My wife and I had a couple of foreign exchange students live with us for a year.  They have since returned home, and we still keep in touch with them.  However, while they were here, we listened to them talk about COVID from their country’s perspective.  I was full of melancholy as I heard the tones in their stories.  They used the phrase, “back during COVID,” like you and I would say, “back when I was a kid.”  COVID stole from their youth.  They knew it.  They knew they didn’t get the same opportunities their parents got.  For these guys, even their first kiss with a girl was delayed by COVID!  Listening to their stories is a part of our memory of our time with them.

A little over a month ago, Johns Hopkins University (JHU) stopped collecting COVID data from the hundred-plus countries that were sending it to them.  I have kept this hyperlink in my “news” folder long enough to realize I must decide if it still belongs.  Certainly, it was considered news.  It changed the world more than anything that has happened since I was born about 60 years ago.    They discontinued their resource center operations but left all their data in a public-facing format, just as they promised they would.  The media placed this closure of data collection in the same category as the retirement of an old battleship going to drydock as a future tourist attraction.  However, it isn’t just like an old ship with no life other than its history.

To start, this is some of the most objective and protected data the human race has ever collected, and there is justification that deserves a moment of consideration.  JHU established itself as the global non-governmental leader, with that last distinction being very important.  Around the world, educated people don’t trust the government to report what is happening.  JHU’s role as a private and independent university, willing to take all incoming data from all governments without any duress to filter it, made this data meaningful.  The “bad data” was not removed, as is often the case, and as some think probably happened.  To this day, people still think all of the output from their data collection has been fudged by some government or big pharma to manipulate us.  Did Elvis just reemerge, as well?  JHU had no behavioral obligations to anyone in government.  They weren’t family members to Fauci, the president, Chinese authorities, or EU officials.  They were Public Health experts, MDs’, engineers, and security specialists who wanted to collect data, create outputs people were asking for, then make all that public-facing in case someone discovered they were wrong.  That last distinction gave them global credibility.

Fortunately, our god is a god of measurement.  Throughout history, he measures time, distance, height, weight, duration, age, etc.  He also gave us a gift of pattern recognition that includes numbers.  We remember songs after only a few notes, even if we haven’t heard the song in decades.  We remember our street addresses from 50 years ago.  All of this recall uses the mathematical and pattern recognition centers of the mind that are built into our identity as we were created.

We also remember the bad patterns, too.  We remember the day of our parent’s death.  Some of us still count our parent’s or grandparent’s age, even if they have been dead for years.

So, JHU stopped listening to new data.  We had enough.  There was a consensus that the pandemic, as a global phenomenon, was over, all opinions in and weighed.

Here is the output, unadulterated. In it, you will find yourself following creation and looking at the numbers and the patterns.

FINAL Johns Hopkins Data.

So, now that we are “done” with the data collection and all that is left is analysis, let’s hit some myths that linger.  It is a sad moment to be an American as I see the number of people who still think these myths are credible and aren’t willing to unwind their own thinking.  Since when are we scared of the truth?

COVID Myths

• The US was the world leader in Covid cases because we tested and reported the most.   Per capita, there were several countries ahead of us, both in Europe and Asia.  I circled Germany, but you can circle others and check for yourselves.  Germany has 84 million people.  With 38 million unique COVID positives, that is nearly half of the population, way ahead of the USA.  Remember, in the USA, a person can get COVID twice, and that be counted as a second case of the disease.  Not every country agrees with that conclusion…benefits to reading that data!  Look at Japan, Korea, Brazil, and Austria.  They all had more cases, per capita, than the USA did.
• COVID  deaths were blown out of proportion because of all the money that insurance paid to hospitals if they listed COVID as the cause of death.   This has been repeatedly audited by multiple independent firms, and there is no evidence to support this claim.   No, the auditors weren’t paid for by the hospitals.
• This was a hiccup, and our people and economy will quickly recover. Can’t say if this is a myth, as it is a prediction for the future that has not yet come to pass.  However, the Brookings Institute reported last month that the impact on educational outcomes, both public and private, will last for the rest of this generation.
• This was as bad as the Spanish Flu.  Total Myth.  In 1918 when that influenza pandemic occurred, the minimum estimated number of deaths was 17 million.  Some put it at 50 million, but we don’t know as we didn’t have a JHU equivalent centrally gathering data back then.  We know that the world population back then was 1.8 billion.  As you can see, JHU reports that a total of 6.9 million died of COVID while the earth’s population was nearly 7 billion.  A spoonful doesn’t equal half a cup.  COVID was mild, by the numbers.
• Vaccinations helped. Can’t prove this, one way or another.  Concurrent with the development of the vaccine was changes to the protocol for treatment when someone was diagnosed.  In essence, we created an artificial resistance concurrent with getting better at fighting it, and the two were intermingled strategies in literally every population group on the planet. People want us to believe that vaccines helped, and they may have!  But we can’t use science as the tool to make that argument.  We can say, with certainty, that the number of people who died once they were diagnosed decreased as we got better at treating it.
• We can’t trust this information.  It is still nothing more than an opinion of a group of scientists.  I am in the majority that agrees with the need for multiple references to be credible.  So, let’s add another reporting agency that uses parallel data, not just COVID data.  The National Vital Statistics have been tracking birth and death numbers for longer than anyone reading this is alive, and they get the benefit of knowing that reporting to them is mandatory in this country.  You can’t be born nor die in the USA without that information making it to them.  Their output on death rate changes is below, AND anyone can download their information to a spreadsheet and crunch in on their own.  They set it up for the untrusting to access and see for themselves.

Our world’s CIVOD database continues to exist not as a news source but now as a link to data, full of undiscovered observations.  Hopefully, you are mature enough not to believe the myths and can do as your teachers instructed you over the years to look at the facts, by yourself and draw conclusions that stand up to the test of multiple reviewers.