The U.S. Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort departs Naval Air Station Norfolk Pier 8, Saturday, March 28, 2020, en route to New York City where she will support the city’s response to COVID-19. (The U.S. Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort departs Naval Air Station Norfolk Pier 8, Saturday, March 28, 2020, en route to New York City where she will support the city’s response to COVID-19. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

One of the big bogeymen that the Wuhan opportunists and enthusiasts are dancing a tiny jig over is the idea that this virus will have a second wave. This is pretty standard behavior and is to be expected. Every year we have two flu seasons, the first in November (approximately) the second in March (also approximately). The reasons for why this happens are immaterial but the fact that it does happen is driving a lot of the debate about whether we should reopen the country or if it is more prudent to continue to hide under our beds and loll about in our own feces.

The left, being a huge fan of history they recently discovered and have set about interpreting for the rest of us, is warning that by lifting the restrictions too soon, that we are risking a major resurgence in Wuhan virus much like what happened with the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918-19.

"Most deaths from the 1918 Flu came during its second wave. A second substantial wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US would trigger a second large-scale lockdown and necessitate another round of costly stimulus." https://t.co/p9UqOPA2IG pic.twitter.com/psLyvGsVym — Catherine Rampell (@crampell) April 20, 2020

The villains here are those of us who’ve had enough of a self-defeating strategy that even if executed perfectly cannot do much to save lives but can to a lot to make the lives of everyone else miserable.

In 1918, as the first wave of the Spanish flu was dying down, San Francisco lifted a lockdown and held an armistice day parade on November 11th, this triggered a second wave of infections and caused many more deaths. pic.twitter.com/oyTJISBOb2 — libcom.org (@libcomorg) April 24, 2020

In my view, there are a couple of data points here. First, so what? We’ve seen, and now we have more than ample documentation to empirically prove, that the Wuhan virus pandemic is a manufactured panic. It is not as virulent as its boosters claim. It doesn’t require hospitalization in the overwhelming majority of the cases of infection (New York, ground zero of our pandemic, never came close to having its capacity of ICU beds reached), indeed, in the vast majority of cases, the people with the infection do not know that they have it. If there is a second wave, we’ve learned from the first wave that what we’ve been through is an unconscionable overreaction.

The second data point is this: we’re already in the second wave.

Why do I say that?

The current policies are all predicated on the idea that Wuhan virus emerged in a big way in the United States in late-February/early-March. The hysteria and the burst of cases we’ve seen are the ‘first wave.’ This is what is driving the largely self-interested hype about a much larger ‘second wave,’ such as the head of the CDC was flogging about last week. But now we know for a scientific fact that is not true. The first fatality with Wuhan virus in the US (I say with rather than from because the actual cause of death was a heart attack) happened on February 6. The consensus is that this was a ‘community’ based infection as the dead person had no history of overseas travel or using cruise ships. As I posted in If the First Deaths to Wuhan Virus Were in February in California, the Whole Nation Has Been Screwed by the ‘Experts’, this moves the date of a significant influx of Wuhan virus from the late February time frame back to early January at the absolute latest. And that meshes with the stories we had in November-December about an especially hard flu season. If, as it now seems, what we were experiencing in November was the initial onslaught of Wuhan that no one recognized, what we are reacting to now is the ‘second wave.’ And, as I spelled out in Wuhan Virus Is Not the 1918 Flu and No Number of False Analogies Will Make It So, Wuhan virus is not the Spanish Flu, but the four-month lag between first and second waves of Spanish Flu that the Wuhan alarmists are using matches nearly exactly with the lag between the ‘severe flu season’ and the advent of Wuhan virus.

As one of my favorite bosses used to say at times like these, “Maybe we’re waiting for the other shoe to drop and we’re fighting with a one-legged man.”

But, in the words of someone famous for her nonchalance, “What difference, at this point, does it make?” We know this virus is not unusually deadly. The national death rate in 2020 was the lowest in about 3 years as the year started in January and it remained that status (READ If Wuhan Virus Is So Bad, Why Are Deaths So Low?) even as Governor Andrew Cuomo was bleeding from his whatever and wailing about needing ventilators and free stuff from the federal government. If this is the first wave, it is really no big deal and we need to man-up and work through any ‘second wave.’ If it is, as I suspect, actually the much-feared second wave, we need to start putting statisticians and public health officials up against walls for waging a war of aggression upon our nation.