Reposted from the Fabius Maximus website
By Larry Kummer, Editor / 7 Comments / 15 February 2020
Summary: The coronavirus epidemic provides amazing news. About the epidemic, about the barrage of fake news (that we love), about the fear it creates (that we love), and the wonderful hidden news that makes this a milestone in history.
“We need a vaccine against misinformation {and} a communications vaccine. We need to be able to communicate in a much more effective way.”
— Dr. Michael J Ryan at WHO’s Feb. 13 press briefing. He is Executive Director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme.
“News” about the coronavirus global pandemic!
If you have been reading the headlines from the “right” sources, you are terrified of the coronavirus pandemic. Pants-wetting is America’s new national pastime. No wonder our rulers and foes have contempt for us. Coronavirus disease is now known as COVID-19, the virus is SAR-CoV-2; details here.
Jan 23: Coronavirus Pandemic Simulation Run 3 Months Ago Predicts 65 Million People Could Die.
Jan 23: “Doomsday Clock Hits 100 Seconds To Midnight As Viral Pandemic Sweeps Globe.”
Jan 24: Coronavirus Pandemic Simulation Run 3 Months Ago Predicts 65 Million People Could Die.
Jan 25: “Martenson: The Risk Of A True Pandemic Is Higher Than We’re Being Told.”
Jan 26: “Is Another Black Death On The Way?”
Jan 29: “How Viral Pandemic Benefits The Globalist Agenda.”
Jan 30: “GnS Economics: Coronavirus Has The Potential To Trigger A Global Depression.”
Feb 1: “Fear Of The Coronavirus Is Spreading Like Wildfire All Over The Globe.” – I wonder why?
Feb 3: “Petition For WHO Director-General To Resign Reaches Over 210,000 Signatures.” – From where comes the misinformation about WHO?
Feb 3: “Brace For Impact: Global Pandemic Already Baked In” – “If we accept what is known about the virus, then logic, science and probabilities all suggest we brace for impact.”
Feb 5: “The Lies We Are Being Told About The Coronavirus.”
Feb 6: “Mish Exposes WHO’s Historical Controversies” – The usual nonsense. When dealing with disasters, some people always accuse agencies of acting too slow or too small. But I never hear people offering to give them the money to stand ready for any disaster, anywhere.
Feb 8: “The Pandemic Isn’t Ending, It’s Just The Beginning Of Global Disorder & Depression.”
Feb 10: “Even The Mainstream Media Is Now Admitting That Humanity Is Facing ‘A Perfect Storm’.”
Feb 11: “Why Is The Government Turning 11 Military Bases Inside The US Into Quarantine Camps?” – Remember the big camps supposedly being built before Y2k?
Feb 12: “‘All Disasters Are Not Created Equally’ – CDC Powerless In Halting Spread Of Covid-19.”
Feb 13: “In Shocking Admission, WHO Advisor Says Coronavirus May Infect Over 5 Billion People.”
Feb 14: “Chaos Is Coming: US To Start Testing People With Flu Symptoms.”
Feb 14: “What If… The November Election Has To Be Postponed?”
Feb 14: “Harvard Expert Warns, Coronavirus Likely Just Now ‘Gathering Steam.’”
These headlines are from ZeroHedge. These stories are not all exaggerations and misinformation. Some quote actual experts seeking their 15 minutes of fame. But they fail to provide any larger context, such as that by the experts at WHO and CDC. It adds up to fake news. They publish this because they are smart.
Gallup’s surveys of Confidence in America’s institutions show a collapse during the past four decades. Especially the well-deserved collapse of our confidence in newspapers from 41% to 23%. So, many Americans have turned to vendors of exciting misinformation (see other reasons for this here). This makes fake news a fast track to success on the Internet.
The bottom line: the scarier the story, the less accurate the stories. That’s true from Climate Change to Coronavirus. Institutions trying to keep us informed about these complex and poorly understood issues (e.g., IPCC and NOAA) are attacked all sides. Sadly, Americans often express the most confidence in the most bogus sources.
“While the virus spreads, misinformation makes the job of our heroic health workers even harder. It is diverting the attention of decision makers. And it causes confusion and spreads fear to the general public. At WHO, we’re not just battling the virus; we’re also battling the trolls and conspiracy theorists that push misinformation and undermine the outbreak response. As a Guardian headline noted today, “Misinformation on the coronavirus might be the most contagious thing about it.”
— Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of WHO, at a press briefing on February 8.
The hidden story
On January 25, I wrote that that “the 2019-nCoV virus shows that we’ve built a better world.” The response by public health agencies was faster and more powerful than anything before in history, a combination of global organization and high technology. China’s scientists isolated the virus on January 9 and sequenced it on January 10. On January 20 the CDC released a diagnostic test for the virus. On January 22, China quarantined the city of Wuhan.
