Sometimes, proving that mass hysteria is driving government policy, expert opinion, and media coverage of covid is as easy as one-two-three-four. Just look at the graphs below of data from the United Kingdom. 

If you haven’t heard, Her Majesty’s Government is now threatening to fine Britons a whopping £10,000 ($13,000) for not self-quarantining after coming into contact with an infected person. There’s also talk of another lockdown to stave off the dreaded “second wave.” 

The Guardian quotes the director of a think tank in London with the Orwellian name of “Centre for Behaviour Change,” saying, “If more restrictions aren’t done very soon then I think we risk being back into the situation where a national lockdown may be necessary. . . . Business as usual isn’t an option.”

To illustrate the gloom and doom in its report, The Guardian provides a simplified version of this graph: 

As you see, new cases of covid seem to have suddenly soared above 4,000 per day, a level not since the first week of May. 

But now look at this graph, which The Guardian does not provide, showing the three-day rolling average of deaths blamed on covid over the same period:

As you can see, daily deaths blamed on covid are way, way down since the spring and have been pretty much flat for the past two months. 

Actual deaths from covid might even be much lower than shown, as the fine print at the top of Figure 2 warns that “limited testing and challenges in the attribution of the cause of death” mean that the numbers shown “may not be an accurate count” of deaths due to covid. 

So why aren’t Brits seeing a surge in covid deaths to match their present surge in covid “cases”? Here’s why: 

Ever since April, Britain has been maniacally testing as many people as possible for covid, with the rate of testing rising fast in the past two weeks to just under 230,000. That’s nearly a quarter of a million people tested in a single day.  

But what are all these tests finding? Next to nothing, really. Here’s the percentage of tests turning out positive: 

As you can see, positive test results have ranged between zero and two percent since June, with the last data point on Sept. 18 being 1.5%. But, hey, when you’re testing 230,000 people, 1.5% provides enough positives to pretend publicly that covid is still a serious threat, still an epidemic, still an emergency justifying extreme measures.

All you have to do is ignore the real danger (slight as it is) and pretend that all these new positive test results constitute life-threatening “cases,” regardless of whether the person testing positive is in no way ill.  

Who would want to do that? Lots of people—people who don’t want to admit they’ve been wrong all along about covid, people who instead want the party in power to be wrong all along about covid, and, of course, people making money off the panic, like the corporations working on vaccines, making and marketing masks, reporting the latest alarms, and testing 230,000 people per day.