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.
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 Jan 1st to March 22. Of those only 273 people were quarantined. That explains, right there, why the UK dug such a huge hole for itself. Since then, flight traffic has continued, albeit at only 1% or so of normal levels, because nearly every other country on Earth closed borders, and most passengers don’t want to fly. That is still 10,000 people arriving every day in the UK with no mandatory quarantine at all. Like four Ruby Princesses cruise ships every single day. This alone explains why the UK is stuck in the same hole week after week.
UK Travel advice recommends not travelling unless it’s essential (as decided by the traveller) and advises travel insurance (which possibly no one is selling). On return it asks people to stay home for 7 days and “and only go outside for food, health reasons, daily exercise or work if you absolutely cannot work from home.” In Australia everyone flying in is escorted to a hotel, prevented from leaving, and fed and monitored for two weeks. That’s a quarantine.
Sir Patrick Vallance wanted Herd Immunity for the UK, but officially that suicidal policy was junked, so what gives — is the UK on a “silent Herd Immunity” plan?
Vallance said that studying the genomics of the virus had allowed them to determine the origin of cases brought into the UK.
Arrivals into the UK have plummeted by as much as 99% on some routes but the country has been described as an “outlier” in its approach to border controls during the crisis. The only measures being taken at the border are the use of posters, digital displays and leaflets with information about the measures in place.
The Home Office has insisted that the scientific advice showed that placing restrictions at the border would not have had a significant impact on the spread of the virus in the UK.
“Scientific Advice” is the great abrogation of responsibilities. Once the virus had spread and it was too late to stop it — then it’s possible that the extra infections might not make much difference, but when the nation is in lockdown at great expense, surely priority one is to limit the flow. And not just because of its a soul destroying symbolism. The extra cases keep the tally stubbornly flat, looking like a failure, demoralizing and disincentivizing, and making the lockdown longer…
The open borders madness explains why the United Kingdom wallows in an extended constant infection rate. Why pay the pain of the lockdown while allowing people to bring back the virus? It’s as if London is dooming itself to lockdown until the whole world clears the virus first.
The places with open borders will be the last places on Earth to get rid of the virus
According to the BBC on May 5th “When will the lockdown end and how?” the UK lockdown has dropped the Ro from nearly 4 down to about 0.7 (as eyeballed of the graph below from the much maligned Imperial College. A college headed by the even more maligned Neil Ferguson, Grade A hypocrite, caught for visiting his lover while telling the nation not to). Assuming that the R0 calculation of Imperial College is correct (below), the UK Daily Infection rates ought to be falling and “tracking to zero” like most of the rest of the world. Any number below one is a winner.
Though I can’t find the source document for this graph, and it is suspiciously, unnaturally, square, with a very modeled look about it, despite the headline.
Ro infection in the UK, Coronavirus spread and the effects of lockdown.
But how important are the flights?
The additional load of new incoming passengers with infections could easily be the difference between the UK daily infections shrinking or not.
If 1% of passengers are infected on take-off as they head toward the UK, by the time they land, that may be 3% infected on touchdown (I can’t find any data on flight Ro — can anyone else?) So that would mean 300 new infections arriving every day in the UK. It doesn’t sound like much when there are 5,000 new infections reported every day, but those 300 could infect 200 more in the next 5 days (let’s assume they adopt the lockdown practices and same Ro of the UK as soon as they arrive, so an Ro of 0.7, as per the graph above). Those 200 will infect another 140 and so on. In the end, the 300 infected passengers arriving each day will cumulatively add a load of around 900 cases before the chain extinguishes itself. It could be a lot more if flights are mainly coming from countries with poor infection control (like the US, Brazil or Russia). And flights, by definition, will be coming from places with poor infection control. All the nations that are trending to zero will have closed their borders, and they won’t want flights from the UK.
And if a city should really go pear shaped, there aren’t too many places a person would want to escape too. London might be too infected for most of the world to want to fly to, but in the worst hot-spots on Earth, it might still look better…
As infections spread in the poorly controlled parts of the world, the load will increase. (And if flight traffic is 3% of normal as suggested by some, then overseas infections will be bigger).
In other words, 67 million people are living under expensive and strict lockdown conditions, and the thing stopping that from eliminating the virus are the 10,000 or so people who arrive daily without quarantine. How does any science advisor justify flying in new cases daily? How does any policy-maker explain holding the nation to extended ransom week after week just so a few people can arrive without the hassle of a two week mandatory quarantine?
For people who want strong borders, this is the biggest chance to get them since WWII. Where are the sovereign battlers who want border controls?
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”.
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. And probably the biggest adjustment of them all is that the big killer, pneumonia, is bundled in with influenza when it could be caused by as many as 30 different things. Thus a whole range of viral, bacterial, and mycoplasma-related pnumonia cases get collected under the “influenza” banner. It’s as if we are comparing all known respiratory diseases with the new one on the block.
Death is messy and multifactorial. There will be heart attacks labeled as “Covid” that shouldn’t have been, but there will be Covid deaths labeled as heart attacks that never got tested for Covid. And somewhere there will even be someone sitting behind a wheel who’s tired with coronavirus, who makes a mistake they wouldn’t have made… The best we can do is look at is all-cause-mortality or at least, confirmed cases. What matters is that we compare like with like to decide what to do.
As Doctor Jeremy Faust noticed, despite all the deaths he’d seen, he could hardly remember more than a single person who had died from the flu, and nor, he found, could his colleagues:
…it occurred to me that, in four years of emergency medicine residency and over three and a half years as an attending physician, I had almost never seen anyone die of the flu. I could only remember one tragic pediatric case.
Based on the CDC numbers though, I should have seen many, many more. In 2018, over 46,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses. Over 36,500 died in traffic accidents. Nearly 40,000 died from gun violence. I see those deaths all the time. Was I alone in noticing this discrepancy?
