“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.” – C. S. Lewis
“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-front for the urge to rule it.” – H.L. Mencken
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins,all of them imaginary.” – H.L. Mencken
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When the 24-hour mainstream media ‘news’ cycle is intentionally geared to keep you fixated through mechanisms of fear, hysteria and alarm it is perhaps beneficial to be grounded, often, by good old fashioned hard data.
CDC and Stanford University data demonstrating the actual risk of death by Covid may be one way to help defend against the merciless attack on reason, sanity and calm by Covid-19 power-hungry politicians and compliant mainstream media.
Perspective: Look Up Your Risk of Dying of COVID-19
Get some perspective folks. Our good friend Phil Kerpen has updated the COVID-19 mortality tables by age – specific age actually! So look up your own risk between you and your peers below.
First, find your age on the chart on column #1.
Second column: how many people your age have died of COVID-19 since January 2020
Third column: the number of people in the U.S. who are that age.
Fourth column: the % of the people that age who have died of COVID.
If you’re 49 there have been 3,965 49-yr-olds who have died of COVID-19. There are over 4.3 million 49-yr-olds olds – which means that 0.085% of 49 year olds have died of COVID. As I always note, if you are over the age of 65 strongly consider getting vaccinated as there is acute risk to you. Under the age of 45 there is a near zero statistical risk of mortality. Otherwise – your choice but stay informed!
You might also choose to look up how many people your age have died of ANYTHING since January 2020 and how that gives you perspective on COVID-19 deaths.
Lastly, consider the types of deaths which occur at these ratios. We’ve mapped these to mortality risks provided by insurance companies for comparison.
And of course we provide some perspective on age comparisons. The median age of death of a COVID-19 victim is about 80 years old. The risk tables show that for every 20 years below 80 your risk decreases by 10x. So if you are 60 your risk is 10x lower than that of an 80 year old. If you are 40 your risk is 100x lower and if you are 20 your risk is 1000x (ONE THOUSAND!) times lower than an 80 year old.
“Acute food shortages were feared last night after high gas prices forced most of Britain’s commercial production of carbon dioxide to shut down.
The closure of two fertiliser plants in northern England and others in Europe has left the food and drink industry facing a shortage of carbon dioxide, which is a byproduct of fertiliser manufacturing. The gas is critical to the production and transport of a range of products, from meat to bread, beer and fizzy drinks.”
The twisted irony of climate wokeism, on full display; a shortage of life-sustaining CO2 caused by extremist climate policies that aim to ‘eliminate’ life-sustaining CO2 in the form of cheap, reliable energy!
Not to mention the hard reality of the swift, tangible and disastrous effects to society of constantly ‘bending the knee’ to the anti-human climate lobby, on full display.
The UK shut down cheap coal, refused to drill for its own gas, and failed to replace its old nuclear power stations then, when gas suddenly becomes expensive, is caught with its proverbial trousers down. So much for ‘world leading’ climate policies.
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As energy prices in Europe go through the roof, factories are beginning to shut down and food is disappearing from the shelves, say The Times & The GWPF.
Welcome to green Britain, offering a foretaste of what life will be like under Net Zero conditions – poorer, colder, hungrier – unless Government changes course.
Acute food shortages were feared last night after high gas prices forced most of Britain’s commercial production of carbon dioxide to shut down.
Emergency talks were being held between government officials and food producers, retailers and the energy industry with warnings of a “black swan event”, an extremely rare blow with unpredictable…
The images above come from MASIE showing ice extents on day 260, the lowest daily extent on average the last 14 years. Note that 2012 was the lowest in this period and 2021 is now the highest, surpassing 2014. The abundance of ice this year contrasts with both 2007 and 2020. Clearly, the location of remaining ice in September varies greatly from year to year. The marginal seas are open water, including the Pacific basins, Canadian Bays (Hudson and Baffin), and the Atlantic basins for the most part. As discussed later on, other regions retain considerable ice at the annual minimum, with differences year to year.
