"gullible blue lockdown states" had high mortality because they got hammered hard and early...
In fact those same states have since had far lower rates of infection and death than dumbass states like South Dakota
And as Berg notes...the mitigation practices used for Covid virtually eliminated the flu. They were less effective against the more virulent and deadly covid bug but they were effective enough to keep the death numbers NOT in the millions
And no ...they didn't just reclassify flu as covid. Neither the numbers nor the symptoms support that stupid claim
No, "flattening the curve" only reduces the rate of infection, but by preventing the spike, it conserves hosts to keeps the virus alive forever, which greatly increases the death total eventually.
Fauci only estimated millions of deaths if we went for herd immunity because he did not account for the fact over half the people, (like children), are already inherently immune, and that those under 40 years of age have 40 times less chance of dying from it than the elderly.
He over estimated by more than a factor of 200.
If we had gone for herd immunity last March, the death toll would have been only about 20,000 instead of half a million.
If not for the vaccine, then "flattening the curve" could have kept the virus alive for decades possibly.
You are very confused about how herd immunity works. The only way to get herd immunity is to attempt to get as many ppl infected with the virus as possible. Unchecked spread like that would naturally result in deaths on a massive scale, before any supposed herd immunity would start taking effect. Furthermore, while covid is very contagious, it's not so contagious that everyone would get it casually. Thus dragging out the time line you would want to achieve herd immunity before the dead toll starts mounting. You probably need to force covid on everyone. I'm sure that would work out just fine. Your fantasy of only having 20k dead is just that, a fantasy. I honestly don't know where you got such a silly number.
I disagree.
First of all, you only need 70% to be immune in order to achieve herd immunity and kill off the virus entirely, because it has such a low R0=2.
Second is that we already know essentially all people under 18 are already inherently immune.
Then from total testing of all members of isolated groups, like military bases, prisons, cloisters, etc., we have now discovered that the number of people who have been infected is over 10 times what we thought, and that means the number infected, recovered, and acquired immunity is 10 times what we thought it was.
And finally, the difference in death rate of those over 70 is 400 times higher than the death rate of those under 38, so if you deliberately infect healthy volunteers under 38, you can reduce the death rate by a factor of 400.
Its called variolation, and is a tried and true historic method to end epidemics with the least number of deaths.
It was used in ancient India, Egypt, China, etc.
Variolation is how we discovered vaccination.
{...
Some of the earliest written records of variolation come from China and India4 and the practice was well known in China by AD 1500,5 where the typical method was inserting dry scabs into the nostril of the recipient. In AD 1661, variolation influenced the Qing dynasty. Smallpox had killed emperor Fu-lin and was particularly prevalent among the Manchu people.6 Emperor Kangxi (K’ang Hsi), son of Fu-lin, had survived smallpox as a toddler. His immunity to the disease made him preferable as a ruler over his brothers, who had never had the pox. He was selected to be emperor when his father died, despite being the youngest. In Kangxi’s later years, he would institute a variolation program among his regular troops, protecting them, in his words “as I did my own children.”7
The overall evidence suggests that variolation began somewhere in Asia, traveled to China and then on to Persia and Turkey,8 where it would catch European attention. The most well-known form of variolation was practiced in Turkey. As recorded by Lady Mary Wortley Montague, who lived there with her ambassador husband: “a set of old women performed the operation by scratching open a vein in the patient and putting into it as much of the smallpox venom as could lie on the head of a needle.”9 The wound was then covered with a nutshell. Lady Mary had enough faith in this practice that she had her son variolated this way.
One story held that women from the Caucasus were considered especially beautiful in Turkey and married into the country because they had been variolated and were unscarred by smallpox.10 It is possible that these women went on to teach others the technique or to variolate others themselves, establishing the practice Lady Mary observed.
When Lady Mary’s family returned to England, a smallpox epidemic was raging. She had her daughter variolated and advocated for its widespread practice in England. Her efforts eventually resulted in the variolation of members of the royal family and an official experiment involving six Newgate prisoners.11,12
Variolation faced intense pushback from clergy in England, who said that the practice was counter to God’s will. However, after the Newgate experiment proved effective and the royal children survived their treatment, variolation became incredibly popular. As the practice spread, it evolved into an elaborate process of weeks-long preparation including special diets, cycles of purging and bleeding, and extensive recovery periods.13,14 From 1721, the year of the Newgate experiment,15 to 1728, physicians would variolate 897 people. Only seventeen of them would die, compared to the 18,000 total deaths from smallpox in those same seven years.16
Interestingly, variolation existed as a folk practice in Europe before Lady Mary’s introduction. Thomas Bartholin mentions it in a note published in 1675 and it could be found in rural France and Wales at that time.17 Parents would “buy the pox” by purchasing scabs or dried pustules from the parent of a child recovering from smallpox and tie them on to the arm of their own child, or deliberately put one child to bed with another who had mild smallpox.18
“Modern” variolation—reintroduced from Turkey—was first brought to the Royal Society by physicians Emanuel Timoni (or Timonius) and Jacob Pylarini (or Pylarinius), but the Society considered their reports a novelty, not worthy of investigation. However, after variolation’s rise to popularity in England many English physicians became popular elsewhere in Europe for offering variolation services.19
In Austria, Empress Marie Theresa promoted variolation after recovering from the pox, and this may have encouraged her daughter Marie Antoinette to do the same for the royal family in France.20 Another empress, Catherine the Great, would advocate for variolation in her country of Russia.21,22 Praise was not universal, however, and Voltaire recorded the opinion of some Europeans about the technique:
“The English, on the other side, call the rest of the Europeans cowardly and unnatural. Cowardly, because they are afraid of putting their children to a little pain; unnatural, because they expose them to die one time or other of the small-pox.”
...}
![[IMG]](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/duSp6L-Hgieja3L5wOEoP67Wcmo=/0x0:1860x1560/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:1860x1560):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22297452/pS4iI_few_americans_have_had_confirmed_flu_cases_this_season.png "[IMG]")
