Getting wet in the dry

When Mrs G. and I were on our honeymoon in the West Country, a whole sapphire ago last month, we took a trip to the remote Doone Valley on Exmoor.

This valley is the setting for a fictional seventeenth century clan of robbers, and became famous through a nineteenth century novel, Lorna Doone, by R. D. Blackmore. The locals seem to have made the most of the tourism opportunity from the start, showing visitors the very window in Oare church through which Carver Doone shot his sister Lorna as she stood to marry the hero John Ridd. Local farmers showed off old guns as those which once belonged to the Doones, and so on.

My new wife was reading the novel at the time, so it was a graphic experience to visit it, and besides it is a beautiful and wild place.

It also has very changeable weather, which is why we were caught short by a sudden squall without having any waterproofs with us. Fortunately a lone, quite dense, tree was nearby, and we sought shelter underneath as the heavens opened. Pretty soon even that refuge became increasingly uncomfortable as the rain began to work through the foliage and start dripping down our necks.

But we bravely stuck it out for twenty minutes or so, getting almost as wet as we would have done if we’d kept walking, until we suddenly saw two other tourists walk by, in their summer clothes, without waterproofs or umbrellas and clearly enjoying not getting wet. It turned out that the shower had passed over long before, and we were fooled by the residual rain in the tree not only making us wet, but looking like rain as we peered out.


And that seems to me a metaphor for the current situation we see not only in the UK, but in pretty well all the northern hemisphere lockdown nations, which are now experiencing, and reacting fearfully to, what has been dubbed a Casedemic. I mentioned the phenomenon, if not the name, in my recent post, but the phenomenon is well-described, in a pleasant Irish accent, in this YouTube video:

The ability to do mass testing with PCR tests lagged the actual COVID-19 epidemic by a considerable amount, and now that it is being increasingly rolled out across all these countries, more and more postive “cases” are being picked up. But it has been known for at least a decade that PCR picks up fragments of virus long after patients cease to be infected, or infectious.

There’s a review of the literature on this, relating to the present epidemic, by the celebrated Centre for Evidence-based Medicine in Oxford. It’s not hole-in-the-corner stuff.

The fact that, as I pointed out in the previous article, there is a steady decrease in both hospital admissions and deaths over the very weeks that the test-positives have been increasing proves that what we are seeing is just such a Casedemic, an artifact of testing rather than any indication of disease reality. The only alternative, a mutation of the virus to a less virulent form, is unlikely in the short time scale, and there is no evidence for it.

UK COVID “cases” to 20th August

But either explanation means that, for now, there is no epidemic whatsoever, and all the restrictive measures still in place, many even increased because of the increase in positive tests, are as useless as was our sitting beneath a dripping tree on our honeymoon, under the illusion it was still raining. The epidemic was over many weeks ago.

The YouTube video cites evidence for how exactly the same phenomenon, using the same kind of test, and producing the same unnecessary anxiety though not the abrogation of civil liberties, occurred during the swine-flu epidemic. The biggest peak of “cases” then occurred in the summer after the major outbreak, when deaths from it were almost non-existent. A second, much smaller, peak occurred in the following winter, some of which was due to actual cases, and led to a relatively small number of deaths. Although our present problem is a Coronavirus rather than a Flu virus, the pattern this year is more or less the same, and suggests that we will see only a small recurrence of the disease come the winter: that is the established pattern of Coronavirus epidemiology.

However, this winter we will also, because of even more intense testing, inevitably see a big peak in positive test results, leading to an inflated “R-number” (which is a figure derived from test results), leading (on a current assessment of government’s policy and press propaganda) to more draconian restrictions and more disruption of human life and the economy. A fake winter crisis has been built into government policy by fake science – or rather, by ignoring true science.

Yet you will not have seen any of this suggested in government communications, or the mainstream press. That may well be because politicians are totally unaware of the “Casedemic” literature. But if so it is because the advisory scientific groups in all the various countries (SAGE in the UK) have failed to inform them of it, and so advise a complete relaxation of lockdown forthwith. And that either means the senior government scientists are all ignorant of the literature – or that they are deliberately witholding the information for ideological reasons.

Well, that takes us into Far Right Conspiracy Theory country, which is of course absurd. Yes, I know that much of the lockdown “science” has come from the WHO – which explains why Britain, America, Canada, Australia and most other countries all shifted from “masks are useless” to “masks are mandatory” in one choreographically perfect manoeuvre. And I know that a whistleblower from the WHO said the team working on the science of masks was leaned on politically to change their position. And I know that the boss of the WHO is a corrupt stooge of the Chinese Communist Party. And I now that, now President Trump has withdrawn the USA from it, the biggest funder for the WHO is the Gates Foundation, and that Bill Gates is not only an advocate of universal vaccination, but stands to pocket a significant percentage of the entire world’s wealth, and a lot of power, from keeping the “pandemic” storm going long after the sun has come out.

But reading anything untoward into that is sheer paranoia. You’ll be telling me next that the US government harvests data from its citizens’ internet communications. Or that the Iraq war was based on rigged intelligence. No, the simple explanation – that both governments and their scientific advisers are morons who haven’t noticed that all their countries are collapsing about their ears by following the same policies – is too compelling to doubt.

Well, across the pond you have an election soon, and can vote in Democrats who will soon sort out the errors like they sorted out corruption in the Ukraine. After all, most scientists vote Dem.

And over here, I guess we can always kick Boris out and vote Labour again, which is also the party of choice for modern Academics. Then we can return to the EU, eliminate systemic racism and heteronormativity and reboot the future, at least until the climate collapses in 2030. But Bill Gates will have reduced the population by a couple of billion by then.

THERE ARE GOOD REASONS WHY GOD GAVE US AN IMMUNE SYSTEM AND NOT SOCIAL DISTANCING.

What was that YouTube meme? “Doctor, when will this pandemic end?”
“How would I know – I’m not a politician.”

Avatar photo

About Jon Garvey

Training in medicine (which was my career), social psychology and theology. Interests in most things, but especially the science-faith interface. The rest of my time, though, is spent writing, playing and recording music.
This entry was posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science. Bookmark the permalink.

1 Response to Getting wet in the dry

  1. Avatar photo Jon Garvey says:

    An example of how the use of “cases” keeps us in the dark. The WHO reported a while ago that there was not a single case of a teacher catching COVID from a junior pupil.

    But today various papers report 22 “cases,” including 17 teachers, in a school in Scotland, resulting in everyone having to self-isolate, and so on. Here’s one report .

    Reading a few of these reports, I realise I still have no idea whether anyone at all in the school is actually ill. It looks more as though there are lots of positive tests, which given the OP above, might mean nothing at all, and given the WHO position, DOES mean nothing at all, unless one small Scottish school has changed the science.

    One more interesting exercise for you to try: think of any three digit number, and type it into a search engine thus: “nnn new cases.” See what headline results you get. Strange, huh?

    Edit: there are 900 three digit numbers, so what are the chances that they’ve all been used in COVID case headlines over the last 6 months? Does it show engineered headlines, or just an unhelpful obsession with counting daily cases?

Leave a Reply