There is an old story about NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which I might have mentioned somewhere on the blog before – I can’t remember exactly when or where, that does tend to happen when you’ve written something approaching 3,000 posts over not quite 8 years of writing – in which some sort of space probe smashed into Mars at extremely high speed and turned into a metallic hail on the surface of the Red Planet.

Why did it happen?

Because the brilliant engineers at JPL – and give them their due, they ARE brilliant – forgot to convert from Queen of England units (i.e. Imperial) to metric, or something along those lines.

It is well worth reading about the entire story to understand the cock-up in full detail. Essentially, the engineers at Lockheed got their wires crossed with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory software engineers. The Lockheed boffins were using Imperial units to express force in pound-seconds, but the JPL engineers stuck to their default of Newton-seconds.

The problem is that nobody thought to check between software packages to see what the units of measurement were. And the result of this minor screw-up was the complete and catastrophic failure of a mission that cost in excess of $327 million if you add up everything, and the loss of a $200 million probe.

I bring this up because the actual subject of this post brought it up in his article about how a far more severe f***-up in terms of scale resulted in tens of thousands, maybe HUNDREDS of thousands, of excess deaths around the world – all because some eggheads couldn’t figure out the difference between an infection fatality rate, and a case fatality rate:

First, there’s the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR). This is the total number of people who are infected by a disease and the number of them who die. This figure includes those who have no symptoms at all, or only very mild symptoms – those who stayed at home, coughed a bit and watched Outbreak.

Then there’s the Case Fatality Rate (CFR). This is the number of people suffering serious symptoms, who are probably ill enough to be in hospital. Clearly, people who are seriously ill – the “cases” – are going to have a higher mortality rate than those who are infected, many of whom don’t have symptoms. Put simply – all cases are infections, but not all infections are cases.

Which means that the CFR will always be far higher than the IFR. With influenza, the CFR is around ten times as high as the IFR. Covid seems to have a similar proportion.

Now, clearly, you do not want to get these figures mixed up. By doing so you would either wildly overestimate, or wildly underestimate, the impact of Covid. But mix these figures up, they did.

The error started in America, but didn’t end there. In healthcare, the US is very much the dog that wags the tail. The figures they come up with are used globally.

On February 28, 2020, an editorial was released by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the editorial stated: “… the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza.”

They added that influenza has a CFR of approximately 0.1 percent. One person in a thousand who gets it badly, dies.

But that quoted CFR for influenza was ten times too low – they meant to say the IFR, the Infection Fatality Rate, for influenza was 0.1 percent. This was their fatal – quite literally – mistake.

The mistake was compounded. On March 11, the same experts testified to Congress, stating that Covid’s CFR was likely to be about one percent, so one person dying from a hundred who fell seriously ill. Which, as time has passed, has proved to be pretty accurate.

At this meeting, they compared the likely impact of Covid to flu. But they used the wrong CFR for influenza, the one stated in the previous NEJM editorial. 0.1 percent, or one in a thousand. The one that was ten times too low.

Try, if you can, to process this without spitting your coffee all over your keyboard.

These are scientists from the CDC, supposedly the gold standard in immunological research and virological outbreaks. These are the people that Americans trust to give them the best available information about new and ongoing health risks, ranging from measles to influenza to Ebola.

And they confused EVERYONE, including themselves, with a fatality rate that is TEN TIMES HIGHER than what is actually observed, for a pandemic that has crippled the entire global economy.

As we have discovered over the past six months or so, COVID-19 does in fact have a pretty low fatality rate. The initial mortality rates of 3-5% turned out to be wildly overblown. Now, that is excusable given the fact that, back in February and March, when Corona-chan was really getting around, nobody really understood the disease very well and there was not much by way of empirical evidence to show us who was catching it and who was dying from it.

We now have more than six months’ worth of data, and hundreds of thousands of fatalities, to give us a much better idea of how the disease spreads, who it targets, who is most vulnerable, what the symptoms are, and how to stop it from killing people.

It has been transparently obvious for months that COVID-19 is nearly harmless, statistically speaking, to people under the age of 50 with no existing medical conditions. For healthy youngsters, even those who get a severe form of it are mostly fine – with the exception of the very small proportion of people that have permanent lung damage. We’re still finding out how large that sub-group will be, and the fact remains that those people will have to live with the tragic side-effects of COVID for the rest of their lives.

The elderly and the infirm are definitely at risk. My own parents are at risk – they are exactly in the age range that COVID affects the most, and they have precisely the kinds of health issues (weight problems, immunological disorders, past history of smoking and lung disease, etc.) that put them at risk for this bug.

There are ways to help them by keeping them isolated, that still do not involve shutting off contact with them permanently. There is every reason to treat the elderly with humanity and compassion, while still taking stringent sanitation and hygiene measures to ensure that they are protected. We cannot protect all of them – that’s just reality and life. But we can protect most of them, fairly easily, without taking economy-destroying measures to do so.

