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…
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 farms are less polluting than fossil fuels.
But a new documentary, “Planet of the Humans,” being released free to the public on YouTube today, the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day, reveals that industrial wind farms, solar farms, biomass, and biofuels are wrecking natural environments.
“Planet of the Humans” was produced by Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore. “I assumed solar panels would last forever,” Moore told Reuters. “I didn’t know what went into the making of them.”
What next?
If the uber Greens now admit that wind, solar and biomass are destructive, and it becomes unfashionable to be seen supporting them (or Gore), what will they replace that with next?
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.
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 significant increase in the number of patients with large strokes,” Dr. Johanna Fifi, associate director of the cerebrovascular center at the Mount Sinai Health System in New York City, said.
Many are patients in their 30s and 40s. Over a recent two-week period, Fifi told NBC News she had five COVID-19 patients under age 49, all with strokes resulting from a blockage in one of the major blood vessels leading to the brain.
Not surprisingly the worst neurological complications are probably in ARDS severe cases:
We report the neurologic features in an observational series of 58 of 64 consecutive patients admitted to the hospital because of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) due to Covid-19.
In this consecutive series of patients, ARDS due to SARS-CoV-2 infection was associated with encephalopathy, prominent agitation and confusion, and corticospinal tract signs. Two of 13 patients who underwent brain MRI had single acute ischemic strokes. Data are lacking to determine which of these features were due to critical illness–related encephalopathy, cytokines, or the effect or withdrawal of medication, and which features were specific to SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Patients are not getting all their executive functioning back necessarily as they depart hospital either. ARDS patients go through a lot — being put into induced comas, paralyzed, and having just enough oxygen pumped in to keep them alive — so it’s no wonder a third of them are not operating at full speed on departure.
“Of the patients who had been discharged at the time of this writing, 15 of 45 (33%) had had a dysexecutive syndrome consisting of inattention, disorientation, or poorly organized movements in response to command.”
After brain damage, cognitive skills can keep improving for up to a year or two as inflammation subsides and the brain adapts. We hope this happens after Coronavirus ARDS events. But this is another one of the unknowns about a new virus. What damage is permanent?
Some neurological effects were found in the first round of SARS, even in young healthy people
About 5% of SARS patients back in 2004 experienced central nervous system symptoms. In one case a 39 year old doctor developed all the usual symptoms, was hospitalized, then developed vision problems and “progressively worse central nervous system symptoms, like restlessness and delirium. A computed tomography scan indicated brain damage. He died about a month after being hospitalized, and his brain tissue was examined and found to contain the SARS coronavirus.”
Most people get their sense of smell back, but some are still waiting:
As CNNreports, some coronavirus victims have been waiting for their sense of smell to return for weeks, and fears of permanent loss of smell are spreading.
Those fears may seem extreme, but they’re not unwarranted. As Professor Steven Munger of the University of Florida’s Center for Smell and Taste told CNN, sensory changes caused by an illness can hang around for a long time.
“What we’ve known for a long time is one of the major causes of smell loss are upper respiratory tract infections due to viruses — a common cold, influenza — a subset of people lose their sense of smell, most of them temporarily, but a small subset lose that smell permanently,” Munger explains.
Tough job for the coroner
Right now, in both New York and the UK, the all-cause mortality rates are higher than we’d expect due to Coronavirus. It could be that people who are getting heart attacks and strokes for other reasons are afraid to go to hospital out of fear of catching Coronavirus. But it also may be that Coronavirus could be causing strokes or heart failure itself. And unpacking how much is one or the other will often be impossible. If someone has a preexisting stroke risk and coronavirus pushes them over the edge, how much do we blame Coronavirus? It would take an indepth autopsy, and even then it may be impossible to tell.
Years from now someone will trace mortality rates through this and look for a long tail (or a reduction) in deaths following the pandemic in heart attacks and strokes. Only then might we get an idea of how many years of life were stolen by this virus.
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.
“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, instead of inventing on its own,” Reichelt wrote. “The reason China does not innovate and invent is that you don’t let the young people in your country think freely. China’s greatest export hit (that nobody wanted to have, but which has nevertheless gone around the world) is coronavirus.”
See ZeroHedge, which got banned from Twitter on this topic months ago (but was largely right and far ahead of the mainstream media).
