Americans have no idea where they are catching the coronavirus

The following article originally published by the New York Times last October 31, 2020 and updated last November 4, 2020 talks about how public health officials in the US have abandoned efforts at determining infection clusters. The article says, “Now there are so many cases, in so many places, that many people are coming to a frightening conclusion: They have no idea where the virus is spreading”.

Editor’s Note: This article was written to create even more fear among readers. The message it tells us is this: “We have no idea where infections are coming from. We need to stop what we are doing and begin from the very beginning, if we want to protect our loved ones from dying”.

The problem with this article is that like previous reports from mainstream media, it has centered once again on the number of infections and neglects to ask the more important questions. Are there more people dying today of COVID-19 than before? Are the number of deaths exponential? [If the recent CDC publications are any indication, true COVID-19 deaths are so much lower than the media wants us to believe, see CDC updates planning scenarios, shows IFR lower than flu]. 

If infection is coming from many different sources, does it still make sense to do contact tracing or to lockdown? Also, take note that infectiousness has never been a measure of COVID-19’s lethality. What is the point of panic if infection does not cause increased deaths? Shouldn’t this article be taken as a signal that it is now time to focus only on those who need protection from the disease, since there is no longer any point to mitigation or control? And this is exactly the point of over 48,000 health professionals who signed the Great Barrington Declaration [see The Great Barrington Declaration: Life must return to normal for the healthy, the vulnerable must be protected]

If the US wants to go to a country-wide lockdown (which is the growing “consensus” among specific leaders), then perhaps they should first consider the experience of other countries. There are so many new resources to look at, particularly the results of the UK experiment and the Sweden experiment [see Mark Woolhouse: UK lockdown a monumental mistakeand compare with Sweden’s COVID death rate now lower than Spain, Italy, and UK despite no lockdown approach].Also, the US must realize the impacts of lockdowns as there are now a multitude of resources to consider [see article category Is a lockdown necessary?].

How Are Americans Catching the Virus? Increasingly, ‘They Have No Idea’

New outbreaks used to be traced back to crowded factories and rowdy bars. But now, the virus is so widespread not even health officials are able to keep up.