By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
In recent weeks, behind the scenes, a battle royal has been raging among the epidemiologists advising governments. On one side are the activists, who argue that the Chinese virus is both more infectious and likely to prove more fatal than influenza, a deadly combination.
The activists’ strongest arguments are that in the early stages of a pandemic the daily growth rate is exponential; that in the absence of determined control measures a quarter of the global population would be infected by the end of May; and that continued exponential growth at the daily compound rate of almost 20% (entailing a doubling every 3.8 days) that prevailed until mid-March would rapidly overwhelm not only the hospitals but also the morgues, as has already happened in Spain and northern Italy.
On the other side are the passivists, who argue that after a few weeks in lockdown people will cease to observe the restrictions, introducing a second wave of infection. They hold that the best thing to do is let everyone become infected, let the old and the sick die, let the health services collapse, and leave the population to acquire what the lamentable Chief Officer of Health in London described at a press conference some weeks ago as “herd immunity”. The international outcry at this crass remark led the British government to backtrack at once.
I declare an interest. When it comes to preventing pandemics, I am an activist. The earlier one interferes with the exponential growth of a pathogen as infectious as the Chinese virus, the less the cost in lives and treasure. When HIV first emerged, I minuted the Cabinet to the effect that there should be universal testing, followed by immediate, compulsory and permanent isolation of carriers. No such action was taken, unfortunately. The result is that some 50 million have died of HIV, another 500,000 a year die of it, and the cost of treating those who are HIV-positive is heavy. Nearly all those deaths were preventable.
The Chinese virus is considerably more infectious and more fatal than HIV. Realizing this, the British Prime Minister, after weeks of listening to the internal wranglings between the activist and passivist public-health scientists, who were unable to agree among themselves, took a command decision to lock down the United Kingdom firmly, completely and for as long as might be necessary. He was persuaded by modeling from Imperial College, London, showing just how rapidly the National Health Service would be overwhelmed if things went on as the passivists wished. It was clear to the Prime Minister that patients suffering from diseases other than the Chinese virus would be placed at risk as the health system collapsed.
Mr Trump, who, like Mr Johnson (and me) was by instinct reluctant to subject the entire population to house arrest and to cause dislocation and damage to the economy, eventually came to a similar view. The situation is more complicated in the United States, where the individual states rather than the Federal administration are chiefly responsible for public-health measures. But in many states, as in many nations round the world, lockdowns of varying severity have been introduced. The activists have thus far prevailed.
But are the lockdowns working? A simple performance indicator, clear enough to show people whether or not the house arrest and related measures to which they are being subjected should be persisted in, is necessary. Remarkably, however, no such benchmark test is yet available. Therefore, I have been researching the statistics and propose the following test. The reference period for the test is the three weeks from January 22 to 14 March 2020, the date on which Mr Trump declared a national emergency. During the reference period, the mean compound daily growth rate in confirmed cases was 19.8%. Confirmed cases were thus doubling worldwide every 3.8 days.
To demonstrate the extent to which mitigation measures are or are not working, the benchmark test calculates the mean daily compound growth rate in confirmed cases of infection for successive seven-day periods ending on every day from March 14 to the present. Here is the test for the world excluding China and occupied Tibet (whose Communist regime cannot be trusted to tell the truth about case numbers, or about anything else much); for the United States, and for the two worst-affected European nations, Italy and Spain:
All four nations show an inexorable reduction in the daily rate of growth (though it remains dangerously high). The most impressive results are those for Italy, the first country in Europe to impose a strictish lockdown. During the reference period, the Italian growth rate was more than 30% per day, and cases were doubling every 2.6 days. But the lockdown is beginning to work. In the week to April 2, the daily growth rate in Italy was down to 5.2%. Even that is an alarming value: it would lead to a doubling of cases every two weeks. But the trend in the daily growth rate is firmly downward, and it will probably continue that way – provided, that is, that people can see, as they can from this test, that the lockdown is indeed working. In the world outside China, as more and more countries introduce lockdowns, the daily growth rate has declined from 19.8% in the reference period to 11% in the week to April 2. In the United States, the daily growth rate has declined a little, from 23.1% in the reference period to 16.2% in the week to April 1.
