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How times change. Last November Jacinda Ardern announced a zero carbon plan for New Zealand.
Six months later, after Coronavirus, saving the planet barely gets a mention.
Once the luxury money is gone, the golden gravy train will dry up. Crazy ideas about changing the global weather are a boom time activity.
NZ Budget 2020: trading coronavirus for the climate crisis
Analysis: In responding to the Covid-19 crisis, the Government appears to have completely forgotten about the climate crisis.
In announcing the 2020 Budget, which creates a $50 billion Covid-19 recovery and relief fund and pumps billions into health, infrastructure and wage subsidy extensions, Jacinda Ardern said.
The climate is hardly mentioned in the Budget – the word itself is used just four times in the entire document and not at all in Ardern’s speech to Parliament.
h/t RicDre, Eric Worrall at WUWT who found the gentlest spin:
New Zealand’s COVID-19 budget delivers on one crisis, but largely leaves climate change for another day
9.5 out of 10 based on 41 ratings
Just….
9 out of 10 based on 19 ratings
The claims that the current pandemic Coronavirus is natural all rely on it being 96% closely related to a natural bat virus known as the RaTG13 virus. But new analysis suggests this “natural” virus only exists as a fake creation on a Chinese computer.
The implications of this type of work will affect global politics. The anger towards the Chinese CCP mismanagement, dishonesty, and the coverup will unite the world against the global bad-citizen player. It also drives a pike through the casual globalist academic programs, and the role of people like Anthony Fauci, chief advisor to Trump, head of the Expert Swamp in the US. Why was he sending money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology? Why did the West help train and supply this lab?
h/t ramblingidiot, Choroin, Selwyn, El Gordo, Rob Dinn, Mike Mitchell
The virus that SARS-CoV-2 is supposed to have evolved from looks unmistakably artificial — in sections it contains far too many “mutations” that matter but hardly any of the normal noise of silent mutations which always occur naturally alongside the mutations which change the end product. Like someone cut and pasted multiple photos together with different background noise. Other sections of the […]
Five million people live on Hokkaido, north of Japan. They went into a lockdown early on Feb 28th. By March 19th Hokkaido looked like a success and was showing the world how to manage Coronavirus (they started early, and used masks). But then they reopened too soon, when there were still a few cases around and within a month had to lockdown again.
UPDATE: From readers in Japan (or who know people there) we hear that this is voluntary self-isolation, the government can declare “A State of Emergency” but the people are asked to comply, not forced. The Japanese government cannot order the population to “lock” down. Presumably “restrictions” are therefore “recommendations”.
The restrictions were released just before a three day holiday weekend and the border with the rest of Japan was not closed, which meant workers and students returned quickly and brought infections in. Three weeks later on April 14th Hokkaido closed down again.
The lag is diabolical. Most of the cases in Hokkaido were reported after the second State of Emergency was declared.
h/t David E.
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As long as the borders are open, the lockdown cannot succeed until the whole country is cleared.
As […]
Despite doing everything it could to gain herd immunity Iran starts on second wave
Iran was one of the first countries to succumb to the pandemic, and so it is for the second wave. Back on Feb 25th Iran emerged as a new epicentre — whereupon smart nations like Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Oman, Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Jordan, Ankara, Georgia and Tajikistan immediately closed borders and flights from Iran. Rich nations with Expert-Swamps, however, would wait until they actually caught cases before they stopped the flights.
Iranian leaders worked to spread the virus: they were slow to close religious institutions, and quick to claim they’d be immune, right up until the day the leaders started catching the virus themselves. They declared quarantine was stone age, and shipped their masks off to China, but like everywhere, when things got bad, they started quarantine.
The peak came and went and things were headed in the right direction so Iran started releasing restrictions from April 11th. By May 2nd, less than a thousand new cases a day were being recorded. But five days later cases had doubled. Now they are back to where they were when they started releasing restrictions.
Just […]
In Northern Italy, people are talking about how some people have not recovered even two months later. Patients with mild infections can recover, feel fine, and test negative, but then slide into debilitating fatigue, with strange aches and pains, bouts of diarrhea, and burning eyes. Some of them even test positive again.
And these were not the serious ICU cases which are paralyzed and ventilated. The head doctor of a hospital in Lombardy said “the discomfort often seems to last even longer for people with lighter symptoms. “
Surviving Covid-19 May Not Feel Like Recovery for Some
Debilitating symptoms can last long after a person’s body has gotten rid of the coronavirus, a reality Italians are now confronting.