I decided to call colleagues around the country … Most of the physicians I surveyed couldn’t remember a single [flu death] over their careers. Some said they recalled a few. All of them seemed to be having the same light bulb moment I had already experienced: For too long, we have blindly accepted a statistic that does not match our clinical experience.
He calculates that in the worst ever week of both covid and flu deaths, the confirmed covid deaths were 10 to 44 times higher:
In the last six flu seasons, the CDC’s reported number of actual confirmed flu deaths—that is, counting flu deaths the way we are currently counting deaths from the coronavirus—has ranged from 3,448 to 15,620, which is far lower than the numbers commonly repeated by public officials and even public health experts.
… we have to compare counted deaths to counted deaths, not counted deaths to wildly inflated statistical estimates. If we compare, for instance, the number of people who died in the United States from COVID-19 in the second full week of April to the number of people who died from influenza during the worst week of the past seven flu seasons (as reported to the CDC), we find that the novel coronavirus killed between 9.5 and 44 times more people than seasonal flu.
My kingdom for good statistics
We want good stats, but we’ve got what we’ve got. Both Flu and Covid contribute to heart attacks and strokes (and undoubtedly others too — as the burden of a major disease adds one more straw to any condition.) We just know Coronavirus bodies clot so fast, from head to toe that even Heparin can’t stop it. But even with a $5000 autopsy for every patient — which won’t be done — we won’t always be alble to say if the heart attack was 46% Covid, or 64% Covid. And then there are the people who die in their homes and will never be tested.
US testing statistics for Covid are still inadequate and missing some cases — with a positive rate (positive results per test) up in the 20% range — it means there are still more people out there with Covid who don’t know it, than are showing up in tests.
Deaths from coronavirus are almost certainly underestimates:
If Coronavirus were stealing bodies from the cardiovascular tally — the all-cause-mortality numbers would show that. Instead there’s a wave of people dying above and beyond what we’d expect in places like London and New York, and there are deaths even above and beyond what we’d get from adding normal deaths to Coronavirus deaths. It’s likely thousands of people in corona-hot-spots are also dying of strokes and heart disease or things related to clotting and inflammation.
All cause mortality shows this is “not just the flu”. Though thankfully action stopped it hitting most places as bad as it hit New York.
Whatever it is running through the biggest cities of the Northern Hemisphere (and places like Ecuador) looks like a deadly pandemic, spreads like a deadly pandemic, and kills like a deadly pandemic…
Lawrence Solomon, who wrote “The Deniers” –a book about climate skeptics who stood up to global warming hysteria — wrote in 2014 that the CDC were inflating flu numbers as a way to market flu vaccines.
“U.S. data on influenza deaths are a mess,” states a 2005 article in the British Medical Journal entitled “Are U.S. flu death figures more PR than science?” This article takes issue with the 36,000 flu-death figure commonly claimed, and with describing “influenza/pneumonia” as the seventh leading cause of death in the U.S.
“But why are flu and pneumonia bundled together?” the article asks. “Is the relationship so strong or unique to warrant characterizing them as a single cause of death?”
Dr. David Rosenthal, director of Harvard University Health Services. “People don’t necessarily die, per se, of the [flu] virus — the viraemia. What they die of is a secondary pneumonia.”
“Cause-of-death statistics are based solely on the underlying cause of death [internationally defined] as ‘the disease or injury which initiated the train of events leading directly to death,'” explains the National Center for Health Statistics. Because the flu was rarely an “underlying cause of death,” the CDC created the sound-alike term, “influenza-associated death.”
Using this new, loose definition, CDC’s computer models could tally people who died of a heart ailment or other causes after having the flu. As William Thompson of the CDC’s National Immunization Program admitted, influenza-associated mortality is “a statistical association … I don’t know that we would say that it’s the underlying cause of death.”
The CDC’s response was its “Seven-Step ‘Recipe‘ for Generating Interest in, and Demand for, Flu (or any other) Vaccination,” a slide show Nowak presented at the 2004 National Influenza Vaccine Summit.
So the same team that hyped flu deaths cannot be trusted on Coronavirus deaths either, but the freezer trucks are backing up to hospitals and the morgues are overflowing. At least “all cause mortality” just amounts to the counting of bodies and those coronavirus deaths all have names.
We know corruption is endemic, but hopefully we can still, at least, count the dead.
Things worth knowing about Coronavirus:
Quarantines work: 12 days after lockdowns, quarantines and isolation, Coronavirus slows. This is text book microbiology.
The stroke virus? Covid causes hundreds of microclots throughout the lungs (and everywhere else)
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 them wanting to spend more time with their offspring in future, and just 13 per cent wanting less time.
The survey by the Mail on Sunday finds that people are less likely to divorce, are arguing less, and in a shock, don’t mind spending more time with their spouse and kids. Since they are catching up on sleep, it may make getting along easier.
Deltapoll interviewed 1,564 British adults online on April 30 and May 1. The data has been weighted to be representative of the whole adult population.
This is not to forget that for some life is harder, and the financial pain is bad. (11% saw income go up but 38% said income went down). And we all acknowledge that lockdowns are tougher for singles, both for the young who can’t date and especially for older people living in solitary isolation. It may be singles and the 9% of couples “more likely to split” who said their mood got worse (30%) compared to the 23% who said their mood improved in lockdown.
In the UK, only 31% thought people should be allowed to sunbathe in parks and open spaces. 61% disagreed. Freedom means so much more than just the ability to wander the streets. There is a freedom from fear in places which had less freedom to move.
For those who have lost livelihoods and businesses, governments could do more to to spread the pain fairly. In New Zealand public servants at least took a twenty percent shave. But in most lands the small business entrepreneurs and service industry workers bore most of the cost while the academics and public servants just worked from home.
It’s time for some to admit that an unplanned holiday in our homes is not a disaster for a large part of the population, nor was it unpopular. In other wars, people were separated for years, went hungry or were called up to put their lives on the line. In this war, health workers are paying a terrible price, but for others, the war effort means staying home and watching TV.
