One thing that intrigued me from a deep Google search of Julius Ruechel is that nobody has bothered to critique his work. How important is it if nobody has bothered to push against it?
A friend sent me this link to Ruechel’s 115 page expose.
Julius writes: “Having a severe pre-existing health condition or a severely compromised immune system are necessary pre-requisites before you have cause to worry.”
That does not seem to square with this Feb. 18, 2021 Nature magazine study showing the average Covid death costs 16 years of life.
I find the Nature report more compelling. It strikes me as judicious while Ruechel’s style is hyperbolic.
Julius writes: “a full 97% of outbreak-related deaths are in long-term care & hospitals/healthcare!”
He doesn’t footnote the claim. It does not jive with other things we know about Covid deaths, including the Nature study.
Julius writes: “The pie chart demonstrates that this is a crisis that affects people with extremely serious pre-existing health conditions and compromised immune systems. And almost no-one else.”
That does not seem to square with this Feb. 18, 2021 Nature magazine study showing the average Covid death costs 16 years of life. Somebody is wrong here.
Julius writes: “Which means that, despite all the shaming about our desire to have a BBQ in our backyards with our friends, 98.6% of outbreak-linked deaths are from infections caught and spread inside the walls of tightly controlled institutional environments, not out in the community.”
He is on to something here as we have no evidence of substantial Covid transmission outside.
I find Ruechel’s rhetorical style too shouty to endure for long.
“When you overstate, readers will be instantly on guard, and everything that has preceded your overstatement as well as everything that follows it will be suspect in their minds because they have lost confidence in your judgment or your poise. Overstatement is one of the common faults. A single overstatement, wherever or however it occurs, diminishes the whole, and a single carefree superlative has the power to destroy, for readers, the object of your enthusiasm.” (Strunk & White)
Julius writes: “98.6% of all outbreak-linked deaths are the result of infections caught inside these institutional barriers. Only 1.4% are linked to outbreaks in the community at large.”
I’m skeptical. Where’s the footnote for this claim?
Julius writes that “many COVID deaths are deaths with but not from COVID.”
As soon as I hear this argument, my brain shuts off because I know I’m dealing with someone who doesn’t know much on the topic and does not think clearly with the little knowledge they do have. When I compare Julius’s arguments with Dr. David Gorski’s arguments on this matter, I find the surgeon more convincing. A pandemic that kills people at a median length of time of 18 days seems likely to be the underlying cause of death for most people who die with Covid. Covid, like AIDS, is never the proximate cause of death. Instead it will be something like organ shutdown or respiratory failure.
I don’t have the energy right now to survey the literature on the utility of face masks and social distancing to reduce an influenza pandemic. On the other hand, to me, just because some politicians and health officers used the justification of “two weeks [of lockdown] to flatten the curve” is not strong evidence that lockdowns don’t provide benefits that might outweigh the costs in some circumstances. Also, just because politicians and health officers reversed themselves quickly on the efficacy of face masks to reduce the spread of an influenza pandemic is not strong evidence that face masks are not useful in some contexts.
It makes sense to me that leaders would want to reduce the Rt (a measure of how quickly the virus is spreading), and when it goes above 1, they would have incentives to promote social distancing and when it goes well below 1, they might ease up on social distancing.
