Analysis of a panic porn piece

Vincent J. Curtis

15 Feb 22

RE: Omicron expected to spread through March.  By Joanna Frketich.  The Hamilton Spectator 15 Feb 22.

The article is a good example of COVID panic porn.  It uses scary words and scary looking statistics without context.  It reports the word of a single source without question.  The word “endemic” does not appear is a story about the threat of Omicron.

Here are the few “facts” reported: “public health officials estimate that vaccines have saved 131 lives in the fifth wave.”  This number is meaningless.  It says nothing about the variable number of vaccinations individuals have had, and more importantly the age of the people whose lives were allegedly saved.  COVID is dangerous to those over 80, and less dangerous than the seasonal flu to those under 50.  So, what was the average age of death of those alleged saved?  Lastly, the difference between model projections and actual results might well be due to flaws in the model, which grossly overestimated deaths.

On page A4 it is revealed how the 131 saved lives was calculated: “Public heath used the rate per 100,000 to determine that 216 Hamiltonians would have died since December if there were no COVID shots as Omicron rapidly spread.  Instead, Hamilton reported 85 deaths from Dec. 1 to Feb 11 – a difference of 131 lives spared.  “This data just serves as a great highlight for the great importance of vaccination during this wave and ongoing,” said city epidemiologist Erin Rodenburg.

Of course, she’d say that.  It’s nonsense on stilts, and it’s self-serving as hell.  In the first place, estimating from old data does not constitute new “data.”  The old death rate did not take into account the milder effects of the Omicron variant, and so the estimated number of deaths ought to be high, a lot high.  But the self-serving epidemiologist put down the difference between her flawed estimate and the actual number to “vaccines,” with no mention of number of shots taken or who got infected or average age of death.  This is a farce of statistics.  Going unnoticed is the lack of credit for lockdown measures as a quantified element of success.  Why?  Are lockdowns, passports, and crowd size restrictions, and earlier closing hours now completely discounted, or was the point of the story to push vaccines?

Scarsin Forecasting warns of potential for 20,000 additional infections.  So what?  They grossly overestimated number of deaths.  Their modelling potentially is wrong, so why should we believe them?  If 20,000 cases occur in the under 40 crowd, there’s no reason to believe hospitalization or deaths will go up.  The figure of 20,000 is just to scare people; it’s only a guess and it matters who gets infected.  Hence, projections of 300 hospitalizations and 50 deaths involve assumptions about who gets infected and their state of health.  There’s no statement of estimated numbers of people saved as a result of vaccination.  Why?  Because it would expose the circular reasoning involved in making statements of success.

The skepticism developing over panic porn is reported at the tail end of the story, which indicates the degree of hesitancy over further vaccination.  The law of diminishing returns nowhere gets mentioned, but that’s what people are beginning to think about.

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