Category Archives: Argument

Told You So About Testing: Now, Italian Experts Are Getting Testy, Too

Argument, Critique, Europe, Healthcare, Intelligence, Reason

Today, April 17, Dr. Anthony Fauci finally explained what I EXPLAINED on April 9, a week ago, in the column, “Kung Flu Is A Killer, All Right, But So Are The Bureaucrats“:

“… COVID testing [is not] an amulet against the dreaded disease. It isn’t. All testing does is give an individual a snapshot in time of his COVID status. As soon as he drives out of the testing facility, a COVID-free person could become infected. Unless they engage in prevention, a single testing in time doesn’t in any way give individuals a clean bill of health.
Prevention protects people.”

Testing is, however—at this stage of spread—helpful in giving medical researchers a grip on the symptomless-sick phenomenon, as well as an idea of how the disease is disseminated and distributed in the population.

Test and keep testing large enough representative samples, and you’ll get good prevalence data.

Maybe Anthony Fauci got a whiff of what his Italian colleagues in Lombardy were saying, for they preceded his belated, simple, overdue insight about the limits of testing:

“… some doctors at the Italian epicentre of the health crisis doubt that testing is their way out of confinement.”

“It is a nonsense,” Milan’s Polytechnic Institute professor Davide Manca said. “Conceptually, I am sceptical.”

The reason for Manca’s scepticism is plain to see in the math.

Milan’s Lombardy region has 10 million people and 11,142 officially registered COVID-19 deaths.
The economically strong area, the size of Belgium, has been under one of the world’s strictest lockdowns since early March.

Yet Lombardy has been conducting just 6,500 tests daily over the past 10 days.

Manca estimates it would take more than five years for everyone in Lombardy to get tested just once.
“And you need people tested every 15 days for it to have any meaning,” Manca said in a phone interview. [My point here exactly.]”

“Even if you raise that number 10 times, that would still take 200 days for one test. That’s six or seven months.”

“Manca said he still did not understand how the end of confinement would work.”

“Herd immunity is very difficult to achieve with COVID,” the professor said.

“You need 90-95 percent (of the population) to have COVID for immunity. That number is too high to reach.”

More candidly, in Italy, they are not talking dishonestly about “opening up the country.” They are talking about “coexisting with the coronavirus.”

Well, yours truly beat the good doctors to it on April 9, with “Kung Flu Is A Killer, All Right, But So Are The Bureaucrats.“

However, these medical heroes were busy saving lives. Bless them.

* Photo by Miguel MEDINA / AFP

NEW COLUMN: Kung Flu Is A Killer, All Right, But So Are The Bureaucrats

Argument, Criminal Injustice, Critique, Government, Healthcare, Political Correctness, The State

NEW COLUMN is “Kung Flu Is A Killer, All Right, But So Are The Bureaucrats.” It is currently on WND.COM and the Unz Review.

Excerpt:

“When, Mr. President, will you deliver instant, standardized, country-wide testing to all the American people,” comes the daily, petulant demand from the malfunctioning media, reiterated by the expert class and an intelligentsia that is not always very intelligent.

The hype over testing will be the next contagion of illogic on matters related to coronavirus.

The testy twits are treating COVID testing as though it were an amulet against the dreaded disease. It isn’t. All testing does is give an individual a snapshot in time of his COVID status. As soon as he drives out of the testing facility, a COVID-free person could become infected.

Unless they engage in prevention, a single testing in time doesn’t in any way give individuals a clean bill of health.

Prevention protects people.

Testing is, however—at this stage of spread—helpful in giving medical researchers a grip on the symptomless-sick phenomenon, as well as an idea of how the disease is disseminated and distributed in the population.

Test and keep testing large enough representative samples, and you’ll get good prevalence data. You’ll probably discover statistically significant differences in COVID infection rates along the rural/metropolitan axis, and the Chinese/no-Chinese axis.

In fact, high-tech meccas are likely a good proxy for the correlation between COVID and the Chinese population. Hubs of high-tech like my state of Washington—the King and Snohomish counties, in particular—have high coronavirus infection rates.

Antibody status is another essential parameter obtained from testing. In addition to identifying the prevalence of disease in the population, a COVID serology assay will divulge who has developed antibodies to the virus, is now immune to it, and can get on with it.

But unless you vigorously protect your health status with barriers to SARS-CoV-2, testing is but a snapshot in time of your disease status.

In the fullness of time, mainstream will arrive at these simple deductions.

Before the testing fetish came the face-mask mythology. Face masks were the first contagion of illogic sprung on a gullible public.

Most “covidiots” insisted that, because the “experts” had said so, donning face masks during an epidemic to reduce droplet transmission was futile. Proven. Q.E.D. Nothing more to show.

But, as far back as March 5, in “Unmasking Statist, Socialist Propaganda About ‘Face Masks,’” this column unpacked the lies and illogic underlying the contention that masks (surgical and N95) were worthless to the public. As follows:

“While the coronavirus is indeed minuscule, smaller than 0.3 microns (likely between 0.1 and 0.2 microns), COVID-19 is delivered in a larger medium of bodily fluids or spray. Certainly, some barrier to the spittle in which the coronavirus is dispersed is better than none.”

