COVID-19 ESSAY - PART 1 of 2


DOCUMENT ABSTRACT
This will be an essay on SARS-COV-2 and the resulting COVID-19 sickness. It will be one of the most comprehensive and lengthy pieces of data available on this site regarding COVID-19. I am doing this here, just as I do in other places, online forums, news outlets, etc... b/c I believe it's imperative that people begin to understand the truly phenomenal nature of the perfect storm of events that lead us to this point, which has become rather absurd in totality.

The goal is to create this essay in the most easily digestible format while also providing concrete links, inserted images, CDC, WHO, and NIH (National Institute of Health) data. Many of the links will be links to articles that either link to the studies themselves (with my comments), or contain images themselves, which have been done by numerous skeptical scientists and/or doctors. Some links will be directly to CDC, WHO, NIH data. Some will be to preprint server studies such as medRxiv and bioRxiv (however, there are many other preprint repositories).


PREPRINT STUDY SERVERS

So, what are preprints anyway? Preprints are complete public drafts of scientific documents not yet certified by peer review. These documents ensure that the findings of the research community are widely disseminated, priorities of discoveries are established and they invite feedback and discussion to help improve the work. Read more about preprint servers & relationship to COVID-19 here.

Preprint servers exists for many disciplines: biology, physics, computer science, mathematics, chemistry, etc etc... We are concerned mostly with medical or biological sciences preprints.

The main preprint repos include: bioRxiv, medRxiv, arXiv, SSRN, and a few others. PubMed is the largest repo in the world of medical peer reviewed and preprint data. The explosion of research around SARS-COV-2 is unparalleled in our history. Zenodo which aggregates data from preprints, including the largest repository in the world, PubMed, contains 178,000+ entries currently for the search term: SARS-COV-2. That is unreal! All in a span of months! Normally those preprint for a medical field are receiving something on the order of 1,000-2000+ per month and that's for ALL specialties or topic areas within that medical/biological field.

In a span of months we now have countless tens of thousands of studies on the main private preprints (bioRxiv, medRxiv, arXiv...) for COVID alone and then we have a total of nearly 180,000 entries on the open platform PubMed, for one single topic (COVID), all in a span of a few months! It is truly unprecedented and beyond imagination!


LINKS TO PREPRINT SERVER RESOURCES: Preprints and Rapid Communication of COVID-19 Research

MAJOR PROBLEMS RESULTING FROM PREPRINTS

The preceding topic section above about the sheer volume of studies is so incredible that there are now numerous sites/studies devoted to fishing out the bad science as a result of this situation. The irony is that there are even preprint studies themselves ABOUT COVID-19 itself but instead they are discussing how bad the veracity of the study data is in certain other COVID studies!

Take this article here from BMC Medicine which discusses that very issue, bad data, rushed scientific studies, incorrect methodologies or statistical models, all of which result in horrible conclusions many times. Here is an excerpt from the intro of that BMC Medicine link:

Preprint manuscripts, rapid publications and opinion pieces have been essential in permitting the lay press and public health authorities to preview data relating to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), including the range of clinical manifestations and the basic epidemiology early on in the pandemic. However, the rapid dissemination of information has highlighted some issues with communication of scientific results and opinions in this time of heightened sensitivity and global concern. [1]
This is something Dr. John Ioannidis has lamented about for months. He is a champion of the veracity of scientific data. He is recognized as "one of the most cited scientists in the world". You can read all about that stuff and his awards and fame for pioneering good scientific studies on Wikipedia. He is very famous for a paper he wrote in 2005, titled, "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False".

Want another example of just how ridiculous the bad science has gotten (which leaks out to the news outlets)? Here is another entry about this very thing and a medical journal being put together expressly for this purpose (to fix this bad data or retract the studies - btw many studies already have had to be pulled from preprint servers): "New journal will vet Covid-19 preprints, calling out misinformation and highlighting credible research". Here is another excerpt from that link showing how bad it can be with all of the frenetic and rushed science, especially when the media gets involved and gets their grubby hands on it:

The wild, wild west of Covid-19 preprints is about to get a new sheriff. On Monday, the MIT Press is announcing the launch of an open access journal that will publish reviews of preprints related to Covid-19, in an effort to quickly and authoritatively call out misinformation as well as highlight important, credible research.

“Preprints have been a tremendous boon for scientific communication, but they come with some dangers, as we’ve seen with some that have been based on faulty methods,” said Nick Lindsay, director of journals at the MIT Press, which will publish Rapid Reviews: Covid-19. “We want to debunk research that’s poor and elevate research that’s good.”

The Covid-19 pandemic has produced a fire hose of preprints (papers posted to servers such as bioRxiv and medRxiv without peer review), many of questionable validity. The poster child for that is a bioRxiv preprint that suggested the new coronavirus had somehow been engineered from HIV; it was quickly withdrawn. But many other preprints, while not clearly wrong, used weak methodology, such as small numbers of patients or inadequate controls, as in an experiment concluding that a commercially available immunoglobulin might protect against the disease. [2]




AN ALTERNATE POSTULATE BY A GROUP OF VIROLOGISTS/SCIENTISTS

Below is a link to an article that discusses a mid-May webinar done by a panel of leading epidemiologists lead by, Dr. Stoian Alexov. The entire panel concluded that the virus is not actually responsible for any deaths. This is not as wild as you might think. Why? B/c, once again, there is still no bonafide way to actually tell if someone dies of COVID-19 (whether it's that they died WITH IT or they died BECAUSE OF IT - either way we don't really know exactly what causes death). So it's not as "crazy" or "wild" as one might think. We know the SARS-COV-2 virus exists. No one disputes this fact. Nor do we dispute that COVID-19 develops in some patients. The issue is that with all these death reports (most of them now in the US - which ironically is the only country with the financial and man power to continue such an effort of compilation) we don't *really* know what they are dying of or how much COVID-19 plays a part.

