Dödligt virus från Kina orsakar panik (SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19)

Exhibit E: Spending time in a hospital or long-term care facility is dangerous. But why are there so few people dying outside of institutions?

I think we can agree by now that when the virus goes on the hunt, it is finding different kinds of prey in different settings. The most vulnerable prey are those living in long-term care homes, as well as patients in hospitals who are already suffering from other serious pre-existing conditions, like Alzheimer's, dementia, cancer, or leukemia.

Children, office workers, mall shoppers, personal care clients, gym-goers, restaurant guests, and industrial workers rarely have such severe life-threatening pre-existing conditions that they become easy prey for this virus. The virus can infect them. But the overwhelming majority of these encounters have a happy ending. A significant number of them will not even experience a single symptom. Mild pre-existing conditions, which many active people in the community have, are not a death sentence. Severity matters.

So how many of the total outbreak-linked deaths are from infections caught in these two very specific high-risk settings: long-term care and hospitals?

Hold on to your hat... a full 97% of outbreak-related deaths are in long-term care & hospitals/healthcare!

Add prison populations and that number rises to a full 98.6%!

And I promise, you'll soon understand why I have chosen to add prisons to this select group of settings.

The remarkable pie chart in figure 15 begins to put the risk to the general public into perspective. Anyone not hanging out in one of these three settings faces an almost inconsequentially small level of risk from this virus.

The pie chart demonstrates that this is a crisis that affects people with extremely serious pre-existing health conditions and compromised immune systems. And almost no-one else.

But if you think you're beginning to gain perspective, I haven't even started getting to the good bits yet. Remember, there are also large numbers of people with equally serious pre-existing health conditions and compromised immune systems living outside of these three settings, but they are not dying in droves.

Why are the vulnerable living outside of these three institutions not suffering the same fate?

The eye-popping layers of this scandal begin here...

Exhibit F: Captive populations vs the rest of the community.

If you thought that 98.6% number was surprising (it surprised the heck out of me, which is why I started digging deeper into this data set in the first place), I'd now like to point out exactly what these three settings are. The people in these three unique settings are essentially captive populations that are permanently or semi-permanently segregated from the rest of society inside government-owned or government-regulated institutions. (Note: Privately-run nursing homes fall under this category because they are extremely tightly regulated by the government in order to acquire and maintain their licenses. They are privately owned, but they operate according to the government's rules.)


All three are institutional settings. Everyone who lives in these three settings is either a resident, a patient, or a prisoner. They don't go home at night. They don't mix with the rest of the population. They live there, permanently or semi-permanently. The only way they get to mingle with us is if we visit them. And we are only allowed in after staff members look us over, test us, and let us through the door. The people inside these settings already live behind an institutional wall. They permanently live under some form of lockdown, even when the rest of society does not.

I'm going to say it one more time, because it's so important to everything else that comes next:

They already live behind an institutional wall.

Which means that, despite all the shaming about our desire to have a BBQ in our backyards with our friends, 98.6% of outbreak-linked deaths are from infections caught and spread inside the walls of tightly controlled institutional environments, not out in the community.

For the past 15 months these institutions have been closed or severely restricted to the public. If the virus makes it in, it is because staff brought the virus with them to work or when health officials transferred patients from hospitals into long-term care in order to free up hospital beds. !?!

There is an equivalent of a medieval wall separating the people living inside these institutions from those living outside these walls. Their world and our world is permanently separated by an institutional barrier. There is a door that leads between these two worlds, but the government has the choice to close that door, even seal it, at any time.

As long as the government defends that institutional barrier between our two parallel worlds whenever there is a virus circulating outside, the rules imposed on those living outside are largely irrelevant to those living inside. These institutions were designed to function that way. During bad winter flu seasons, staff of long-term care homes have the option to shut the doors and live on the inside with their patients for a few weeks while the worst of the flu surge passes through the population outside.

Most pandemic waves last around 6 to 8 weeks +/-, and then the doors can be reopened.

That is how long it takes for most respiratory viruses to surge through a healthy population when general population-wide lockdowns are not used to slow the spread. But "flattening the curve" stretches that 6-week period into months, now over a year, and there still isn't enough natural immunity built up outside the walls to safely reopen the doors between these two separate worlds. Isolation kills in its own right. And defending a door for 15 uninterrupted months all but guarantees a steady stream of mishaps that let the virus through the door (more on that later).

98.6% of all outbreak-linked deaths are the result of infections caught inside these institutional barriers. Only 1.4% are linked to outbreaks in the community at large. That context is probably starting to grow a queasy feeling in the pit of your stomach about how this pandemic is being managed. But this is just the beginning of the scandal.