A READER from Michigan writes:

I have been following your posts about coronavirus with interest. It is clear that there is an unbelievable power grab and wealth transfer happening right before our eyes. About that you and I are in agreement.  Thank you for continuing to write about it and bring awareness to this issue.

However, you have been rightly questioning how it is that hospitals could be overwhelmed by the coronavirus pandemic when so many more people die annually of influenza. I had the same question, so I asked my husband, who is a nurse at University of Michigan hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Michigan is one of the hardest hit states for COVID-19 infections at present.

First of all, you may be seeing posts on social media claiming that hospitals in southeastern Michigan are completely overwhelmed, have run out of equipment, and have no place to put patients. As of today, my husband says this is not true (although it certainly could happen in the future).  He has friends who work in Detroit hospitals who say that their hospitals are very full and very busy and everyone is a bit stressed and they are beginning to run low on masks and gowns, but at present they are not completely overwhelmed or out of anything entirely.

University of Michigan hospital has been preparing but also at present is not full. My husband‘s cardiac telemetry unit will be converted on Monday to an all COVID-19 unit but at present it just doesn’t look like it will be full.  Hopefully it will stay that way.

So why are there concerns that the hospitals could in fact become very overwhelmed due to COVID-19 and thus we must all stay quarantined at home? This is what my husband said:

First, remember that the COVID-19 patients are in addition to all the other regular flu patients and patients with other needs. This could represent a big increase over the usual number of patients that are being seen in the month of March, which is always a very busy season at the hospital.

Second, COVID-19 patients seem to require ventilators more often than the average influenza patient does. This could potentially lead to a shortage of ventilators (which I hasten to add is not currently happening in Michigan although it could).

Third, it seems like COVID-19 is highly contagious, more so than a regular seasonal flu is, although these statistics are very much up in the air right now because no one really knows how many people have already had it and recovered. But the infection does seem to spread very quickly compared to the flu. The idea with keeping everyone home, as I’m sure you’ve heard, is to keep too many people from getting infected at once, which could potentially overwhelm the hospitals.

And most importantly, when considering the potential for the healthcare system to become overwhelmed at some point, you need to look at the weekly, not the yearly, death rate. Take the state of New York for example. Over the past week, around 500 people have died from COVID-19 complications; last year at this time, 159 people died from complications of influenza in New York State (Source)

The weekly death rate is much higher with COVID-19 at present.

So, the idea that we need a quarantine to slow the rate of COVID-19 infections down is not entirely without merit. Having said that, I don’t know if anybody knows yet whether this was the right choice or not. I suspect we won’t have an answer to that until after this whole thing is over with. There’s just not enough data at this point, but it’s not necessarily bad to err on the side of caution when trying to save human life.

Laura writes:

Thank you for your thoughtful comments. I appreciate your concern.

You write:

[I]t’s not necessarily bad to err on the side of caution when trying to save human life.

Well, let’s consider this: An average of 102 people die in car accidents in this country every day, and most of them are healthy and in the prime of life. To err on the side of caution, we should ban automobiles. All of these deaths could be prevented. The case for a car ban is not any weaker than the case for this shutdown of the American economy due to what Dr. Anthony Fauci, who irresponsibly predicted millions of Americans would die, has admitted is essentially a serious seasonal flu similar to past years when no mass quarantine was initiated.

The government and media have never hit us over the head day after day after day with the gruesome reality of traffic fatalities. We don’t hear about all the doctors and nurses who are stressed due to traffic accidents.

Why? Because it’s not in their interest.

Scarlet fever and polio killed and crippled tens of thousands of young people in the 20th century, but the economy was not shut down to prevent the spread of these terrible, infectious conditions and healthy people were not put in quarantine. Those who were sick were isolated. I know they say coronavirus is especially contagious, but Taiwan has been able to contain it without a massive shutdown. In a country of 26 million 81 miles off the coast of China, the virus has reportedly killed three people. (See Worldometer/Coronavirus) And if a total lockdown is the answer, why has it not prevented some 10,000 deaths in Italy?

