The Corona that does not exist

Last updated on 2020-11-01

I am amazed by the amount of people, on Twitter, that deny the existence of COVID-19 and do not believe at the relevance of the measures to control the spread of the disease.

In this comment I must restrict my knowledge of this phenomenon, that I will call here anti-Corona, to the German crowd of people writing on Twitter and mostly reacting to the posts of virologists such as C. Drosten.

Among the readable posts of such kind, I have tried to put together the main arguments. These are:

1. The government and the politicians are actually using the COVID-19 pandemic just for the purpose of panicking people and thus gain power. The restrictions, sold as a way to secure the well being of all citizens, are thus a farce aimed at restricting the freedom of citizens.
2. The PCR test is too sensitive, the rate of false positives is enough to explain the number of positively tested (slightly gone in disuse in these days when the hospitalizations are too high for this explanation to be spoken loudly).
3. The number of deaths is kept artificially high by just counting as COVID-19 death also those (risk patients) who have actually died for other reasons and were by chance tested SARS-CoV-2 positive.
4. “Our” health system is so good/efficient that we can withstand all such a small number of seriously ill patients and those who die are anyway “only” those old and sick who would have died anyway.
5. Politicians and virologists put down every day some new rule, without even trying to explain where this rule comes from and why that specific rule makes sense from the epidemiological point of view.
6. The restrictions, even if they may sound reasonable in a certain extent from the point of view of a virologist, are going to kill more people than COVID-19 due to the economic consequences, the resulting poverty and depression, and mistrust in the state.
7. Most of us do not know anybody who was tested positively for SARS-CoV-2, thus indicating that the virus either does not exist or it is extremely rare, much rarer than claimed by the official media (gone in disuse in these days, when we start learning of more and more friends and neighbors and colleagues who got the virus).

I guess, there are some more noticeable reasons that escaped my attention or are published on other platforms. Pro-active readers are welcome to send me their comments and/or additions.

Why do some people believe in these reasons?

Despite the fact that some of the reasons listed above may contain some part of truth, people who tend to believe and propagate them as a form of religion do actually base their beliefs somewhere else (without realizing it).

We can learn a little bit about an interesting phenomenon of human mind when looking back at the concepts of freedom in societies based on slaves. For most of us, being a slave is synonymous of having no freedom. But the ancient Greeks – as well as the most modern societies based on slave economy (e.g. US before the civil war) – didn’t think it that way.

The intellectual elite in ancient Greece, a.k.a. the philosophers, had concepts of freedom that are basically indistinguishable from most concepts of freedom that we use today. In their essence, freedom was considered as the highest symbol of being a Human, compared to animals or things. This includes the freedom to understand what you want, move beyond the limitations of nature, express your thoughts, decide upon your life^[1].

How do these advanced concepts of freedom fit into a society based on slaves, such as the ancient Greek society? Well, since slaves were the material basis of the existence of the intellectual elite and of the state as such, the first principle to follow was to find a way to exclude slaves from the concept of freedom. This way was very simple (and unconscious): slaves are foreigners and are thus less than humans. Since freedom applies only to humans, a discussion about freedom for the slaves was meaningless.

The lesson to be learned is: many of us, independently of their level of instruction, will tend to interpret, twist and tilt any information so that the material basis of their own existence does not run under discussion.

Therefore, if somebody sees a personal lost of power, money, influence in the measures to contain the spread of the virus, they will find arguments to negate the need or usefulness of those measures. Their starting point is not a rational discussion about what is really happening. Their starting point is the conclusion that they want and have to reach.

These arguments can go both in the direction of negating the existence and the gravity of the situation and in the direction of implying that those imposing these rules have indeed second aims or are incapable.

Can we help with some good “rational” arguments?

No.

As an ancient Greek philosopher would have never understood what you are talking about when speaking of freedom for the slaves, the anti-Covid people will never understand any argument against their believes. If somebody believes that their existence is directly endangered by wearing a protective mask, they will interpret, twist and tilt any reasoning just to conduct things back into their original purpose, namely to save their own interests and existence.

What could help?

We cannot convert the anti-COVID behavior by means of rational arguments. The only thing that helps is to change the conditions of their existence and by this also change the conditions of everyone’s existence.

Making everyone sure that there are sufficient funds and mechanisms to save their existence, jobs and families after the end of the pandemic, is the best that should be done in order to convince as many as possible to follow the safety measures.

Some people, who got a minute of fame by riding the anti-COVID wave will still ride this wave independently of any other measure to ensure their lives, until this wave disappears. Those who will feel secured by (financial) recovery mechanisms will eventually abandon their anti-COVID attitude.

Nevertheless, there are issues in the points listed above that should not be completely thrown away.

When everyone is busy talking about an emergency situation, governments and lobbyist of all kinds are busy approving laws and rules in their favor without much glamor and without opposition. Nobody of us knows, what else the governments are doing apart from talking about COVID-19. But they are doing also something else!

