Key people seemed to “know too much” at the beginning of the COVID fiasco. If you examine a typical flu season worldwide (at bottom below), you find up to 518,000 deaths:
When assumed to be evenly spread, that works out to 43,000 flu deaths per month, worldwide. After any individual pair consisting of two months of observation, a crude expectation is to expect 86,000 flu deaths, worldwide. This crude analysis assumes that the seasonality of the northern hemisphere perfectly offsets that of the southern one.
If, inside of any two months, up to 86,000 flu deaths are expected, one could ask when death estimates during COVID began to be of concern. By 2 Mar 2020, the Economist showed that, using the 95% upper bound on the estimate of excess death, no “pandemic signal” had yet arrived:
Even the upper bound on the COVID excess death estimate (82,765) was still below the crude expectation for flu death (86,000). This means that public figures who made dire warnings prior to 2 Mar 2020 would be engaged in “fortune telling” — because raw data did not exist to show any untoward danger ahead.
Even by late March, no “supra-flu” death signal existed — at least outside of China.
But curiously, with under 3,000 COVID deaths and not even an upper bound on excess death that surpassed flu, Bill Gates published a dire warning in NEJM: “Responding to Covid-19 - A Once-in-a-Century Pandemic?”
Gates warned about how the public sector and the private sector must be forced to merge with one another on a common goal, where public money funds private vaccine firms and vaccine production is sped up and globalized, so that international regulatory approval happens in 3 months or less.
And that warning came at a time when there were only 67 deaths outside of China.
Really?
Reference
[world COVID death count outside of China was 67] — CNBC report on 28 Feb 2020. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/28/bill-gates-says-coronavirus-may-be-once-in-a-century-pathogen.html
Good find!