Here is the benchmark test for four more countries: three in Europe and one for South Korea. All four countries show declines in the daily growth rate of confirmed cases. But in South Korea the pandemic is almost under control:
The reason for the success in South Korea is that, following the SARS epidemic, the public health authorities fully understood the paramount importance of very widespread testing, immediate isolation of carriers and vigorous contact-tracing, including use of the cellphone network to identify where the carriers had been and whom they had met. The EU has picked up this idea, though the UK – in this as in much else – lags behind.
In particular, ever since the SARS epidemic the Korean public health authorities have maintained a very large testing capacity. They activated it as soon as they realized that the director of the World Health Organization, who has close links to the Peking regime and had as recently as January been parroting Chinese propaganda to the effect that the virus could not be transmitted from human to human, could not be relied upon.
Britain will be calling for an independent investigation of the WHO’s gross misconduct in this affair as soon as the pandemic is under control.
South Korea also adopted national lockdown. The public health authorities also recommend use of personal protective equipment (notably face-masks) not only by health professionals but also by the general public when outdoors. In this respect, too, the South Korean public health authorities disagree with the WHO, which has today announced it is reconsidering its notion that masks are valueless. The director of Korea’s public health authority bluntly says that the evidence that masks work is overwhelming.
Following his advice rather than that of the useless WHO, I wear a full-face motorcycle helmet and gauntlets whenever I leave our own grounds. Full-face protection is useful, according to the South Koreans, because the Chinese virus can enter the body not only through the nose and mouth but also through the mucous membranes of the eyes. Even wearing spectacles provides some measure of additional protection. As South Korea’s expert made clear in an excellent recent interview, it is necessary to obtain every advantage one can, because each additional barrier to transmission helps to bring the pandemic under control.
It is South Korea, then, that provides the clearest evidence that prompt, determined and vigorous control measures work, and work well.
Both Germany and France have done quite well in beginning to control the pandemic. Their mean daily growth rates were down from more than 30% in the benchmark period to around 10% in the week to April 2. The United Kingdom, however, had a daily growth rate of 16.4% in that week: a value scarcely better than the global 19.8% during the reference period from January 22 to March 14. The UK is the worst-performing of the 12 territories tracked here.
Germany and France both took advantage of the EU’s system for supplying both testing kits and personal protective equipment for health professionals. The UK, however, failed to respond to the EU’s email in time. Worse, British civil servants are so used to acting simply as passive agents for the Brussels tyranny-by-clerk that they were more or less completely unprepared for a pandemic, and the flapping-around is saddening to watch.
The former director of “Public Health England”, a grim but useless bureaucracy, was asked four times yesterday why it was that Germany had tested more than 500,000 of its citizens in all, while Britain had not yet managed to test 10,000 in any one day. He could not answer.
Here are benchmark tests for four more countries: Canada, Australia, Sweden and Ireland. Note that for Ireland the benchmark period is the two weeks to March 14 rather than three weeks, because Ireland began to report cases later than other countries.
From the point of view of the passivists, Sweden is the most interesting result. For its public health authorities are passivists: they have not introduced a lockdown. Yet their daily growth rate has fallen to 10%, among the lowest anywhere. Nevertheless, there is growing concern among health professionals in Sweden that the do-little option may yet prove fatal. It is possible, then, that Sweden will follow other European countries in imposing a strict lockdown in the near future. In the past ten days, other countries have seen a decline in the daily growth rate of confirmed cases, but Sweden, uniquely, has not.
Overall, the benchmark test show – at this early stage – that the lockdowns are beginning to work. The daily growth rate in confirmed cases is falling in those countries that have been locked down, and is tending to fall fastest in countries with the most determined control measures.
The next few weeks will be particularly interesting, because it is in the nature of exponential growth curves that, just as the growth is very rapid if control measures are not tough enough, the slowing of growth is just as rapid when the measures really begin to bite.
Over the next few weeks, the extent of the lockdowns’ success or failure will become evident. For this reason, I propose to update the benchmark tables daily until further notice.
It should be made clear that the benchmark test is not policy-prescriptive. It merely shows, in a dispassionate fashion based on the available data (warts and all) the extent to which control measures are or are not working, territory by territory and for the world excluding China.
Finally, the question arises whether the official data on which I have relied are trustworthy. The answer is that they are not, for the lack of widespread testing has entailed a very substantial understatement of the numbers infected.