When a virologist (let it be the most famous in the country) talks about measures to limit the expansion of the pandemic, they probably know a bit more than a layman about the topic but they are certainly not the right person to speak. The right persons to talk about how to limit the spread of the virus are called epidemiologists. The epidemiologist suggests measures based on (mathematical) models to predict the expansion of the virus. These models are based on data and assumptions. If the data is incomplete or the assumptions are wrong, their models will be also wrong. In fact, all models are wrong in some sense. Therefore, portraying some virologists as the wise guys who know everything is as wrong as saying that virologists are helping establishing a dictatorship.

More in detail to the various points

1. Applying a lot of restrictions from side of a politician without any reasonable ground based on epidemiology is difficult to accept for everybody. Both the press and the politicians should give more space to these experts and less to virologists, who are still one important piece of the epidemiologists equation. Talking only about Corona, even if this is a very serious problem, leaves the suspect that the governments are playing other games on our back. For instance: were did all the Corona recovery funds go during the summer? Why is there again shortage of health care workers in the hospitals?
2. If one knows the rate of false positive of PCR and the number of tests performed every day, one can make a hypothesis test to verify the hypothesis that the number of positively tested is what one expects from the rate of false positives. Since the number of positively tested is increasing day by day, the number of seriously sick is also increasing very fast and hospitalizations are increasing rapidly while the number of tests is not, the only explanation is that the virus is spreading again. The argument about the false positives is, without further details, just bullshit.
3. There is in my opinion a wide and diverse way of counting the number of deaths due to COVID-19, which is different from one country to the next. There should be a European unique way to do that and to quantify in some unitary way the cases where COVID-19 was a concomitant cause or the principal cause. The diversified way of counting explains, in my opinion, why mortality in certain countries (e.g. Italy) is larger than in others even though the number of infected people is roughly the same.
4. Every country has some very good and very efficient health system. Even the poorest country in the world has some first-class hospitals. The question is not whether these are first class or not, the question is what is the capacity of the system? By an exploding amount of cases and patients that need hospitalization, whatever the system is, independently of the efficiency of the system, when the maximal capacity is reached, second class people will have to die. This holds for the poorest as well as for the richest country. Building solidarity means avoiding that people in need of hospitalization cannot get their slot. Those who do not wear masks and do not follow the safety measures may be those to blame when this happens.
5. Politicians are those who have to take a decision. If they are not able to do that because they are not able to find the right people to give them the correct know-how, they should resign and leave their position to somebody else. This is a very simple rule: if you are incapable of doing your job, you should leave it especially if you are a politician. Virologists possess a crucial know-how but the experts here are the epidemiologists.
6. The system as it works now is incapable of being able to keep people at home, slow down the spread of the virus and still feed everyone. To do that we need a system where everyone collaborates to reach this goal and everyone does not fear for their existence. The systems we are living in are not capable of reaching this goal.
7. The fact that you are not able to perceive Earth curvature with naked eyes doesn’t make the Earth flat. In Germany, there have been so far about 400 thousand positively tested people. In a population of 80 million, it is 0.5%. If you have less than 139 friends, the probability that at least one of them was positive is less than 50%. A similar calculation shows that if you have 20 friends, the probability that none of them was positive is about 90%. If you go to a demonstration with 20 thousand other people, with 90% probability there were at least 86 people who tested positive among them.

The identifier: Liberals

Needles to say, most of the presentable anti-COVID people in Germany are related to the “liberal” party FDP. For the liberal ideology (I call it ideology because it is an idea born in the mind of some people despite the fact that it has little to do with the real world), what is really important is that goods (commodities), such as products, and people, i.e. work force, should circulate freely, independently of everything else. These “liberals” would then be against any law that limits the circulation of goods and people.

This is the somewhat positive part.

However, what is important for the liberals is only things that can be sold and bought. A good, such as a bag of potatoes or a car, can be bought. The work time of a worker can be sold to the employer. Both should circulate as freely as possible, at least within the national market.

This is the true basis of liberal politics.

Nevertheless, those who do not produce, i.e. the elderly, the chronic sick people, the long term unemployed who will never get a job etc. do not play so much of a role in the liberal politics. So, for the liberals, if they die by COVID-19 that’s not a problem. They would have died anyway.

This is the ugly aspect of liberalism.

Conclusion

It’s good to keep an eye open to see what the governments are doing behind the scenes when everyone is talking only about the pandemic outbreak.

There should be more control and transparency concerning the financial aids, to make sure that small shops and small companies do not disappear. There should be more protection at the work place, which is probably the place where a great proportion of infections takes place.

Small shops holders and workers should fight for their share of financial aid and for the right to stay protected without losing their jobs. Fighting for these rights has nothing to do with wearing a mask and avoiding big crowds of people.

Take care, stay healthy and prepare yourself for a new life after the pandemic.

[1]In our time” BBC July 4, 2002: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p00548hh