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.
After he had spent nearly three weeks in an intensive care unit being treated for COVID-19, Broadway and TV actor Nick Cordero’s doctors were forced to amputate his right leg.
The 41-year-old’s blood flow had been impeded by a clot.
A recent paper from the Netherlands in the journal Thrombosis Research found that 31 percent of 184 patients suffered thrombotic complications, a figure that the researchers called “remarkably high” — even if extreme consequences like amputation are rare.
Coronavirus’s new mystery: It’s causing strokes in healthy people
“These people are clotting, and we can’t shut it off.”
Even anticoagulants like heparin are not enough to stop the clotting:
“I’m a hematologist, and this is unprecedented,” says Jeffrey Laurence of Weill Cornell Medical College, who has been in the field for three decades. “This is not like a disease we’ve seen before.”
Laurence also describes the multitude of people sick with Covid-19 whose blood clots are plugging up the dialysis machines in their wards. Beyond that, he says, even “as the nurses are drawing their blood, it’s clotting in the tubes, and they’re on full doses of Heparin” and other blood-thinning medications. “Everyone is seeing a similar kind of thing,” he says.
Lawrence saw a photo of a young Coronavirus sufferer with a pattern of skin lesions that was “a picture of microvascular clotting. Lawrence wondered if that kind of clotting was going on in the lungs, and then saw that it was in an autopsy.
Blood markers of clotting are up at 100 times normal:
Dr. Tiffany Osborn, a professor of surgery and emergency medicine at Washington University in St. Louis.
“We are seeing lab values that are off the wall,” she says. For example, doctors are seeing levels of a protein fragment called a D-dimer that are more than 100 times normal levels, Osborn says. This suggests the presence of lots of blood clots that the body is trying to break down.
Hundreds of small clots throughout the lungs also found in Ireland:
“In addition to pneumonia affecting the small air sacs within the lungs, we are also finding hundreds of small blood clots throughout the lungs. This scenario is not seen with other types of lung infection, and explains why blood oxygen levels fall dramatically in severe COVID-19 infection. — Fogarty et al 2020. ScienceDaily
Also in France: a quarter of ICU Covid patients had a pulmonary embolism (clot in their lung) and nearly 70% had some venous thromboembolism. (Llitjos, 2020)
Young people are not on the look out for stroke symptoms:
For example, the youngest, a 33-year-old woman, developed slurred speech and felt weak and numb on her left side for 28 hours before seeking help. She (as well as one other stroke patient in the study) was “concerned about going to a hospital during the pandemic,” the authors noted — even though she had had a cough, headache, and chills for a week.
She is one of the lucky ones. She is the only one who has been able to start speaking again.
Coronavirus deaths from stroke or heart attacks could be uncounted Covid deaths
If Coronavirus can cause strokes in otherwise healthy 33 year olds, imagine what happens to 80 year olds at home?
The prevalence of blood clots also raises the question of whether some stroke or heart attack home deaths in recent months were actually linked to Covid-19. It’s yet another possible way Covid-19 fatalities might be being undercounted. Many people who have already died are not currently tested for Covid-19 (often in the interest of preserving tests for those who are still alive). But more widespread posthumous testing could help clarify the full impact of this disease.
Previously some docs suggested the “light lung” stage of Coronavirus (where lungs are still flexible and compliant) was a sort of high altitude sickness which leads to clotting. But this newer theory turns it around and suggests that the clotting itself causes the hypoxia which perhaps leads to the appearance of the high altitude sickness.
Obviously it’s not known how long people might be at an increased risk of stroke or heart attack after getting a coronavirus infection.Though there were reports out of China in early February of people having heart attacks weeks later and a suspicion that the virus was increasing the risk.
Note that even influenza increases the risk of heart attacks and strokes, and being immobile in an ICU bed is a well known factor promoting blood clots. That’s why patients are given prophylactic doses of heparin right from the start. The difference here is that the clotting is so strong that even higher doses of heparin are not enough to stop it clotting.
This doesn’t change the fact that it’s likely 75% of people will be asymptomatic or have mild cases.
Things worth knowing about Coronavirus:
Quarantines work: 12 days after lockdowns, quarantines and isolation, Coronavirus slows. This is text book microbiology.
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 with a reading of 35%.
Dr Levitan, an emergency doctor in New York recommended a week ago that a pulse oximeter at home would save lives and prevent patients from ultimately needing the highly invasive, expensive ventilator treatment which was so dangerous and such a drain on hospitals.
Oximeters are cheap devices, bound to be disappearing off chemist shelves and from Ebay and Amazon right now, but if you are high risk, or in a high risk area, it might be worth trying to track one down.
…almost all the E.R. patients had Covid pneumonia.
Apparently, some of those asymptomatic cases are already suffering from pnumonia. This wasn’t the point of the article, but the message implied in here is that there may be walking cases of Covid who think they are fine, but they are already suffering lung damage.
Even patients without respiratory complaints had Covid pneumonia. The patient stabbed in the shoulder, whom we X-rayed because we worried he had a collapsed lung, actually had Covid pneumonia. In patients on whom we did CT scans because they were injured in falls, we coincidentally found Covid pneumonia. Elderly patients who had passed out for unknown reasons and a number of diabetic patients were found to have it.
And here is what really surprised us: These patients did not report any sensation of breathing problems, even though their chest X-rays showed diffuse pneumonia and their oxygen was below normal. How could this be?
Normally people with low oxygen levels are struggling to breathe, gasping, working their intercostal chest muscles between their ribs. They are in distress. But with Covid patients they may feel OK, and be able to talk on the phone. By the time they get to the hospital they already have fairly serious case of pneumonia and the chest x-rays show it. About 20% of these patients will go on the the more serious “wet lung” type of pnumonia which needs a ventilator. The hope is that people who get treatment early may be able to avoid the ventilator stage.
