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Mortality rates show that this is a medical situation we have not seen since WWII
All statistics are suspect but some numbers still tell us something important. In the early fog of a global pandemic, a proper diagnoses is difficult if not impossible. People are dying of heart attacks because they are too scared to go to hospital, but equally, Covid is causing heart attacks and strokes that might never have happened. It’s fair to ask how many deaths are due to Coronavirus and how many are due to the lockdown, but it’s not realistic to expect that we can do an autopsy on every single patient. And as the Financial Times team points out, the excess deaths also occur in the regions of the UK with the highest infection rates — which suggests they are due to the virus, not just collateral damage. Though people will also be less willing to visit a hospital in a zone where there are more cases. On the other hand, in areas with lockdowns but no major outbreaks, the mortality rates are 10% below normal (see many US states). So these peaks could have been even higher but the lockdown saved some people […]
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 […]
Soon after isolation began, Australian and New Zealand cases started to fall as fast as they rose
This is what Crushing the Curve looks like, and if works it will set the new standard, and change the way the rest of the world views this. It isn’t over yet, but still — something is working and the international press has just started to get excited.
Be aware the figures may jump next week, as testing in NSW has ramped up and everyone can now get a free test. But testing is already high per capita, with a very low positive test rates. (12,000 tests done in Australia yesterday and 99.8% were negative).
Australia has 25 million people and found just 18 new cases yesterday. New Zealand with 5 million people, got five new cases. Obviously these numbers look great from the US and UK where 700 people are dying every day.
The rise and fall of Australian Covid-19 cases, March and April 2020
…
Worldometer
Daily Mail, UK:
Australia is steamrolling the curve!
[The] Nation records just 17 cases in one day – including three states with ZERO infections – as the country’s road to […]
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 […]
And the global pile-on against China gathers speed
Blistering
Julian Reichelt is editor-in-chief of the Bild, Germany’s largest paper. Their team calculated that China owed €149 billion to Germans for coronavirus damages. China’s embassy shot back that they reported everything according to WHO guidelines, that countries had time to prepare (for something “like the flu“, eh?) and that Bild was stirring up xenophobia and nationalism.
So Reichelt replied and addressed it to President Xi:
“You rule by surveillance. You wouldn’t be president without surveillance. You monitor everything, every citizen, but you refuse to monitor the diseased wet markets in your country. You shut down every newspaper and website that is critical of your rule, but not the stalls where bat soup is sold. You are not only monitoring your people, you are endangering them – and with them, the rest of the world.”
… “surveillance is a denial of freedom. And a nation that is not free, is not creative. A nation that is not innovative, does not invent anything. This is why you have made your country the world champion in intellectual property theft.
“China enriches itself with the inventions of others, […]
“Coronavirus may be far more widespread than known”. Or not.
Yet another small non-random study shows “48,000 – 81,000” people in Santa Clara County had Coronavirus and didn’t know it, but all the study really shows may be the power of motivated reasoning.
The Santa Clara study looked at the county with the highest number of Covid cases in California, then advertised on Facebook for people to come forward for an unvalidated test, after which the results were adjusted upwards and converted into headline grabbing ratios and extrapolated to include the whole county and to calculate case fatality rates.
Advertising for participants creates an obvious selection bias straight away — people who thought they may have had coronavirus are surely more likely to want to go and get tested. But people who knew they didn’t have it (because they had self isolated) might not want to turn up and stand in a queue or even catch coronavirus while they waited.
Basically, they found 50 people out of 3,330 tested positive. About half of which were likely to be false positives. They weighted the sample by zip code, race and sex, but for some reason, didn’t adjust for age, which […]
The price for the coverup will be huge
Donald Trump crossed the Rubicon by pulling funding from the WHO and asking China to ‘fess up’. Now no respectable politician wants to be left out in the race to demand answers and the WHO is an open target too. The UN agency helped China hide the severity of this disease and advised nations not to stop flights with China. The World Health Organisation failed in the one job they were designed for.
DailyMail.co.uk
Australia’s Foreign Minister will demand a global inquiry into the spread of COVID-19 – and says the World Health Organisation should play no part in it.
China told her the disease was both ‘preventable and curable’ during a conversation in late January.
