Governments, international organizations and mainstream media continue to drum up fear and panic in India, even as the facts entirely contradict their claims.
At this time last year, in April 2020, much less information was known about the virus. But even though some models were suggesting that this could turn out to be a severe pandemic, our party, Swarna Bharat Party, had insisted that India not implement any lockdowns but follow, instead, an age-based risk management approach. Our recommendation was consistent with the approach identified in officially approved pandemic plans across the world and also with the approach supported later in 2020 by the eminent authors of the Great Barrington Declaration.
After one year of the pandemic, though, we are no longer at the mercy of ridiculous models. We know a lot more – enormously more – about the lethality of the virus. We can say without the slightest hesitation that covid is not a major pandemic by any stretch of imagination.
Around 27,000 people die in India from all causes every day: around one crore annually. People reporting on covid deaths in the media have forgotten that in the arithmetic of fractions there is thing called the denominator which exists for a reason: to provide a sense of context.
If you take one piece of pizza out of eight, then it is 12.5 per cent of the pizza. Likewise, 850 (the number of people who died of covid in a single day recently) divided by 27,000 is around 3 per cent.But if that is the worst that covid can do, it is definitely not a severe pandemic.
In actual fact, this is not how it works: the average daily covid deaths over the course of the year are far fewer. When we add up India’s covid deaths from 2020, we get a total of around 150,000, which is less than six days worth of additional annual deaths, or 1.5 per cent in all. This then qualifies as random noise – being entirely insignificant.
Had covid been in a once-in-100-year event in the range of the Spanish flu, then well over three times normal annual deaths would have occurred last year, in the range of 20 million additional deaths. Compare 0.15 million with 20 million. That’s the level of exaggeration in the media and by international organizations. Someone has forgotten basic arithmetic.
Likewise, consider the media’s frenzy about covid cases. Does anyone in the media know that approximately one billion people get infected with the flu each year in the world, i.e. roughly one out of eight persons on this planet, which is around 4.6 lakhs people per day in India. If the media were to tell us this figure – i.e. the denominator – then the number of daily covid cases today would not sound high at all.
And so, no matter which way we look at this pandemic, it is – at worst – in the range of the Hong Kong flu: definitely not enough to prompt draconian CCP-style lockdowns that have been imposed once again in many parts of India. We have clearly lost our marbles as a nation.
But even if it was the Spanish flu, lockdowns would never have been justified. Society-wide lockdowns were never imposed in human history. Instead, lockdowns are purely the personal invention of President Xi Jinping of China. As I have shown in great detail in my November 2020 complaint to the International Criminal Court, lockdowns are unsuitable even for Ebola, let alone for a respiratory virus which is necessarily endemic and cannot possibly be eradicated.
There are many other issues that we need to keep in mind while considering covid. For instance, there are serious problems with the use of PCR tests as a stand-alone diagnostic tool, as well as many problems with its accuracy. Then there are issues with covid death counts. Suffice it to say that posterity will note that both covid cases and covid death counts across the world have been grossly exaggerated in 2020 and 2021.
In the end, I wish to reiterate our party’s firm opposition to lockdowns. We are seeing the continuation of irrationality and hysteria in India, of a sort that the data does not support. These draconian lockdowns and curfews are further harming the poor of India, who are now on their knees: at the end of their tether.
Let the Modi government regain some sanity before it weakens India even further.