The rest of us, though, have little, if anything, to fear. COVID-19 is not a world-ending disease, though, as I pointed out some months ago, it is almost surely a genetically engineered one designed in a lab.

The damage done by COVID on human populations is proving to be as nothing compared to the damage that we have done to ourselves by listening to the so-called “experts”. They screwed up with a simple multiplication issue and ended up exaggerating the threat of COVID-19 to the entire world by a factor of 10.

That doesn’t sound like much – until you remember that the epidemiological models for this disease have pretty much universally proven to be hopelessly wrong. And those models all assumed that a 15-day lockdown would “flatten the curve”, stop hospitals from being overwhelmed, and prevent wholesale collapses of national healthcare systems.

Precisely none of those things happened. In the UK and much of the US, new infections were already trending downwards for days before the lockdowns were implemented. National healthcare systems, and even local ones, were never in any danger of collapse anywhere, except maybe in the Lombardia region of Italy – and even there, the systems buckled but did not break. And now we have a rather queer situation in much of the developed world where hospitals are empty and nurses and doctors are being furloughed because there is literally nothing for them to do.

The basic business of medicine has ground to a halt because “non-essential” operations have ceased – even though many of those operations could have saved the lives of thousands of patients in the long-run.

International travel restrictions probably stopped the virus from spreading too far and too fast initially, but now they are proving to be completely counterproductive. If you look at India, for instance, international travel to and from India has been almost completely shitcanned for more than four months – yet their infection numbers are among the highest in the world.

Their mortality numbers, on the other hand, are quite low. And that is to be expected, because India has some of the most favourable demographics in the entire world when it comes to this disease. The population is young, and while diabetes, obesity, lung disease, and hypertension are serious problems in the country, the fatality numbers are proving to be far lower than any of the initial projections.

It is well past time for the authorities to admit that they panicked. They won’t, of course – that would cost them vast amounts of public credibility and result in a massive global backlash against their stupidity, tyranny, and wastefulness. But the information that we have on hand shows very clearly that authorities around the world made bad policies on the back of bad data and bad evidence fed into bad models.

Even His Most Illustrious, Noble, August, Benevolent, and Legendary Celestial Majesty, the God-Emperor of Mankind, Donaldus Triumphus Magnus Astra, the First of His Name, the Lion of Midnight, may the Lord bless him and preserve him, has not been immune to this problem. He continues to claim that his policies saved 2 million lives. This is false and wrong. There was never any likelihood of “two million” Americans dying from this disease. Even the numbers that we have right now, of approximately 200,000 deaths, are extremely suspect because of the very screwy ways in which COVID deaths are being counted.

Hell, even the number of positive tests that we have are suspect, because these tests keep throwing up so many false positives.

The simple truth is that we have no idea how many people are actually infected. Nor do we have the first clue how many people actually died.

What we do know by now, through simple observation, is that this disease is nowhere near as bad as any of us initially feared. It is nowhere near as bad as SARS. It is nowhere near as bad as MERS. It is nowhere near as bad as H5N1. It is merely about as bad as a severe influenza on a global scale.

As Dr. Malcolm Kendrick points out in his article:

We locked down in fear. We killed tens of thousands unnecessarily, in fear. We crippled the economy, and left millions in fear of their livelihoods. We have trapped abused women and children at home with their abusers. We have wiped out scores of companies, and crushed entire industries.

We stripped out the NHS, and left millions in prolonged pain and suffering, on ever lengthening waiting lists, which have doubled. There have also been tens of thousands of delayed cancer diagnoses – the effects of which are yet to be seen, but the Lancet has estimated at least sixty thousand years of life will be lost.

Lockdown can be seen as a complete and utter disaster. And it was all based on a nonsense, a claim that Covid was going to kill one percent. A claim that can now be seen to be utterly and completely wrong. Sweden, which did not lock down, has had a death rate of 0.0058 percent.

Enough is enough. It is well past time for everyone involved in this colossal global farce to stop panicking, put on his Big Boy pants, admit that huge mistakes were made, and get people back to normal life.

There are many benefits to this pandemic, actually, if you think about it. We now have definitive proof that the cities are not good places to be, and that most white-collar jobs can be done remotely, which – combined with the charming effects of the “peaceful protests” conducted by the Black Looming Menace and the Pantifags – is leading and will lead to a massive exodus to the suburbs. And that is a very good thing.

What is not good is to keep entire populations terrified and panicked about a disease that simply does not do the kind of damage that we expected.

The young and the healthy should get back to work, study, and play. The cities should be left to die on the vine. The elderly and the infirm should be protected inasmuch as is practically and economically feasible. International travel should resume as fast as possible. Gyms and hair salons and restaurants and everything else should reopen and let people in as quickly as possible.

And the “experts” who inflicted this gigantic catastrophe upon us should be held accountable.

Which means, by extension, that the politicians who continue to hold their native populations hostage – almost uniformly of the Left, at least in the USA – should be lined up and tried for treason at this point. And yes, that includes a certain Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has done more than almost any other “expert” to confuse and mislead us during this crisis, and whose pronouncements these days verge on the insane.