Thorner: Will the US learn from Canada’s serious coronavirus blunder?

     Canadian scientist        Tom Harris

By Nancy Thorner - 

The idea for this article originated from a YouTube lecture shared with me by Canadian scientist Tom Harris. Harris presented his lecture titled, Covid-l9 in Canada: A Serious Blunder, from his home in Ottawa, Canada, on April 30, 2020.  At the time, Harris was stuck at home because of Covid-19; however, a recent communication with Harris informed me, "We are in partial lock down. Some businesses are starting to open up.”

Harris is Executive Director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition, and a policy advisor to The Heartland Institute. He has 40 years of experience as a mechanical engineer/project manager, science and technology communications professional, technical trainer and S&T advisor to a former Opposition Senior Environment Critic in Canada’s Parliament.

Hello, my name is Tom Harris. I’m talking to you from Ottawa, Canada on April 30, 2020. Like most Canadians, I’m stuck at home because we’re on national shutdown because of COVID-19. But our governments are flying blind on this disease. They have no idea how many Canadians are infected or what the true mortality rate is. The shutdown of Canada may be a huge mistake.

 

But before I explain why, I’d like to start with an analogy.

 

Imagine that following a rash of accidents on the 401 Highway, the government decided they had to figure out if they would close the highway to everything except essential traffic. To determine how safe the highway really was, they chose to sample a group of drivers who had often used the highway. The survey showed that 3% of them had been involved in serious accidents in the last year.

 

Now, when they plugged this data into computerized transportation models, they found that they could forecast that tens of thousands of people would be involved in serious accidents on the 401 over the next year. And, in fact, there would be a death rate of 5%, according to their models. Of course, if this happened, it would flood our hospitals with emergency cases, and it would seriously compromise our health care system.

 

When the survey and the computer model forecasts were released to the press, headlines followed in newspapers across the province: "401 Death Trap – we must close the Highway or thousands will die." Not surprisingly, governments responded quickly and closed the highway to keep us safe, they said. But the consequences of the shutdown were horrific for industries and companies and stores which used the 401 as their vital communications and transportation artery. Also, millions of people were left unemployed. But the government would say, “We must listen to the transportation experts or thousands will die!”

 

But then somebody noticed something strange about the survey – the drivers questioned for the poll were those who had been before the courts with traffic violations. The average, mostly safe and law-abiding drivers were not involved in the survey at all. So, no one knew what the actual fatality rate really was. The study, and the government's actions, were based on nonsense.

 

Now, if you think such a scenario is too silly to happen in the real world, then think again – because to a certain extent, this is essentially what’s happened in the COVID-19 health emergency that we’re in right now. 

 

You see, the federal government says that, of the 800,000 Canadians who have been tested for the virus to this point, about 51,600 tested positive. Now, that’s about 6.5% of the total number tested. We are also told that about 3,000 people have died of the disease, and that would be 5.8% of those who tested positive. And, of course, that’s a far higher mortality rate than people who die after contracting the flu, which is typically about one in one thousand, or 0.1%. Now, of the total population tested so far for COVID-19, it turns out that about 0.4% of those have actually passed away. Again, this is far higher than percentage of people who die across Canada due to Influenza and pneumonia. And, if you think about it, if 0.4% of Canadians died due to this virus COVID-19, we would see a catastrophe with over 100 thousand deaths.

 

And, it is exactly this kind of scenario that has frightened people and, in particular, led to headlines across the media and the governments shutting down the economy, throwing millions of people out of work,  business failures  and a society frozen in fear.

 

But have you noticed something unusual about the input data to these models? Just as in the case of the hypothetical 401 accidents scenario, Ontario, for example, is only testing people who have symptoms of COVID-19 or people who support them such as health care and first responders. The general population are not being tested at all. So, this means that the government really has no idea of the total number of Canadians who are infected with the disease. Now, when you’re calculating mortality rates, that number would of course go the denominator. So, what it really means is that, instead of 5.8% of those infected dying, as is the case of those who have been tested so far with coronavirus, it could be that there’s only a tenth as many, or a 1/100 ^th.  Because the amount of people who are in the population who have the virus and show no symptoms could be much higher. In fact, in Italy, in one noted study, they found up to 75% of people who had the virus had no symptoms. So no one really knows unless they do a special kind of survey what the real fatality rate is. And, that’s what I want to speak to you about.

 

Scientists around the world are concluding that random testing across entire populations should be used to get a clear picture of the overall infection rate and the mortality rate of the virus in a nation. By randomly testing a large enough group of people across a region, you’re able to get sample results that are indicative of what would happen across the whole country if you could test everybody. This is not rocket science. This is done all the time in national polls to do with politics and various other fields.

 

If a national random sample was carried out, epidemiologists would learn much more than the total number of coronavirus cases and the virus’s fatality rate in Canada. They would also find out the number of people who are infected but not sick, and, as I said, that’s a crucially important statistic to have if you’re going to try to determine how deadly COVID-19 really is and whether a complete shutdown of society actually makes any sense.

 

There have been some cases in the world where they have actually done random sampling. For example, in a hot spot in Germany, a hot spot being a place where they had lots of virus contagion. And a hot spot in California, particularly in Santa Clara. They also did it for the complete countries of Iceland and Denmark. And they found that, in all these cases, the death rate appears to be no more than the seasonal flu rate for people who catch the disease. This is supported by studies carried out by Stanford University epidemiologist John Loannidis who concludes that the WHO has overestimated the fatality rate of COVID-19.

So, our governments have shut down the nation’s economy and ordered the self-isolation of millions of Canadian based on the output of models with woefully incomplete input data.  It is truly a case of garbage in, garbage out, on this computer model.

 

Loannidis made an analogy of what our leaders may have done if it turns out, as seems likely the case, that the real danger from this virus is really quite low. He said,  “It’s like an elephant being attacked by a house cat. Frustrated and trying to avoid the cat, the elephant accidentally jumps off a cliff and dies.”

 

Well, thank goodness, Canada has not died yet, so let’s do proper sampling, random sampling across the population before we do entirely jump off the cliff.

• Fact 1 : The overwhelming majority of people do not have any significant risk of dying from COVID-19.
• Fact 2: Protecting older, at-risk people eliminates hospital overcrowding.
• Fact 3: Vital population immunity is prevented by total isolation policies, prolonging the problem.
• Fact 4: People are dying because other medical care is not getting done due to hypothetical projections.
• Fact 5: We have a clearly defined population at risk who can be protected with targeted measures.

1. The shocking inflation of COVID-19 death numbers.
2. States with longer lockdowns had worse results.
3. Outside nursing homes, the fatality rate never warranted such action, even it is would work.
4. Outside New York, this is barely worse than bad flu seasons.
5. Excess deaths are from the lockdowns, not the virus. 
6. Social distancing was invented by a high-school kid and politicians, not scientists.