Coronavirus Pandemic

I understand, Eric... but the key may be "time frame" related to those numbers... do we know over what time frame the H1N1 2009 number of 12,500 spans?

On a different note, the "world" reaction may, in hind sight, be viewed as an overreaction (maybe a massive one). But the problem isn't "the truth",,, it's perception. And so Trump and the response of his administration is under such a biased microscope, he's forced to err on the side of caution measured by "the world's perception as to what is merited."

I can understand how various governments view this whole nightmare as an opportunity to run various "real world ops" and for all sorts of reasons. Manipulating the media... tweaking the media that is all too ready to manipulate the public... all that stuff seems likely to be "in play."

That is certainly the right question to ask. The answer is that H1N1 was a year long process. However, it was much bigger than what we are seeing from covid-19. If take H1N1's year long admissions to hospitals and deaths and convert to a monthly average, you get just about what we are seeing from covid-19. So I think my question (and the point therein) remains viable.

Also, there have been some bad flu years where lots of people have been on vents; like way more than covid-19 to date. The monthly average from those flu seasons is also way higher than the monthly covid-19 averages. Again, why no complaining about a lack of vents and masks?

I agree with you that Trump is being forced to act and that his acting then signals as "evidence" for the severity of this thing. It's a self-reinforcing feedback loop. I further agree that a plethora of interest groups have independently become invested in keeping this thing alive; that said, this might be one of those rare instances when a true conspiracy is afoot. Maybe. Remains to be proven (evolved self-organizing feedback loops versus deliberate plot by a small group of individuals; or both in operation). Something about this smells rotten, but I can't quite put my finger on what it is exactly that has set off my usually quiet paranoid alarm.
 
Careful David. Read Levitt carefully and you'll see he supports a lot of the measures you are calling "draconian". A dissenter? Hardly.

https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3800632,00.html
Well he seems to deviate a long way from the extreme lockdown that is being imposed here in Britain - I have no recent experience of the US.
The Diamond Princess was the worst case scenario, according to Levitt. “If you compare the ship to a country—we are talking 250,000 people crowded into one square kilometer, which is horribly crowded. It is four times the crowding in Hong Kong. It is as if the entire Isaeli population was crammed into 30 square kilometers.” Furthermore, he said, the ship had a central air conditioning and heating system and a communal dining room. “Those are extremely comfortable conditions for the virus and still, only 20% were infected. It is a lot, but pretty similar to the infection rate of the common flu.”


As with the flu, most of those dying as a result of coronavirus are over 70 years old, Levitt said. “It is a known fact that the flu mostly kills the elderly—around three-quarters of flu mortalities are people over 65.” To put things in proportion: “there are years when flu is raging, like in the U.S. in 2017, when there were three times the regular number of mortalities. And still, we did not panic. That is my message: you need to think of corona like a severe flu. It is four to eight times as strong as a common flu, and yet, most people will remain healthy and humanity will survive.”

The point is that lockdown for months will destroy many people's businesses, destroy the aspirations of many young sporting enthusiasts, create intense stress that will kill people in various ways such as heart attacks, etc. Just because these are less easily quantifiable, does not reduce the horror.

You work in the kind of job that will continue after this is all over, but many will see everything they have ever worked for destroyed.

David
 
The point is that lockdown for months will destroy many people's businesses, destroy the aspirations of many young sporting enthusiasts, create intense stress that will kill people in various ways such as heart attacks, etc. Just because these are less easily quantifiable, does not reduce the horror.
You work in the kind of job that will continue after this is all over, but many will see everything they have ever worked for destroyed.
David

Trump was making capitalism look great and socialism was being rejected (Comrade Bernie failed even against a daffy old Biden who shows obvious signs of dementia). The Coronavirus hoax is win/win for the forces of socialism. If Trump refused to act on the media + globalist CDC/WHO hyped "threat", he could probably be removed from office. If Trump responded in the way recommended by the "experts" in those agencies, then the capitalist economy would be destroyed (as it is), draconian authoritative and unconstitutional measures could be taken and a hyper socialist "new deal" would become attractive. Socialism is a global movement. That is why the same panic has been induced all over the civilized world. Even many people who talk about fighting a civil war against these forces have become tools of the info op. - that is the theory I am entertaining at the moment to explain the madness that we don't see for the far more destructive "bad flu", and didn't see for H1N1.
 
