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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 errorDoctors 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 dataEssentially 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. Here’s one: Two California doctors go viral with dubious COVID test conclusionsBy Calmatters, Mercury News 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 fluThere’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. Keep reading → Wow. If this is confirmed, Coronavirus is almost a disease of Vitamin D deficiency Missing out on the Sunshine Vitamin? Hot off the press: A new Indonesian study of 780 people with Coronavirus found that people with a Vitamin D deficiency were much more likely to die. We discussed Vitamin D at length a few weeks ago, so we already knew Vitamin D is associated with a lower rate of respiratory illness, but the results here are quite remarkable. Of those who died most (85%) had a co-morbidity, the real surprise is that even more than that, 96% had low Vitamin D levels. Of those who survived, most people had normal Vitamin D levels. Only 7% of survivors had low or deficient Vitamin D. That is quite a split. Vitamin D deficiency was very common among these Indonensian patients. Half of those measured did not have enough Vitamin D in their blood. Of those that did, 96% survived, and only 4% “expired”. Vitamin D looks like a good protector. After controlling for known risk like being old, or male or having high blood pressure, a Vitamin D level described as deficient (less than 20ng/ml) was associated with a 10 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. ABSTRACTThis 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:
REFERENCERaharusun, 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. May 1st, 2020 | Tags: Coronavirus, Vitamin D, Vitamins | Category: Global Warming |  Print This Post | | Mortality rates show that this is a medical situation we have not seen since WWIIAll 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. Global coronavirus death toll could be 60% higher than reportedMortality statistics show 122,000 deaths in excess of normal levels across 14 countries analysed by the FT Posted free to read at the Financial Times, and see also John-Burn Murdoch on Twitter. @jburn-murdoch. 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.  Deaths are far higher than the normal yearly peaks in midwinter. See the full set of graphs here. 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. John Burn-Murdoch, Valentina Romei and Chris Giles in London 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 oneWe 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:
April 30th, 2020 | Tags: Coronavirus, Excess Deaths, Mortality | Category: Health, Microbiology, Mortality | Print This Post | | To show what a good global citizen it is, the CCP in China could have welcomed a multinational independent investigation into the origins of the Flu from the Fish markets (or was that the Bat-Lab?) Instead, the Chinese Ambassador of the CCP threatens to throw its (huge) weight around:
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. h/t Colin, David E *Unfriending, of course, means by CCP mandate.
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As so it begins. The first country declares “elimination” success. Today New Zealand announces the effective elimination of coronavirus. Soon hopefully other countries can join and rebuild the “Virus Free Zone” – and the borders that surround them will expand as the infected zone shrinks. Theirs was a very strict lockdown. Beaches, playgrounds, schools, businesses and restaurants closed. Not even takeaway sales. New Zealand says it has stopped community transmission of Covid-19, effectively eliminating the virus.BBC News With new cases in single figures for several days – one on Sunday – Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the virus was “currently” eliminated. But officials have warned against complacency, saying it does not mean a total end to new coronavirus cases. The news comes hours before New Zealand is set to move out of its toughest level of social restrictions. The shift down to level 3 restrictions means things are still pretty strict: Level 3 will see retailers, restaurants and schools allowed to reopen on a smaller scale. Schools will reopen on Wednesday for children up to Year 10 who cannot study from home, or whose parents need to return 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: Wipeout: New Zealand’s bid to eradicate COVID-19Australian Financial Review 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.” Even two weeks ago Australia’s chief medical officer did not seem to think eradication was possible: Keep reading → … Soon after isolation began, Australian and New Zealand cases started to fall as fast as they rose This is what Crushing the Curve looks like, and if works it will set the new standard, and change the way the rest of the world views this. It isn’t over yet, but still — something is working and the international press has just started to get excited. Be aware the figures may jump next week, as testing in NSW has ramped up and everyone can now get a free test. But testing is already high per capita, with a very low positive test rates. (12,000 tests done in Australia yesterday and 99.8% were negative). Australia has 25 million people and found just 18 new cases yesterday. New Zealand with 5 million people, got five new cases. Obviously these numbers look great from the US and UK where 700 people are dying every day.  