Came across this Randall and thought I would throw it out there:
A review of Alberta Health data on influenza deaths shows more people have died of COVID-19 in 2020 that died of flu since the 2009-10 flu season.
calgary.ctvnews.ca
The problem with these stories like this is that they spin the issues in order to justify the government's actions. For starters it gets people focused on the debate between influenza and COVID-19, when that debate is in and of itself nearly irrelevant to what's happening to the lives and livelihoods of people who have neither the flu nor COVID-19. It's a complete red herring.
This is a complex subject. I've changed my views on various aspects of the issues a number of times as new information has surfaced. Another reminder about what may very well be misleading numbers is that the WHO changed the way the cause of deaths were to be reported such that if it is the case that our system is following those recommendations, the mortality rate and deaths cited are definitely skewed.
I have found no way to confirm this within our system because that fine-grained data is really difficult to obtain. We basically have to trust what we're being told. However the source was directly from the WHO website where it describes how deaths
from COVID-19 as opposed to deaths
with COVID-19 were to be reported, and it is a complete turnaround from the way they
were being reported prior to the pandemic. That was verified by agencies such as the American Cancer Society.
The problem is that most people don't have the time to look into these issues this deeply. Hell, even I don't. But here's something else to ponder. When going way back to find public data on deaths in Alberta from respiratory related diseases prior to the pandemic, I found that total deaths from respiratory illnesses were over 800 in one of the years.
Remember that COVID-19 was called pneumonia at first, because it is a perfectly legitimate medical term for it, even if less specific. In the intervening years between that study and now, the population has increased to the point where the deaths from COVID-19 in the groups most affected, may actually look very similar. Take into account the way the deaths are being reported, and the big emergency vanishes.
I've said this before: To get a really balanced view of the picture, we need access to fine grained data and some independent people to run a critical analysis. But we don't have that. We do however have estimates that the number of people who will die from poverty related causes brought on by the lockdowns. They are in the millions, and that's after the pandemic is all over ( if it ever ends ).
Also, lets again be reminded about the "flatten the curve" strategy. It's a trade-off for fewer immediate hospitalizations for a longer disease life-cycle. The overall mortality rate doesn't change. So vaccines notwithstanding, had our system been able to take-in the numbers, we'd be over the curve, no more people than otherwise would have died, and it would all be over by now. No variant would have had time to emerge either, unless it also came from a lab.
The reason we didn't go with that option was because our system couldn't handle it. However in China they built a new hospital in
10 days complete with isolated rooms for patients. In over a year since the pandemic began, how many have we built to specifically handle it? None. Why? The cost would surely be a whole lot less than the cost of what the lockdowns have cost, not to mention the billions lost on the pipeline.
Some might argue that China is communist so they can just do whatever they want. Sorry but that excuse obviously fails in the face of us being under the Alberta Emergency Measures Act, which means they certainly could have built whatever hospitals were needed, and hired as many people as were needed as well. But wouldn't that just throw a great big wrench into their plans to lay-off over 11,000 heath care workers.
This government says it wants to "protect the system" when in fact it wants to reduce it, if not kill it by privatizing it. Building new hospitals would have meant keeping those jobs and expanding the system so it could cope. But no, they couldn't have that, so they forced thousands of perfectly healthy working people to close-up shop, many of them permanently, and then feed us these pathetic excuses.
All the while, treating us as if we're in a fu&^ing communist dictatorship. People who own their own houses can't even decide for themselves how many guests they can have
in their own homes without risking government imposed fines. It's totally outrageous, but they've scared people into submission, and even into reporting on their neighbors.
All that being said, I still personally haven't broken a single rule. But I really wish someone who isn't suffering financially because of all these measures would fund the sort of study needed to obtain and present the variables in a way that people with serious doubts like these would be satisfied with. If such a study validated all these repressive restrictions, then fine. So far NONE have. The science has been a
façade for the politics of reducing the capacity and reliability of our healthcare system.