On kids and (useless) masks and Covid: One death is a tragedy...
... a million deaths is a statistic
Our multimedia propaganda overlords on team fear have most of the country convinced that all the kids will be dying of C19 any second now so masking them in only a slightly less ghastly manner than the antebellum Democrats did their slaves is perfectly justified to “save” them. Similar comments were made 160+ years ago about how this type of tyranny would “save” the southern slaves from themselves as well IIRC.
Yes, that headline and sub is a direct quote from “Uncle Joe” (where have I heard that “affectionate” name phrasing before!?) Stalin.
What “Uncle Joe” Stalin was getting at was that the general population is more easily swayed by drama and anecdotes than by ground truth analytics. This makes sense when you understand that huge swaths of the population “self identify” (even before the woke religion raring its purple head) as not knowing math from a hole in the wall.
That very same “Uncle Joe” caused one of the most famous dissidents in all of history — and in the light of that history provably correct in his assessments unless you’re “woke” — named Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to sarcastically comment:
"We know they are lying. They know they are lying. They know that we know they are lying. We know that they know that we know they are lying. And still they continue to lie." —Alexander Solzhenitsyn
That seems to have yet another ring of deja vu about it as well doesn’t it? — like (cough) (cough) flu vaccine efficacy among what seems like a thousand more government mistakes and convenient flip-flops…
So how have the kids actually been faring so far?
This markup of a chart posted by @MarkChangizi of 2016 top 10 causes of death by age bands — my dark purple line added for stronger visual emphasis — seems somehow relevant.
Yes, that’s right. Even with most of C19’s 2020’s (highly questionably “with” vs “of” accounted for but we’ll leave that alone for now; this is close to correct “seasonal” accounting) deaths mapped onto 2016 deaths by age bands we find that it isn’t until age 25 that C19 even cracks the top 10 causes of death.
And it never exceeds unintentional injuries until you reach retirement age and even then never exceeds the top 4 causes of death!
Now we know in yet another way why the multimedia propaganda is all about anecdotes and not data (other than large numbers presented without adequate context). And yes, that applies to “long Covid” in children as well.
All our “Uncle Joe’s” are smiling when the current one isn’t risibly comatose and thereby unable to whip along his burka campaign in Afghanistan. Gotta keep little girls everywhere safe from Covid…