…when Covid pneumonia first strikes, patients don’t feel short of breath, even as their oxygen levels fall. And by the time they do, they have alarmingly low oxygen levels and moderate-to-severe pneumonia (as seen on chest X-rays).
He recommends all people who have tested positive for coronavirus, or have respiratory symptoms use an oximeter for two weeks.
Pulse oximeters helped save the lives of two emergency physicians I know, alerting them early on to the need for treatment. When they noticed their oxygen levels declining, both went to the hospital and recovered (though one waited longer and required more treatment). Detection of hypoxia, early treatment and close monitoring apparently also worked for Boris Johnson, the British prime minister.
Not all medicos think this is a good idea, but for a smart audience who can weigh up the pros and cons and give themselves a bit of training, it’s a cheap bit of insurance. I’ve got one and have used it for years.
…a pulse oximeter might signal that you’re in trouble before you realize it. That’s what Levitan saw when he spent 10 days working in the ER at Bellevue Hospital in New York City earlier this month: Many COVID patients were already very sick with COVID pneumonia by the time they arrived. They were breathing rapidly, their blood oxygen levels dangerously low. Like mountain climbers, the patients had grown accustomed to gradually decreasing levels of oxygen and didn’t realize they were in distress.
Many of them said they only recently started feeling short of breath though they had experienced symptoms of COVID-19 for days. By the time the patients went to the hospital, says Levitan, the virus had already damaged their lungs, and many were in critical condition. He saw COVID pneumonia patients with oxygen saturation levels as low as 50 percent.
NPR goes on to discuss reasons to get one, as well as reasons not to — with warnings and instructions. Read the NPR article and other links, but most of the warnings about using them probably don’t apply to the well educated person. The warnings about untrained users sound like anti-mask messages did — contradictory and patronising. Bright lights can skew the readings, as can nail polish or pre existing conditions like anemia, asthma or lung disease, so using one when you are healthy is good practice to get the “normal” trendline.
Like masks and PPE, pulse oximeters are suddenly going to become hot property, and thus, mass produced.
Curiously, sales of pulse oximeters dramatically rose in the US on Jan 20th when the first case of coronavirus was recorded in the US, but it seems to me more likely to be a sign of our friendly CCP agents at work — posting meters to China without mentioning to the people around them that they might be useful to have at home.
Note to commenters: Since lives and livelihoods are both at stake, good manners and grace will go a long way. Sometime the worst scaremongers are the ones complaining about other scaremongers.
h/t Mum.
Things worth knowing about Coronavirus:
Quarantines work: 12 days after lockdowns, quarantines and isolation, Coronavirus slows. This is text book microbiology.
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 have studied virology once. (Yes DNA does mean Deoxyribnucleic acid, but these viruses are RNA ones, and none of that jargon needed to be there.) They have virtually no data that supports any of their other claims, and they simply ignore, or aren’t aware of the properly randomized studies that don’t agree with them. In Austria only 0.3% had a current infection at that time, so probably only 1% of the total Austrian population have immunity (if it exists).
UPDATE: How Sampling Bias makes the mortality rate appear too low: If people who have a disease are more likely to go out and get tested, then the sample they provide will overestimate the true rate of infection, which leads to an underestimate of the mortality rate.
People without Covid are less likely to want to get tested — they who have carefully self isolated are unlikely to rush down to the testing stations where they might catch coronavirus. And if they think they are negative they won’t want to pay for a test either.
Imagine 1% of the population is infected with disease X but a company sells tests for X, and it attracts 100 people who have had some kind of cold or flu and who think they had X. In the end 20% of them turn out to have X, the rest had a normal cold. The researchers might claim 20% of the whole state have X (which would be wrong). The real rate of infection is still 1%. And if the mortality rate was 5% (of those infected), after the number of infections is accidentally bumped up from 1 to 20% that makes the death rate appear to fall from 5% to 0.25%.
Nothing can rescue them from the sin of extrapolating from small unrepresentative data
Essentially they say their tests of 5,000 people in Curran Country found 6.5% were positive “of the population” they say (erroneously). This is “widespread”. They point at testing throughout California which returns a 12% positive and calculate that people have a 0.03% chance of dying in California. Which is misleading and wrong. Careless.
33,865 Covid cases out of 280.000 tested. That’s 12% of Californians infected. We have 39 million people. That’s 4.7 million cases. We’ve seen 1,227 deaths, that means you have a 0.03 chance of dying….
At one point, Erickson goes on to say almost 96% of people recover without any significant sequelae, as if this is good news — but if 4% do not recover isn’t that a problem? (By his own bucket maths that’s up to 1.5 million Californians that face a threat they might not completely recover from, and who might carry long term health issues — assuming they don’t die.)
He repeats like a mantra: millions of cases, small amount of death.
At the core of their message, the two docs have a message that the high positive test rates in NY, Spain and their own work support their theory that millions are infected, and therefore the death rate is tiny, so we can drop the lockdown. But a high positive test rate mostly means a state isn’t doing enough testing. It is not a good proxy for the prevalence which needs random tests. ( See The Atlantic on high positive test rates. ) Obviously current testing is missing all the people who have isolated at home, or had no symptoms at all and are less likely to front up to a testing clinic and pay money to find out they probably don’t have coronavirus.
Doctors Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi of Accelerated Urgent Care are ER doctors, and they run a business doing these tests. So we’d think they would be aware of sampling bias. And since their business would profit from lifting the lockdown, we’d think they’d be very careful about putting out reasonable caveats when they spoke in a press briefing, yet they didn’t — even when reporters asked them why their message conflicted with so many other doctors.
Possibly they didn’t realize they were jumping into a global fire. After the video went viral, and Elon Musk raved on twitter to his 33 million followers, many other doctors came out and explained why it was wrong.
The doctors should never have assumed that the patients they tested — who came for walk-in COVID-19 tests or who sought urgent care for symptoms they experienced in the middle of a pandemic — are representative of the general population, said Dr. Carl Bergstrom, a University of Washington biologist who specializes in infectious disease modeling. He likened their extrapolations to “estimating the average height of Americans from the players on an NBA court.” And most credible studies of COVID-19 death rates in reality are far higher than the ones the doctors presented.