I am watching the news conference with Trump and the corona virus task force.

There are a lot of companies getting involved in producing hospital equipment - hopefully it will mitigate to some extent the economic effects of the stay at home orders. Interestingly we have some surplus materials that we are sending to Italy. Respirator production is expected to go up and we will be exporting them soon.

 
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-03-29/coronavirus-choir-outbreak

A choir decided to go ahead with rehearsal. Now dozens of members have COVID-19 and two are dead​
...​
On March 6, Adam Burdick, the choir’s conductor, informed the 121 members in an email that amid the “stress and strain of concerns about the virus,” practice would proceed as scheduled at Mount Vernon Presbyterian Church.​
...​
Sixty singers showed up. A greeter offered hand sanitizer at the door, and members refrained from the usual hugs and handshakes.​
...​
Nearly three weeks later, 45 have been diagnosed with COVID-19 or ill with the symptoms, at least three have been hospitalized, and two are dead.​
The outbreak has stunned county health officials, who have concluded that the virus was almost certainly transmitted through the air from one or more people without symptoms.​

2/45 = 4.4% fatality rate.
 
https://www.oann.com/spain-returns-...returns-defective-covid-19-test-kits-to-china
Spain Returns Defective COVID-19 Test Kits To China​
The Spanish government faced immense criticism following the purchase of more than half a million kits, 60,000 of which were found to be only 30 percent effective.​
I have a similar experience with amazon.com most of the items they sell are made in China. Some are very good quality but I also return a large fraction of what I buy because they are defective or not as described.


https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/03/30/netherlands-recalls-600000-defective-masks-sent-china/
Netherlands Recalls 600,000 Defective Masks Sent from China​
 

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1244339294463881216.html

The #Coronavirus is acting like an unwelcome Olympics for scientists, doctors, engineers, entrepreneurs, techies, leaders, parents, and ordinary heroes of every kind. Setting records in every event.​
You can almost feel humanity getting smarter. The most capable among us are forming lasting connections. Sharing best practices. Learning shortcuts. Building a working trust. Creating tools at blazing speeds.​
One way to imagine the future is that the economy will lose trillions of dollars and we will never get it back.​
Another filter on the future is that energy doesn’t disappear, it only relocates and changes form. A huge amount of energy is leaving the economy. We know that for sure.​
What is less clear is where that energy is going. My filter shows a global “mind” being formed, in real time, to fight our common enemy, the virus. That mind needs a lot of energy, like a newborn. And wow, is it getting it.​
I had resisted the common pundit prediction that “everything would be different” after this crisis because I expect a speedy recovery. But I revise my opinion.​
While I still expect a speedy recovery, I also think this experience is rewiring the collective mind of civilization. We probably crammed years of innovation into months. We’ll be coming out of this with a LOT of extra knowledge about our systems and ourselves.​
And that energy will get channeled back into the economy.​
The coming weeks will test us all. But when it is over, we will be far smarter, and far tougher, in every way.​
As Steve Jobs proved, the right thoughts and the right skill stack can turn into trillions of dollars.​
Civilization’s skill stack is undergoing a major upgrade. Watch how much energy that later pumps into the economy. It will be amazing.​
 

This is a excerpt of a translation of the interview that China has tried to censor:

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/cG9oP6VlT2GiyARfFYMyfA
...
At the time, I was scared of cold sweat, which was a terrible thing. The patient was admitted to the respiratory department. It should reasonably be reported by the respiratory department, but for the sake of insurance and attention, I immediately called and reported it to the hospital's public health department and the hospital's sensory department.​
...​
After calling the hospital, I also circulated this report to my classmates. I purposely drew a red circle on the line "SARS coronavirus, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, 46 types of oral / respiratory colonization bacteria." It is to remind him to pay attention. I also sent the report to the doctors in the department to remind everyone to take precautions.​
That thing was spread that night, and the screenshots of the transmission were the photos I painted in red circles, including the ones that I later learned that Li Wenliang passed on to the group. At that time, I was thinking that it might be bad. At 10:20, the hospital sent a message. It was a notice of transfer to the city health committee. The main point was that pneumonia of unknown cause should not be arbitrarily released to avoid causing panic among the people. If panic is caused by information leakage, accountability should be pursued.​
I was very scared at the time and immediately passed this information to my classmates. About an hour later, the hospital sent another notice, again stressing that related news within the group cannot be circulated.​
...​
After the interview, I suffered an unprecedented and very severe rebuke.​
At that time, the leader of the conversation said, "We ca n’t afford to raise our heads when we go out for a meeting. The director of XX criticizes our hospital. As the director of the emergency department of Wuhan Central Hospital, you are a professional.​
...​
I was very emotional at the time, saying that I did this thing, and it had nothing to do with the rest of the people, you just arrest me and go to jail.​
...​
I went home that night, I remember quite clearly, and told my husband after entering the door, if something went wrong, you can bring the child up. Because my second treasure is still very young, I'm only over 1 year old. He felt inexplicable at the time. I didn't tell him what he was being told. On January 20th, after Zhong Nanshan told people, I told him what happened that day. During that time, I just reminded my family not to go to crowded places and wear masks when going out.​
...​
Many times I was thinking, if they did n’t rebuke me like that, ask the ins and outs of this matter calmly, and then ask other respiratory experts to communicate with them, maybe the situation will be better, I can at least communicate more in the hospital a bit. If everyone was so alert on January 1, there would not be so many tragedies.​

The last paragraph (I think) in the excerpt above has also been translated this way:
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/soc...han-doctor-says-officials-muzzled-her-sharing
“If these doctors could have been warned [about the disease] earlier, they would not have died. So I really regret [that I didn’t warn more people],” she said.​
“If I could have known [how the outbreak would turn out] I would have told everyone, even though I was warned,” she said. “I have thought many times – if only time could be turned back.”​
 
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Here is an interview with Daniel Ingram a retired emergency room physician. Some of you may also know of him as an author of a book on meditation and Buddhism (it's a different style than I practice I mention it but not as an endorsement).

I watched the first part of the interview up to 24:00 which is on the medical aspects of covid-19. The description of the video at youtube has a full table of contents for the video.

He has read as much as possible of the research on covid-19. He believes it is more infectious and deadlier than seasonal flu. He is aware of the uncertainty in the data but he quarantines his mail for 3 days.

He says it is very contagious if someone infected with the virus coughed in a room three hours ago you can get the virus by breathing that air.

He takes the virus very seriously.

 
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Well, I always called myself a moderate conspiracst, and distanced myself from an extreme ones. This means, why I accept the fact that there are many elite groups that are trying to obtain even more power than they already have by covert means, and they are capable of a lot of ugliness; yet I do NOT think that there is a singular worldwide meta-conspiracy that controls all other conspiracies for a single purpose.

That's why I think of this current global panic as exactly of this - panic, caused by mass supseptibility to fear and stupidity, rather than a kind of global conspiracy... This does not cancel the fact that a lot of elite groups - governmental, corporate, academic etc. - are now actively trying to use this mass hysteria to advance their own even-more-power-grabbing agendas).

Yet... after I saw THIS... I really had to fight a temptation to postulate a truly global conspiracy:

https://www.hopkins-cepar.org/on-alert/two-different-drills-with-two-different-goals

What do you think of this?
 
Vortex, you can find full videos of that event at http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/media

I would recommend at least watching the highlights video.


There's also previous exercises, like the years before, Clade X which specifically had to do with a weaponized virus. http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/events/2018_clade_x_exercise/index.html

My question, if this isn't evidence of a conspiracy, why did our agencies such as CDC seem to be so unaware of what was going on, considering Stephen Redd, MD, director of the CDC’s Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response was going through this pretty much exact scenario just months before?
 
To illustrate my point about other pathogens being present, but downplayed by the media, there is the story of the choir in the Seattle area that got together to practice despite coronavirus warnings. The news says, "Since the rehearsal, 45 members have become ill and 28 have tested positive for coronavirus, Skagit County Public Health told Q13 FOX on Monday. Two members in their 80s died."

