|
|
The bickering in Australia over borders is a prelude to the world
Australian states are fighting about borders. The WA premier swatting down the NSW calls to open with two words “Ruby Princess” — the disastrous failure to allow a cruise ship of coronavirus cases to spread from Sydney to every state of Australia.
The border debate is bizarre. From a pure medical point of view there is zero, no, nothing, none, not one reason to open borders between states when one of those states has a highly infectious, deadly new virus present in the community. There is only risk.
The decision about opening borders is all economic. Is it worth it? The problem is that none of the economists know what the cost is, so we end up with Medical Swamp Experts, who don’t know the answer either, making economic judgements and calling it “medical advice”.
Which borders to open? Within the hard borders is real freedom from both the virus and Big Government.
Virus free states are Golden Zones of freedom
The view from within a Golden Zone is very different. In a state with no virus (as far as we can tell) — the costs of […]
The British government is finally putting a two week quarantine on arrivals, after about 12 million people arrived in February and March, and nearly 100,000 came through in April. Nearly every country on Earth closed their borders except the US, UK and Sweden and parts of Africa and a few ‘istans’. This closure is so late, by the time it takes effect other countries are planning to open.
Coronavirus: After 34,000 dead, UK to finally shut borders
Jacquelin Magnay, The Australian
The secretive Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies has refused to detail to parliament its reasoning for introducing border closures now. Britain has recorded 34,000 deaths but infections have peaked.
This is how not to do quarantine:
Prime Minister Boris Johnson signalled the border closures earlier this month.
The warning allowed farmers time to fly in seasonal crop pickers from eastern Europe and gave pharmaceutical companies time to bolster stock levels, with many having factories on the continent.
It’s important to give travelers lots of warning so that infected fruit pickers can fly germs in without that pesky two week isolation. As for flying in “stock levels”, the rest of the […]
We know everything about Chinese Communist official figures can be adjusted. So we watch what they do, not what they say.
In February, 80% of the entire economy of China was shut down and non-productive. Electricity use was down, coal use was low, container ships sat in ports, and satellite tracking of aerosols showed the air over China was cleaner than it has been, probably for a century. Locking down the nation must have been wildly expensive, and yet the Chinese still behave as if this is a plague and it’s worth doing everything humanly possible to avoid.
They said it was preventable and treatable, only infected the old, and was like the flu. What do they know that they are not saying?
CCP autocrats are known for organ harvesting not for compassion, so we could assume that culling off a few old folk would be deemed “useful” in a nation with older demographics.
They are incompetent, communist management, but they are not stupid. This reaction speaks volumes about how seriously the CCP views Covid-19:
They’ve found 34 new cases and they’re locking down 100 million people Over 100 Million in China’s Northeast Face Renewed Lockdown
Some 108 […]
Travel bubbles are coming:
Tasmania’s premier is looking at opening up travel between WA, SA, NT, and possibly New Zealand.
If the selective borders do open, it won’t be popular with the two biggest states which still have outbreaks. (Queensland has only had four new cases in the last week, but NSW has 23 and Victoria 50+. Indignant commenters at The Australian talked of High Court Challenges using s117. BUt I can’t see anyone rushing to fund those.
Coronavirus: Apple Isle’s selective reopening would shut out tourists from ‘sick’ states
Mathew Denholm ,The Australian
Some Australians craving a long-promised Tasmanian getaway may have to wait longer than others, with the holiday isle’s Premier considering a selective border relaxation favouring states most on top of COVID-19.
Options included restoring direct flights to cities in jurisdictions that had the virus under control, such as Adelaide and Perth, or even New Zealand. This would avoid the need for tourists to travel via Sydney or Melbourne, cities still experiencing multiple new daily coronavirus cases.
A few days ago three Baltic States opened borders with each other.
On May 15 Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia decided their Coronavirus situation […]
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
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.
