS-CoV-2 is akin to erecting a chain-link fence to keep out mice. There is no relevant evidence to support the use of masking to prevent transmission or infection. If you feel the need for a protective barrier, why not consider a transparent face shield? It will protect you from water droplets as well as others from yours, unless they defy gravity. There is a list of unknowns regarding potential harm from a broad public policy to masking: Do used and loaded masks become sources of enhanced transmission? Do masks become collectors and retainers of pathogens that the mask wearer would otherwise avoid when breathing without a mask? Are large droplets captured by a mask atomized or aerosolized into breathable components? Can virions escape an evaporating droplet stuck to a mask fiber? What are the dangers of bacterial growth on a used and loaded mask? How do pathogen-laden droplets interact with environmental dust and aerosols captured on the mask? What are long-term health effects arising from impeded breathing? Are there negative social consequences to a masked society? Are there negative psychological consequences to wearing a mask, as a fear-based behavioural modification? What are the environmental consequences of mask manufacturing and disposal? Do the masks shed fibers or substances that are harmful when inhaled? Please do some additional research or your own to make an informed decision. https://www.technocracy.news/blaylock-face-masks-pose-serious-risks-to-the-healthy/Reply
21. Jason Hommelsays:28th May 2020 at 4:20 pmhttps://www.post-gazette.com/news/crime-courts/2020/05/26/Giant-Eagle-customers-breathing-problems-sue-company-covid-19-facemask-policy/stories/202005260086Reply
22. Jason Hommelsays:28th May 2020 at 4:24 pmHow to File an Americans with Disabilities Act Complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice
    https://www.ada.gov/filing_complaint.htm?Reply
23. Jason Hommelsays:28th May 2020 at 4:25 pmThe meaning of wearing a mask. It appears to have ancient and deep roots into the demonic.“The wearing of masks
    The person who wears the mask is also considered to be in direct association with the mask’s spirit force and is consequently exposed to like personal danger of being affected by it. For the sake of protection, the wearer, like the mask maker, is required to follow certain sanctioned procedures in using the mask. In some respects he plays the role of an actor in cooperation or collaboration with the mask. Without the dance and posturing routines that the mask wearer performs, often to the accompaniment of music, the mask would remain a representation without a full life-force. The real drama and power of its form is the important contribution of the wearer. Covered by the mask and costume, the performer loses his previous identity and assumes a new one. Upon donning the mask, the wearer sometimes undergoes a psychic change and as in a trance assumes the spirit character depicted by the mask. Usually, however, the wearer skillfully becomes a “partner” of the character he is impersonating, giving to the mask not only an important spark of vitality by the light flashing from his own eyes but also bringing it alive by his movements and poses. But often the wearer seems to become psychologically one with the character he is helping to create. He seems to become an automaton, without his own will, which has become subservient to that of the personage of the mask. At all times there remains some important, even if sub rosa, association between the mask and its wearer.”https://www.britannica.com/art/mask-face-covering/The-wearing-of-masksReply
24. Jason+Earl+Hommelsays:30th May 2020 at 6:16 amhttps://www.businessinsider.com/trump-shares-tweet-that-says-masks-represent-slavery-and-social-death-2020-5Reply
25. Jason+Hommelsays:30th May 2020 at 5:49 pmIt is, admittedly, 100% pointless to wear a mask if you are well, because the entire point is “to protect others”.But “to protect others” makes even less sense, because wearing a mask restricts your own oxygen, increases your own carbon dioxide, which would make the COVID even worse, and just help the COVID kill you faster, and make you even more infectious.Masks are worse than pointless, they are a mark of conformity and stupidity.Reply
26. A.R.L.says:31st May 2020 at 8:14 amYou once put together a protocol for Emily, she needs that again. I’ll gladly provide a donation, I remember it was mega mag, silica, amino acids, cant remember 3-4 more items. Insomnia, night terrors, general malaise, residual of lyme…thank you.Reply
    1. Jason Hommelsays:31st May 2020 at 3:59 pmmega mag, silica, amino acids, cant remember 3-4 more items. Insomnia, night terrors, general malaise, residual of lyme…thank you.Keep taking mega magnesium, and get the amino acids from more protein. Even hot dogs work! Eggs. Sausage. Bacon. Tuna. Anything tasty that she will eat.For insomnia, zinc at night, 30-50mg right as you lay down to sleep.
       For general malaise, B complex, 1 pill, up to 5 times a day. Get “doctor’s best” brand, or look for “methylated” B vitamins.