The rise and fall of Australian Covid-19 cases, March and April 2020 … Daily Mail, UK: Australia is steamrolling the curve![The] Nation records just 17 cases in one day – including three states with ZERO infections – as the country’s road to ending lockdown is revealed New York Times: “Vanquish the Virus? Australia and New Zealand Aim to Show the Way”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 StateNSW — The largest outbreak in Australia has shrunk almost as fast as the other statesA 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 0,1,0,0,2To 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 waveIt shows how easily one mistake, one cluster can get out of hand. Health workers picked up a case, likely from a Ruby Princess patient. More than 70 health workers became infected, two hospitals were closed and up to 5000 people had to be quarantined. 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 spreadDeath 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.  Demographics Covid-19 cases, Australia, April 2020 Australian Testing per capita is as good as other leading nationsGiven 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:
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. The most important posts:
______________________________________________ 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. ☀ Economics: ☀ The huge impact on the Chinese economy, the awful case of Iran.☀ Beware UN advice: ☀ Ethiopian WHO chief was part of China’s debt trap diplomacy ☀ Stats and Data: ☀ John Hopkins Live Map ☀ Worldometer ☀ Coronavirus data in Australia ☀
April 25th, 2020 | Tags: Borders, Coronavirus, Covid-zero, New Zealand, Quarantine | Category: Microbiology | Print This Post | | Now is the perfect time to get rid of pointless green burdens on our economyThanks to the rude wake up call from a real global pandemic, suddenly the fluffy luxury of “Green” rules and strangling red tape are put in the right perspective. Few are going to complain. Despite this outbreak appearing to tick the Green Left fantasy list, any reality check exposes how frivolous most fashionable angst is. There is a great opportunity here to clean out some of the worst of the Big Government burden. The Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act is in the government’s sights: Green tape to be cleared for recoveryRichard 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 review of Australian environmental regulationsLanai Scarr, The West Australian 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.
We all helped to make China what it is, by buying the cheap goods, by selling our manufacturing base, ignoring the ethical quagmire and by assuming that China would follow in the footsteps of Japan, Taiwan and Korea. And as we speak, Chinese military ships are plying the waters of the South China Sea. While China is sending doctors and PPE to Malaysia to fight the pandemic, the Malaysian government is not publicly protesting the prolonged and close presence of the Chinese Navy. (h/t Dave B) Time to put China on lockdown for its dishonesty amid coronavirus crisisGlenn 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. Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of “The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself,” is a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors. In late January Tedros-head-of-the-WHO raved about President Xi’s handling of the novel coronavirus, which our ABC radio played in full as a non-stop five minute grovel, with no questions asked about whether he had any role in China’s $13 billion Belt and Road program loan to Ethiopia (which it was struggling to pay) and whether that might have compromised his judgement. A few days later Professor John Mackenzie, a Senior WHO Expert on the Novel Coronavirus Emergency Committee delivered a savage reply, calling China’s response “reprehensible”.( Thanks to commenter Sunni Bakchat.) WHO expert says China too slow to report coronavirus cases,Financial Times 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?WHO chief again deflects criticism of China and seeks US$675 million in aidBavan Jaiopragas, South China Morning Post 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. Keep reading → …. The moment greens realize they’ve been used by Big Money Renewables — the Michael Moore documentary: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 Humans1 – unapologetically exposes Al Gore, Bill McKibben, Robert Kennedy, etc. for being con artists and hypocrites, 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?
