To be sure, some good people have died from covid-19. People die of the flu every year and the most recent guess by our experts regarding the lethality of covid-19 puts it near the kinds of flus that come every year. Some years, the flu is worse and covid-19 is like those flus but not like the Spanish flu. In our history, we haven’t shuttered the economy in response to that kind of flu challenge.
I am troubled to see that some want to discredit effective treatment with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. In the face of evidence that it’s an effective treatment, I read recently about a Veteran’s hospital study to debunk it. If you give hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin to someone close to death who seeks treatment for the first time at the extremity of illness, hydroxychloroquine combined with azithromycin can’t always save them. This is unsurprising. The outcome would be similar at death’s door no matter what you tried to do. Claiming that the hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin combination doesn’t work based on that kind of situation is really dodgy. Whose interests are served by debunking an effective treatment?
I’ve been frustrated to see the press campaign to prolong social distancing continue, apparently for as long as possible. “We are all in this together,” say the campaigners. I felt ok about social distancing when we were uncertain about the lethality of covid-19. But the situation has now changed. We know that covid-19 isn’t as scary or as deadly as was feared. Also, graphs are showing that social distancing has failed to stop infections with covid-19; that social distancing failed to lower the rate of infection because the virus had already become established before social distancing started. Public health based social restrictions aren’t supposed to be used except in the case of an emergency. Covid-19 epidemic doesn’t appear to be an emergency now.
In any case, your safety and mine wasn’t the reason that we started social distancing. The purpose of social distancing was to reduce the numbers of acutely infected individuals so that hospitals could cope with them. Even during the peak of covid-19 infections, New York hospitals have not needed overflow treatment areas.
These days, there seems to be a campaign to unite everyone behind social distancing, maybe even more than before even though it won’t reduce the total number of infected people. A study out of Santa Clara California showed more people already have antibodies to covid-19 than was recently thought. They overcame the infection a while ago. With widespread antibody testing, we may learn more about that in many other cities. With many more people infected than what was recently known based on active positive infection testing it appears that covid-19 isn’t killing people at the percentages we’ve been shown. Social distancing controls on healthy people aren’t needed.
The politicization of covid-19 has already included false estimates of how many will die of it, missing descriptions on protocols that show how it should be treated and ignoring treatments that work, and some states prolonging social distancing past its usefulness possibly for political or financial gain. Fantasies involving covid-19 are an excuse for powers in banking to get more money, with inflation that will insure you’ll pay that money. Global warming similarly was fraught with phoniness. Global warming was always meant to increase the tax base. Now similarly, covid-19 appears to be the bugaboo that promises higher taxes and greater advantages to some at a huge cost to most of us.
If you want to keep your distance, you are welcome to. But the social distancing initiative should end now. Meanwhile, buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries: Liberalism, Pragmatism, Opportunism available now in print or electronic form at Amazon.com.