Remind me not to start a series of posts on a hot topic and then take a two-week vacation. The vacation was sorely needed and much enjoyed, but so much happened during it that I couldn’t keep up. 

Things are still happening, however, so I’ll just pick up with a recent headline: “Fauci: Prepare to ‘Hunker Down’.” Prepare? Aren’t we hunkering down already? Haven’t we been hunkering down since March? Oh, he’s saying we should prepare to hunker down “through this fall and winter because it’s not going to be easy.” 

And the reason he gives for hunkering down through the winter is that “cases” are still “unacceptably high.” 

Fauci considers 10,000 cases a day acceptable but not 30,000 or 50,000, which is allegedly what we’re now seeing. How heartless of him! How arbitrary! He’s OK with 10,000 people getting covid every day. No problem there. But somehow 30,000 is too much and worth many more months of extreme pain and death to avoid. (Yes, death, because suicide rates are way up since we hunkered down.)

But be advised: “Acceptable” is not a scientific concept. Nothing in medical science tells us how much disease we must accept. It’s a strictly personal issue, except when groups of persons get together to decide what to force others to accept or reject. Then it becomes a political issue. So when Fauci tells us how many cases are “unacceptable,” he’s not speaking as medical expert; he’s speaking as a politician. 

But what about the alleged facts supporting Fauci’s personal opinion on the political issue?  

I say “alleged” because counts of covid “cases” are notoriously unreliable for several reasons. Governments are pouring a lot of money into covid care, so hospitals are providing as much of it as possible, counting patients who test positive for covid as covid “cases” even if covid is not what made them patients. 

Governments are also pouring a lot of money into covid testing, so testing companies have rigged their tests to produce as many positives as possible, making them far more sensitive than is sensible. What else should we expect? They are being paid to find covid, so they are making sure they find it.  

But most of what they’re finding isn’t a threat to anyone, because most of the people testing positive (up to 90 percent, according to the New York Times) aren’t people sick with covid and capable of infecting others, but people who have merely encountered the virus some time ago and still have traces of its RNA in their bodies. 

That’s why the CDC (while I was away) very reasonably changed its recommendation on testing to say “you do not need a test” if you don’t have covid symptoms and haven’t been “in close contact with someone known to have” covid. 

The CDC had previously recommended testing anyone who had come into “close contact” with someone known to be infected. That’s a whole lot more people, and in practice it led to people getting tested just for having come into close contact with someone not positively known to be not infected.

The usual experts immediately accused the CDC of murder. “This change in policy will kill,” tweeted Alison Galvani, a disease modeler at Yale School of Medicine. (Galvani has also modeled Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All proposal and concluded it would save $450 billion and 68,000 lives every year. Sure it will.)

In fact, the CDC’s change merely brought its recommendations into closer alignment with standard medical procedure, which is to test people for infections only after they show symptoms of an infection. As explained in my last post, testing is not a diagnosis, merely a diagnostic tool. It doesn’t tell you you are sick; it tells you what you might be sick of so your doctor can decide what to do about it. 

But without widespread testing, our Faucis and Galvanis would have very little to scare us with. Deaths are way, way down everywhere and never were very high for most age groups. “Cases” are the only scare number they have left, and even they are going down, but not down enough to be considered “acceptable.” So they say.