Since then, China has implemented quarantines on a scale never before attempted. Coordinated by the WHO, the world’s nations implemented screening and research programs of unprecedented scale. See the full timeline here.
China has been hit hard by the epidemic. It combines poverty, high population density, and people living in close proximity with animals (even wild animals). It will have horrific epidemics. China’s people must deal with them. The rest of the world must act so that these epidemics do not devastate the other six-plus billion people
The great fear of the global public health agencies is that coronavirus would spread to poor nations with weak health infrastructure (those nations with strong ties to China are especially vulnerable) – from which it would spread around the world. So far that has not happened. WHO is working with those nations to make that less likely.
Every day the world becomes better able to defend itself against the coronavirus, with better screening mechanisms, better detection machinery, and better treatments (the first human trials of treatments have begun). Whatever happens next, this has made us better able to cope with it. That is why this is a milestone on the road to a better future.
The public health agencies are the core of our defenses. They are criticized for not accomplishing miracles with the small funds given them (see the Director-General speech yesterday). This shows the nature of our greatest problem: a failure to assume responsibility for our nation. But we can learn and do better.
From WHO’s February 14 Situation Report.
See the full report.
- Lots of bad news from China. But at their February 12 press conference, the Director-General said “The number of newly confirmed cases reported from China has stabilised over the past week but that must be interpreted with extreme caution.”
- No coronavirus cases have been reported in new nations since February 4.
- A total of 505 cases have been reported so far outside China, with 2 deaths (Feb 1 in the Philippines and in Japan on February 13).
- Other than those on the quarantined Japanese cruise ship (blue below), there have been few new cases reported outside China in the past 5 days. See the graph; ignore the blue segment (click to enlarge).
Conclusions
Events in the three weeks since my post have validated my original assessment. This is a milestone in history, no matter what happens next. But this is not the amazing news. It is that this remains hidden news.
The news media are no different than McDonald’s. Both work in the free market, serving us what we want. Americans today want exciting and scary news, not accurate news. We saw this in the hysteria during the 2009 swine flu and 2015 ebola epidemics. This weakness of ours almost guarantees that we will make poor decisions as citizens about America’s future – about coronavirus and our many other big challenges.
It’s easy to follow the coronavirus story
The World Health Organization provides daily information, from highly technical information to news for the general public.
- There is their daily situation report, with detailed numbers.
- The Director-General of WHO gives frequent briefings, which are quite insightful.
- Their daily press briefings have more information. An audio goes up quickly afterwards. A transcript is posted the next day.
For More Information
Ideas! For some shopping ideas, see my recommended books and films at Amazon. Also, see a story about our future: Ultra Violence: Tales from Venus.
Please like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. Also, see these posts …
- See the ugly cost of the next big flu pandemic. We can do more to prepare.
- Stratfor: The superbugs are coming. We have time to prepare.
- Posts debunking the hysteria about the 2009 swine flu in America.
- Posts debunking the hysteria about the 2015 ebola epidemic in America.
A great film about epidemics in the 21st century
Contagion (2011).
This shows the progress of a pandemic from patient Zero, through global devastation, to eventual victory by the world’s scientists. The summary from the studio makes it sounds like a horror flick. It isn’t, or at least not entirely one.
“When Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) returns to Minnesota from a Hong Kong business trip, she attributes the malaise she feels to jet lag. However, two days later, Beth is dead, and doctors tell her shocked husband (Matt Damon) that they have no idea what killed her. Soon, many others start to exhibit the same symptoms, and a global pandemic explodes. Doctors try to contain the lethal microbe, but society begins to collapse as a blogger (Jude Law) fans the flames of paranoia.”
The largest study of coronavirus patients so far suggests it could take up to 24 days after exposure for symptoms to show
What’s “left” unsaid is that they have mitigated its progress, maybe.
Larry,
It’s funny to watch skeptics respond to ‘worse case’ scarenarios the same way alarmist respond to
RCP 8.5
Could Covid be really really bad? yup. The combination of a high R0, asymptomatic transmission and relatively high CFR is a recipe for mathematical disaster. Could be.
Note I say mathematical.
Here is a cool model for England. I’m sure some journalist will misrepresent the output.
They HAVE TO. This is why you should never get your science from newspapers.
Get a BIBLIOGRAPHY from the news–sources, cites, etc,– and then dismiss every word
the journalist wrote. Read the science instead
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.12.20022566v1
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.12.20022566v1.full.pdf
Are models reality? Nope. They merely outline what is possible, given what we know and making
assumptions about what we don’t know. That is, knowing what we know about the past it would reckless
to disregard what we do in fact know, despite our ignorance about key things. Not every
question needs to be settled to understand the mathematical possibilities. Dont freak out over possibilities
and dont ignore them.
What should you do?
