By Scott Turner, Corvallis
I’m sure I’m not the only one wondering what a real pandemic looks like. First off, an explanation of a concept that I use as an important yardstick. Dunbar’s Number is a number proposed in the 60’s by an anthropologist estimating the number of people an individual could cognitively recognize and place them in the social order. In other words, the quantity of persons you could have some level of acquaintance with. Gather those people in your mind as we move on here.
The word pandemic is a Greek word, demos = population, pan = of or relating to all. In relation to sickness or medical application there is not a definitive meaning but it generally refers to a sustained transmission from person to person across a wide region of areas and countries across the globe. In a February interview with Dr. Fauci, he said “it really is borderline semantics.” Since we are left with generalities on the grammar, let’s look at what history has labeled pandemic.
The Plague of Galen, 2nd century, mortality rates between 25-33%. The Black Death, 14th century, mortality rates 25-60%. Small pox, which spanned many centuries, killed 3 out of 10 of its victims with a mortality rate of up to 80% among children. There are many others, but I’ll end this brief grisly history of pandemic with the Spanish Flu (1918-1920) where up to 20% of its victims succumbed to the virus. Interesting side note here, the media censors downplayed the mortality rate in the allied countries in WWI for fear it would damage morale but fully reported deaths in Spain, which had remained neutral, which is how the name came to be… Hmm, media manipulating the story for the benefit of a larger narrative. Yeah, but that was the old days, right?
I ask you to picture those 150 people that you know both closely as well as that neighbor that you wave to but have not talked with yet. Picture 30 of them dead (20%), picture 90 (60%) of those faces gone forever. Picture 10 of the children that you know and now erase 8 of them. I thought about apologizing in advance for this but if you have the hubris to advocate shutting down the world and mandating social distancing and dehumanizing us with masks, I think you are grown up enough to do this exercise with me. You know calls to suicide hotlines are up 600%, right? Small businesses are being decimated across the country. This is adult stuff here and if you are not pushing back against the narrative then you are culpable for the results. Unlike Spain, you do not get to be neutral.
The CDC says the number infected with SARS-CoV-2 is somewhere between 6 and 24 times the amount of confirmed cases. Using the most current numbers I could find of 6.4 million cases and 188,500 deaths in the US and then multiplying the cases by 6 and 24 respectively that gives us a mortality rate of .005 to .0012. So, go back to the mental line up of your Dunbar number. How many of them are still here for you to hug or wave at? Personally, the engineer I work with got this and said it was the worst 3 weeks of his life so I do have a personal touch-point here but thankfully that is the extent of it.
Folks, this is no pandemic. Then that begs the question, if not, then what is it? Why this insistence that it is? Why this non-stop reinforcing of the narrative on mainstream media? I have my ideas and they correlate the level to which we are being manipulated to a solution of their making but that is for another letter. As I said in my last letter, courage is the foundation to all other virtue and there is a serious lack of courage out there right now. I hope this is an en-couragement to people to start questioning this story that is being pushed and then start asking why?
Roger Mitchell says
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one,” –Charles MacKay
If this is true, then we have seen the rush to madness and must wait patiently for the recovery from it.