Fever dreams, part 1: five years since the shutdowns

What I learned during the first year of Covid

This is Part One of a series reflecting on the fifth anniversary of government-imposed Covid shutdowns and restrictions in the US. In this first part, I recall what I learned during that first year of enforced isolation about Covid’s origins, Covid deaths, masks, and the Covid tests. In Part Two, I’ll focus on what I learned about Covid vaccines and their significance to the whole episode, and then provide some summary thoughts.

Five years ago today, on Thursday, March 19, 2020, the governor of my state of Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson, announced that, beginning the next day, bars and restaurants would no longer be permitted to offer dine-in services and barbershops and salons would be forced to close.

These measures against the newly declared Covid-19 pandemic would continue indefinitely. State officials would monitor infection statistics and make determinations later as to when restrictions could be lifted.

Public schools had already closed for onsite instruction two days earlier and would remain so for the rest of the school year.

Other states issued similar orders that week in a coordinated effort.

Many companies that were able to send their workforce home, like the one I worked for, had already begun to do so on a voluntary basis. With the state orders, they followed suit and made it mandatory.

I had traveled to Key West and Savannah, Georgia in January. By the time I arrived in Savannah, news of a mysterious and alarming new virus emanating from Wuhan, China, sickening and killing people in that country, was in the news but wasn’t yet a headline story.

It had become one by the time the first US Covid case was announced in late January, in Washington state.

I had traveled with friends by car from San Diego to Mexico in late February for a trip to last until early March. The first Mexican case, in Mexico City, was announced while I was there, but life and commerce was completely unaffected where we were in the Ensenada area of northern Baja.

I had worried that Donald Trump might shut the border before we could return, but later when I flew home from California only a handful of people in airports were wearing the flimsy paper masks that would become ubiquitous in a couple of months.

The World Health Organization (WHO) had declared Covid-19 a pandemic on March 11. From that moment, the way the media and public officials talked about the illness had changed, from concern tempered with reassurance to full-on alarm, eventually progressing to barely contained panic.

I met a friend at a local German-style beer hall after work for our last opportunity to go to a bar before the shutdown was to take effect the next day. We were bewildered by what was happening in the country and parts of the wider world. How had it come to this so quickly?

Federal health officials said states’ restrictive measures might need to be in place for as few as fourteen days, just long enough to “slow the spread” and prevent hospitals being overwhelmed, but I and I think most others knew it would be longer.

Arkansas’ restrictions would never go as far as some states that imposed “stay-at-home” orders and closed additional types of businesses, though rumors that Hutchinson was on the verge of issuing such an order circulated more than once. I’m sure he was getting pressured to, and although I’m not a Hutchinson fan, I applaud him for having at least resisted that.

To my way of thinking, he should have resisted closing schools and restaurants, and imposing mask mandates, but I suppose the pressure was too much and the political fallout would have been too great.

I wanted Arkansas to be the US equivalent of Sweden, the one and only country in western Europe whose public health officials didn’t impose widespread shutdowns or mask mandates and focused instead on protecting the elderly and vulnerable for the duration of the crisis.

Sweden ended up having very similar disease outcomes to comparable neighboring countries that locked down hard, but they suffered far less economic dislocation and harm to their children’s social development and education.

With little work to do and out of disillusionment at what the world was coming to, I began reading as much as I could, between episodes of Tiger King, about Covid, Covid tests, the efficacy of masks, and the already anticipated vaccines.

For months on end, I read.

Covid’s origins

I read about the possible origins of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that was found to be the cause of Covid-19. I learned that the alleged place of origin — a “wet market” in Wuhan, China — was just eight miles from the only research lab in all of China that did testing on bat coronaviruses, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

I learned that WIV’s testing involved “gain-of-function” research in which coronaviruses were intentionally made more infectious to humans, apparently to study them and prepare for possible future mutations and outbreaks.

I learned that a significant chunk of funding for WIV’s bat research came from Anthony Fauci’s agency NIAID, under the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and that much more may have come from the US Department of Defense. I also learned that all the US government funding for this research at WIV was channeled through an organization called EcoHealth Alliance, run by a British virologist named Peter Daszak (more on that below).

I learned that when Fauci and the head of NIH wanted to put a stop to growing suspicions about the Wuhan lab as the source of the virus, they pointed to a letter signed by 27 scientists in the field of virology that had appeared in the February 2020 edition of The Lancet. The letter defended the lab and said the virus had almost certainly arisen naturally.

I learned that many of the scientists who had signed the letter had professional or financial ties to EcoHealth Alliance or China, and that the letter had been prompted by, and even written by, none other than Peter Daszak.

I learned that when the WHO sent a team to investigate the Wuhan lab in early 2021, they appointed, once again, Peter Daszak to lead the team.

Thus, the one man responsible for channeling the US government’s funding to the Wuhan lab orchestrated publication of the leading scientific statement downplaying a lab origin and then was tasked by the WHO with investigating the lab and clearing it of all wrongdoing.

I learned that a number of scientists in the US and around the world who had studied the genome of the Covid virus found what appeared to be “inserts” of known genetic sequences, including some that appeared to come from HIV virus, that caused them to suspect the virus was engineered in a lab.

Covid deaths

I read statistics on Covid-19 deaths and how Covid was determined to be a cause of death on death certificates.

