Clearly, The Data Is Wrong
Because The Pandemic Panic Narrative Could NEVER Be Wrong. Right?
“Health experts” concede the extant data on COVID-19 cases shows infections to be a fraction of what they were.
That merely means the data is wrong, and that we’re missing or ignoring huge swaths of cases. After all, their social circles are “flooded” with COVID cases, so there simply must be a fresh infection wave rising.
Yes, that is literally their argument now.
But many people in the country may be noticing what seems to be a flood of cases in their social circles.
Health experts say this anecdotal evidence may not be simply coincidence, as the U.S. may be in a “hidden” wave — one much larger than reported data would suggest.
“There's a lot of COVID out there. I see it in my social circles, in my kids' schools and in the hospital employee infection numbers,” Dr. Shira Doron, an infectious disease physician and hospital epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, told ABC News. “We are clearly in a wave.”
What is clear is that the “experts” are frustrated. As the Omicron wave waned in this country, many local health departments and hospitals no longer report cases and hospitalizations to HHS and the CDC, and community testing centers are being phased out in favor of “at home” test kits.
This is due in part to changes in data collection and reporting and the proliferation of at-home tests. Some state officials report that health departments and healthcare facilities have also ended traditional tracking of COVID-19 patients, which epidemiologists say make it more difficult to know how many patients are coming into hospitals in need of care.
How have the “experts” responded to the decline in reporting? By insisting that the cases are out there, just unreported.
Former FDA Commisioner Scott Gottlieb insists the official numbers are picking up only one in seven or eight cases.
White House coronavirus response coordinator Ashish Ja just “knows” the cases are higher than what’s being reported.
And President Joe Biden’s new coronavirus response coordinator, Dr. Ashish Jha, acknowledged that there are "a lot of infections" last week, likely the result of highly infectious omicron subvariants spreading across the country.
“We know that the number of infections is actually substantially higher than that. It's hard to know exactly how many but we know that a lot of people are getting diagnosed using home tests,” Jha explained.
Kansas City Local Reported Data MUST Be Wrong
Even local health officials are insisting the reported data must be wrong.
According to doctors with the University of Kansas Health System, the Kansas City metro area is experiencing between two and five times the reported number of COVID cases.
Doctors at The University of Kansas Health System said that underreporting of positive COVID-19 tests means that actual case numbers are likely between two and five times higher than official data suggests. That’s because community testing events, which report results to state officials and the CDC, have largely been replaced by home testing kits.
In other words, the data—even the local data—is wrong.
The Kansas City local dashboard is not to be trusted on its case reporting, which is showing 493 cases for the week of May 21.
Nor should it be trusted on COVID hospitalizations, which on May 20 was reported as being 16.
That this local data reconciles to the CDC per-county metrics is something you should just ignore. It means nothing that the CDC rates Jackson County (where most of Kansas City is located) at the “Low” Community Level. Consider it irrelevant that the 7-day average for the county is ~162 cases.
Disregard the CDC reporting that only 2.4% of hospital beds are occupied by COVID patients.
What matters—what really matters—is what the “experts” are saying: there are a lot of cases, there are a lot of people sick with COVID, and places across the country are experiencing “hidden” waves of infection. Since the data fails to show this, the data must clearly be wrong.
Do Not Believe The Boston Numbers Either
Circling back to Dr Shira Doron’s (quoted above) home turf of Boston, the locally reported data—data which the city leaders explicitly use to make public health decisions regarding COVID-19—we are told is equally unreliable.
Taking Dr. Doron’s statement from above, “We are clearly in a wave.”, by implication we should not trust the Boston Public Health Dashboard showing that COVID-19 positive tests trending ever so slighly down in recent weeks.
Nor should we take any comfort in the hospitalization trend rising much more slowly than for Omicron earlier in the year.
That the local data tracks with what is reported by the CDC? Meaningless.
It is meaningless that the case trends reported by the CDC match the local dashboard.
It is meaningless that the CDC hospitalization data aligns with what local government is using.
If The Data Is Wrong, The CDC Is Wrong—So Why Trust The CDC?
Yet the “experts” are contradicting themselves with this narrative shift. By disputing the CDC numbers, they are challenging the credibility of the CDC Community Levels metric, and the credibility of all decisions made using that metric for guidance.
If the CDC data is wrong, how is it reasonable for Los Angeles Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer to explicitly defer to the CDC when assessing the need for a new mask mandate?
If the CDC data is wrong, how is it reasonable for Pittsburgh Public School officials to simply ignore the data reported on the Allegheny County COVID-19 Dashboard?
On the other hand, if the data local government is using for public health decisions is wrong, how can local government be making any public health decisions?
If the data is wrong, how are individual anecdotal testimonies about how many people one knows to be sick any better?
If the local COVID dashboards are inaccurate, if all the data is wrong, on what base does the Pandemic Panic Narrative then reside?
It is one thing to point out that data may be incomplete or inaccurate. It is quite another thing to as a consequence jettison the data altogether and argue that people should trust the “experts” and their gut instincts.
Yet that is what the premise of a “hidden” wave of COVID-19 infection demands—that we must disregard the evidence and rely solely on whatever the “experts” proclaim to be true. We must disregard the broad trends shown by the data and trust the “experts” to tell us when disease is increasing and decreasing in our communities.
After all, the Pandemic Panic Narrative can never be wrong. Right?
Interesting. Oddly enough, I tend to agree with them here - the data is wrong - because the CDC simply doesn't want a record of how many vaccinated people are getting reinfected multiple times.
There was never really pandemic, it was only media and politicians who claimed this. Every other voice was silenced and heavily censored.