April 23rd, 2020 | Tags: Biomass, Renewable Energy, YouTube | Category: Big-Government, Global Warming, Renewable, Solar Power | Print This Post | |
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. NBC News That was when she noticed her father, who had shown no previous signs of dementia, was largely unaware of what was happening around him. There is growing evidence to suggest that COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, can affect not only the lungs, but the brain, too. A recent study of 214 patients in Wuhan, China, where the pandemic started, found more than a third had neurologic manifestations of the disease, including loss of consciousness and stroke. Physicians in the U.S. have noted the same. “We’re seeing a 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: Neurologic Features in Severe SARS-CoV-2 InfectionApril 15, 2020, DOI: 10.1056/NEJMc2008597 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 peopleAbout 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:Coronavirus patients are waiting weeks for their sense of smell to recoverMike Wehner As CNN reports, 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 coronerRight 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. It’s another reason to crush the curve until we learn more. … And the global pile-on against China gathers speedBlistering Julian Reichelt is editor-in-chief of the Bild, Germany’s largest paper. Their team calculated that China owed €149 billion to Germans for coronavirus damages. China’s embassy shot back that they reported everything according to WHO guidelines, that countries had time to prepare (for something “like the flu“, eh?) and that Bild was stirring up xenophobia and nationalism. So Reichelt replied and addressed it to President Xi: “You rule by surveillance. You wouldn’t be president without surveillance. You monitor everything, every citizen, but you refuse to monitor the diseased wet markets in your country. You shut down every newspaper and website that is critical of your rule, but not the stalls where bat soup is sold. You are not only monitoring your people, you are endangering them – and with them, the rest of the world.” … “surveillance is a denial of freedom. And a nation that is not free, is not creative. A nation that is not innovative, does not invent anything. This is why you have made your country the world champion in intellectual property theft. “China enriches itself with the inventions of others, 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. h/t Richard K “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%. The headlines took a bad study and made it worse: Stanford University antibody testing finds California virus infections are 50 TIMES higher than reported – suggesting COVID-19 is more widespread across the USCoronavirus spread: Number of people infected by COVID-19 may be 50-80 times higher than official countCommenters 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.) Keep reading → The price for the coverup will be hugeDonald Trump crossed the Rubicon by pulling funding from the WHO and asking China to ‘fess up’. Now no respectable politician wants to be left out in the race to demand answers and the WHO is an open target too. The UN agency helped China hide the severity of this disease and advised nations not to stop flights with China. The World Health Organisation failed in the one job they were designed for. DailyMail.co.uk Australia’s Foreign Minister will demand a global inquiry into the spread of COVID-19 – and says the World Health Organisation should play no part in it.China told her the disease was both ‘preventable and curable’ during a conversation in late January. As diplomatic faux pas go, it doesn’t get much worse than bringing a deadly disease to a party and telling everyone “it’s just the flu”. But China was scalping the medical gear too. Not only did China hide the true nature of the virus even as it shared the virus around. It harvested all the protective gear it knew the world would need, then held the world hostage. It even took donations from Italy, then made Italy pay to get their own donations back: Italy gave China PPE to help with coronavirus — then China made them buy it backAmber Athey, The Spectator 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. There are nearly a million signatures on the Sack Tedros Petition. Imagine the anger if the virus turns out to be lab escapee, or something worse?
… Virus follows fixed mysterious patternAn Israeli Prof is claiming to be “shocked” to find that tough lockdown quarantines made no difference. He claims the virus fades after 6 weeks in the “exact same way” everywhere — which it does if you wear a welding mask while looking at the data. When asked why this extraordinary text-book-breaking shift happens he says “I have no explanation” but that doesn’t stop him concluding that hard quarantines are unnecessary. When asked, he apparently suggested the exponential growth of viruses ends because of “the climate” or maybe “the virus has its own life cycle”. (How does he think this works? Telepathy?) Israeli Professor Shows Virus Follows Fixed PatternProfessor 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. For example, Italy started mass lockdown on March 10th. The growth of new daily cases peaked on March 21, 11 days after the mass lockdown began.
 New cases in Italy peaked 11 days after lock down 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. Ben Israel has welded twenty variables into one“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 fastSingapore’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. His words again, with his graphs:“… coronavirus peaked and subsided in the exact same way. In the exact, same, way.” What does “exact” mean anyway? Anything you like.  Mysterious peak in infections that are “exactly” the same.
All of these countries changed their behaviour, and that changed the curve. h/t Colin. REFERENCE: This might be the paper ( in Hebrew?) April 19th, 2020 | Tags: Coronavirus, Covid-zero, Quarantine | Category: FakeNews, Global Warming, Microbiology | Print This Post | | |
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