As diplomatic faux pas go, it doesn’t get much worse than bringing a deadly disease to a party and telling everyone “it’s just the flu”. But China was scalping the medical gear too. Not only did China hide the true nature of the virus even as it shared the virus around. It harvested all the protective gear it knew the world would need, then held the world hostage. It even took donations from Italy, […]
Virus follows fixed mysterious pattern
An Israeli Prof is claiming to be “shocked” to find that tough lockdown quarantines made no difference. He claims the virus fades after 6 weeks in the “exact same way” everywhere — which it does if you wear a welding mask while looking at the data. When asked why this extraordinary text-book-breaking shift happens he says “I have no explanation” but that doesn’t stop him concluding that hard quarantines are unnecessary.
When asked, he apparently suggested the exponential growth of viruses ends because of “the climate” or maybe “the virus has its own life cycle”. (How does he think this works? Telepathy?)
Israeli Professor Shows Virus Follows Fixed Pattern
Professor Yitzhak Ben Israel of Tel Aviv University, who also serves on the research and development advisory board for Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, plotted the rates of new coronavirus infections of the U.S., U.K., Sweden, Italy, Israel, Switzerland, France, Germany, and Spain.
The numbers told a shocking story: irrespective of whether the country quarantined like Israel, or went about business as usual like Sweden, coronavirus peaked and subsided in the exact same way. In the exact, same, way. His graphs show that all […]
For months there have been rumors that Coronavirus leaked from a Chinese lab. The only P4 (high security lab) in China happens to be in Wuhan, near the fish markets and people there happen to be working on synthetic coronaviruses with S proteins that happen to infect ACE2 receptors in humans. But if Mother Nature wanted to generate her own viruses, it’s hard to beat wet markets in high density Chinese hubs. And there were papers too saying the gene analysis, etc, fitted 96% with the bat-pangolin-human story.
But now we find, long before the CCP was asking for sympathy, authorities were asking the staff to destroy all those lab viruses:
“Existing virus samples must be destroyed. Information about the samples, related papers and related data are all prohibited from release. “
— Hubei Health committee on Jan 1st. (See the Epoch Times Documentary below).
And told the staff to say nothing to anyone, anywhere, anytime, ever:
“Notice regarding the strict prohibition of disclosure of any information related to the Wuhan unknown pneumonia.
National Health Commission clearly mandates that all detection, empirical data, results and conclusions related to this […]
Far from being imposed from above, lockdowns in the face of a pandemic are just democracy in action. Faced with a deadly new disease people just want to be safe, and they want their loved ones to be safe too. Even if they might lose their job.
Has there ever been such a radical plan that was this radically popular?
Coronavirus: UK lockdown supported by 93 per cent of public, poll finds
Jon Stone, Independent, UK, March 24
YouGov says 93 per cent of people support the plan unveiled the by the prime minister, with just four per cent opposed and the rest saying they do not know.
The poll said 75 per cent strongly supported the measures, with 17 per cent saying they “somewhat” supported them.
It’s still popular:
THE BRITISH public are steadfastly ready to continue with lockdown restrictions for as long as it takes to defeat coronavirus, a new poll has revealed.
David Maddox, The Express, UK April 12
It found that voters in Britain are strongly behind the government’s science led strategy to tackle coronavirus and back the police in taking a tough stance against those […]
The real question is why is this even news? The WHO is there to prevent mass pandemics from spreading and killing people, and they have not saved one single country in 2020. The US wasted $900 million dollars, 15% of the WHO budget, on an organization so corrupt it has been captured and become a Chinese advertising agency directly working against the interests of the Western nations that fund it.
Donald Trump says US will halt funding to WHO over handling of coronavirus pandemic
Mr Trump, speaking as the US death toll from COVID-19 passed 25,000, said the United Nations health agency had “failed in its basic duty and it must be held accountable”.
He said the group had promoted China’s “disinformation” about the virus, and said the outbreak could have been contained at its source and lives could have been saved if the WHO had done a better job of investigating initial reports coming out of China.
The big news is that Australia, and most other countries are still funding the WHO. When will our media start asking why we do that? Is Scott Morrison afraid of the UN, afraid of China, or afraid of […]
Studies may not be what they seem We need antibody tests to find the number of asymptomatic Covid-19 cases, but the German Heinsberg study was poorly done. Apparently there aren’t many good antibody tests available yet.