…
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
…
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 few people are asking about the video the Youtube removed which is now on Bitchute. (h/t AC Osborne) The cack hand of Youtube strikes again with unnecessary censorship. But even if the docs were wrong, it’s better to discuss why than try to disappear them — we can all learn something. Plus the censorship gives them a de facto kind of hero status among some, but for the wrong reasons.
The Doctors main point is a sampling bias error
Doctors Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi of Accelerated Urgent Care are ER doctors, they look convincing, and speak well, but their thesis rests entirely on an error. They take test results from a high risk group of people, and extrapolate the results to the whole state. What they have is non-randomized data, and they assume it represents millions of people who didn’t come out for testing. This is not a small or incidental point. It’s the foundation of nearly everything they say.
They repeat this same mistake over and over, and say “we are following The Science”. They come up with some just-so rationalizations, some truisms that aren’t true, and inject some superfluous vocabulary in there so people know they […]
Wow. If this is confirmed, Coronavirus is almost a disease of Vitamin D deficiency
Missing out on the Sunshine Vitamin?
Hot off the press: A new Indonesian study of 780 people with Coronavirus found that people with a Vitamin D deficiency were much more likely to die. We discussed Vitamin D at length a few weeks ago, so we already knew Vitamin D is associated with a lower rate of respiratory illness, but the results here are quite remarkable.
Of those who died most (85%) had a co-morbidity, the real surprise is that even more than that, 96% had low Vitamin D levels. Of those who survived, most people had normal Vitamin D levels. Only 7% of survivors had low or deficient Vitamin D. That is quite a split.
Vitamin D deficiency was very common among these Indonensian patients. Half of those measured did not have enough Vitamin D in their blood. Of those that did, 96% survived, and only 4% “expired”. Vitamin D looks like a good protector.
After controlling for known risk like being old, or male or having high blood pressure, a Vitamin D level described as deficient (less than 20ng/ml) was associated with a 10 […]
To show what a good global citizen it is, the CCP in China could have welcomed a multinational independent investigation into the origins of the Flu from the Fish markets (or was that the Bat-Lab?)
Instead, the Chinese Ambassador of the CCP threatens to throw its (huge) weight around:
In reported comments, Mr Cheng described the Morrison government’s proposal for an inquiry as “dangerous” and accused Canberra of pandering to US instructions. He said Chinese people were upset with Australia and if the trend continued they could decide not to come as tourists or students, and not eat Australian beef or drink Australian wine.
Fortunately the Australian Government was not impressed:
[Australian Foreign Minister] Senator Payne doubled down on her call for an independent inquiry into the pandemic’s outbreak, saying it had produced “an unprecedented global crisis with severe health, economic and social impacts”. …
The Coronavirus is an extraordinary threat to communist China. It’s almost the only thing that could coordinate so many factions against China. In a normal world, China could use this kind of economic bullying China to pick off one country at a time. But this time, all the other major trading nations of […]
As so it begins. The first country declares “elimination” success. Today New Zealand announces the effective elimination of coronavirus. Soon hopefully other countries can join and rebuild the “Virus Free Zone” – and the borders that surround them will expand as the infected zone shrinks.
Theirs was a very strict lockdown. Beaches, playgrounds, schools, businesses and restaurants closed. Not even takeaway sales.
New Zealand says it has stopped community transmission of Covid-19, effectively eliminating the virus.
BBC News
With new cases in single figures for several days – one on Sunday – Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the virus was “currently” eliminated.
But officials have warned against complacency, saying it does not mean a total end to new coronavirus cases.
The news comes hours before New Zealand is set to move out of its toughest level of social restrictions.
The shift down to level 3 restrictions means things are still pretty strict:
Level 3 will see retailers, restaurants and schools allowed to reopen on a smaller scale. Schools will reopen on Wednesday for children up to Year 10 who cannot study from home, or whose parents need to return […]
Now is the perfect time to get rid of pointless green burdens on our economy
Thanks to the rude wake up call from a real global pandemic, suddenly the fluffy luxury of “Green” rules and strangling red tape are put in the right perspective. Few are going to complain.
