It’s Over

I’m declaring that the COVID-19 pandemic is over. While I have no authority to make such a declaration for the world, I can use common sense and make decisions for myself. And in this case they do seem to align with reality.

Biden declared the pandemic over, and he has titular authority. But those surrounding him walked that back, saying no, not really over over, still worth worrying about and therefore worth submitting to orders from the elites.

For some time I've thought I would write one last post on the subject. And my plan was to use the data I collect daily, chart it, and compare the various years or segments of years, and thereafter give myself permission to stop the habit of daily trips to the data sites. However, a month or two ago, the sources that had been giving daily data changed to weekly, or what seems random but is something like every 3-5 days. Others are daily, but since they aggregate from less frequent sources, they make daily charting less accurate. So I may or may not ever get to that comparison chart. But I can show a few things. Here are a couple of charts (not made by me):

charts from here on December 14, 2022

These are low resolution, but you can see the progression of the pandemic. We had a sizable bump in cases in January 2021 (coinciding, coincidentally, with the rollout of vaccines), and then another bump late summer, followed by a huge bump in January 2022. January 2021 was the Delta variant mainly. January 2022 was Omicron—a much milder strain, albeit perhaps even more contagious. After that January spike, there was a steep drop-off in cases, which continues to trickle on to pretty much background noise.

Parallel are the deaths due to COVID-19. We had the initial stage around April 2020, a bump in late summer, a large spike in January 2021, then a couple of lesser rises in fall 2021 to January 2022. January 2022 was a much lower spike than the previous year, despite a much higher spike in cases—again, showing the Omicron variant was less deadly. After January 2022 deaths dropped precipitously, and they remain low. This is likely due to the ubiquitous Omicron variant and its subvariants, which are more like a bad cold than the scary thing we were told we were facing in early-to-mid 2020.

Whether you’re measuring cases or deaths, there’s not much news there anymore. With the fear of sudden death—or suddenly killing granny—some people are able to approach the subject more rationally, at last. But not very rationally.

Pandemic Amnesty

A few weeks ago there was a piece that got some attention, “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty,” by Emily Oster for The Atlantic, October 31, 2022.  It attempts to be a thoughtful piece, talking through some of the things we did in the beginning out of fear, or lack of knowledge; we just didn’t know better. I’ve been thinking deeply about the casual dismissal for weeks now. And this week Joshua Philipp on Crossroads interviewed Dr. Aaron Kheriaty about calls for amnesty related to the pandemic (in two parts, here and here). Dr. Kheriaty considers the suggestion in the Atlantic piece with a lot more depth, and with a lot more background about medical ethics, which is his specialty.

So, instead of writing “one last piece,” with lots of charts (maybe I’ll still do that someday), I really want to look at how/whether we can go forward with forgiveness.

Oster seems to think that being right or wrong about things related to the pandemic was mainly just a matter of luck. But she lists things that we either did know, could have known if we were paying attention (I did), or things we shouldn’t have done regardless of what we knew.

She talks about how she and her family, back around April 2020, hiked with homemade cloth masks on, alerting each other to oncoming people on the trail, so they could avoid them—when we soon knew that the disease wasn’t spreading by casual passing outdoors. And that those cloth masks didn’t work anyway. (Nor did any other masks work on viruses, which were much smaller than the particles filtered out.) How silly that seems now that we know better.

OK. I wore a mask—but never out of fear; only out of compliance to law or to request from church or stores, etc., where they were required to alleviate other people’s fears or to comply with imposed regulations in order to not get shut down. In the past more than a year, the only place I have worn a mask is in a doctor’s office that still requires masks (of any sort, regardless of efficacy), even though they should know better.

Oster tries to make it look like—well, there were misunderstandings on both sides. She says,

Remember when the public-health community had to spend a lot of time and resources urging Americans not to inject themselves with bleach? That was bad. Misinformation was, and remains, a huge problem. But most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society.

I remember when people intending to mislead tried to claim there were people recommending injecting bleach—a falsehood and wild misrepresentation of some of the work that was being done in reality. I remember that huge amounts of actual truth were being labeled as misinformation. I wrote this about the accusation in April 2020 when it happened: 

There was nothing in what President Trump said that wasn’t related to UV rays as a disinfectant. Take a look at the transcript. [I transcribed the President in the footnote.] If you heard “disinfectant” and thought only of Lysol and Clorox, and “inject” and thought only of a needle—not that light the dentist “injects” into your mouth to cure the material used in your filling, or not the scope the gastroenterologist “injects” to view your intestines during a colonoscopy—that is your failure to see things in more than one limited way.

