The Absurdity of Covid "Cases" | Mises Wire

The Absurdity of Covid "Cases" | Mises Wire

"As always, the story keeps changing: Today's headlines announced Donald and Melania Trump "tested positive" for covid-19. Another claims nineteen thousand Amazon workers "got" covid-19 on the job. Both of these pseudostories are sure to ignite another absurd media frenzy. 

• Remember ventilators, flatten the curve, the next two weeks are crucial, etc.? 
• Remember Nancy Pelosi in Chinatown back in February, urging everyone to visit? 
• Remember Fauci dismissing masks as useless? 

Why should we believe anything the political/media complex tells us now? So what do these headlines really mean? What exactly is a covid "case"? 

Since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, most US media outlets have been exceedingly credulous and complicit in their reporting. Journalists almost uniformly promote what we can call the "prolockdown" narrative, which is to wildly exaggerate the risks from covid-19 to serve a political agenda. They may be motivated to hurt Trump politically, to promote a more socialist "new normal," or simply to drive more clicks and views. Bad news sells. But the bias is clear and undeniable. 

This explains why media outlets use the terms "case" and "infection" so loosely, to the point of actively misinforming the public. All of the endless talk about testing, testing, testing served to obscure two important facts. 

• First, the tests themselves are almost laughably unreliable in producing both false positives and negatives. And what is the point? Are we going to test people again and again, every time they go out to the grocery or bump into a neighbor? 
• Second, detecting virus particles or droplets in a human's respiratory tract tells us very little. It certainly does not tell us they are sick, or transmitting sickness to anyone. 

Take a perfectly healthy person with no particular symptoms and swab the inside of their nose. If the culture shows the presence of staphylococcus aureus, do we insist they have a staph infection? When someone drives to work without incident or accident, do we create statistics about their exposure to traffic?

A virus is not a disease. Only a very small percentage of those exposed to the virus itself--SARS-CoV-2--show any kind of acute respiratory symptoms, or what we can call "coronavirus disease."...Read all! Excellent comments at link.