If there was ever a time that ‘Zero Covid’ – the goal of eliminating Covid altogether – made sense, it was when the virus first appeared in Wuhan. Had the Chinese authorities raised the alarm sooner, and scrambled to contain the virus, perhaps there never would have been a pandemic.
But there was one. Covid has now been with us for two full years (perhaps longer). Hundreds of millions have been infected, and even greater numbers have received the vaccine. At this point, you might say, ‘Zero Covid’ is a non-starter.
Yet people are still pushing the idea. A recent article in the Daily Kos – a left-wing news site in the U.S. – argues that “COVID-19 must be eliminated, not become endemic, if America is to survive”.
Is this just a case where the headline is much more radical than the article itself? No – the one thing of which the author can’t be accused is attempting to downplay his position. “We cannot live with endemic COVID-19,” he writes, “Hang on, let me say that again: We. Cannot. Live. With. Endemic. COVID-19.”
Let’s consider his arguments, one by one. The author begins by comparing Covid to the flu, noting that the former is much more contagious. Whereas seasonal influenza has a basic reproduction number of 1.4, he notes, “COVID-19 has a R0 that is over five. Maybe as high as 10.”
I don’t know where he got the figure of ‘10’ from, but even if you take the higher estimates of Covid’s R0 at face value, they correspond to circumstances in which the population was immunologically naïve.
Once enough people have caught the virus at least once, the number still susceptible to infection will be substantially reduced. Not to zero, of course, as even natural immunity wanes – but enough to forestall the kind of transmission levels we saw in the spring of 2020.
Note: this is evident not just from the protective effect of natural immunity, but also from the declining transmission advantage of new variants. As immunity to each new variant rises (particularly among the subset of individuals who’re most likely to infect others), the effective reproductive number correspondingly declines.
The author then claims that a world with endemic Covid will be one where health care is much more expensive, due to demands placed on the system by constant surges of new Covid patients. Here again, however, he ignores the impact of natural and vaccine-induced immunity.
“Endemic COVID-19,” he writes, “would behave exactly the same as epidemic COVID-19: in surges, waves, or spikes.” Would it? What seems far more likely is that endemic Covid would not behave in this way. At the very least, any “surges, waves, or spikes” will be smaller and less deadly than those observed during the epidemic phase of the disease.
The author’s next argument is that, even once Covid becomes endemic, we’ll still see a lot of deaths. But as before, he fails to take account of immunity. “If the level of COVID-19 fatalities could be dropped to just 0.5%,” he writes, “then the rate of deaths would be “just” 160,000 people a year.”
Yet ‘0.5%’ is an implausibly high estimate of the IFR for a world where Covid is endemic. In a recent Twitter thread, Professor Francois Balloux used the figure of 0.1%, adding that even this was “probably far too pessimistic”.
The author then invokes the spectre of long Covid, noting that persistent symptoms “are not rare”. However, if he’d referred to the latest estimates from the ONS, he’d know that only 2–3% of patients still report symptoms after 12 weeks, and this is before you factor in widespread immunity.
Even if ‘Zero Covid’ were achievable, which it almost certainly is not, the costs of getting there would be enormous. We’d not only need a massive annual re-vaccination program, but also constant vigilance at the border, as well as large-scale testing in perpetuity.
“Whatever the price of defeating COVID-19 may be,” the Daily Kos article concludes, “it must be paid.” And that more or less sums up the case for, and against, ‘Zero Covid’. For you can’t take a proposal seriously if there’s no estimate of costs.
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With a R0 rate of 6, it would take less than 2 months to infect the entire global population. Some people quote ‘science’ without having a clue about it. The BBC rana programme claiming the R0 was maybe 3 to 6. I wrote to the doctor who hosted the programme with wheel on ‘scientists’ to make the claims and challenged her. I said it never went above 1.6 ever except for 1 week. She never wrote back of course.
