Found this on the CDC website after reading a transcript of an interview with the head of the Department of Biostatistics at New York’s Rockefeller University – Dr. Wittkowski.
Dr. Wittkowski’s standpoint is that, the curve of the virus peaked right around the time that governments started to issue lockdown orders. The virus had already largely hit everyone it was going to hit and that by middle of April, shutting down schools, and restaurants, and the economy, about ten days after the peak was totally absurd.
To back his point, he uses data from the CDC showing numbers of ILI hospital admissions for the 2019-2020 season, overlaid with year by year data from the last decade. “WITTKOWSKI: So, on the 17th, April the 17th, the Director of the CDC presented at the Presidential Briefing this graph that I am showing here. And this is data from the Influenza-Like Illness Reporting System, or ILINet, where hospitals make a checkmark, or count, how many patients show up and [are] having fever, sore throat, runny nose—any of those—and with an indication that this might be some sort of influenza or similar [illness]. And what you see, and he explained that, there are three peaks: One was in December 2019; the other was sometime in January-February 2020; and then a third peak, that was around March 18th, and that was COVID-19. So, if the number of admissions, or people showing up in a hospital, peaks around March 18th, that means that the number of infections must have occurred on March 8th.””WITTKOWSKI: Because it takes a week until you have symptoms. And you don’t go to the hospital with the first symptoms. You say, “Oh, I have the flu. Oh, I have a cold. Whatever, it will be over soon,” and then after three or four days, if it’s not over, then you say, “Well, maybe it’s something more serious,” and then you go to the hospital. So, what we see around the 18th must have been events, or infections, that were around the 8th. And if the infections peaked around the 8th, shutting down schools, and restaurants, and the economy, about ten days later is something that is totally absurd. In particular, if you know that one week later, only one week, not ten days later, one week later the curve was already clearly going down, indicating that the worst was already over. And if, in an epidemic, the worst is already over, to say, “Okay, let’s shut down the economy and cause 26 million people [to] lose their jobs, because it’s so fun seeing them losing their jobs,” I think that is heartless.
“I also want to echo the interviewer on this point, which I feel is so important in these FB discussions:
“I’m struck by the partisan nature of this discussion, where any dissent from the accepted approach to the virus is dubbed as “Trumpian,” or its analogues in other countries, with the only acceptable approach being what is billed as “the scientific consensus.” But shouldn’t science always be an open question, subject to revision, new evidence, and debate, irrespective of political party?”
Full interview: https://ratical.org/PandemicParallaxView/PerspectivesOnPandemic-V.html
Graphic via the CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/weeklyarchives2019-2020/images/ILI16_small.gif
CDC’s raw data backing graphic: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidview/04242020/csv/percent-ili-visits.csv
We allowed the stampede to trample our economy, damage our way of life, devalue our currency, wreck our savings and set us trillions of dollars into debt. Over this?