5 April, 2021
It’s now over a year since we were told we all needed to stay home for a couple of weeks to ‘flatten the curve’. As I wrote back in May last year, in The fog of the war on COVID-19, the objectives of this phoney war on a respiratory virus with a mortality rate in the same range as a bad flu have shifted so many times that most people have long since forgotten what they were in the first place.
That’s the point of endless wars, of course. As in George Orwell’s Ninety Eighty-Four, eventually most people simply accept the “permanent war” as normal. The New Normal, one might say.
But if you cast your mind back to the opening salvo of the endless war on SARS-CoV-2, the rationale behind ‘flattening the curve’ was quite straightforward: By slowing down the rate of transmission of the virus, the number of infections occurring at any one time could be reduced, and the peak of infections would be delayed. This – so the theory goes – would allow time for the health care system to gear up to treat an expected influx of COVID-19 patients, and prevent hospitals from being so overwhelmed that they would be unable to provide effective care for COVID and non-COVID patients alike.
The area under the pink curve below represents the number of anticipated cases if nothing is done to delay the spread of the virus, while the area under the blue curve represents the number of cases if mitigation measures such as social distancing are successful in slowing the spread:
Note that the areas under the two curves are practically identical; that is, the number of people infected ends up being essentially the same, no matter which strategy is pursued. To borrow Alex Berenson’s immortal phrase, virus gonna virus.
‘Flattening the curve’ only saves lives if it actually prevents the healthcare system from being overwhelmed to the point where effective care cannot be provided. Otherwise, any measures used to achieve it are merely a socially, economically and educationally costly and pointless imposition – and the longer these measures go on, the more harm they inflict on the population on which they are foisted.
Since there is now abundant evidence that there is no relationship whatsoever between the stringency of government interventions and the total number of infections, hospitalisations and deaths related to SARS-CoV-2, the question arises, “What else might we do to prevent hospitalisation and death, in people who become infected?”
Early, effective home treatment of people at risk of serious illness, hospitalisation and death from SARS-CoV-2 infection is an obvious place to start, but despite widespread government-sponsored provision of cheap, generic drugs and nutritional supplements to infected people in developing countries, Australian authorities forbid such treatment, or even the discussion of it.
Rationale Response to the Global
Pandemic
How else might we preserve the capacity of health care system? A study published in late February 2021 in the Journal of the American Heart Association concluded that 64 per cent of COVID-19 hospitalisations in US adults were attributable to just four chronic cardiometabolic conditions: obesity, hypertension (high blood pressure), diabetes, and heart failure.
Specifically, an estimated 30.2% of COVID‐19 hospitalisations were attributable to obesity (body mass index ≥30 kg/m2), 26.2% to hypertension, 20.5% to diabetes mellitus, and 11.7% to heart failure. Note that these figures add up to more than 64%, because many patients had multiple comorbidities, as is true of the US population as a whole:
To put the study’s findings another way, 64% of people who became so sick from SARS-CoV-2 infection that they required hospital treatment, would not have needed to go to hospital if they weren’t obese, hypertensive, diabetic and/or in heart failure. They could have simply stayed home, kept warm and comfortable and taken it easy until their own immune system prevailed, just as we do with every other respiratory virus, every year.
Obviously, if the number of hospitalisations for COVID-19 had been cut by almost two thirds, no healthcare system in the developed world would have faced the prospect of overwhelm at any point during the epidemic.
The dramatically lower numbers of COVID-19-attributed deaths per million in developing world populations with poor health infrastructure but low prevalence of cardiometabolic disease, speaks volumes about the utter irrelevance of government interventions to ‘flatten the curve’.
In fact, aggressive government interventions in countries where large numbers of people live hand-to-mouth and will quite literally starve to death if they are prevented from leaving their homes to work, are causing and will continue to cause more deaths from poverty than would ever have occurred from COVID-19.
In case you’re thinking that addressing rich nations’ poor cardiometabolic health would take far too long to yield meaningful reductions in COVID-19 hospitalisation, the authors of the study further calculated that reducing the prevalence of each of the four cardiometabolic conditions by just 10% would have resulted in an 11.1% reduction in hospitalisations. That’s a high-value intervention!
