COVID-19
Pandemic: We need to be smarter than China (and Italy)
**This article has been amended in light of the ongoing situation in Italy. It was originally posted to dredles.com.
Dr J Edward Les is a Pediatric Emergency Physician practicing in Calgary.
In the winter of 2017 two 17-year-olds with a 3-D printer created a little spinny thingy called the Fidget360 and promoted it on social media.
Fidget spinners quickly went viral. And because there was no patent, dozens of companies hurried to produce knockoffs.
By May of 2017 the little gadgets accounted for 17% of all online toy sales and had spun their way into every nook and cranny of the globe. Every kid I tended to in the emergency department of my hospital was spinning one of the plastic gizmos—and more often than not, so were their parents.
But then—just as quickly as it started—it was over. By September of 2017 fidget spinners had vanished, consigned to trash bins and forgotten corners of toy rooms and closets.
There’s a word we use to describe this sort of phenomenon, where something spreads quickly throughout an entire country, continent, or the whole world and affects an exceptionally high proportion of the population before burning itself out.
That word is pandemic, of course. We use it to describe massive outbreaks of disease, typically, not outbreaks of fidget spinners.
It’s a scary term—one that conjures up images of the Spanish flu, which wiped out up to 100 million people in 1918 (five percent of the world’s population); or of the bubonic plague, which ravaged the globe in the 14th century, killing half of Europe’s people and knocking the world population down to 350 million from 475 million.
Not all pandemics are as lethal as the Black Death or the Spanish flu, mind you. The H1N1 influenza pandemic of 2009, for instance, killed approximately half a million people—a big number, but roughly on par with the death toll extracted by the seasonal flu each year.
Another pandemic—COVID-19—now threatens the world. This time the viral assassin is a novel coronavirus that originated in China.
How much danger we are in remains a matter of intense debate. Death toll predictions run the gamut from the ridiculous to the obtuse, from epic eradication of mankind on the scale imagined by novelist Stephen King in The Stand, all the way to: “Nothing to see here, folks, keep calm and carry on.”
Rampant misinformation, relentless spin, and wacky thinking amplified by social media hasn’t brought clarity, suffice it say. U.S. President Donald Trump labeled the coronavirus a Democratic conspiracy. Paranoid wing-nuts blather on about Chinese bioweapons. Some people blame a vengeful God; others warn shrilly (and wrongly) of the risk of mail from China or of the danger of eating in Chinese restaurants.
I wrote about the coronavirus outbreak on February 20, seemingly an eternity ago. At the time I wasn’t overly stressed—just a bit fidgety. Twelve thousand people were infected and 250 were dead, pretty much all in the epicentre of Hubei province in China; but it seemed like a drop in the viral bucket compared to the seasonal flu, which takes out up to 600,000 people globally per year.
Plus, after initially dismissing the virus as a threat, the Chinese had reacted with unprecedented measures, locking down Wuhan and a slew of other cities, cordoning off Hubei province, shutting down mass transit, closing airports, and confining 60 million people to their homes—berating those who dared to venture outside with government drones.
It seems to have worked for the Chinese. Epidemiologic data show that the virus continued to spread post-lockdown, but primarily among families already infected pre-quarantine. Community spread was stopped in its tracks.
The number of cases in Hubei province ultimately crested at around 67,000, with 2900 dead. (Just a smattering of new cases are being reported.)
By the time the Chinese instituted their draconian quarantine measures, of course, the viral dandelion had gone to seed: infectious spores of coronavirus had already blown around the world.
Still, the worst-case scenario for Canada, I surmised, surely couldn’t be worse than what Hubei endured.
Applying Hubei’s experience—a population infection rate in that province of only 0.11% (67,000 divided by 60 million) and a case fatality rate of 4.3%— to Canada’s population of 37 million would mean roughly 41,000 cases and 1750 dead in Canada.
Bad enough—but seasonal influenza kills 3500 Canadians every year; traffic accidents kill 2000 people.
So not a huge deal, right?
But here’s the problem: Canada is not China. Neither is the U.S., or any of the other countries where coronaviral spores have taken root.