Was misinformation a huge problem, and is it still? It was, but only because the elites were purposefully misinforming us, and then censoring us when we countered with the truth. And yes, that is still a problem, but the more truth that gets out, the more people are realizing what got censored was the truth all along.

I remember the silencing of doctors who were having success with various treatments. I remember these things because they haven’t ended yet. Some of the most respected and successful doctors, giving real data, using real science, are even now being silenced and discredited—and their credentials being stripped from them—not because they’re saying wildly incorrect and dangerous things, but because they do not align with the worldwide cabal’s stated narrative. I’m talking about doctors like Peter McCullough, Robert Malone, Pierre Kory, and a number of others.

And if Oster is characterizing things like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as akin to “injecting themselves with bleach,” or possibly “eating horse paste,” then that is simply another lie. If we’re supposed to agree that both sides were wrong on some things, that won’t fly; all the censoring was of truth that we knew and were not allowed to say.

And therefore we are not ready for amnesty.

Forgiveness

Forgiveness is an interesting and complex abstract idea. There is a somewhat messy mix of “I want to get along,” “I want to see justice done,” “I want to be a good person, but I’m still feeling injured,” and more. Oster’s piece sort of says, let’s just put all that behind us and move on; after all, we were all equally wrong about some things. Except—we weren’t equally wrong. Beyond the very early time when I sanitized my groceries before putting them away in my house—a practice I imposed on no one else—I was seeking truth and finding more and more of it, mostly at odds with the Fauci lies.

Related to this pandemic there are a few people I can agree to amnesty with, people who were sincere, frightened, and misinformed, but also never militant against those who didn’t see things the same way they did. They might have worried about non-mask-wearers or non-vaccine-getters, but they wouldn’t have ostracized us or condemned us.

But there were others, like those who shouted at friends of mine who were walking together, husband, wife, and son, because they weren’t socially distancing—outside, only among people who lived together in the same house. The shouters don’t deserve amnesty; they need to change their ways and prove they can be trusted in society again.

Then there’s the next level up, the silencers, the ones who set and enforced rules against disagreement. Censorship is not an accident of temporary misunderstanding; it is a constitutional-level crime. Have amends been made? Have they even stopped doing it yet?

Nuremberg image, screenshot from here

There are those who imposed vaccine mandates—of an untested experimental drug—on people, against the very principles of the Nuremberg Code, principles we imposed on ourselves to keep atrocities such as happened during WWII from ever happening again. The ones who broke their contracts with hospital employees, college students, and travelers as a coercion to take such medical interventions—have they made up the losses in pay and opportunities to those who wouldn’t give in to their coercion? A few are finally considering it. But how do you explain refusing a kidney transplant to a child because she is unvaccinated—when she wasn’t at serious risk from the illness but did have elevated risk from the vaccines? Such decisions are evil. This is ongoing, so clearly there’s no making amends there yet. Have such power wielders apologized and compensated those who took the experimental vaccines under duress and who may have suffered injury or death as a result?

There are those who set the policies in motion. There are those who encouraged the creation of the virus, and then covered up its origins, lied about them. There are those who took the safe and effective (and cheap) drugs off the market, or took away doctors’ abilities to prescribe them—with the full knowledge that they would work, and that depriving people of them would cause suffering and death. (I wrote about this here.) 

We could speculate that such people—Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, the CCP, the WEF, the WHO, the CDC—that they knew the catastrophic death and injury they would cause and were fine with that, for whatever ulterior motive: greed, Malthusian death plots, power mongering. Is it even possible in this life for such people to make amends? For millions of deaths? For many more millions of injuries from the illness and/or from the so-called vaccines? For trillions of dollars in economic loss? For the loss of freedom and opportunity to heretofore free societies?

You can’t wave off such things with a blanket call for pandemic amnesty. We need compensation. We need to be made whole. And we need absolute rock-hard guarantees that such things will never happen again. We can only approach getting such guarantees if we hold accountable the wrongdoers in this pandemic.

Forgiveness is a complex thing. According to Dr. Stephen Marmer you might look at it in three levels. The first is exoneration: this is acting as if the wrong never happened. You exonerate wrongdoers who are incapable of knowing they were in the wrong, such as young children, or people who express their sincere sorrow, regret the hurt they caused, do all they can to make amends, and go forward with every effort not to cause that hurt again. For such people, you continue the relationship as though the wrong never happened.

According to Dr. Stephen Marmer, there are 3 types of forgiveness:
exoneration, forbearance, and release. Screenshot from here.

