As many will know from previous posts, I have struggled to understand the push for continuing to have the nation on lockdown. Now there is a renewed push to return the country to lockdown status. What is the motivation behind this push? Most anyone will tell you it is due to the huge increase/spike in new COVID-19 cases. Others will include deaths. While we are seeing huge increases in the number of people testing positive for COVID-19, we do not see the same in numbers of deaths. Rather than go into panic mode and hide our heads in the sand once again, shouldn't we understand what is causing the surge?
At the beginning of May, the number of tests being performed each day was barely 200k. Today we average between 800k and 1 million, a four to fivefold increase. If COVID-19 has spread relatively uniformly throughout the populace, we should expect to see a four to fivefold increase in the number of positive results. Since April, the quantity and availability of antibody testing devices have increased dramatically. Many, if not all states, are performing both virus identification tests (PCR) and antibody tests. In the media, however, these test results are conflated and reported within the same numbers. Why is this important? If an individual tests positive for the antibodies, he/she has already resolved the infection or is on the way to resolving the infection. It should be essential to make this distinction in the numbers. We hear a lot about asymptomatic individuals, shouldn't we want to know how many people fall into this category?
Now to the question posed in the title of this post, why the renewed push for lockdowns? The answer came to me as I read an article about a newly published research paper. The paper purports to have tracked variants of the virus using the data from an app where individuals recorded their symptoms. The data was collected back in March and April. Best on the descriptions of the individuals' symptoms, the scientists claimed to have been able to identify six variants of the virus. How ludicrous is this? At the very most, they could have identified six manifestations of symptoms in different individuals. But it is reasonable to expect the symptoms of any number of diseases will manifest differently in different individuals. As I read this article, it struck me; here is why so many scientists and medical professionals are calling for increased lockdowns, restrictions, and creating panic once again. They are afraid that if people return to normal, it will kill their cash cow.
From the beginning of the year, there has been a massive increase in funding for studying COVID-19. We have seen every kind of study. There have been studies on masks, studies on contamination, studies on travel distance of airborne particles, studies on infection rates in humans, animals, and other species. There have been studies on genome sequencing, protein spikes, enzymes, symptoms, lethality, model development, projections, and many other studies. Thousands of scientists and medical professionals worldwide have been able to cash in on the demand for studies. Hundreds of organizations and countries have been on a spending spree in the hope of discovering an answer or cure. If suddenly things were to return to normal, what would happen to this newfound cash flow?
It is no different than in the early days of the Global Warming crisis. Scientists around the world suddenly found a cash cow. Governments and institutions everywhere were willing to throw many at anyone willing to produce a study. Obviously, the study conclusions had to reflect the fact Global Warming was real and of grave concern. This same confirmation bias exists in all the studies performed on COVID-19, except for a few. Otherwise, the funding dries up, and what would the researchers do then?
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