In one sense, at least, that’s a good thing: our air is much cleaner, and far fewer of us smoke cigarettes, leaving us with lungs presumably less hospitable to invading coronavirus.
However, we are not going to quarantine entire Canadian cities and provinces (it’s too late for that now anyway).
We’re not likely to close airports and shut down mass transit.
We’re not going to chase our citizens with drones.
We’re not going to mandate that entire city populations stay in their houses for weeks or months on end.
And we’re not likely to be as good at keeping infected patients alive—not because we lack the know-how, but because we lack adequate space, supplies, ventilators, and personnel.
The WHO’s Bruce Aylward, commenting on the case fatality rate observed in China, had this to say about the regime’s efforts:
“That’s the mortality in China — and they find cases fast, get them isolated, in treatment, and supported early. Second thing they do is ventilate dozens in the average hospital; they use extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (removing blood from a person’s body and oxygenating their red blood cells) when ventilation doesn’t work. This is sophisticated health care. They have a survival rate for this disease I would not extrapolate to the rest of the world. What you’ve seen in Italy and Iran is that a lot of people are dying.”
Canada may do better than Italy and Iran. But our hospitals are already stuffed to the gills (and people won’t stop suffering from heart attacks and strokes and trauma and cancer just because COVID-19 is kicking around).
We can’t, like the Chinese, build enormous hospitals almost overnight specifically for coronavirus patients. (We can’t even build a pipeline in this country.)
Does all of the above mean we’re screwed?
Not at all.
Certainly, we can’t do what the Chinese did. Nor should we try. The Italians are trying, and their country is descending into unmitigated chaos.
We must adopt a radically different strategy.
First, we must acknowledge that stopping this virus is like trying to stop the wind.
We must acknowledge what any seasoned epidemiologist can tell you: viral pandemics burn themselves out—but only after millions of people get sick and recover, freshly equipped with powerful antibodies to the virus. The resulting collective population immunity—called herd immunity—prevents the virus from hopping from person to person to person with epidemic speed, and the pandemic dies out.
There are no other options. Well, there are two, but neither are on the near horizon: complete eradication of the virus (as mankind did with smallpox), or the development of an effective vaccine.
We must let this pandemic burn itself out.
But just as importantly we must control how that happens.
The novel coronavirus has an R0 value of 2.2, which means that each person can infect 2.2 others. The case fatality rate across all of China was 2.3% (it’s higher in Wubei province and outside of China—it’s over 4% in Italy, for example). Those numbers, ominously, aren’t much different from the Spanish flu.
Knowing that most of the world cannot replicate China’s totalitarian lockdown to control viral spread, epidemiologists estimate that between 30-60% of the world could end up infected with coronavirus.
Wait a minute, you say: Hubei province had a population infection rate of only 0.11%. That’s a far cry from 30%.
Sure. But the Asian elephant in the room is that China, by its draconian quarantine measures, prevented community spread—which also very likely prevented the development of herd immunity.
When Wuhan and her 15 sister cities are re-opened; when the stranglehold on Hubei province is released; when the airports re-open and the trains start running and commerce restarts: we may see a second wave of infection in China. The virus is not gone, and because the Chinese prevented community spread from continuing for two months, most of their population is probably not immune.
It was the second wave of the Spanish flu, remember, that killed most of the people in that pandemic. And China could be on the cusp of a second wave of COVID-19.
We must not allow this to happen globally with COVID-19.
If epidemiologists are correct even at the low end of their estimates—30% of the world’s population infected and a case fatality rate (also at the low end) of 2.3%—that means 53 million dead: roughly 255,000 of them in Canada (73 times the death toll of the seasonal flu).
Horrific stuff. But the achilles heel of the coronavirus is that it primarily kills old people. And we can exploit that.
The Spanish flu killed across demographics, disproportionately killing those in the age categories of 20 to 40, over 65, and younger than five. The high mortality in healthy people was a unique feature of this pandemic – as was the case with the 2009 H1N1 pandemic.