“They’ve used methods that are ludicrous to get results that are completely implausible,” Bergstrom said.
Just a bit of junk science: ….”we’ve never seen a situation where you quarantine the healthy”.
There were lots of other signs they hadn’t thought about their theory too hard. Right at the start Erickson declares “Typically you quarantine the sick, and we’ve never seen a situation where you quarantine the healthy”. Yes, well, that’s except for all of history. The use of quarantine goes back to biblical times, and often meant isolating people who might have a disease whether or not they were sick. That was the point, we quarantine healthy pets that fly overseas, not because we know they are sick, but because even asymptomatic dogs can carry nasty diseases. Obviously, if we knew who was healthy and who wasn’t, we wouldn’t be quarantining the healthy ones. See, for example, American Samoa where they escaped the Spanish Flu by insisting all boats wait for 5 days offshore. Quarantine has to work this way if the disease spreads asymptomatically.
Erickson et al have some fair criticisms of lockdown, and the hypocritical, contradictory ways governments have manhandled the situation. But plenty of other more careful commenters are saying that already. Let’s have that conversation. But don’t mix up the basic success of isolation measures with the other debate on which kinds of isolation are the most cost effective, with the other debate about how pandemic preparedness plans were a disaster, we didn’t have the PPE (personal protective equipment) and we had to close off elective surgery because all the mask and drug factories had moved to China.
It’s not the flu
There’s no equivalence comparing simple death numbers after 2 months to a whole year of flu statistics, yet they do it:
Drs. Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi, who co-own Accelerated Urgent Care facilities in Kern County, said, “The death rate of the coronavirus is similar in prevalence to the flu,” according to ABC 23.
“If you study the numbers in 2017 and 2018, we had 50 to 60 million with the flu,” Erickson said. “And we had a similar death rate in the deaths the United States were 43,545 — similar to the flu of 2017-2018. We always have between 37,000 and 60,000 deaths in the United States, every single year. No pandemic talk. No shelter-in-place. No shutting down businesses.”
In 8 weeks, half of which was under the most severe isolation measures USA has ever seen, coronavirus has already killed as many people as the worst flu season ever. Imagine what it might do, if there were no efforts to slow it down?
When reporters ask why their view is so different to almost all the other experts they vaguely mention “theories and models”, and “how they are working with patients” not being desk-bound. This was when a good science team would have talked about the contradictory studies and said something that gave an insight in to the inadequacy of the other tests. Instead we get nothing but motherhood cliches, and sometimes one cliche bites the next one. Like when they discuss New York, they explain they are right because they “don’t have to live in Manhattan to look at the data”. So sometimes being a desk jockey is OK after-all.
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 Dat 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 fold greater risk of death. These are quite extraordinary numbers. In most medical studies an OR (odds ratio) as low as 1.3 is notable enough to get published. But these are OR’s of 10.
This doesn’t mean taking a Vit D pill will protect you. It’s possible the severe form of the disease might have caused the low Vitamin D levels, in which case taking a supplement may or may not help. Though I would keep D levels up for all the other reasons anyhow, like a reduction in cancer, flu, asthma, depression, and heart disease. “Not too shabby”. Low risk. Low cost.
UPDATE: Just to make it clear, the caveat in that last paragraph above is very important. This study likely exaggerates the effect of D. If the infection drains D, it could produce a strong association like this. We need prospective studies. Whatever this study shows, the reasons for using D are incredibly strong.
…
Just looking at the raw data, without adjusting for risk factors, suggests that when vitamin D levels fall below 30 ng/ml (moderate levels) people were 12 times as likely to die — and when they were even lower, below 20ng/ml, people were 19 times as likely to die. These were higher risks than those from the pre-existing conditions themselves.
The patients were an average age of 54. But it is sobering that the paper notes that even of the under 50s who survived, 80% are still in hospital.
The cost of one night in intensive care would provide vitamin D supplements for a month for 3,000 people.
Grant et al, put out a call for people to supplement with D during this pandemic, pointing out that this will reduce the incidence of the co-morbidities that are hit hardest by Coronavirus. They also point out that D reduces respiratory tract infections, and is actively involved in our own anti-viral defences in at least three different ways. Vitamin D induces cathelicidin and defensins (polypeptides that our immune system uses like surface-to-air missiles against bacteria or enveloped viruses). D also reduces production of proinflammatory cytokines (the messengers that elict the deadly cascade of inflammation).
If the effect of Vitamin D is this strong, it changes everything. It would explain why Coronavirus has hit so hard in the northern colder climates, where wealthier people stay indoors, and cover up, and suffer from Vitamin D deficiencies. The news tonight was full of stories of Remdesivir reducing mortality by a few percent and shortening hospital stays by a day or two. Instead something so much cheaper may be so much more effective.
ABSTRACT
This is a retrospective cohort study which included two cohorts (active and expired) of 780 cases with laboratory-confirmed infection of SARS-CoV-2 in Indonesia. Age, sex, co-morbidity, Vitamin D status, and disease outcome (mortality) were extracted from electronic medical records. The aim was to determine patterns of mortality and associated factors, with a special focus on Vitamin D status. Results revealed that majority of the death cases were male and older and had pre-existing condition and below normal Vitamin D serum level. Univariate analysis revealed that older and male cases with pre-existing condition and below normal Vitamin D levels were associated with increasing odds of death. When controlling for age, sex, and comorbidity, Vitamin D status is strongly associated with COVID-19 mortality outcome of cases.
For Vitamin D status, cases were classified based on their serum 25(OH)D levels:
(1) normal – serum 25(OH)D of > 30 ng/ml,
(2) insufficient – serum 25(OH)D of 21-29 ng/ml, and
(3) deficient – serum 25(OH)D of < 20 ng/ml.
h/t David E
Things worth knowing about Coronavirus:
Quarantines work: 12 days after lockdowns, quarantines and isolation, Coronavirus slows. This is text book microbiology.
