Socio-Economics History Blog

Socio-Economics History Blog

The 1% Blunder: How a Simple But Fatal Math Mistake by US Covid-19 Experts Caused the World to Panic And Order Lockdowns

by mosesman
FILE PHOTO: Adriana Cardenas, a medical technologist processes test samples for the coronavirus at the AdventHealth Tampa labs on June 25, 2020 in Tampa, Florida. © Getty Images / Octavio Jones
  • The 1% Blunder: How a Simple But Fatal Math Mistake by US Covid-19 Experts Caused the World to Panic And Order Lockdowns
    by Malcolm Kendrick, https://www.rt.com/
    In February, US Covid guru Anthony Fauci predicted the virus was ‘akin to a severe flu’ and would therefore kill around 0.1 percent of people. Then fatality rate predictions were somehow mixed up to make it look ten times WORSE.
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    When you strip everything else out, the reason for lockdown comes from a single figure: one percent. This was the prediction that Covid, if left unchecked, would kill around one percent of us.
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    You may not think that percentage is enormous, but one percent of the population of the world is 70 million people – and that’s a lot. It would mean 3.2 million Americans dead, and 670,000 Britons. But where did this one percent figure come from? You may find this hard to believe, but this figure emerged by mistake. A pretty major thing to make a mistake about, but that’s what happened.
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    Such things occur. On September 23, 1998, NASA permanently lost contact with the Mars Climate Orbiter. It was supposed to go round and round the planet looking at the weather, but instead it hit Mars at around 5,000 mph, exploding into tiny fragments. It didn’t measure the weather; it became the weather – for a few seconds anyway.
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    An investigation later found that the disaster happened because engineers had used the wrong units. They didn’t convert pound seconds into Newton seconds when doing their calculations. Imperial, not metric. This, remember, was NASA. An organisation not completely full of numbskulls.
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    Now you and I probably have no idea of the difference between a pound second and a Newton second (it’s 0.67 – I looked it up). But you would kind-of hope NASA would. In fact, I am sure they do, but they didn’t notice, so the figures came out wrong. The initial mistake was made, and was baked into the figures.
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    read more.

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