… government which attempts to control minds is accounted tyrannical, and it is considered an abuse of sovereignty and a usurpation of the rights of subjects, to seek to prescribe what shall be accepted as true, or rejected as false, or what opinions should actuate men in their worship of God. All these questions fall within a man's natural right, which he cannot abdicate even with his own consent.
—Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677)
In Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith gave a warning about rich and connected con-men, noting at how they can deceive and oppress the masses by controlling, colluding with, or hoodwinking the existing government officials.
If very rich people want you to believe in a lie, they often succeed, by coopting existing authorities in whom you had previously put your trust. It appears that COVID is mired in such corruption.
Odd Things
One odd thing that occurred just prior to COVID is the excess death rates dropped precipitously worldwide — as if, suddenly, tons of people started eating healthy and taking care of themselves in that month or two before COVID hit.
Then excess deaths and COVID deaths rose together for a while, until COVID deaths could no longer keep up:
By June of 2020, confirmed COVID deaths no longer accounted for the majority of excess deaths which were occurring, and by November 2020, they no longer accounted for even a third of excess death.
Best estimate of the worst that COVID got
To get a good estimate of the virulence or lethality of a disease, you need a large sample taken early on, before treatment changes had had a chance to set in. Changes in treatments, such as the broad release of vaccines into the public square, would confound all future estimates.
The best early estimate (i.e., the best estimate) of COVID lethality is the 28-day infection fatality rate (IFR) found in the UK’s Technical Briefing No. 5, where 104 of 52,000 people infected with confirmed Alpha variant died — giving a 28-day COVID IFR of 0.2%.
But not all COVID deaths occur by Day 28 after symptom onset, so the true IFR of Alpha variant COVID would be adjusted to account for the 11% of deaths which are expected to occur after Day 28.
This comes from the distribution of deaths model formed by Linton et. al., and it uses the upper bound estimates for mean and standard deviation (to correct for early data having more than its share of patients with short incubation times):
The best estimate of COVID at its worst (Alpha variant) then becomes an IFR of 0.22% — about one expected COVID death for every 450 people infected.
After the Alpha variant came the Delta variant, but to find out the relative lethality of Delta, it requires a side-by-side comparison — rather than a direct measurement. As said before, direct measurements of lethality, while you make drastic changes to treatments in the background (i.e., release vaccines on the public) make for poor estimation.
Best estimates of Delta and Omicron virulence/lethality
The best estimate of Delta lethality compared to Alpha comes from UK’s Technical Briefing No 25 — when the comparative ratio of deaths to 700,000 sequenced COVID cases showed that Delta variant was only 42% as fatal as Alpha variant (Delta IFR = 42% of Alpha IFR).
The best estimate of Omicron lethality compared to Delta comes from a March 2022 study of 1.5 million infections — where it was discovered that Omicron variant infections are only 31% as fatal as Delta variant infections (Omicron IFR = 31% of Delta IFR).
There are roughly 3 kinds of COVID: pre-Delta, Delta, and post-Delta (Omicron).
There is an infection fatality rate (IFR) for each group above, and this allows for graphing expectations on the number of excess deaths expected when each kind of COVID was dominant in circulation.
Expected Excess Death by dominant COVID variant
After getting a baseline for pre-Delta COVID from the 29 most-populous nations of the earth, I stepped it down according to how each new kind of COVID was less than half as fatal as the kind before:
While the median daily excess death per million (DEDpM) began at almost 2.5 in 2020 before vaccines rolled out in the 29 nations, the predicted DEDpM after that dropped by more than half with each new variant.
But have a look at the actual median DEDpM for the 29 largest nations:
The evidence suggests that vaccines made things worse. Relative lethality was strongly overwhelmed after vaccines rolled out, indicating net harm was done.