Why does having cardiometabolic disease increase the risk of hospitalisation and death from SARS-CoV-2 infection? Because it affects quite literally every system in the human body that plays a role in responding to the virus:
- Cardiometabolic diseases, including diabetes mellitus, heart failure, hypertension, and obesity, are associated with diminished innate and adaptive immune responses – that is, decreased virus-fighting capacity.
- Obesity reduces baseline pulmonary function and ventilatory reserve, and is known to cause worse outcomes with influenza.
- Each of the cardiometabolic conditions highlighted in the study cause endothelial dysfunction and chronic systemic inflammation, both of which drive the excessive proinflammatory response (‘cytokine storm’) that results in severe COVID-19, characterised by vasculitis, intravascular microthrombi, inflammatory cascades, disrupted vascular architecture, hypoxemia, acute kidney injury, and stroke.
- Individuals with cardiometabolic risks have generally poorer quality diets, with lower intake of immune‐relevant nutrients such as zinc; selenium; iron; quercetin; epigallocatechin gallate; and vitamins A, C, D, E, B6 and folate.
- Physical inactivity is a driver of both cardiometabolic and immune health, increasing inflammation and illness risk and reducing overall immune regulation.
The authors conclude,
“Our findings suggest that, in the absence of these cardiometabolic conditions and/or their underlying drivers, such individuals could be still infected but experience significantly less severity of illness requiring hospitalization.”
Notably, the same mechanisms that drive hospitalisation of SARS-CoV-2-infected people are involved in so-called ‘long COVID‘, suggesting that poor cardiometabolic health is driving this post-viral syndrome.
If the governments of rich westernised countries were serious about reducing potential strain on their healthcare systems and protecting their populations against both the acute and chronic effects of SARS-CoV-2 infection, they wouldn’t be squandering taxpayers’ dollars on intrusive surveillance apps and rushed-to-market, inadequately-tested experimental COVID-19 injections, and enacting policies that decrease opportunities to exercise and increase stress-induced consumption of junk food, tobacco and alcohol.
The impact of government policies on the health-related behaviour and metabolic health of their unfortunate citizens has been catastrophic:
- In the 45 US states that issued shelter-in-place orders between March 19 and April 6 2020, daily step counts declined and self-reported snacking and overeating ramped up, resulting in average weight gain of 0.27 kg every 10 days which translates into roughly 0.7 kg of weight gain per month.
- 42% of US adults reported unwanted weight gain since the COVID-19 panic-demic began, with an average increase of 13 kg in body weight. Gen Zs and Millennials – already the fattest generations in history – reported the greatest weight gains, at 12.7 kg and 18.6 kg respectively. Not only does this weight gain increase the risk of these young adults succumbing to COVID-19 rather than simply shrugging off SARS-CoV-2 infection with a robust immune response; it’s setting them up for substantially increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and many types of cancer.
- The increased stress, anxiety and depression levels generated by poverty-inducing policies and the constant barrage of fear-porn from the corporate presstitutes posing as media, resulted in what researchers have dubbed ‘a mental health paradox‘: poor mental health reduces the motivation to exercise, even in people who want to engage in exercise for its mental health benefits. Study participants reported a 22% increase in psychological stress during the pandemic as compared to the 6 month period before it, accompanied by an 11% decrease in aerobic activity, 30% decrease in strength-based activity, and an 11% increase in sedentary behaviour. Many reported feeling too anxious to exercise. Those whose physical activity levels declined the most also suffered the worst mental health outcomes.
No, if politicians, and the apparently unironically-titled ‘public health professionals’ who advise them, actually cared about their citizens and had two functioning brain cells to rub together, they would be ending all destructive and pointless ‘containment’ measures, and investing serious money and brainpower into developing and implementing policy changes and effective programs to reduce the prevalence of obesity and related cardiometabolic diseases.
Forget ”flattening the curve”; Australia, the US, UK and westernised countries need to flatten their waistlines.
But since governments’ real constituents are Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Food and other industrial complexes, not lowly taxpayers like you and me, hell will freeze over before we see such interventions. It’s up to us as individuals, families and communities to take the steps which lead to metabolic health: adopt healthful diets based on minimally-processed plant foods, get regular exercise, avoid harmful substances, prioritise restful sleep, and engage in meaningful social contact.
Leave A Response