Re: 'Are we living in a culture of fear?'

I was moved when I read Julie’s article about our current culture of fear because it gets at the heart of the issue that is plaguing us right now. To those who expressed offense or felt she was insinuating they suffered from cowardice if they do fear COVID-19, that was not the message being conveyed. The objectionable thing that has occurred over this past year is the exploitation of scientific language to deliberately inject fear into society and exert control over the masses.

The unsubstantiated claim that underlies the fear is quite simple. The public health officials, politicians and media tenaciously cling to the premise of asymptomatic spread being a major driver of COVID-19 transmission. This claim is used to justify the quarantining of healthy people, the mandatory masking of everyone, the closure of schools, the shuttering of businesses and related edicts.

There is no significant asymptomatic spread, however. Just as Dr. Anthony Fauci said in early 2020, asymptomatic spread has never been the driver of pandemics. That statement was based on decades of research, and no evidence has emerged to refute it.

Presymptomatic spread occurs rarely but almost exclusively among people in close contact for prolonged periods of time. There are several studies showing it. These studies took positive subjects and did extensive contact tracing to identify people who had been in contact with each subject with contact usually defined as 15 or more minutes, face to face, with no distancing or masks.

In one study (Cheng et al. JAMA Internal Medicine, 2020;180(9):1156-1163), the authors also did a timeline to determine when, and for how long, the exposure occurred and broke down the data by type of contact and time of exposure.

Firstly, in that study, the average overall transmission rate was 0.8% – out of the 100 confirmed COVID-19-positive subjects and their 2,761 contacts, there were 22 secondary infections as defined by positivity. Only 18 had mild to moderate symptoms, meaning a clinical attack rate of 0.7%. Of those 22 secondary infections, 13 came from only six of the subjects who had more severe symptoms. In other words, 60% of the transmission came from 6% of the subjects.

With respect to asymptomatic spread, there were nine subjects who never experienced symptoms and of their 91 contacts, none developed secondary infections.

There were 299 contacts who only had presymptomatic exposure and two of them tested positive; both were household members of the more severely ill patients. Importantly, 1,836 of the contacts were identified as “other,” meaning identified as having encountered one of the subjects in public spaces-restaurant/public transit/retail, etc., and only one tested positive. That contact was exposed to a symptomatic subject during the symptomatic phase.

In short, there were no examples of transmission by either asymptomatic or presymptomatic individuals to the general public.

The study by Cheng was the most rigorous in terms of breaking down the different subjects and contacts, but they were consistent with what we know from other respiratory viruses and from what was reported in other studies.

In a study by Cao et al. (Nat Commun 11, 5917 (2020)) the authors looked at transmission in Wuhan during a two-month period after lockdown orders were lifted. Out of 9,899,828 participants who were screened, 300 asymptomatic cases were reported and out of their 1,174 contacts, no new positive tests or clinical symptoms were reported.

Buried in that study is a table showing that 37% of the asymptomatic cases had no antibodies, meaning they weren’t “asymptomatic” – they were never infected at all.

No data have emerged to contradict Fauci’s initial statement about asymptomatic spread not being a driver of pandemics and the data emerging on COVID-19 support this initial statement.

Only models seeded with an assumption that there is asymptomatic spread showed otherwise. And scientists do not refute data with models, they test models and either refute or prove them with data. This lie of the asymptomatic spread drives all the measures because it turns everyone into a potential danger. It is the most heinous lie I have witnessed in my 57 years.

The other thing used to deceive the public is the way we are counting deaths and cases. We have never done it before for anything. Flu deaths are only called such if it was a major cause, but with COVID-19, it had to be mentioned if there was a positive test or it was suspected to be present. That’s why the CDC published that only 6% of the deaths had no other obvious cause.

It doesn’t mean COVID-19 didn’t contribute to an additional cohort of the deaths recorded or that there were only 30,000 deaths due to COVID-19, but we have no context with which to understand what this death count being reported means unless we go back and look at other respiratory viruses the same way.We can’t do that, however, because we don’t do, and have not ever done, widespread RT-PCR testing for these other viruses.

Buried in the “Danish mask study” that showed unmasked people did not have a significantly higher COVID-19 positivity rate than masked individuals was a table looking at other viruses in their study population, https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/suppl/10.7326/M20-6817/suppl_file/M20-6817_Supplement.pdf.

It was included as a control for their RT-PCR numbers, but what it ended up showing was that, in both masked and unmasked individuals, there were even more people with detectable levels of the common cold RNA than COVID-19 and similar numbers of people with respiratory syncytial virus, coronavirus HKU1 and influenza A.

What if everyone who died in 2020 were tested for those? And we called them common cold, influenza and RSV deaths? Do you see how we need context to understand COVID-19? The excess deaths in 2020 turned out to be higher than the previous few years, but normalized for population, the number is similar to other years where a spike was observed.

It is still sad – that we had so many deaths in 2020. But, in many states the primary increase was seen in dementia deaths – and cardiac disease in others. The measures we took are so drastic that we simply cannot assume the increase in deaths this year compared to 2019 and 2018 are due to COVID-19 and not to the lockdowns.

It is not a rationalization. It is not a conspiracy theory. It is common sense, and it’s irresponsible not to consider it and look at the data without attempting to force everything through a COVID-19 narrative. It’s hard to undo the psychological damage that has been wrought by power-hungry politicians and public health wanna-be TV stars.

People are calling normal behavior, such as interacting with loved ones, socializing, breathing without our nose and mouths covered, irresponsible with no data to back it up. I left studies on masks out of this essay, but the mandates are still predicated on asymptomatic spread.

There is much evidence to suggest that the majority of actual COVID-19 deaths were a result of vulnerable individuals contracting the disease from close contact with someone, not from the unmasked person at Albertson’s or the neighbor who had friends over or the restaurants that remained open.

You can look at a situation like New York, where symptomatic patients were introduced into nursing homes with a vulnerable population who are more likely to develop severe symptoms, creating a perfect environment for a severe outbreak.

I know some people have lost a loved one to COVID-19, because there is no question that it, like any respiratory virus, can be lethal. It makes this essay hard to read because the media has handed those who lost someone in 2020 a scapegoat. The fact remains, however, that the disease is not spreading via the mechanisms that public health officials are attempting to shut down. Rather, they are simply creating a second source of anguish and death.

Kathryn DeFea