I learned that in March 2020, the CDC issued new guidance to medical personnel for coding disease and filling out death certificates that weighed heavily in favor of finding Covid-19 as a cause of death even in the presence of other serious medical conditions that could cause death, known as “comorbidities”. The statement said the rules were “expected to result in Covid-19 being the underlying cause more often than not.”

I learned that, due to the new guidance, many deaths were automatically attributed to Covid based solely on a positive test result having been obtained from a flawed Covid test (more on that later) within 30-60 days of their deaths, and that this was done even if the deceased had one or more comorbidities at the time of testing or death.

I learned that only about 6% of Covid death certificates listed Covid as the only cause, and that the other 94% had, on average, four comorbidities. I discovered that the average age of death from Covid was in the 80s, beyond average life expectancy, and that children accounted for fewer than 0.1% of all Covid deaths in the US.

With those numbers, it was next to impossible for the media to find tragic child deaths that they could exploit, but whenever they could find a statistically rare case of a relatively healthy 40-year-old whose death had been attributed to Covid, they shamelessly trumpeted it as if it were the norm.

I learned that Medicare issued reimbursement rules in March that ensured hospitals got higher reimbursements for coding Covid-19.

Finally, I learned that the overly aggressive use of ventilators early on in the pandemic had likely killed many Covid patients as ventilators themselves were highly invasive and known to increase the risk of death by their very use.

I knew lots of people died from Covid, and I knew each of those deaths was a tragedy for their family and friends. But I had learned that sensation claims about the death toll from Covid were likely inflated, and that regardless of the total number, the statistical threat to any individual person not already very sick was very, very small.

The vast majority of people of all age groups infected with the virus would not become seriously ill or die, even when the virus was still at its most lethal and before the vaccines were available. Isolating and providing preventative care for only the most at-risk populations and cautioning everyone else to wash their hands and stay home if they were sick was always the best option.

They said what they were doing was necessary to prevent hospital overload, but most had forgotten that a severe flu season in 2018, one of the worst in decades, had forced hospitals in a number of states to expand capacity using tents and mobile units to accommodate flu patients. But no one had suggested shutting down the country, mandating masks, or forcing vaccinations.

Stoking fear and imposing mass isolation of the entire population was unconscionable and had its own, largely unquantifiable health impacts, as did keeping people sedentary in their homes and cancelling many non-Covid hospital procedures.

Masks

I read about the CDC’s remarkable U-turn in April 2020 on its longstanding guidance about the futility of wearing masks to prevent the spread of respiratory diseases, including Covid.

CDC-published meta-analyses of numerous studies across the decades, some going back to World War II, had consistently found wearing masks had no significant effect on preventing community spread of respiratory illnesses like the flu. Only hand-washing and similar hygienic measures had shown to be preventative.

Frequent use of masks carried its own risks of burdening respiration for people with compromised cardio-pulmonary function, and, if not changed or washed frequently, they could also act as reservoirs for viral or bacterial material to be repeatedly re-inhaled.

Public health officials like Fauci had maintained this stance against masking as late as March, but then in April, after New York became a global hotspot of infections, the CDC abruptly reversed its guidance and recommended that all people wear masks outside the home.

CDC said it changed the recommendations due to studies of water-droplet dispersal from sneezing and coughing and the predicted effect such dispersal could have on viral transmission. But predicting how a virus theoretically could spread based on observations of droplets and aerosols does not overcome decades of studies showing how viruses with similar particle sizes actually do spread in community settings and what does and doesn’t work to stop them.

Subsequent comparisons of states with and without widespread masking would show no association between the introduction of mandates and reduction in Covid-19, and many states and countries would see their highest case rates of the pandemic after the introduction of mask mandates.

Covid tests

I read about the Covid tests and how they worked.

I learned that a process called polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was the key component of the most widely used Covid test, and that some scientists considered it questionable whether PCR was appropriate for use as a primary diagnostic tool for infectious diseases.

That was because the PCR technology, which uses several cycles of processing to amplify DNA present in a sample, amplifies not just live viral DNA but also fragments of inactive viral DNA remaining in a person’s system after the body has cleared an infection. This meant that if too many cycles were run in a single test, a person could test positive when they’re not actively sick and almost certainly not infectious.

I learned from an August 2020 New York Times article widely discussed at the time that several states were indeed running so many cycles in each PCR test that up to 90 percent of people testing positive in those states carried barely any live virus when their samples were subsequently subjected to culturing in a lab.

This opened the question as to whether the daily Covid briefings being conducted by states and the federal government, in which the latest ominous statistics on case numbers and deaths were relayed to a frightened public, based mostly on PCR test results, were actually putting out highly inflated numbers.

Tony Fauci had alluded to this problem of overly sensitive tests in passing when he participated in a podcast in July, but he didn’t highlight the significance of it and rarely, if ever, talked about it afterwards.

I learned that around the same time in January 2021 that most states’ first wave of Covid sharply peaked and then began a steep, sustained, months-long decline, a number of states had begun quietly reducing the cycle thresholds of their PCR tests and requiring labs to report the number of cycles run for positive tests they returned.

The WHO had also issued updated information instructing labs to consult test manufacturer requirements to see if manual adjustment of PCR cycle thresholds were needed.

Whether the timing of adjustments to overly sensitive tests and the peak in cases was coincidental or not, it showed that the problems with the PCR technology as a diagnostic tool was finally being recognized. By then, more reliance was being put on the so-called “rapid” tests that looked for Covid antigens rather than viral genetic material and were less likely to return false positives.

Part 2 - mRNA vaccines and what it all meant - coming soon

Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.