Who killed Granny?
During the Covid crisis, children have often been portrayed as dangerous Granny killers. But the evidence says they didn't do it. So who did? A criminal investigation.
“Don’t kill Granny”, “children are the vectors of the pandemic”. School closures. “Generations must not mix”. So often in the past year it has been implied that it was our kids who put the older generation in danger. They would come into contact with lots of other kids and innocently pass on their viruses to Granny and Grandpa and assassinate them. “It is impossible to keep children away from each other”, it has often been proclaimed, as though that were a terrible thing, fully convinced that keeping kids isolated was a morally important goal.
It’s a powerful image. Innocent kid, free of suspicious symptoms, hugs Granny and days later, Granny is dead. The child assassin. WHO, popular media, TV experts and governments have used the word “children” disproportionally often during the pandemic, always alluding to either “dangers for kids” or “dangers because of the kids.”
An incredibly large percentage of deaths caused by Covid were old and frail people. The image that has been drawn in front of parents worldwide is a horrifying one: the two people you hold dearest could, without knowing or wanting it, kill one another. Your parents and your kids. No wonder most people now believe vaccinating children against a disease they are at no risk from is the most normal thing in the world.
But does the evidence hold up when examined closely? And if not, must we look for another murder suspect? Let’s investigate.
To disprove a theory, it often suffices to find one case that doesn’t correspond. For example, Sweden, which, without masks, is doing perfectly fine regarding Covid numbers. For the case we are examining here, that example is even easier to find.
Though official numbers are hard to come by, it is very clear that the majority of Covid cases and deaths occurred or started in retirement homes and nosocomial settings, in particular during the massive first waves. In most countries, at least in Western Europe, those were completely shut off from visitors. Do you remember those first, heady days and weeks at the start of the pandemic, two years ago? The sense of excitement that something big was happening, the Zoom appetizers with friends, washing your hands 25 times a day? Clapping for the hospital staff, and the touching pictures at the end of the news journals where you could see families greeting their relatives in front of their windows in the care homes? Well, many of the elderly in those fragments are now dead.
It wasn’t the kids then, was it? The decisions made during these stages of the pandemic were influenced by an unwavering belief that surface transmission and droplets were mainly responsible for transmitting the virus. It made sense, based on that assumption, to keep people isolated and limit social interaction by all means possible, even if that means treating each other cruelly. If we kept our elderly as much as possible alone in their rooms, the reasoning was, they would have little chance of becoming infected and they would survive.
The problem, of course, with such a strategy, is that it is not at all sustainable in the long run. If Covid had disappeared after those first week, then perhaps one could have excused the drastic measures. As it happens, though, two things went wrong.
First, the crisis took too long. Isolation and loneliness are never beneficial for one’s health but when you isolate the elderly, especially in care homes but also in their own homes, during lockdowns etc, they lose not only their motivation to get better (most of them would literally live for those moments where they see their families, get to know the latest gossip, see their grandchildren) but also, they lose their primary advocates and the people who know them best.
My brother has an old dog who fell down the stairs when he last visited me. He was taken to a clinic, operated on, and stayed there for a few nights in observation. During the first night, my brother got a call. His dog was poorly, they said, and kept whining. He must be experiencing huge pains after the operation, something that was unexpected. One could almost picture the doctors there at the clinic, needle in hand, waiting for the approval from the dog owner to say his last rites.
Trouble is, as it happens, my brother knew his dog and recognized that this was his dog’s typical behaviour when he wanted to got out to pee. He explained this and his dog eventually recovered well, learnt to walk again, and will probably live for a long time to come. My brother was his family member’s advocate, the one who knows best what is the right thing to do. Many elderly were forced to live without their advocates for a very long period of time during the pandemic.
The second assumption that was wrong was how the SARS-Cov.2 virus spreads. It should have been very clear, even in the early weeks when care home residents were dropping like flies, that the measures taken to protect them were not working. Droplet transmission was clearly not the only culprit and strategies should have been changed immediately. What if this virus was airborne? What if it wasn’t really a yes or no question (escape or not from this deadly virus) but what mattered was to stay away from high viral loads that were swirling through the air, transported through the hospitals and care homes by ventilation shafts, closed windows etc?
Would it have been better to remove residents from these settings, to let them get in contact with as many healthy people as possible, to get “used to” very low loads of the virus?
Spain would be a good example of this on the wider level, where residents were almost not allowed to leave their houses, and many cities have huge numbers of high buildings where ventilation shafts lead from one bathroom to the one above to the one above etc. A country where life naturally occurs in the outdoors was shut down and people were exposed to viral loads in the ambient air of their buildings. This is exactly what happened in the hospitals and care homes.
It wasn’t the kids, then, who killed Granny. They wouldn’t be the “only allowed visitor” during those months. 5-year olds were not sent to update Gran on the family news. They didn’t venture into the hospitals, they were busy looking for an open playground or that one park bench that wasn’t sealed off - maybe, if they were allowed out of the house at all.
In fact, the kids probably didn’t kill anyone else either, as they are thought to be able to produce much lower quantities of virus, as outlined in this excellent article by Marc Girardot.
Our case, then is closed. Kids acquitted, charges dropped. They have been instrumentalised to strike fear into the population and to make parents drop their most natural instincts, which, if we had listened to them, probably would have kept us from following most instructions.
Which leads us to our next investigation, one which is only starting now and may lead us to conclusions too terrible to ponder.
Deaths are through the roof for young people, especially males in their teenage years.
https://www.hartgroup.org/press-release/
All over Europe, young people are dying and suffering more than they should, and those figures cannot be explained by Covid.
Who killed our kids?