COVID Context Again (Updated with More Context!)
The other day, in my essay “COVID Context Alert,” I concluded by yet again comparing this year’s fake cataclysm in the U.S. to the same country’s battle with the 1918 flu pandemic:
The 1918 flu pandemic death total, by the way, if we could estimate its size relative to today’s U.S. population, would be well over two million — about seven times this year’s coronavirus total — and remember, hundreds of thousands of those deaths would be healthy young people in the prime of life.
I neglected to add, but will add now, that of course that arithmetic — 675,000 American deaths from the “Spanish flu” enlarged proportionately for today’s U.S. population — presumes that in every other way, the 1918 population and the 2020 population are equivalent in their capacity to withstand a new flu-like virus outbreak. In truth, the population of 1918 was much hardier overall. Its diet was healthier, its level of physical exercise was higher, and most obviously, the vast majority of its population was not morbidly obese, whereas today, whenever I fly home to Canada (the sissy version of America) for a visit, everywhere I go, I am continuously haunted by the thought, “My god, everybody is fat!”
The reason this is so alarming to me, as you may guess, is that I have lived long enough in Korea that the standard North American body type is no longer a routine part of my daily perspective. In other words, relatively few Koreans are severely obese — which probably has a lot to do with the extreme disparity in COVID deaths between East Asia and the West.
Hence, I must modify my 1918 to 2020 pandemic comparison to account for more than sheer mathematics, i.e., the multiplication of raw numbers. If the “Spanish flu” virus hit America today, three special factors would have an effect on the death rate:
- That virus, entirely unlike COVID-19, was extremely deadly to otherwise healthy young adults;
- Today’s young American adults are generally highly unhealthy in ways likely to greatly exacerbate the effects of a flu virus that was intrinsically much more dangerous than COVID-19;
- A much larger proportion of today’s U.S. population lives packed together in enormous apartment blocks, studies in overcrowded mega-schools until age eighteen and beyond, and spends its “golden years” residing in densely-populated disease factories called nursing homes.
Factoring in those three conditions, I think it would be more reasonable to estimate that had the “Spanish flu” hit America’s population in 2020, its death toll would not have been “merely” two million, but perhaps more in the neighborhood of three or four million — and I am being deliberately conservative.
Luckily for the U.S. and the world, this coronavirus pandemic is a non-event compared to the 1918 flu pandemic — although our rulers and their propagandists would have you believe you are living through Armageddon. (You should take a hint from that fact: You are indeed living through it, as is almost everyone else.)
By the way, as of today, almost an entire year into our Pandemic That Ate a Planet, the official propagandists have tabulated 1.65 million deaths worldwide from COVID-19 — and that is with certain countries using highly dubious death certification rules to inflate the numbers as much as possible.
By contrast, I just read a 2018 epidemiology study expressing extreme skepticism about the traditional estimates on the 1918 pandemic, and offering a new, greatly reduced estimate on global deaths from the “Spanish flu.” The authors’ low-balling new number: 17.4 million.
In other words, the most conservative estimate available on the 1918 pandemic would still make it ten times more deadly than COVID-19 (on inflated numbers) has been over this year.
In truth, what I just said — “ten times more deadly” — is a huge misrepresentation. For the world population in 1918 was barely a quarter of today’s. So to be more accurate, without over-complicating things, let’s say the “Spanish flu” outbreak was forty times more deadly than COVID-19 has been so far.
Luckily for the powers that be, today’s world, at least in the advanced countries, is also (conservatively estimated) forty times less rational, forty times more cowardly, forty times more historically ignorant, forty times more sanguine about accepting the word of authority on blind faith, and forty times more susceptible to propaganda, than the world of 1918. As I calculate it, that makes us approximately 102,400,000 times more likely to do the disastrously wrong thing, as might be expected of irrational, frightened, ignorant, compliant, and successfully propagandized people.
