back to school brush up on health facts
stats with cats reminds you that youth covid is predominantly a condition of adult anxiety
well, it’s back to school season again and you know what that means: it’s time for the branch covidian stalwarts to once more wake from summer slumber with tales of doom, gloom, and unrelenting, uncalibrated fear about the risks of covid to children as our youngsters seek to find a path to edification and education.
as i believe that los niños deserve better that to be once more traumatized in service of the medical, statistical, and resiliency shortcomings of anxiety addled adults who want to jab them, mask them, and keep them from enjoying anything akin to normalcy in some sort of singularity of agoraphobia, munchhausen’s by proxy, and germaphobia generated virtue signaling, i’d like to inject a little data into a debate that is clearly on the last legs of some sort of mental breakdown by those who experienced covid as validation of their own mental and emotional shortcomings and are engaging in addict style behavior to try to get back to their happy place.
they are making up history, making up facts, and inviting you to inhabit a hallucination of their own devising.
you can see the anxiety on full display. and this idea that “covid is spiking” is gaining odd currency even among those who are purportedly “epidemiologists and federal disaster medicine team members.”
but this is a nonsense.
the 5% WHO threshold was entirely made up, had no basis in anything, and is not even meaningful without first defining “of what population?”
the “interventions” suggested like lockdowns and masking were nothing but pseudoscience and pandemic cosplay.
and those positivity numbers are so clearly impossible on any sort of representative basis that you’d need to be a bald faced lair or a statistical illiterate to try to use them.
back in reality people who actually understand how to use statistics were noticing that covid was basically zero in the united states and that these absurd positivity numbers came from a cohort size < 2000.
it's clearly some severely salted sample made up of the sort of people who still go to hospitals for a cold or some other similar selector. you can always make a positivity rate spike by testing non-representative populations. it’s like using the NBA to measure “the average height of americans.”
it’s not going to align with reality.
even more striking, when folks like doug seek to inject a little baseline reality here (you cannot avoid covid, you will be exposed, the best plan is to work on your health) they get attacked by the safety goblins claiming that it’s about interventions, not health.
but this is utterly false. it’s also the sort of magical thinking used to deny a basic reality: there is no magic bullet. if you want to avoid illness, the best way to do it is to work on being a healthy, fit, well nourished human. an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,
this is a set of data from one of my very early substacks written 2 years ago in aug 2021. (shortly after being de-catformed by the bluebird for sharing data like this)
it shows 2 things with great clarity:
covid was never a real risk to the young
general good health is (apart from age which we cannot do anything about) the single biggest reducer of covid risk known
let’s look:
source data HERE
this data is with 100% certainty overstated in terms of risk. it uses a hugely inclusive definition of “covid death” amounting to “death of any sort in a person in which trace covid could be found using 40 Ct PCR testing.” it’s going to over-express overall risk rates, but it will probably do so in a reasonably consistent fashion across and within age groups so it’s quite useful for comparison and we can also use it as a sort of “worst case” boundary.
obviously, the young have FAR less risk than the old.
the rate for 5-14 is 0.0001% (1 in a million) and frankly is not distinguishable from zero in this study in any statistically significant sense. it’s 1/410,000th the risk of an 85 year old. it’s a risk so low for kids that there is basically nothing to mitigate.
look at covid overall though.
here’s the real story: it’s almost all driven by comorbidities once you get out of the very young who are so highly immune anyway that this data simply lacks the powering to measure the difference.
in most of the curve, you’re dropping a zero off the PFR by not being sick. that’s a stunning outcome.
the fatality rate for an 85+ with no comorbidities is the same as the 45-55 cohort overall.
65-74 looks like 35-44.
got that? “70 is the new 40 if you’re healthy.”
what this shows us is that covid19 is not so much a disease of the old as of the obese, hypertensive, diabetic, and heart diseased. most of these are predominantly diseases of lifestyle and can be handled with diet, exercise, and minor supplementation. obviously, there are exceptions. type 1 diabetes is autoimmune. that one just happens. it’s not like type 2 (by far the more common, 30mm in US vs 1.6mm type 1’s) which is essentially acquired insulin resistance from crushing your pancreas under 700 grams of sugar a day for a decade. that one, you generally brought on yourself.
let’s look at just the comorbid to round this out. now we see the vast price of health issues.
we can see the relative risk ratios here by comparing cohorts, no comorbidities vs comorbidities.
these are big drops: 92% as an overall average and 99% in 85 and older, 98% in 75-85, and still 89% in 45-55.
it turns out that “being healthy” is as good or better than even the best vaccine claims in high risk age groups (vaxx efficacy which have been shown to be utter bunk in any event)
if we had a drug this good, people would be buying it like hotcakes. but, apparently, they’d rather just buy hotcakes. and slather them with syrup. and probably some chocolate chips. and get fat and sick and then demand a pill or a jab to mitigate the effect of the choices or that everyone else change their lifestyles because they will not change their own.
pretty ugly philosophy to describe as “health seeking,” no?
the simple fact is that “being healthy” is the best anti covid drug known. it likely protects children just as well it’s just that their baseline risk is so low that it fell beneath the resolution of the data and so you cannot get a meaningful ratio.
all this safety theater is the worst sort of self-serving hypocrisy and reality denial.
the jabs have extremely negative risk/reward for kids even using their own (massively rigged) data. always did.
masks do not work to stop covid. and the data from schools is stark.
this is a lot of very poorly calibrated people inviting you to join them in their hysteria holes because it makes them feel better.
they are erupting in all manner of fear mongering, outlandish statement, and historical revisionism. this is not about safety, it’s about projection of their own hyperbolic emotional frailties upon defenseless kids who deserve to have their lives back instead of being forced to live in service to the most damaged of adults.
just who are supposed to be the grown ups here?
but we are awake now and these ideas do not go unchallenged.
and we are organized now and will not let people crush the children beneath adult insecurities.
the good news is that we see signs that nature is healing. the merchants of menace are being defenestrated at speed.
(hey, maybe leaving windows open really does work!)
I try to fart when standing next to people with masks. Just as a test.
It is unfair to say people would just rather eat junk. The entire nutrition and medical industry tells them to eat a diet that is high in diabetes-promoting carbohydrates and low in healthy fats and meat. Hell, the diabetes association suggested diet is laden with carbs and low fat. Many who have done everything their doctors told them to lose weight just continue to gain and get sicker. Take a look at the latest chart of foods from Tufts, where Lucky Charms are rated as extremely healthy, while bacon and eggs is rated extremely unhealthy. A high carb diet is addictive, these poor folk crave those sweets. Following mainstream diet advice It is like going to a drug dealer for advice on kicking your habit.