Clark,
“It named the very virus that was to later consume our world for 12 months”
Sorry Clark, I didn’t mean to suggest they’d predicted all the details you fastidiously unearthed, merely that they’d used the acronym “nCoV-2019” and that the WHO later adopted a very similar designation, “2019-nCoV”.
Thank you for sharing the Wikipedia page & for taking the time to go into some statistical analysis/explanation.
But to be honest, I’ve trudged through more medical/scientific writing over the past 12 months than I would have wished upon myself in 100 lifetimes and, as I mentioned a couple of times in the overly ‘verbose’ comments earlier, I look elsewhere for comprehensive & authoritative information so don’t pay much attention to “comments” other than for opinion.
I don’t mean to be dismissive or pompous (although I realise it does sound very pompous & dismissive), it’s just that when I wrote that “I gave up a long time ago trying to work out how dangerous COVID is or isn’t”, it wasn’t out of difficulty grasping the literature, it was more out of a lack of confidence in the data & an understanding that science quite invariably has competent & convincing voices on either side of research & I was best out of it.
Funnily enough, it was a paper by Dr Brown (published in August 2020 – Public Health Lessons Learned From Biases in Coronavirus Mortality Overestimation) & specifically focusing on IFR & CFR data such as that with which you seem familiar, that probably convinced me to find something less taxing to read :-)))
Although peer reviewed & published, I’m sure there’ll be equally qualified people expressing a contrary opinion, such is the nature of science. Incidentally, his conclusions were quite different to those that you cite.
To my simplistic layman’s mind, there were 2 particular features of the COVID data collection & presentation that have made me disinclined to trust the ticker tape of terror.
Firstly, the changes to the procedure involved in processing the Medical Certificates of Cause of Death (MCCD), implemented as part of the March 25th 2020 Coronavirus Act, seemed destined (if not specifically designed) to result in a substantial over reporting of COVID fatalities. It went much beyond the common “with/from COVID” death reporting concerns that were being voiced more widely at the time.
The guidance by the Chief Coroner a day later was also very ominous, suggesting that s/he could not “envisage a situation” where any coroner would speak publicly about these changes. Thankfully, some brave handfuls of professionals, in the UK & abroad, did express their concerns and the OffGuardian did quite a comprehensive report on the detail & implications of these MCCD changes, on 5th May.
These changes to reporting, invariably under the onus of necessity & expedience in an emergency, was duplicated across Europe & US. I think the simultaneous adoption of these policies simply dates back to the 2005 WHO International Health Regulations & the subsequent emergency powers Acts adopted by individual states. Thus everyone acts in ‘lock step’ under the requisite ‘circumstances’. Unfortunately that applies to ‘bad’ directives as much as ‘good’ ones.
I imagine most of us are familiar with politicians fudging the numbers: juggling troop deployments between ‘theatres’ of engagement, discounting mercenaries & “off the books” forces, in order to mislead reporting of particular military involvements; or shuffling the jobless from one ‘training’ scheme or ‘waiting’ period to another, to misrepresent unemployment statistics. So the changes to MCCD reporting didn’t inspire confidence…..in actual fact, it felt more like fraud if I’m honest.
Secondly, the PCR test debacle just completely delegitimised all the case reporting figures. Again, this was an issue that was raised quite comprehensively in those first few months of the ‘crisis’ but was sidelined & maligned. I imagine that was even before there was a slur in our vocabulary for people who raised such concerns.
The inventor of the test, Kary Mullis, had been quite forthright in stressing that his Nobel Prize winning invention was not a diagnostic tool and that had been a discussion in the scientific community decades ago; even clinicians were separately reminding authorities that clinical diagnosis does not come from a test alone; and, perhaps worst of all, concerns were rife over the Corman-Drosten paper, which initially proposed the rt-PCR COVID test, due to its rapid publication one day after it was submitted (without peer review), in a journal for which 2 of the paper’s authors declined to mention that they were also editors (?!?), & which was immediately endorsed, before publication, by the first non-medical doctor DG of the WHO.
rt-PCR tests & hence COVID case statistics have thus stunk for a long time.
The President of Tanzania (Chem. Ph.D?), getting positive COVID tests on pawpaw & goat samples seemed humorous at the time (love how the MS swarmed his dead self with denigration & false claims about his passing to suggest that he got some kind of comeuppance – not very ‘Woke’).
The Lisbon Appeal Court ruling that rt-PCR tests were unreliable was nice for Portugal.
The Borger report which finally exposed Drosten to peer review was damning.
And, incredibly, the WHO itself finally came out and tacitly admitted that rt-PCR tests with a cycle threshold over 35 were invalid, in new guidance issued exactly a year after adopting the dubious test in the first place & scaring the bejesus out of everybody, day in, day out for 12 months.
With the new WHO ‘guidance’ released on 20th January 2021, the number of cases predictably plummeted. Of course, the decline in numbers is supposed to be due to the wonders of vaccination, despite the fact that this tremendous decline in case numbers happened across regions & states irrespective of how many or how fully people had been vaccinated.
So on those 2 points alone, even if I could bring my self to trawl through another stack of papers analysing the dangers of COVID, and assume that I’m in any way qualified to understand what they’re going on about, I’m not particularly inclined to because the very source data seems compromised, fudged, massaged, politicised or whatever.