If the Bat-soup from Wuhan turns out to be a Bat-Virus-Gift from Wuhan Labs, the international rock-tossing will be a magnitude more savage.
“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 is a defining characteristic of infection and fatality rates, but then they estimated fatality rates anyway.
Effectively, the study found only 1.5% of a group who probably thought they had had Coronavirus had actually had it. With post code adjustments, the rate was lifted to between 2.5% – 4.2%.
Commenters under the preprint are unimpressed. Quite a few estimate that it is not possible to be sure there were any true positive results given the false positive rates. Though one defended the published confidence interval estimates by pointing out that people complaining about false positives had forgot to account for the false negatives. We know how good a study is when they need the false negatives to counteract the false positives so they know they got more than zero.
First, he picked the county that had the earliest cases in California and had the outbreak the first, ensuring that the population would be undertested. This means that it’s likely that every other county in California has fewer unregistered infections than Santa Clara.
Second, study participants were people who responded to a facebook ad. This is a self-selected sample, and this property completely kills the usefulness of the study all by itself. This is a beginner’s error! People who think they had Covid-19 and didn’t get tested or know someone who did are much more likely to respond to such an ad than people who did not….
Third, age is the one most common predictor of mortality. He did not weigh the results by age, and old people are underrepresented in the study. Anything he says about mortality is completely useless if we don’t know how prevalent the infection was in the older population. (In Germany, cases show that the prevalence among tested older people was low initially and took a few weeks to rise.)
Fourth, instead he weighs prevalence by zip code–why? This exacerbates statistical variations, since there were only 50 positive results, and Santa Clara has ~60 zip codes. If you have a positive result fall on a populous zip code by chance where only a few participants participated, then the numbers are skewed up. They must have seen this happen because their estimated prevalence is almost twice as high as the raw prevalence.
Fifth, the specificity of the test is “99.5% (95 CI 98.3-99.9%)”. This means that theoretically, if the specificity was 98.5%, all of the 50 positive results could be false positives, and nobody in the sample would have had any Covid-19. This means the result is not statistically significant even if the sample had been well chosen (which it wasn’t). (It’s not even significant at the 90% level.)
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.
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, then made Italy pay to get their own donations back:
After COVID-19 made its way to Italy, decimating the country’s significant elderly population, China told the world it would donate Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) to help Italy stop its spread. Reports later indicated that China had actually sold, not donated, the PPE to Italy. A senior Trump administration official tells The Spectator that it is much worse than that: China forced Italy to buy back the PPE supply that it gave to China during the initial coronavirus outbreak.
But there is a flip-side– when China said ” it’s curable and preventable”, the follow-up question the media are not asking our politicians yet is: And you believed China? Because if the Foreign Ministry and Health Departments had been doing the same research I was (like, watching the Twitter feed out of China) it would have been obvious China was not acting like it was preventable and curable. We don’t weld people in apartments when they get pneumonia.
At least a part of the rush to demand answers from China is because most of the leaders in the free world failed to protect their citizens, and The Scapegoat is now in sight.
Make that Scapegoats:
China needs a review, but the WHO are not the ones to do it. At least Western Governments are now aware of how compromised the WHO is:
When pressed, Ms Payne said she does not believe the World Health Organisation should be involved, given their proximity to the crisis up until this point.
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?)
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 countries experienced seemingly identical coronavirus infection patterns, with the number of infected peaking in the sixth week and rapidly subsiding by the eighth week.
It’s no accident the virus peaks after six weeks of rapid exponential growth. That’s about as long as any free democracy can stand it. After three weeks the bodies are piling up, the doctors are pleading for help, and it’s all on facebook and the nightly news. After four weeks most nations are doing some kind of isolation, and 12 days later, after the incubation period, it starts to shift the results. So by six weeks the isolation starts to take effect. All Prof Yitzhak Ben Israel had to do was google and he would have found that 12 days after lockdowns start, Coronavirus slows. We see it in Japan, Italy, Norway, Spain, Germany and Australia. Everywhere.
The countries he glanced at were the U.S., U.K., Sweden, Italy, Israel, Switzerland, France, Germany, and Spain. He seems to think they are independent variables, but the internet and 24 hour news means all these nations are watching each other. All the politicians were hoping to avoid closing down. All moved a bit too late. All ramped up action in response to the curve. The citizens are watching too, and even if they are not ordered to isolate, often they’re doing it anyway, reducing the curve, if not flattening it.