1 person infects 6 6 people infect 36 36 infect 216 216 infect1296 etc so after 10 iterations at R6 you have infected the population of the world twice over <13,060,694,016> 10 iterations at 5 days between catching and spreading = 50 days. Nothing has ever spread like that ever. That is what you truly call expotential spread. What Whitty called expotential is 1.5
“If there was ever a time that ‘Zero Covid’ – the goal of eliminating Covid altogether – made sense, it was when the virus first appeared in Wuhan. Had the Chinese authorities raised the alarm sooner, and scrambled to contain the virus, perhaps there never would have been a pandemic.”
Too late. It was already in sealed samples of potable water taken in early 2019.
Sounds like this writer is working for the CCP. Either consciously or unconsciously.
“even natural immunity wanes“. There are studies which show that it doesn’t wane for years, and even some which show that immunity lasts a lifetime.
If the government would lift the ban on antibody tests we’d have a far better picture of where we are, but they won’t do that because there are still £billions to be made from the vaccines. We must not be allowed to know that we already have natural protection.
Zero humans are easier to achieve than zero Covid.
Sadly the USA is being led by another puppet who simply does as he is told. I do feel sorry for future generations. It won’t be a very nice world to live in when your own governments are eliminating those they choose to eliminate. Been to North Korea or China.
He only way to ‘eliminate’ the SARS-CoV-2 virud is by mass use of the effective medicine, Ivermectin. That way, we build natural immunity whilst ensuring people don’t suffer from covid.
If the author of this piece of tripe Cannot.Live.With.Endemic.COVID he could Kill.Himself.Now. That would save him the trouble, be far cheaper than his policy proposal and wouldn’t affect any innocents.
There is an easy solution, just isolate together those who “Cannot. Live. With. COVID-19”. Because they are very few it should not require that many resources to establish a safe concentration camp for them. (Same policy as for enforcing vaccinations, BTW.)
“We. Cannot. Live. With. Endemic. COVID-19.”
It. Has. An. IFR. Of. 0.15%. The. Same. As. Flu.
For age cohorts under 40, the IFR is 0.10 (or lower) – which is lower than the mortality fate for the flu.
Many people are skeptical of my “early spread” hypothesis and make the point that a spike in deaths would have begun much earlier if this was the case. Not necessarily, certainly not in the age group under 60. Those people survived and, if they were symptomatic, would have thought they simply had the flu or a flu-like illness. Which was the case with millions of people who went to the doctor with flu symptoms but tested negative for influenza.
Some of these people later got antibody tests to try to prove or confirm they had COVID. However, these people did not get these antibody tests until May 2020 (when antibody tests became widely used). By this time, if these people had been sick in, say, December, these tests would be likely to come back negative as antibodies proper fade and are undetectable in most people within 2 or 3 months of their symptoms. But, as noted, some of these sick people did test positive for antibodies in late April or May – and the only time they had… Read more »
As a single, anecdotical data point: Judging solely from my personal experience with weird things happening to/ in my body, Sars-CoV2 was probably in the UK beginning September 2019 and almost certainly November 2019.
Without the Chinese propaganda campaign popularizing it in early 2020, it seem unlikely (to me at least) that this deadly disease had ever been noticed.
You mean propaganda against China to provoke an over-reaction that Ferguson then used to justify the UK’s response to covid? All those clearly fake videos of dead bodies lying neatly arranged in the streets? That propaganda?
The CIA-run regime change ops in Hong Kong conveniently stopped when covid appeared as an issue in China.
China was dealing with outbreaks of pneumonic plague at the time. Now that is some serious sh*t requiring full BSL-4 treatment facilities. Don’t even think of ‘face masking’ that one away.
Zero covid is insane. Just as people who have been vaccinated will eventually have to choose between a booster every six months or eventually running out of immunity and catching covid-19 to gain natural immunity, zero covid territories will eventually have to allow the coronavirus to sweep through them. This is why government advice should have focussed on improving public health from the start – more exercise, weight loss, proper nutrients and vitamins. Instead, they locked people in their houses, made them fat, deprived them of vitamin D and stopped them from going to hospital.