Many patients are over 80 with multiple complications. In fact, the global average currently is about age 80-85 AND an average of ~3 (usually a low of 1 up to a high of 5) potentially fatal comorbid conditions. Meaning, we aren't just talking about healthy old people. We are talking about very elderly people with serious complications already in play. Another interesting thing is that over 35% of all deaths come from nursing homes. Not surprising as most who die are, sadly.... "at deaths door with multiple potentially fatal underlying conditions". Now, does that mean it doesn't happen to others? Of course it does. People also die of a pebble that falls on their head or in an airplane crash or from the flu or from rape or gang violence and so on. Does that mean you don't go outside? No. That's the point there; not that there aren't edge cases.

Article Link: “No one has died from the coronavirus”, Important revelations shared by Dr Stoian Alexov, President of the Bulgarian Pathology Association

Key Excerpts (check link to find complete data yourself):



Here we have Dr. Klaus Püschel backing up Dr. Stoian Alexov as well. Dr. Alexov is a physician with 30yrs of experience, president of the BPA, a member of the ESP's Advisory Board, and head of the histopathology department at the Oncology Hospital in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia.











CURRENT COVID-19 DANGER/LETHALITY STATISTICS

July 14th, 2020 study posted on MedRxiv by Stanford team: The infection fatality rate of COVID-19 inferred from seroprevalence data

Read the "Abstract" section of the link to get the relevant data. This is data not from one study. This is a compiled study consisting of data from nearly 50 different global seroprevalence studies (prevalence of antibodies in blood serum). I will break down the gist of the fatality numbers and the their true IFR vs CFR below the "NOTES" section.

NOTES:
  • IFR = Infection Fatality Rate = number of people believed to have died of something divided into the true number of infected cases (not just known cases which are very, very limited in the first year of a new disease)
  • CFR = Case Fatality Rate = number of people believed to have died of something divided into the list of known, tested positive, cases


The CFR is obviously a very bad estimate and terribly misleading until you have a much truer picture of just how pervasive a virus either is or isn't among the population.

For example, if there are 300+ Million people who have or already had it globally then the virus is less deadly than your chance of dying from a traffic accident. Even if it's not quite the 300+MN that Dr. John Ioannidis and his Stanford team believe it currently is (if not higher) we do obviously know it's fantastically higher than only the ~15-17MN cases tested globally. Of course. Because we only test a tiny fraction of the population. In the beginning it was strictly elderly and people with serious symptoms so the introduction rate of cases was pretty low and was fairly slow.

TOTAL AVERAGE IFR REGARDLESS OF AGE (ACROSS ~32 GLOBAL EPICENTERS): .24% (this is still thought to be high as we still don't know how pervasive the virus is in the population but that's where it stands now for ALL ages. The overall range for seasonal flu is ~.12%-.18% across ALL age ranges (for comparison).

MEDIAN IFR REGARDLESS OF AGE IN LOWER MORTALITY STUDY AREAS: .1% (technically on par or even less than the seasonal flu - and this is not complete data yet).
MEDIAN IFR REGARDLESS OF AGE IN MEDIUM MORTALITY STUDY AREAS: .27% (~1.5-2x that of seasonal flu for areas where mortality is high - likely this is due to age ranges, medical care, social dynamics, etc...)
MEDIAN IFR REGARDLESS OF AGE IN HIGH MORTALITY STUDY AREAS: .90% (~6-8x that of seasonal flu for global areas with high mortality - again likely heavily affected by age range, medical access, expertise, social issues....)

MEDIAN IFR FOR AGE <70 (GLOBAL AVERAGE): Across all ~32 global studies the IFR ranged from 0.0% to .57% with a median IFR of .04% across all global areas. For comparison the seasonal flu is 3 to 4 times as deadly for those under age 70.


FATALITY CHANCES BASED ON CURRENT DATA ACROSS ~50 SEROPREVALENCE STUDIES:

  • Fatality Chances (disregarding age - includes all ages): .24% (1.5-2 times the rate of flu) (this is also very likely to keep going down as we learn even more about how common the virus is in the population)
  • Fatality Chances (everyone under age 70): .04% (seasonal flu is >2-4 times as likely to kill you)
  • Fatality Chances (under 40): Literally so low to write it here would be a silly joke. It is so low you are literally more likely to get killed in a routine car accident before you died of this. I believe the last one I saw a week or two ago for age <50 was .002485%.


Even our own CDC had to revise it's original rates of 3% (way back) down to 1% then .6% something, then .4%, then .3%, and then down to .26% recently!

As you go lower to age 40, 30, 20, etc... it gets astronomically low (hence the reason the study data above ranges from as low as "0.00%"). At the .0024875% level for those at the 50yr age range we are talking about something so low that the common seasonal flu would kill you 50 times over before you would come near death with this infection. That's IF it even became symptomatic. We know that about 35%-40% of all cases are entirely asymptomatic.

Another interesting thing to consider is that of all deaths approaching 40% of them have been in nursing homes. As I've said before that has an average age of >80 with an average of ~3 comorbid conditions of some serious (i.e. complications already existing which could become life threatening at any point).

Now, that said, does that mean young people don't die? NO! They do. Just like they do in airplane crashes, car accidents, heart attacks, cancer, the flu, shock, violent crimes, diabetes, etc etc. The point is it has become a PANIC driven fear caused by the media. I will explain more about that in some to links to psychological data and why the critics are not able to get their voice heard. There are many reasons folks.