       For being tired, take copper in the morning, 1 x 3mg pill x 3 times a day.
       For Lyme, iodine and colloidal silver; together they will kill it.Reply
27. A.R.L.says:31st May 2020 at 5:14 pmThank you, one more thing, anti anxiety, mental stamina.Reply
    1. Jason Hommelsays:1st June 2020 at 11:53 amThe zinc, magnesium, B vitamins, iodine and copper will all help that.Reply
28. Jason+Hommelsays:16th June 2020 at 2:02 pmhttps://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/may/1/forced-face-masking-civil-rights-offense/Reply
29. Jason+Earl+Hommelsays:24th June 2020 at 8:28 am***MASK WEARERS take notice***
    Shared from Jason Grieve“So I did a test today that I am quite confident has never been done, relative to the mask guidelines.So in order to live healthy we must breathe the correct atmospheric oxygen which is 19.5% -23.5% of the air must be O2. OHSA requires a confined space environment to maintain this atmosphere or you must remove yourself from that environment immediately. So we breathe in that O2 in two places mouth and nose, both of which are confined to the mask.My hypothesis was that the atmosphere inside of the mask was not meeting the lower 19.5% atmospheric oxygen levels making the mask immediately dangerous to life and health (IDLH).The test:I took an industrial MSA air gas monitor and tested 3 face coverings. I wore each mask covering appropriately and inserted the gas monitor wand inside the mask. The results of the atmospheric oxygen levels are as follows: (remember under 19.5% is IDLH)Double layer hanker chief – 17.5%
    Half face respirator with 2 valves and particulate filters – 18.0%
    N95 with single valve – 18.0%Conclusion – these face coverings that are being recommended are depleting the oxygen to your brain and is immediately dangerous to life and health. The reason: gas exchange isn’t happening fast enough inside the mask and you are breathing too much expended CO2.”Reply
30. Jason+Earl+Hommelsays:24th June 2020 at 8:29 amMask wearing drop “This study is the first RCT of cloth masks, and the results caution against the use of cloth masks. This is an important finding to inform occupational health and safety. Moisture retention, reuse of cloth masks and poor filtration may result in increased risk of infection. Further research is needed to inform the widespread use of cloth masks globally. However, as a precautionary measure, cloth masks should not be recommended for HCWs, particularly in high-risk situations, and guidelines need to be updated.”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4420971/#__ffn_sectitlehttps://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/4/e006577.fullhttps://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/04/data-do-not-back-cloth-masks-limit-covid-19-experts-sayCloth masks can increase infectionhttps://www.who.int/publications-detail/advice-on-the-use-of-masks-in-the-community-during-home-care-and-in-healthcare-settings-in-the-context-of-the-novel-coronavirus-(2019-ncov)-outbreak
    From the WHO: There is limited evidence that wearing a medical mask by healthy individuals in the households or among contacts of a sick patient, or among attendees of mass gatherings may be beneficial as a preventive measure.14-23 However, there is currently no evidence that wearing a mask (whether medical or other types) by healthy persons in the wider community setting, including universal community masking, can prevent them from infection with respiratory viruses, including COVID-19.Masks-Prolonged wearing of the surgical mask causes loss of intellect potential and cognitive performance due to a decrease in blood oxygen and subsequent brain hypoxia. Note – some changes may be irreversible.“Report on surgical mask induced deoxygenation during major surgery” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18500410
    “Seventy percent of the patients showed a reduction in partial pressure of oxygen (PaO2), and 19% developed various degrees of hypoxemia. Wearing an N95 mask significantly reduced the PaO2 level”
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15340662“Wearing N95 masks results in hypooxygenemia and hypercapnia which reduce working efficiency and the ability to make correct decision.”
    …
    “Medical staff are at increased risk of getting ‘Severe acute respiratory syndrome’ (SARS), and wearing N95 masks is highly recommended by experts worldwide. However, dizziness, headache, and short of breath are commonly experienced by the medical staff wearing N95 masks. The ability to make correct decision may be hampered, too.”https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00173017
    https://www.researchgate.net/…/7332926_Headaches_and_the_N9…“Chronic hypoxia-hypercapnia influences cognitive function”
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18331781
    “Hypercapnia status has been shown to predict mild cognitive impairment https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-35797-3Chronic hypoxia – hypercapnia has been seen as a cause of cognitive impairment https://www.atsjournals.org/…/fu…/10.1164/ajrccm.186.12.1307https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31479137https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26952529https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/4/e006577#T1
    updated to find information on cloth mask particle filtration. I did also include a review from 1967 on all the studies about development of masks that is a fascinating read. It is important to read the whole thing if you start. If you just read the first page you will be differently informed than reading the whole thing (it’s short!)Fit testing matters less vs it’s an N95 mask: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21477136
    Masks don’t seem to impact family infection as much: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28039289
    Cloth masks not effective relative to normal medical masks: https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/4/e006577.long
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20584862Gotta use the mask and do all the other things too: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22188875
    Medical or N95 isn’t that different: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31479137Cloth masks worse than surgical masks for anything <2.5 uM: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27531371What kills things on masks?
