A Few New CV-19 Studies

Lockdowns, school closures, forced masking, plastic barriers, etc. during the epidemic were euphemistically referred to as non-pharmaceutical interventions.  They might better have been referred to as non-effective interventions.  Five years later, the mainstream media is finally taking notice of this lack of effectiveness and stories like this one in the Boston Globe are appearing.  (“New Research Shows COVID Stay-at-Home Orders Did More Harm Than Good”)   Anyone who wasn’t inclined to panic knew this at the time of the epidemic.  I knew it, I published ads about the harms and the lack of benefits, wrote columns.  Anyone like me who took this position was pilloried as a grandma killing, heartless idiot.  Now five years later everyone is saying these steps were irrational, taken out of fear and panic, and all the negative impacts were not considered.  What good does it do to recognize this now?  How are you going to repair the damage to children in particuar?  How are you going to fix our nation’s finances?   (BG Story)

On the same topic, this study examined various approaches to evaluating the effectiveness of these interventions.  Various governments, including Germany, launched reviews of the efficacy in their countries.  Germany’s official review found relatively high efficacy.  But these authors did an analysis of the results using nine different statistical methods and showed that depending on the method, the alleged efficacy varied greatly and that the range of likely results was very large.  All of which demonstrates that in fact the interventions had very unproven effectiveness and that reviews of any intervention are highly sensitive to the method used to evaluate it.  (Medrxiv Study)

And one more study, looking at the effect of lockdowns on longevity.  Data from the 1918-1919 flu epidemic, which killed millions of people around the world and led to the equivalent of lockdowns in some US cities, was used.  The authors found that people who as children were subjected to lockdowns had about 3 months of lost life compared to those who didn’t.  The likely factors were lose of educational attainment and subsequent socioeconomic drag.  (SSRN Study)

Why does coronavirus hang around for so long?  All viruses do, they are everywhere all the time.  This study from France finds that deer are a likely reservoir for, if not CV-19, other similar coronaviruses.  Other studies in the US have found that several animals had CV-19 present or had prior infections.  (Medrxiv Study)

Long, long, long CV-19; that is what many people claim to be suffering from.  Here is another study, from France, examining this alleged syndrome.  It finds that the presence of long CV-19 symptoms are correlated with initial disease severity, which it has in common with most infections.  In addition there were certain differences noted in immune cell types and populations in some of the alleged sufferers.  The paper claims 40% of infectees developed long-CV-19 symptoms.  No wonder France is in trouble, it has as many malingerers as the US.  (Medrxiv Study)