What about people who don’t sincerely apologize, or maybe don’t even recognize the hurt they’ve caused? Depending on the severity of the hurt and the value you place on the relationship, you might use what Dr. Marmer refers to as forbearance. This is for that in-law at Thanksgiving dinner who always says something offensive. Do you put up with it, because having the other relatives together is important enough? It’s up to you.

But what about for severe wrongdoing, abuse, harm? Under these circumstances, it might not be possible for a person to make amends. Deaths may have happened. Financial losses beyond what can be paid back might have happened. Irreparable harm may have been done. What then?

We’re supposed to forgive all—according to scriptures: Matthew 18:21-22; Luke 6:37; Ephesians 4:32; Doctrine & Covenants 64:10.

What does forgiveness really mean? Do we let murderers walk the streets to kill again, just so we can virtue signal that we are the forgiving type? No, we must not do that.

What we can do is get out of the revenge business. We can leave getting justice to the law. We can, as Dr. Marmer says, release. This may include never interacting with the person again, in some cases. It may look very different from exoneration. It still removes the poison of vengeance from you personally.

You might see this level of forgiveness in a messy divorce, in which the spouse and/or children were abused. You separate as cleanly and completely as possible. Never tolerate any more abuse. End contact if possible. The forgiveness shows in the lessening need to talk about the wrongdoings of the offender, because you have released the vengeance, so you can go forward with your life, free of both the abuser and the poison of ongoing bitterness and anger about it.

In the case of a murderer, we let the law (assuming the law is just, and not corrupt) take care of getting the perpetrator to “pay his debt to society.” You can’t bring back a dead person, but you can take the perpetrator’s freedom away (or in some capital murder cases, his life), putting him in a place where he can do no more harm to society and is paying a cost for the crime.

In the case of the mass murderers involved in this pandemic, we may or may not ever see justice come in this life. Still, we can release the vengeance for God to take care of. It does not delight me to picture the outcomes that are likely to come to such perpetrators. But I know God is both just and merciful—knowing mercy cannot rob justice. So any mercy granted must entail the character changes and making amends—the repentance—that God requires.

As for us, in whatever ways are in our powers, we must hold such people accountable, and we must never trust them in a position of power over us. No exoneration. No forbearance. Release, yes, including excising them from our lives.

But forgive and forget? For the sake of respect for all those lives lost that cry from the dust, and for the sake of those who have suffered and continue to suffer because of the massive sins involved in this pandemic—we must not forget. As we said after WWII, we must never forget. And this time we had better mean it.

Charts and Other Info

Today, once again, is about data and questions related to this virus that has messed up our lives for the past two years.

There’s a chart worth looking at:

from Alex Berenson's Substack

It shows data from Great Britain during the last week of December and first week of January. I got this in a regular email from libertarian Tom Woods, who has been providing a lot of COVID-19 data and commentary throughout the pandemic. The email is passing along info from Alex Berenson’s Substack. The Berenson post included similar charts from Scotland, Israel, and Denmark, all showing age makes more of a difference than vaccination status. And then Berenson comments,

Remember, these failures cannot be blamed on vaccine skepticism, or Tucker Carlson, or me. These countries are as close to fully vaccinated as it is possible to be.

If you think this is what you were promised a year ago—or six months ago, or even a month ago—I don’t know what to tell you. But the answer cannot be to do MORE of what has not worked.

He's right. But as I look at the Britain chart, I still have questions. It compares the raw numbers of unvaccinated to the vaccinated. But it doesn’t compare populations. You would need to know how many in the total population are vaccinated or unvaccinated at those various levels. Then you could do a per population comparison, for example per 10,000 or per million or whatever is appropriate. There are probably other studies that do that.

Even better, but I don’t know how to get this, would be data on how well the different cohorts do when exposed to the virus. You can’t really tell how effective a vaccine is if the vaccinated person isn’t exposed to the virus. Since you can’t purposely expose people, that study isn’t possible. So you have to extrapolate from general populations and assume there’s some sort of random or generalized exposure.

And, of course, the unvaccinated bucket contains both those who have gotten and recovered from the disease and those who haven’t contracted it yet. There’s an enormous difference between those two cohorts. Add in, as Dr. Mobeen Syed talked about January 27, there’s data showing that people in households with sick Covid patients but who do not also contract the disease—so they have definitely been exposed but don’t get sick—also show that they have antibodies. From some previous illness? From a highly tuned immune system that stopped the virus in its tracks before it could cause illness? More study needed. But it’s interesting. It’s not different from what we see in a great many other illnesses, where some people in the family get sick, but some resist illness.