But that’s not the case with COVID-19: it kills mostly the elderly and the infirm. The mortality rate in those over 80 is 15%; in those over 70, eight percent; and in those over 60 it’s just under four percent. In Italy, where the death toll stood at 366 as of Sunday, the average age of those who have died is 81.
At younger ages the mortality rate drops off dramatically – the vast majority of younger people, especially kids, recover without incident, most of them with mild or no signs of illness.
But—and this is key—even though children (and healthy adults) may be completely symptomatic or have only mild symptoms after they acquire coronavirus, they still carry the virus: they are vectors, much like the rats that spread the bubonic plague in the 14thcentury.
We are not going to exterminate the children as we did the rats—but we can take real steps to mitigate the risk of viral spread.
Those most vulnerable to the deadly effects of this virus—the elderly and the medically compromised—should self-quarantine while we judiciously allow the virus to do what it does among the rest of us.
That means that we all continue to protect ourselves sensibly, just as we do from the flu: wash our hands, cough into our elbows, stay home if we are sick, learn the “Ebola handshake”, and stay away from hospitals and clinics unless truly necessary.
In an earlier version of this piece I wrote: “We must not close the schools, the airports, the theatres, the restaurants.”
I’m no longer so sure.
This is a fast-moving epidemic, and it is imperative—imperative—that we pay close attention to what is happening elsewhere as this virus marches around the world.
Reports out of Italy are deeply sobering: the elderly are dying, and they are sickening at a furious rate. Hospital resources have been completely overwhelmed.
The Italians were utterly unprepared for the sheer volume of critically ill patients requiring intensive care all at once.
And so is Canada.
We need to slow the virus down. We need to impede the rate of its spread to the elderly.
It may be prudent, as COVID-19 establishes a foothold in Canada. to proactively close schools and universities, and to cancel concerts and conferences and other mass gatherings.
Messaging is key. School closures should not incite fear and alarm. The risk to the young and healthy remains very low—whether or not we close schools and cancel concerts doesn’t change that.
But we must do whatever we can to slow the dissemination of virus to the elderly and medically compromised, to as much as possible lessen the strain on our health care resources.
It is far easier for hospitals to deal with a crush of infected, critically ill patients over a four month period than over a four weekperiod.
We must, in the language of disease, “flatten the epidemiologic curve”.
We must sequester the elderly and the medically compromised away from the rest of the population. They should avoid crowds, travel, and children—likely until August or later.
We cannot do this by decree—that will never work. But we must shout this message of self-quarantine from the rooftops loudly and repeatedly so that the elderly and medically compromised understand that if they do not comply, they stand a high risk of dying.
At the same time, it is essential that we protect heath care workers and those who are medically at-risk in hospitals: we must enact systems of external triage (a.k.a. drive-through emergency medicine), external treatment sites, telemedicine, mobile treatment teams, and so on.
These measures are critical to to lessen the coming unprecedented demands on our health care system, to reduce the death rate and to buy time until we either have herd immunity or an effective vaccine.
Our politicians and medical leaders have dropped the ball on this. They’ve been fidgeting while this virus burns, spinning confused and garbled messages of half measures and wrong measures.
It’s time to stop the fidgeting, to do away with the spin, and to lead with strength and clarity.
We must not allow the world to succumb to chaos.
We must not allow the economic infrastructure of the world to be destroyed, and society completely upended, by a viral pandemic that targets primarily the elderly and medically compromised.
There is no need to panic.
We should remain calm and carry on.
But nor should we keep our head in the sand.
As Bruce Aylward put it:
“Get organized, get educated, and get working.”
From LifeSiteNews
Dr. Curtis Wall went against the College of Chiropractors of Alberta’s COVID mask mandate in 2020 and the organization has been pursuing disciplinary action ever since.
The legal team for Dr. Curtis Wall, a Canadian chiropractor who was recently fined $65,000 by his medical college for not wearing a mask in 2020 despite the fact public health orders last year were nullified by a court, has vowed to fight the “illegal” fine, saying that Wall was targeted because he is a “Christian man of integrity and principle.”
