Pandemic Primer
To be able to say that there is a “pandemic,” an objective standard is required. A microbiology text says that pandemics involve “disease occurrence within a large population over a very wide region (usually the world).”
But to understand the word “disease” it is thankfully defined on the prior page as something that “hinders the performance of vital functions.” This means that disease is a loss of (some) vital functioning.
Example: Because breathing is vital, if an infection causes shortness-of-breath, then that infection qualifies as a disease. The phrase “asymptomatic disease” is a contradiction-in-terms, because diseases — by definition — have symptoms. They hamper or cause the loss of vital functioning. Diseases require symptoms.
This means that true pandemics involve the widespread loss of vital functioning. While any measure will be imperfect — a rationally-defensible heuristic, a surrogate marker, for lost vital functioning is the rate of excess deaths.
If the rate of excess deaths jumps up, it is rational to say that there was lost vital functioning. While any cutoff will be operational, such that it won’t be perfect, a good cutoff value for the yearly rate of excess deaths is 25 yearly excess deaths per 100,000.
115 Regions with Low Loss of Vital Functioning in 2020 (non-pandemic)
Out of the 229 regions of the world where The Economist estimates excess death rates, 115 (50.2%) of them did not have a “pandemic” in 2020 — when an objective standard is applied to discriminate a threshold value for widespread loss of vital functions (25 yearly excess deaths per 100,000).
But look at what happened in those 115 “non-pandemic” places after the COVID jab rolled out:
The average excess death rate in these 115 non-pandemic regions rose even higher than the first year of the pandemic of 1957 (Asian Flu). Even into the year of 2022, some of these non-pandemic regions experienced excess death rates still half as high as the all-nations kill rate of World War I (383 yearly excess deaths per 100,000 population).
In 50.2% of the world, COVID wasn’t a big problem — until the jabs rolled out.
A paired t-test comparing 2020 to 2021 was highly signficant, indicating that COVID jabs made excess death rates rise. A second paired t-test comparing 2020 to 2022 was even more highly significant, due to having less variability (everyone doing poorly together).
Here are some notes:
[click image to enlarge]
Reference
["disease" = loss of vital functioning; "pandemic" = widespread disease; "pandemic" = widespread loss of vital functiong (p. 721-2)] — Prescott, L.M., Harley, J.P. and Klein, D.N. (1999) Microbiology. 4th Edition, The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., New York, 685.
[historical yearly excess death from flu] — Glezen WP. Emerging infections: pandemic influenza. Epidemiol Rev. 1996;18(1):64-76. doi: 10.1093/oxfordjournals.epirev.a017917. PMID: 8877331. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8877331/
[USA lost 117,465 lives in 19 months of fighting in WWI; all nations lost 16.5 million in 4.5 years of war (i.e., 383 yearly deaths per 100,000)] — US Census Bureau. https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/reperes112018.pdf
[Estimated cumulative excess deaths per 100,000] — The Economist. OWID. https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid