I’ve been checking the IHME COVID stats site almost every day since the pandemic began. I did this for a couple reasons… one, I’m a total stat junkie and I love staring at Data Sets to try and pull out useful information. And two, because so much of the panic porn I was seeing in the news and hearing from friends was obviously bonkers, and I found that most of it could be easily debunked by five minutes spent surfing the IHME site.
You could also notice some interesting things if you watched how the data changed over time. For one thing, it was obvious that the IHME predictions were absolute garbage and nothing but worst-case-scenario additions to the overall climate of fear being so lovingly cultivated by Government and Big Industry for thier own benefit. For instance, back in October, the IHME was predicting almost five hundred thousand U.S. dead by the end of the year, which was preposterous. We were at two hundred thousand U.S. dead at that point and there was no way in hell that the total nine-month death toll was going to more than double in just 70 days. And you didn’t have to be The Rainman to grasp that, either.
It was also interesting to see reality set in occassionally, and to watch as the IHME repeatedly revised its ludicrous death total predictions downward, while simultaneously memory-holing the previous wildly incorrect predictions. You would go to bed one day in October after seeing them predict 461K by year’s end, only to wake up in November to find that the new number was 350K… or that they had decided to extend the time horizon for their prediction from January to April, without ever mentioning that they had been forced by reality to do so.
It has been a few weeks since I checked in on the IHME site because… well frankly, it’s because the pandemic is over and the urgency to track the data just isn’t there for me anymore. But I had occassion to check it a few weeks ago when I decided to use their data to back up my assertion that Michigan did not need another lockdown despite a surge in “cases.” One of the IHME stats I used to make that case was their Hospital Bed Usage stats. That graph showed that even in the IHME’s worst case scenario, Michigan would not even get above 50% in its hospital bed usage rate. And therefore, since the danger of medical resources has always been THE metric used by the Government to justify the lockdowns (when Government officials said “Two weeks to flatten the curve”, the IHME Hospital Usage Graph was the exact curve they were talking about), Michigan was in no danger of overloading its system and did not need to lock down (again or ever).
Well, I went to the site again this morning, meaning to check and see how Michigan was doing and to compare the results to my predictions, and guess what? The Hospital Usage stat is no longer displayed on the site. It’s been replaced by stats estimating overall mask usage and proper social distancing rates. In other words, the danger of U.S. medical services being overwhelmed is now so low that the IHME isn’t even bothering to report on it anymore.
Given that we just spent almost an entire year on lockdown because of the potential for the virus to overwhelm our national health grid, I would think that the official demise of that danger would at least merit some kind of announcement from the IHME. But then we live in a world where it’s more important to bury good news so that people don’t “let their guard down” than it is to celebrate good news about the end of a deadly pandemic. Dr. Fauci himself has admitted as much on several occassions.
Now, don’t misunderstand me, the IHME is not doing anything nefarious, they’re just reacting to changing conditions on the ground and updating their stats and methods accordingly. But I do find it interesting that every prediction that turned out to be wrong was wrong on the side of being overly dire. Every one! They overestimated the danger every chance they got. And when they readjusted their numbers or changed the way they reported their stats because the danger was fading, they never took the opportunity to trumpet the good news or even to admit that they’d been forced, by improving conditions on the ground, to revise their predictions downward.
What’s that old saying? Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you…
Never let anyone forget how dire predictions like the ones made so loudly and so often by organizations like the IHME were used by Governments to force us into dubiously scienced lockdowns that probably wound up doing much more harm than good.
UPDATE (5/13/21): The Hospital Resource graph is now back up on the IHME site. Not sure why… perhaps someone over there reads the Continental Congress and didn’t like being called out by your man George….