They should start off with something less contentious – like Zero Common Cold.
Actually, the rewritten WHO definition of pandemic would allow for the common cold to be used to justify the never-ending ‘pandemic’. Conveniently, the UK regime has altered the supposed symptoms of covid to include flu and common cold as equivalents.
Nigel Farage is soaking up the vaccine propaganda and accepting the NHS view that they don’t care if they lose many of the staff who refuse the vaccine. While he says he disagrees with the 2 tier society
Clearly two tiers aren’t enough.
I see three at least. The DS, the willing acolytes of the DS and the untermensch.
I agree with Noah’s points, but would highlight this sentence:
“Covid has now been with us for two full years (perhaps longer).” Perhaps indeed.
If the virus did originate in China in November or December 2019, how did it spread so quickly to 11 geographically-dispersed states in the U.S. by November and December?
The articles linked below list 16 Americans – all of whom tested positive for antibodies – who were sick with COVID symptoms in November or December 2019. All of these almost certain “early” cases were detailed in U.S. press reports, which the CDC and NIH must have known about when they stated (in a May 2020 press conference) that there were “no indications” the virus existed in America before January 2020 ….
The first story is about the mayor of Bellville, NJ who is steadfast in his claim he had COVID on or around November 20, 2019 (The mayor later had two positive antibody test results. The mayor also reports that several other people became sick at the same conference he first experienced symptoms).
https://www.foxnews.com/world/china-new-jersey-mayor-coronavirus-november
This Palm Beach Post story identified 11 people from one small Delray Beach Florida neighborhood who had symptoms in November and… Read more »
The virus may have originated in Wuhan, but we know from wastewater samples it was in Barcelona, Spain in March 2019 and we know from wastewater samples and also blood samples it was fairly widespread in Lombardy, Italy in September 2019. How SARS-COV-2 was in northern Italy for six months over a flu season without anyone noticing it is a nice little mystery for us all to think about.
My hypothesis – backed by evidence, I think – is that a certain percentage of the people who were sick with flu-like illnesses in the winter of 2019-2020 had COVID. The group to look at would be those who had the classic COVID symptoms and tested negative for influenza. Most people of course would have been asymptomatic. Some people were already dying from it. However, most of these deaths would have occurred in the elderly and would have been attributed to any number of other causes. Tim McCain, cited above, came as close to death as a person could come. If he had died, he would not have been listed as a COVID victim. However, his antibody tests and all his symptoms and clinical markers confirm this is what put him in critical condition. Tim McCain was sick a week before the Wuhan outbreak. And he had not been to China, nor had anyone in his little town been to China.
As his wife told me in an interview, “It seemed like half our town was sick” at the same time she, her husband, their children, their roommate and her boss also became sick with COVID symptoms.
There was also a strange outbreak of so-called ‘vaping disease’. Early reports suggested that heavy smokers were more susceptible to the virus
It’s not a computer virus nor are people computers.
Psychopathic Gates/Pharma et al renamed colds to make them sound scarier than they ever are.
It’s all propaganda designed, as always, to achieve thought-control, thus control people.
Tests are tests. Jabs are jabs. Coronavirus are cold virus, not computer virus
The gullibles against the non gullibles
The globalist puppets appear to have been mentally affected by this, none of the so called leaders are showing any common sense any more, the whole pathetic scheme is falling apart. Johnson, with his pithy idiotic comments, Biden and his lack of mental capability, Jacinda pushing the person doing the hand signals off the stage with her head.
Doesn’t matter because the media are still keeping to message.
Fully paid up, like all of the activists on expenses for the climate change lobbyists
‘Zero Covid’ is similiar to ‘Long Covid’ i.e. a load of absolute f*cking bollocks.