As with climate, start with no regrets actions. Stuff you should be doing REGARDLESS.
wash your hands more than you think you should, stop touching your damn face. Wear a mask if you are coughing, sneezing or otherwise potentially endangering others. Its not your air. Don’t go to work if you are sick FFS.
At some point here I will have to go back to Beijing.
meh.
Now
It’s funny to watch skeptics respond to ‘worse case’ scarenarios the same way alarmist respond to
RCP 8.5
Wonder why this is? Risk perceptions are Identity driven. If you fear the “other” then, of course,
you will be in a panic about diseases, crime, etc that result from “others” coming to your country.
and you will easily accept the math models of disease spread. without noting the assumptions
or knowing the difference between a projection ( conditional prediction) and a prediction.
If you mistrust FF industry, then, of course , you will be in a panic about risks that are industry related.
and will easily accept something like RCP 8.5 as a prediction, when it’s not.
These responses preserve Identity.
Folks will interpret according to their Identity until it becomes painful to do so.
lastly At some point there might be an interesting discussion about the right to spread rumors, we all know you cant shout fire in a crowded theatre. Can you shout Virus in
a crowded world? I suppose there will be an interesting discussion about the role of experts.
“Its not your air.”
Yeah, we know, its the IPCC’s atmosphere.
They hold especially dear the 0.04% CO2 – its like gold to them. Can’t have a glut.
Permission to breath, Sir?
My 2 cents.
if I pissed in your drinking water what would you say?
we share the air. that makes the problem tough
So, question, I left China on Jan 24th.
Would you be happy with me coughing next to you on the plane?
well would you?
IPCC’s air? nope. Not theirs, not yours, not mine. Ours.
governance of shared resources is tough
I put a lot of NOx in the air today – diesel ya know.
How dare I?
Just now I breathed out 4% CO2.
How dare I?
How dare you, self esteemed Squire, lecture anyone on “our” air!
So piss in someone else’s exhaust.
We certainly do not share the same ideas, which after all is what this all about.
remind me to cough on you.
Steven Mosher, good comment. Thanks.
welcome
“Larry,
It’s funny to watch skeptics respond to ‘worse case’ scarenarios the same way alarmist respond to
RCP 8.5”
Another absurd analogy. Whereas just about exactly zero people have been killed or hospitalized by anthropogenic SLR, Hurricanes Tornadoes or extreme weather, and the KNOWN benefits if CO2 are immense, this virus has very rapidly killed far more then SARS or MERS, and has a manifesting R-naught in China that is worthy of great concern. Additionally Chinese reaction to this virus is extreme and a real threat to their economy and to the global economy; and the videos leaking out of China, people lined up for blocks trying to get medical aid, people dying in those lines, reports from Doctors in China of 10 plus day hospitalization requirements for 20 percent of the infected, which overwhelms the medical system,
reports of many dying of this virus never getting added to the infected numbers, reports of many just going home to die, etc, are all real events with exactly zero real world correlation to results of CAGW
Therefore it is my perspective that if you wish to make a case that the world has greatly increased its ability to respond to viral epidemics, and that there is no reason to panic, and much of what is published is click bate for readership, then it us best to use less insulting and very inaccurate analogies.
Steve Mosher posted: “As with climate, start with no regrets actions. Stuff you should be doing REGARDLESS.”
And what person, committee or organization determines what “stuff” all of humanity should be doing REGARDLESS?
And if the worldwide cost of the “no regrets actions” exceeds, say, twice the world gross domestic product (over $180 trillion USD) over the next two years, is that OK with all the world’s nations assuming each is to pay their “fair share”?
“And what person, committee or organization determines what “stuff” all of humanity should be doing REGARDLESS?”
Typically the folks in charge. And note, it’s not the same for all folks.
There is no supposition that No regrets policies will be the same everywhere.
“And if the worldwide cost of the “no regrets actions” exceeds, say, twice the world gross domestic product (over $180 trillion USD) over the next two years, is that OK with all the world’s nations assuming each is to pay their “fair share”?”
Seems like you don’t know the meaning of no regrets.
Example of no regrets.
1. You should probably NOT distort the insurance market by subsidizing the rates of folks
who build in places known to flood.
2. You should probably control underbrush in fire prone areas.
3. You should probably not burn dung for cooking food or warmth.
4. You should probably not shut down nukes before their life is up.
5. Energy efficiency is a good thing.
No regrets. wash your damn hands and dont touch your face, and cover your mouth when you cough.
You forgot “Do not get a tattoo that says No Regerts”.
A lot of leeway and differences in perceived level of importance are contained in the two words “should probably”.
I have no regrets is stating such.
“the folks in charge”.
Interesting, that’s Gleichschaltung, the folks (corporate governance) “in charge” after an “emergency”, in charge after an Reichstagsbrand, or “climate emergency”.
Ever heard or this stuff?
They liked then to issue little yellow diamonds with no regrets.
In fact to this day they have never regretted.
