As of 6/2/2020, 5:49:29 PM, Georgia has recorded 48,207 cases of COVID-19 positive tests. And the new cases graph is showing an impressive post-lockdown surge. So why does my post title say the opposite?
Because GA DPH is finally showing separate tallies for viral (active infection) and antibody (post-infection/recovered) tests. 5,395 of the positives were antibody tests. Antibody testing started after the lockdown ended. And that matters because…
To test positive for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, one must be exposed to the virus, be infected enough to stimulate an immune response, begin producing the appropriate antibodies, and produce enough to be detectable. The entire process can take weeks. That means any positive antibody test represents someone who was infected before the lockdown ended. They’re simply reporting those as new, post-lockdown cases. But in reality, they have no idea when they really occurred (as opposed to finding out about them).
DPH is still graphing viral and antibody testing together. I wish the idiots would separate those out. But a SWAG at the numbers strongly suggests that nearly the entire post-lockdown bump was really antibody-positives.
There was no post-lockdown surge in new cases; it was a surge in reporting, as predicted. The lockdown was pointless from a public health perspective. Kemp locked down Georgia three months after community transmission had already started in the US (despite CDC claims that it was late-January/early-February).
Another interesting point about Georgia’s antibody testing: 5.9% of those tested were positive. Remember; those were people who’d never had any symptoms to speak of, or they would have had viral testing before. COVID-19 has spread across the entire state; viral testing showed cases in every county. Georgia’s population is 10,617,423. Extrapolating, it’s very likely 5.9% of the population would be antibody-positive.
626,428
Georgia has reported 2,102 COVID-19 deaths (never mind for now that we know that number is inflated). That gives us a COVID-19 mortality rate of 0.335%. One-third of one percent. One-tenth of the 3.4% WHO claimed. The vast majority of whom were elderly and/or infirm (and many of those wouldn’t have happened if some states hadn’t decided nursing homes full of the elderly and/or infirm were a good place to stick the infected). But the powers that-be-locked down the entire younger working and student population, crippling the economy for — hopefully only — years.
Here are some more numbers to play with: You’ve heard that over 108,000 have died of COVID-19 in the US. Do you know how many the CDC actually has ICD-10 coded as COVID-19?
Yeah, the other 21,000 may have had (or once had) SARS-CoV-2, but that wasn’t what killed them. It was little things like murder, or surgical complications.
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Random Acts of Gibberish 