There's No Second Covid-19 Wave. There Is A CaseDemic Panic Of Tests

Ontario premier Doug Ford is telling his fellow citizens that Ontario could be entering “a second wave” of Covid-19. Naturally this dark warning has sent the Trillium province into panic, many demanding more lockdowns/ mask mania/ school closures. 

It’s unsettling. Especially since what Ford is describing is not a second wave of Covid-19 at all. The worst of the virus has, for all intents, been over since June in Ontario. What Ford is describing today is a CaseDemic in Ontario and Canada as test results continue to produce a lot of what Luddite media call “cases” but are often just PCR tests showing viral fragments, dead virus, some results from those who’ve recovered from an earlier infection. (As we pointed out on August 5, true cases require hospitalization and treatment for the Virus. These are positives. )

Conversely daily deaths in the entire nation of Canada are down from 222 on May 31 to single digits (from Sept. 17-27 averaging 6.9). Shouldn’t there be a connection between positives and deaths? What’s going on here is the public’s inability (reflected by Ford) to distinguish probability from possibility.

The same CaseDemic pattern emerged after the Swine flu epidemic in 2008-2009. When deaths dropped dramatically toward the end of the pandemic health officials created a CaseDemic of testing. Numbers spiked, officials scratched their heads and the media went full panic. 

Strangely, while the testing produced startling numbers, deaths from Swine Flu flatlined. Eventually, officials and health types realized that they were chasing a ghost and ceased the furious testing. (For this data and more in this column we can’t recommend highly enough the work of Irish researcher Ivor Cummins who clearly illustrates the disconnect between the data and the political football of COVID-19:

While many are urging Ford to re-think his draconian strategies Ford remains fixated on PCR tests and the models produced in February by the WHO and the Imperial College of Medicine. They predicted over two million Covid-19 American deaths— numbers that exaggerate reality by a factor of +15. (Almost all early WHO and ICME policies been reversed 180 degrees since February.) 

With a minimum of effort Ford could have learned that a major factor in the spike in 2020 deaths was the dip in expected mortality the previous two winters. In short, many of the unexpected deaths in 2020 were fragile people who, sadly, would have died in the previous years. It took Covid-19 to re-balance the mortality scales.

Politically Ford must be seen to take COVID-19 seriously lest the Toronto Star accuse him of blood on his hands. This, however, has led him— and many other leaders— to extreme caution. For instance, Victoria (B.C.) General Hospital has had no Covid-19 positive patients admitted in 2020, but the hospital was almost empty for months. Now it is overflowing as those denied service or who remained at home earlier in the year seek care for cancer, drug abuse, cardiac issues etc. (By opening their wards are hospitals admitting that Ford’s Second Wave is a mirage?)

Covid-19 critic Alex Berenson points out that the Covid Doomsday Book is misleading. “About three million Americans will die of all causes this year. Even with our insane counting rules, fewer than 10 percent will be #Covid-linked. Worldwide, 60 million people will die; maybe 2 percent of the deaths will be #Covid. (In a world population of 7.8 billion) We have lost all perspective.”

So why have we lost perspective? Media. By its nature, media prefers to deal in human interest, not probabilities. It bleeds it ledes. Who wants to deal with all those numbers showing mortality by age has an average age of 82 and virtually no one under 19 dies of COVID19?

Better give one heartrending tale and extrapolate it to the nation to scare suburban Karens and Neils watching The National or CTV. People who willingly buy lottery tickets with infinitesimally poor odds of success can easily exaggerate their likelihood of contracting Covid-19. Thus the media inundates by anecdote instead of cumulative effect.

The perfect example of this distortion is “unarmed blacks killed by police” meme in the U.S. The actual number (13 in 2019) as a percentage of 37 million black population is 0.0000003. Yet each death has been endlessly detailed and scrutinized by #BLM and its media acolytes until TV watchers and readers are led to believe it’s a real genocide not a statistical anomaly. 

No media outlet has chosen to provide the same blanket coverage to black v. black shootings, suicide, drug overdoses, cancer and economic collapse that are a far greater risk than cops shooting unarmed blacks. The laws of probability and uncertainty are foreign ground in the contemporary media.  

Professor Jeffery S. Rosenthal described the phenomenon in his 2005 book Struck By Lightning. People, he says, will accept larger losses of life in methods with which they are familiar. Car crashes. Cancer. War. But a rampaging virus is beyond their comfort zone, and, hyped by the media, Covid-19 becomes a plague even if 99.98 percent of people know they will not die of the virus. 

Statisticians like Rosenthal could tell Ford that the Law of Large Numbers should calm the citizenry. “This law says that if you repeat any random event often enough… the good luck will cancel out the bad, and you will be left with ‘approximately’ the correct average; that is, a number that mimics the true probabilities.” Check out Canada’s minuscule death numbers. That is reality.

But screw your numbers, that doesn’t win you a Pulitzer Prize. If you dare challenge the media on the Large Numbers they revert to “every life is precious”, branding you a cold killer with no compassion or humanity (see Joe Biden in Tuesday’s debate). And so Biden pillories Trump’s record on black deaths knowing he has something greater than numbers at his back. He has fear and ignorance. Which is his stock in trade.

Pray they don’t keep being the same for Doug Ford.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his next book Personal Account with Tony Comper will be available on BruceDowbigginBooks.ca this fall.