The annual competition between ice and water in the Arctic ocean is now at the maximum for water, which typically occurs mid September. After that, diminishing energy from the slowly setting sun allows oceanic cooling causing ice to regenerate. Those interested in the dynamics…
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.” – C. S. Lewis
“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-front for the urge to rule it.” – H.L. Mencken
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Covid-19, targets a very specific sub-set of the population. In fact, 99.9% of anyone under the age of 90, without severe underlying health conditions, survives.
An overdue article out of the hard-left, fear-porn-loving Atlantic, bells-the-cat on another high level hoax that came out of the ‘pandemic’, in order for you to submit and comply — “hospitalisations.”
Why is The Atlantic publishing this? Because they need to show history (what will be left of it) that they knew, ‘before anyone’, that Covid-19 was used, maliciously, by the MainstreamMedia, inept politicians and useful idiots, as a tool of fear and panic to wrought (“Build Back Better”) ‘change’.
Change in their own image. Not in yours, or, by yours.
Our Most Reliable Pandemic Number Is Losing Meaning
A new study suggests that almost half of those hospitalized with COVID-19 have mild or asymptomatic cases.By David Zweig
At least 12,000 Americans have already died from COVID-19 this month, as the country inches through its latest surge in cases. But another worrying statistic is often cited to depict the dangers of this moment: The number of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in the United States right now is as high as it has been since the beginning of February. It’s even worse in certain places: Some states, including Arkansas and Oregon, recently saw their COVID hospitalizations rise to higher levels than at any prior stage of the pandemic. But how much do those latter figures really tell us?
From the start, COVID hospitalizations have served as a vital metric for tracking the risks posed by the disease. Last winter, this magazine described it as “the most reliable pandemic number,” while Vox quoted the cardiologist Eric Topol as saying that it’s “the best indicator of where we are.” On the one hand, death counts offer finality, but they’re a lagging signal and don’t account for people who suffered from significant illness but survived. Case counts, on the other hand, depend on which and how many people happen to get tested. Presumably, hospitalization numbers provide a more stable and reliable gauge of the pandemic’s true toll, in terms of severe disease. But a new, nationwide study of hospitalization records, released as a preprint today (and not yet formally peer reviewed), suggests that the meaning of this gauge can easily be misinterpreted—and that it has been shifting over time.
If you want to make sense of the number of COVID hospitalizations at any given time, you need to know how sick each patient actually is. Until now, that’s been almost impossible to suss out. The federal government requires hospitals to report every patient who tests positive for COVID, yet the overall tallies of COVID hospitalizations, made available on various state and federal dashboards and widely reported on by the media, do not differentiate based on severity of illness. Some patients need extensive medical intervention, such as getting intubated. Others require supplemental oxygen or administration of the steroid dexamethasone. But there are many COVID patients in the hospital with fairly mild symptoms, too, who have been admitted for further observation on account of their comorbidities, or because they reported feeling short of breath.Another portion of the patients in this tally are in the hospital for something unrelated to COVID, and discovered that they were infected only because they were tested upon admission. How many patients fall into each category has been a topic of much speculation. In August, researchers from Harvard Medical School, Tufts Medical Center, and the Veterans Affairs Healthcare System decided to find out.
Researchers have tried to get at similar questions before. For two separate studies published in May, doctors in California read through several hundred charts of pediatric patients, one by one, to figure out why, exactly, each COVID-positive child had been admitted to the hospital. Did they need treatment for COVID, or was there some other reason for admission, like cancer treatment or a psychiatric episode, and the COVID diagnosis was merely incidental? According to the researchers, 40 to 45 percent of the hospitalizations that they examined were for patients in the latter group.
The authors of the paper out this week took a different tack to answer a similar question, this time for adults. Instead of meticulously looking at why a few hundred patients were admitted to a pair of hospitals, they analyzed the electronic records for nearly 50,000 COVID hospital admissions at the more than 100 VA hospitals across the country. Then they checked to see whether each patient required supplemental oxygen or had a blood oxygen level below 94 percent. (The latter criterion is based on the National Institutes of Health definition of “severe COVID.”) If either of these conditions was met, the authors classified that patient as having moderate to severe disease; otherwise, the case was considered mild or asymptomatic.
