Ignore the experts; Covid symptoms DO matter …

A striking number of people became sick with Covid symptoms before official Covid. This article show how personal observations (aka anecdotes) should carry much greater weight.

My high school alma mater. My wife taught at this school in JANUARY 2020 and reports that the school seemed like a “ghost town” due to the large number of absences “due to illness.” IMO, such anecdotes should carry more weight than the experts give them. In fact, such personal anecdotes launched my long, strange voyage into investigating “early spread.”

In my research into “early spread,” I’m really more interested in tallying the number of people who became “sick” in a certain periods of time, more so than delving into subjects of complex cellular biology.

That is, I can write a piece on “early spread” without even getting into the contentious debate over whether viruses exist or not.

Expressed succinctly, my core hypothesis is simple. If more people than normal became “sick” in the months November 2019 through February 2020, this would fit (or jibe with) my theory that a novel virus* might have been spreading months before the experts said.

*Edit: In this article, I’m going to try to not harp on “viruses.” So I’m going to revise the above sentence to now read:

“For some reason, large numbers of people were becoming sick in the months before official Covid.”

Note: This is another story on the long side, but readers who skim to the bottom sections will see what I think “really happened” … and how the experts probably completely missed “peak” Covid.

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When I formulate a theory or hypothesis, I start from “known knowables” that I can personally observe.

That is, before I segue into macro research and investigations, I start with findings that I personally observed in my little corner of the world.

Regarding possible early spread (and not even talking about viruses), here is what I personally observed and experienced in Troy, Alabama in January 2020.

Rice family case study:

Around January 20, 2020, I personally received a phone call from the nurse at Troy Elementary School telling me my 3rd grade daughter was sick and needed to be checked out of school.

I personally drove to the school and checked out my daughter, who I immediately discovered, (to my satisfaction) was indeed sick.

For example, Maggie had a high fever and personally told me that she felt terrible. I personally observed that Maggie’s face appeared flushed and she was acting like I would expect a sick child to act.

At the time, my only thought was: “Maggie is sick.” (At this point in time, I didn’t ask myself, “I wonder if viruses are real?’)

Once home, I gave Maggie some children’s Tylenol and told her to go to bed.

That night, or maybe the next night, my son, Jack, and I attended a Troy University basketball game. (We left Maggie, still sick, at home with her mother.)

When we left to go to the game I felt fine, and, in fact, would not have gone to the game if I felt sick.

By halftime, I could tell I was rapidly “becoming sick.” To provide a few details, I felt a scratch in my throat and was experiencing chills.

I told Jack, “Let ’s go home.” On the walk to the car, I distinctly remember experiencing profound chills. As I’ve been sick before, I knew the signs that a bad sickness was descending on me.

On the way home, I stopped at Dollar General and loaded up on my favorite cold-and-flu medicines, plus Gatorade and Sprite.

By 2 or 3 a.m. I had become what I might call, full-fledged “very sick.”

Aside: Many people have correctly pointed out that Covid symptoms are virtually identical to flu or “bug” symptoms. However, a few symptoms might be different and these differences might be important.

(I can report that several of my symptoms were unlike other bouts of “flu” I’d endured. One thing I personally observed was that “symptom onset” happened much faster than previous bouts of presumed flu or bronchitis or other miscellaneous sicknesses I’ve experienced in my life).

Over the next five to seven days, I barely left the bed.

Since I now consider myself to be somewhat of a Covid expert, I know there are about 11 “signature” Covid symptoms; I would say I had at least nine of the most-common “Covid symptoms.

Five or so days after I became sick, Jack, then in kindergarten, became sick with a fever, sore throat, fatigue, etc.

Jack, Maggie and myself all went to a local medical clinic (something I almost never do, which is confirmation I felt unusually rotten). All three of us received flu tests and all three were negative for influenza.

For some reason (thank God), my wife never became sick.

Still, in the Rice family of four people, I can report with 100-percent confidence that 75 percent of our family (3 out of 4) was definitely “sick” in late January 2020.

The plot thickens, the early investigation expands …

One day when I was sick in bed, my wife, then a 10th grade English teacher at Charles Henderson High School, came home from school and told me “half” of one of her four classes was “out sick.”

For fact-checking purposes, I quizzed my wife on this memory and she confirmed this anecdote was true and she still remembers why she made this determination.

According to Carrie, her classroom had 30 desks - six desks in five rows. She counted “students in desks” and only 15 students occupied said desks. Carrie still remembers one student, who was sitting in the center of the classroom with no classmates around her.