In Sweden, the government forced parents to send children to schools, and asked everyone to be careful. But its numbers now are worse than its Scandinavian neighbours which did a faster-harder version. Norway announced mass lockdowns on March 15 and headlines read: “Norway takes most far-reaching measures ever experienced in peacetime over coronavirus”. New cases in Norway peaked on March 27, exactly 12 days later, and they’ve been falling ever since.’ Meanwhile in Sweden, new daily cases are still not from the peak, there’s no nice bell curve, no magical 6 – 8 week peak and fall. Quite a lot stayed at home anyhow, so the numbers rose in a middling way, and the peak is later.
“Lockdowns” mean many different things. He seems to think they are a “binary” Hard:soft thing. It is a PhD project to estimate the exact level of lockdown in each country, and on top of that he’d need to compensate for population density, average daily temperature, humidity levels, demographics, transmission sources, viral strains, Vitamin D levels and co-morbidity risks. He’d need to estimate compliance too. Then, after that, and after the country had actually beaten the disease he might be able to unpack which kinds of lockdown were cost effective, and the answer won’t be the same for every country.
Ben-Israel told the Jewish Journal: “This is how it is all over the world. Both in countries where they have taken closure steps, like Italy, and in countries that have not had closures, like Taiwan or Singapore. In such countries, there is an increase until the fourth to sixth week, and immediately thereafter, moderation until during the eighth week, it disappears.”
Singapore is not following the plan: Week 11 and rising fast
Singapore’s first case was Jan 23rd, and it launched into action with obsessive mass tracking and great success. But they’ve lost the plot in the last few weeks as they let students return from overseas and brought in foreign cheap labor. The foreigners who live in packed dormitories make up 90% of new cases. In a predictable response to the doubling of numbers, Singapore has tightened entry rules, mandated masks, spent lots of money and imposed a partial lockdown. Spot the pattern, it’s not the magic number of the week, it’s the exponential shock, and the predictable reaction to change human behaviour.
Singapore: 11 weeks since the first case and no peak in sight.
It’s fair to ask how hard a quarantine needs to be to be effective, but to conclude that viruses fade out on a “fixed” schedule for no good reason is an all new discovery in microbiology. Call it Viral Numerology.
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 outbreak cannot be published on self-media or social media, nor disclosed to any media (including state media) or collaborative organization s (including any technical services companies).” 30 minute mark.
— Email from The Director General of the Wuhan Institute, Jan 2nd, 2020
So the Wuhan lab was ordered to destroy all their synthetic Coronaviruses on Jan 1st. Which is a strange thing to do if a similar, but different virus was evolving in the Fish Market around the corner. But it’s the obvious thing to do if a careless lab member made a mistake and leaked it from the lab. Especially if those viruses had distinctive HIV sequences embedded in them. Which the man who discovered HIV says they do.
Dr Luc Montagnier the man who discovered the HIV virus back in 1983 disagrees and is saying that the virus was man made.
According to Professor Luc Montagnier, winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2008 for “discovering” HIV as the cause of the AIDS epidemic together with Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, the SARS-CoV-2 is a virus that was manipulated and accidentally released from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, in the last quarter of 2019.
“With my colleague, bio-mathematician Jean-Claude Perez, we carefully analyzed the description of the genome of this RNA virus,” explains Luc Montagnier, interviewed by Dr Jean-François Lemoine for the daily podcast at Pourquoi Docteur, adding that others have already explored this avenue: Indian researchers have already tried to publish the results of the analyses that showed that this coronavirus genome contained sequences of another virus, … the HIV virus (AIDS virus), but they were forced to withdraw their findings as the pressure from the mainstream was too great. — The podcast is in French
Worth watching: The Epoch Times Documentary on the Origin of CCP Virus (Coronavirus).
The Epoch Times are an organization of dissident reporters, staunchly anti-communist. They interview medical and political experts and we also find out the Chinese lab was set up with some US funds and with a lot of French support. Obama cut off funds in 2014. But the West has made it as easy as possible, offering help, expertise, and training.
