Four

It didn't take long for our one death (29 March) to become two (10 April) to become four (11 April). And for all the tracking of cases, recoveries and intensive care, three of them were essentially cases that were barely recorded before they were moved column from cases to fatalities. The first fatality showed how freakish the virus is with its contagiousness. an elderly woman on the relatively remote and unexposed West Coast who caught and died of Covid-19 in a flash. It seemed that the diagnosis was almost an afterthought. There is no path determined how she acquired this virus. She is the clear-cut case of community transmission and was our first death. Two of the others were at the same resthome as Covid-19 like a determined ferret to get into the henhouse finds any weakness to find the defenseless. 

Some people are caught with the bittersweet of the burst in deaths and the drop in new cases. This may be just a result of the expected delay between infection and testing, testing to diagnosis, diagnosis till official release, and infection, to critical case, to death. Each update is like the light from stars, Alpha Centauri's light is four years old by the time it arrives. A distant supernova that suddenly appears in the sky is long after the violence of the explosion. It reminds me of one of the definitions of "report" being the sound of gunshot or explosion, which is slower than the sight of the action.

I have dabbled a little in the world of the Corona-denier recently. There is a hodgepodge out there which doesn't necessarily internally agree but is uniform in its suspicion and its attack of every part of the reporting or the response to the pandemic, or the term that they use: plan-demic. It is interesting to see what counter-evidence they use to sustain their fervour. So far:
1 - doubt about one vlogging nurse at a New York hospital (there is the lamentable use of the term "crisis actors", which is someone who is not a true victim but acts as one for the news).
2 - "empty hospitals" or rather the contrast between the visuals on the news, and those when a correspondent in the area videos the same hospitals at another time
3 - suspicion of the numbers, which seems to focus on the doubt for numbers that support the overestimation, and ignore doubt around numbers that underestimate the damage.
4 - suspicion about the criteria for dying with covid-19, if it is the prime cause of death, or that it is just killing the people who were going to die anyway.
5 - beliefs that the number of asymptomatic or naturally immune people is higher than thought.
6 - quotes from experts qualifying statements taken out of context. (For example, quoting a statistician to say the "case counts" as meaningless; when the pragmatic methods of PCR testing can only lead to an indicative count, and to identify risk and isolate. Random antibody testing that will come on stream soon would be the only ones that should yield statistically meaningful results.)

(The contradiction in some of the messaging is whether Covid-19 is a true health crisis or whether it's overblown, and whether it's natural or a designed weapon. Above I've taken arguments from those who think it's a true, natural but moderately harmless virus. Some of the analysis below would be different if it is thought to be a Chinese weapon, or a true pandemic virus that is being exploited in the spirit of "Never let a good disaster go to waste.")

Anyone of the points above is an interesting rabbit-hole to waste away an afternoon. And if I were to meet someone who was really possessed by this evidence and argumentation, it'd be an interesting but probably fruitless interaction. These points are just the scaffolding to support one plank of a greater belief system that is generally suspicious of the mainstream media, government and science. And the belief system is often a sustaining pillar in their intellectual self-esteem. The above are the reeds of the discussion but it's interesting not to get caught in there but better to contemplate the swamp.

The points above are all parts of the "plan-demic", so it pays to look at the swamp, that is, what "plan" is being enacted by creating a multi-country conspiracy with agents in every level of each society to execute with great loss to almost every level of society. And it is that which I think makes it an easy conspiracy theory to dispel. There must be a pay-off for executing a plan, and the pay-off needs to cover the cost of the plan.

So first, what is the pay-off of this plan? A summary of possible answers to this is: to get control of everyone's information and limit their freedoms, reset the world, wipe out debt, end democracy and implement martial law. It is hard to imagine who exactly would be the dark, shadowy figures who benefit from this, and for the investment they must be sure that this is the result. In most countries the established elite already have huge benefits.

What are the costs of all this? Almost all economic entities have had a loss of wealth and value in the last three months. Even after the smoke clears, it would seem that a whole lot of value has been lost and compared to the salad days of last December, profits will not be flowing with the recovery. A huge portion of the citizenry have lost their jobs and their ability to be the kind of consumers who can reflate the economic cycling of money. If the string-pulling entities had wealth, it's likely their wealth will be diminished, and will not recover for some time. But that's just the bodyblow of the lockdown. To execute the plan, you would need to persuade a huge number of people to act against their own interests. There would need to be bribery or subterfuge to make them think they would be better off in the end. But on top of that, you would have to have enough threats to prevent any one of the actors and agents in the conspiracy from speaking out, blowing the whistle and exposing it. But the only people speaking out are the conspiracy theorists and not any of the doctors, the not-so-dead victims, the testing organisations, the health officials in a myriad of districts in a multitude of countries.

The result you get is an unlikely benefit to a nebulous group at an unimaginable cost to a group who can create unbelievable discipline across an innumerable group of individuals to do their bidding, suffer a loss and not say word. If I were to meet that hobbyist conspiracist it would be these bigger questions that I'd discuss.

All the reeds are an insult to the dead and dying. The term "crisis actor" came to real prominence, at least for me, when victims of the Sandy Hook gun massacre who went public and was met with accusations, death threats and criticism. Sandy Hook was somehow contrived into a false flag operation to take away gun rights. So the victims were not really victims. So the victims were attacked.

For all the intellectualism that can be poorly applied to a tragedy it would be that.