www.byzcath.org Forums General Discussions Town Hall Prudent or paranoid?

Engaging in this nonsense debate goes against my better judgement. You misstate situation when you pit "the cowering fearful" mask-wearing sciencers vs. "the brave" anti-mask justice league - and this shows your bias. Being careful for the safety of others and following precautions is not disbelieving in eternal life or Christ.. however, disregarding other people's health and negligently putting others in danger seems to go against every Christian tenet.



"Coronavirus vs. flu deaths
The first thing to know is that deaths due to COVID-19 and the flu are not counted in the same way. This means comparing the numbers isn’t as straightforward as we would like.

Each death due to influenza in the U.S. does not have to be reported, so there is never a direct count. Each flu season, the CDC estimates deaths from the flu based on in-hospital deaths and death certificate data. They continue to update the data on their website as they collect it. Therefore, numbers from the last two flu seasons are not considered final just yet.

Conversely, each death due to COVID-19 is being recorded. The numbers you see and hear about are not estimates. So you can see how comparing mortality rates between the two isn’t exact at this point.

That said, here’s a quick look at the number of cases and deaths for the last two flu seasons (again, not final) and COVID-19 to date:

2017-2018 Flu 2018-2019 Flu COVID-19
Cases 45 million 35 million 5 million
Deaths 61,000 34,157 180,000+

According to this dashboard, the case fatality ratio of COVID-19 in the US is 3.1%. The case fatality rate for influenza will obviously change year to year. But news reports and the World Health Organization often estimate it at around 0.1%. While the medical community is still learning about mortality from COVID-19, it does appear to be more deadly than the flu." - {https://www.goodrx.com/blog/flu-vs-coronavirus-mortality-and-death-rates-by-year/}

Your source, Mercola, is a quack: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Mercola


Peer-reviewed, well-regarded sources:
https://www.jhsph.edu/covid-19/articles/no-covid-19-is-not-the-flu.html
https://www.livescience.com/new-coronavirus-compare-with-flu.html
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/hea...irus/coronavirus-disease-2019-vs-the-flu
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/season/health-care-professionals.htm
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/coronavirus-myths/art-20485720

I remember back in the 70s going to an automobile junk yard to get a part for my Ford Pinto. I noticed a number of cars that had very noticeable "spider web" cracks over the driver's side portion of the windshield. I asked the attendant, "why?" He told me those were from the drivers who were not wearing seat belts. They either died or got serious head injuries. It gave me the assurance I needed to do the right thing and always buckle up. The folks in my neighboring state of New Hampshire, long known as the "Live Free or Dieers" resisted this simple restriction on their personal freedom for a number of years. Eventually, they, too, noticed the "spider web" cracks. Is there a parallel to the masks we are being asked to wear? Of course people die in automobiles in other ways, but the wearing of seat belts has prevented a whole lot of head injuries and even deaths that would have occurred from less deadly accidents. As an old professor used to say to us: "A word to the wise is sufficient".

Christ is in our midst!!

Some people think and then take the risk in an act of defiance of the risk. Some people don't think. Some people think and are able to take the advice of others.

What did Jesus say when the Devil told him to jump off the parapet of the Temple? Something similar to don't tempt the Lord God. For me, 'nuff said.

Bob

Thank you. I shall read the linked articles. Interestingly enough, in regards to the first one from Johns Hopkins, I have read an article by a Johns Hopkins doctor who states that the death rate has remained the same.

https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/j...hows-covid-hasnt-increased-us-death-rate

As for Dr. Mercola, I am surprised at the site you posted. I would like to do some due diligence in this regard to see if these charges are true or bogus. There is a very strong lobby in the United States against holistic medicine of any kind, mainly because it ruins the profits of the big drug companies. Even if he is a shady character, there are other doctors who are also making similar statements regarding the overreaction to this disease.

Here's the biggest problem I see. Never before in the history of diseases have we locked up the healthy and enacted punitive measures against them. Our economy has been wrecked (I have suffered personal loss from the lockdowns), people have been thrown out of work and had their businesses destroyed. Churches were closed while WalMart was given the green light to do business as usual (You don't find that just a tad strange?). The normal methology of treating an illness is to quarantine the sick, not the healthy. If nothing else, this has been a wrong reaction. Here in Fairfax County, children are failing their in-home studies at a much higher rate than ever before. This is simply unwarranted and harmful.