“No surprise then, that world health authorities can’t seem to get their story straight on masks. At times, they concede ‘that N-95 face masks are protective.’ More frequently, they scratch the proverbial proboscis (ostensibly a sign of lying) and say ‘No, of course, they’re ineffective.’ In other words, ‘they work for me, the healthcare worker, but not for thee.’”

“For honesty’s sake,” I had exhorted, “the country’s health-care functionaries might appeal to consumers on the ground of dire shortages. But on the basis that no protection is better than some protection? Please! …”

On March 30, our great Tucker Carlson seconded my mask message of March 5, emphasizing the arguments above. Two days prior to Tucker, 23 days after Mercer—a lifetime in a pandemic—mainstream caught up. Wrote the New York Post: “Experts say face masks can help slow COVID-19, despite previous claims.”

A full month after this column’s advice to ignore government enjoinders against face masks and respirators, the government has reversed its position.

On April 3, government grandees finally instructed Americans to cover their faces with anything but surgical and N95 masks. In so doing, the government had stopped flouting logic and had come clean about why it had endangered American lives.

As pinpointed in my unmasking of March 5, the depraved calculus that went into advising Americans initially, and unintuitively, not to shield viral entry points—mouth, eyes and nose—was purely utilitarian. It stemmed from a fear that, by protecting their health, citizens would contribute to scarcity and undermine the health of healthcare workers.

Sold to the public as settled science, the initial mask fallacy-disguised-as-policy was social engineering for the sake of resource conservation. …

…  READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN is “Kung Flu Is A Killer, All Right, But So Are The Bureaucrats.” It is currently on WND.COM and the Unz Review.

* Image is of Hydroxychloroquine Via AP

 

Mainstream Is Catching Up With Mercer On Masks, N95 & Surgical

Argument, Healthcare, Intelligence, Journalism, Media, Pseudoscience

I try to tell people This Column is always ahead of the curve, in war and peace, and that, sometimes, they ignore the analysis offered here at their peril. Alas, most covidiots I know insisted on relying on their “smarts,” refusing to delegate their thinking.

The covidiots insisted that, because the “experts” had said so, masks were futile. But on March 5, this column unpacked the lies and illogic underlying the contention that masks (surgical & N95) were worthless:

While the coronavirus is indeed minuscule, smaller than 0.3 microns (likely between 0.1 and 0.2 microns), COVID-19 is delivered in a larger medium of bodily fluids or spray. Certainly, some barrier to the spittle in which the coronavirus is dispersed is better than none.

No surprise then, that world health authorities can’t seem to get their story straight on masks. At times, they concede “that N-95 face masks are protective.” More frequently, they scratch the proverbial proboscis (ostensibly a sign of lying) and say “No, of course, they’re ineffective.” In other words, “they work for me, the healthcare worker, but not for thee.”

For honesty’s sake, the country’s health-care functionaries might appeal to consumers on the ground of dire shortages. But on the basis that no protection is better than some protection? Please! …

THERE’S MORE. READ on:  “Unmasking Statist, Socialist Propaganda About ‘Face Masks,’” March 5.

What do you know? Mainstream is, 23 days later, catching up. Writes the New York Post: “Experts say face masks can help slow COVID-19, despite previous claims.”

As my mom likes to say, “Good morning, Elijah.”

The expert always knew this to be true, they just misled the Covidiots, who willingly partook in the charade. (Who will hold the liars accountable?)

UPDATED (4/27/020): NEW: Remembering H. L. Mencken

America, Argument, Democracy, English, Journalism, Literature, The Zeitgeist

NEW: The excerpt is from my “Remembering H. L. Mencken,” at Chronicles magazine.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) may no longer seem relevant, but that is not his fault. Mencken was a well-read  bon vivant with a taste for Teutonic philosophy and a fidelity to what he understood as truth. He was also a brilliant satirist, a longtime writer for the Baltimore Sun, and editor
of The American Mercury. His facility with the English idiom  and grasp of intellectual history are unsurpassed. How can an aristocratic individualist like Mencken appeal to an age which makes idols out of equality and “democracy”?

He can’t and shouldn’t.

Henry Louis Mencken was a contrarian polemicist and consummate critic, who wrote prolifically and prodigiously from 1899 until 1948. It is inconceivable that he would appeal to our bumper crops of humorless, dour social justice warriors. He couldn’t possibly resonate with those who are afraid to question received opinion, left and right, who cannot conjugate a verb correctly, use tenses, prepositions, and adjectives grammatically and creatively, or appreciate a clever turn of phrase.

How can Mencken, author of The American Language (1919), be relevant in an America that regards the rules of syntax as passé, politicizes and neuters pronouns, and employs “editors” who think nothing of letting mangled phrases and lumpen jargon spill onto the page like
gravy over a tablecloth? …

… READ ON. “Remembering H. L. Mencken” is at Chronicles magazine, now edited by paleoconservative thinker, my friend Paul Gottfried.

https://tinyurl.com/tlopcon

UPDATE (4/27/020):

Haven’t yet read this, but my guess is that American Conservative didn’t cite our
Chronicles Mag piece, “Remembering H. L. Mencken by ilana mercer.” Just a guess, based on, err, history: