China Ends Lockdowns, Says "Covid is Mild". Is It?
COVID Skeptics and Defeated Governments Agree for the Wrong Reasons
Note: this post is intended to provoke people into thinking. You can fully disagree and express your thoughts in the comments!
China’s “Covid Experts” Changed Minds — at the Speed of Science!
Chinese citizens were pushed beyond what they could tolerate by the totalitarian Zero Covid policies of China, which made people digital slaves of WEF-style AI-powered digital tracking and subjected to undescribable restrictions. People finally rose up, destroyed testing booths, fought with the hazmat-clad Covid goons, and forced the government of China to surrender and give up Zero Covid.
New York Times explains that the expert consensus in China is changing at the speed of science, and Chinese health experts are now saying that “Covid is mild” after years of scaremongering. It took Chinese “Covid Science authorities” only a week to do a complete 180-degree turn!
New York Times forgets that it promoted similar lockdowns, and explains:
For nearly three years, the Chinese government deployed its considerable propaganda apparatus to fan fears about Covid to justify large-scale quarantines, frequent mass testing and the tracking of more than a billion people. As the authorities now shift their approach to the pandemic, they face the task of downplaying those fears.
Yet allaying Covid worries bordering on terror among millions of people, particularly older residents, is proving a challenge for the Communist Party and state media. Further complicating matters is that China’s leaders have a long history of not wanting to look as though they are reversing policies because of public anger.
Missing from the state media’s new reporting about Covid has been any mention of the recent days’ protests. The coverage has shifted to research by Chinese scientists that the Omicron variant may not be as dangerous as earlier versions of the virus.
Southern Daily, a state-controlled newspaper in Guangzhou, published on Saturday a report emphasizing a municipal estimate that 90 percent of Omicron infections were asymptomatic. Citing interviews with seven leading Guangzhou doctors, the newspaper also reassured readers that symptomatic cases were seldom serious, except among elderly, unvaccinated residents.
Great, right? I am certainly happy for the citizens of China. While I expect the authoritarian governing style of China to continue, I am glad that people will not have their doors welded shut or personal movement prohibited.
Authorities Everywhere Are Pretending Covid is Mild
Does the China story sound familiar? All governments, abandoning forced vaccinations and lockdowns, sang the same exact song about how Covid is now mild — to cover up their political loss and avoid responsibility.
Governments everywhere stopped counting Covid cases properly to avoid embarrassment. Many countries have changed their method of counting Covid deaths and hospitalizations to begin underreporting deaths, as well. Suddenly, they decided to distinguish between “died from covid” and “died with Covid.”
Such undercounting would blunt criticism and prevent citizens from asking, “why are your vaccines not working” and “what benefit did we get from the lockdowns.”
Consider the United States: we stopped accounting for cases when we switched from centralized PCR testing to rapid tests used at home. It is not such a bad idea to use home tests, but it conveniently leads to not reporting cases. My estimate of the degree of undercounting of cases is 6:1, based on San Francisco wastewater.
The US began to undercount Covid hospitalizations in early 2022 purposely.
It looked like exceptionally good news Wednesday when the state reported just seven COVID-19 hospitalizations, far fewer than the 20 to 25 reported over the prior week. It was good news – just not the whole picture.
In an announcement Tuesday, the Department of Health and Human Services said it had redefined COVID-19 hospitalization to include only patients being treated with remdesivir or dexamethasone, drugs used for hospitalized patients with moderate to severe illness. Those hospitalized with milder symptoms or primarily for another cause are no longer included – even if they continue to take up a hospital bed because they are too ill to be discharged.
So, if someone is sick with Covid and hospitalized, say due to a Covid induced blood clot, but is luckily not on Remdesivir, that patient is no longer counted as a Covid hospitalization! Note that this patient would not be in a hospital if not for his Covid infection.
What Can We Know Without Statistics?
So, how can we even know how bad Covid is in the United States if cases are not counted, not even estimated, and hospitalizations and deaths are purposely underreported?
We cannot know this — but we have some clues.
