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New research of the WuFlu “gene” lineage in the UK show that the virus kept being introduced via planes, trains and cars. The entire time that UK residents were being restricted in lockdown, tens of thousands of people were allowed to bring virus in through the border. Sabotage or Incompetence? The single failure to quarantine arrivals in the UK means the lockdown has gone on longer than it needed, cost more than it had too, has been less successful, and now, as the UK reopens, it does it with infections still running, when it could be doing it “like New Zealand”.
The BBC news mentioned that there were a lot of imported cases, that the biggest variety of genetic variants came from Spain, France and Italy and not China. But one tantalizing finding was that the UK transmission lines now appear to be “very rare or extinct”. Which surely implies that the lockdown is working, the UK lines are dying out, and that … by golly, the new infections must be regular incoming virus?
Three Key Conclusions: The UK epidemic comprises a very large number of importations due to inbound international travel2. We detect 1356 independently-introduced transmission lineages, however, we […]
Science before politics
Some are claiming the Victorian lockdown was too late, saying the rate of spread was already suppressed before it started. But that misses the point that slowing flight arrivals was responsible for most of the suppression up to that point, but that wasn’t going to stop the rising cases of community transmission. To judge if lockdown works, we need to look at domestic spread.
The graph that matters are the new daily cases, and even more so, the graph of daily new cases due to of community transmission (below).
Victoria started a major lockdown on March 24th when schools were largely closed (except to essential workers) and only essential services were allowed to run. We see daily new cases peaked 11 3 days later, almost exactly as expected (We expect a 12 day delay as seen in Japan, Germany, Italy, Spain, South Korea and Norway). The 12 day average expected lag comes from a five day average incubation and then a roughly seven day lag for new cases to get into breathing trouble and get tested as such. In Victoria, the case numbers were dominated by incoming arrivals, so the timing of border closures determined the daily […]
Despite doing everything it could to gain herd immunity Iran starts on second wave
Iran was one of the first countries to succumb to the pandemic, and so it is for the second wave. Back on Feb 25th Iran emerged as a new epicentre — whereupon smart nations like Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Oman, Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Jordan, Ankara, Georgia and Tajikistan immediately closed borders and flights from Iran. Rich nations with Expert-Swamps, however, would wait until they actually caught cases before they stopped the flights.
Iranian leaders worked to spread the virus: they were slow to close religious institutions, and quick to claim they’d be immune, right up until the day the leaders started catching the virus themselves. They declared quarantine was stone age, and shipped their masks off to China, but like everywhere, when things got bad, they started quarantine.
The peak came and went and things were headed in the right direction so Iran started releasing restrictions from April 11th. By May 2nd, less than a thousand new cases a day were being recorded. But five days later cases had doubled. Now they are back to where they were when they started releasing restrictions.
Just […]
In Northern Italy, people are talking about how some people have not recovered even two months later. Patients with mild infections can recover, feel fine, and test negative, but then slide into debilitating fatigue, with strange aches and pains, bouts of diarrhea, and burning eyes. Some of them even test positive again.
And these were not the serious ICU cases which are paralyzed and ventilated. The head doctor of a hospital in Lombardy said “the discomfort often seems to last even longer for people with lighter symptoms. “
Surviving Covid-19 May Not Feel Like Recovery for Some
Debilitating symptoms can last long after a person’s body has gotten rid of the coronavirus, a reality Italians are now confronting.
Jason Horowitz, New York Times
The stubbornness of the virus and the length of the convalescence have become topics of conversation in northern Italy where some of the longest-suffering Italians are finding themselves in physical and financial uncertainty, unable to shake sickness and fatigue and get back to work.
But even some of the infected who have avoided pneumonia describe a maddeningly persistent and unpredictable illness, with unexpected symptoms. Bones feel broken. The senses […]
Border closures and Quarantine appear to be reducing all respiratory diseases
It’s a striking pattern all over the world. Measures taken to reduce the spread of Covid have, not surprisingly, reduced the spread of all respiratory diseases.
This years flu season is smaller than the last five years
Good news: due to the pandemic it’s likely many people are not catching Influenza and other respiratory diseases.This shows a rather predictable result that quarantine reduces the spread of respiratory diseases. It’s a banal and uncontroversial finding.
Chris Gillham is a part of the unofficial BOM audit team here, and below he looks at WHO data across 17 countries for Influenza. (The WHO Chief of course is a belt-n-debt-trap apologist for China, but this is not their modeled interpretation, just the data). Laboratory indicated influenza cases are down an astonishing 87% in 17 nations compared to the five year period.