I accept that this is very contagious but even so it is not producing catastrophic conditions.

The economic shutdown is causing, and will cause, a great deal of suffering. It’s not so bad for the professional class, but for the working class in all kinds of service jobs and for small businesses this is a nightmare. Sudden job loss causes heart conditions, depression, alcoholism, and social breakdown. An atmosphere of fear saps initiative and causes political instability.

The economy should be re-opened and we should do everything we can to protect the vulnerable, short of stopping most normal business activity.

More than 97 percent of those who died in New York had other serious conditions. That they tested positive of COVID at the time of death does not mean it was the cause of death. These people are dying of old age and cancer, not coronavirus.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to transfer patients in need of ventilators from over-loaded hospitals to other facilities since it appears many large hospitals are not over-burdened? In Pittsburgh, for example, they have hardly any cases and have excellent medical facilities. And the U.S. military is capable of erecting field hospitals and deploying its own medical staff if need be. We are far from needing that. I spoke to a doctor last week who has a busy practice in suburban Philadelphia. He said the flu is over here. He has had five cases of coronavirus. Four have recovered and one, a woman with a history of stroke and diabetes, was sadly in intensive care. Meanwhile, the entire area is in lockdown.

This is causing far more pain than it is preventing.

And it has established dangerous precedents of curtailing freedom of movement and assembly. Unchecked government is lethal too. The fact that many governments quickly initiated similar responses suggests a global plan was made a long time ago.

— Comments —

Rudiger writes:

I would also suggest alcohol. It is far more deadly than car accidents. It kills almost 90,000 a year. But wait, there’s more! It ruins lives, it guts families, causes divorce, mental and physical suffering, and is a huge drain on all kinds of economic areas: sick days, medical expenses, and therapy. It’s time we ban the poison!

Reader from Michigan responds:

Thank you for offering to remove my initials. I guess you could just put “a reader from Michigan writes” or something like that, but I’m not overly worried.

Just a few thoughts in response to your post…

Banning cars is not analogous because the rate of car accidents stays steady, and car accidents are not contagious. The examples of scarlet fever and polio make more sense because these are also infectious diseases.  It’s hard to compare what was done back then with what should be done now, though, because we live in this crazy globalized world now with high levels of travel between different regions of the world.

To me the best comparison is with Ebola. The death rate is 50% for that disease, and when it hit here a couple of years ago, the world did not come to a standstill. I’m really curious about that. Why quarantine the populace for COVID19 but not Ebola?

You write: “Taiwan has been able to contain it without a massive shutdown. In a country of 26 million 81 miles off the coast of China, the virus has reportedly killed three people.”

For sure. After the SARS outbreak, they developed a lot of effective protocols that the rest of the world should learn from.  Part of putting everyone in lock down I’m sure was due to a lack of having our own protocols in place.

“Why has it not prevented some 10,000 deaths in Italy?”

I don’t know for sure, but what I’ve read online is that Italy has a very large Chinese population in the hardest-hit regions that was traveling freely back-and-forth up until around January. Perhaps most of the people who are dying were already infected by then?

“The economic shutdown is causing, and will cause, a great deal of suffering. It’s not so bad for the professional class, but for the working class in all kinds of service jobs and for small businesses this is a nightmare. Sudden job loss causes heart conditions, depression, alcoholism, and social breakdown. An atmosphere of fear saps initiative and causes political instability.”

Yep. No argument with that. We don’t know exactly what the situation would look like if we just left everything open because there is no country that is doing that (Taiwan hasn’t shut everything down but they have put into place other fairly stringent protocols). It’s possible that it wouldn’t look very different than an average flu year or it’s possible that it would be very destructive. Because no one knows, I think the original idea was probably to err on the side of caution.  Now there seems to be a mass hysteria effect that is spiraling out of control, though.

