No fun allowed. Stay home, don’t go out and eat.
For those who swallow large portions of fast junk food, don’t worry, there’s a more deadly killer out there. According to a report issued last Thursday by the CDC, the most dangerous social activity in the age of COVID is… eating out at a restaurant!
The mainstream media, eager as always to foment fear and anxiety, blared headlines on 11 September that read: “People With COVID-19 Twice as Likely to Have Eaten Out at a Restaurant.”
And yet, when one reads the articles carefully, there is no conclusive proof that in fact people are more at risk eating out. For example, the Fox News article states in smaller print, “Dining out at a restaurant or drinking at a bar may heighten the risk of becoming infected with COVID-19 compared to other social activities.”
Notice the phrase “may heighten the risk.”
When reading the CDC report, it becomes clear the data making the case is weak. According to the CDC’s own language:
- “Reports of exposures in restaurants have been linked to air circulation. Direction, ventilation and intensity of airflow might affect virus transmission.” (Note not “will” but “might.”)
- “Symptomatic adults with negative SARS-CoV-2 test results might have been infected with other respiratory viruses and had similar exposures to persons with cases of such illnesses.”
- “Persons who did not respond, or refused to participate, could be systematically different from those who were interviewed for this investigation. Efforts to age- and sex-match participating case-patients and control-participants were not maintained because of participants not meeting the eligibility criteria, refusing to participate, or not responding.”
- “Reported behaviors might represent factors, including concurrently participating in activities where possible exposures could have taken place, that were not included in the analysis or measured in the survey.”
In a report on NPR’s website, after the large, bold, scary headline that a person is twice as likely to get the virus eating at a restaurant, not until the tenth paragraph does the reporter write, “Though the study has limitations – including its size and the fact that participants weren’t asked to distinguish between indoor or outdoor dining – it echoes concerns over safety in bars and restaurants during the pandemic. Many states have imposed restrictions on reopened restaurants.”
And yet, the “experts” at the CDC, while admitting the findings were based on a small sample of unproven data, tweeted that rather than eat out at restaurants, people should “Choose pick-up/delivery if possible.”
TRENDPOST: While the CDC helped the mainstream media ramp up fear and gave power-hungry politicians more reasons to impose draconian rules, based on a report that lacks solid scientific data, absent in the reporting is a hidden fact we have been reporting in the Trends Journal: Staying locked up at home can make you sicker.
“Executive Order” King Governor Andrew Cuomo said in May it was “shocking” that most new coronavirus hospitalizations were people who had been staying home:
“If you notice… 66 percent of the people were at home, which is shocking to us. This is a surprise: Overwhelmingly, the people were at home… We thought maybe they were taking public transportation, and we’ve taken special precautions on public transportation, but actually no, because these people were literally at home.”
Previous to that, on 24 April, UNC Research, a group of scientists at the University of North Carolina, published a report titled, “Household Deemed Most Common Place for COVID-19 Transmission.”
They wrote, “As seven states now require masks and face coverings for visiting essential businesses or using public transportation, it seems like those spaces are where we are most at risk for COVID-19 infection. But, in truth, the riskiest place could be our homes.”
Also, as we noted in our 28 July Trends Journal, studies prove lockdown measures were deadly, yet they keep being imposed around the world:
“South Korean epidemiologists have found that people were more likely to contract the new coronavirus from members of their own households than from contacts outside the home.
A study published in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on July 16 looked in detail at 5,706 ‘index patients’ who had tested positive for the coronavirus and more than 59,000 people who came into contact with them.
The findings showed that less than 2% of patients’ non-household contacts had caught the virus, while nearly 12% of patients’ household contacts had contracted the disease.”
And according to the New England Journal of Medicine, “The risk of transmission among household members can be as high as 40%, whereas the risk of transmission from less intense and less sustained encounters is below 5%.”
TRENDPOST: The restaurant industry, already suffering from the devastating lockdown and capacity limitations imposed on them by politicians – and the fear people have of catching the virus by going out to eat – will take a harder hit should this CDC report continue to gain mainstream traction.
As reported, Yelp estimates 60 percent of restaurants that had shut down will not reopen. Again, these facts are barely reported, as are the dire implications imposed on economies and the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world that are out of work, broke, and busted.