Quarantine is textbook microbiology, and for most of history, the best way to reduce the spread of disease. In many countries 12 days after major isolation measures started, viral growth flattened off the dreaded exponential curve. Despite that, some commentators still wonder if the lockdowns achieve anything for Coronavirus. And so […]
With 1.4 million confirmed infections about 0.4% of the United States has had a known infection. But we know testing is inadequate given that there is such a high positive test rate (14% of all tests so far are positive). So we know the real rate of infection is higher than that.
The group that did the Santa Clara antibody test have run another test on 5,600 baseball employees and this time found only 0.7% carry the antibodies. The researchers were surprised.
About the only message we can really draw from this is the US is a long way from Herd Immunity, and as the US reopens there are twenty to fifty times as many people who could still catch this.
LA Times: Fewer than 1% of MLB employees test positive for COVID-19 antibodies
Of the 5,603 major league employees who submitted to what researchers called the largest national antibody study to date, only 60 tested positive, researchers said Sunday.
The researchers announced an estimated positive rate of 0.72% after adjusting the results for what they said were false positives and false negatives.
Still, the minute percentage of positive tests provided a data point […]
It’s almost like the swamp in the UK wants to keep the infections running as long as possible.
The UK Government have scored heat on the pointless sabotage of their own lockdown by flying in the virus through open borders. So in reply, instead of doing an immediate proper quarantine, like most countries in the world, the UK is giving everyone with an infection and the means to travel three good weeks to plan their trip so that they can avoid the two-week quarantine.
If they beat the easy deadline they can stay at home for seven days instead and “only” go out to infect people at chemists, shops, and anywhere they deem essential, including their workplace, during that week.
Boris needs new advisors.
UK ‘to bring in 14-day quarantine’ for air passengers
Tom Burridge, BBC
UK airlines say they have been told the government will bring in a 14-day quarantine for anyone arriving in the UK from any country apart from the Republic of Ireland in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
The new restriction is expected to take effect at the end of this month.
Industry body Airlines UK said the […]
Australia and New Zealand may soon open up a safe travel zone in the South Pacific and some mock it as a “bubble”. But many other nations could potentially join this growing virus-free zone. Countries which could get there sooner include Germany, France, Norway, Ireland, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, Czechia, Serbia, Croatia, Greece and Iceland. Plus South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, Israel, and even perhaps Italy and Spain not long after that. And there are others.
Countries that are only flattening the curve, and not crushing it, include bizarrely the powerhouses of the Western world, the UK and US, as well as Sweden and Canada. It also includes Russia, Brazil, and a lot of the third world. But even Turkey is bringing the curve down. Forgoodnesssake, Jordan looks impressive. Even Cuba looks like reaching zero before the US of A does.
The US and UK are keeping their virus cases alive by flying them in through open borders. Sweden is just not doing enough. Canada? Good question. Please tell us.
We know how to beat this virus yet top level expert advisors are telling Boris and Trump they need to leave the borders open. Can someone shake these men […]
The annual Flu death tally is not what it seems
It’s another bubble I don’t want to pop. Thanks for sticking in there in the quest for data that counts.
People worry that doctors are inflating the number of Coronavirus-deaths by listing other kinds of deaths in the Covid category. Fair enough. But they miss that this has effectively already been done with the famous flu death count. The national discussion is stuck in a rut, because it’s trying to compare confirmed cases of Coronavirus with modelized broad category influenza “burdens”.
It’s tempting to cite the current toll of 72,000 US Coronavirus deaths and wonder why we’ve reacted so differently to the worst influenza season where 62,000 people died of the flu (supposedly). But the actual confirmed cases of influenza deaths in the US are only 3,000 – 15,000 annually. Coronavirus really is on a different scale.
The headline grabbing flu numbers are modeled guesses based on assumptions about things like how many people go to hospital, how many get tested, or what other diseases were around at the time. It’s called the Influenza Disease Burden, not the List of Those Who Died, because it’s statistics and word-games. […]
Could a mass clotting event explain the excess death rate, the hypoxia, the delirium
Stories are now appearing of a few youngish people losing fingers, toes or even getting a leg amputated. And strokes have been seen in some as young as 30. Coronavirus, it seems, doesn’t just cause blood clotting, it causes the large and small sort, arterial ones, venous ones, and now microclots, and many of them all through the lungs and other tissues. This might explain the hypoxia, and also the other cases of organ failure. And while strokes in 33 year olds are still very rare (even in Coronavirus patients) the clotting could be the factor that matters most in the lungs, and in mortality.
