Hospitals could never have absorbed the absurd fatality rates we were sold
Infection Fatality Myth - If you are still fighting people who believe the COVID fatality rate is 1% or more, tell them it translates to an impossible 17% hospitalisation rate!
In this new article, I emphasise the central importance of the infection fatality rate. By highlighting the absurdity of the high hospital utilisation consequent of a high IFR, I demonstrate C19 IFR could never be around 1% or above, but more in line with the flu at 0.1%. Lockdowns, masks, forced vaccination, the destruction of the economy and of social life for 2 years…none were justified. It is time to acknowledge that fact.
Last week, I (re-)published on Substack my May 2020 article on New York where I challenged the prevalent narrative that the Infection Fatality Rate was above 2%.
For those of you who haven’t read the article:
I had estimated that the infection fatality rate of SARS-COV-2 was close to 0.1%
My good friend, Dr. Michael Yeadon kindly commented that “agencies within U.K. government recently estimated IFR at a little under 0.1%” and that the UK government didn’t change their policies…
Another cooperative reader pointed to this September Tweet from MP, Steve Baker confirming that.
In the Spring of 2020, I had gone through a lot to check for sanity of this number and validated it with actual New York data. As you can imagine, feedbacks were aggressive… I have since addressed IFR at length in another article called “A novel perspective on a not so novel virus”, underlining the role of pre-existing cross-immunity protection and the role of asymptomatics in this very low figure, but I wanted to take a different angle.
Today I want to put a nail in the IFR coffin. It is time proportionality is upheld again as a key principle in our public life.
Debunking IFR Absurdity with Absurd Reasoning
The COVID crisis has been utterly absurd from the start, and we - conspiracy theorists or Team Reality advocates (choose your point of view :-)) - have been on a wild goose chase all along, going down one rabbit hole after another… But the very justification of it all, a dubiously high lethality was never challenged as the narrative was overwhelmed by a constant flow of apocalyptic news.
Frankly, I haven’t been able to watch television peacefully ever since, sickened by the stream of idiotic fallacies.
So, let’s get back to reality. These past 2 years, many have asserted absolutely unfounded high fatality rate numbers. And many still believe those numbers, the justification for the incredible sacrifices imposed on everyone…
For example, Nicholas Brazeau et al from Imperial College estimated last year an IFR of 1.15%. Interestingly enough, these “experts” could have checked the soundness of their calculation against some real tangible data…they never did, contributing ever more to the panic.
Let me run you through a simple sanity check: the hospital utilisation inconsistency.
It’s pretty factual as you will see.
In the Spring of 2020, about 40% of severe C19 patients would typically die in the ICU. After a change of heart of W.H.O. in July, hospitals finally started giving patients anti-inflammatories and stopped systematically intubating patients… and in the Fall, it went down to 20% as care improved. Starting from Brazeau’s estimate, we can reverse engineer the “risk of ICU” and the “risk of hospitalisation” in 2020.
If such a high IFR were true, it would bring:
the “risk of ICU” roughly between 3% and 6% in the general population,
[1.15% divided either by 41% or 19%]and correspondingly the “risk of hospitalisation” between 11% and 24% !
[3% and 6% divided by 25%]
That would indeed be very scary. But the question is: Was it ever real? Is that even possible?
Of your friends infected with COVID in 2020, did 1 out of 4, or even 1 out of 10, end up in the hospital?
I may be lucky, but I only know one friend who was hospitalised, and he still isn’t 100% sure it was COVID, not even in 2020! But I’ll agree that it’s anecdotal evidence.
Here’s another reference:
We know from the Regeneron monoclonal antibodies trial that only 4% of infected “at risk” untreated adults above 50 yrs old ended up in the hospital, so if you account for the very low risk below 50 plus the healthy above 50, the “risk of hospitalisation” is much closer to 1% than to 24%!
One way to verify if the anecdotal evidence and the data from Regeneron are correct is a proof by the Absurd: What does a 1.15% IFR entail?
Conservatively, let’s agree the UK was hit 20% by SARS-COV-2 in 2020, that would mean around 2.4 million were hospitalised based on the Imperial College team estimation! Talking about flattening the curve… 😳
Average stay being 2-week that would equate to 33 million days in the hospital for COVID , or 18 times what NHS England has recorded in 2020 (1.8 million days of care) for COVID patients care …
At peak, clearly 33 million days in the hospital would have left no room for car accidents. No room for giving birth. No room for cancer. No room for mental health. It’s completely absurd.
Even corrected for the many unfortunate deaths at home or in retirement homes, that spells “ABSURD ALERT” !
Imperial College totally discredited itself - they are not alone - and as they literally told the world, they were off by at least 10x!
For the record:
I remember reading an NHS audit in late August 2020 whereby 87% of Covid patients were wrongly labelled COVID. Again Covid patients were overestimated by a factor of 10. Motorcycle accidents or heart attacks were being labelled COVID, and a very large majority of patients were patients suffering from other pathologies…
NHS data shows 2020 bed utilisation in England was 86%, with 111,321 beds occupied, with 16,068 beds occupied for “Mental Illness” beds…
In France, according to ATIH numbers, some 272 thousand COVID patients were hospitalised in 2020 (or 11% of the Imperial inferred number for a similar population), and accounted for only 2% of patients and 5% of total days occupied!! Having lived in the UK, I cannot believe there would be a major difference1 between the UK and France.
In other words, a 1% IFR CALCULATION IS TOTALLY ABSURD, AND IS AT LEAST OVER-ESTIMATED BY A 10x2 FACTOR. We come back to an IFR below 0.1%!
Such a gigantic miss isn’t a coincidence. Unfortunately, it can only be malevolent to nourish the panic and the dystopia we have been living in for 2 years now. And people will need to be made accountable for fuelling the panic.
It’s been quite disquieting to witness the disproportionate measures taken relative to this low fatality rate: family-wrecking lock-downs, bankruptcy-triggering business closures, heart-breaking isolation of our elderly, forever-lost opportunity to say a last word of comfort to loved ones, disgraceful bullying of our children, denial of treatment, incomprehensible untreated illnesses, forced vaccinations…not to mentioned the trillions of dollars wasted and the upcoming economic ruin. We will need to ponder as to how and why we have lost our humanity for a flu.
Clearly, Civilisation is more fragile than we all thought, it is always on the brink of collapse, at the mercy of human hubris, self-serving interests and the panic of the crowd.
I am not sure we are out of the woods yet, but positive signs are emerging...
beyond the obesity factor which is higher in the UK
Just for the record 0.057% IFR would be very close to the Case Fatality rate in Singapore during the whole of 2020
When the government pays for covid, then by God, "everything" is gonna be covid!
Me, Easter dinner 2021, all squinty-eyed, asking my hospital-administrator nurse sister-in-law "don't you think it's weird that 80-yro to 100-yro people are no longer dying of natural causes, like "old age", everybody is just dying from covid??"
And completely straight faced she replied "no, it's not weird. Covid is deadly and it's killing people of all ages!"
Me, still squinty-eyed "Reeeeally?" Then my brother gave me the mean squinty-eyed "just shut up" look.
She is corporate medicine through and through, because they sign her paycheck.
If this is accurate, which appears to be the case, then the reaction to COVID may have resulted in as much, or more, fatalities. I call this the Infection Reaction Fatality Rate. I am not a statistician and will leave to more qualified people to determine the IRFR.
The IRFR is a critical metric that will reveal the insanity of idiots given authority to order our actions, treatments, etc, without awareness that they have crossed the line with lethal consequences, or worse, that they are aware.