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29855107: yes: bleach, UVC,autoclave, TERC no: UVA, alcohol
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29678452: UVGI is a yes
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25806411 UVGI works, and mask still good, but much more fragile (90% more)
    https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0186217Can you breathe if you double mask?
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23108786 : less well if it’s a surgical mask over an N95We need more studies
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25858901This might be where we get the guidance from:
    https://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=s04272006_______________________________________2020. Lancet. We have no uniform policy:
    https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(20)30134-X/fulltextHistory of surgical masks: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/5333967
    This paper was actually a great read. Basically walks up to the invention of plastic masks with filters. You can’t get a fabric mask wet, and it’s much less effective without a lining (in the citation they were using packed cotton as the best lining)The take home wrt cloth masks stopping viral particles of ~120 nm or cough particles less than 1 um:Distribution of particle sizes in a cough maxes out at ~9Distribution of particle sizes in a cough maxes out at ~900 nm: https://bmcpulmmed.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2466-12-11
    Most particles under 1 um: Fabian P, Mcdevitt JJ, Dehaan WH et al. (2008) Influenza virus in human exhaled breath: an observational study.Cloth masks not very efficient with small particles (in some cases negligible filtering):
    https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/4/e006577.full: Laboratory tests showed the penetration of particles through the cloth masks to be very high (97%) compared with medical masks (44%) (used in trial) and 3M 9320 N95 (<0.01%), 3M Vflex 9105 N95 (0.1%).Highly recommend reading this one- particle size breakdown and fabric differences for cloth masks and particle penetration: https://doi.org/10.1093/annhyg/meq044Cloth masks worse than surgical masks for anything <2.5 uM (** the one brand had a filter, and was the best performing cloth mask): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27531371_______________________________________________________https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0843-2In conclusion, both surgical and cotton masks seem to be ineffective in preventing the dissemination of SARS–CoV-2 from the coughs of patients with COVID-19 to the environment and external mask surface.https://annals.org/aim/fullarticle/2764367/effectiveness-surgical-cotton-masks-blocking-sars-cov-2-controlled-comparisonMask wearing can increase infection. Most people do not even know how to wear or use them.https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200315/Wearing-masks-may-increase-your-risk-of-coronavirus-infection-expert-says.aspxUS surgeon general warns against wearing face coverings.https://www.businessinsider.com/americans-dont-need-masks-pence-says-as-demand-increases-2020-2Reply
31. Jason+Earl+Hommelsays:24th June 2020 at 8:29 amMASK Face maskI left 2 resources on your other post as wellBlaylock
    https://www.fort-russ.com/2020/05/dr-blaylock-face-masks-pose-serious-risks-to-the-healthy-hypoxia-and-hypercapnia/Neurosurgeon says face mask pose risk
    https://truepundit.com/neurosurgeon-says-face-masks-pose-serious-risk-to-healthy-people/https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-1342?fbclid=IwAR2541ssvUEtFyw04kMVI_5lr3yJeUg3ttYIEs849FwmKXNGYn518CF8Akc&amp;Results
    The rates of all infection outcomes were highest in the cloth mask arm, with the rate of ILI statistically significantly higher in the cloth mask arm (relative risk (RR)=13.00, 95% CI 1.69 to 100.07) compared with the medical mask arm. Cloth masks also had significantly higher rates of ILI compared with the control arm. An analysis by mask use showed ILI (RR=6.64, 95% CI 1.45 to 28.65) and laboratory-confirmed virus (RR=1.72, 95% CI 1.01 to 2.94) were significantly higher in the cloth masks group compared with the medical masks group. Penetration of cloth masks by particles was almost 97% and medical masks 44%.Conclusions
    This study is the first RCT of cloth masks, and the results caution against the use of cloth masks. This is an important finding to inform occupational health and safety. Moisture retention, reuse of cloth masks and poor filtration may result in increased risk of infection. Further research is needed to inform the widespread use of cloth masks globally. However, as a precautionary measure, cloth masks should not be recommended for HCWs, particularly in high-risk situations, and guidelines need to be updated.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4420971/BLAYLOCK MD on MASK
    https://www.citizensforfreespeech.org/blaylock_face_masks_pose_serious_risks_to_the_healthy?fbclid=IwAR3hg0EIiHfFp_Tq4fPTrDt7KdtyWelrRiR4eKtSL_vuy1g3kn0kkGlsWUIRespiratory consequences of N95 type mask usage in pregnant healthcare workers
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4647822/A cluster randomised trial of cloth masks compared with medical masks in healthcare workers
    https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/4/e006577Covid-19: important potential side effects of wearing face masks that we should bear in mind
    https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1435/rr-40Controlled research study shows fabric masks increase infection.
