Happy Independence Day! Today, I sit in my office reviewing our recent history since Dec 2019 when I first heard of the novel coronavirus breaking out in Wuhan. Many months have gone by and what I notice is how poor our information about covid-19 continues to be. It’s also obvious that some in politics and in the press want that fuzzy obscurity to continue. It should end.

Our federal state and municipal government response to covid-19 was too authoritarian and it continues to confuse rather than clarify. In fact it makes clear to me and perhaps also to you that our government shouldn’t be involved in healthcare because politics doesn’t belong in healthcare.

Declaring that some businesses should be shut down to isolate healthy people from a new infection was costly and didn’t protect people from catching the virus. In history it has been common to isolate sick, not healthy people. People are suffering economic harms right now because so much of the economy was shut down. Even after the death rate has fallen, there are many who call for mask wearing and isolation of healthy people.

If most people don’t get sick and many don’t get any symptoms, there’s already some level of immunity. There’s no need for a free-for-all spree of new rules that flout historical precedents for dealing with new contagious illnesses. It’s time to update the deathrate and admit that it’s not that different from regular seasonal flu. Covid-19 stopped being worthy of quarantine when the death rate dropped from the millions that had been estimated in March.

Exagerrations of covid-19 fatalities should stop. Covid-19 declared deaths should be followed up and checked to see if they can be confirmed in the laboratory. If they can’t, they shouldn’t be counted. People who did multiple tests for covid-19 should be counted as a positive once; right now they are being recounted as a new positive covid-19 test as though they are a new covid-19 patient each test.

Back when trains were improving transportation and connecting the nation in a new way, the press gained a new importance because people started travelling and getting to know their neighbors within a train’s ride from where they lived. Suddenly news could expand beyond local information. Social problems in far away places gained a new importance because there was a new audience that could read stories that made far away cities suddenly more real. During covid-19 news coverage we’ve been saturated with global misinformation and panicked descriptions of millions of soon to be seen deaths everywhere. Covid-19 press coverage has been intoxicated with fear, intoxicated with fake statistics and models that failed to approach real experience.

Who wins? Banks got a multitrillion dollar subsidy. Jobs evaporated, putting more downward pressure on wages. Online buying increased as compared with stores that were closed down.  Some people gained a temporary enhanced level of importance as experts and they continue to believe that you should heed their warnings. I agree with Rand Paul who thinks that Fauci and crew have overplayed their expertise and abused your trust.

What do we still need? We still need a treatment regime that works and I heard recently that hydroxychloroquine is back in focus as an effective treatment. We need to change what’s not working in healthcare and in politics and in banking and in our economy. Covid-19 shouldn’t continue to distract us from doing that. If you want to learn more about the United States and how we can solve our current problems in the twenty-first century, buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com.