…
Patient zero may have been a scientist at the P4 virus lab in Wuhan called Huang Yanling who unfortunately died. The Director of the Lab, Dr Shi Zengli — was the person who isolated a virus from bats that has the key S Protein spike that enables a bat virus to get inside human ACE2 cells. In February, after her institute had “nothing to do with the outbreak” she was sacked, presumably because she did such a good job. Her replacement was Major General Chen Wei. It’s interesting to know when the military are doing the microbiology? (h/t JanEarth)
Some Chinese researchers are in the habit of selling their laboratory animals to street vendors after they have finished experimenting on them. You heard me right.
Instead of properly disposing of infected animals by cremation, as the law requires, they sell them on the side to make a little extra cash. Or, in some cases, a lot of extra cash. One Beijing researcher, now in jail, made a million dollars selling his monkeys and rats on the live animal market, where they eventually wound up in someone’s stomach.
According to Mosher, in mid February President Xi decided China needed “A national system to control biosecurity risks” … “to protect the people’s health,” Xi said, because lab safety is a “national security” issue.
Professor Richard Ebright of Rutgers University’s Waksman Institute of Microbiology, a biosecurity expert — thinks it was an accidental leak too. He says the Nature paper claiming SARS Cov-2 is natural has to rely on a bunch of assumptions:
… points out that scientists in Wuhan have collected and publicized a bat coronavirus called RaTG13, one that is 96 percent genetically similar to SARS-CoV-2. The Nature Medicine authors are arguing “against the hypothesis that the published, lab-collected, lab-stored bat coronavirus RaTG13 could be a proximal progenitor of the outbreak virus.” But, Ebright says, the authors relied on assumptions about when the viral ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 jumped to humans; how fast it evolved before that; how fast it evolved as it adapted to humans; and the possibility that that the virus may have mutated in cell cultures or experimental animals inside a lab.
Obviously there will be a lot more to say about this. Especially because Donald Trump says he will look very closely at whether Coronavirus came from the Wuhan lab.
It’s officially denied:
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said on Thursday: “I want to remind you that the head of the World Health Organisation has stated many times that there is no evidence that the new coronavirus was produced in the laboratory. Many well-known experts in the world also believe that there is no scientific basis for such claims as laboratory leaks.”
“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin,” a team of 27 scientists from outside China said in a statement in the Lancet medical journal in February.
“Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus,” they said, adding that scientists from around the world overwhelmingly conclude that the coronavirus originated in wildlife.
Looks like a “Consensus” then, and Scientists-Against-Trump have spoken. It would be better if they could have debated it out so we could hear both sides. There are quite a few papers that at a glance make a solid case for the natural evolution of the virus. Eg Zhou et al 2020, and Prof Lu et al. But instead the scientists have flipped straight into lectures about how only bad prejudiced people would ask these questions.
People inside China and out of it are going to get very angry if they don’t get some good answers.
h/t Lance, WXcycles, JanEarth OriginalSteve, many others.
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?
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 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 who are not respecting social distancing with 60 percent believing “the terms or rules of the current lockdown are about right”.
Only 6 percent say they are “excessive” while 31 percent say they are “not enough” and should go further than the current lockdown.
Actually working from home might be better than working at work:
…in a suggestion that lockdown measures have changed how people want to live their lives in the long term 53 percent of those who are now being forced to work from home would like to work from home more after the crisis ends and 31 percent of those unable to work from home say they are now “more likely” to seek a job that could allow them to work from home.
New polling also suggests that Trump’s desire to end this period of quarantines and sheltering in place is out of step with the public’s wishes. In a poll by Morning Consult taken March 20 to 22, a plurality of Americans said they strongly support a “national quarantine,” and nearly three-quarters of Americans express at least some support for the idea.
Coronavirus crisis: Exclusive poll reveals West Australians want nation placed in ‘full lockdown’ to slow spread of COVID-19
The West Australian (paywalled).
West Australians want the nation placed into “full lockdown” to slow the coronavirus spread, despite two-thirds being worried about losing their jobs in the next six months.
The latest People’s Voice Poll from Painted Dog Research found 71 per cent of the more than 500 West Australians surveyed believed the Morrison Government should enforce a lockdown.
Unexpectedly, it was younger West Australians aged between 18 and 39 who were the most supportive of a lockdown (80 per cent), compared with 68 per cent aged 40-59 years.
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.
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 the ABC?
President Xi’s personal guidance and deployment show his great leadership capability, Tedros said.