The early results of a small study in Germany on the town of Gangelt suggested that as many as 15% of the town might have caught an asymptomatic form of coronavirus and already had antibodies to it. This would mean that death rates to coronavirus were much lower — a mere 0.37%, not 2% (or so), and that aiming for Herd Immunity was a realistic policy. It was picked up in many newspapers and turned into headlines that may have misled a lot of people, including the Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia.
“Coronavirus: Nearly 15% Europeans Now Immune in COVID-19”
“Many people may already have immunity to coronavirus, German study finds”
“Scientists say many more people than previously thought could have acquired coronavirus immunity after discovering 15% of people in city dubbed ‘German Wuhan’ could be carrying antibodies”
Five different reasons the results may be spurious The test may have detected antibodies to the harmless common cold form […]
Across the US all-cause mortality is down as as people avoid catching the flu, getting run over, and other risks. But in New York where coronavirus has hit hardest, all-cause mortality is at record highs.
This is nothing like the seasonal flu
For the whole month of March, deaths in New York were twice as high as normal. This includes not just extra coronavirus deaths but all other causes. Deaths were even higher than the number of known coronavirus deaths, leaving cardiologists worried that there may have been an increase in other conditions like heart attacks or strokes, because people were afraid to go to hospital or couldn’t get help in time.
This is an underestimate. The authors expect this number to rise as more paperwork gets completed. It’s still only a small excess in a giant country, but it hints at the scale of the event were no quarantine measures put in place, no flights stopped, and the virus allowed to spread naturally. The current epidemic is stabilizing in New York, but if major action wasn’t taken, this would be the early weeks of a pandemic about to sweep across all fifty states. And this would not be the […]
Herd Immunity is not realistic
For the first time we have true randomized testing –and it shows that Austria was officially picking up about a quarter of the real number of infections in the population. So when Austria was officially saying 7,000 were infected, the true number was 28,500. Finally, this puts a solid limit on the chance that asymptomatic rate of infection was high. There is no iceberg.
About 75% of cases were mild or truly asymptomatic (and thus not getting officially tested), but it was still only a small slice of the population — just one third of one percent.
Less than 1% of Austrians infected with coronavirus, study shows
Peter Beaumont, The Guardian
The co-founder of Sora, Christoph Hofinger, told a news conference: “Based on this study, we believe that 0.33% of the population in Austria was acutely infected in early April.” Given the margin of error, the figure was 95% likely to be between 0.12% and 0.76%.
99% of the population is still vulnerable
The Austrian chancellor estimates only 1% of the population had had the infection (presumably he is including an estimate of people who had already had the virus, cleared […]
For doctors or nurses reading — there’s a call to share this widely
An information event on this online SUNDAY April 12 8pm US Eastern time. (Open, free to anyone who wants to listen). That’s 10am Monday morning EST Australia.
This is not the flu. Most of the time apparently it’s not ARDS either. Coronavirus it turns out — is a vascular disease as much as lung disease. In fact in 70-80% of ICU patients putting them on a ventilator straight away may make the situation worse.
Currently patients in ICUs have about a 50:50 chance of making it out alive. The odds are terrible. Doctors have been reporting how people can degenerate suddenly into a life threatening crisis situation. Now, perhaps this explains it. This kind of hypothesis is one of the reasons we really want to crush the curve, now, because we are so underprepared and there is so much to learn. If this is right it will save many lives.
This could solve several mysteries at once
This virus causes heart damage, it raises clotting factors. People seem fine, then they relapse.
One recent paper found people with high levels of D-dimer, a clotting factor, […]
Locking up the olds and letting this rip still has some drawbacks.
Coronavirus: Nearly 800 people under the age of 50 have died in the US
Alex Woodward, The Independent
Nearly 200 people in the US in their thirties have died from coronavirus, among the nearly 800 people under age 50 who have died following the outbreak.
At least 45 Americans in their twenties have died from the Covid-19 disease caused by the virus, not including another nine deaths involving people under 20 years old, according to data collected by The Washington Post.
One third of young deaths had no known co-morbidity. Doctors have little idea what factors increase their risk. It may be genes, which is yet another reason to hammer this down and delay this round. Gene and blood tests might enable us to figure out who was high risk of being hospitalized.
How many deaths among the under 50 will the average person tolerate before they stop sending their kids to school out of fear?
Hundreds of young Americans have now been killed by the coronavirus, data shows 8 out of 10 based on 37 ratings […]
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