“Dr. Wall should not pay any fines or costs when the public health orders he was charged with not following have been declared void by the courts,” said Wall’s legal team, Liberty Coalition Canada (LCC), in a press release.
“He is a Christian man of integrity and principle — attributes that make him a target for government overreach in the era of COVID.”
Wall was practicing in Calgary in 2020 when the COVID crisis was gearing up, went against Alberta’s public health orders and chose not to wear a mask during patient visits. Many of his patients also decided to not wear masks during their visits, which quickly drew the ire of College of Chiropractors of Alberta, which had mandated that all chiropractors wear masks.
Wall, who has been seeing patients for the last 25 years with a pristine record, was then targeted by the College, which tried to strip him of his license to practice. The College was unable to strip Wall of his license and he continued to practice, sans mask in 2021 and 2022.
In 2021, the College had brought against Wall, as per the LCC, “a long list of charges of unprofessional conduct against Dr. Wall, most of which related to Dr. Wall not wearing a mask while treating patients and permitting his patients to not wear a mask.”
Wall was then brought before a disciplinary hearing Tribunal to mediate his case, which went well into 2022, and had placed a publication ban on all “identities of all witnesses,” including Wall’s.
James Kitchen, Wall’s lawyer from the LCC, was successful in getting the publication ban lifted, as the LCC noted due to the College “wishing to avoid likely defeat before the courts” regarding keeping the ban in place.
Fined chiropractor says college did not recognize his ‘Christian convictions’
In 2023, the Tribunal ruled against Wall entirely and in favor of the College.
The Tribunal’s decision noted the LCC is “riddled with errors of fact and law and is so poorly decided it is an embarrassment to the chiropractic profession.”
Wall spoke with LifeSiteNews and observed that while in his point of view he does not feel his fines and costs imposed on him by the college “are a direct result of my Christian faith,” he did note that the tribunal did “not recognize my honest Christian convictions as a valid reason for my not wearing a mask.”
“They put placed no merit in the argument that as a Christian I believe I am created in the image of God,” Wall said.
“My face is an expression of Him. Having man arbitrarily mandate that I cover my face is an affront to that expression and signifies that I am living in the fear of man, not by faith. So, in all, I don’t feel directly persecuted as a Christian, but certainly indirectly.”
Wall told LifeSiteNews that in his opinion the college could have “handled this issue much differently.”
“There must always be room for exceptions to a rule. I did present a doctor’s note to verify my inability to wear a mask. They did not place any weight on that note. They blamed me for ‘self-diagnosing’ my problem,” Wall said.
“Number one, I’m a doctor. I think eight years of schooling has given me some wisdom to diagnose my own signs and symptoms. Number two, if someone eats a peanut and their throat swells shut, can they not diagnose themselves and stay away from nuts? It’s not a problem to self-diagnose.”
Wall said that despite his legal team presenting four expert witnesses to demonstrate “the obvious inadequacy and lack of efficacy in mask-wearing, not to mention the harms as well,” the college “did not cite the record once in their verdict.”
He noted that “common sense, science and past and present studies overwhelmingly demonstrate” the lack of efficacy regarding mask-wearing.
The LCC noted that although both Kitchen and Wall hoped for an “unbiased decision from the tribunal,” they knew it was more “likely the tribunal members would lack the courage to oppose the government’s COVID narrative by accepting the scientific evidence masks are utterly ineffective at preventing the transmission of COVID and harmful to wearers.”
“Nonetheless, it is shocking the lengths the tribunal went to dismiss the evidence of Dr. Wall, three of his patients, and his four expert witnesses while blithely accepting all the evidence of the College.”
Wall’s charges laid despite a recent court ruling nullifying all Alberta COVID health orders
According to LCC, the charges brought against Wall show that the College of Chiropractors of Alberta has “ignored the law” relating to non-criminal COVID-era charges handed out in the province.