He said that China has released information in an open and transparent manner, identified the pathogen in a record-short time and shared the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus in a timely manner with the WHO and other countries.
China’s measures are not only protecting its people, but also protecting the people in the whole world, he said. — FMPRC
The answer is because the mainstream media act as if the WHO are Gods, and never ask them a hard question.
UPDATE: When the media do, they might want to ask about this WHO tweet on January 14th. The first cases of the SARS-Cov-2 Virus were circulating in November in Wuhan.
Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China,” the organization had said.- FoxNews” h/t to Leo Morgan #21 below.
The Guardian is still apologizing for the WHO – claiming lamely that it said the right things, but doesn’t have any power. They quoted Tedros on March 11 warning of ““alarming levels of inaction” from many countries. “. But by then the virus was everywhere, tens of thousands were infected and coronavirus was practically slapping world leaders in the face.
If the WHO was controlled by Donald Trump, the socialist mainstream media would be all over its failures. But because the UN is a mini World Government, effectively The Vatican of left wing loving writers, it gets a free pass.
Enough is Enough. Here’s that petition again, just in case you haven’t already signed it, but we need to send letters to the media, and to our ministers to find out why we send money to a group that is worse than useless.
Not only do we not need Tedros Adhanom, we don’t need the WHO, The UN, or The ABC and BBC either. None of them were serving Australians, Brits, or Americans, or even Ethiopians. How many will now succumb to Coronavirus that might have been saved?
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.
Five different reasons the results may be spurious
The test may have detected antibodies to the harmless common cold form of coronavirus instead of the deadly SARS-Cov-2 type. Cross reactivity of antibodies can be ruled out through a time consuming test that seemingly was not done.
The town infections were started in a cluster by one superspreader at a large carnival. Does that mean the virus spread first through a younger cohort? That would explain both the rapid spread and low fatality rate.
The data is preliminary and apparently not published in full. No one can analyze it properly. E.g. What were the ages of the people that tested positive?
It’s not a random test. The researchers selected households, not individuals. People in a household are much more likely to infect each other, and households with children will also be likely to have asymptomatic cases. Family groups may have been overrepresented compared to singles or older couples.
Even if the antibodies are to Covid-19, that doesn’t mean a person is immune to covid-19, just that they had it.
Other estimates of asymptomatic infections suggest the unknown asymptomatic infections are not 15 times larger, but only 2 or 3 times bigger than known infections of Covid-19. An Austrian team found that only 0.33% of the population was infected about a week after the peak, and estimated just 1% of Austrians were infected. Iceland showed a similar number — around 0.3 -0.8% were infected and that was only twice the number of known infections. These latter tests are RNA tests, which can only find an active infection, not people who have been cleared of the virus. Antibody tests will be more useful (hopefully) but they are barely there, and some are unreliable.
…It is probably even methodologically incorrect. Above all, it is unclear whether the antibody test used can show what it is said to have shown, namely immunity to the new virus. The Braunschweig infection epidemiologist Gérard Krause from the Helmholtz Institute for Infection Research had already told the Süddeutsche Zeitung a few days ago that there are currently no widely available tests that could reliably demonstrate immunity to Sars-CoV-2.
On Thursday after the press conference, the virologist Drosten also referred to the problem that some of the tests already available detect antibodies against completely harmless colds, which are also corona viruses. “We are now just a month after the end of the cold season,” said Drosten. According to the Helmholtz Institute, a third of the colds are caused by these four known, harmless corona viruses. After a positive antibody test, only time-consuming neutralization tests have so far shown that the person in question actually went through an infection with the new pandemic pathogen. At the PK in Gangelt, however, there was no question of such neutralization tests.
For example, Streeck’s team selected households for the tests and tested all people in these households. This is legitimate so far – however: “You should not take all the results from these households and convert them into percent, but at most one person per household,” explained epidemiologist Krause on Thursday. The reason: within the household the risk of infection is many times higher than in the general population, a complete count of all family members therefore results in an excessive percentage for immunity, which cannot be transferred to the general public. But that’s exactly what was done in Streeck’s study
Dr Simon Clarke, Associate Professor in Cellular Microbiology, University of Reading
“The finding that 14% of the population of Gangelt in Germany have antibodies to the virus causing COVID19 is interesting, but does not in any way prove that 14% of the population are immune, as these reports suggest. While it’s undeniably a good sign, merely having some antibodies does not necessarily prove immunity, as is often casually asserted. We don’t know what the correlates of protection, the measurable signs that someone has immunity to a disease, are for this virus and neither do we know how long any immunity would last.”