Raharusun, Prabowo and Priambada, Sadiah and Budiarti, Cahni and Agung, Erdie and Budi, Cipta. (2020) Patterns of COVID-19 Mortality and Vitamin D: An Indonesian Study (April 26, 2020). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3585561 26th April 2020, Preprint.
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 from catching the normal flu or dying in a car accident.
We saw the spike in excess deaths in New York already. These graphs compiled by the Financial Times of the UK, Italy, Spain, Austria, Switzerland, Netherlands, and Belgium, show that this is not remotely a normal flu season, and can not be ascribed to “relabeling” deaths that are not due to Coronavirus. The bodies in icerinks, and freezer trucks are real.
In 13 countries and cities people are dying at rates far higher than normal and hundreds of thousands of people (at least) have died that we can assume would not have died if the CCP virus, or whatever we want to call it, had not spread around the world.
The official tallies of deaths probably underestimate the deaths — even if we accept that some normal heart attacks and strokes have been mislabelled as “coronavirus deaths”, both autopsies and medical papers show that Coronavirus is also causing heart attacks and strokes that would not have happened.
So many spikes, thousands of deaths above even the worst winters in most of Europe.
This is not true of all nations. In Denmark there are only 100 or so unexplained deaths. It’s not above the normal range. In Portugul and Austria deaths are only up 10% or 12%. In Sweden it’s 18% (so far, but the curve is not slowing). In the UK, it’s up 37% , Spain, 50% and in Italy an awful 90%. We’ve already discussed New York where deaths are up 100%. But of course, in some areas, deaths are down, below average, the lockdown means less flu, less car accidents and over all lower mortality where the lockdown was started early enough, or where some other variable saved the day (climate, geography, demographics, population density).
The solution to both medical and economic fears is to get rid of the virus if we can, and it looks like we can.
Mortality statistics show 122,000 deaths in excess of normal levels across these locations, considerably higher than the 77,000 official Covid-19 deaths reported for the same places and time periods. If the same level of under-reporting observed in these countries was happening worldwide, the global Covid-19 death toll would rise from the current official total of 201,000 to as high as 318,000. To calculate excess deaths, the FT has compared deaths from all causes in the weeks of a location’s outbreak in March and April 2020 to the average for the same period between 2015 and 2019. The total of 122,000 amounts to a 50 per cent rise in overall mortality relative to the historical average for the locations studied.
Some of these deaths may be the result of causes other than Covid-19, as people avoid hospitals for other ailments. But excess mortality has risen most steeply in places suffering the worst Covid-19 outbreaks, suggesting most of these deaths are directly related to the virus rather than simply side-effects of lockdowns.
The most useful comparison we can make between different countries is all cause mortality.
In places like Ecuador, the official numbers hopelessly underestimate the true medical onslaught:
In Ecuador’s Guayas province, just 245 official Covid-related deaths were reported between March 1 and April 15, but data on total deaths show that about 10,200 more people died during this period than in a typical year — an increase of 350 per cent.
Something awful is going on in Ecuador:
…
We don’t solve the economic crisis without first solving the medical one
We all want the lockdown lifted as soon as possible. For those of us in a democracy, where the voters en masse, want action to stop this virus, the choices are to get rid of the virus (see New Zealand, Australia, South Korea and other nations crushing the curve) or to convince fellow voters to accept death rates that are far higher than usual, and that a significant proportion of the population will have to be “protected” which is a soft form of imprisonment.
Unless a treatment appears soon, the countries that try option two (which is not as good for business or for lives), will end up doing option one — Especially once voters see other nations beating the virus. The long run costs of living with the virus, losing hospitals periodically, suffering repeat lockdowns, and “managing the death rate” will be far more painful than the cost maintaining borders and two week quarantines with countries that fail to control this virus..
The most important posts:
Quarantines work: 12 days after lockdowns, quarantines and isolation, Coronavirus slows. This is text book microbiology.
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 the world could be lined up together — as long as they don’t wait for the WHO or the UN to do it.
Surely it is time to admit that the UN model is inherently prone to corruption and failure — when the WHO utterly failed at the one task it was created for.
Instead, work through a new health agency set up only with the major player countries that pay their way and don’t use a Belt and Road to buy their blind eye.
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.
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 to work.
Workers will also be able to resume on-site work, provided they have a Covid-19 control plan in place, with appropriate health and safety and physical distancing measures. It is expected one million New Zealanders will return to work on Tuesday. — The Guardian
Almost no medical experts are even discussing elimination as a possibility. NZ may be the only land where they did:
New Zealand’s Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield said the low number of new cases in recent days “does give us confidence that we have achieved our goal of elimination”.
He warned that “elimination” did not mean there would be no new cases, “but it does mean we know where our cases are coming from.
For a scientific advisor, it’s safer to be a cynic and aim low, but the price of not even discussing elimination — with all its benefits — is to misinform business and demotivate the people that governments were asking so much from. The talk of inevitable long lockdowns “for six to 12 months” played havoc with policy and business planning.
Many unambitious advisors were using old 1918 flu plans. They talked of flattening the curve, but they have not admitted it was a devastating long slow bleed and impossible policy, and they’ve ended up Crushing the Curve instead as predicted here. They still call it “flattening the curve” but it is a very different strategy to what they originally suggested.
And yet most countries treated COVID-19 as if it were influenza, he said, trying to slow its advance rather than eradicate it. Nations including the UK and the US opted for such mitigation and suppression efforts after they found themselves overwhelmed by cases.
The man who should get the credit is Professor Michael Baker who had brave ambition and saw an opportunity because this was not the flu:
Central to New Zealand’s approach is a scientific fact that most Western leaders appear to have ignored, according to Michael Baker, a professor at the University of Otago’s Department of Public Health in Wellington who sits on the government’s COVID-19 Technical Advisory Group. That is that the virus usually has a mean incubation period of five to six days, twice as long as influenza, and could be as many as 14 days.
