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1/ COVID is finished. A vitally important thread.
As Belgium has entered a third lockdown (which in itself is interesting as we were supposedly in the middle of a second lockdown), here are some observations and questions.
As Belgium has entered a third lockdown (which in itself is interesting as we were supposedly in the middle of a second lockdown), here are some observations and questions.
2/ Let's start with a thought experiment: You gather the world's best scientists around a table and present them with a new problem. You give them 2 min to offer a solution with the absolute minimum of information that they have. You write down that solution.
3/ Then, you give them one year to go away, inform themselves, read all the literature, perform studies, live experiments, hold conferences, enlist help from all available sources, study like they have never done before.
4/ They then come back to the original problem with the additional knowledge and ideas and empirical knowledge from these 12 months of intense scientific research.
5/ Would you all agree that it is not only improbable but Mathematically Impossible that they would all come back and say, the solution we scribbled on a piece of paper originally was the right one.
6/ Not only was it the right one, it was 100% the right one so we should stick with it.
7/ So why, I ask, are we seeing that exact phenomenon where experts in Belgium suggested two weeks ago that we should "have the exact same lockdown we did one year ago" (when we knew nothing about the virus and had to do something, quickly).
8/ Option 1 is that science, in general, is Useless. That a panicky hunch, inspired by China, has indeed proven to be the go-to solution for pandemic (sic) management. All scientists must join the bars and restaurant owners and live without a job immediately.
9/ Option 2 is that science is not useless and that it has evolved and gathered an impressive amount of data that does have new insights into how to handle the situation.
10/ That this science, for some reason, is not our governments' science but the science of the Great Barrington Declaration and other platforms, and our governments are therefore sticking with "the hunch" while we all wonder about science going nowhere.
11/ Perhaps we should look at some of the key ingredients of the initial Hunch to understand how it can still be so right.
12/ 1.5 m SOCIAL DISTANCING - was introduced because our governments reckoned the main route of transmission of this virus was by droplets (people coughing or spitting on each other).
13/ Did they really think this was likely, given that people spitting on each other would hardly have explained the very rapid spread the virus made, allegedly from Wuhan via a plan to all the skiers in Austria to the rest of the world?
14/ Was there a coughing or spitting chain of events between that bat in Wuhan, those passengers on the plane and the returning skiers and consequently the rest of the world?
Does FLU start with a bat each winter, or who is patient 0?
Does FLU start with a bat each winter, or who is patient 0?
15/ How does patient 0 succeed, each winter, to infect millions around the world simultaneously? This is the Hunch science.
16/ The Other Science, quite conceivably, would talk about aerosol spread and the fact that Airborne viruses don't really get transmitted from one person to another by close contact, that airplanes can help but that, just like the Spanish flu, a virus appearing almostâŠ
17/ âŠsimultaneously in most parts of the world can hardly have been spread from one person to another to another to all persons.
18/ That "transmission" is "infection" and anyone can get infected and therefore all distance rules, untenable as they are, will have very limited impact.
What else did the founding fathers of the Hunch say one year ago, that still holds true today?
What else did the founding fathers of the Hunch say one year ago, that still holds true today?
19/ That all HEALTHY PEOPLE were DANGEROUS. That for the first time in history, proven by one case in Germany (a lady that later did turn out to be taking flu medication), a disease would be spread by asymptomatic people.
20/ The other, unheard science would perhaps say that, though there is no evidence and they could easily disprove the concept of asymptomatic transmission, the question was not even relevant for if "transmission" is "infection" and viruses are airborne, and can be triggeredâŠ
21/ âŠwhen in your body for months, all discussions about symptomatic or asymptomatic people are pointless, as are lockdowns or quarantines.
But all of this is hopeless, pointless bickering.
But all of this is hopeless, pointless bickering.
22/ The stage has been set for an altogether different ending, one that will inform our culture and the future of our children for a long time to come.
23/ It is the story of an ever present threat, one that can be contained through modern means and technological wonders, such as weekly testing, periodical jabs of ever-changing ingredients. We must test to see we are Not sick, Not deadly, Not infected.
24/ We must test to see we are feeling well and very soon we will only feel well once our test has told us to.
Going back to my thought experiment, let us imagine there would be one scientist among the group who says, "After our initial Hunch, let us collect data for one year.
Going back to my thought experiment, let us imagine there would be one scientist among the group who says, "After our initial Hunch, let us collect data for one year.
25/ Let us test different strategies and see their impact, let us research and open our meetings to all the ideas, as wild as they seem, and then get back and define what we do Next Time, and until the end of Time. "
26/ What would this scientist have brought to the meeting, one year on?
27/ They would have found that "virus" is not "disease" (most people have the virus in them and very few have the disease), that "transmission" = "infection" could not be stopped but treated (not only through vaccines but with many treatments who were neglected due to theâŠ
28/ âŠfocus on vaccines). They would have seen the damage to our world and weighed it against the empirical impact they had on the health situation.
29/ They would have also looked at data, and for Belgium, they would have compared, understanding seasonality, the late winter period 2020 with the late winter period 2021 (the only valid comparison point for a seasonal phenomenon).
30/ They would have seen the fraction of deaths occurring now, during the height of the virus's season. The conclusion would have been that Covid is finished, or almost, and that its natural course has been run.
But this is not what has happened.
But this is not what has happened.
31/ Government has stuck with the Hunch. They are just debating whether there may be a little element of seasonality (6% according to @demorgen this morning).
32/ Therefore, they still support a narrative that our human behaviour is largely responsible for our health situation (positively when it "defeated the virus" last summer and negatively when "the relaxation of the rules" made it come back last autumn).
33/ They also maintain that we need a lockdown to combat this uprising which slowed down two weeks ago. We needed to do this because it worked last time. We now need to do it before vaccines are handed out to all citizens, including children.
34/ Here is my take, for those of you who have read on to the end of this thread: Science is not useless. Science did happen, and Science has come back to the problem with Dramatically different conclusions. But The Hunch had killed.
35/ It had abused, it had destroyed, it had f## #ed up every single element of Life, our lives, our children's lives. The truth of what Science would have done must never be known.