And yes, it is true, it’s not the same for all folks – see the famine in India, or the “famine” in Ireland – no regrets, the market was protected with the British Empire, Squire.
You certainly qualify for de-carbonizer Dr. Schellnhuber’s title, CBE – Commander of the British Empire, Squire. Give Her Majesty a call.
take your concerns to your local politician.
You forgot to mention, “You should probably express yourself civilly as an adult in the company of equals, even if you don’t quite believe they are, rather than as a snarky college sophomore running his/her mouth for the pleasure of it.
No regrets. Edit your own damn comments like you have some idea of how grownups interact.
cover your mouth when you cough
you see you have a choice whether to read my snark or not.
maybe folks sitting next to you have no choice but to breathe.
It’s pretty simple and you don’t disagree, why else would you parry logic with
weak comments about style?
you only comment about style because you have no actual argument.
Like liberals who object to Trumps style
Mosher: No, I’ve made substantive arguments in other comments. You are outside your expertise here. You’re just another guy on the internet with an opinion, a lack of manners and outsized arrogance.
What a lazy, disjointed comment…and too cute for words.
It’s not that hard to figure why skeptics of climate change might be equally skeptical of government pronouncements that COVID is under control, nothing to see here, so move on. Most Western observers assume the Chinese numbers are substantial underestimates. What other claims might be happy talk to put a better face on things?
Kummer and Mosher deign to psychologize their opponents, but neither Kummer nor Mosher stand above this fray like God — or Santa Claus deciding who’s been bad and who’s been good. It’s hard to miss by their smugness their personal investment in being clever and contrarian.
..this is the same China that tried to cover up SARS
Exactly and we are to believe they are working really hard to be transparent with the number of people dead, dying, and ill. They waited until their system was overwhelmed with the ill and dying. They waited while 5 million people escaped the epicenter to jump on cruise ships, airplanes, buses, and cars leaving behind the horror – they thought they were leaving it behind – only to take it with them.
Who were these people who escaped? Were they frightened researchers, doctors, nurses, government leaders, rich people who could afford to get out before the city was shut down?
They all knew and did nothing, said nothing to their own fellow citizens and people began to die.
You continue with nonsense; “It’s funny to watch skeptics respond to ‘worse case’ scarenarios the same way alarmist respond to
RCP 8.5”
My response was here https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/02/15/amazing-but-hidden-news-about-coronavirus/#comment-2918191
and elsewhere.
BTW, many of the alarmist responses to RCP 8.5 are peer reviewed reports by lettered scientist, and those papers are regularly ripped apart here and elsewhere, yet you Mr Mosher do not participate in the critiques of these published alarmist papers, yet are quick to come here and make horribly false analogies.
“BTW, many of the alarmist responses to RCP 8.5 are peer reviewed reports by lettered scientist, and those papers are regularly ripped apart here and elsewhere, yet you Mr Mosher do not participate in the critiques of these published alarmist papers, yet are quick to come here and make horribly false analogies.”
1. never seen a paper ripped apart here. Ripping would consist of publishing data and methods
Only person who does that is willis.
2. It’s not an analogy. Its an observation. Analogy is “dogs are like people”
3. Err I have been critical of RCP 8.5 since 2015 at least.
4. Logically my criticism of 8.5 or lack of criticism has ZERO to do with the argument
I am making:
To recap: People judge risk based on their identity. In general, you probably judge the risk from foreigners higher than you judge the risks from corporations, and leftist do the opposite.
It is very hard to be objective in risk assessment because all risk is uncertain, by its nature
It ain’t my “Identity” that I fear for. My papers and estate will survive me. It is my life next autumn, next year, and loved one’s lives that drive me to seek safety, Steve Mosher. In Wuhan, where I have an old friend in lockdown, I appear to fit the high risk category.
You are out of touch with real life and real people: too long in SF? (I do have old friends living there, too. One who could not attend the World Mobile Congress in Barca, cancelled for…irrational “reasons,” I’m told.)
“We need a vaccine against misinformation {and} a communications vaccine. We need to be able to communicate in a much more effective way.”
The vaccine involves humor, as when the modern Crassus, Sir Mike Bloomberg, mini Mike as President Trump tweets, teams up with none other than …. Hillary. Also from ZH :
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/bloomberg-considers-hillary-running-mate
Even if Fake, it is Hilarious.
The problem is that nobody knows for sure how severe the situation is, and then the most scary stories sells best.
If WHO and the Chinese reporting are correct, the rate of infections in China peaked February 5. at 3893 cases per day. The last three days have had fewer than 2000 new cases per day.
The infection rate outside China hopefully peaked February 11th at 76 new cases.
/Jan
“The last three days have had fewer than 2000 new cases per day.’
I do not believe that to be true. Please verify.