Take the United States as an illustration. On average the Chinese virus takes five days to incubate and a further 16 days to kill those to whom it proves fatal. The least unreliable of the official statistics are those for deaths caused by the virus. On February 29 the United States reported its first death from the virus. The World Health Organization, which had originally estimated a death rate of 2% (as it had with SARS, whose death rate was actually 9.6%), now estimates it at 3.4%. In that event, 21 days previously, on February 8, there must have been 1 / 3.4%, or 29 cases. However, only five cases were reported. But if there were 29 cases on February 8, and if the growth rate for unreported cases is the same as for reported cases, the true number of cases by February 29 was not 5, as reported, but more than 2300.
Performing a similar calculation for each day until April 2 would lead us to conclude that there were not 26,500 cases of infection in total by that day, as reported by the U.S. administration, but 36 million. Curiously, if this were true it would not be all bad news. For the death rate would then be less than 0.02%, rather than the WHO’s 3.4%.
What is more, since only 6000 deaths have been reported in the U.S., the vast majority of those infected would have suffered symptoms little worse than those of the common cold and have recovered, in which event the “herd immunity” of which the British public health commissar spoke is being built up at a rapid rate.
If the death rate is only 1%, it is possible that 123 million people – more than one-third of the U.S. population – are already infected. If, however, it is 10%, as for SARS, then about 12 million U.S. citizens are infected.
What, then, is the true death rate? This early in the pandemic, the answer is that nobody really knows, even to within an order of magnitude. The standard method of obtaining a preliminary assessment of the death rate in the early stages of a pandemic is to consider the closed cases – those who, having been infected, have either recovered or died. Until April 2, 135,447 people outside China and occupied Tibet were reported as recovered from the infection, while 49,845 had died. Therefore, 185,252 had either recovered or died, and the deaths represented not 2% nor 3.4% but almost 27% of all these closed cases. I have not seen that figure reported anywhere, but that is the figure.
If the death rate is indeed 27%, then only 4.6 million U.S. citizens are infected, compared with the reported. However, the 27% figure should be regarded with some caution, since it takes no account of the under-reporting of cases, many of which will have been recoveries or asymptomatic. But it does suggest that of the currently-active 748,153 confirmed cases outside China more than 200,000 will be likely to die worldwide.
The Chinese virus, then, will be a biggish killer, either because far more are infected than are being reported or because the death rate is higher than the WHO imagines, or both. At this stage, we do not know: but no responsible government, seeing figures such as these, would consider itself as acting responsibly if it were to fail to ensure that energetic control measures were put in place.
In all this mishmash of competing statistics, the one certainty is the daily mean rate at which reported cases have been increasing. That is why I have chosen this measure as the basis for the benchmark test.
My hypothesis is that, thanks to the decisive measures taken by most governments, the daily growth rate of total confirmed cases will continue to fall, and that about 1-2 weeks from now the fall will become quite rapid, perhaps buying enough time for health services to increase their capacity to handle intensive-care patients on ventilators, and to perform antigen tests for the presence of the virus and, no less importantly, antibody tests to demonstrate that those who have recovered are immune.
If the daily growth rates do not fall very quickly to South Korean values, then the capacity of health services will be overwhelmed. As of yesterday, the hospital ship sent by President Trump to New York had just three patients on board. Expect the ship to be filled to capacity within days.
Keep safe. And come back here daily for the updated benchmark test.
If this was such an emergency, why would we be not having:
1. (some) public random testing, eg, NYC or Seattle,
2. stop all international flights
3. stop construction of Industrial Wind Turbines,
Here is a video of NY State, USA, wind construction, meanwhile Cuomo says stop all industry:
but wind turbines ARE essential ! We must act now !! How dare you?!
I cannot understand why people who are under high threat of infection by covid-19 do not protect themselves with hydroxychloroquine. Its effectiveness has been demonstrated e.g. LOL@K… above and others. It is commonly used for Lupus, malaria, etc. so its few side-effect risks are well known. Certainly it would be easy enough to compare the covid rate of those already using it with the general population (H/T Brian Kilmeade). New Yorkers have to contend with their politically blinded governor but the rest of the states are not so encumbered.