“That means that when someone gets sick, if you isolate them quickly and round up their contacts, you can quarantine those people and interrupt that chain of transmission,” Professor Baker said. “With influenza you can’t really do that because by the time you’ve found their contacts it’s too late, they’ve infected other people.”
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.
Both nations are now reporting just a handful of new infections each day, down from hundreds in March, and they are converging toward an extraordinary goal: completely eliminating the virus from their island nations.
This is my kind of man:
Dr. Michael Baker, a physician and professor at the University of Otago in Wellington, became a prominent voice outside the government pushing for elimination of the virus, not just its suppression.
He argued that New Zealand, an island nation with a limited number of cases, should think of the virus more like measles than influenza — something that should be made to disappear, with rare exceptions.
One man like this may have saved thousands of lives. In other nations a random pick of the loudest expert in the room may have produced an expert fan of the dreadful herd-immunity plans. Great leaders must take the blame for not picking the right expert, but some leaders got a head start.
Then what? Keep the borders, clean each state, open accordingly…
Read Crush the Curve, nothing has changed. We use hard borders to keep the virus out until there is a treatment or vaccine or the virus learns to act nicely. Given that billions of dollars and lives are on the line, with satellites and ships it can be done. Viruses can’t fly by themselves. People can still come to Australia and leave, but temporarily (for a few months or a couple of years) all flights inbound need a two week quarantine.Unless, of course, the other nation is Virus-Free too!
Australia is already talking to New Zealand about reconnecting flights at some point. Fantastic.
With hard state borders, Australia can open in sections. The NT (see below) is there already. Schools are opening. In the giant state of WA, there are smaller sub regions with hard borders. That means rural areas might not have to wait for the big cities to open up their local economy.
These virus-free “clean zones” will grow and the infected zones will shrink. And as I keep saying, we will beat this, every biotech lab in the world is looking and there are so many options and so much money to fuel research. We don’t have to have a vaccine — we can solve this with monoclonal antibodies, with CRISPR, RNAi, stem cells, anti-virals (and other anti-virals, and so many options — even maybe sheep drench).
State by State
NSW — The largest outbreak in Australia has shrunk almost as fast as the other states
A shrinking exponential curve can shrink exponentially fast. Even though NSW needs a different scale graph to all the other states, it is now also recording very low numbers. In the last five days, 6, 6, 5, 5, 7. Next week with more testing, that may change.
NSW, State Covid-19 cases, Australia, April 2020
Victoria — New cases in the last 5 days: 1, 7, 2, 1, 6.
VIC, State Covid-19 cases, Australia, April 2020
QLD – new cases in the last 5 days 0,6,0,2,2.
QLD, State Covid-19 cases, Australia, April 2020
WA: New daily cases 0,1,0,0,2
To know when the (hopefully) last cases will be identified, we have to look at individual case transmission. The last two new cases are so far listed as known local, and unknown. Hopefully they will find the outbreak. There have been four new “unknown” source cases in the last two weeks in WA, suggesting that there is some asymptomatic spread going on, and the state needs to do more testing.
This graph may not be as impressive as it looks.
WA, State Covid-19 cases, Australia, April 2020
SA, New daily cases 0, 2, 1, 0, 0.
The big question is how long with the stragglers straggle on for? Can we zap them before winter?
SA, State Covid-19 cases, Australia, April 2020
The ACT (Australian Capital Territory)
Things are looking good, but after 6 days straight with no cases there were 2 single cases in the last five days.
Borders between NSW and the ACT are still open.
ACT, State Covid-19 cases, Australia, April 2020
Tasmania has already had a cluster outbreak that was bigger than the first wave
And this was in a regional area with a lower population.
This is why it is not worth trying to live with this virus if extinguishing it a realistic option.
TAS, State Covid-19 cases, Australia, April 2020
Northern Territory — how long before we declare the NT to be free of coronavirus?
After two weeks with no new cases, and no known local community spread, the NT will surely be one of the first regions in the world to extinguish the virus. Given state borders are closed, it is only sensible to ease up on restrictions which has started to happen. NT children have already returned to school.
Is it possible there still may be some cases sneaking asymptomatically through the local population?
NT, State Covid-19 cases, Australia, April 2020
In Australia, the demographics show a younger spread
Death rates are lower — probably because covid-19 hasn’t romped through nursing homes and the 80+ generation. Instead, in Australia the infection spread through a young and middle aged group and not in the 80+ super high risk category. This may be due to infections coming from Chinese students, who mix with other students, and not their Grandparents. And that other infections came from people on long haul flights from the US, Europe and Iran. Even in the Cruise ship category, the average age of the Diamond Princess was 58, not 85.
Australian Testing per capita is as good as other leading nations
Given that the case load is so low, this means the number of positive results per test in Australia must be one of the lowest in the world.
Australia conducted 12,000 tests on the 22 April to find 20 cases announced on the 23rd. That’s just 0.16% positive.
National Testing for Covid-19 cases, Australia, April 2020
There must be lessons here
While NZ has done a tougher lockdown “Alert Level 4”, Australia’s was not as severe. Many workplaces stayed operating. The fast isolation successes are amplified by climate and geography. It may also be the large compliance rates, and not such a toxic politicization.
Good things include:
Warmer weather which degrades viruses faster indoors and out. (In Australia, parked cars get sterilized every day in February.)
UV radiation which destroys germs (and helps generate Vitamin D).
At the end of summer not as many people are vitamin D deficient. Their immune systems have a chance.
Big houses and a low population density means home lockdowns have more “social distance”.
Lots of cars, which means less public transport (greens are going to hate this virus).
Early action. New Zealand may have started earlier than most nations (every day matters). Perhaps Australia did. Both were too late to stop a trillion dollar loss. So no Gold Stars.