This student, who my wife can still name, told Carrie, “every class is like this. This school is a ghost town.”

(The above is what I might call a “micro anecdote,” but I love details/quotes like this and assign more weight to “micro anecdotes” than other “investigators.”)

Another anecdote shared by my wife: Carrie told me that when the halls of CHHS seemed like “a ghost town,” the school’s principal couldn’t find enough substitute teachers to cover for all the teachers who were also out sick. This meant non-sick teachers, like my wife, had to “cover” for classes where there was no teacher.

Take-away: It wasn’t just large numbers of teenagers who became sick “all at the same time.” Whatever it was that was making people sick in this “congregate” setting was affecting humans of all ages.

I later learned that in Maggie’s class, 8 students became sick at, roughly, the same time as Maggie. If memory serves, there were only 22 students in a third-grade class so this would be at least 37 percent of that class.

Also, Maggie’s teacher (Mrs. Key) was “very sick” and out of school for an extended period of time. I later sent a Facebook direct message to Mrs. Key who told me all four of her children also became sick at the same time.

So in the “Mrs. Key” cluster of sickness at Troy Elementary School, I can identify 14 people who all became “sick” in a short period of time.

As I later expanded my investigation, I identified several sources via Facebook (this was before I was banned).

One of my sources was an administrator at a local private K-3 church school. This source, who requested anonymity (which I found interesting), told me that a major outbreak of what I’m calling “sickness” also happened at this Troy school in January 2020.

For purposes of this article (where I’m not talking about viruses), the only observation I can make is that “something” was making a huge number of people in at least three local schools sick … all at the same time.

The catch, the intriguing part of my “citizen journalist” investigation, is all these people were becoming sick before the experts said Covid was spreading in America.

For emphasis, or as a memory-refresher, the experts (who clearly believe viruses exist), said this virus would make people “sick.” But, per my investigation and personal observations, many people were already becoming sick in the weeks before people were supposed to be sick with what the experts called a “novel” and “contagious” virus.

An Important part of my theory …

Given that the experts do believe viruses exist and can be “contagious” and can make people “sick,” I’m struck by the fact these experts clearly didn’t want to “confirm” any early Covid sicknesses.

I keep asking myself why would it matter if a sickness-causing virus (or illness-producing something) was spreading in, say, October or November 2019, instead of (the official story) … late February and March 2020?

Per my theory, it’s possible someone in the Deep State echelons of government might have known that some microscopic something could have escaped from a lab (maybe in America?) and was already making many people sick in the summer or fall of 2019.

This, per my theory, might be “thermo-nuclear” information certain people in the government (or maybe every person in government) would want to conceal from the public.

This thought exercise might explain why an event/observation as prosaic as “more people are becoming sick” could become potentially powerful - even scandalous - information … if revealed.

*** (My articles don’t reach nearly as many people as they once did, but I still greatly appreciate those who try to boost the reach of my articles.) ***

The birth of a hypothesis!

I later became the only journalist in the world who tried to investigate - and quantify - the number of schools that closed in America “due to illness” in the weeks and months before Official Covid had begun to circulate in the USA.

I trust that readers can see my mind percolating. I started off applying micro observations from my own little corner of the world but ended up applying local, micro theories to the entire world … or country.

Propelled by a simple theory, I spent weeks surfing the Internet looking for any and every archived report of a school or school system in America that “closed due to illness” between November 2019 and February 2020.

If my theory was correct (some kind of something was making lots of people “sick” at the same time in the winter of 2019/2020), I would probably find many stories of school closings in America.

Conversely, If I didn’t or couldn’t find such evidence in my research, my theory would suffer a setback.

… But I did find evidence of what I was searching for.

I actually found at least 108 schools or school systems in at least 15 American states had “closed due to illness” between November 2019 and early February 2020.

While I’m not 100 percent sure, I’m 99-percent sure that in the history of America no “cold and flu season” produced more school closing than the “flu season” of 2019-2020.

For emphasis, I didn’t find just a few schools in a couple of states that closed due to illness in the months before official Covid, I found hundreds of schools in 30 percent of America’s states - states on the west coast, the heartland, the South, North and the east coast.

Put it this way: If I hadn’t found so much persuasive and voluminous evidence of large numbers of Americans who “became sick” between November 2019 and February 2020, I would have probably dropped my “early spread” investigation in mid-2020.

