This is the 2nd in a series of articles from the Brownstone Institute:
The Dreaded Silent Spread
Everything Birx claims about the Covid pandemic, and all of her prescriptions for mitigating it, are based on a single idea, expressed repeatedly in her book, The Silent Spread:
“The distribution and spread of the virus would be far greater and far quicker [than the 2002/3 SARS virus] due to the undetected silent invasion I fundamentally believed was taking place across the globe.” (p. 28)
In other words, as Birx explains, the SARS-CoV-2 virus was different from other flu-like viruses and previous pandemics because it was spreading faster, and it was less detectable as it was spreading. Why was it less detectable? Because most people who were infected had “a mild disease – another way to describe silent spread” (p. 92).
Let’s take another second to consider the words of Dr. Deborah Birx herself: silent spread means mild disease. The more silent spread, the more people are getting infected but experiencing mild to undetectable symptoms.
Transmissibility and fatality
If silent spread means most people have mild disease, why does Birx think SARS-CoV-2 is so dangerous that it merits shutting down the entire world and imposing unprecedented mitigation measures?
As she explains (p. 18), when we want to know how dangerous a virus is, we have to consider how easily and quickly it spreads, and how many people who are infected end up dying. But instead of looking at each of those factors separately, Birx conveniently conflates them:
“More exposure meant more infections, which meant a greater frequency of serious illness and death.” (p. 56)
In other words, the more people are infected, the more people will get seriously ill or die. But we just learned from Birx that most people who were infected with SARS-CoV-2 through silent spread had mild or no symptoms. So, by her own account, more infection does not necessarily mean more serious illness or death.
It’s not rocket science. It’s not even Epidemiology 101. It’s just plain logic.
The Diamond Princess
Now let’s say we don’t want to resort to mere logic to refute Birx’s baseless implication that silent spread makes SARS-CoV-2 exceptionally dangerous. Suppose we look at what a world-renowned epidemiologist had to say in March 2020 about what silent spread means in terms of the overall danger posed by a novel coronavirus.
John Ioannidis is a Stanford professor and leading world expert in epidemiology, statistics and biomedical data, with hundreds of publications and expertise in precisely those areas that are crucial for understanding an emerging pandemic. He’s just the type of person you’d want advising you on how to evaluate the threat posed by a novel virus.
In an article published March 17, 2020, Ioannidis explained that to figure out how dangerous a pathogen is, you need to calculate approximately how many people who get infected are going to die.
Ioannidis used the Diamond Princess cruise ship to calculate an approximate fatality rate (the number of people who get infected and die) for SARS-CoV-2. He used the cruise ship because the passengers were quarantined for long enough to allow the virus to spread among them, and those with symptoms were tested for Covid. Seven people of the 700 who tested positive died. That’s a fatality rate of 1% (7/700).
However, as Birx herself notes: “The documented spread was intense, going from 1 to 691 confirmed positives in only three weeks—and those were just the people with symptoms. If they had been testing more widely, among asymptomatic people, the real number could be two to three times greater: 1,200 to 1,800 infections.” (p. 46)
Ioannidis also thought that many untested people might have been infected. In which case, let’s say for example there were 1,400 untested but infected people, the fatality rate would go down to 0.33% (7/2,100). And if there were 2,800 untested but infected people, the fatality rate would be 0.2% (7/3,500). And so on.
That’s what silent spread means for the fatality rate: the more the virus infects people without killing them, the less lethal it is. Which, in a rational world, would presumably mean we would need less drastic mitigation measures.
Birx, however, in one of her many feats of illogical counterfactual obfuscation, concludes that ...
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