Prof David Heymann, Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology
“It is important to understand the sensitivity and specificity of the serological test used in the German studies to be sure the test is not picking up antibody to other corona viruses (4 different common cold causing coronaviruses have been isolated in humans during the past years and 3 more serious ones (SARSCoV1 and 2, and MERSCoV).
Perhaps readers who understand German can help me find the data? The original link to the report has been taken down.
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 peak week, but just a point on a rapidly rising exponential curve.
For those who wonder if this is just a case of poor data or misdiagnosis, no, something unusually bad is really going on. This is not just the normal flu “mislabelled”.
These numbers contradict the notion that many people who are dying from the new virus would have died shortly anyway. And they suggest that the current coronavirus death figures understate the real toll of the virus…
…
The increase in all-cause mortality could be due to people being unable or afraid to access normal medical care.
But even if the current count is perfect, roughly 9,780 people have died of all causes over the past month in New York City, about 5,000 more than is typical.
The numbers for the last two weeks of the period are even more stark: nearly 7,000 dead, more than three times as many deaths as would normally be expected this time of year.
But the deaths over the last month dwarf what would be expected from seasonal variations, and look more like a mass casualty event. The city’s medical examiner’s office is holding bodies in refrigerated trailers outside of hospitals. City emergency medical technicians are declaring deaths in homes and on the streets instead of bringing people to hospitals.
Though the New York Times authors do not suggest it, given that coronavirus patients suffer from both an increase in blood pressure and in blood clotting, it is possible that a mild coronavirus case may increase risk factors for heart attacks and strokes too.
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.
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 it, and tested negative).
The Austrian chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, who saw initial findings a few days ago, said on Monday that the rate of infection was around 1%. This disproved the idea of herd immunity, which requires widespread infection, as a viable policy option, he said.
Austria has sampled 1,554 people with help from a polling company from April 1 – 6. The nose and throat swabs they used will have found active infections, not past ones. But the peak of infections was March 26, so this will still have included some, perhaps many, of those people who were infected the week before. It depends on how long people shed virus for, and like everything with this virus, that’s not simple. Some people shed for a long time even weeks, but others don’t.
Ten times worse than the flu
Austria has officially recorded 6,941 cases in total of which 337 have died. So the mortality rate for diagnosed cases is 5% and likely to rise due to the lag of one to two weeks (and even longer) before deaths occur. So the mortality rate of all infections (including asymptomatic) is more like 1.2%, making this at least ten times deadlier than the flu. (It may be worse if Austria was able to protect the 80+ and other vulnerable groups).
We can see that testing around 1 – 6th April should give a realistic estimate of the scale of infections. Nose and throat swabs are probably a PCR test looking for two RNA segments unique to the virus. PCR means Polymerase Chain Reaction, where small amounts of DNA or RNA get amplified up so they can be tested.
Austria was among the early movers in Europe to try to contain the outbreak, clamping down on public life and enforcing social distancing when cases were still in the hundreds and few had died. The country will start to relax some of the measures next week, when small shops and hardware and gardening stores can reopen, but it will keep schools and other stores closed until May.
The only way to figure out the true rate of asymptomatic infections is with an antibody test (also known as a serum test), but that’s not possible yet, though many labs are reportedly close. These tests require a blood sample, but will hopefully show how many people were exposed to the virus, at least for a few months after the infection.
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, are the most likely to die. In another mystery, some autopsies show heart damage and inflammation occurred, yet there was no virus present in the heart tissue. It also explains why people with heart disease and high blood pressure could be the most at risk group.
There are two different lung conditions in Covid patients; one is not ARDS
The news from ICU specialists is that Coronavirus patients are presenting with two very different lung conditions. The most common one is the L type (unknown til now) and these people still have an elastic working lung, but they are desperately in need of oxygen. The second type is the H type, which L types may degenerate to, which is worse, a heavy lung, filled with fluid, and is the ARDS-type crisis.