So 17 members became ill, but are not corona positive. What do they have? Was there food poisoning involved? What?

Of the 28 that tested positive, is it the corona that is making them ill, or whatever the other 17 have?

The two that died were quite elderly. What did they actually die of? What does the autopsy reveal?

Note that the media presents the story as if these fools laughed at coronavirus or - even more stupidly - thought God would protect them, but they were savagely mowed down by the virus that will get us all if we aren't on house arrest.

IMO, it will turn out that we have all been exposed to the virus. Many of us already. Maybe the test is no good. false positives and false negatives.
 
https://www.sciencealert.com/why-herd-immunity-will-not-save-us-from-the-covid-19-pandemic

Here's Why Herd Immunity Won't Save Us From The COVID-19 Pandemic
...​
For mumps, you need 92 percent of the population to be immune for the disease to stop spreading entirely. This is what's known as the herd immunity threshold. COVID-19 is, fortunately, much less infectious than mumps, with an estimated R0 of roughly 3.​
With this number, the proportion of people who need to be infected is lower but still high, sitting at around 70 percent of the entire population.​
Which brings us to why herd immunity could never be considered a preventative measure.​
If 70 percent of your population is infected with a disease, it is by definition not prevention. How can it be? Most of the people in your country are sick! And the hopeful nonsense that you can reach that 70 percent by just infecting young people is simply absurd. If only young people are immune, you'd have clusters of older people with no immunity at all, making it incredibly risky for anyone over a certain age to leave their house lest they get infected, forever.​
It's also worth thinking about the repercussions of this disastrous scenario – the best estimates put COVID-19 infection fatality rate at around 0.5-1 percent. If 70 percent of an entire population gets sick, that means that between 0.35-0.7 percent of everyone in a country could die, which is a catastrophic outcome.​
With something like 10 percent of all infections needing to be hospitalised, you'd also see an enormous number of people very sick, which has huge implications for the country as well.​
The sad fact is that herd immunity just isn't a solution to our pandemic woes. Yes, it may eventually happen anyway, but hoping that it will save us all is just not realistic. The time to discuss herd immunity is when we have a vaccine developed, and not one second earlier, because at that point we will be able to really stop the epidemic in its tracks.​
Until we have a vaccine, anyone talking about herd immunity as a preventative strategy for COVID-19 is simply wrong. Fortunately, there are other ways of preventing infections from spreading, which all boil down to avoiding people who are sick.​
So stay home, stay safe, and practice physical distancing as much as possible.​
Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz is an epidemiologist working in chronic disease in Sydney, Australia. He writes a regular health blog covering science communication, public health, and what that new study you've read about actually means.​
 
https://www.theblaze.com/news/stanford_coronavirus_too_high_death

A pair of public health experts from Stanford, Drs. Eran Bendavid and Jay Bhattacharya, warn Americans in a Wall Street Journal editorial that the current estimates about the coronavirus' fatality rate may be too high by "orders of magnitude."​
...​
The two professors argue that the best evidence of the coronavirus death rate being significantly lower than what is being reported may lie in the Italian town of Vò. On March 6, the town's 3,300 residents were tested. Of these, 90 tests came back positive, indicating a prevalence of 2.7% of the population having the virus.​
If one were to apply this to the entire province where the town is located, which has a population of 955,000, it would mean there were actually 26,000 infections at the time, and not just the 198 that were officially confirmed. This would be 130 times greater than the number of reported cases. Since Italy's case fatality rate of 8% is estimated using the confirmed cases, Bendavid and Bhattacharya write, "the real fatality rate [of the virus] could in fact be closer to 0.06%."
...​
Existing evidence suggests that the virus is highly transmissible and that the number of infections doubles roughly every three days. An epidemic seed on Jan. 1 implies that by March 9 about six million people in the U.S. would have been infected. As of March 23, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 499 Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. If our surmise of six million cases is accurate, that's a mortality rate of 0.01%, assuming a two week lag between infection and death. This is one-tenth of the flu mortality rate of 0.1%. Such a low death rate would be cause for optimism.​
 
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