One of the multitude of hidden costs is the effect of very large-scale testing for SARS-CoV-2 on testing for other things e.g. PCR testing for specific mutations which guide treatment in certain cancers. When I mentioned to a lab colleague whether they were experiencing difficulties obtaining PCR extraction reagents her response was: “Extraction! We can’t even get hold of pipette tips!”. Patients are going without the tests they need to guide their treatment all in the name of jacking up the number of COVID infections found.
I should think that the only certain way of achieving “Zero-Covid” is the complete extinction of the human race, perhaps also assured by a conflagration or disaster of some sort which ensures that every scrap of tissue that may contain Covid is destroyed as well. Of course, it may also be in animals, so why stop at humans? Armageddon for All, and a sterile Planet Earth.
You need a fireball that destroys the atmosphere as well, as there are trillions of virus circling the earth. ‘This’ coronavirus will now be widely circulating in all mammals as well as the lower atmosphere. Most mammals don’t suffer from human excesses so are perfectly able to live with it.
COVID-19 is a disease that has been exploited mercilessly by the political left. To think that zero-covid is achievable is bordering on the insane. For goodness sake a cure for the common cold has never been found, nor will it, because it keeps mutating. And it will be the same for this particular coronavirus.
It’s good to get a laugh every day from the noddies who attribute all ills in this shit-show of mega-capital to ‘the left’.
I did not say it was all down to the Left, I said they have exploited the situation mercilessly and to their benefit. Which is undeniable and irrespective of your personal sensibilities.
This has become a religion.
I recommend all Sceptics to try to find the studies that actually prove that viruses make people ill at all.
This is the classic Terrain Theory versus Germ Theory debate.
Over the past year, I have been on an intellectual journey and increasingly think that Germ Theory is fundamentally wrong.
If anyone knows the proof points (eg a pure virus definitely made someone ill as opposed to associational data where we deduce contagion) then please do post that.
Or better still, it would be great if someone could write an article here explaining why Germ Theory is right.
Doctors believing Germ Theory is not “proof”, of course. Doctors can be (and often have been) wrong.
“If there was ever a time that ‘Zero Covid’ – the goal of eliminating Covid altogether – made sense….”
“It has to be Noah”, I thought.
Again – final conclusion absolutely right, but why the thought that it ever ‘made sense’?
I’m no virologist or epidemiologist, but I’ve picked up enough knowledge to know that, right from the start, the thought of ‘eliminating’ a corona virus is sheer, unadulterated nonsense.
If we could push it off a cliff, that would be better.
Some background for those unfamiliar with the Daily Kos. Its been around for about 20 years and is owned by a really nasty left loony hypocrite who lives in Berkeley, California. Markos has made himself comfortably rich from Trust Fund Babies giving him money to support the site. He is a really nasty piece of work who is politically to the left of the Socialist Workers Party. And of course he sent his kids to private schools until found out. The Berkeley Public Schools are terrible because of they have being ruined by the politics of people just like Markos.
The guy who wrote the article is an author of low grade fantasy science fiction whose day job is as a low level IT manager for a large coal company in St Louis,MO. He has a weird BS in Geology from what sounds like a community college in Kentucky (a bit like a Tech in the UK, but more like City and Guilds level) and seems to have been a field assistant for 20 years for the state geology service or USGS. Then no doubt went into IT as the money was better. Not the pittance he was getting at… Read more »
Peanuts from Peabody?
Whatever the price of defeating COVID-19 may be,” the Daily Kos article concludes, “it must be paid”.
What a lame brain who wrote that is. Viruses cannot be defeated, they are far too small and far to numerous for mere mortals to comprehend or stand a chance of conquering.
(I use to be a research scientist using electron microscopes, to give you some idea of how small viruses are look at a hair off your head and divide it by 1000, that’s how small a virus is. Look up into the heavens and see the stars just in our galaxy, now divide the number of viruses on earth by the number of stars in the universe (yes universe not our galaxy). Each star in the universe would have 100 million viruses each).
