CORONAMANIA AND DEFICITS OF PATTERN RECOGNITION

I’ve played much pick-up basketball, often with strangers. In the first three minutes of any game, one readily sees the ability levels and tendencies of the other players. As a game continues for twenty more minutes, one’s initial impressions generally hold.

In countless other realms, a small sample is equally revealing. When you meet someone new, you typically know in the first five minutes whether you’d like to spend more time with that person. Or not.

You know after the first five minutes if a given movie will hold your interest or, if a comedy, will make you laugh.

People don’t take a bite of some unfamiliar food, hate it, and expect the second bite to be delicious.

Pollsters and market researchers gauge wider public sentiment by sampling very small groups.

And so on. Pattern recognition is an essential life skill. If you can’t quickly recognize patterns, life will pass you by and kick you in the backside as it does.

When I heard in March, 2020 news that hundreds of Italians and Spaniards had reportedly died with this respiratory virus, I wasn’t alarmed. I knew that these countries had aging populations totaling over 100 million people and that old people often died with respiratory viruses. The European data didn’t indicate that everyone was at risk. To the contrary, those data were unsurprising and reassuring: as usual, this latest respiratory virus clearly didn’t threaten most people.

In general, American culture has taken to a ridiculous extreme the insincere, PC notion that all people are equal. Physically, we simply are not. Our bodies differ in clearly observable ways, and all of our bodies change considerably over the courses of our lives. You know this, I know this and so do Covid bureaucrats like Fauci, Birx, Collins and Walensky. Yet, during Coronamania, many, including the bureaucrats, Gates, Biden, many governors and mayors, green-haired college students and other Democrats have pretended that they didn’t know.

I, and many others, knew and said, since mid-March, 2020, that it was lunacy to treat everyone the same by locking down a society, including the healthy and non-old. In a 27-month cavalcade of lies, the notion that all were at risk has been the most fundamental and consequential untruth; it put the Scam in Scamdemic. This Big Lie has pervaded every aspect of Covid policy. “Educators” kept those under 25—who were at no risk—out of colleges and schools. They, and other officials, tried to force all to “vaxx,” mask and test, even though they knew the healthy under 65 were at microscopic risk.

Legions were conned. They demanded that 30 year-olds who didn’t inject should lose their jobs. One still sees many people of all ages masked, even outdoors, and inside cars. The real Pandemic is mental illness.

The Corona charade of universal peril had nothing to do with reasonable caution. It simply laid bare Democrats’ unprincipled quest for power. These latter-day Captain Ahabs’ desire to slay the white whale Trump and to control society was packaged with fake outrage over some small fraction of old and/or very baseline unhealthy people dying with, not from, some virus. (BTW, I didn’t vote for Trump in 2016; I didn’t see then the depths to which Democrats would descend to exercise dominion and enrich themselves and their cronies. I didn’t vote for Hillary, either; I figured that if I was going to vote for a self-aggrandizing Communist, at least I should vote for someone who was honest about it). Locking down was reckless, disingenuous Democrat opportunism. Germophobic Trump gave bureaucrats the mic and let them govern.

Forget the 27-month barrage of stats and graphs and the case and TV death tickers; the Coronamania books have been cooked in so many ways that they have always had limited heuristic value. The core, March, 2020 pattern—a small fraction of old and/or very sick people dying with Covid—held during April, 2020 and May, 2020, and has continued ever since. Throughout, I’ve corroborated this trend by seeing that the virus killed none of the many people I know—and sickened very few of them—and by asking the people I know about the outcomes of people they know, and hearing their, similar anecdotal data. If you were very old and/or fundamentally unwell, you were at some tiny absolute Covid risk. The rest of us faced functionally no risk, and should have been left alone. The infected would have become various degrees of sick, but survived. Herd immunity would have developed naturally and quickly.

In civil litigation, the burden of proof is properly placed on the party seeking to change the status quo. Those who wanted to induce an unprecedented social and economic coma should have been required to prove that the virus’s health risks justified society-wide lockdowns, school closures, mask mandates and mass testing. Put to their proofs, the lockdowners, maskers and 40 cycle PCR testers would plainly have been unable to justify universal interventions, given the virus’s clear demographic risk profile. But there was no deliberation or due process, only hype and panic.

The “vaxxes” have also failed miserably, despite all of the hucksterism, hectoring, statistical chicanery, sloganeering, tropes and mandates trying to force everyone—including the vast majority at no risk—to jab. As time passes, the shots’ negative effects will continue to expand across all demographics, even as the media and government continue to suppress data about vaxx failure and injuries and, incredibly, to promote the shots. The jabs have killed, injured and placed many at risk who would have been fine unjabbed.

For 27 months, government officials and the media knowingly, exasperatingly exploited the plainly false premise that a Coronavirus threatened everyone. Those who pushed the lockdowns—including school closures—and mass masking, testing and vaxx mandates played the fear card, and they dealt it from the bottom of the deck.