Dan
You claimed, “so its few side-effect risks are well known.” Would that were true! The side-effects are not just a few, and there is no way of knowing how an individual will react ahead of time. That could be crucial if the patient is already in critical condition.
I’ll just make the observation that arthritis tends to be a disease of the elderly, and they are therefore more likely to be using it than the younger generation. Yet, it is well known that the elderly appear to be more at risk for catching COVID-19, and especially more likely to become seriously ill. There is your informal test.
re: “The side-effects are not just a few, and there is no way of knowing how an individual will react ahead of time. That could be crucial if the patient is already in critical condition.”
A) NO blanket ‘banning’ of hcq et al based on the loose caveat “here is no way of knowing how an individual will react”. Administer, observe, stop if adverse reactions are noted.
B) START TREATMENT before the patient becomes CRITICAL. Duh!
_Jim
Except for a couple of state governors, coincidentally both democrats, there has been no “blanket banning.” It has always been up to the discretion of doctors under “compassionate use” guidelines to try it. I suspect that most are unwilling to risk a lawsuit if the patient should die from complications resulting from unexpected side-effects of an ‘off label’ drug that only has anecdotal evidence supporting its efficacy.
It has been my personal experience that HCQ has an apparent half-life longer than the official stated time. In any event, the damage it does takes a long time to repair. So, stopping in the presence of “adverse reactions” is like trying to stop a battleship quickly. Duh!
re: “Except for a couple of state governors, coincidentally both democrats, there has been no “blanket banning.””
Non-sequitur; not germane to my comment.
re: “It has always been up to the discretion of doctors under “compassionate use” guidelines to try it.”
Duh. That has been my (expressed in some postings) thought all along.
re: “So, stopping in the presence of “adverse reactions” is like trying to stop a battleship quickly. ”
200 mg (milligrams) hcq twice a day. How difficult is it to notice adverse symptoms? WHEN will symptoms begin showing on a known sensitive individual?
What are the damages done by short term use of HCQ?
I’m only getting 83 mg / day. According to the dose / effect curve in the studies I showed in my prior post, that imparts a reduced infectivity of ~60% immediately after ingestion, to ~40% 24 hours later (immediately prior to the next ingestion). Average would be ~50% reduced infectivity.
Given Covid19’s R0 of ~2.2, if we knock infectivity rate down by ~50%, we knock that R0 down to ~1.1… that nearly completely flattens the curve. As we gain herd immunity (which we will if people are pre-dosing and clearing the virus easily because it has a hard time attaching to cells in the respiratory tract), that curve will bend downward pretty quickly.
The only way is through. We can’t run, we can’t hide. This only ends when we gain herd immunity. Delaying that only does financial damage and ultimately increases the number of people who will have adverse effects from the virus (because they went the route of Flo-nase and Ibuprofen and intubation and ventilators, rather than pre-dosing and clearing the virus quickly).
And what happens when the financial base is so weakened that we don’t have the financial wherewithal to keep some hospital staff employed, what happens when store shelves are not restocked because the companies making the products went out of business, what happens when money flow becomes so low that starting new businesses to climb our way out of this self-dug Pit O’ Stupidity becomes nigh well impossible? How much innovation and R&D is going to occur then? Very little.
Well, then the elderly and immune-compromised are pretty well screwed the next time a bat decides to infect humanity, eh? We are (were) a strong society because we are (were) a wealthy society… destroying that wealth to gain some perception (and that’s all it is… a perception) of safety will ultimately also destroy any safety we thought we’d gained.
“B) START TREATMENT before the patient becomes CRITICAL. Duh!”
Exactly
Yet, the French health ministry promoted that protocol proposed by Didier Raoult for … people in almost desperate conditions (as a palliative measure?).
But then the virus concentration either is already too extreme for an antiviral drug to have effect, or even has dropped to non detectable levels.
Some medical people say that the benefits of the treatment may come from reducing on immunity but I don’t buy it.
Clyde,
You appear to be oblivious to the common sense action part: “…compare the covid rate of those already using it [hydroxychloroquine] with the general population…” The data is already there. Just collect it. The need to run a double blind test with a placebo is asinine. Who wants to partake in such a test with the chance of getting the placebo? I should have said ‘covid DEATH rate’ because covid doesn’t get life threatening unless it develops into viral pneumonia. The question that a survey might answer is: Does hydroxychloroquine provide prophylactic protection against fatal complications of covid-19?