Reference
[Spinoza Quote] — https://www.faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/Courses/Spinoza/Texts/Spinoza/tpt20.htm
[Adam Smith Quote] — Adam Smith Institute. https://www.adamsmith.org/adam-smith-quotes
[Cumulative Excess Death (The Economist)] — OWID data. Available: https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
[Deborah Birx claims 25% COVID death inflation by CDC] -- Blaze Media. https://www.theblaze.com/news/deborah-birx-cdc-trust
"Birx, who is the White House coronavirus task force response coordinator, reportedly said that the CDC was inflating COVID-19 statistics by up to 25%."
[CDC readjusts COVID death counts downward in 2022 (after the fact)] -- Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/cdc-reports-fewer-covid-19-pediatric-deaths-after-data-correction-2022-03-18/
[The most appropriate "onset-to-death" model for COVID death is lognormal with mean of 14.5 days (12.5, 17.0) and SD of 6.7 days (4.9, 9.4)] -- Linton NM, Kobayashi T, Yang Y, Hayashi K, Akhmetzhanov AR, Jung SM, Yuan B, Kinoshita R, Nishiura H. Incubation Period and Other Epidemiological Characteristics of 2019 Novel Coronavirus Infections with Right Truncation: A Statistical Analysis of Publicly Available Case Data. J Clin Med. 2020 Feb 17;9(2):538. doi: 10.3390/jcm9020538. PMID: 32079150; PMCID: PMC7074197. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7074197/
[25% annual attack rate for COVID] -- Ioannidis JPA. Reconciling estimates of global spread and infection fatality rates of COVID-19: An overview of systematic evaluations. Eur J Clin Invest. 2021 May;51(5):e13554. doi: 10.1111/eci.13554. Epub 2021 Apr 9. PMID: 33768536; PMCID: PMC8250317. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8250317/
"Acknowledging residual uncertainties, the available evidence suggests average global IFR of ~0.15% and ~1.5-2.0 billion infections by February 2021 ..."
[Delta dominant after 26 Jun 2021; Omicron dominant since 19 Dec 2021] — Shi DS, Whitaker M, Marks KJ, et al. Hospitalizations of Children Aged 5–11 Years with Laboratory-Confirmed COVID-19 — COVID-NET, 14 States, March 2020–February 2022. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2022;71:574-581. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm7116e1
[As of 19 Jan 2021, from 52,000 COVID infections with Alpha (SGTF) variant, there were 104 deaths, 1 death per 500 Alpha infections (IFR=0.20%)] — Page 3. Epidemiological findings. UK Technical Briefing #5 (PDF file). Available general: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/investigation-of-novel-sars-cov-2-variant-variant-of-concern-20201201
Available specific page: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/959426/Variant_of_Concern_VOC_202012_01_Technical_Briefing_5.pdf
"On 19/01/2021, ... 104 deaths among SGTF cases (0.2%), within 28 days of specimen date."
[In almost 700,000 cases confirmed by sequencing, Delta was only 42% as lethal as Alpha (IFR=0.08%)] — Table 3. Number of confirmed and probable cases by variant as of 11 October 2021. UK Technical Briefing #25. General page: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/investigation-of-sars-cov-2-variants-technical-briefings
Available specific page: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1025827/Technical_Briefing_25.pdf
[From 1.5 million confirmed cases, Omicron is 31% as lethal as Delta (IFR ~ 0.03%), making Omicron much safer than the seasonal flu] — Nyberg T, Ferguson NM, Nash SG, Webster HH, Flaxman S, Andrews N, Hinsley W, Bernal JL, Kall M, Bhatt S, Blomquist P, Zaidi A, Volz E, Aziz NA, Harman K, Funk S, Abbott S; COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) consortium, Hope R, Charlett A, Chand M, Ghani AC, Seaman SR, Dabrera G, De Angelis D, Presanis AM, Thelwall S. Comparative analysis of the risks of hospitalisation and death associated with SARS-CoV-2 omicron (B.1.1.529) and delta (B.1.617.2) variants in England: a cohort study. Lancet. 2022 Mar 16:S0140-6736(22)00462-7. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(22)00462-7. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 35305296; PMCID: PMC8926413. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8926413/