According to WHO (see https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/situation-reports/ ):
February 13 report: 1826 new cases reported globally in last 24 hours
February 14 report: 2056 new cases reported globally in last 24 hours
February 15 report: 1527 new cases reported globally in last 24 hours
These three days average to 1803 new cases per day, which is less than 2000 new cases per day.
QED.
Note: February 16 report: 1278 new cases reported globally in last 24 hours
..but it only takes one in the right place
Two Japanese tourists had it in Hawaii on vacation….
Did they catch it in Hawaii?
…catch it in Japan before they left…passed it around on the plane and hotel?
passed it around on the plane when they returned to Japan?
..or even catch it on the plane on the way to Hawaii??
Gordon Dressler: Sure those are the official numbers. But do you recall way back to Feb. 12 — five days ago, when many were breathing a sigh of relief that COVID was leveling off — then BOOM! a 15.1k increase in a single day.
Of course, you conveniently begin your statistics list *the day after* that huge jump. QED indeed.
The Chinese changed their standard for confirmed cases from a test kit positive to a clinical diagnosis. They were running out of test kits and/or getting backed up. Not surprisingly.
Now the case numbers are leveling off again. Maybe it’s good news. But I doubt it. They’ve quarantined millions of people and their system is overwhelmed.
I suspect they are now reporting only as many can as they can manage to report. Who knows how many people are sick in their homes and uncounted.
huxley,
1) The “BOOM” you reference was due largely to defining a better, more accurate method to diagnose/test for novel coronavirus infection, but a delaying in reporting from certain regions is China also contributed to the jump.
2) I begin my listing of days directly in response the request to validate that there had been “less than 2000 new cases per day of confirmed coronavirus infection over the last three days” (see David A’s February 16, 2020, 11:00 am post above). There was nothing “convenient” in doing this.
3) Your are completely free to believe in any conspiracy theories that you want, as well as to imply that other WUWT posters have sinister motives for their posting . . . but that doesn’t mean that you are correct . . . good luck with that approach in your life.
One issue I have is the assertion that “every one is panicking”. I don’t know where this idea came from. I open the newspapers and I see no end of articles on Meghan Markle and other celebrities, on Brexit, Boris Johnson, the Labour party leadership contest (yes, I live in the UK), mumps vaccines, high cost of electric charging points, and a single page on the COVID-19, with the title that half of Britons would fall ill in the worse case scenario, according to the chief medical officer. The term “fall ill” is not an alarmist phrase.
Similarly, I have not overheard people talking about “coronavirus”, there is no hoarding, people appear quite disinterested. You have to go onto YouTube to see alarmist reporting, after you wade through usual channels on politics, cars, sports, kittens, movies and all the rest of it. That you will find alarmist reporting on a platform with millions of channels is completely unsurprising. Panicking? Yawning more like.
Good post. That public disinterest, and the very false comparison to CAGW alarmists have a string negative affect on an otherwise informative post.
Kids love scare stories, and so do many grownups, it’s remnant of our self-preservation evolution development. Here is one more version:
“Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe of the Buckingham Astrobiology Center contributed to a paper submitted last week to The Lancet in which he proposes that a meteorite which crashed in October 2019 in Sonjyan City (also called Songyuan) some 2200 km (1360 miles) north of Wuhan, the center of the coronavirus outbreak, may have spread “hundreds of trillions of infective viral particles” that were “embedded in the form of fine carbonaceous dust” as it blazed through the Chinese atmosphere until it fell to Earth. Wickramasinghe is a well-known British mathematician, astronomer and astrobiologist who strongly supports the idea of panspermia – space rocks and spacecraft carrying and spreading living organisms around the universe.”
Basic requirement for any, repeat, any reporting on any ‘medical epidemic/pandemic’.
1. Define what a pandemic means: it is not threatening to human survival unless it will kill 100m+ in a year. With a global population of 9 billion, 100 million at least die every year through natural wastage.
2. Do not prematurely define a pandemic based on very, very early statistics. It is like calling a 2 year old Einstein. You may be right, far far more likely you are talking baloney.
3. Do not pronounce humans incapable of overcoming a new disease vector naturally without explaining that you manufactured the weapon to make it not so. That is the only justification for knowing that the human immune system will not overcome this disease: you made a biological weapon.
4. Do not proclaim with certainty that the vector will spread globally where food practices may be radically different. We have no sign of an emerging pandemic in the UK despite a few cases emerging from those returning from Wuhan.
5. DO say that you are monitoring the situation and the trigger for global worrying is 1 million serious cases. Not 1 million sniffles: 1 million people needing hospitalisation and in danger of dying if untreated. At least then educated people will take you seriously.