    https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/4/e006577Controlled study shows fabric masks are NOT recommended
    https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/4/e006577Problems caused by wearing masks
    https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1435/rr-40Fabric masks increase infection rates
    https://www.sciencedaily.com/releas…/2015/…/150422121724.htmMasks increase risk of infection
    https://interestingengineering.com/face-masks-might-actuall…WHO states masks shouldn’t be worn by healthy people as it leads to increase in infection
    https://www.businessinsider.com/who-no-need-for-healthy-peo…Increased skin infections from masks https://www.thejakartapost.com/…/beware-of-skin-infections-…Increase infections from masks
    https://www.aa.com.tr/…/improper-use-of-medical-mas…/1766676Masks worn over 2 hours should be thrown away due to increase microorganisms load (surgical mask)
    https://www.sciencedirect.com/…/artic…/pii/S2214031X18300809https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.health.com/condition/infectious-diseases/coronavirus/does-wearing-face-mask-increase-co2-levels%3famp=truePizza Gate update Tom Hanks etc
    https://www.facebook.com/1905037476390714/videos/592444051703478/?vh=eOSHA Mask
    https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/osha-issues-faqs-regarding-face-88221/Mask do not work
    https://www.thehealthyamerican.org/masks-dont-work?fbclid=IwAR2PmNRmN9KFPw07rPc3AaP2kpCWEFPF_O7F3y5vW4TLazhfkZQQzPkSH3EDo mask prevent
    https://off-guardian.org/2020/06/15/do-masks-and-respirators-prevent-viral-respiratory-illnesses/Mask fail to filter
    https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/85814Reply
32. Jason+Earl+Hommelsays:24th June 2020 at 8:32 amVideo of a man showing oxygen levels drop from 20.5 to 17.5% under a mask.https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=4199997680040648&id=100000913716799Reply
33. Jason+Earl+Hommelsays:25th June 2020 at 7:21 pmEducate before you maskulate!(I didn’t make that up but I’ve seen it in a few places and I love it) It’s not about health, complete opposite actually.
    Masks Are Causing More Harm Than Good!
    Cloth masks – dangerous to your health!TWO DOCTORS SAY WEARING A MASK HURTS YOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM
    https://www.bitchute.com/video/jJ26bdQ4rhxYAsymptotic have not been linked to any cases as of date.
    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32513410/?duplicate_of=32405162Masks: Are There Benefits or Just a Comfort Prop? Let the Facts Speak
    https://www.healingwithouthurting.com/single-post/2020/05/21/Masks-Are-There-Benefits-or-Just-a-Comfort-Prop-Let-the-Facts-SpeakFace-Masks-For-All Is Not Scientific
    https://www.timesofnewrome.com/2020/05/face-masks-for-all-is-not-scientific-but-whats-the-harm-in-wearing-one-anywayNew Jersey Driver Crashes Car After Passing Out From Wearing N95 Mask
    https://www.healthnutnews.com/ny-post-new-jersey-driver-crashes-car-after-passing-out-from-wearing-n95-maskTwo boys die from wearing masks in gym class https://www.nydailynews.com/coronavirus/ny-coronavirus-two-chinese-boys-die-face-masks-gym-class-20200507-ruyinz7czjbqde3tprx647q3dm-story.htmlNo good choices: A mask may block out some pollution but have other ill health effects.
