I read Overcoming the COVID Darkness yesterday, Dr. George Fareed and Dr. Brian Tyson's new e-book about their impressive early treatment program.
Both are clearly very competent and caring physicians. Unfortunately, they're lousy writers. The book would be much powerful if they'd paid a good editor to clean it up and trim it down. (I see that several summaries of the book are already available. Sight unseen, I have to suspect they’re much better that the full-length version.)
Nonetheless, it is impressive what these two doctors accomplished by providing early treatment to 3,962 patients: only four of those patients were hospitalized and none died. Based on the data from those who didn't get early treatment in the same county in the same time period, we should have expected 903 hospitalizations and 132 deaths. (Of the 20,921 patients who didn't get early treatment, 22.8% were hospitalized and 3% died.) That's a truly spectacular reduction in morbidity and mortality.
That's not the statistic that most impressed me though. Later in the book, statistician Mathew Crawford presents a summary of some of the largest early treatment trials. He totals the result of all these studies and finds that only 30 patients died of the 100,000 people given early treatment. This represents a case fatality rate of .03%. That's pretty much the infection fatality rate in a bad flu season.
This larger population is more interesting to me because it strips out the effect of particular clinicians, and gives us a more generalizable figure to use for what would have happened if early treatment had been made available to all Canadians and Americans who contracted COVID.
Let's imagine that, instead of draconian lock-downs, public health officials had concentrated on testing and contract tracing to slow the spread of COVID while keeping the economy open, and that early treatment was provided to everyone who tested positive for COVID.
We would have seen a huge wave of COVID cases. However, with only one person in a thousand needing hospitalization following early treatment, a big wave of COVID early in the pandemic would have filled hospitals but probably not overwhelmed them. (Remember that in the no-treatment control group in the Tyson/Fareed study there were 228 hospital admissions for every thousand patients.)
Let's imagine for a moment that everyone in North America got symptomatic COVID by the end of 2020. With a .03 percent case fatality rate, 11,000 Canadians and 100,000 Americans would have died of COVID in 2020.
How would that have changed the course of the pandemic?
1) All of the immense economic and mental health damage of the lock-downs would have been avoided.
2) Five thousand fewer Canadians and 245,000 fewer Americans would have died of COVID in 2020
3) By the end of 2020, all of North America would have had natural immunity. The pandemic would have been over before the first vaccine became available.
This imagined scenario probably overestimates the actual deaths that would have occurred by a factor of three, in that I have used the case fatality rate rather than the infection fatality rate. Two-thirds or more of those who contracted COVID were asymptomatic. Usually they didn't even know they had had COVID. But even with this huge built-in over-estimate of mortality it's clear that providing universal early treatment could have brought the COVID pandemic to an end in under a year with far fewer deaths and way lower economic costs.
That's the price we paid for allowing the vaccine cult to run rampant and silence all dissent. I suppose if we continue to leave idiots in charge of our two countries, we deserve to have the madness continue.
I'll close with a quick review of other news:
Dr. John Campbell looks at Denmark's decision to end all COVID protocols:
Norway and Sweden have already followed Denmark's lead.
A huge new John Hopkins Study meta-analysis presents findings indicating that lockdowns likely only reduced COVID deaths by 0.2 percent, and did so at a huge economic and mental health cost. The mainstream media is working very hard to ignore this important study, even though it has obvious implications for COVID restrictions still in place in North America:
Two days ago, I reported an Angus Reid poll that found that 54% of Canadians wanted to see COVID restrictions ended. Today there’s a report that 70% of Americans feel the same way.
Finally, the economic costs of lock-downs have pushed Government indebtedness through the roof in both Canada and the United States. Here's a two-minute graphic to help you visualize how massive the US Debt is:
PS: For all those who have forgotten that those in charge once said everyone should get vaccinated because it would stop the spread of COVID, here’s Rachael Maddow doing just that. Rachael is now self-isolating, which is COVID karma of a sort.
I do appreciate all this good information with a Canadian perspective