Covid positivity is at its highest ever:
Look at hospitalizations in almost-totally-vaccinated New York City, for example. They are the highest since February, despite undercounting explained above:
Take a look at the utilization data at a large hospital near me:
If you are not paying attention, you might think that “covid is over.” Only 25 beds out of 342 are covid patients. Not a big deal, right? Remembering that only Remdesivir patients are counted, look to the right — and note the number of ER visits with a positive Covid test. That number is NOT fudged like the hospital bed number based on Remdesivir. Any ER visit with a positive Covid test is counted. You can see that 800-900 people out of 2,000 or so ER visits are COVID-positive!
The last time this many Covid-positive people visited our local ER was last January, at the peak of Omicron. (My wife had Covid around then). The only previous time my hospital ER had this many — over 800 Covid positive visits — was Nov 2020, when I had my Covid.
Is Covid mild now, or is it just not counted properly?
The Perfect Storm of Misunderstanding
Covid skeptics were quite right to reject the hysterics and scaremongering of our authorities and the media around 2020 and 2021 when motorcycle crash victims were counted as Covid deaths.
Without rehashing endless arguments of those times, deaths and hospitalizations were indeed overcounted, and hospitals were incentivized to overstate the number of Covid patients.
We were promised that “lockdowns will lead to vaccination,” which would stop Covid and save us.
It did not work out: lockdowns that never worked were thankfully canceled, vaccines failed, and Covid kept infecting vulnerable people. Vaccines are making it worse due to preventing proper immunity. At this point, it became the interest of governments to minimize Covid to avoid citizens seeing the extent of the failure of their health policy.
Does rejecting official scaremongering require us to deny that Covid is a serious, harmful disease? No.
It is very regrettable that some Covid skeptics also minimize Covid instead of being realistic about it.
I will not name names, as some of them are my virtual friends and have amazing substacks that I love reading. They are also right on almost everything else! I believe that we all owe the public a duty to be realistic and to look beyond self-serving numbers supplied by our governments.
When we look beyond such self-serving numbers, we see high rates of Covid positivity, sick people repeatedly infected and getting sicker each time, and little sign of improvement.
A “mild” illness that reinfects sufferers three times a year is not so harmless.
We also have an AIDS-like immune deficiency problem affecting millions of people — getting sick with EVERYTHING from scabies to fungi to severe cases of ordinary colds, flu and RSV. Rintrah Radagast described them in an amazing post that I highly recommend reading.
I discussed such a possibility in March and April:
Regrettably, Covid keeps going, and “progress” mostly comes from not counting illnesses properly.
I, as well as many of my unvaccinated readers, had one instance of Covid, it was mild, so it might seem to us that everyone else has the same experience. Unfortunately, this is NOT the case for everyone. If you doubt this, read the poignant and detailed comments of my subscribers discussing their long Covid experiences just yesterday in this thread:
Many dozens of bad Covid experiences are listed in the comment thread!
Minimizing COVID Gets Reckless Virologists and Authorities Off the Hook
Laboratory development of Covid, its likely intentional release, as well as reckless vaccinations of young people with untested, non-working vaccines constituted enormous wrongdoing.
Minimizing Covid means minimizing those wrongful acts. It amounts to saying, “who cares about the origin of Covid, nobody died anyway.” That is NOT true, and such a minimizing approach does not lead to just outcomes.
Seeing COVID as a pathogenic illness also does not mean we support lockdowns. They do not work — and we need to find something that does.
Thank you for listening. Let us know if you agree or not. It is okay to disagree, so tell us what you think!
This is not pleasant to watch unfold in real time. Many injected friends getting sick, a prolonged case of the 'sniffles', repeatedly, and worse (irregular heartbeats, doctor tells them "it's probably hormonal imbalance, totally normal, don't worry"). Even mildly suggesting their immune system might be compromised falls on deaf ears. Many have said to me "I expect to get COVID again soon, it's been a few months since my last case." They've forgotten that it is not normal to be re-infected by any flu-like virus multiple times within a span of 12 months.
*Edit: What a fascinating thread. The fact that these words resonate with so many shows that anecdotal evidence cannot be discounted, and should be 'qualitative data'. Here's to hoping we can deprogram our friends and families and save their souls.
“For nearly three years, the Chinese government deployed its considerable propaganda apparatus to fan fears about Covid to justify large-scale quarantines, frequent mass testing and the tracking of more than a billion people.”
The New York Times said that. The New-F*cking-Propaganda-Apparatus-York-Times.
As the Brits would say, “Are you taking a piss?!”
Look “rich” up in the dictionary, and you’ll find that example under the “informal” entry.