6. Do NOT say that experts are always accurate. Foot and Mouth in the UK twenty years ago was a classic example of appalling computer modelling by ‘experts’ who had never worked on a farm in their lives. All the model assumptions proved to be WRONG. Stop assuming modellers have the first competence until the real world proves that they do. They are grant seeking hustlers seeing a new gravy train……
The scaremongering by the western media is outrageous and criminally irresponsible. The headline story in the UK Sunday Mail newspaper today reads that ‘the global death toll has surpassed 1,600’. Of course 99%+ of those deaths are in China and virtually all in Wuhan still, months after it first appeared. When we reach the level of the swine flu pandemic of 2009, when nearly 400,000 cases and over 200 deaths were reported in the UK alone, then we can start to panic. Yesterday NBC informed us that there have been 14,000 deaths from flu so far this winter in the USA, a strain of flu not seen since 1993.
Bad flu season in the US in 2017-18 bumped off 80,000 for your info and do you remember that?
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/09/26/health/flu-deaths-2017–2018-cdc-bn/index.html
and the world’s had flu pandemics from time to time-
https://www.verywellhealth.com/deaths-from-flu-2633829
The deaths from Coronavirus compared to infected are running at 2-3% and yes that could rise but then there’s those with light symptoms that go undiagnosed. Clearly not a bug you want to catch but like flu most at risk with low immune systems or respiratory problems are dying from secondary pneumonia.
Fake model numbers. The number for reported flu death are 10-20 times lower.
Evidence?
Robert Koch-Institut reports. They state estimated numbers for Germany as 25k, but the really reported deaths are around 1000-1500. From page 135 – https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/Infekt/Jahrbuch/Jahrbuch_2018.pdf?__blob=publicationFile
So we should trust the Chinese and the World Health Organisation?
Hmmmmmmmmm… That was me breathing through my nebulizer.
From the Telegraph:
Prof Neil Ferguson, professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College, has warned that the world is “in the early phases of a global pandemic”.
He said Britain is probably only picking up around one in three cases, focusing on those coming in to the country, when cases may have arrived – and gone undetected – before restrictions set in.
“Surveillance has started in hospitals across the UK of pneumonia cases, that will give us a proper picture,” he said.
“Our best estimate is that transmission in the UK will get going in the next few weeks; unless we are very lucky probably peaking 2 to 3 months after that,” he said. “If it truly establishes itself in terms of true person-to-person transmission it will behave like a flu pandemic, maybe up to 60 percent of the population being affected but most of those people having very mild symptoms.”
He suggested that 400,000 people in the UK could die from it in the next 12 months, based on estimates of a 1 per cent mortality rate and an infection rate of 60 percent of the population.
The world is 4 weeks behind the Chinese curve… 21. January – 278 cases, 4 dead. The world outside China today minus the cruise ship – 338 cases, 3 dead. But we are completely safe, nothing to see here, move along…
Don’t discount this is China and Chinese government.
Not to say they’ve taken advantage of the epidemic but one should notice included in their massive response has been the isolation and shutting down all dissent (think Hong Kong) and it’s spread. Those alive in 1989 might recall their response. Seems they had to move in troops from outside the effected areas. This time around, no need to shuffle troops since they have an easy to understand public health crisis and just coincided with their internal dissent crisis.
Don’t forget this is the government that enforced it’s one baby policy which routinely killed babies who just happened to be girls. Population control is still a big concern. Allowing the very young and th elderly to meet a fairly quick end helps reduce medical costs since they consume more health care than any other segment.
One should not be surprised to learn all those videos of China “rounding up” those possibly infected could actually be dissenters heading off to the gulag. Even the “young, otherwise healthy” MD that first broke the news somehow died as one of the few outside the greatest at risk groups.
Regardless of the actual story behind the Wuhan virus and it’s spread, the Chinese government steps are ones that are typical of controlling dissent and whether it’s because of “not letting a good crisis go to waste” or China just having learned lessons from Tiananmen Square, they, for sure, are using this to their advantage.
Then there’s reality. Track the spread of flus. They’re highly contagious, as contagions go. Imagine employing the same government actions we’ve seen and on the same time line. Would government responses to date have stopped the spread? Given the Wuhan purported contagious periods, the start time of a few months ago, modern travel, etc., it’s more likely millions and millions and millions of people have already been exposed? That’s how models work.
Well I think the first thing our fearless leaders should announce is no airconditioning for publicly paid officials to nip a couple of global threats in the bud and show they’re serious about these doomings. I know the schoolkiddies and uni students will be applauding this urgent measure as a rebellionistas against extinction. The masks over all their gobs will be a great improvement too.
I’m going to bookmark this page.
I have a feeling it will be a great place to leave the comment “Whelp that didn’t age well” in about 3 months time, when every single person in China will either be infected, recovered, or dead.
And once the number of active cases reaches a number so great that people who think they’re not infected flee and pour across China’s borders on foot if needed, there will be no containing the spread to the rest of the world, because many who flee will be unknowingly infected.
