Data misreporting during the Covid-19 crisis: The role of political institutions
sciencedirect.com
sciencedirect.com
In my own case, personally, I am pretty sure Canada's response policies are leveraging the pandemic as a pretext to impose a digital identity system designed to have the effect of reducing every person to a political minority of one, as a means to neutralize resistance to ever more radical non-consensual transformations of our society. Sure, get shots, take care of yourself, wear a mask if you think you are a source of risk. Rolling political compliance checks at every public gathering and turning principled people into an outgroup and a new underclass? No thanks. Even if it's a small probability, the impact is so huge that it's reasonable to index on mitigating it. There are reasonable and thoughtful people who are ready to draw a line. Data like this is pretty good, but even when it supports my particular flavour of ideology, I'd still treat it as an interesting anecdote, and not evidence.
There are no short answers, but since you've asked - Essentially, the rule of law has no business in the lives of a "community," and while the freedoms of speech, movement, and association allow a community to pursue their collective interests, those interests and rights are limited by the equality of the individuals that make up the whole society. It's an imperfect dynamic, but the alternatives are 20th century history.
Remember that freedom is different from a right, in that a freedom represents the limit on an external human/state power, where a right is something given and enforced by one. A right is just permission, which reinforces the power of the grantor. You don't have rights to freedoms, you have freedoms that the rights of others balance. (to say you can be free from hunger or forces of nature, is essentially a misuse of the term because there is no other person involved) In this taxonomy, taking liberty is the act of exercising both rights and freedom.
In this sense, communities are not, and cannot be free because they are not individuals, and to limit the power of a nation state to impose rules on a community (to free a communuty), creates a an unequal class just as privileged as one given special rights. A community can be granted rights, but very sparingly, because every single one has to be weighed against the necessary compromise it creates against the principle of legal equality. (The notion of "human rights," is its own issue because it implies a universal earthly grantor and enforcer, which you can appreciate the complexity of. Originally they were called "human dignity," which was more practical, but again, different can of worms.)
If the communities I live around want to collude to restrict my nationally guaranteed Charter rights of movement, association, and making a living using an internal compliance passport, it's illegal, but there is still a legal mechanism if they want to push it, and it requires passing legislation with specific prescribed legal tests, which this govt has not done. Instead, this govt (federally, and provincially) has abused "temporary" emergency powers to normalize abhorrent 20th century internal passport systems that violate Charter rights, and stepped out of their mandates into attacking freedom - which means overstepping its authority and voiding the entire social contract.
This idea that science (and not, say, math) overrides our Charter, legal system and social contract is necessarily absurd because science is how we discover and organize knowledge (or lately, produce narratives), and at it's base level, law is how we agree not to hunt each other for sport. They can enlighten each other, but they can have no power over each other that reconciles to truth.
Using this medical emergency to contrive exception after exception to unmoor our society from these limits on state power so as to be able to privilege the "communities" that prop it up at the expense of the rights and freedoms of all individuals has been a clever application of a specific theory, but they've broken the rules.
Hence, I'd say the question of balancing freedoms of individuals against those of communities while preserving the integrity of the principle of equality is a false dichotomy, and is a begged question for the legal legitimacy of a community as a thing at all. So, get shots, wear masks, stay home if you want to, don't invite wrongists to your house, but otherwise, we're equals, so farewell and good luck!
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide treats peoples (identity communities), as such, as having rights, and is recognized as embodying peremptory norms of customary international law, thus any Charter or other international or national decree or declaration which purports to deny—or conflicts with the idea—that communities, as such, have distinct rights is, to the extent it does so, invalid.
Allow me to twiddle the brim of my shiny aluminum hat here and ask objectively one more nagging question, was there any possible benefit to misreporting this data? What resources and opportunities did that afford at the time?
Hospitals were/still are getting subsidies for every covid patient treated. There is a financial incentive to inflating the covid numbers. Couple that with COVID resembling the regular old flu in many cases and you get inflated numbers.
IMO the idea peddled around last year that the regular flu just took a year off while covid was emerging will go down as one of the more egregious examples of cherry picking data in the covid era.
even if the hypothesis was true , the lack of any meaningful evidence or due process itself should worry people . and the hypothesis is preposterous
> The State and Territorial Epidemiologists Report, a weekly estimate of the geographic spread of influenza activity in each jurisdiction, was suspended for the 2020-21 influenza season due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic which impacted the data systems used to generate the estimates.
From near the bottom of https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/overview.htm
As far as I know, in the beginning of the pandemic, western countries generally relied on rtPCR for confirming COVID-19 cases. This makes it extremely unlikely that Influenza cases were mislabeled.
Wait, in the US or world-wide? When did that happen?
No matches for flu on the submitted page… I can recall - it was reported in the news - flu cases in the US dropping dramatically.
When did we have no flu at all?
Ontario officially admitted they inflated numbers significantly early in the pandemic because we didn't fit the global trends. The numbers were fudged by over 50%.
We also had the problem of Fauci chastising Ontario for running PCR cycles far too high causing significant false positives. This actually accounts for the significant portion of 'symptomless spreader' having not actually been covid but rather just false positives.
Vaccination numbers were also impossibly high. We had a shortage of vaccines available and it was reported ~80% of the population had 1 shot when nobody under 40 could have the shot without some high risk diseases. The numbers were either false or Ontario is far worse off than official numbers allow in terms of aging population and illness. The assumption is that Ontario also misreported how many people were vaccinated. The actual real numbers seem to be much more in line with the USA, at that time period it was most likely more like 30-40%.
The next problem is the misrpresentation of covid being the problem. How many people go to the hospital for not-covid and get tested but test positive. They aren't there for covid but they are represented as being there for only covid. Which is not right.
From the table, Australia has 9.59, which is comparable to Italy, Ireland, Luxembourg and Switzerland, but also Nicaragua, Thailand, Tajikistan, Haiti. Why is Australia a special case here, why does the same reasoning not apply to China (which has/had, to say the least, "highly restrictive government measures"), and why is it not weird that all these countries, regardless of their autoritarian status, have a "high MAD"?