New polling from Ipsos MORI has found that 20% of Britons think it is likely that they have already had COVID-19. 6% are confident about having had the disease, whilst 14% think it is fairly likely. The Government announced yesterday that it is carrying out randomised tests across the country to see how far the virus has spread. It will be particularly pertinent to discover how many have had the virus completely asymptomatically. The sooner we know, potentially the sooner the lockdown can end…
Having had the nastiest flu-like infection in years following a New Year family get together including one under-the-weather grandchild, CanSpeccy would certainly like to know if most of those who think they've already had the Corona virus are right.
In considering lives lost due to the corona virus, it would be worthwhile to calculate a Loss of Expected Lifetime (LEL) whereby the number of deaths is multiplied by a factor equal to (E - D)/E, where E is life expectancy at birth, D is mean age at death. Due to the great age of most of those killed by the virus, this would reduce the headline number concerning the impact of the virus by a factor of perhaps ten or twenty.
Furthermore, one might adjust LEL by an age-dependent life quality index (LQI), with a value of 1 at birth and 0.01 at age 100. This would likely deflate the headline loss numbers by a further factor of ten or thereabouts.
Overall, such calculations would reduce the apparent devastation of, say, one million Covid-19 deaths to something like 10,000 LQI-adjusted LELs, which not only seems less appalling, but is more accurately reflective of the human cost.
Dr. Richard Schabas,former Chief Medical Officer of Ontario,
Chief of Staff at York Central Hospital, etc.
Quarantine belongs back in the Middle Ages.
Save your masks for robbing banks.
Stay calm and carry on.
Let’s not make our attempted cures worse than the disease.
Dr Wolfgang Wodarg is a German physician specialising in Pulmonology, politician and former chairman of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. In 2009 he called for an inquiry into alleged conflicts of interest surrounding the EU response to the Swine Flu pandemic.
"Politicians are being courted by scientists…scientists who want to be important to get money for their institutions. Scientists who just swim along in the mainstream and want their part of it […] And what is missing right now is a rational way of looking at things.
We should be asking questions like “How did you find out this virus was dangerous?”, “How was it before?”, “Didn’t we have the same thing last year?”, “Is it even something new?”
"We are afraid that 1 million infections with the new virus will lead to 30 deaths per day over the next 100 days. But we do not realise that 20, 30, 40 or 100 patients positive for normal coronaviruses are already dying every day.
[The government’s anti-COVID19 measures] are grotesque, absurd and very dangerous […] The life expectancy of millions is being shortened. The horrifying impact on the world economy threatens the existence of countless people. The consequences on medical care are profound. Already services to patients in need are reduced, operations cancelled, practices empty, hospital personnel dwindling.
All this will impact profoundly on our whole society.All these measures are leading to self-destruction and collective suicide based on nothing but a spook..."
Yep, the corona virus has been a disaster all right. It's meant massive looting of the treasury of many countries including the US, Britain and Canada, and it has caused huge disruption of medical services without a scrap of decent scientific evidence in justification.
One may say it has been a catastrophic failure by the global elite, medical experts and the ranks of academia always anxious to get in on a new research gravy train.
Or was it more than that? A panic engineered to achieve a massive wealth transfer from an innocent citizenry to the globalist elite via a stock market and economic crash?
Los Angeles Times, March 23, 2020:Michael Levitt, a Nobel laureate and Stanford biophysicist, began analyzing the number of COVID-19 cases worldwide in January and correctly calculated that China would get through the worst of its coronavirus outbreak long before many health experts had predicted.
Now he foresees a similar outcome in the United States and the rest of the world.
While many epidemiologists are warning of months, or even years, of massive social disruption and millions of deaths, Levitt says the data simply don’t support such a dire scenario — especially in areas where reasonable social distancing measures are in place. Read more
The turning point in an epidemic occurs when the number of new cases reported each day turns down. Canadian Government stats, suggest that this may have happened in Canada late last week:
Figure 3. New reported COVID-19 cases (n=1,041Footnote1) in Canada by date of symptom onset.
Note: The shaded area represents a period of time (lag time) where it is expected that cases have occurred but have not yet been reported nationally.