This also might explain why ventilators are not working too well. Ventilators are useful for “wet lung pneumonia” because they help use pressure to push fluid out of the lungs. But if the problem is massive clotting, the ventilators that everyone worked so hard to get might be the wrong solution.
It also suggests people in Covid-zones should be on the lookout for stroke type symptoms, and drinking plenty of water and keep moving around.
Mysterious blood clots are COVID-19’s latest […]
A pulse Oximeter | Image Thinkpaul: Wikimedia
A cheap device might keep people off ventilators and be the first warning of trouble
In coronavirus blood oxygen levels can silently drop to unheard of levels. People may be unaware they even have coronavirus as oxygen levels fall to the point, medicos are rewriting the record books. This is a hypoxia crisis — it’s a defining feature of the disease. In the UK, the demand for oxygen at hospitals is so great that the NHS is running out, rationing it, and asking docs to lower their blood oxygen targets.
People are monitoring their “blood oxy sats” at home so they get an early warning that they need more serious medical help. Normal blood oxygen levels are 95-100% saturated. Doctors used to get uppity at levels below 92%, and hospital alarms often go off if children with asthma fall below 90%. At 88% doctors are putting people on continuous oxygen therapy. Levels below 80% are considered dangerous enough to start causing organ damage. But medical staff are finding conscious covid patients with levels so low they are unheard of — an unbelieveable 50 percent. I read somewhere an ambulance medic found someone […]
A few people are asking about the video the Youtube removed which is now on Bitchute. (h/t AC Osborne) The cack hand of Youtube strikes again with unnecessary censorship. But even if the docs were wrong, it’s better to discuss why than try to disappear them — we can all learn something. Plus the censorship gives them a de facto kind of hero status among some, but for the wrong reasons.
The Doctors main point is a sampling bias error
Doctors Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi of Accelerated Urgent Care are ER doctors, they look convincing, and speak well, but their thesis rests entirely on an error. They take test results from a high risk group of people, and extrapolate the results to the whole state. What they have is non-randomized data, and they assume it represents millions of people who didn’t come out for testing. This is not a small or incidental point. It’s the foundation of nearly everything they say.
They repeat this same mistake over and over, and say “we are following The Science”. They come up with some just-so rationalizations, some truisms that aren’t true, and inject some superfluous vocabulary in there so people know they […]
Mortality rates show that this is a medical situation we have not seen since WWII
All statistics are suspect but some numbers still tell us something important. In the early fog of a global pandemic, a proper diagnoses is difficult if not impossible. People are dying of heart attacks because they are too scared to go to hospital, but equally, Covid is causing heart attacks and strokes that might never have happened. It’s fair to ask how many deaths are due to Coronavirus and how many are due to the lockdown, but it’s not realistic to expect that we can do an autopsy on every single patient. And as the Financial Times team points out, the excess deaths also occur in the regions of the UK with the highest infection rates — which suggests they are due to the virus, not just collateral damage. Though people will also be less willing to visit a hospital in a zone where there are more cases. On the other hand, in areas with lockdowns but no major outbreaks, the mortality rates are 10% below normal (see many US states). So these peaks could have been even higher but the lockdown saved some people […]
Soon after isolation began, Australian and New Zealand cases started to fall as fast as they rose
This is what Crushing the Curve looks like, and if works it will set the new standard, and change the way the rest of the world views this. It isn’t over yet, but still — something is working and the international press has just started to get excited.
Be aware the figures may jump next week, as testing in NSW has ramped up and everyone can now get a free test. But testing is already high per capita, with a very low positive test rates. (12,000 tests done in Australia yesterday and 99.8% were negative).
Australia has 25 million people and found just 18 new cases yesterday. New Zealand with 5 million people, got five new cases. Obviously these numbers look great from the US and UK where 700 people are dying every day.
The rise and fall of Australian Covid-19 cases, March and April 2020
…
Worldometer
Daily Mail, UK:
Australia is steamrolling the curve!
[The] Nation records just 17 cases in one day – including three states with ZERO infections – as the country’s road to […]
Adriana Midori Takara,
Adriana Midori Takara was only 38 when she died of Covid in Australia last week. She instantly became a posterchild for the vaccine advertising campaign. But the true story may be something else entirely. Rebecca Weisser treads where few dare: Adriana’s family tried to get her ivermectin, which may have have saved her, but even though they found a doctor willing to try, he was not allowed to.