But since I did find hundreds of contemporaneous news reports and weekly Influenza Like Illness (ILI) surveillance reports that told me large numbers of people were becoming sick, I soldiered on in my research. (Plus, as noted, personal anecdotal observations also supported my early-spread hypothesis).

School Closing Investigation caveats …

• I’m sure I missed some reports of school closings so my list (see here) is probably not “definitive” or comprehensive.

• I also note that many schools - like Charles Henderson High School in Troy - didn’t close for excessive absences, but probably could have. That is, I suspect many schools that had rashes of “illness outbreaks” didn’t close.

(In researching schools that did close, I used Facebook comments in these communities to gauge parent feedback regarding this decision. I found several posts from parents saying their unclosed school was also experiencing very high levels of absences due to illness and these parents wished that their child’s school would also close.)

• Another caveat: Per my extensive research into ILI weekly surveillance reports, the spike, or worst part, of this flu season probably occurred in America in late December 2019. This would be when all schools were out for Christmas holidays. That is, if students and teachers had not been out on break, many more schools would have no doubt closed “due to illness.”

One anecdote from Sylacauga, Alabama that corroborates my early spread theory …

My first “blockbuster” early spread story (which turned out to be a dud as no other media organization ever mentioned it) was a feature story published by UncoverDC on Tim and Brandie McCain, who became very sick with Covid symptoms in late December 2019.

Fun trivia aside … “Gaw-lee!”

(Sylacauga, population 13,000, is located about 2 1/2 hours northeast of my hometown of Troy. Sylacauga’s claim to fame is it’s the hometown of late actor Jim Nabors, aka Gomer Pyle).

Tim McCain, 39 at the time, later tested positive for antibodies with the only antibody test he received. His wife, Brandie, later tested positive for antibodies three times. But, for this story, I’m not focussing on antibody tests. I’m just focussing on symptoms and people who became sick.

At the time, the McCains and their two teenage children were temporarily living at a friend’s house, meaning five people were living in this house.

Of these five people, all five became sick within a matter of one or two weeks.

Tim McCain nearly died, his wife was “very sick” for several days and their friend who owned the house was as sick as he had ever been in his life (the friend never got an antibody test). Like my family, the symptoms of the McCains’ two children were milder than the adults.

Brandie also told me her boss became very sick at the same time and, when everyone in the house got sick, it “seemed like half of Sylacauga was sick.” (I found a Facebook post from a friend of Brandie’s who worked at a doctor’s office who said this clinic was over-run with sick people at the time).

Take-away: Troy wasn’t the only Alabama town where tons of people were becoming sick at the same time.

(When I got sick, 12.6 percent of medical visits in the last week of January 2020 in South Alabama were for Influenza Like Illness - a figure 4X higher than normal or higher than the expected “baseline” percentage. In January 2020, five school systems in Alabama closed “due to illness,” including Opp City Schools about 50 miles south of Troy.)

DISCUSSION/Re-Cap:

• 3 of 4 people in my family were sick at the same time.

• 15 of 30 of students in one of Carrie’s high school classes were out sick at the same time.

• 8 of 22 of Maggie’s classmates were out sick at the same time (plus their teacher and all four of this teacher’s children).

• Four weeks earlier, 5 of 5 people in the McCains’ house in Sylacauga became sick at the same time.

• Schools and school systems with perhaps hundreds of thousands of students closed due to illness in at least 15 U.S. states.

The obvious question …

Why did so many people get sick at the same time in all these schools, houses and communities?

While I might catch flack for this, I do assume something made these people sick.

(Another conclusion, one that seems kind of bizarre to me but one, I guess, should be considered is that nothing made all these people sick).

The most-important point …

Per the authorized guidance or official testing protocols, none of these tens of thousands of “sick” American citizens could have had Covid because none of them had tested positive via a Covid PCR test.

(Note: Extrapolations from the Red Cross antibody study suggest at least six million Americans could have already been infected by Covid by November 2019).

I looked into this and learned that the reason nobody tested positive via a PCR test is that virtually no American citizen received a PCR test before March 1, 2020.

This is explained by the fact that very few “testing kits” were available before March 15 and all the tests that were available - per the CDC testing guidelines - were only used to test Americans who had recently returned from China.

First take-away: Speaking as one citizen journalist, it is not farfetched (or implausible) to reach the conclusion that millions of American citizens could have had Covid before March 2020 … at least if one of the key criteria is “Covid symptoms.”

Second take-away: In Covid “Origins Investigations,” symptoms don’t matter.

I’ve now spent five years of my life trying to prove more people than normal were sick in the weeks and months before official Covid. Apparently, this effort was a complete waste of time because all this “evidence” is considered moot or irrelevant.

