A reader kindly forwarded the September 8 Viral Issue Crucial Update posted on YouTube by Ivor Cummins. I have found the video both entertaining and instructive. Indeed, even though I have lost my sense of humor on the subject, I found Cummins’s understated contrarian take on the epidemic hugely entertaining. Focusing on COVID-19 in Europe, Cummins places the relevant data “in context,” as they say.
I asked my friend and coauthor Kevin Roche for his comments on the video. Kevin assesses it “a great video.” He adds that “everything seems very accurate…he just does a great job of concisely covering key points. I don’t agree with everything he says, but he is using good data.”
Kevin notes that “the thing people should really pay attention to in the video is the ‘dry tinder’ discussion, which is sensitive to some people, but factually accurate. We had a mild couple of flu years, so a lot of older people who might have succumbed didn’t, but CV-19 got them. The charts show that pretty clearly. Part of the explanation for so many LTC deaths in the US.”
Kevin and I collaborated on “False alarm” for the current (Summer) issue of Thinking Minnesota, the flagship publication of John Hinderaker’s Center of the American Experiment. Trying to do for Minnesota something of what Cummins does for Europe, we wrote the first draft of the article in mid-May. I think it has held up well.
Cummins’s video is posted here with citations that may be of interest to some readers. I’m not sure how the video has survived the censors at YouTube. Perhaps it is the video’s focus on Europe. As Kevin suggests, however, Cummins’s analysis nevertheless illuminates our situation in the United States and Cummins specifically takes up our data at 22:00. At about 24:15 he takes up the “casedemic” hysteria.
Quotable quote: “Sorry, guys.”