There may always be more to learn. But it does look like we’re nearing the end of this pandemic. There are still some deaths happening, although more of a plateau than a rise. There are still some hospitalizations. But only a small fraction need oxygen or ventilators, and time in hospital is down from weeks to 3 to 5 days.

The number I don’t have is hospitalizations as a percentage of cases. Even during Delta, the number was about 1 in 100, of which somewhere above 90% recovered—while media had stirred the public to believe that 50% of cases went to the hospital and 50% or so of those died.

But now, the case numbers have skyrocketed. I look at my zip code to get a grasp on numbers, gathering numbers daily from the Harris County website. Through most of the pandemic, we’ve had active cases mostly below 100. Now we’re more than 10 times that number. Yet we have had no additional deaths since early December. The total number—through the entire pandemic—is between 36 and 38. We hit 36 on November 30; 37 on December 7; 38 on December 10. That was a pretty rapid rise, since we’d been averaging a bit over 19 days between additional deaths. But this was Delta, before Omicron took over.

But wait! We went back down to 37 on December 16, and down to 36 on December 17, then back up to 38 on December 18, but back down to 36 on December 24—Merry Christmas to whichever families got their loved ones back. I’ve been calling these resurrections. We went as low as 35 again on December 27, but have toggled mostly between 36, 37, and 38 most days since. Yesterday and today we are at 37. I don’t know the meaning of these “resurrections.” I’m assuming someone inputs data wrong, although I can’t explain why they would change it downward from an existing number. It may be that a death attributed to COVID-19 was later found to be due to some other cause. Whatever the reason, we essentially have not had a death due to COVID-19 in this zip code for over a month and a half. Back when we first got to 37 deaths, we had 70 active cases. Now, we topped out at just over 1200 active cases last weekend, and maybe this week we’re trending back down for good.

The comparison is, 70 active cases, one death per 20 days, to 1100 active cases, no deaths in 45 days.

I also look at my son’s county, in rural central Texas (getting data daily from the state) which has a population in the range of imaginable, like my zip code. They had a surge in deaths in a late summer wave. In November they had a total of 7 deaths. In December, just 1, going 35 days until 2 more in January. None the past two weeks. Their cases, meanwhile, have skyrocketed as we see all over.

In other words, unlike in past waves, deaths remain low, as if we are past a wave, even though our case rates are the highest ever. And, we should add, case rates are likely undercounted, since only official tests count, and for people who have only minor symptoms, they’re likely to stay home a few days until they feel better and not bother getting a test that would tell them to stay home a few days until they feel better. Or maybe they've done an at-home test that they do not report.

I’m on day 4 of something that feels like a bad cold; my husband had it for the five days before I came down with it. Neither of us had fever. I had a sore throat the first day. The rest has been just sinus congestion and severe fatigue. I haven’t been able to find at-home tests in stores (don't want to contact the government to send me any), and haven't wanted to go out and get a test when what I’m doing is getting me through this just fine. But, maybe it would be good to know if this is just a cold or Omicron.

The silver lining for all the people getting the Omicron variant this month is, getting the virus now gives future immunity. Even if there’s another wave to come, of an even more transmissible variant, this natural immunity holds up. And for those who miraculously stayed well through until the next strain, the severity of a future strain is going to be no worse than now, and possibly even weaker. And it will only progress through the population that doesn’t have it now, a population that's getting harder to find.

I've been watching these charts turn blue lately. The comparison is to the week before in that area. You can get actual numbers by clicking on the interactive maps on the site. If an area has been blue for a very long time, like South Africa, and now it's up a bit, that's a comparison to that place 7 days earlier, already low, so probably still low and not reason for alarm. There's another level that goes down to the county level, which is also fun to look at. Again, these are case counts, saying nothing about severity of illness, just whether it is spreading (orange) or not (blue).

New cases compared to 7 days prior, showing the trend
for the past three days for the US.
data gathered daily from here

New cases compared to 7 days prior, showing the trend
for the past three days for countries worldwide.
data gathered daily from here

Dr. John Campbell has been giving a lot of good news, from the data, this past week. On January 27, he pointed out that concerns about high case rates or even hospitalizations are temporary:

I don’t think it will mean that more people will die overall. But it means that the deaths could come in a shorter period of time, because the infection is going through the population in a shorter period of time.

A week earlier, January 20, Dr. Campbell presented interesting data on deaths from COVID-19 with no other underlying causes. That was eye opening. 