Despite this outbreak appearing to tick the Green Left fantasy list, any reality check exposes how frivolous most fashionable angst is. There is a great opportunity here to clean out some of the worst of the Big Government burden.
The Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act is in the government’s sights:
Green tape to be cleared for recovery
Richard Ferguson and Dennis Shanahan, The Australian
Environment Minister Sussan Ley is set to cut green tape in time for October’s post-coronavirus federal budget, as a new report shows restrictive environmental regulations have grown 4½ times since 2000 and threaten to hamper the economic recovery.
Think tank the Institute of Public Affairs’s new study of federal environment laws found regulations have grown by more than 10 per cent each year and have delayed up to $65bn in new […]
The one thing China may have successfully done with the CCPVirus is to rally the rest of the world to say Enough. Enough of the crass mercenary games, the self-serving lies, and enough of the reckless hygiene or leaky labs.
We all helped to make China what it is, by buying the cheap goods, by selling our manufacturing base, ignoring the ethical quagmire and by assuming that China would follow in the footsteps of Japan, Taiwan and Korea.
And as we speak, Chinese military ships are plying the waters of the South China Sea. While China is sending doctors and PPE to Malaysia to fight the pandemic, the Malaysian government is not publicly protesting the prolonged and close presence of the Chinese Navy. (h/t Dave B)
Time to put China on lockdown for its dishonesty amid coronavirus crisis
Glenn Harlan Reynolds, USA Today
China needs to be isolated from the civilized world until its behavior improves. We are in the current situation, with deaths and economic devastation worldwide, because China handled this outbreak with its trademark mixture of dishonesty, incompetence and thuggery. Were China a more civilized nation, this outbreak would have been stopped early…
It’s like someone read all the major skeptic blogs in the world and turned them into a documentary.
The new Michael Moore documentary: Planet of The Humans
1 – unapologetically exposes Al Gore, Bill McKibben, Robert Kennedy, etc. for being con artists and hypocrites, 2 – crucifies the Sierra Club and their ilk for being disingenuous and primarily in it for the money and influence, and 3 – also carefully documents how wind, solar and biofuels are scams. — John Droz, jr.
h/t Thanks to Peter D, AndyG, Michael S, Colin, Willie, and Jim Simpson who enjoyed this “even the credits”.
Richard Branson will allegedly spend $3 billion to fight global warming! Then Branson, sitting next to @AlGore, is asked “Is Al Gore a prophet?” Branson replies “How do you spell “prophet””? [Profit!!!] Everyone laughs! — @tan123
HaroutDSDZ: It’s the moment when Winston Smith realizes that O’Brien is not a revolutionary but a loyal member of Ingsoc… Covering article by genuine environmentalist –
Over the last 10 years, everyone from celebrity influencers including Elon Musk, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Al Gore, to major technology brands including Apple, have repeatedly claimed that renewables like solar panels and wind […]
Sometimes the first sign of a serious coronavirus complication can be delirium and confusion.
Some kind of neurological effect is quite common with Covid-19 (CCP-flu). As many as 30 – 60% of coronavirus cases may lose their sense of taste or smell. But now we should also look out for stroke type symptoms or confusion. This may be the first sign someone is in trouble with Covid-19.
Coronavirus can infect brain and nerve tissue, causing inflammation. And if it increases blood clotting then it could increase the risk of strokes as well.
Her father’s delirium was a first sign of coronavirus
NBC News
That was when she noticed her father, who had shown no previous signs of dementia, was largely unaware of what was happening around him.
There is growing evidence to suggest that COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, can affect not only the lungs, but the brain, too.
A recent study of 214 patients in Wuhan, China, where the pandemic started, found more than a third had neurologic manifestations of the disease, including loss of consciousness and stroke. Physicians in the U.S. have noted the same.
“We’re seeing a […]
|
JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
Jo appreciates your support to help her keep doing what she does. This blog is funded by donations. Thanks!
Follow Jo's Tweets To report "lost" comments or defamatory and offensive remarks, email the moderators at: support.jonova AT proton.me
Statistics
The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
|
Recent Comments