George Rebane
What is the death rate of those infected with SARS-Cov-2 (here C19)? Well, the more we try to find out, the more it gets curiouser and curiouser. The latest attempt to explain the whole matter to us is put forth by Reason magazine in their ‘Do the Divergent Results of COVID-19 Antibody Studies Reflect Real Differences?’ Their quest for the answer was launched with the premise “The infection fatality rate (IFR) probably varies from one place to another.” Well, no sh!+ Red Ryder, you’d think? Then after a head-spinning discussion, about all the reader can walk away with is that IFR varies anywhere from 0.0005 to 0.013. And IFR is strongly correlated with old age, especially those with preexisting comorbidities. But then a little later, someone concludes that, no matter your age, it’s actually mainly your preexisting comorbidity that determines your probability of dying, and old age is just a prominent proxy for that since almost all old people have one kind of preexisting malady or other. But what brought a smile to my face was their attempt to buttress the piece by injecting numbers. All kinds of talk about test 'specifities' and disease 'prevalence', and the resulting 'positive predictive values' were bandied about which the reader is supposedly able to follow with their numbers. But it turns out that none of it could be followed because nowhere do they bring up, let alone cite, the related test sensitivities without which their discussion is a meaningless jumble. The point they try and fail to make is that which I presented in ‘Image of ignorance and/or incompetence’ along with its preceding tutorials on testing. The bottom line here is that to understand how C19 relates to the mostly insane current response policies is almost impossible. Since everything, like IFR, depends on so many different factors, to get even a glimmer, one has to have more than a smidgen of numeracy under their belt. And if you’re going to publish something about it, you’d better be at least numerate. Today none of that is a prerequisite before spouting volumes about the pandemic.
This PAN-DEM-IC looks like a DEM-PANIC when we consider how the Dems are doing everything they can to blame the whole shebang on President Trump – everything from the economy to the number of deaths attributed to the corona virus. A reader sent an article from American Thinker (here) that details the whole thing, including why cooking the books on the body count has become a cynical political football. November is coming and the Democrats are desperate to making something stick on Trump before they have to let Bumblebrain out of the basement. No matter who the DNC picks for Biden’s VP, I bet they will demand that the presidential debate(s) will be presented in a tag-team format so that Bumblebrain will have someone with him on stage who can talk – otherwise it will be a bloodbath.
rebanesruminations.com 
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