Even as states and nations continue to open up while not seeing a spike in COVID-19 cases and deaths, lockdown measures are still in effect across the nation and world. How is it that COVID-19 justifies just about everything a socialist state would do to its people? Is it just a coincidence that this virus is allowing authorities to:
Close churches
Censor dissent
Monitor our movements
Decide who is essential and who is not
Give government handouts to make us more docile and accepting of these mandates
Decide where we can and can't go?
I don't think it's a coincidence. Furthermore, I think the more people support the narrative being pushed by most politicians and major media outlets, the more the authorities are able to justify their actions. So I will challenge their claims at every turn, because their claims that this virus is more dangerous and deadly than we can handle—despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary—is the whole basis of this tyranny.
At the beginning of their decision to lock down our society, world leaders were told of horrible outbreaks of the virus in China, Italy, Spain and New York City. We were compelled to believe all the reports claiming the coronavirus was overwhelming the healthcare system in those places, making a lockdown necessary. If we are to accept measures that affect our lives so directly, we need to be given proof that it's really bad, and I mean bad in a historic and unprecedented way since the response to the virus is historic and unprecedented. That's only fair. If we are being expected to stay in our homes, leave our jobs, and lock our churches---they better give us indisputable evidence that the virus is really as bad as they say it is.
But notice that their narrative does not focus around how bad it is, but how bad it could get. Despite the fact that we now have data showing how widespread it is, and how deadly it is not, we are still only being told projections about how bad COVID-19 could be if we do not continue to lock down our society. They refer to the isolated cases in the aforementioned places because they can't sustain evidence that proves the virus is very deadly beyond those few places.
This truth begs the questions: how bad was it in China, Italy, Spain, and New York City, to warrant such strict lockdowns, and are there any other factors besides the virus that could have contributed to a surge in hospitalizations? If we are being required to heed the quarantine and public health mandates, we should demand answers to these questions.
For Italy:
Was there already a bad outbreak of influenza and pneumonia in Northern Italy? Was the arrival of COVID-19 made worse due to the fact that it arrived at the peak of flu season?
How much did an elderly population affect the death rate for the disease?
How overwhelmed are Italian hospitals during a normal flu season, given that they have a public healthcare system?
Italy has many Chinese migrant workers. How much did that affect their COVID-19 numbers?
For China:
What if the virus was bad in the beginning simply because it was new? Don't viruses weaken over time as they multiply in order to sustain themselves by finding new hosts?
Are there any factors in Wuhan that could have made the virus worse there, like dense population, a great deal of pollution, and a large number of smokers?
Why did the numbers go down so quickly in China? Are we to believe the lockdowns there were truly that effective? Or, what if the virus simply took its course and died out there?
I'm not ruling out that the Chinese created this virus as a weapon. But if that is true, is retreating from an attack the best response? That's basically what we're doing. If COVID-19 had emerged naturally in China or not, it seems our reaction would have been the same: run as far as we can from this virus we know nothing about. Perhaps in the beginning that was a wise strategy, but the reaction from the beginning has been ignoring data showing that the virus is not as deadly as our first fears thought. We seem to completely rule out the possibility that COVID-19 may just be a normal new virus like those that emerge every year. Since when did the American spirit of ingenuity run in fear from what was unknown?
For Spain, I think the same questions as those for Italy apply.
For New York City:
About 70 percent of New York deaths were in nursing homes. Governor Cuomo made it illegal for nursing homes to deny COVID-19 infected patients, as the state was preparing for a surge and supposedly needed room in hospitals, despite the fact that the field hospitals created for the anticipated surge in New York were more than a third empty at the peak of the supposed surge in hospitalizations. So, how many deaths in New York could have been avoided if we just kept COVID-19 patients away from nursing homes in New York? (By the way, New Jersey sent COVID-19 patients to nursing homes too.)
What are inner-city Queens hospitals like March-April in a normal year? We started hearing the number of deaths in these hospitals and were scared stiff, but shouldn't we compare them to numbers in recent years? These hospitals are serving densely-populated neighborhoods, and the residents often have bad healthcare plans. It's safe to assume that these hospitals usually see more deaths per day than the average U.S. hospital.
How many deaths were caused by ventilators? Usually ventilators are a last resort, but hospitals were resorting to them for patients who just had mild upper respiratory issues, because it was assumed they had COVID-19.
How many deaths weren't even actually from COVID-19? The disease has been put on death certificates even if it wasn't a leading cause of death, and even if the person didn't test positive for the virus but had its symptoms, which could be caused by a number of illnesses.
These questions are important because our liberties are being taken from us due to assumptions that the answers would only negate our suspicions. But a worldwide lockdown should depend on more than assumptions and projections.
The best place I've found for honest answers and questions is unherd.com/lockdown. Check it out for extensive interviews with experts from various fields, examining this crisis from many different angles that are mostly being ignored.
For example: "Many people who have died (from the virus) would have died anyway at exactly the same time sadly," said Professor Karol Sikora, Founding Dean and Professor of Medicine at the University of Buckingham Medical School, and ex-director of the WHO Cancer Programme. That statement may sound morbid and inconsiderate, but it should get us thinking, 'How bad of a virus is this really?' and 'What's the real crisis here?'
Time and time again, politicians and the media are ignoring the good news and emphasizing bad news. For instance, some good news is that the spread of antibodies from person to person may not be the only form of immunity we have right now. Local antibodies in our mucus may also help fight it.
Some more good news: The state of Georgia and the country of Austria started opening up weeks ago and have seen no spike in COVID-19 cases and deaths.
I hope we come out of this stronger. I hope that whenever something like this happens again—whenever socialist influencers and politicians try to push their agenda under the guise of the greater good or public interest—the common people refer to the gimmick as COVID-19. We could say, "This candidate is proposing COVID-19 measures that the people will not accept.' Or we could say, 'These COVID-19-level decrees will have common people living under the thumb of the state for decades.' That way, what has happened here will be forever ingrained in our memory, like "Big Brother" or "1984" or "Trojan Horse", a perpetual hyperbole in our lexicon; only this one is real—so it would be more like a historic anecdote—and yet the comparison may yet still be hyperbolic when considering how tyrannical things are now (or at least I would hope).
Let's hope our freedoms are never violated to this extent ever again, and work to ensure that society never again succumbs to COVID-level mandates. Let's fight this every way we can. Never again. Never forget.