The Facts That Prove Almost Everyone Is Wrong About This Pandemic

Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

When it comes to COVID-19, most Americans seem to be gravitating toward one of two extremes.  Some are treating this pandemic like it is the end of the world, while many others are dismissing it as a “nothingburger”. 

But the truth is somewhere in between. 

Nobody can deny that lots of people are getting sick and lots of people are dying.  In fact, the U.S. death toll has doubled in a little over a week and it has now shot past the 47,000 mark.  And as this pandemic progresses, a lot more people are going to get sick and a lot more people are going to die, and this is going to be true whether the lockdowns continue or not.  The lockdowns were never going to stop COVID-19, and anyone that believed that was just being delusional.

The only time a lockdown should be instituted is if a pandemic has gotten so bad in an area that hospitals are being absolutely overwhelmed, because if people can’t get treatment that is a factor that could potentially increase the overall death toll substantially.

In most of the United States that is not happening right now, and so in most of the nation the lockdowns should be immediately ended.

But won’t a lot more people start getting sick if that happens?

Of course, and this is something that the “nothingburger” crowd doesn’t understand.  Lifting the lockdowns is going to cause the virus to cycle through our population at a much faster rate, and the numbers will get pretty ugly.  But as long as the medical system can handle it, lockdowns are not necessary.

What “the end of the world” crowd does not understand is that when you are dealing with a virus that spreads as easily as this one, it is inevitable that most of the population will eventually become infected.  You can “flatten the curve” and delay the inevitable with lockdowns, but that also prolongs the pandemic.  In the end, roughly the same number of people will get sick and roughly the same number of people will die no matter how the pandemic is “managed”.

This week, the “nothingburger” crowd has made a really big deal out of the fact that a study conducted in L.A. county discovered that about 4 percent of all residents had already developed COVID-19 antibodies, and they were trying to use that study to prove that this pandemic is not much of a threat at all.

Actually, it shows just the opposite.

This pandemic is not going to be over until herd immunity is achieved, and according to Johns Hopkins that does not happen until 70 to 90 percent of a population has developed immunity…

When most of a population is immune to an infectious disease, this provides indirect protection—or herd immunity (also called herd protection)—to those who are not immune to the disease.

For example, if 80% of a population is immune to a virus, four out of every five people who encounter someone with the disease won’t get sick (and won’t spread the disease any further). In this way, the spread of infectious diseases is kept under control. Depending how contagious an infection is, usually 70% to 90% of a population needs immunity to achieve herd immunity.

So let’s do some really quick math.

Let’s assume that the study conducted in L.A. County is representative of the nation as a whole and that approximately 4 percent of all Americans have now developed antibodies.

And let’s also assume that herd immunity for COVID-19 will be achieved when 80 percent of the total population has developed antibodies.

If 47,000 Americans have died at the current 4 percent level of exposure, that means that we could potentially be looking at an overall death toll of 940,000 once we hit an 80 percent exposure level.

Does anyone in the “nothingburger” crowd want to try to claim that 940,000 dead Americans is not a big deal?

I keep hearing people say that this virus “is just like the flu”, and that is absolutely absurd.  As Mike Adams of Natural News has pointed out, COVID-19 has killed more Americans in the last 17 days than the flu did in the last year…

In the last 17 days, the Wuhan coronavirus has killed more Americans (35,087) than the regular flu kills in an entire year (34,157 for the last year). It obliterates any last shred of the argument — still heard across the independent media — that the coronavirus is “no worse than the flu.”

The coronavirus remains the No. 1 cause of death in America on a day-to-day basis, clocking in at 2,804 deaths just today. Total deaths in the USA will exceed 46,000 tomorrow, confirming our earlier projection that estimated 46,000 to 93,000 deaths from coronavirus in the USA by the end of July. It’s not even the end of April, and we’re already beyond 45,000. (At the time we made the projection, it was dismissed as “crazy” by the very same people who still claim the coronavirus is “no worse than the flu.” Those are the people who can’t do math.)

And actually the number of Americans dying from the coronavirus is being seriously undercounted.

In New York City, if someone dies at home they are typically not tested to see if they have the coronavirus.  So even though the number of city residents dying at home is now nearly ten times higher than normal, the vast majority of those cases are never showing up in the official numbers.

But the “end of the world” crowd seems to think that if we just keep everyone at home long enough that we can significantly reduce the final death toll from this pandemic, and that just isn’t accurate either.

Right now, the virus continues to spread even though most of the U.S. has now been locked down for weeks.  In fact, there were nearly 30,000 more confirmed cases during the 24 hour period that just ended.  Whether it does it relatively quickly or relatively slowly, this virus will continue to rip through our population until we eventually get to the point of herd immunity.

“Experts” such as Bill Gates are suggesting that the lockdowns are “buying us time” until our scientists can develop a “vaccine”, but the truth is that is really not much more than a pipe dream.

As I pointed out yesterday, there has never been a successful vaccine for any coronavirus in all of human history, and now that scientists have discovered approximately 30 different strains of the virus that will just make the task of trying to develop a vaccine even more complicated.

Sadly, the reality of the matter is that this virus is going to be with us for a very long time to come.  Eventually herd immunity will hopefully be achieved, but until then a lot of people are going to get sick and a lot of people are going to die.

And fear of this virus is going to be with us for a long time to come as well, and that is going to paralyze our economy whether there are lockdowns or not.

The bottom line is that this virus is not going to be stopped, and the economic collapse that has now begun is not going to be stopped either.

But this isn’t the end of the world, and most of us will get through this.  Of course even bigger challenges lie beyond the end of this pandemic, but that is a topic for another article.

As of this moment, COVID-19 has killed more than 184,000 people around the globe, and by the end of this pandemic the overall death toll is likely to be much, much higher than that.

There is no way that you can possibly call that a “nothingburger”, and sticking your head in the sand is not going to help anything.  But on the other hand, trying to lock down the entire planet is not going to solve this crisis either.  It will simply delay the inevitable, because this virus is just going to continue to spread no matter what actions our politicians take.