This virus appears to trigger a normal healthy vascular reflex in a diabolical way
In a normal infection if the small parts of the lung called the alveoli are filling up with fluid or pus, the blood circulation around it will squeeze or vasoconstrict. This forces the blood to flow to the other parts of the lung instead, where there isn’t so much damage, and blood can still pick up oxygen. That’s a good way for our vascular system to compensate and route blood around the damaged part of the lung.
The coronavirus is causing something similar to high altitude sickness
This reflexive vasoconstriction gets us into trouble at high altitudes where oxygen levels are low. Because the levels are ubiquitously low throughout the lung, the whole blood supply throughout the lung tries to constrict at once, which is a major problem. The back pressure in the pulmonary artery builds up right back to the heart. The pressure becomes so high it causes fluid to leak, and the thinnest, most delicate membranes are in the lungs. If these collapse, the fluid suddenly fills some alveoli and it’s a crisis. This condition is known as high altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE). In mountain climbers, it’s treatable, we just get the oxygen up (or the person down to where the oxygen is). That isn’t enough with Covid patients.
Something like this HAPE high altitude event seems to be occurring in Coronavirus patients due to the virus. Covid-19 binds to an enzyme involved in controlling the vasoconstriction. It targets and sticks to the ACE2 enzyme, stopping it working. Normally ACE1 raises angiotensin II and ACE2 lowers it. Angiotensin II raises blood pressure (ACE Inhibitors, the very common drugs against hypertension, act against ACE1 to lower blood pressure). So if the virus multiplies to the point it takes out all the ACE2, then there is nothing stopping Angiotensin from creating a vasoconstriction crisis (or a type of cytokine storm).
As the blood pressure builds it will force the fluids into the alveoli, flooding the lungs, dropping the oxygen levels in a vicious cycle. The high pressure may also increase blood clotting which could block flow, clogging up the blood vessels further. But the clotting problem may be due to antibodies against the virus. At this point, the patient (I gather) probably does need a ventilator but the odds are awful and it’s remarkable that doctors can keep many people alive with this kind of damage rapidly spreading through the lungs and back to the heart.
Assuming this pans out, it will make treatment so much better and also help us figure out who is at risk of ending up in ICU. Is it genetic changes to the ACE2 enzyme which allow the virus to bind better? Is it people who produce more ACE2 (or less)? It opens lots of questions about ACE inhibitor drugs.
ABBREVIATIONS
HPV: Hypoxic Pulmonary Vasoconstriction
HAPE: High Altitude Pulmonary Edema
Type L patients: They have good lung elasticity – i.e. A low ventilation to perfusion ratio. Most patients start this way but some in ICU may progress to Type H where fluid may fill the lungs and make them heavy.
REFERENCES and RESOURCES
Free Online Event Dr. Seheult is speaking at on Sunday, April 12: https://awr.org/health
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?
Australia remains the star Lucky Country compared to overseas. Infections are low, deaths are even lower. It’s all so much better than the desperate situation in Europe and the US. These are enviable, fantastically small numbers. Politicians are afraid to say so, lest the population relax, and party too much this Easter and the “unknowns” increase. (Which might well happen).
At the moment, the trend that matters most is the daily new cases of unknown transmission and it is trending down. There is community spread, but social isolation is shrinking it. This is what “Crushing the Curve” looks like. Right now there are still asymptomatic spreaders out there, but they are infecting less than one other person each (Ro < 1), so the infection is on its way to extinguishing itself — assuming we keep up the distancing.
But these great figures are not a reason to let up on social isolation, they’re a reason to go harder. We want to achieve the Golden Holy Grail — no new infections, and business as usual with no lockdowns, no curfews and a zone of freedom.
Australia is the Lucky Country, and doing the right thing
Why is the situation so good here:
A giant nuclear ball cleans streets every day with infra red heat and UV sterilization.
Indoor room temperature means viral survival time is lower, and thus less easily spread.
The population is at its healthiest — close to annual peak levels of Vitamin D levels.
Deaths are lower because long distance travellers (the greatest source of infections) are a younger cohort — mainly 20 – 60 years old. Also possibly because there is less Vit D deficiency (see point 3). Though this will change with local spread and winter is coming.