... when one deals with deep uncertainty, both governance and precaution require us to hedge for the worst. While risk-taking is a business that is left to individuals, collective safety and systemic risk are the business of the state. Failing that mandate of prudence by gambling with the lives of citizens is a professional wrongdoing that extends beyond academic mistake; it is a violation of the ethics of governing.
The obvious policy left now is a lockdown, with overactive testing and contact tracing: follow the evidence from China and South Korea rather than thousands of error-prone computer codes. So we have wasted weeks, and ones that matter with a multiplicative threat.
If the New York Post is correct in reporting that half the UK population has already been infected with Covid-19, while only 422 deaths have resulted, we can infer that the death rate from this virus is in the order of 0.0006%, give or take the odd zero. If that's the case, then maybe I need not worry that so many of the people where I live seem to have no comprehension of the meaning of the term "social distancing."
Western governments are rolling the printing press and spewing money like water in response to the epidemic spread of the novel Corona virus, COVID-19. But if you thought that their aim was to protect you from the virus, you are entirely mistaken. The object is not to protect you from infection, but to extend the plague season, to reduce peak demand for medical services.
The assumption governments are making is that most people will be infected. The only people governments seem concerned to protect from infection are the over 60's who are urged to remain in quarantine, while being advised that in the event that they fall ill, they will be denied hospital treatment.
So how's it going so far? Like a house on fire, it seems. In Ottawa, the Canadian capital, with a population of just under one million, it is estimated that 4000 are already infected and the doubling time for the infection rate is just two or three days.
And how are the victims of this disease faring? According to one report, of confirmed cases in America, more have died that have recovered.
Is the novel Corona virus scare a hoax to change public attitudes about the care and maintenance of the elderly, or to facilitate acceptance of compulsory vaccination?
Here's one doctor's assessment (if the video doesn't play for you here, you can get it directly from U-Tube, unless it's been flushed).
What that article shows is that despite the near ideal conditions for disease transmission, a closely confined and highly social population, 83% of passengers aboard the Diamond Princess were uninfected.
Of those infected, almost half were without disease symptoms. Of those made ill, mortality was 1.2%. And of those who died all were over 70 years of age.
Does a disease like that seem like a good reason for shuttering the economy, flinging public funds in all directions, stiffing the people with massive new debt while debasing the currency, and imposing a near police-state level of supervision to prevent people from going about their lives as they see fit?
But if you are still worried about dying of what can certainly be a nasty illness, we'd advise taking 2000 units of Vitamin D, daily. Vitamin D upregulates production of innate antibiotics by the endogenous immune system, and in a controlled study has been shown to massively reduce susceptibility to flu infection. For details, we recommend this lucid and informative paper: John J. Cannell, and others: On the epidemiology of influenza.
Meantime: Israel Embraces the Plan that Boris Johnson and Donald Trump Chickened Out Of:
We have previously noted the extraordinary fact that Boeing Corporation's Board of Directors includes not a single engineer, aeronautical or otherwise. That fact must surely be an embarrassment to members of the Board now that the company's manifestly corrupt and useless management has become a matter of public knowledge. It is no surprise, therefore, that Nikki Haley, former US Ambassador to the United Nations, former Governor of South Carolina, etc., etc., has had the wit to disembarrass herself by resigning from the Board of Directors on a supposed matter of principle, namely, her opposition to Boeing's request for a $60 billion publicly funded bailout. In her letter of resignation, Haley states:
I cannot support a move to lean on the federal government for a stimulus or bailout that prioritizes our company over others and relies on taxpayers to guarantee our financial position.
One wonders how soon it will be before the other, less politically savvy, members of the Board bail too. Perhaps Boeing's other female aeronautical genius, Caroline Kennedy, will be the next to go?
March 19, 2020: Today, deaths in Italy due to the the novel Corona virus reached a total of 3,405.
The average age of those who died was 79.5 years.
Most who died suffered from one or several other diseases, including heart disease, emphysema and diabetes.
Prior to the COVID19 outbreak, Italy's death rate was running at about 10.6 per thousand, equivalent to 639,000 per year for the country as a whole.
So deaths attributable to the novel Corona virus have thus far increased Italy's death rate for the year by at most one half of one percent.
However, since most of those carried away by the Corona virus were both very old and more or less seriously ill due to other causes, many, probably most, would have died in the current year anyway.