You might ponder these words from Rev. William Bentley's Diary: August 2, 1805

“While Boston is making every provision against the fever, in Salem the Health Committee has as yet given no embarrassment to Commerce. The belief of the importation of disease does not readily prevail against the interests & among men who suffer much abroad by quarantine.” They spoke and wrote a bit differently back then, but I think you might get the gist of what the erudite pastor is saying.

No one is locking up the healthy, nor are punitive measures being enacted. Restrictive measures, like seat belts, stop signs and a host of other restraints including face masks are not punitive, but are sensible ways of keeping people from killing one another.

FYI to all here:

I just checked the Virginia State Department of Health website. It lists 251,173 cases, with 30,663 of those being probable (what the heck is that?). There have been 15,255 hospitalizations and 4,197 deaths. That death rate for the whole year translates to .015%.

Pandemic? I don't think so! Sounds more like a common disease which, like so many other diseases, will kill a certain percentage of the population. In this case, thankfully that percentage is very small, however tragic it is for those who have lost loved ones. No one is denying the pain of losing a loved one, but the reaction to all this, as I stated earlier, has been more destructive than the disease itself.

So in Virginia, just to take my state, driving people out of business, wrecking the economy, putting people out of work, and causing a spike in suicides and alcohol/drug abuse is totally warranted for a disease which this year has killed .015% of those who became infected?

One other thing that is vexing is the utter silence on cures that have worked. Doctors have reported extremely high success rates treating people with hydroxycloroquine and zinc, with inhaled cortical steroids, and with inhaled medical grade hydrogen peroxide. Why is the media so silent about this? I mean, they haven't even looked in that general direction.

Who has the expertise? Who is putting out the full, unbiased information? There are a lot of meticulous, well-documented data available but what does it mean?

I have, I believe, a good sense of and direct experience with scientific reporting, critiquing, and zeroing in on and properly answering the right question, the one that identifies the problem. I'm not seeing it coming through on this Covid-19 issue.

For example, I delved into this link and the clumsy reporting and retraction and deficient verifications and appraisals that it generated:


I have a lot of problems with the overall narrative and could spend a lot of time trying to decipher and deconvolute. I think the original conference presenter in the link has been misrepresented but she has not, it seems, responded to the criticism. The architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is credited with two dicta: 1. Less is more; 2. God is in the details. With those principles as a guide, regarding Covid-19, the Art of Science, the analyzing of the data and reporting and interpreting of results, has performed poorly.

4,197 deaths/251,173 cases = 0.0167 => 1.7% deaths/cases. This is from year-to-date (YTD) data, but I didn't see that detail given on the website The Virginia Department of Health [vdh.virginia.gov]. It is not, however, a death rate for the whole year or YTD etc. anymore than for a whole month for instance: YTD ~ 11 months; 4,197 deaths/ 11 months = 382 deaths/month; 251,173 cases / 11 months = 22,834 cases/month; (382 deaths/month) / (22,834 cases/month) = 0.0167 deaths/cases, as before. So this data ratio tells us about the severity of the disease, i.e. 1.7 deaths / 100 cases that is for VA, of 100 people who get Covid-19, 2 will die. For the US that ratio is 1.9% deaths/cases so VA is doing a bit better than US overall.

You know the sad part about all this? There is so much information, so much which is not 100% accurate, and so many people who are simply trying to have victory for their point of view, that people like me become quite cynical.

Now what am I supposed to believe in all this? Who am I supposed to believe?

The people getting hurt by all this are not those with money and perhaps secret access to the truth. It's the little guy.

Right, that is one of my points. Scientists collect data and analyze it, distill it and present it as their profession. The methodology is not perfect, there are accepted means of correction, but it gets legitimate results when there are checks and balances operating. The dots need to be connected literally: what is the raw data, how is it analyzed, find the numbers, the statistic, that shows the impact of Covid-19 put it on a graph (connect the dots) that does not misrepresent the magnitude and that clearly shows what is happening and why that requires the appropriate government response.