Thank the sun: the north end of Australia is only 12 degrees from the equator, and the top of Tasmania is as far from the equator as is Rome (41°). So nearly the whole nation is effectively situated between Rome and the equator — with most of the big cities getting the same kind of sunlight as Athens to Jerusalem do. Compared to the US — Tasmania stretches north of Salt Lake City or New York, but Darwin is “down” in Nicaragua. Most Australians in four of the five big capitals get about the same intensity sunlight as Los Angeles and Atlanta.
After the Hammer strikes a winning blow, we can start the Dance
The states with no sign of community transmission will soon be able to start a staged return to normal business, as long as they are testing widely, and as long as they strictly guard all borders and enforce two week lockdowns. Within weeks they could open up cafes and restaurants, gyms and sporting facilities. Wearing masks would be good insurance. Schools could open after that as long as the tests continue and no community spread is seen. Finally, large events would be the delayed — they may need to wait until the chance of cases coming across borders is very low. That may be months. Obviously international travel will be the last thing to return to normal. But as each state clears hurdles and becomes a clean zone, interstate travel with only those states can resume.
At all times though, we remain only one runaway infection from the start of a new exponential curve.
The whole nation is getting it under control:
Covid19data has the graphs. But not for Queensland. There doesn’t seem to be published data.
This is just what I was hoping for. But we must aim for extinction of this dangerous rogue code.
In NSW notice the decline in community spread (orange segments, below).
This is excellent news. NSW needs to work on shrinking the spread from known cases, but the current measures appear to be slowing the spread from healthy carriers. The light blue transmission segments below show “Known Local transmission” — meaning probably from people just before or after they got symptoms and got tested. We need to get better at testing and isolating these cases faster. Symptomatic people likely shed more virus than asymptomatic people do.
NSW Australian, Covid Cases, April 10, 2020.
The ACT
It would make sense to close the ACT from NSW (or probably to close the rest of NSW off from Sydney, depending on regional test results). If people in the ACT understood this, they would be lobbying to do that so they could restart things sooner.
No untraceable cases at all. Remarkable.
ACT Australian, Covid Cases, graph, April 10, 2020.
In Victoria
Hopefully the latest blip in local transmission (light blue) can be crushed asap. But there are good signs that untraceable community spread is shrinking in Victoria (orange).
Victoria, Australia, Covid Cases, April 10, 2020.
Western Australia
In WA there is not as much detail. There are a few new cases of unknown transmission still ticking over (2 new “not traced yet” cases last night to add to this graph). The state has only just started testing anyone with fever, and has the second highest rate of positive tests in the nation (see below) suggesting that it needs to do more testing. No champagne yet. There are now 506 known cases — with 11 new ones overnight, nine of which were from cruise ships.
Because WA has regional quarantines, sections of the state could be reopened sooner. The price is roadblocks but the payoff is freedom within the region. The health minister said “he didn’t think it was going to be possible to eradicate the disease. “What we want to do is control it”. It’s not clear why he thinks we can’t exterminate this.
Western Australian, Covid Cases, April 10, 2020.
South Australia
In SA there appear to be 4 – 7 cases “under investigation” — which must be “unknown”. It would be good to get more specific reporting. But only three new cases in the entire state have been found in the last two days. That’s got to be good.
South Australia also appears to be doing enough testing.
South Australian, Covid Cases, April 10, 2020.
Tasmania
Tasmania is hard to analyze. It isn’t doing enough testing. There is still a recent rise in known cases and four days ago, a spate of ten or so unknown cases.
Australian, Covid Cases, graph, April 10, 2020.
The Northern Territory
No one can complain about this! The NT looks great and (see below) appears to be doing enough testing too. It’s been saved by lower incomes — not so many people could afford to fly to Aspen or London in the last two months.
Australian, Covid Cases, graph, April 10, 2020.
Testing – WA Tasmania and Victoria all need to do more
Compared to that, Australia is only returning 2% positive in the worst case.
Tests per capita for covid-19 cases
WA and Tasmania are not doing enough testing and showing a higher positive rate per test.
NSW shows a high rate but is testing more people per capita. The most reliable results are from South Australia.
The rate of positive testing for covid-19 cases
Deaths are lower because Australians with coronavirus are younger
Demographics show that Australians who have been infected are predominantly in the 20 – 70 age group. As local transmission takes over from those who caught it on arduous long distance flights — we will see death rates increase due to the spread among the 70 – 100 age cohort.
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