Therefore, when 2020 ends, the effect of the Corona virus on Italy's death toll for the year may be rather small to negligible.
Yet the Western nations are shutting down their economies and debauching the government finances in the name of what is merely another strain of flu.
Looks like a colossal scam from which those with inside knowledge of government planning will make fortunes.
What Governments should be doing is something sensible like urging old folks to self-isolate, providing old-folks with home delivery of food, medicine, etc., and getting everyone to take at least 1000 units of vitamin D every day.
Radical measures beyond such obvious, minimal and sensible actions, should prompt voters to punish governments severely, as in booting from office, for buggering up the economy, and creating schemes for looting the treasury. Trump Out, Trudeau Out, Xi Out, etc.
I don't know if the following is bunk or incredibly important, but it seems to me at least somewhat plausible, so I have lifted it in its entirety from LewRockwell.com.
The mistaken presumption that a person “catches a cold” from someone else, or a flu virus, or a coronavirus, is the basis for calling a quarantine.
The fallacy of person-to-person transmission is ingrained in the population as news reports of vacationers trapped in China during a coronavirus are flown back to the US and are found to have COVID-19 corona virus that may spread to their family members. But COVID-19 is not spreading into the community. Online maps showing the almost stagnant number of coronavirus-confirmed cases in each State are rapidly vanishing from view on the internet.
There is person-to-person transmission of the virus, but not necessarily person-to-person transmission of the disease. To better explain this, we have to dig back into the annals of epidemiology (the study of disease).
A couple of decades ago it was epidemiologist Edgar Hope Simpson who asked some questions about the incongruities between published dogma about the spread of flu viruses and current epidemics that caused him to ask these questions:
Where is the flu virus in between epidemics?
Why do flu epidemics end so abruptly?
What explains the frequent coincidental timing of flu epidemics in countries located at a similar north-south latitude?
Why, in previous ages, did epidemics spread so rapidly despite the lack of modern transportation?
Why do volunteers who have flu virus instilled into their nasal passages fail to produce symptoms of the flu in all cases?
Why do hospitalization and mortality rates fail to decline when vaccination rates dramatically increase?
Why does the flu strike in concert with the earth tilting on its axis away from the sun during the Winter solstice in northern latitudes.
Dr. John Cannell cites an experiment conducted among six volunteers who were inoculated with a flu virus similar to the virus that caused the 1918 Spanish flu that reportedly killed millions. Of the six volunteers, just one experienced moderate symptoms; three had mild symptoms, one very mild, and one no illness at all.
In another similar experiment, 46 of 55 inoculated volunteers failed to develop symptoms.
A consistent fact is, immunization rates have risen in recent times among the elderly, without a decrease in mortality.
Hope-Simpson had an over-arching question: What is the seasonal stimulus for influenza? If it comes and goes, where does it go when it doesn’t come?
The answer is that the humans are exposed to viruses throughout the year but they remain dormant when sunshine vitamin D blood levels are within a normal range.
Viral disease erupts as vitamin D blood levels decline. Which is why wintertime infectious disease travels faster than people travel.
Viruses hidden within
Some viruses, like herpes, remain dormant within the body, hiding in an inactive state in nerve sheaths.
The type of herpes that caused chicken pox in youth remained hidden deep in nerves, only to erupt later in life as immunity declined. You end up with a case of the shingles. Or consumption of arginine-rich foods (chocolate, nuts) triggers eruption of herpes on the lip (herpes labialis), a so called cold sore. The amino acid lysine (in high doses) is its countermeasure. Supplemental vitamin D is of course, another antidote.
A problem 93-million miles away
Ninety-three million miles away is another complicating problem. Sun spot activity is unusually low (zero), reducing intensity of solar ultraviolet radiation that produces vitamin D in human skin. This year the problem is acute.
Quarantines may backfire
Predictably, the coronavirus epidemic will worsen with quarantine, which is precisely what happened on a cruise boat off the coast of Japan and what happened in Italy. People deprived of sunshine vitamin D, particularly the elderly, may succumb to any pathogenic bacterium or virus.
The aftermath of a quarantine on an ocean liner
After about a month of quarantine on the Diamond Princess the number of confirmed cases out of 3711 people quarantined on the boat who became infected rose from 174 to 712 over a 1-month period of time (334 of the 712 had no symptoms).
