https://www.redstate.com/michael_th...sion-about-lockdowns-but-masks-are-no-better/
...As I pointed out in my May column on this and other dangerous lockdown-lies, “if you look closely at all those explanations we were given of what “social distancing” is supposed to accomplish, you’ll see that great care is always taken never to claim that fewer people will contract COVID-19.”
That’s because social distancing can’t decrease the number of infections. Nothing short of developing an effective vaccine can.
For the virus to go away, enough of us have to become immune to deprive it of a sufficient number of carriers to reach the rest. Until that threshold for herd immunity is reached, the COVID-19 virus isn’t going away. And neither lockdowns nor any other measures designed to slow down the rate at which it spreads do anything to lower its threshold for herd immunity.
In far too many cases those pushing for lockdowns encouraged the false belief that we were going to lower the ultimate number of people contracting COVID-19 by failing to explicitly acknowledge that the point of lockdowns was, instead, only to get “the same large number of patients arriv[ing] at the hospital at a slower rate.
Here’s the Center for Global Development’s resident expert on global outbreak preparedness, Jeremy Konyndyk, in the middle of a long techno-rant urging us to flatten the curve, but, nonetheless, admitting we’ll wind up with the “same number of cases.”
Here’s a Washington Post ode to the beneficent wonders of social distancing, informing us with surprising and commendable honesty that “the reason [to engage in social distancing] isn’t that it will stop the virus; it’s likely the same number of people will ultimately still get sick.”
Here’s infectious disease specialist Cherise Rohr-Allegrini trying to prepare us for the effort flattening the curve will require, but noting that the point isn’t to lower the number of infections but instead to “spread that same number of cases over a longer period of time.”
The average age of those who succumb to the virus is 78 years old. That’s the average age.
In fact, of the 10 countries where data on the median fatality age is available, there isn’t a single one in which it’s less than 80. In Sweden, whose leaders decided against locking down, the median fatality age is 86.
A disease so “deadly” that in No-lockdown Sweden where schools, bars, restaurants, hairdressers etc etc all remained open, with no masks. The median age of fatalities is 86-years-old. That’s higher than the average life expectancy. pic.twitter.com/rMdJ22ZCWO
— paint it black (@CollinsMikeyc) July 16, 2020
The relentless state of fear most Americans have been driven into is completely unjustified. We have a ton of data now and it’s clear that COVID-19 is no more deadly and, indeed, likely less deadly to the young and healthy than the seasonal flu.
In fact, even COVID-19’s high U.S. death rate among the elderly is largely a result of the inexplicable decision by several Democratic governors to force infected patients into nursing homes.
If you remove just six states with extraordinarily high nursing home deaths from the data, COVID-19 never even reached the CDC’s definition of an epidemic.
Apart from only increasing the amount of time we have to deal with COVID-19, wearing masks, assuming they are effective, creates the impression that we need to fear COVID-19 more than the flu, feeds the state of panic Americans are in, and delays our return to normal living.