“More than 97 percent of those who died in New York had other serious conditions. That they tested positive of COVID at the time of death does not mean it was the cause of death. These people are dying of old age and cancer, not coronavirus.”

True, but the flu statistics are gathered in the exact same way. So if we’re comparing flu and coronavirus deaths, it’s apples to apples. And COVID-19 seems to be killing people at a much greater WEEKLY rate than the flu usually does on average.

“Wouldn’t it make more sense to transfer patients in need of ventilators from over-loaded hospitals to other facilities since it appears many large hospitals are not over-burdened? In Pittsburgh, for example, they have hardly any cases and have excellent medical facilities. And the U.S. military is capable of erecting field hospitals and deploying its own medical staff if need be. We are far from needing that. I spoke to a doctor last week who has a busy practice in suburban Philadelphia. He said the flu is over here. He has had five cases of coronavirus. Four have recovered and one, a woman with a history of stroke and diabetes, was sadly in intensive care. Meanwhile, the entire area is in lockdown.”

This is what I keep asking my husband. He has YET to have a COVID patient who doesn’t have underlying health problems.  However, he said U of M will be starting to get transfer patients from the Detroit hospitals because they really are filling up.

I was pretty much in support of quarantine up through Easter because there was so much that was unknown. I see now that quarantine is scheduled to continue through the end of April. I think that’s due to hysteria more than anything else, but I guess we will find out. If it truly does kill the 200,000 Americans Dr. Fauci is saying it might, then I guess it was worth it to quarantine everyone.  If not, then I guess it wasn’t. I really think this is one of those situations where only hindsight is going to be 20/20.

“And it has established dangerous precedents of curtailing freedom of movement and assembly. Unchecked government is lethal too. “

Agreed.

“The fact that many governments quickly initiated similar responses suggests a global plan was made a long time ago.”

I’ve read several articles this week about both the Israeli and American governments tracking everyone’s cell phones, ostensibly to see overall how well the population is complying with quarantine. I don’t know if “a global plan was made a long time ago” or if this is just an example of letting no crisis go to waste, but I don’t think it will stop when the virus does.

Here’s the thing though. The masks are finally coming off. The average person can now see that we live in a state of constant surveillance, that our debt-based economy has turned us into near-slaves to a tiny oligarchy (did you see David Geffen’s social media posts from

his quarantine yacht?!), and that our news media is so vile and corrupt that they can’t be trusted at all.  Those of us who have been pointing this stuff out for years are used to being called conspiracy theorists, but now no one can really argue with us because it’s right out in the open.

Anyway, to summarize my position: from the evidence that I see, it seems like public health officials instigated quarantine out of a genuine desire to slow or stop the spread of COVID-19, a serious public health threat, because there were a lot of unknown variables. Since that time, it is very clear that world governments have seized this opportunity to massively increase their access to protected phone data. I think it’s also been an experiment in just how far they can go with suspending civil liberties.  Apparently, they can go pretty far (for example, today I read that the Serbian government has told people they can no longer even leave the house to take their dogs for a walk! I guess they’re just supposed to let their dogs poop on the floor or something – madness!).

Thanks again for the discussion!

Laura writes:

You’re welcome, and thanks.

I haven’t had a chance to go through all your points yet but I just want to comment on your statement that this cannot be compared to banning automobiles. I wasn’t suggesting we would introduce a quarantine, but that we would take the most serious measures, regardless of the economic consequences, of preventing these deaths. That’s what the quarantines and economic shutdowns are about: preventing death. So I would say that it is still a good analogy.

Laura adds:

You mention the weekly death rate for coronavirus. I’m not buying these figures until they are examined by the public. I suspect that people who die of other reasons but are tested positive for COVID are being labeled corona deaths. We need to know more about the events that preceded these deaths. I’m not testing the reporting on this yet. There’s too much politicization of these deaths to trust the figures. That doesn’t mean we should just blow them off and not take precautions. We should take reasonable precautions.

Please follow and like us: