The Nature of Physical Reality, Part I: Time

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
...
William Shakespeare

The moving finger writes,

and, having writ, moves on.

Nor all thy piety nor wit,

Shall lure it back to cancel half a line. 

Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.

...
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, translated by

Edward Marlborough FitzGerald

Time is not an illusion: it is a record of change in an evolving system, whether that be the unfolding of the universe, the progression of the seasons, or the vibration of the crystal at the heart of a quartz clock.

Before the creation of the universe there was no time. But after the Big Bang, stuff happened: first a fireball of quarks and photons exploding; then particles from the expanding plasma condensing; these, upon further cooling, cohering as atoms, mostly hydrogen plus a little helium; the clouds of gas collapsing under their own gravitation; the atoms fusing to heavier elements and heating the first stars to incandescence; the stars forming into gravity-bound spiral galaxies; the galaxies separating from one another in an ever expanding universe; the stars, their fuel of light elements exhausted, imploding violently to create the heaviest elements and spewing the remnants into space; stellar ashes aggregating into meteors and planets, some to be captured in orbit around new stars, our sun included; the process of universal evolution continuing, so far as can be told, without end. Thus the universe is the ultimate clock, its multifarious transformations marking the hours in the life of the world.

As the universe unfolds, so also do its components. Galaxies and stars evolve, as do planets, the latter both geologically and climatically. Planets may also acquire life, the evolution of which may result in the emergence of intelligent creatures able to fashion clocks and calendars providing measures of date and time more convenient for the regulation of life than natural processes, astronomical or geological.

The notion of events as the measure of time, seems odd to those conditioned by a scientific culture to view time as the measure of events. The notion of time outside of the world of events and having a reality of its own is reinforced by the subjective notion of time: our sense of the ongoing present, and receding past. But the subjective notion of time results from the workings of the mind, which constitute a process in evolution. The conscious mind, flowing continuously from idea to idea, as influenced both by internal processes and sensory input, serves as its own clock.

That it is the stream of consciousness which provides our sense of the passage of time is evident from the fact that when unconscious, for example, between the time  — as instructed by the anesthetist — to begin counting, and reaching perhaps to the number two or three, until the time consciousness returns amid the seeming chaos of a dimly lit and crowded recovery room, there is no sense whatever of the lapse of time.

The common use of language, according to which clocks measure time, further reinforces the misconception that time has a reality independent of events. But, in fact, clocks do not measure time, of which there is no known means of sensing, but only the evolution of their own internal workings: the swinging of a pendulum; the unwinding of a spring; the vibrations of a crystal.

A mistaken belief about the reality of time may also arise from the notion that time forms part of the ultimate fabric of the universe. So far as we understand it, reality consists in a succession of events in a three dimensional space. Thus to identify a particular event it is necessary to specify a point along the three spatial dimensions. But because what happens at every point throughout the universe evolves, identification of a specific event requires that it be time stamped. Thus time is often referred to as the fourth dimension in a space–time continuum. But time has no more reality than the spatial dimensions, fore and aft, left and right, up and down, none of which have a reality in the absence of the events that they map.

The Block Universe: Image source. In the block universe, 

each of our moments are not forever"changing place with that which 

goes before," neither does the Moving finger of Omar Khayyam move, 

but both remain  forever fixed like the frames of a movie on a reel of 

celluloid. Only in perception, do our moments "in sequent toil all forwards 

do contend."

A curious consequence of the notion of time as the fourth dimension, is the idea that just as every event located in space at a particular point on the temporal axis, co-occurs, so every event located at a particular point in three-dimensional space must co-occur at every point on the temporal axis. Hence has arisen the concept of the "block universe," a world in which there is no future and no past, but where everything conceived to be past, present or future has always existed, and always will exist, in all its exquisite detail.

Perhaps this view is correct, but if so, it contradicts Ocham's razor, the principle that, among alternatives, the simplest theory is the one that should be preferred. And it does not merely contradict Ocham's razor, it makes an utter mockery of it, for what it asserts is that for everything that ever happened, that is, for every microscopic event, and every nanoscopic, or picoscopic event that has ever occurred, or will ever occur, there exists a complete copy of the entire universe, to which a time traveler could transport himself. Worse still, time travelers, by showing up in the past or the future, would necessitate countless more copies of the world: giving rise to an infinity of infinitely many worlds.

Something else the theory of the block universe implies is that the creator is a practical joker, for whereas the universe has every appearance, from the microwave background radiation to the fossil record, of being a system in continual transformation, everything in a block universe, from the big bang to the evolution of the big brain and onward to eternity, has always existed and always will exist in a world where absolutely nothing has happened or ever will.

The evidence for evolution, according to this view, whether cosmic or organic, is a matter of appearance created by the juxtaposition of events preserved eternally in aspic but seemingly related to one another as cause and effect in accordance with temporal scientific laws. Morally, this notion seems odious. It means that for all that a person may strive, he will achieve nothing, good or bad, that is not  already cut in stone.

Contrary to the view presented here, Isaac Newton held time to be

absolute, true, and mathematical ... in and of itself and of its own nature, without reference to anything external, flows uniformly... 

Newton's great contemporary Gottfried Leibniz, on the contrary, held time to be, not the reason for, but a consequence of, the linkage of events in accordance with strict laws of cause and effect, a view also held by Einstein's mentor, Ernst Mach,* who wrote.

Time is an abstraction, at which we arrive by means of changes of things. 

Clockwork Time by Fractamonium

Taking the Newtonian view, Julian Barbour has argued that the structure of the universe is such that events are interconnected as if driven by gears in a gigantic clockwork mechanism.*

There is, however, a serious problem with the Newton–Barbour view of time, which is that time is not, as Newton believed, "absolute, true and mathematical," or uniformly flowing as would be required within Barbour's clockwork cosmology. Rather, time, as measured by the best clocks known, the oscillations of a photonic wave, or the vibrations of a quartz crystal, flows at different rates according to circumstance, as observation of clocks moving relative to one another or subject to a difference in gravitational field reveals.

Thus, although Einstein's Theory of Relativity is widely believed to prove the existence of a space-time continuum underlying physical reality, Einstein was not without doubts, remarking that:*

Perhaps, ... we must also give up, by principle, the space-time continuum. It is not unimaginable that human ingenuity will some day find methods which will make it possible to proceed along such a path."

With that intuition, Einstein seems to have come down on the side of Leibniz and Shakespeare, seeing time as a record of the succession of events in an evolving universe. On that view, the universe exists only in the present, not in any past or future states, which means that time travel is impossible since there is no past or future world existent to which one might travel.

————
* Quoted by George Musser in "Spooky Action at a Distance." Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2015.

Related:
CanSpeccy: The Nature of Physical Reality, Part II: Space
CanSpeccy: More about time
Thibault Damour: Time and Relativity

First published November 26, 2015

German Survey Proves Corona Virus Poses No Existential Threat to the Nation

To know how deadly Corvid19 is, one must know how many of those who are infected will die. 

This, governments have thus far failed to determine, which is remarkable since any competent epidemiological research group furnished with a modest research grant could easily find out. The task is simple. The number of deaths due to the disease is known. Thus what remains to be determined is the proportion of the population that has been infected. For this purpose, a small random sample of the population, a thousand or two at most, needs to be tested for current or past infection. For this purpose  there are blood tests that assess the presence of the virus (indicating current infection), the so-call reverse transcriptase PCR tests, and there are blood tests that assess the presence of antibodies to the virus (indicating past infection), namely immunological or serological tests. 

To hear government spokespersons talk about such testing, one might assume it necessary to test every human on the face of the planet to come to any useful conclusion. Thus, for example, President Trump's medical expert on Covid19, Dr. Fauci is reported to have said:

‘Obviously’ I Would Like to Test Whole Country for Coronavirus Antibody... [But] “We’re not going to have testing for everybody in the country tomorrow. It’s going to be a gradual process. We are starting when the next week or two, we’ll be able to scale-up the kind of antibody testing to give you a good feel for what the penetrance of the infection is.”

Clearly the man is an idiot or someone who thinks that Americans are idiots.

To get "a good feel for what the penetrance of the infection is," if one must talk in such ridiculously stilted language, it’s not necessary to test the whole goddam population, all you need is a random survey of a few hundred people.

And thanks to the fact that Germans, if no one else, are not entirely stupid, we now have the results of one such survey:

A team at the University of Bonn has tested a randomized sample of 1,000 residents of the town of Gangelt in the north-west of the country, one of the epicenters of the outbreak in Germany. The study found that two percent of the population currently had the virus and that 14 percent were carrying antibodies suggesting that they had already been infected — whether or not they experienced any symptoms. Eliminating an overlap between the two groups, the team concluded that 15 percent of the town have been infected with the virus.

This work needs to be replicated on a nationally representative sample population of several thousand people in total, but if the result for the town of Gangelt is indicative of the rate of Covid19 infection nationally, it indicates that around 12 million Germans have already been infected. With 2763 deaths to date, the implied death rate is of 2736 per 12 million infections (i.e., 15% of the national population), or 0.0023%.

No doubt the virus is still spreading in Germany, and the national death toll could mount six or seven times higher if the infection were to spread to the entire population. But that is not possible, since herd immunity would stop the epidemic beyond the 50 to 60% infection rate. Thus total deaths in Germany due to Covid19 are unlikely to exceed 10,000, or about three times the annual motor accident death toll. So yes, the cost of the novel Corona virus is high. But note that most virus deaths will be among the over 65's, many of them at the point of death due to other conditions, whereas car crashes kill mainly the young and healthy.

But the German death toll due to Covid19 will certainly not reach anything like 10,000 if the German Government takes the most simple-minded steps to limit the death toll, most importantly by advising the elderly to stay in quarantine, while the rest of the population goes back to work.

So the proper virus response is simple really. But give the likes of Trump and Trudeau, Merkel and Micron the opportunity to grab totalitarian powers, and they will not give them up unless those powers are torn from their hands by an enraged populace and an effective government opposition.

Related:
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ZH: Robert F Kennedy Jr. Exposes Bill Gates' Vaccine Agenda In Scathing Report
YDN: More than 3,600 elderly people have died from coronavirus in nursing homes across the US - but the government does not count them
ZH: South Korea Says Nearly 100 Recovered COVID-19 Patients Tested Positive Again
Jonathan Geach, MD: Eight Reasons to End the Lockdowns As Soon as Possible
The BL: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. answers Bill Gates on the dangers of a mandatory CCP Virus vaccineJohn Vibes: Governments Using Pandemic to Build “Architecture of Oppression”
ZH: China Begins Mass Deletion Of Online Research On Coronavirus Origins
From Harvard to the Big House: The COVID-19 pandemic and serial passage gain-of-function research
WSJ: Coronavirus Strikes at Least 2,100 Senior Facilities Across U.S., Killing 2,300 People
Fort Russ: Vaccine ‘Mark Of The Beast?’: It’s Time To Stop Bill Gates
NewsPunch: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Slams Bill Gates’ ‘God-like Willingness To Experiment With Lives of Lesser Humans’
IW: US Hospitals Get Paid More to List Patients as COVID-19 and Three Times as Much if the Patient Goes on Ventilator
SW: UK hunger crisis: 1.5m people go whole day without food
ZH: British Suicide Rate Soars To Record High
ZH: Whistleblower: How CDC Is Manipulating The COVID-19 Death-Toll

The Corona Virus and Care Homes That Kill

Of Canada's 5 million plus over 65's, only six or seven percent are in care facilities, yet those in care facilities account for almost half of Canada's Covid19 deaths.

So if you want to be rid of Granny in a hurry, put her in a care home.

Since viruses are not spontaneously created, we can infer that Covid19 is killing so many in Canada because a small proportion of the nation's old people are incarcerated in care facilities and nursing homes where the staff bring the corona virus to work with them.

Among other things, this suggests that national differences in covid19 deaths likely depend in large part on differences in quality of care home management. Where, as in Canada, many care home workers are part-timers, on minimum wage and without fringe benefits, home inmates are exposed to an unnecessarily large number of employees, some of whom work part-time at more than one care home. Such conditions minimize professionalism among workers while maximizing the risk of infection being introduced to care homes from the outside community and being transmitted from one home to another.

Almost certainly better regulation of care homes and better working conditions for care home workers would have spared Canada a large proportion of virus deaths. Instead of shedding crocodile tears for the elderly dead while imposing lock-downs on the entire community and thereby destroying the economy, government ministers should be acting to bring about reform in the care home industry.

Related:
WSJ: Coronavirus Strikes at Least 2,100 Senior Facilities Across U.S., Killing 2,300 People
NBC News: 2,500 Long-term care facilities in 36 US states are battling coronavirus cases
Ryan McMaken: In March, US Deaths From COVID-19 Totaled Less Than 2% Of All Deaths
The Spectator: How deadly is the coronavirus? It’s still far from clear
CBC: As many as 34,000 Ottawans could have COVID-19
Zero Hedge: "No Hope": Canada's Nursing Homes Prepare For Mass Death
Station Gossip: Three major nursing home companies are DENIED tests for residents - despite spate of deaths from suspected outbreaks

Understanding the Reproduction Number, Lock-downs and Herd Immunity

During a disease epidemic, lock-downs cut the reproduction number -- that is the number of people infected by each infected person -- by reducing opportunities for viral spread. This can be seen in the Canadian data, which show that the number of newly reported cases turned down within two week of the onset of a national lock-down (see figure 2). As the incubation period for the disease is approximately two weeks, that indicates that the lock-down had a more or less immediate effect in reducing the spread of the virus.

Figure 2. New reported COVID-19 cases (n=5,590

Footnote1) in Canada by episode dateFootnote2 as of April 1, 2020, 11 am EDT

When R0 is less than one, the epidemic dies down and is ultimately extinguished. Problem is, if R0 is driven down by means of a lock-down, any remaining cases or new cases from whatever source are likely to re-ignite the epidemic when the lock-down ends. That is the danger China now faces. China is dealing with this risk by testing people entering the country so that imported cases can be quarantined, and so that contacts of new cases of any source, can be tracked down and quarantined.

In time, if the proportion of the population that has been infected rises high enough, R0 will fall below 1 without a lock-down because most people are immune and cannot therefore be (re-)infected. That is why, in Britain, epidemiologists are now conducting surveys to determine how many people have already acquired immunity. If the proportion is high enough, probably over 60%, herd immunity will have been achieved. That means that even without control over human interactions, R0 will be less than 1 and the virus will be unable to spread. At that point, any new outbreak will die out spontaneously and the national lock-down can be ended.

A further consequence of making a reliable estimate of the population-wide infection rate is that it will provide a basis for an accurate estimate of the mortality rate for the disease. At present, mortality rate estimates are hopelessly skewed because the infection rate includes only those with disease symptoms who are known to medical authorities. Those who suffer the illness without reporting to a doctor, or who are infected without experiencing disease symptoms, are currently excluded from mortality rate estimates, thus elevating the apparent death rate, probably many times in excess of the actual rate.

Related:
James Corbett: The Things You CANNOT Say About Coronavirus
Spectator USA: No lockdown, please, we’re Swedish
Guido Fawkes: China Faking Corona Virus Stats?

How Trump Will Take Over the Monetary Printing Press to Juice Markets for the Election

For all those in the alt-news world who rail against America's privately owned central bank, the Federal Reserve, with its power to print money without limit, here's an alternative that looks much worse: a President with the power to spend without limit and force the Fed to print the money to cover the cost. And that President is Donald J. Trump.

How has Trump acquired such power? As a reporter explains it, this outcome has been achieved through the creation of an:

alphabet soup of new programs that deserve special consideration, as they could have profound long-term consequences for the functioning of the Fed and the allocation of capital in financial markets. Specifically, these are: CPFF (Commercial Paper Funding Facility) – buying commercial paper from the issuer. PMCCF (Primary Market Corporate Credit Facility) – buying corporate bonds from the issuer. TALF (Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility) – funding backstop for asset-backed securities. SMCCF (Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility) – buying corporate bonds and bond ETFs in the secondary market. MSBLP (Main Street Business Lending Program) – Details are to come, but it will lend to eligible small and medium-size businesses, complementing efforts by the Small Business Association. To put it bluntly, the Fed isn’t allowed to do any of this. The central bank is only allowed to purchase or lend against securities that have government guarantee. This includes Treasury securities, agency mortgage-backed securities and the debt issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. An argument can be made that can also include municipal securities, but nothing in the laundry list above. So how can they do this? The Fed will finance a special purpose vehicle (SPV) for each acronym to conduct these operations. The Treasury, using the Exchange Stabilization Fund, will make an equity investment in each SPV and be in a “first loss” position. What does this mean? In essence, the Treasury, not the Fed, is buying all these securities and backstopping of loans; the Fed is acting as banker and providing financing. The Fed hired BlackRock Inc. to purchase these securities and handle the administration of the SPVs on behalf of the owner, the Treasury. In other words, the federal government is nationalizing large swaths of the financial markets. The Fed is providing the money to do it. BlackRock will be doing the trades. This scheme essentially merges the Fed and Treasury into one organization. So, meet your new Fed chairman, Donald J. Trump.

So Corona virus and global pandemic, mass unemployment and the Greatest Depression, even if the worst that could happen happens, Trump is now in a position to buy a stock market recovery by November 2020, which means that the US is surely headed for the biggest stock market manipulation in the history of fixed markets and financial rackets.

How Many Have Already Had the Corona Virus, Covid19?

Guido Fawkes reports:

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.

Related:
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John Ward (The Slog): THE INSANE FARCE OF LOCKDOWN
Lord Sumption, former UK judge speaks on UK overrection to Covid19:

RFA: Wuhan corona virus whistleblower disappeared
Reuters: China has at least 40,000 asymtomatic corona virus cases, spreaders, that is.
CNN: US had 80,000 flu related deaths in 2019-20.

Putting the human cost of the new Corona virus, Corvid-19, in perspective

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.

Related:
Piers Robinson: Is the Corona Virus a new 9/11, a new deep event?
Luis Miguel: How to Fight Coronavirus (Without Causing a Global Depression)
Gateway Pundit: EU Total Deaths Per Week for All 24 Reporting Countries Combined is LOWER than the Normal Weekly Rate in EVERY Age Group
John P. Ioannidis: A fiasco in the making? As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data
James Corbett: The Greatest Depression

Coronavirus Quote of the Day

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. Source

Related: 

SPR: A Swiss Doctor's Diary on Covid19

The Government Response to Covid19 : A Monstrous Boondoggle

Looks like the Corona virus pandemic panic is the result of bad science, social media hyperventilation and corporate media bullshit.

Thus: Coronavirus may have already infected half of UK, study says

... and killing how many?

Just over 400, for a fatality rate of about zero point three noughts three percent.

Mostly old or very old people. Mostly people with other conditions, probably several other conditions.

Except out of respect for the very small number of fatalities, I would say LOL.

Then there's this:

12 Experts Questioning the Coronavirus Panic:

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?” That’s missing."

And here are eleven other medical experts whose opinions on the Coronavirus outbreak contradict the official narratives of the MSM, and the memes so prevalent on social media.
For example, Dr Sucharit Bhakdi, a specialist in microbiology who was a professor at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz and head of the Institute for Medical Microbiology and Hygiene and one of the most cited research scientists in German history has this to say:

"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?

Related: 
The Blaze: Stanford medical professors: COVID-19 death toll estimates may be 'orders of magnitude' too high
Wall St. Journal Editorial (pdf): Estimates of Covid-19 fatality rate too high by orders of magnitude
Gov. UK: COVID-19 is no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious disease in the UK
Brabantian via Unz.com: Medical Professionals Expose Corona Virus Scam
Swiss Propaganda Research: Covid19 In Italy: 90% of the deceased are over 70, mean age of 81
The Scientific Media Centre: Expert reaction to unpublished paper modelling what percentage of the UK population may have been exposed to COVID-19
The Federalist: The Scientist Whose Doomsday Pandemic Model Predicted Armageddon Just Walked Back The Apocalyptic Predictions
Station Gossip: The Coronavirus Death Toll Is Rising At Different Rates In Different Countries. These Charts Help Explain Why
Financial Times: Coronavirus may have infected half of UK population — Oxford study
ZH: Prof Who Predicted 500K UK Deaths Now Says Under 20K Will Die, Peak In Two Weeks
ZH: 15-Minute Coronavirus Home Testing Kits Will Be Available To UK Public "Within Days"

Covid-19: Nobel Laureate Sees Light at the End of the Tunnel

If you are already tired of social distancing, compulsive hand washing, and empty grocery store shelves, here's an encouraging item from the Lost Angeles Times:

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.

But today, March 24, British Columbia announced 145 new cases, so maybe the worst is yet to come. 

Related: 
Nassim Taleb: The UK's coronavirus policy may sound scientific. It isn't:

... 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.

New York Post: Coronavirus may have already infected half of UK, study says

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."

If You Thought the Government Wanted to Protect You From the New Corona Virus, Think Again

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.

Seems like time for everyone to quarantine, take their vitamin D and zinc supplement, while avoiding toxic painkillers.

Yet China claims to have stopped this thing dead with only a few deaths out of 1.4 billion. Funny that?

The Novel Corona Virus: the Biggest Mass Killer That Kills Almost No One Since Mad Cow Disease

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).



And has the risk of contracting the novel Corona virus, Covid-19, been massively exaggerated by media and governments? So it would appear from this analysis of the epidemic aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship.

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:


Related:
Peter Hitchens: Is shutting down Britain – with unprecedented curbs on ancient liberties – REALLY the best answer?

Top Aerospace Engineer, Nikki Haley, Resigns From Board of Boeing Corporation

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?

COVID19 Death Toll in Italy: No Need to Panic Yet, or Probably, Ever

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.

Related:
Stat: John P.A. Ioannidis. A fiasco in the making? As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data

Vitamin D and Flu Resistance, or Why Quarantines May Backfire

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.

By Bill Sardi,  via Lew Rockwell.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). Governments have a different play book But governments have a different understanding.  The idea of social distancing is in vogue at the moment and its effectiveness appears to be complete but would never head off the onset of a viral epidemic when people are not aware of a need to maintain social distance. 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. Pray for an early spring Researchers note that COVID-19 coronavirus favors cool and dry climate and therefore, looking forward on the calendar to April and May, “a worst-case scenario of synchronous global pandemic is improbable. “ 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. Adults ought to be taking 8000 units of vitamin D per day; 2000 units per day for young children.

Related:
The Harvard Gazette: Study confirms vitamin D protects against colds and flu
Science News: Vitamin D protects against colds and flu, finds major global study
BMJ: Martineau et al., 2017. Vitamin D supplementation to prevent acute respiratory tract infections: systematic review and meta-analysis of individual participant data