As reported by LifeSiteNews before, last year a judge from Alberta ruled that politicians violated the province’s health act by making decisions regarding COVID mandates without authorization. This ruling came from the Alberta’s Court of Kings Bench’s Ingram v. Alberta decision, which put into doubt all cases involving those facing non-criminal COVID-related charges in the province. In effect, the ruling struck down and nullified all health orders issued by Dr. Deena Hinshaw, Alberta’s former chief medical officer of health.
As a result, multiple people facing charges, such as Dr. Michal Princ, pizzeria owner Jesse Johnson, café owner Chris Scott, and Alberta pastors James Coates, Tim Stephens, and Artur Pawlowski who were jailed for keeping churches open under then-Premier Jason Kenney, have had COVID charges against them dropped due to the court ruling.
The Alberta’s Court of Kings Bench’s Ingram v. Alberta decision put into doubt all cases involving those facing non-criminal COVID-related charges in the province.
As a result of the court ruling, Alberta Crown Prosecutions Service (ACPS) said Albertans facing COVID-related charges will likely not be convicted but instead have their charges stayed.
However, last year, the College, and of important note after the Ingram ruling, ordered Wall to pay $65,000 in fines and costs “under threat of immediately losing his license to practice if he does not pay,” the LCC said.
Chiropractor’s lawyer to fight fine tooth and nail
According to the LCC, the College’s new complaints director said she will enforce the tribunal’s court-defying order and mandate Wall pay the $65,000.
Because of this, Kitchen submitted an application to the College “to prevent this injustice” against Wall, the LCC noted.
“The Application will be heard on June 21. It will be heard virtually and is open to public, although the College has erected a number of barriers to people attending its hearings. For one, people must register with the hearings director and must do so many days in advance,” he told LifeSiteNews.
“The Tribunal elected to ignore the Ingram decision despite issuing its decision over two weeks after Ingram was released by the Court.”
Kitchen noted that the Tribunal had a lawyer advising it who was being paid some $700 an hour. He told LifeSiteNews that “Tribunals can do whatever they want and often do.”
“Only if the affected person takes further legal action can they hold the Tribunals accountable. And even then, that’s very difficult because the first appeals are to the councils of the Colleges, which almost always rubber stamp whatever the Tribunals decide. Real accountability isn’t had until the impugned professional is able to reach the Court of Appeal, which of course takes years and an enormous amount of funding for lawyer fees,” Kitchen said.
Kitchen is working Wall’s case at discounted rates and noted that high legal costs in such cases dealing with tribunals, who can drag things on for years, to him appear to be a tactic the Colleges count on for “avoiding accountability.”
The LCC estimates the College, which is funded through payments from all chiropractors, paid some $600,000 in legal fees to fight Wall.
“LCC asks supporters to donate toward Dr. Wall’s case so he and Mr. Kitchen can hold the College of Chiropractors of Alberta accountable and bring an end to the unjust persecution of Dr. Curtis Wall. Liberty Coalition Canada is assisting Dr. Wall with his legal expenses through the Legal Defense Fund.”
Kenney quit after losing the confidence of his United Conservative Party (UCP) members for backtracking on his promise to not impose a COVID vaccine passport. Under Kenney, thousands of businesses, notably restaurants and small shops, were negatively impacted by severe COVID restrictions, mostly in 2020-21, that forced them to close their doors for a time. Many never reopened. At the same time, as in the rest of Canada, big box stores were allowed to operate unimpeded.
Under Kenney, thousands of nurses, doctors, healthcare and government workers lost their jobs for choosing to not get the jabs, leading Premier Danielle Smith to say – only minutes after being sworn in – that over the past year the “unvaccinated” were the “most discriminated against” people in her lifetime.
Recently, LifeSiteNews reported on how Alberta-based Rath & Company is in the process of putting together a class-action lawsuit against the Alberta government on behalf of many business owners in the province who faced massive losses or permanent closures from what it says were “illegal” COVID public health orders enacted by provincial officials.
From the Brownstone Institute
As documented in a 2023 report from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, more than seventy local governments used ARPA funds to expand surveillance programs in their communities
If you ever had the vague sense that Covid relief funding worked in a manner akin to US aid packages in failed Middle Eastern dictatorships, your instincts weren’t wrong.