It appears there is no foolproof way to halt the spread of infection. The COVID-19 coronavirus was reported in circulation in the U.S. prior to the initial outbreak in Wuhan, China. For every known case of coronavirus there are another 5 to 10 cases undetected. But the masses in the U.S. aren’t getting sick or dying in large numbers.
It appears the federal government in an effort to prolong the life of less than ~1000 unhealthy 80 year-olds in the U.S. for a short while, particularly seniors who smoke tobacco and over-consume alcohol, they are willing to crash the economy, kill businesses, particularly churches and restaurants that are unlikely to have the resources to re-open their establishments, and coerce people to stay indoors, a practice that will further lower vitamin D levels and result in widespread infection and death among retirees.
The cost per life saved is estimated to be in the range of $100-300 billion.
The cost per life saved appears to be in the range of $100-300 billion. We are talking about 2-6 million people losing their income, at least for a significant period of time, to extend the lives of a few unhealthy people by maybe as little as a few months.
Yes, with the onset of Spring, the intensity of sun rays reaching the surface of the earth increases and the epidemic is expected to vanish. Yes, the President of the United States was predictably correct in saying on February 27 that: “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.”
Fortunately, someone figured out how to take sunshine vitamin D and bottle it.
Click on this link to see how a little bit (50 micrograms/2000 units) of vitamin D can quell viruses.
An effective treatment for #Coronavirus #COVID-19 has been found in a common anti-malarial drug Encouraging news: three new medical studies show a commonly available anti-malaria drug known as chloroquine aka chloroquine phosphate is showing strong results against COVID-19 infections in both China and South Korea. Excerpts from three studies, including one published in Nature are below.
Corona Virus Mortality in Italy: Italy's National Health Authority reports that of 2500 corona-virus-linked deaths, 99% were of people with other illnesses: more than 75% had high blood pressure, about 35% had diabetes and a third suffered from heart disease. Moreover, as of March 17, 17 people under 50 had died from the disease. The average age of those who died was 79.5. All of which raises the question, is COVID19 any more hazardous than any other kind of flu. Based on these statistics, that seems doubtful. Although the numbers vary greatly from year to year, Italy has, in recent years, had an average of around 15,000 flu deaths per year.
The day the stock market collapsed, US global hegemony ended, Trump's reelection prospects dived, and the Covid19 epidemic took off in both Britain and America, the Daily Caller had this headline:
This three-minute video explains how vaccination works to protect a population, even when many, perhaps most, are not vaccinated.
The same logic applies in the case of naturally acquired immunity within a population. Here's the explanation of the UK Government's policy in response to the bat flu, as provided by Guido Fawkes:
The government’s internationally unique strategy is premised on the idea that the majority of us will inevitably get the coronavirus and for most of us it will be merely an unpleasant experience from which we will recover. Letting the healthy get it, with the more vulnerable kept physically separated from the majority, in the expectation Britons will develop herd immunity and because immune people cannot infect others. [Thus], in the long run, [there will be fewer] fatalities.
The British Government policy reponse to COVID19 benefits from the Chinese experience. What that experience shows is that the virus-caused demand for hospital care and mortality rises sharply with age, doing so strongly over the age of 60. The UK response reflects this fact.
(1) it will prevent mass infection of those most liable to life-threatening disease symptoms, thereby limiting both mortality and demand for hospital care;
(2) it will reduce the average number of people each infected person will infect, i.e., the reproduction rate or R_nought. The latter effect, combined with the rise in the proportion of the under-65 population who by then will have acquired immunity, will drive the reproduction rate down, hopefully below 1.0, at which point the epidemic will die out.
Perhaps Britain's current crop of bureaucrats and government advisers are smarter than the old guard:
There is nothing in Britain's unwritten constitution to suggest the need for a royal family. All that is required in the way of royalty is a Monarch. On the death of the Monarch, the crown passes to another person in accordance with law as laid down, and from time to time changed, by the British Parliament. Under current law, the monarchy will pass on the death of Queen Elizabeth II, to her eldest son, Charles, and on the death of Charles, to his oldest son William.