And no, I haven’t read the WHO’s daily report. But I know what the graph of an exponential function looks like. I suppose I should believe the WHO instead of my own lying eyes, though, because otherwise I’m just like those AGW fellers.
We are going to need a one-world government to protect us from our popular fears of possibly deadly things due to our interconnectedness. And that one-world government will be the virus. I think back on witch doctors and village elders and wonder if anything has changed except the interconnected sensitivity to fear.
COVID-19 is the reductio ad absurdum of globalism.
Like most topics today there are forecasts for this virus to be almost benign through catastrophic. The truth as usual will be in the middle. Exactly where nobody knows yet. I have read many reports including on zerohedge and many read as believable but of course cant all be accurate. Some other authors defend their position arrogantly as well as if only they know the truth. An important consideration is that amongst those seemingly concerned are some experts not usually given to exaggeration. Some from China at least have first hand knowledge.
Comparisons to climate change are not much use. I have been interested in climate for 60 years and kept my own records from age 11. It is easy to form an opinion based on experience. One way to judge any temperature rise here in Canada where I live is simple. In Fall and Spring the temperature changes at around 2 degrees Celsius per week over most of the country. Hard to believe an additional degree or 2 would make much difference. Ironic that our prime minister is such an advocate for carbon caps when most Canadians would welcome a shorter winter. But my knowledge and experience with viruses is entirely second hand. Because of this I have to read and evaluate whatever is available and will still most likely be effective in this. As everyone else I will have to wait and see what actually happens. At that time those ” experts ” who were the closest to reality will declare they were correct.
I remember a financial guru was once asked how he was successful. His answer was something like start with 1000 analysts and each toss a coin. Those with heads were correct in their forecast. Repeat until only a few remain and these become the experts.
And this article this morning
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8009669/Did-coronavirus-originate-Chinese-government-laboratory.html
Mac
To get an idea of the value of this article, I checked on something that ought to be easily verifiable.
The article states that there are no bats native to that part of China, Wuhan:
“It describes how the only native bats are found around 600 miles away from the Wuhan seafood market and that the probability of bats flying from Yunnan and Zhejiang provinces was minimal.”
This is as false as false can get.
A search quickly turned up a summary of bats in China, and details the over 100 species of bats that have their range at least partly in China.
Just glancing through some of them, it is obvious that there are in fact upwards of dozens of different bats native to that part of China. Many of them are listed as widespread and existing in large numbers.
Besides, no one who has suggested that the virus came from bats ever said anything about the bats at the market flying there. It is a market, and animals are clearly being brought from far and wide, as in most places in the world and most types of food.
It also says that no one eats bats there…but this is clearly false, as they are known to be considered a delicacy there.
One need not look far to find that yes bats are definitely eaten there.
So basically every thing that is said in the article that can be checked, can be readily proven false in a few seconds.
Sources:
Bats in China
http://www.bio.bris.ac.uk/research/bats/China%20bats/
Bats as food in China:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_as_food
Then it mentions the specific species of bat with this type of corona virus, Rhinolophus affinis.
And again, a quick check shows that the range of this species includes that part of China.
Wuhan is approximately due north of Hing Kong and due west of Shanghai.
Conclusion: Article contains obvious BS,
Your link to WIK does not contradict the reports that bats were not being served in the seafood market in Wuhan at this time. ( It was reported that the bats at this time were mostly or completely hibernating) Dozens of people stated that bats were not in the current market in Wuhan
At what time?
No one knows how much time might have passed between the index case and the first person who got sick enough to go to the hospital.
It seems unlikely one or two people getting what appears to be a cold of the flu would raise huge alarm bells.
And all that time the virus was spreading, under this scenario.
Besides, I never spoke to those points.
The assertion that no native bats exist within less than 600 miles of that city are false, as is the assertion that no one eats bat there.
Moreover, in the case of SARS and MERS there were intermediate hosts, as it has been theorized is the case here.
There are many zoonotic diseases in the world, and AFAICT all of the bad and new diseases are the result of a disease jumping from animals to people.
It is not rare.
Every case of rabies is such an event.
What makes SARS and Ebola and a few others so bad is that once one person gets infected, it spreads from person to person.
When it is airborne, it can spread widely before anyone is aware.
Long incubation, most cases being mild, and a long time between onset of symptoms, and another long time before passing to the lower respiratory infection end stage…each of these means something can spread much farther before anyone knows a novel virus has appeared and is spreading.
This exact situation has occurred many times with various ailments, and it has been the subject of books, movies, papers, public health alerts, for decades.
Horizontal gene transfer in a coinfected individual is not a rare or unanticipated event either.
The old Chinese proverb states that a virus gently flapping wings in China has the power to dramatically affect everything on the other side of the world.