Hopefully our Northern friends can follow this (or parts thereof) as their summer comes (and hopefully we don’t fall off the cart).
It’s possible that nastier mutations arose in Italy and New York, in which case the back-patting may be more lucky than anything, but Australia did fly in virus samples to infect ourselves from Rome, Milan, Iran, London, Indonesia, Cuba and California. If there were nasty strains anywhere in the world, in early March, we did our best to get them.
Neither country used masks (correct me if I’m wrong New Zealanders). This was silly, as it would have sped things up. But we barely had enough for the Doctors. So the experts told everyone they didn’t work, and could they send their spares to St Vincents Hospital in Sydney.
The Australian-NZ solutions are not the answer for everywhere (especially in large cities in cold lands with high rise apartments) but they are a few more datapoints than we had two months ago. And there’s hope…
Dedicated to the ANZACS who paid the price so we can live free.
Commenters, please read carefully before asking the same old, same old. Let’s try to be constructive.
Coronavirus Background: ☀ The Demographics: the young are spared, but the severity increases with age, and slightly more for men than women. ☀ How Coronavirus kills: why the number of ICU units matters so much. ☀. ☀ ☀ Proof that viruses don’t have wings and we should have stopped all flights so much earlier. ☀ The story of how American Samoa avoided Flu Deaths with quarantine in 1918. ☀ The story of Vo, the Italian town that stopped the virus. ☀ Delay = Death, statistics show mortality rates rise tenfold if hospitals are overwhelmed. ☀
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:
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 investment.
As Scott Morrison looks ahead to rebuilding the Australian economy after the coronavirus crisis passes, the government is moving to clear its backlog of environmental decisions on dams, roads, public transport, mines and other key projects by June.
National Cabinet will be asked to fast-track a major 10-year review of Australia’s environmental regulations as a way to boost the nation’s economic revival and cut green tape post the COVID-19 pandemic.
Many projects, including in the WA resources sector, often get tied up in environmental assessments for long periods, acting as a wet blanket for investment.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said today reducing green tape would be key.
National Cabinet will meet tomorrow to consider the next steps forward for easing social distancing measures as Australia continues to keep a lid on new COVID-19 cases and keep the curve flattened.
“Ensuring that we’re moving quickly through approval processes and providing that certainty for business investment … will be … a key part of the economic recovery strategy,” Mr Morrison said.
A month ago Victoria suddenly allowed onshore gas exploration — a news item of a major backflip not-so-coincidentally released the same week as the coronavirus news eclipsed everything. But great news for Victorians who want cheaper gas that one day they might be able to provide more of their own. Though fracking was banned.
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.
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…
… wherever the virus came from, China’s response was inept, dishonest and utterly inconsiderate of the rest of the world. A competent, honest response would have placed the world on notice much earlier. A China that cared about the rest of the world would have halted flights abroad while this disease was spreading, instead of allowing its citizens to spread willy-nilly around the globe. (As Brian Kennedy writes: “China seems to have taken the position that if they were to suffer the coronavirus, so too was the United States and the rest of the world….
Among other things, the United States — and ideally the world community at large — need to sharply reduce economic relations with China. In particular, no one should be relying on them for medicines, medical equipment and other vital goods. (China’s state news service threatened to plunge America into a “mighty sea” of coronavirus by withholding critical medications.) Chinese scientists should no longer have easy access to Western laboratories or universities. Chinese political leaders should no longer find it easy to travel the world.
Congress should pass legislation stripping the Chinese government of sovereign immunity to lawsuits for COVID-19 damage in the United States. China should be stripped of its leadership roles in international organizations. And finally, Taiwan — a nation that has handled the outbreak better than almost any other nation, but has been excluded from the World Health Organization because its membership would offend the Chinese government — deserves membership in WHO, and full diplomatic recognition from the United States, and the rest of the world.
The stinging criticism from Prof John Mackenzie, a member of the World Health Organization’s emergency committee, … labelled China’s response “reprehensible” and said it defied logic that there was no increase in new cases at the same time that Chinese officials were holding local political meetings in January.
“There must have been more cases happening that we weren’t being told about. I think they tried to keep the figures quiet for a while because of some major meeting they had in Wuhan but I think there was a period of very poor reporting, or very poor communication,” he said.
As it happens, I was lucky enough to learn virology from the same John Mackenzie, one of my all-time favourite lecturers, long ago at UWA. He was sharp as, and a font of hilarious and captivating tales of viral trickery, havoc and mayhem. I’m delighted to see him in the fray showing that though the UN is an unsalvagable, troughing, corrupt organisation, there are still a few good people in there among the political climbers.
Tedros was forced to reply to this accusation and pretty much said no one should pick on him til after there was a long deferred review, and he’d retired or something. And could he have another half a billion dollars. And besides John Mackenzie wasn’t a WHO staffer. (He’s just a member of the Emergency Committee on Coronavirus.) As if that mattered. It was that pathetic.
What follows is one long weaseling excuse, but where were the Western Media?
Speaking at a press conference in Geneva, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said China should only be criticised for its response to the crisis if an “after action review” justifies doing so. Tedros was responding to media comments by John Mackenzie, an epidemiologist who is part of the world body’s emergency committee, that Beijing’s early response to the outbreak had been “reprehensible”.
Tedros, who has been criticised for repeatedly praising China, tried to steer the topic away from Beijing’s actions when asked about Mackenzie’s comments. “Again, I say let’s check,” the director general said. “Maybe we will have the after-action review to see if there was something hidden or not … we will have scientists who will understand, investigate and tell us the truth. “Now as a global community, please let’s focus on the actions we can take today.”
He added that if China had actually been hiding case reports, the number of infections now would be higher than it is.
Moreover, he said, McKenzie, an emeritus professor at Australia’s Curtin University, was not a WHO staff member.
Below, Sunni Bakchat compiled some of the relevant clauses from the WHO Pandemic Guidelines that China was supposed to meet for those of you with legal minds and an eye for detail.
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