Thoughts on Covid-19

The best sources of data and analysis are from the Twitter feeds of Aaron Ginn and Alex Berenson. Aaron's early, excellent analysis of the Covid-19 outbreak, Evidence over Hysteria, was censored by Medium. This got an op-ed in the Wall St Journal . Read the article: the fact that it was censored says as much as the article itself. Alex Berenson worked as a reporter for the New York Times but left to pursue a successful career as a novelist. After becoming interested in Covid-19, he decided to write a book on it: Unreported Truths about Covid-19 and Lockdowns. Amazon censored the first installment until Elon Musk interceded - and it promptly became the #1 best selling book on the site.

EthicalSkeptic and Covid Tracking Project have great analysis and data.

Briefly:

The news on vaccines is nothing short of miraculous. Note that only seven new vaccines have been developed in the last 25 years (four by Merck!). The fastest a new vaccine has ever been brought to market is 4 years; the average time is 10 to 15 years. Vaccines intended for mass use by the general population have always required years of testing with very large test groups, because the side effect rate must be minuscule. Indeed, no Phase 3 clinical trials of a Covid-19 vaccine is due to end before October 2022 (see "Vaccines" below for links). Any vaccine released before the end of its Phase 3 trial is offered with incomplete data under an Emergency Use Authorization. And at least half of adults polled say they won't hurry to get a Covid-19 vaccine.
Mitigation measures like "social distancing" and mask-wearing have no effect on the virus's progress. See e.g. Four Stylized Facts About Covid-19 from National Bureau of Economic Research and A Country Level Analysis… from EClinicalMedical/The Lancet and California Summer Lockdowns Have Been Ineffective
Masks don't work. See also this from the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford.
You can't get it from asymptomatic people. "Virus gonna virus."
Covid-19 is much less dangerous than influenza for people under age 70. 94% of people who die from Covid-19 have a serious comorbidity, most often obesity. Most Covid-19 deaths take place in long term care facilities, where annual mortality before Covid-19 was 32%.
Children overwhelmingly have asymptomatic or mild cases, and only rarely pass the disease to adults.
Testing is a total fiasco. Even the NY Times reported that as many as 90% of positive results are false. Most infections are asymptomatic. People who get tested do it because they're required to (hospital admissions, employees who face mandatory testing) or because they're stupid. The test has no clinical value outside a hospital: if you're sick, stay home until you're better and do your very best to stay away from elderly and infirm people. If you have trouble breathing call your doctor. You don't need a Covid-19 test to figure that out. But if you have the test and get a positive result, you're in the system, with attention from officialdom, mandatory quarantine, possible fines, and intrusive contact tracing.
The mere notion of contact tracing for this disease is moronic. The virus has been endemic for almost a year. Most infected people are asymptomatic. By the time a contact tracer gets your data, you've shed virus for days and have recovered. Tracing is impossible. And why cooperate with a contact tracer? Just give them the names of your worst enemies.

There's no end of panic porn about Covid-19, and "Team Apocalpyse" (The Atlantic, CNN, New York Times, etc.) eagerly promotes every possible scary trope. For all the following actual observations, those outlets publish hysterical (and sometimes false) reports of the extremely rare counterexamples:

Covid-19 is a minor factor in overall morbidity and mortality. For one example, in the past eight months in Santa Clara County, there have been 433 Covid-19 deaths out of roughly 12,000 total deaths from all causes.
Covid-19 poses negligible risk to people under 40. Death and serious illness in people under age 40 is extremely rare - the infection fatality rate for this group is 0.01%. There have been 4 deaths in people under 30 in Santa Clara County out of 10,000 proven cases - and possibly 5 or 10 times as many actual cases. It is less dangerous than influenza for non-obese people under 75.
Infection/recovery confers lasting immunity.
Sequelae like viral myocarditis are extremely rare, and no more common in Covid-19 than in influenza
Incidence of Kawasaki disease in young children is no more common now than in past years, and no connection with Covid-19 has been shown.
Lockdowns and social distancing and economic disruption have huge negative effects which will be with us for decades. University Ave in Palo Alto has one empty storefront after another. More disturbing, see e.g. Famines related to the Covid-19 pandemic - "12,000 people per day could die from COVID-19 linked hunger"... It is "projected to be among the worst famines in human history." And then there are suicides, and abuse, and morbidity and mortality because people avoid the healthcare system.

People are terrified. The big question is: How can we make our way out of this and restore normal life and prosperity? Scott Atlas is trying to communicate the risks of virus vs costs of our response - and getting vicious vilification for it. But can we suspend life for another year or two or five until we have a vaccine? What if there are adverse events following vaccination?

State governors have police power. They are the ones who commanded the lockdowns and masking and social distancing rules. They are responsible for the great blunders - Andrew Cuomo's nursing home orders alone might have killed 10,000 people.

Somehow this has all gone political - but Trump, for all his moronic tweeting, hasn't done a particularly bad job - because there's really nothing a president can do. Closing borders didn't make any difference - by the time it happened the virus was already endemic everywhere - but while it was opposed at the time by Democrats it's now generally agreed to have been a reasonable measure. For all the anti-Trump rhetoric, we never needed ventilators or emergency overflow hospitals. Do people believe that Biden/Harris will somehow make life all good again? Is the destruction of half the nation's restaurants and a third of all small businesses, and the permanent loss of 20 million jobs just a tactic in a presidential election year?

Further readings on Covid-19:

Data Sources:

CDC Dashboard

Santa Clara County Dashboard

San Mateo County Dashboard
San Mateo County reports on just 390 beds, but the county has seven hospitals:

Hospital Beds
Kaiser Redwood City 149
Kaiser South SF 120
Mills Peninsula 301
Sequoia Hospital 208
Seton Medical Center 434
Seton Coastside 121
San Mateo Medical Center 448
TOTAL 1,763

Hospital	Beds
Kaiser Redwood City	149
Kaiser South SF	120
Mills Peninsula	301
Sequoia Hospital	208
Seton Medical Center	434
Seton Coastside	121
San Mateo Medical Center	448
TOTAL	1,763