Jason Horowitz, New York Times
The stubbornness of the virus and the length of the convalescence have become topics of conversation in northern Italy where some of the longest-suffering Italians are finding themselves in physical and financial uncertainty, unable to shake sickness and fatigue and get back to work.
But even some of the infected who have avoided pneumonia describe a maddeningly persistent and unpredictable illness, with unexpected symptoms. Bones feel broken. The senses […]
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9.6 out of 10 based on 12 ratings
Border closures and Quarantine appear to be reducing all respiratory diseases
It’s a striking pattern all over the world. Measures taken to reduce the spread of Covid have, not surprisingly, reduced the spread of all respiratory diseases.
This years flu season is smaller than the last five years
Good news: due to the pandemic it’s likely many people are not catching Influenza and other respiratory diseases.This shows a rather predictable result that quarantine reduces the spread of respiratory diseases. It’s a banal and uncontroversial finding.
Chris Gillham is a part of the unofficial BOM audit team here, and below he looks at WHO data across 17 countries for Influenza. (The WHO Chief of course is a belt-n-debt-trap apologist for China, but this is not their modeled interpretation, just the data). Laboratory indicated influenza cases are down an astonishing 87% in 17 nations compared to the five year period.
Quarantine is textbook microbiology, and for most of history, the best way to reduce the spread of disease. In many countries 12 days after major isolation measures started, viral growth flattened off the dreaded exponential curve. Despite that, some commentators still wonder if the lockdowns achieve anything for Coronavirus. And so […]
With 1.4 million confirmed infections about 0.4% of the United States has had a known infection. But we know testing is inadequate given that there is such a high positive test rate (14% of all tests so far are positive). So we know the real rate of infection is higher than that.
The group that did the Santa Clara antibody test have run another test on 5,600 baseball employees and this time found only 0.7% carry the antibodies. The researchers were surprised.
About the only message we can really draw from this is the US is a long way from Herd Immunity, and as the US reopens there are twenty to fifty times as many people who could still catch this.
LA Times: Fewer than 1% of MLB employees test positive for COVID-19 antibodies
Of the 5,603 major league employees who submitted to what researchers called the largest national antibody study to date, only 60 tested positive, researchers said Sunday.
The researchers announced an estimated positive rate of 0.72% after adjusting the results for what they said were false positives and false negatives.
Still, the minute percentage of positive tests provided a data point […]
OK. It’s late Tuesday somewhere in the world.
9.7 out of 10 based on 11 ratings
It’s almost like the swamp in the UK wants to keep the infections running as long as possible.
The UK Government have scored heat on the pointless sabotage of their own lockdown by flying in the virus through open borders. So in reply, instead of doing an immediate proper quarantine, like most countries in the world, the UK is giving everyone with an infection and the means to travel three good weeks to plan their trip so that they can avoid the two-week quarantine.
If they beat the easy deadline they can stay at home for seven days instead and “only” go out to infect people at chemists, shops, and anywhere they deem essential, including their workplace, during that week.
Boris needs new advisors.
UK ‘to bring in 14-day quarantine’ for air passengers
Tom Burridge, BBC
UK airlines say they have been told the government will bring in a 14-day quarantine for anyone arriving in the UK from any country apart from the Republic of Ireland in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
The new restriction is expected to take effect at the end of this month.
Industry body Airlines UK said the […]
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8.7 out of 10 based on 18 ratings
Australia and New Zealand may soon open up a safe travel zone in the South Pacific and some mock it as a “bubble”. But many other nations could potentially join this growing virus-free zone. Countries which could get there sooner include Germany, France, Norway, Ireland, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, Czechia, Serbia, Croatia, Greece and Iceland. Plus South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, Israel, and even perhaps Italy and Spain not long after that. And there are others.
Countries that are only flattening the curve, and not crushing it, include bizarrely the powerhouses of the Western world, the UK and US, as well as Sweden and Canada. It also includes Russia, Brazil, and a lot of the third world. But even Turkey is bringing the curve down. Forgoodnesssake, Jordan looks impressive. Even Cuba looks like reaching zero before the US of A does.
The US and UK are keeping their virus cases alive by flying them in through open borders. Sweden is just not doing enough. Canada? Good question. Please tell us.
We know how to beat this virus yet top level expert advisors are telling Boris and Trump they need to leave the borders open. Can someone shake these men […]
Figure that UK residents can be fined for gathering in a group of three in the park across the road, but can legally travel to Tehran or Moscow if they reckon it’s essential (though the Russians might not let you in). Coronavirus is raging in Moscow but Russians can fly to Heathrow for a bargain next week.