Sensible article. I’m sorry, but I don’t agree that “people want exciting scary news, not accurate news”, or that citizens will make poor decisions about America’s future. Absolutely not true. Most people have common sense, and they are quite aware of fake news. To describe citizens this way is inaccurate and frankly, condescending and arrogant. The American people put President Trump in the White House, because the majority are smart, not idiots.
The paper I read states that:
“No significant disparities in ACE2 gene expression were found between racial groups (Asian vs
Caucasian), age groups (>60 vs <60) or gender groups (male vs female). However, we
observed significantly higher ACE2 gene expression in smoker samples compared to nonsmoker
samples. This indicates the smokers may be more susceptible to 2019-nCov and
thus smoking history should be considered in identifying susceptible population and
standardizing treatment regimen."
Larry- there is no the peer-reviewed paper that proves COVID-19 miraculously jumped from species to species, then arrived at a Wuhan wet market and spread like wildfire…
That’s just a story too. Another conspiracy theory that should not be trafficked.
Fact is we don’t know the basics here… That said the counter-theory that the COVID-19 is a bio-engineered chimera that escaped from the Wuhan BSL-4 lab is more credible to many observers.
Here’s the basic narrative:
https://harvardtothebighouse.com/2020/01/31/logistical-and-technical-analysis-of-the-origins-of-the-wuhan-coronavirus-2019-ncov/
You think zoonosis is some ultrarare event?
Miraculous even?
Diseases spread between people and animals all the time.
Public health authorities have long considered it merely a matter of time before exactly such an event as this resulted in something really bad.
This does not seem really bad.
Really bad is 35% of people infected ending up dead.
Really bad is mostly healthy adults dying, or equal numbers of all ages of people dying.
SARS, MERS, HIV-AIDS, Ebola, plague, anthrax, rabies, tularemia, West Nile Virus, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Eastern Equine Encephalitis, Listeria, Salmonella, Toxoplasmosis…the list is endless…are all diseases that have jumped and continue to jump from animals to people.
Influenza is a perfect example.
It can kill massive numbers of people at times.
Who thinks the world has seen the last widespread massively fatal pandemic?
They used to occur far more often.
Chances are that several that might have become one of them have been prevented from doing so by a combination of modern sanitization and medical care, and rapid response by public health authorities to prevent or limit the spread and/of impact of novel illnesses.
Corona viral illness spreading to people in that very part of the world, and being very bad, is not even rare.
Try reading the linked article. You’re just shooting off your mouth.
I read through NM’s post and could not find anything un-factual nor hysterical. He seems to be unusually well informed.
The headlines could just as easily be applied to “climate change virus”.
People currently killed by climate change? About zero, plus or minus zero, within reasonable confidence levels.
This virus has already killed far more people than the previous recent disease scares, and deserves to be taken very seriously. I’m going to watch the statistics from that Japanese cruise ship. That should provide something more reliable than what comes out of China. Either way, there’s not really much that can be done on an individual level.
I am going to be watching that cruise ship as well – from what was it? 240 or so to 335 people with the virus so far, as the U.S. is removing most of the people on that cruise ship because they are Americans. They are not allowing any one of them to fly if they have a fever. However, that seems to be the problem – people can carry the virus without having a fever and that means they are spreading it far and wide if they allow these people to get on a plane and fly to some military base to be quarantined . The flight crew should also be part of the quarantine unless they are wearing haz-mat suits.
No so Ellison. they brought 14 active cases back and are not including them in our count of 15 cases because they began outside the US–seems silly to me as most of the cases began outside the US and came in on the planes.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-idUSKBN20B014
Really? Not reporting them because they got sick outside of the U.S.? So if more people are found to have this virus having contracted it outside of the U.S. and they somehow get here the CDC and the government aren’t counting them? This is like the most ridiculous thing I’ve read so far …
Guess you can’t believe everything you read about how many people on that cruise ship have this virus. Thanks.
How long do you think it will be before climate change is blamed for the coronavirus. It’ll be about bats shifting their range in response to changing temperatures or something – you know how these stories typically go.
Such an ignorant patronising article. Not what one expects to find on wuwt.
I read this post as the antithesis of WUWT. It reads as an ad hominem attack on Zero Hedge and any information they, or anyone else that questions WHO for that matter, post. There is information behind the headlines listed. Just looking at the last in the list I clicked through to an interview with a Professor of Epidemiology, Marc Lipsitch. Seemed like a credible interview. No hair on fire.
Let’s be very specific here rather than brushing broad strokes of slander. You have characterized, through your post, that Professor Lipsitch is just seeking his “15 minutes of fame.”
Do you stand behind that characterization?
Re: “The great fear of the global public health agencies is that coronavirus would spread to poor nations with weak health infrastructure (those nations with strong ties to China are especially vulnerable) – from which it would spread around the world. ”
I thought the African nations – Nigeria in particular, handled the Ebola epidemic very well. When it comes to terrifying pandemics, they’ve “been there and done that”. It’s about time we stopped patronising them.