He refers to a release of data in the UK, following a FOIA request, which he assumes will translate to similar news in the US, Canada, and other similar countries.  The data was provided about a month ago but strangely was not mentioned in mainstream media, and he only just came across it. The data is cumulative, covering 2020 through the first three quarters of 2021, ending September 30, 2021. They’re looking at deaths listing COVID-19 and no other cause on the death certificate.

Total deaths from COVID-19 with no other underlying causes.: 17, 371

Age 0-64: 3,774

Age 65+: 13,597

During this time, the average age of these COVID deaths in 2021 for all of UK: 82.5 years.  This means a lot of people were over 82.5 in order to get that average. For comparison, the average life expectancy in the UK from 2018 to 2020 (which includes the first year of the pandemic):

Males: 79.0 years

Females: 82.9 years

Averaged out for whole country, there’s a drop in life expectancy of 7 weeks for men and an increase of 0.5 weeks for women—meaning all the COVID deaths have only reduced men’s life expectancy by a few weeks, and women’s life expectancy through the COVID-19 pandemic has actually increased by 3-4 days.

Dr. Campbell did this simple math, dividing the total number of deaths WITH COVID-19—137,133—by the number of deaths FROM COVID-19—17,371—and you get that there are 7.9 times more deaths WITH than FROM the virus.

For anyone well under 82.5 years old without comorbidities, the likelihood of death caused by COVID-19 was remarkably low—through September 2021. Since then, the Delta variant has been taken over by the Omicron variant, and likelihood of death has further dropped dramatically.

The data we’re getting can be summed up as:

·       Natural immunity is much stronger than vaccination.

·       The surge in cases with the Omicron variant (and sub-variants) will mean a huge portion of the population will have natural immunity going forward.

·       Vaccination may be helpful for certain groups, such as the elderly and those with comorbidities, for whom the virus is most dangerous; to all others, the vaccines and boosters provide little protection from contracting the virus or spreading the virus, and only marginal help in less virulent cases.

·       Following each additional booster, the amount of time before antibodies wain and a new booster is needed drops approximately in half. (This is mentioned in a Dr. Mobeen video.)

·       Lockdowns, masks, mandates, and other attempts at coercing the public have not contributed to protection from COVID-19 and have contributed to deaths and lower health by other causes than COVID-19.

There’s more news daily. Most of it indicates better days ahead, and what ought to be regret for the utter failure of national health advisories responsible for doing everything wrong these past two years, including squelching dissent and even possibilities for treatments, which have been known since the early months of 2020.

Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein discussed how to go forward, after knowing how people have behaved the past two years. Their advice seems to be, if someone recognizes their wrongness and apologizes—or at least admits their wrongness—then that is the right direction going forward, and we can associate with them. If they refuse even now to recognize they were wrong, or perhaps they claim against all evidence that they’d been on the side of truth all along, then we will know them for what they are and probably continue to distrust them. This has been significant for them. They were fired from their teaching positions and had their lives disrupted and their reputations sullied. For me, I’m just an onlooker, seeking the truth the whole time, but not materially affected.

This whole episode in world history has been both baffling and disturbing. May the effort to tyrannize people through fearmongering over this illness end abruptly and soon. And may everyone be wiser in the future.

 

More Resources:

Dr. John Campbell and Dr. Mobeen Syed put out videos just about every day going over the latest data and latest news. I suggest following them. Both are pretty good at explaining the data clearly, and also give links to the data sources for you to search out yourself. Dr. Peter McCullough goes on various podcasts and is always worth listening to. Besides those linked above, here are a few more sources worth checking out:

·       Dr. Peter McCullough on Meet Me for Coffee podcast, January 9, 2022.  Dr. McCullough gives a list of ways to treat yourself at home when you can’t get hold of the helpful medications (HCQ or Ivermectin).

·       “FDA Approval Never Happened for the Vaccines? Peter McCullough” on Anthony Pompliano podcast, January 12, 2022.

·       “Walmart in Quebec is BANNING Unvaccinated from Entering! Viva Vlawg on the Street” Viva Frei law vlog, January 25, 2022. 

·       “Who constructed the COVID narrative? (Chris Martenson & Bret Weinstein)” DarkHorse podcast clips, January 28, 2022. This is an interesting conversation about the topsy turvy situation we’re in.

·       The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., © 2021, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 

·       “Man removed from heart transplant list for being unvaccinated gets emergency pump” Yaron Steinbuch for the New York Post, January 27, 2022.