School Closings Spiked Before Official Covid

At least 100 school systems or schools in at least 14 states closed for flu-like illnesses, which provides more compelling evidence of ‘early spread.

Is it just a coincidence that a few weeks and months before “official” Covid, schools across the country were closing for “the flu?” I don’t think so.

(Part 1 of 2)

The number of schools nation-wide that closed for “flu outbreaks” might not seem like a particularly interesting or important story. However, it might be if this figure provided compelling evidence that government and public health officials lied about the start date of the “Pandemic of the Century.”

Or if at least some public health officials were aware of compelling evidence of an atypical ILI outbreak in the country - an outbreak that spanned months - and simply dismissed this evidence … or, for some inexplicable reason, didn’t consider this as possible evidence of “early Covid.” (See Anthony Fauci quote at the end of this article).

I might be the only journalist in the world who’s seriously researching the possibility the birthdate of the novel coronavirus is off by several months. 

Providing “smoking gun” evidence to confirm my hypothesis is challenging for one primary reason: According to the protocols established by the CDC, the only way to “confirm” early Covid cases is via a positive PCR test. 

The catch is that no PCR test was administered in America until mid-January 2020 and, even by the date of the lockdowns, virtually no American had received such a test (through February, almost the only people receiving the few tests available were citizens who’d travelled to China). 

Absent someone going back in a time machine and delivering medical clinics hundreds of thousands of PCR tests, the only way to provide “testing evidence” would be through later antibody tests (which can detect if someone was infected weeks or months earlier). However, these tests didn’t become widely available until the last days of April and early May 2020.

While I’ve identified more than 300 citizens who had antibody-evidence of infection dating to November 2019 or earlier, this “evidence” has been completely ignored by public health officials and mainstream journalists.

This leaves a dogged journalist only one more line of inquiry that might “prove” - or at least strongly suggest - this virus was circulating widely throughout the world by late 2019 and had probably infected tens of millions of Americans by the date of the lockdowns (approximately March 13, 2020).

This “evidence” would be large numbers of people who became sick with flu-like symptoms (as “flu-like symptoms” are, with a few notable differences, identical to “Covid-like symptoms.”)

In a previous article, I showed that copious evidence does exist that cases of Influenza Like Illness (ILI) were dramatically higher in the fall and winter of 2019-2020 than previous flu seasons. (More evidence to come).

However, in my prior story I didn’t present a sub-category of “ILI evidence” - School Closings.

In Part 2 of today’s exclusive article, I document/quantify that at least 107 school systems or schools in America - in at least 15 states - shut down because of “flu” in the months of November, December, January and February. (Note: After this article was originally published, a helpful reader provided me info on six more school systems that closed in Illinois between Jan. 15, 2020 and Feb. 6, 2020 and another reader added two more schools from Wisconsin).

(In Ohio, at least 30 schools or systems closed. In Arkansas, at least 23 closed).

In my opinion, ILI outbreaks which were severe enough to produce large numbers of school closings  throughout the country - as well as in all sections of individual states - connotes a virus that was “spreading.” That is, spread was NOT “isolated.”

My theory doesn’t square with the experts’ theory …

The CDC’s official narrative on virus spread in America is that infective circulation of the virus began to accelerate in late February 2020. 

Prior to this, per the CDC experts, a very small number of cases had occurred in America by late January 2020 (and these cases emanated from people who’d contracted the virus outside of America). 

Also, any virus transmission that may have occurred was “low-level” transmission and these strains of the virus did NOT spread elsewhere. 

Part-2 of this article might challenge this official version of events. That is, “low-level” and “isolated” spread could NOT have infected so many people in so many different states - in all parts of these states - in roughly the same time periods. 

From my research, I know that ILI “activity” was “high,”  “widespread” and sustained for at least 22 weeks (a record period of time) across the entire county.

Based on my extensive ILI research, I believe the number of Americans who had ILI symptoms in the flu season of 2019-2020 was also much higher than previous flu seasons.

(I also wonder why the CDC later significantly revised - downward of course - its estimates of ILI “cases” for the 2019-2020 flu season. I believe these “revised ILI estimates” were another mechanism public health officials used to conceal evidence of “early spread.”)

A question I keep asking myself:  Was it simply a coincidence that 40 days to four months before “official” Covid arrived, tens of millions of Americans happened to be becoming sick with a list of symptoms identical to those of Covid? My answer: I doubt it. 

Context is always important when comparing years …

Every data point I’ve examined leads me to believe the flu season of 2019-2020 was one of the most severe and widespread in many decades. ILI activity, and its geographic disbursement, was not “normal.” 

School closings are an important metric to explore my “early spread” hypothesis as this data could provide evidence that large swaths of citizens in countless communities across the country were becoming sick. 

This, to me, presents evidence this virus was also quite contagious (although, significantly, for almost every person who was infected, the virus was NOT lethal).

In Part-2 of this article, I list more than 100 schools and school systems that closed because of widespread illness. At every one of these schools, 10 to 20 percent of student bodies and faculty (in some cases 40 percent or more) were “out sick.”