The study found that from March 2020 through early January 2021—before vaccination was widespread, and before the Delta variant had arrived—the proportion of patients with mild or asymptomatic disease was 36 percent. From mid-January through the end of June 2021, however, that number rose to 48 percent. In other words, the study suggests that roughly half of all the hospitalized patients showing up on COVID-data dashboards in 2021 may have been admitted for another reason entirely, or had only a mild presentation of disease.
This increase was even bigger for vaccinated hospital patients, of whom 57 percent had mild or asymptomatic disease. But unvaccinated patients have also been showing up with less severe symptoms, on average, than earlier in the pandemic: The study found that 45 percent of their cases were mild or asymptomatic since January 21. According to Shira Doron, an infectious-disease physician and hospital epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center, in Boston, and one of the study’s co-authors, the latter finding may be explained by the fact that unvaccinated patients in the vaccine era tend to be a younger cohort who are less vulnerable to COVID and may be more likely to have been infected in the past.
Among the limitations of the study is that patients in the VA system are not representative of the U.S. population as a whole, as they include few women and no children. (Still, the new findings echo those from the two pediatric-admissions studies.) Also, like many medical centers, the VA has a policy to test every inpatient for COVID, but this is not a universal practice. Lastly, most of the data—even from the patients admitted in 2021—derive from the phase of the pandemic before Delta became widespread, and it’s possible that the ratios have changed in recent months. The study did run through June 30, however, when the Delta wave was about to break, and it did not find that the proportion of patients with moderate to severe respiratory distress was trending upward at the end of the observation period.
The idea behind the study and what it investigates is important, says Graham Snyder, the medical director of infection prevention and hospital epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, though he told me that it would benefit from a little more detail and nuance beyond oxygenation status. But Daniel Griffin, an infectious-disease specialist at Columbia University, told me that using other metrics for severity of illness, such as intensive-care admissions, presents different limitations. For one thing, different hospitals use different criteria for admitting patients to the ICU.
One of the important implications of the study, these experts say, is that the introduction of vaccines strongly correlates with a greater share of COVID hospital patients having mild or asymptomatic disease. “It’s underreported how well the vaccine makes your life better, how much less sick you are likely to be, and less sick even if hospitalized,” Snyder said. “That’s the gem in this study.”
“People ask me, ‘Why am I getting vaccinated if I just end up in the hospital anyway?’” Griffin said. “But I say, ‘You’ll end up leaving the hospital.’” He explained that some COVID patients are in for “soft” hospitalizations, where they need only minimal treatment and leave relatively quickly; others may be on the antiviral drug remdesivir for five days, or with a tube down their throat. One of the values of this study, he said, is that it helps the public understand this distinction—and the fact that not all COVID hospitalizations are the same.
But the study also demonstrates that hospitalization rates for COVID, as cited by journalists and policy makers, can be misleading, if not considered carefully. Clearly many patients right now are seriously ill. We also know that overcrowding of hospitals by COVID patients with even mild illness can have negative implications for patients in need of other care. At the same time, this study suggests that COVID hospitalization tallies can’t be taken as a simple measure of the prevalence of severe or even moderate disease, because they might inflate the true numbers by a factor of two. “As we look to shift from cases to hospitalizations as a metric to drive policy and assess level of risk to a community or state or country,” Doron told me, referring to decisions about school closures, business restrictions, mask requirements, and so on, “we should refine the definition of hospitalization. Those patients who are there with rather than from COVID don’t belong in the metric.”
The Atlantic’s COVID-19 coverage is supported by grants from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. David Zweig is a writer based in New York. He is the author of the nonfiction book Invisibles and the novel Swimming Inside the Sun.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.” – C. S. Lewis
“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-front for the urge to rule it.” – H.L. Mencken
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins,all of them imaginary.” – H.L. Mencken
•
At some point, the majority will conclude that the Left’s pet, and intentionally emotional causes; climate, Covid, race, gender etc., have absolutely nothing to do with the subject and the people involved, rather, about the clever, tactful and intentional use of highly emotive issues designed to divide and polarise the masses (you and I), in order for absolute power and control by them (the elites).