There is no Constitutionally or legally determined rule according to which the successors to the British crown must undertake a public role. Except by virtue of other titles or appointments, neither Prince Charles nor his son William have any constitutionally mandated function unless and until they succeed to the throne. Yet today, not only Charles and William but a large number of other relatives of the British monarch, now widely referred to by the ludicrous term "Royals," engage in public activities, publicly funded, as if this were an essential requirement of the British system of government.
In fact, the "Royals" are for the most part an unnecessary burden on the taxpayer and a frequent embarrassment, the Queen's son, Prince Andrew, being a prime example. Prince Harry's marriage to a bitchy minor TV actress with vaulting ambition is a further example, except that Harry and his wife have opted to quite their public role as British "Royals." To that we say Bravo, and good luck. Now let us hear no more about them.
A commenter at the Unz Review writes: "Defense One is smearing Philip Giraldi (an Unz Review contributor) as a “conspiracy monger” who works for Russia."
Patrick Tucker said, “another piece of PressTV’s COVID-19-as-bioweapon coverage cites Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer and conspiracy monger writing for the Moscow-backed Strategic Culture Foundation. Giraldi’s evidence that the United States, and not China, is the source of the virus? There are some regions of China with more bats than Wuhan, he argues, but somehow those regions have fewer cases of COVID-19.”
The most commonly reported mainstream media account of the creation of the Coronavirus suggests that it was derived from an animal borne microorganism found in a wild bat that was consumed by an ethnic Chinese resident of Wuhan. But there appears to be some evidence to dispute that in that adjacent provinces in China, where wild bats are more numerous, have not experienced major outbreaks of the disease.
Can't say if Giraldi works for the Russians. But other arguments that Giraldi and his defenders present in support of the notion that the bat flu is an American biowarfare agent loosed with malicious intent upon China, are about as absurd as the one Defence One cites.
Another Unz Review commenter remarks:
As soon as COVID-19 is attributed to the US government (and that won’t take long,)
Which is as clear an admission as one will find at the Unz Review that there is currently no evidence whatsoever to attribute COVID19 to the US Government. Where this death dealing virus came from, I have no firm opinion. But I would like some real evidence before presenting a conclusion that could legitimately be taken as a justification for war.
Communists will shut down a city to prevent a deadly epidemic from going exponential. Our neo-liberal leaders only started to care when the Dow Jones went down. Don't expect them to call for a shutdown as that will cost their donor's some money. As mostly elderly people will die they are probably calculating how much money the pension funds will save.
the Italian premier just announced that all retail stores are closed across the country except for pharmacies and grocery stores.
In other news out of Italy, the Boomercaust is officially upon us "as country's top doctors say intensive care units should stop treating the elderly."
Infectious diseases cause epidemics when infected individuals infect, on average, more than one other person, causing the total number of infections to grow despite recovery or death of those previously infected. The number of individuals infected by each infected person is call the Reproduction number (R0).
Epidemics end when R0 falls below one. The COVID19 epidemic in China went exponential in January, with an R0 peaking at almost 4.0, and then tailed off throughout late January and February.
Why did it tail off?
Simple: quarantines and sequestrations.
Quarantine means restricting people's movement. This may mean restricting or prohibiting travel from one city to another, often referred to as a "lock-down,"or it may mean closing schools, universities, and places of business, thereby keeping people largely confined to their homes, rather than crowding together in the streets, on trains and buses, and in all places of assembly where those who are infected but asymptomatic can pass on the infection.
Quarantines may extend to ordering people to stay home, or even physically barring them from leaving their homes.
Sequestration means keeping the infected out of contact with the uninfected, including their own family or others with whom they share accommodation. In Wuhan, that was achieved by the creation of many thousands of beds in isolation facilities. These facilities are not primarily treatment facilities, they are simply places where sick people are put together out of contact with healthy members of their family and community.
The effectiveness of sequestration can be greatly enhanced if infected and infectious, but asymptomatic, individuals can be identified. Simple and rapid COVID19 tests have been developed, although control of the epidemic in China seems to have been achieved prior to widespread use of testing.
China's success in controlling COVID19 is proof of the effectiveness of China's authoritarian form of government in handling a crisis of the kind that would be experienced in the event of a biological WMD attack. As the virus spreads around the world, we will learn whether Western governments are can achieve by gentler means, China's remarkable success in containing this novel Corona virus.
