Somebody in the Ontario government must have these numbers. Why are they not being released to the public?
Speak up, Premier Ford.
Are you really stupid enough to believe that a naked test toll is meaningful,
or do you just believe that everyone else in Ontario is stupid enough to
unquestioningly accept the sense of alarm you are trying to impart?
First
appeared in The Western Standard
Is there no-one in Ontario
premier Doug Ford’s cabinet or caucus, or the entire civil service, who has two
brain cells to rub together?
Ontarians
have been given another alarming statistic this week: 700 new COVID cases. It’s a record high, the
headlines shout, implying that the so-called pandemic is getting worse.
But that naked number by
itself says nothing of the kind. It’s a numerator in search of a
denominator. The only relevant statistic that would tell us whether or not the
“pandemic” is getting worse would be the number of positive tests on a
particular day divided by the total number of people tested on that day. This
ratio would then have to be compared with the equivalent ratio calculated on
prior days.
Olszewski,
Erin MarieBuy New $24.29(as of 02:20 EDT - Details)
Here’s
an example to illustrate the point. We know that the province has ramped up
testing recently. The Ottawa Citizen recently reported that we were testing on average
only 13,200 people per day in April and May, but we tested over 41,000 last
Sunday. Surely someone must know the number of tests that have been
administered on each day. If a prior week’s “case” toll of roughly 300 per day
represented all the positive tests out of 10,000 tests administered that day,
that would mean that 3 percent of all the people tested had tested positive. If
700 tested positive on a different day but 100,000 tests had been administered
on that day, it would mean that only 0.7 percent of the people tested were
testing positive. This would be cause for declaring the “pandemic” to be
virtually over, not for declaring it to have
worsened.
Why are we not being given
the new “case” numbers as a percentage of the people tested? Are the people
governing Ontario so stupid that they can’t understand this simple mathematical
example? Or is there a deliberate policy in place to force the province back in
lockdown?
Note how appearances can be
manipulated by focusing only on the number of positive test results, with no
context in which to view them. After another forced lockdown, the province
could simply stop administering as many tests, then announce that there were
fewer new cases, so the lockdown policies had “clearly worked.” This would be
utter balderdash, of course, but all mainstream news sources currently seem to
be accepting government numbers at face value and not asking the proper
question to put the numbers in context.
Coleman,
Dr VernonBuy New $3.99(as of 04:06 EDT - Details)
The
issue is further complicated by the now well-established fact that many of the
positive tests are false positives, and by the fact that new “cases” really
don’t mean anything if they’re not harming anyone.
Let me illustrate again. If
there are 700 positive test results on a given day this week but not a single
one of those people ends up dying or needing hospitalization, then we are
clearly in a much better situation than we would be if only 100 people tested
positive but 50 of them died. But 700 still sounds scarier than 100, especially
when you’re shouting “New high!”
Somebody in the Ontario
government must have these numbers. Why are they not being released to the
public?
Speak up, Premier Ford. Are
you really stupid enough to believe that a naked test toll is meaningful, or do
you just believe that everyone else in Ontario is stupid enough to
unquestioningly accept the sense of alarm you are trying to impart?
Reprinted
with the author’s permission.
Karen Selick [send her mail]
is a retired lawyer who now works as a freelance writer, editor, and video
maker.
Copyright
© Karen Selick
