Cummins-2020-09-08

This is a response to a widely-circulated YouTube video by Ivor Cummins in which he claims that Covid-19 is essentially all over, and that we've been lied to. His manner is persuasive with a kind of hypnotic lilt, carrying the air of the reasonable man wearily dismantling the establishment. His message is seductive because we'd all like to believe the pandemic is nothing to be worried about and we'd also all like to believe we have one over on the establishment who lack the perspective that we naturally possess (or who have some kind of malign ulterior motives that he alludes to). Despite the fact that almost everything in the video is, I believe, completely wrong, I was actually struck by the persuasiveness of the presentation, and given how many views his video has (more than 1.2 million at the time of writing) I thought it was worth spending some time investigating its claims.

Since I'm a mathematician, this will focus on the more mathematical aspects of the video. For a good critique from a medical perspective, you can read this by Dr Dominic Pimenta.