    A mask may also cause respiratory distress and become a hotbed for microbes to thrive.
    https://scroll.in/pulse/860276/no-good-choices-a-mask-may-block-out-some-pollution-but-have-other-ill-health-effectsAccording to the Florida Statutes if you are wearing a face mask in a public business, on a public way, or in someone’s house or on someone’s property you are committing a criminal act.
    https://www.flsenate.gov/Laws/Statutes/2011/Chapter876Face Mask Pose Serious Risk To The Healthy
    https://www.technocracy.news/blaylock-face-masks-pose-serious-risks-to-the-healthy/Cloth masks compared to medical masks and no mask
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4420971Mask deoxygenation:
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18500410Physiological impact of n95:
    https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00173017Chronic hypoxia:
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18331781Cluster randomized controlled trial to examine medical mask use as source control for people with respiratory illness:
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28039289Efficacy of cloth face masks:
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27531371Increased risk of coronavirus:
    https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200315/Wearing-masks-may-increase-your-risk-of-coronavirus-infection-expert-says.aspxUS Surgeon general: Data doesn’t back up wearing masks in public amid coronavirus pandemic:
    https://www.foxnews.com/media/surgeon-general-explains-masks-public-coronavirus“WHY YOU’RE WEARING A MASK; THE PAGAN RITUAL OF TRANSFORMATION”:
    https://avoidthemark.com/2020/04/22/why-youre-wearing-a-mask-pagan-ritual-transformation/U.S. Surgeon General: “…STOP BUYING MASKS!
    They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus…”:
    https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/1233725785283932160Forced face masking is a civil rights offense:
    https://tinyurl.com/ybas9cddHealthy People Wearing Masks, Should They or Shouldn’t They?
    https://jennifermargulis.net/healthy-people-wearing-masks-during-covid19‘Masks Are Symbolic,’ say Dr Fauci and The New England Journal of Medicine
    https://hennessysview.com/masks-are-symbolic-dr-fauci/Universal Masking in Hospitals in the Covid-19 Era
    https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2006372Sorry Oregon, your mask is useless (according to the science)
    https://www.professorhinkley.com/blog/sorry-oregon-your-mask-is-useless-according-to-the-scienceCarbon Dioxide Triggers Primordial Fear of Suffocation
    https://www.livescience.com/5910-carbon-dioxide-triggers-primordial-fear-suffocation.htmlMasks, Quarantine, and Lockdown
    https://lesberensonmd.com/?attachment_id=5321https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150422121724.htmhttps://www.thehealthyamerican.org/masks-dont-workhttps://deeprootsathome.com/does-a-face-mask-pose-serious-risk-to-children-or-to-the-healthy/https://technocracy.news/blaylock-face-masks-pose-serious-risks-to-the-healthy/The reasons why wearing a mask for a considerable amount of time and isolating yourself actually drops you immunity.
    Hypercapnia is excess carbon dioxide (CO2) build-up in your body. This can happen from wearing a mask for extended amounts of time.
    What’s a symptom of Hypercapnia? An inability to concentrate or think clearly.
    What’s the third leading cause of death in the US? It’s medical errors.
    Who wears a mask for long periods of time?
    The use of cloth masks by healthcare workers may actually put them at increased risk of respiratory illness and viral infections and their global use should be discouraged, according to a UNSW study.
    https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/health/cloth-masks-–-dangerous-your-healthMost of our communications are non-verbal. Wearing a mask hides our full compliment of expressions. We need to understand how harmful this is to us all on such a deep level.We need to breathe fresh air. With a mask on, we inhale way more carbon dioxide, leading to a host of problems, even serious or life threatening. While wearing a mask, we are not breathing fresh oxygen and are re-breathing carbon dioxide!Masks are another control mechanism meant to silence us! Masks are a clear symbol of being subservient to agendas which do NOT have our good health in mind! The wearing of masks has, in fact, been orchestrated by those who have monetized our suffering. Please consider these points.
    https://www.facebook.com/groups/restoreliability/permalink/1145151192505177/The Psychological Manipulation of Universal Masking
    https://www.facebook.com/notes/heather-leigh/the-psychological-manipulation-of-universal-masking/10159673405413146/Reply
34. Jason+Earl+Hommelsays:26th June 2020 at 5:37 pmhttps://www.everythinglubbock.com/news/local-news/watch-live-emergency-city-council-meeting/Reply
35. Jason Hommelsays:5th July 2020 at 7:19 amDel Bigtree showing masks raise CO2 levels from 400 ppm to over 10,000 on a meter. And OSHA limits, at the max, are 5000 ppm.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmEt0UjrnfQ&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR2-vczNKyS5L7JmMj3r4xawzz3sBKbuQXX26AqKQv53sDYqO8rAtqoMrcAReply

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Hope this post will help you in seeing reason conquer hysteria.