(I defy any potential critics to read all of my dozens of articles documenting unusually high incidences of sickness in America in the weeks and months before official Covid and then say, “this is not evidence of large numbers of people who became sick.” This article might be the best place to start.)

Third take-away: When it comes to “confirming” Covid cases, a positive PCR test result is all that matters.

Circling back to the Pandemic of the Century, my theory is that if something was making people sick in late March 2020, that same something could have also made many people sick in, say, December 2019 or January 2020.

But, the above paragraph includes misinformation …

The authorized Covid narrative discounts the possibility that anyone in America could have been infected with Covid before January 18, 2020 (the date of the first “confirmed” case in America.)

In a press conference in late May 2020, the CDC said it could find “no indications” of virus spread in America in the year 2019 and only evidence of “cryptic circulation” in February 2020. (My response to this official statement: “You guys weren’t looking very hard.”)

As I’ve written numerous times, the official theory is that that “Late spread” actually occurred in America.

Per the authorized narrative, the avalanche of Covid “cases” started in late March 2020 and exploded in April 2020.

However, I return to the significance of personal observations to report that I personally remember or observed no evidence that anyone was suddenly getting sick with Covid symptoms in late March 2020 or April 2020 (which I’ve dubbed “Spring Spread.”)

Granted, after March 15, 2020, I was locked down in my house and wasn’t getting out much, but based on social media monitoring and my trips to the grocery store or my strolls through my neighborhood, I don’t remember anyone in Troy, Alabama complaining of “flu-like” symptoms in the Spring of 2020.

However (read above), there was overwhelming evidence (including from myself and my two children) that huge numbers of people in Troy, Alabama were sick with Covid symptoms in November, December, January and early February - before the lockdowns.

That is, all the observable “Covid symptoms” seemed to have happened before official Covid.

(Another personal anecdote: I also don’t remember any grocery store employees who were checking out hundreds of customers every day who “got sick” in March or April 2020. At my Piggly Wiggly, I also personally observed that many check-out girls weren’t wearing Covid masks in March and April.)

Here’s what I think really happened:

Whatever was making millions of Americans sick started “spreading” around Thanksgiving 2019 and continued through Valentine’s Day 2020.

Per micro personal observations and my macro investigative-journalist research, the peak of this spreading illness happened in late December 2019 and lasted through January and the first week of February 2020.

This is the time period when vast numbers of Americans were “sick” … not between March 15 and the end of April 2020.

The Covid “cases” didn’t spike until tens of millions of people, belatedly (and probably by design) started getting a new, magic (40-cycle) swab assay known as a PCR test.

What I really think is …

… If lockdowns had never been ordered and if students at Charles Henderson High School continued to go to school between March 15, 2020 and the end of the school term in May, no outbreaks of “illness” would have been observed at my high school alma mater.

The school’s principal would have had no need to recruit an army of substitute teachers. My wife wouldn’t have had a day where half of one of her classes was “out sick” … She’d already had that day (the same day her husband was sick at home moaning in bed).

Furthermore, I believe this finding (no outbreaks of illness) would have been replicated in probably every school in the nation.

My contrarian conclusion: American schools, and American towns and cities, had already endured their ILI outbreaks for the season.

I’m not sure how many Americans might have already developed “natural immunity” to Covid by the dates of the lockdowns, but I think this figure might be in the tens of millions.

To further illustrate how “contrarian” or bold my hypothesis is compared to that of the “experts,” I’d note that the difference between a couple of hundred infected Americans by mid-February 2020 and a couple of thousand by the lockdown dates of mid-March and my “early spread” hypothesis is … “many millions.” This, statistical range, is actually quite striking … at least to myself.

In Conclusion, I’m back in ‘The Twilight Zone’ …

In several articles, I’ve written that I feel like a character in an episode of “The Twilight Zone.” One reason I feel like this is I think any investigation into a pandemic should start with observations of the number of people who became sick.

I’d also like to apologize for the long length of this article, which I now realize doesn’t matter … because the entire article was about sick people … and the number of people who became sick doesn’t matter in Covid Pandemic investigations.

Still, I’d be more inclined to trust the research and observations of “citizen journalists” like myself than the assertions of the experts or the Cracker Jack “watchdog” journalists employed by the MSM.

And, FWIW, I still think the large number of people who became sick in the pre-Covid weeks and months should matter.

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*** (Thank you to every reader who has supported my writing.) ***

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