The Friday 10: Edition #4

My favorite reads this week and more 📖

Mar 18, 2022

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Jen Psaki says it’s unknown if older people are more vulnerable to covid:

Reporter: “79 years old…if the President of the United States were to get covid, might be more serious than…uh…someone in their 20’s?”

Jen Psaki: “Well, we don’t know that.”

First, a numerical refutation:

921 Americans age 18 and younger have died of covid.

719,600 Americans age 65 and older have died of covid.
The total population of the first group (73 million) is bigger than the second (54 million).

Folks, the CDC has known about the disparities in risk profiles since April 2020, essentially one month into the pandemic if we’re going by WHO’s official declaration on March 11. This is why it’s inexcusable that lockdowns were prioritized over the focused protection of our most vulnerable. You can't say “we didn't know” if you published things that say you knew.

It was always known, though rarely acknowledged, that the “zero-covid” mindset and the draconian mitigation measures this mentality brought about would have a disproportionately negative impact on the people least equipped to handle the burden: the impoverished, minorities (often for complex topographical reasons), and kids. The idea that we could successfully eradicate an airborne respiratory virus was a pipe dream that policymakers should've dispensed with as soon as it was proposed. Instead, they pursued this course of action and sold it with absolute certitude as something they knew it was not: the answer.

Even in the fairytale scenario in which America somehow managed to “defeat covid” by way of heavy-handed restrictions here in the states, there was still the tiny issue of this extant airborne virus in other parts of the world. Were we going to isolate in the U.S. (are you familiar with our southern border?) and hope for a vaccine — an immunizing one — to come around sooner rather than later? Or was the long-term plan to sit tight and wait for every other country to do their part in banishing covid off the face of the earth? How, pray tell, do you propose we enforce zero-covid policies in, say, the Hindu Kush? Do you think they have Zoom and DoorDash? Is it feasible for these people — people who have to work very hard to make ends meet (child labor is common from the age of five and involves both genders), predominantly through agriculture — to abide by a moratorium on farming at a subsistence level until Democrats in America felt sufficiently comfortable? How about the slums in Brazil, those clusters of shanties where hundreds of people practically live on top of one another, surviving off landfills—what’s the plan supposed to be?

But so yes, Mrs. Psaki, we do know this; we’ve known covid mortality is heavily stratified by age since the very beginning of this mess.

The figure is a bar chart showing that the rates of hospitalization for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) increase with age and describes how everyone can protect themselves.

The above graph is from an MMWR report posted on the CDC’s website on April 8, 2020: “Hospitalization Rates and Characteristics of Patients Hospitalized with Laboratory-Confirmed Coronavirus Disease 2019 — COVID-NET, 14 States, March 1–30, 2020.”

You know, this uniquely modern phenomenon where by our benevolent overlords and the mainstream media combine forces to fanatically dismiss and decry as false certain things that ordinary folks know to be true seems like quite the slippery slope, doesn't it?