For seven weeks of lockdown people have been flying straight in without even a temperature check. Though Healthrow just announced it will trial some thermometers and ask people to wear masks. Bravo, eh?
The idea of keeping people in their homes but letting planes come and go is so bizarrely strange it didn’t even occur to me.
The US appears largely the same
The good news is this explains why the UK is stuck in Viral-Neverland, with cases not declining, despite the lockdown. It’s something that can be fixed. The bad news is that Brits have been wasting weeks in lockdown running to stand still, instead of crushing the curve.
The awful news is that it says something dreadful about the health advice Boris is getting. The rot run deeps in the hallowed institutions.
In the UK, 18 million people arrived from […]
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8.4 out of 10 based on 11 ratings
The annual Flu death tally is not what it seems
It’s another bubble I don’t want to pop. Thanks for sticking in there in the quest for data that counts.
People worry that doctors are inflating the number of Coronavirus-deaths by listing other kinds of deaths in the Covid category. Fair enough. But they miss that this has effectively already been done with the famous flu death count. The national discussion is stuck in a rut, because it’s trying to compare confirmed cases of Coronavirus with modelized broad category influenza “burdens”.
It’s tempting to cite the current toll of 72,000 US Coronavirus deaths and wonder why we’ve reacted so differently to the worst influenza season where 62,000 people died of the flu (supposedly). But the actual confirmed cases of influenza deaths in the US are only 3,000 – 15,000 annually. Coronavirus really is on a different scale.
The headline grabbing flu numbers are modeled guesses based on assumptions about things like how many people go to hospital, how many get tested, or what other diseases were around at the time. It’s called the Influenza Disease Burden, not the List of Those Who Died, because it’s statistics and word-games. […]
It turns out being locked up in our own homes with our own families is not the end of the world
Some said the lockdowns would cause skyrocking divorces:
More couples will SPLIT and divorce rates will skyrocket as strict social distancing rules force partners to spend more time together
Instead, people like spending time with their partners and kids:
Lockdown is making us love our families MORE: Britons are less likely to split up from partners, are eating and sleeping more…
Of all those in live-in relationships, 37 per cent say the experience has led to them wanting to spend more time with their partner, as opposed to the ten per cent who are keen to broaden their horizons again.
A total of 26 per cent say their relationship has improved, while 13 per cent say it has worsened.
Only nine per cent of people think they are now more likely to split up as a result of lockdown, compared to 27 per cent who think it is less likely.
Respondents have, on the whole, also enjoyed being cooped up with their children, with 45 per cent saying it had left […]
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9.3 out of 10 based on 8 ratings
Could a mass clotting event explain the excess death rate, the hypoxia, the delirium
Stories are now appearing of a few youngish people losing fingers, toes or even getting a leg amputated. And strokes have been seen in some as young as 30. Coronavirus, it seems, doesn’t just cause blood clotting, it causes the large and small sort, arterial ones, venous ones, and now microclots, and many of them all through the lungs and other tissues. This might explain the hypoxia, and also the other cases of organ failure. And while strokes in 33 year olds are still very rare (even in Coronavirus patients) the clotting could be the factor that matters most in the lungs, and in mortality.
This also might explain why ventilators are not working too well. Ventilators are useful for “wet lung pneumonia” because they help use pressure to push fluid out of the lungs. But if the problem is massive clotting, the ventilators that everyone worked so hard to get might be the wrong solution.
It also suggests people in Covid-zones should be on the lookout for stroke type symptoms, and drinking plenty of water and keep moving around.
Mysterious blood clots are COVID-19’s latest […]
A pulse Oximeter | Image Thinkpaul: Wikimedia
A cheap device might keep people off ventilators and be the first warning of trouble
In coronavirus blood oxygen levels can silently drop to unheard of levels. People may be unaware they even have coronavirus as oxygen levels fall to the point, medicos are rewriting the record books. This is a hypoxia crisis — it’s a defining feature of the disease. In the UK, the demand for oxygen at hospitals is so great that the NHS is running out, rationing it, and asking docs to lower their blood oxygen targets.
People are monitoring their “blood oxy sats” at home so they get an early warning that they need more serious medical help. Normal blood oxygen levels are 95-100% saturated. Doctors used to get uppity at levels below 92%, and hospital alarms often go off if children with asthma fall below 90%. At 88% doctors are putting people on continuous oxygen therapy. Levels below 80% are considered dangerous enough to start causing organ damage. But medical staff are finding conscious covid patients with levels so low they are unheard of — an unbelieveable 50 percent. I read somewhere an ambulance medic found someone […]
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