Some of these are large school systems. So today’s research project might identify hundreds of thousands of potential early Covid cases.  If “only” 20 percent of these sick students and staff members actually had Covid, this would still constitute a very large number. And this is just the students and teachers in these cities (one assumes similar percentages of non-students in these towns were also under the weather).

Far more school closings occurred than

the previous flu season (which was also a bad flu season) …

Per my analysis, the flu season of 2019-2020 produced far more school closings than the prior flu season (2018-2019), which is also considered one of the more severe in many years.

According to an article in US News and World Report published January 25, 2019 (the peak of the previous flu season), schools in at least six states closed due to  “flu” in the prior flu season.

Two weeks later on February 9, 2019 an article published at weather.com reported school closings in at least four states.

As noted, today’s subsequent article will document at least 15 states where schools were closed nine to 12 months later.

2017-2018 flu season also produced a notable spike in school closings

The flu season of 2017-2018 is generally agreed to be one of the worst in four decades in America. This flu season might have produced a similar number of school closings as 2019-2020.

According to a CNN article published on January 26, 2018 (the peak of that flu season), at least 12 states closed their schools. The Wall Street Journal - in a story published a day later - wrote that at least 11 states had closed schools.

Still, these figures are lower than the 15 states I’ve identified. (I’m also certain I didn’t find several or many other states where schools also closed so 15 states is not the definitive number). 

I should also note that the 2017-2018 flu season produced the vast majority of its ILI cases in a period of approximately five or six week (around mid-January 2018). ILI cases in that season spiked quickly, but then fell dramatically beginning in February. 

In contrast, the flu season of 2019-2020 arrived weeks earlier and had ILI percentages that met or exceeded (often by large margins) the “baseline” expectation for 22 consecutive weeks.

It produced noticeable outbreaks in November, early December, (especially) late December, early January and, particularly-notable from today’s article, in late January/early February. ILI percentages were still elevated in late February/early March right before “official” Covid arrived.

In other words, I’m confident the flu season that occurred just a few months before “official Covid” produced more school closings than the two prior flu seasons, both of which are said to be among the worst in many decades.

I’m even more confident the flu season of 2019-2020 produced far more school closings than perhaps all the flu seasons in the prior 10 to 30 years.

A few more notes from this deep-dive research project …

I did not find any CDC or NIH press releases that highlighted the huge number of school closings that occurred in America in this flu season (which I found interesting if unsurprising).

Nor did I find any articles from journalists who posed the question I’m posing today: “Couldn’t all these sick people - or at least some percentage of them - be early Covid patients?” This non-finding was also not surprising as corporate journalists would have simply accepted the authority’s narrative that this virus began to “spread” in America in late February or March.

Especially in the South, the biggest spike in ILI cases in many states in America occurred in late December (around Christmas through the first days of January). For example, in the last week of December in Georgia, ILI percentages were 12.2 percent, a staggering percentage). 

This is actually the same “off-the-charts” type ILI percentage that affected towns near me … 30 days later in late January.

From The Dothan (Alabama) Eagle on Feb. 7, 2020:

“Southeastern Alabama continues to be hit the hardest, with 12.6% of all doctor visits due to influenza-like illness; that means about 1 in 8 patients were seen for flu-related symptoms from Jan. 25 to Feb. 1.

“12.6 percent ILI visits” is off-the-charts. (Both of my children and I contributed to this eye-opening percentage of doctors’ visits.) 

Some major “flu” (Covid?) outbreaks happened when schools were closed for the holidays. Otherwise, the number of school closings would have been much higher.

Also, my article only deals with schools and school systems where the superintendent chose to close schools for one or more days (to disinfect the school, because the schools were running out of staffers, teachers and substitutes or to prevent other people from being infected).

Many school systems have a rule that a school system must close if it reaches 20-percent (or sometime 10) percent absences due to illness.

It occurs to me that many schools didn’t close, but were probably very close to making these same decisions. 

“School absences” from December, January and February would be an interesting topic for another researcher to investigate.

Were all of these sick people and all these closed schools really due to “early Covid?”

Of course not. But if just 10 percent of these sick people really had Covid, “early spread” had already given millions of Americans natural immunity … And, although a lot of people endured some unpleasant days, almost none of these sick people died.

Wouldn’t “early spread” have occurred to

public health experts like Anthony Fauci?

At some point (certainly by mid-January 2020), it must have occurred to someone in the public health bureaucracies that this new coronavirus might be spreading in America. They would know this because they know the ILI symptoms are pretty-much identical to “Covid symptoms” and these agencies actually compile and produce all of the ILI statistics I’ve used in my research.

Here’s an excerpt from CNN on January 6, 2020:

“The season so far is on track to be as severe as the 2017-2018 flu season, which was the deadliest in more than four decades, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

And Anthony Fauci did know this:

“The initial indicators indicate this is not going to be a good season – this is going to be a bad season,” Fauci said.

So why didn’t he investigate early spread in America?

Part 2 is right here.