But China's success remains to be confirmed. As reported here, some in China say the victory over the bat flu is FAKE.
Over at the Unz Review, multiple articles and lame arguments have been presented for the notion that Covid19 is an American biowarfare agent aimed at China, intended to disrupt China's economy.
Problem is there's virtually no way of knowing if that is true, and if it were true it would indicate that the US Government is inept beyond belief, since such an act of sabotage would almost certainly come back on America and cause devastation at least equal to that wrought in China.
In any case, debate about the source of the novel corona virus, whether it derives from a Chinese biowarfare lab or from an American biowarfare lab, or maybe from Israel, and who, if anyone, is responsible for launching it upon the world, is futile.
There is no way of knowing how this pandemic started, short of total incompetence or confession on the part of those responsible.
To launch a plague undetected is the easiest thing in the world.
The responsible party, whether acting with deliberation or by inadvertence, will almost certainly never be identified.
But one thing's for certain. There's no need for 300 American soldiers in Wuhan to do the job, to mention a theory to which Ron Unz repeatedly alludes.
Just one person with a pair of contaminated gloves will do it: visit the supermarket, touch this, touch that, smear the shopping cart handle, then drop the gloves where someone is likely to pick them up and contaminate themselves and others, then stand back and watch as the magic of exponential growth takes over.
In Canada, local transmission “is going to be widespread, it’s going to be severe”.
And that's a key fact you have to understand if you want a plausible theory of the origin of this plague. The thing's a boomerang. It hits those who launch it as hard as those they launched it against, assuming, that is, that this plague is is the result of deliberate human action, unlike all the other plagues that have emerged from China without human intent, from the Black Death in the 14th Century, to the Asian flu of 1958, the swine flu the chicken flu, etc.
Another key fact about this novel Corona virus, whether it is man-made or naturally occuring, is that it kills the old, not the young.
So who benefits?
Both China and America: each with rapidly aging populations and a problem financing the maintenance of the elderly.
What's a government to do? Kill off the useless eaters with this handy virus, obviously.
So no, pretty certainly, China didn't do this to America and America did not do this to China. But it could be a joint operation using a virus modified by scientists of both countries, working, as we know, in collaboration on means to enhance the pathogenicity, or achieve gain-of-function, as the techies of doom like to say, of bat flu viruses.
Over at the Unz Review, the current headline story is about the firing of a UK Government special adviser named Sabitsky who advocated the forced sterilization (by means of a long-lasting contraceptive treatment) of those of low IQ, particularly African immigrants.
The Unzites are, true to form, in uproar against this appalling stifling of the hideous reality of low black IQ and the urgent need for measures of racial hygiene. In fact, however, Sabitsky is a young and obnoxious fool to have advocated compulsory contraception, i.e., sterilization. That's not what can happen in a free country.
His proposal however, does address a real problem: namely, Britain's catastrophically dysgenic reproductive policies, which yield, contrary to the pattern of all past ages, higher fertility among the poor and stupid than among the rich and intelligent.
And as one commenter over at Unz.com, notes: Correcting the disastrous demographic trend in Britain requires four things:
First, barring immigration except to those of British extraction prior to 1950, when the waves of mass immigration began.
Second, bringing back teenage pregnancy. The idiots and self-hating morons who devised sex "education" have destroyed an essential part of the mechanism for population self-replacement. In 1950's Britain there was essentially no sex "education", no pill, and abortion was rare, dangerous and criminal. Hence smart lads and cute, unwed, teenage girls subject to irresistible impulse accounted for one third of all conceptions. The result? Sharp good-looking kids. In about one third of all cases the parents of these children married in haste. The majority of the remaining kids were adopted and well brought up.
Third, make welfare for indigent mothers dependent on identification by DNA test of the father(s) of their children, while compelling father's thus identified to make child support payments or go to debtors' gaol. (That way, no need for compulsory contraception. Only the most imbecile of the fathers of welfare children will fail to use a condom, and those who do fail will end up in gaol.)
Fourth, give intelligent women who bear and raise children vastly greater economic security in this age of no-fault divorce by instituting a child allowance paid to the mother for the rest of her life in the form of a large (at least 25%) tax refund, based on the earnings of both parents whether married, unmarried or divorced.
