Let's get straight to it. This data comes directly from the CDC. Everybody's been looking at daily data or cumulative data related to Covid, but I fear they've been missing the picture, so I decided to look at monthly data. The CDC doesn't, so for cases I had to aggregate their daily data, and for deaths I had to aggregate their weekly data. (And that means that, if the week didn't end exactly on the last day of the month, I may be picking up some deaths in, say, May 2020 that actually occurred in the first couple of days in June 2020; however, over time those differences will average themselves out, and in any event they're relatively small, statistically speaking.)
First, cases. And I want you to note that the mask mandates were largely put in place last June and July. So how did that work from October through January?
And how effective do you think it's going to be now? Yes, thanks to the Delta variant, cases in July were up - there's that 246% increase in just one month! that the media has been screaming about.
Yes. From the lowest level since March 2020, when "14 days to flatten the curve" began. The July total is 75% of that of April 2021, and nobody's hair was on fire then. It's 70% of the level from July 2020, when most states first put mask mandates in place (which, again, were wholly ineffective; what's the definition of insanity again?).
Still, I concede that, due to the higher viral load of the Delta variant, cases are up. (But as I've previously noted, in India and the UK, Delta cases peaked about 55-90 days in, then began to drop precipitously. We're about 45 days into the Delta spread here, with a far higher vaccination rate than India's, closer to the UK's. So it's not unreasonable to expect that we may be about 10 days from peaking.)
But even if we aren't - what about deaths?
July's total deaths - right in the midst of the Delta spike in cases - was the lowest since March 2020. We got our first big spike in April of last year, when Andrew "McFeely" Cuomo was sending infected octogenarians from the hospital back into the nursing homes. Then we got a bigger spike in the winter months, when cases mushroomed and the much more lethal Alpha variant was dominant. (Note that April through Inauguration Day was also the period when every U.S. death was labeled a Covid death. If you got hit by a bus, and tested positive post-mortem for Covid, you died of Covid. Same for drowning, drug overdoses, etc. And that's also when hospitals were getting a CARES Act bonus for every Covid death, so they were moving every patient from palliative care into the Covid wing so they could cash in. Never mind that that meant their loved ones couldn't hold their hands as they passed. And the medical profession wonders why Americans no longer trust them.)
But folks, since May of this year, the pandemic - if you define it as a wave of life-threatening illness - has been over. If you define it as a virus that might cause a bunch of people to get sick, like the flu or the common cold, well, okay, it's a pandemic. And by that definition, we may get a new pandemic pretty much every year.
So what do these numbers equate to in terms of Case Fatality Rate (deaths divided by cases)? Here's where the data is really telling.
See, the cumulative CFR is misleading. It's misleading, because even when cases and deaths spiked last December and January, the CFR was low. Deaths averaged more than 100,000 per month in each of those two months. But the CFR averaged just 1.8%. The cumulative CFR is 1.7%.
Now, why was it so high in January 2020? Remember the first outbreak was in a Washington nursing home. Concentrated in an at-risk population. Doctors didn't know what this thing was or how to treat it. And, the numbers are too small to be statistically significant - six deaths out of 51 cases. Again, the CFR spike in April can be traced largely to the New York nursing home deaths.
So what's the CFR in the month of the "deadly" Delta variant spike?
0.4%.
One-third the rate of any previous month. Much lower than the seasonal flu.
"Oh, but there's a lag," the fearmongers warn.
BS. The lag is less than a month. We'd have seen it by now. Remember, I had to aggregate this data from daily and weekly numbers. I saw no uptick in the weekly deaths in July. In fact, in the last week of the month, deaths fell by 40% from the previous week, even as cases spiked sharply as the month progressed. And, it's not what we saw in the UK: even as cases spiked to near-record levels, deaths remained flat throughout. So the "lag" argument is hogwash.
The data is clear, and it's unfiltered, straight from the very source that is spreading hysteria and issuing guidance that is leading to a return to state and local despots overreaching their authority. Be smarter this time. Look at the data. And tell the despots what they can do with their mandates.
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