How did the response get initiated? Did they politicians just watch the news and act on that information? No. There was testimony given to Congress on March 11, 2020. The House Oversight and Reform Committee was informed by NIAID. Yes, the very organization headed by the popular Dr. Fauci.
They told congress about the "estimated mortality rate", which they said was 10 times higher than seasonal influenza. This launched the response of the new normal as we know it today, with "social distancing, organizational and business lockdowns, and shelter-in-place orders."
This and the following blunders in data analysis, whether by accident or knowingly provided that way to produce he desired response, is detailed in the recent paper published by Cambridge University.
You should read the whole thing if you're interested. It explains a lot about the blunder, if it was that. I have a hard time believing it. Why? One of the core issues was that these so-called "medical experts" who were advising Congress, allegedly didn't know the difference an infection fatality rate (IFR), and a case fatality rate (CFR). I too thought they were the same, but that's not the case.
Case fatality rates (CFRs), infection fatality rates (IFRs), and mortality rates are used by epidemiologists to describe deaths during and after an infectious disease outbreak. The CDC defined a mortality rate as the frequency of deaths within a time period relative to the size of a well-defined population.6 Patients may be classified as having an influenza-like illness (ILI) such as COVID-19 according to standard criteria in a case definition.7 A case fatality rate (CFR) is defined as the proportion of deaths among confirmed cases of the disease. CFRs indicate the disease severity, while an infection fatality rate (IFR) is defined as the proportion of deaths relative to the prevalence of infections within a population.8 IFRs are estimated following an outbreak, often based on representative samples of blood tests of the immune system in individuals exposed to a virus. Estimation of the IFR in COVID-19 is urgently needed to assess the scale of the coronavirus pandemic.
What does that mean? Cases are infections, but infections are not cases. PCR tests get alleged positives for a genetic material, whether it's the SARS-CoV-2 virus or not. That doesn't mean your sick, or will be, or will be infectious. It just means you have genetic material they amplified 35-40 times to get a positive reading, with maybe 90% false positive rates.
The author of the study calls this blunder a "information bias and selection bias". It could be that. but what medical experts are these who don't actually know the definition of what they are talking to congress to advise a national response? An analogy they use is with the MARS lander blunder:
On September 23, 1998, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) permanently lost contact with the $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter.1 A simple miscalculation, failure to convert English measurements to metric measurements, doomed the Mars space mission.2 A later investigation found that backup quality assurance procedures were not in place at NASA to catch and correct this simple miscalculation.
The author believes it's an honest mistake, which it could be. It's a joke that these people have the jobs they do after this mistake. Why do they? No one is talking about this. This paper was published in August, and not a peep in the media about the monumental failure of accurately presenting the data, and we have the overblown response that we do.
It's estimates 30,000 died as a direct result of the overblown fear-based actions taken by the government to control everything and everyone. RT wrote about the paper as well if you want to read some main points. When will the US and Western media cover it? Never? Don't hold your breath!
It is great that you've highlighted this.
I'm not a believer in conspiracy theories and consider that if incompetence and stupidity is an option then 99% of the time it will be that rather than conspiracy.
But the extraordinary destruction of rights in so called democracies and the coordinated stupidity really makes one wonder.