‘Viruses cannot be defeated, they are far too small and far to numerous’…
Completely off topic, but that has just reminded me of the wonderfully entertaining (for all the wrong reasons) movie, The Swarm. If memory serves, the national guard are called up to help combat the killer bees as they descend on a US city – the national guard troops all appear to be carrying a machine gun – presumably so they can shoot the bees! Fly swatters or bug spray would’ve made much more sense!
The response to this virus appears to be similarly illogical.
The Left are resurgent and they will kill us all.
Not hyperbole, it’s like 1989 never happened, the Cold War got hot and in your face.
No. Not ‘hyperbole’. Just bonkers.
With nonsense stuff like that, it’s no wonder that the resistance has been compromised by circular firing squads.
Come up with a better explanation.
The ‘greens’ are lefties in disguise, that is a common theme, and in parts correct given the movement in Germany.
However there are other ‘willing idiots’ as well from all across the political spectrum.
But this is missing the target.
Its MONEY that is behind this, vast wealth created by CBs over the last 15 years lloking for a risk free opportunity to make more money. Billionaires of course, family funds like the Rothschilds, of course. Plus the likes of BlackRock investing $trillions. They want disruption and they want new investment opportunities backed risk free by tax payers.
To make the most of this they need most governments to step in line and create a totalitarian environment that forces these ‘opportunities’ on the tax payer.
Great for them that the likes of the UN/Schwab/ covidiots/CO2 nuts etc are in the forefront of the movement. Nice targets for the masses if things go wrong.
But the real movers are the money men, the real fascists.
i have absolutely no idea how they can be removed or slowed down, as they are so wealthy they ‘own’ nations.
If you think there is a Left and a Right, you are part of the problem. We live in what is effectively a one party state with two faces giving the appearance of choice and the appearance of democracy.
There Is No Alternative. (/s)
Zero Covid became an impossible target once it became clear that there is an animal reservoir.
One unintended consequence of the whole debacle, is that I have lost respect for ‘scientists’, as it is clear a huge majority are either incapable of rational argument or are in thrall to vested interests. I am now a sceptic about every scientific claim in every field.
I read and then ignore any article that has as a headline “Scientists/experts say….”.
The best test is to drop in the word ‘priest’ where scientist/expert is used.
If the article still reads cleanly, then you can ignore it.
If it doesn’t (ie it says “priest suggests X but further research is required”), then it may be worth reading further.
That’s a nice approach – I’ll use it!
Nut job!
PS vax passports coming on the 11th November….
According to…?
Government job advertisements requiring people to prove they are “fully vaccinated” as per government regulations being introduced 11th Nov.
From James Melville’s twitter feed.
for which jobs?
Yep – just after FLOP26 finishes!
Not the first time I have seen reference to introduction of vax passports. It’s happening all over the world so why not here?
Already is in Scotland and here in Wales. No doubt the Welsh Labour government will gradually increase the number of places that are forced to require them. And of course, eventually, we’ll have to pay for their renewal. £10 to start and the £100 after a few years.
In 1992 I paid £53/yr council tax. This year it is £1600 and that’s with a single person allowance!
All a vaccine will do is reduce (by an unquantifiable amount) the impact on health services, it won’t do a lot for transmission or infectivity.
well being jabbed seems to increase the ability to catch and transmit covid.
Actually, it may INCREASE the impact on health services, judging by the volume of reported adverse effects.
Not torturing people into voluntary vaccine compliance would set the dangerous precedent that what’s voluntary is actually optional. That’s something the WHO cannot allow to happen as this would gravely disrupt their disease eradication delusions.
Reality is far too complex to play along with simplistic theories – but people will defend their debunked theories against the reality of reality
A fundamental observation. It’s why all megalomaniacal tyrannies fail. If you declare war on Tao, prepare for defeat.
The article goes to show that this is more about politics and ideology than science and human welfare. It is the justification for totalitarianism. If America (and the rest of the world) is to survive these zero covid nutters must be defeated.