The Guardian and MSN both report relatives saying she wanted but had been unable to get any vaccine. But Rebecca Weisser reports that other journalists heard she was vaccinated, and asked whether she had a vaccine dose. The NSW authorities, who would surely be very interested in her vaccine status, won’t answer that question.
Meanwhile no one is turning the latest 44 and 48 year old victims of Astra-Zenica side-effects into posterchilds for anything. Where are their photos?
This is the battle worth fighting for.
The fastest way to stop lockdowns is by allowing every doctor and patient the choice to use cheap antivirals, not just limit their choices to drugs that earn their manufacturers $45billion dollars. Ivermectin can be used prophylactically to prevent as many as […]
The good news: Lockdowns will end sooner than expected. Not soon enough for some desperate businesses, but sooner than Dan Andrew’s modelers thought.
As I predicted, Victoria is doing better than the models estimated. Many people focus on the “daily new cases” but the “unknown source cases” is a better, more forward looking tool.
In Newspoll today we find — also as I predicted from the outset of the pandemic — that health is priority one for most voters. It’s an awkward fact of democracy. As drastic as the restrictions are in Victoria, more than half the voters are happy to give up some freedom temporarily in order to save lives, hardship and unknown health effects, and the burden on healthworkers.
Right-leaning small business owners and entrepreneurs are often not at all happy about giving up freedom. They’re much more comfortable taking risks, but most of the population are not. It’s a personality type thing. It’s not going to change. (What’s obscene though, is that those comfortable taking risks are bearing more of the costs while public servants like Dan Andrews are getting fat pay rises. )
Despite the strict restrictions, fully 71% of Victorians view the restrictions as “about […]
What does an apology even mean?
While the New Zealand Public service took a pay cut of 20%, in Victoria, MPs and Public servants got a pay rise of 2%. Dan Andrews will take home an extra $46,000 per annum despite presiding over the most costly public policy failure in Australian history. The private sector pays for the mistakes, while the public sector earns even more.
Dan Andrews asks so much, but gives so little. And it is a scandal that so many cheap, well known treatments and preventions are not being tested in large trials — Vitamin D, HCQ, Ivermectin, and all the other potential anti-virals like Interferon, Bromhexine, Melatonin, steroids, asthma drugs etc etc.
Voters slam ‘unfair’ public sector pay rise
Adam Creighton, The Australian
Private sector wages in Victoria dropped by $1.9bn in the June quarter, while wages in the public sector increased by $88m, according to the IPA’s analysis…
The poll, of just over 1000 Victorians, found only 7 per cent supported the 2 per cent pay rise that MPs and public servants received in July…
In the last five years, the Victorian population grew 12% but the bill for […]
Be wary of junk data and junk conclusions
Death data has become a political tool (stretched both up and down by vested interests). We’ve all heard of the motorcyclist who crashed into the Covid tally, and the payments for US docs. We know there’s junk data out there, but the suggestion we only count deaths “from” Covid, and not the deaths “with” Covid is unscientific in the extreme.
Stick with me. We all want WuFlu to be nothing, but scientists and skeptics need to pick their targets carefully. Don’t lose sight of the real scandal and the real solutions. It’s a travesty that people are dying while cheap vitamins and antivirals are being ignored. Let’s fight for Vitamin D, HCQ, Ivermectin, and all the other potentials like Interferon, Bromhexine, Melatonin, steroids, asthma drugs etc etc. But let’s not get distracted by a hopeful fantasy that the true US “death tally” is only 6% of Covid deaths in the US.
There’s an idea out there that only 9,680 people have died of Covid in the US, not 161,392 people. It’s because of this CDC quote:
“For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned. For deaths with […]
One good thing about Coronavirus is that people are suddenly paying attention to all the cheap easy ways to slow viruses. Hopefully we will get a bit better at preventing other respiratory infections too.
As I’ve mentioned before, masks stop as much as 75% of influenza, and now we know the number is similar with Coronavirus. If any drug was this effective, it would be hailed as a Gamechanging Breakthrough (!).
Indeed, just yesterday Anthony Fauci said he’d settle for 70%, 75% effective vaccine, but masks are here already. And we don’t have to wear them forever, just til we starve the virus, set up border checks, and get the cases to zero. Then we wait for a long term solution. 2020 is going to be the year of the mask.
With Coronavirus cases ramping up again all over the world, people like Mike Pence, and Australia’s Health Minister are talking about them. If we add Vitamin D at 5c a dose (which can reduce the spread of influenza by 40%) perhaps some states could avoid a repeat mass lockdown?
Given the cost in deaths and dollars of the spread of this virus, it would be cheaper to […]
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 […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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