First off, there were cases of just outright fraud nearing the $200 billion mark with drug gangs and racketeers collecting Covid unemployment benefits from the US government, with some recipient fraudsters not even having the common decency of being honest American fraudsters.
Even worse, though, were some legitimate uses of Covid funds that actually counted as legitimate despite being laughably frivolous or clearly unrelated to nominal goals connected to public health or helping communities deal with the economic impact of the virus – or, more accurately, the lockdowns.
One of the most should-be-satirical-but-actually-real examples of a legitimate use of Covid cash was a researcher at North Dakota State University being awarded $300,000 by the National Science Foundation through a grant funded at least in part through the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 to aid her in her 2023 efforts to reimagine grading in the name of equity. (If none of that makes sense, please don’t hurt yourself with mental pirouettes.)
Other more mundane projects pertained to prisons and law enforcement using Covid relief money for purposes that extended well-beyond simply paying salaries or keeping the lights on. In 2022 The Appeal and The Marshall Project reported on how large sums of Covid money went to prison construction and expansion projects and to outfit police departments with new weaponry, vehicles, and canines. Regardless of how you feel about law enforcement or our prison system, these probably did little to stop the spread of Covid or keep out-of-work bartenders afloat while public health bureaucrats consulted horoscopes or goat entrails or their equally useful models to divine the proper time to let businesses reopen safely at half-capacity to diners willing to wear a mask between bites but too afraid to leave their homes.
Yet, of course, that didn’t stop people from trying to make the case that these expenditures absolutely were essential to slowing the spread. Often coming off like precocious children explaining to their parents how a new puppy would help teach them responsibility or an overpriced pair of sneakers would facilitate their social-emotional development by ensuring the cool kids would like them, local sheriffs and city managers were reported as claiming prison expansions could help prisoners social distance from each other, new tasers would help officers social distance from suspects, and new vehicles would allow officers to take their cars home with them rather than share one with another officer who might end up contaminating it with their Covid cooties.
But even worse than the funds that were outright plundered or just snatched up as part of a cash grab were those that were used on projects that helped further erode the freedoms of American citizens.
As documented in a 2023 report from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, more than seventy local governments used ARPA funds to expand surveillance programs in their communities, purchasing or licensing gunshot detection systems, automatic license plate readers, drones, social media monitoring tools, and equipment to hack smartphones and other connected devices.
Sometimes EPIC reported that this was done with little, if any, public debate over the civil liberties and privacy concerns inherent to these tools. In one case from a town in Ohio, approval for ARPA-funded ALPRs – cameras that can create a searchable, time-stamped history for the movements of passing vehicles – came after only a 12-minute presentation by their police chief.
Similarly, schools also likely used money from ARPA, as well as the 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, for their own surveillance purposes, although documentation of how schools used their Covid money is said to be somewhat spotty at best.
Vice News in 2021 reported how Ed Tech and surveillance vendors such as Motorola Solutions, Verkada, and SchoolPass marketed their products as tools to help reduce the spread of Covid and allow schools to reopen safely.
Some attempts such as Vice’s description of SchoolPass presenting ALPRs as a means to assist with social distancing come off like police departments explaining the social distancing benefits of tasers.
Others, however, such as Motorola plying schools with lists of behavioral analysis programs that “monitor social distancing violations” and room occupancy while “automat[ing] the detection of students who are not wearing face masks,” seem to offer a glimpse of the dystopian future into which we are heading – as do the other surveillance tools bought with Covid cash.
Maybe at some point Disease X, about which our ruling class has been warning us, will hit and the additional drones, ALPRs, and social media monitoring tools bought by the law enforcement agencies reported on by EPIC will be used to monitor adults for social distancing violations and automatically detect who isn’t wearing a mask. Maybe those tools will just be used to keep a digital notebook of the daily activities of everyone while police reassure us that they promise only to look at it when they really really need to.
In either case, though, if you currently have the vague sense that post-Covid America is a little more like a Chinese surveillance state than in the Before Times, your instincts are dead-on.
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