This simple tweet via VP Harris, perhaps an insightful example.
By vaccinating the unvaccinated, increasing our testing and masking, and protecting the vaccinated, we can end this pandemic. That’s exactly what we are committed to doing.
Think about it. If the vaccine works, as they assure us that it does – with anyone who dares question efficacy; punished, silenced and cancelled accordingly – then how can the unvaccinated possibly pose a threat to the vaccinated?
Who then are the real “science deniers”?
What exactly is the risk to the vaccinated from the unvaccinated?
Your ruling class, Jo Biden, Kamala Harris, CDC, AMA, Scott Morrison, mainstream media et al., will not tell you.
Why? Because they’re lying to you.
No one knows. There is no answer.
The entire; vaccine, mask, lockdown argument by ‘science’, for your ‘protection’, is transparently absurd.
And once you realise that, you realise that none of the endless talking about “public health”, at this point, is really about “public health”.
If it was about “public health”, everyone pushing the vaccine so feverishly would simply make the vaccines available to the infirm, the elderly-infirm, to high risk categories, and anyone else who wanted it, then celebrate, and leave it there.
But that’s not what it’s about.
It’s about power.
Forcing you to accept something without complaint is the whole point of the exercise. It’s a form of sadomasochism — dominance and submission.
It’s all about power, obviously. Power, either newly found, or conveniently manipulated and maintained.
If they can make you take experimental medicine that you don’t want, or need, then they’ve won. They then own you. You belong to them.
Things are certainly moving fast, and they are heading in a specific direction.
Which direction?
You be the judge.
(That is, if you’re still even allowed to formulate thought or opinion, less be cancelled or fined, under the statute of ‘forbidden’).
Climate obsessives drone on about such things endlessly, and pointlessly. Attacking all aspects of modern technological life on the basis of an irrational fear of trace gases leads nowhere good. Time for a complete re-think.
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Global computer usage produces twice the greenhouse gases as the aviation industry, new analysis suggests.
Figures from Lancaster University reveal emissions from computing account for almost four per cent of all greenhouse gases spewed into the atmosphere, compared to two per cent for air travel, says the Telegraph.
Previous studies had claimed that computing’s share of global emissions was between 1.8 and 2.8 per cent, however the researchers of the new paper say this was an underestimate.
After all, Covid-19 has an eventual ‘used-by’ date.
Big government statists well aware that they can’t use a virus, forever, to limit your selfish ‘excesses’ in their authoritarian quest to “Build Back Better”.
The unlimited timeline of “climate change” — a far more appropriate ‘crisis’ to control you while remaking civilisation in their own image.
Top work, our dear ‘planet saviours’! (Sigh)
In times of open deceit and authoritarian behaviour, the prophetic words of the wiser may provide a semblance of solace through understanding …
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely
exercised for the good of its victims
may be the most oppressive.”
– C. S. Lewis
“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-front for the urge to rule it.”
– H.L. Mencken
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has launched a new Office of Climate Change & Health Equity.
The staff will report to the White House’s task force on climate change and focus on how climate change risks the health of Americans, particularly the poor and minorities.
As reported in the Wall Street Journal:
“The new office is likely to spur initiatives touching on many aspects of healthcare, HHS officials announced Monday. It is expected to offer protections for populations most at risk—including the elderly, minorities, rural communities and children, and the office could eventually compel hospitals and other care facilities to reduce carbon emissions.
“Asked how HHS would reduce carbon emissions from healthcare facilities, Mr. Becerra said: ‘We will use every authority to its greatest advantage because it is time to tackle climate change now.’
The UK shut down cheap coal, refused to drill for its own gas, and failed to replace its old nuclear power stations then, when gas suddenly becomes expensive, is caught with its proverbial trousers down. So much for ‘world leading’ climate policies.
Weather forecasting technology 
By Adam Houser ~
The staff will report to the White House’s task force on climate change and focus on how climate change risks the health of Americans, particularly the poor and minorities.
Climatism 
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