What has not been emphasized, probably because not PC, is that the disease is highly concentrated in those areas with direct flights to and from Wuhan. That includes Lombardy and NY State. In the latter case, we have its globalist governor to thank for the deaths of so many senior citizens. NY has even more hundreds of thousands of recent Chinese immigrants than Lombardy.
Cuomo dank deep from the globalist cup, making NY a hub for air traffic from China, and welcoming recent Chinese immigrants, including protecting illegal immigrants through sanctuary city and state decrees. Then, instead of replacing NY’s depleted ventilator stocks, he set up death panels to triage those few old devices left, while instead financing BK solar projects and the state lottery, promising him more funny money with which to play.
No wonder he’s the Left’s latest heartthrob.
The only good that can come from this latest scourge out of Commun ist China would be the downfall of the antihuman regime, which would most benefit the people of China, and of the rest of the world as well. Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore have shown the way forward for the magnificent, ancient culture of the Middle Kingdom (OK, Singapore could relax a bit).
JT,
Good stuff. When the ChiComs absorbed Hong Kong, I predicted that the opposite would happen over time, that Hong Kong would absorb China. Chinese people seeing their fellow Chinese with legitimate self-determination is a vision that will not be forgotten not denied.
nor denied.
One way to study the spread of covid19 and whether isolation and other measures are succeeding in limiting its spread, is to look at the increase or decrease in the number of daily deaths from the virus.
The daily deaths from the virus are – in the view of many – a more reliable metric than detected cases, since the latter depends simply on who has and has not been tested, and that is limited and variable. However deaths are a metric that lags 3-4 weeks behind the spread of infection.
Mathematically there are 3 ways you can look at the daily death rate from covid19 in different countries. You can look at the number, the rate of change or slope, or you can look at the acceleration – does the increase or decrease get faster or slower? Does the plotted curve curve upward or downward?
Mathematically this can be expressed in a second order polynomial – the simplest way of expressing a line that is straight or curved. The equation is:
y = a x^2 + b x + c
How does y change with x, or how do daily death numbers change per day? a is the square or quadratic term that gives the curvature of the slope, if it’s positive the curve is upward and vice versa. b is the linear slope component and c just a number.
Here’s a graph of the quadratic term a of daily mortality, for several countries for the last two weeks. Each daily number of deaths was a 3-day average, and the polynomial was fitted to the 7 days (all 3-averaged) up to that date:
Here’s the source of the daily mortality numbers as a 3-day rolling average:
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus
Remember, these curves are not daily number of deaths, nor are they the slope or linear change with time of daily mortality. They are the “derivative” or the curvature, and indication of if the rate of change is accelerating or decelerating.
Start with the easy one to see, the blue curve for Italy with big amplitude waves. Death rate is – mercifully – decreasing in that country and that is reflected in the bigger area under the oscillating curve that is in the negative region than in the positive. It seems in Italy there was initially fast growth – in Lombardy and the north, which then levelled off, but then further acceleration – the next excursion above the line – reflected new spread in the south of Italy.
That waviness of the curve is present in all countries in the graph. This may reflect the multiple local outbreaks that comprise the covid19 situation in every country. Different outbreaks may be behind the separate waves of acceleration and deceleration of the death rate.
Clustered in the middle and close to zero, and hard to see, are several north European countries – Germany, Belgium and The Netherlands. They seem to follow a similar wave. Curiously their waves match those of Iran, even though Iran is much further developed in its epidemic and deaths are steadily declining.
Spain has a wave that is almost opposite to that of Italy, although like Italy, the good news is that the most recent quadratic is negative and the rate of daily deaths is curving down. The countries with ongoing and accelerating spread appear to be the UK, USA and France.
Note that the quadratic numbers and normalised to the population of each country.
“as a 3-day rolling average: ”
Phil , running means are crappy filters. They leak a lot of what you hope to filter out as well as distorting the data. If you just want a light filter and have few data points use a 1+2+1 binomial filter ( a weighted running average if you like ). Weight the middle one twice as much and divide the result by 4.
a square law is similar to an exponential but since the underlying process is exponential, that seems like the best model. The derivative and second derivative of an exp is also an exp so it should fit rate and accel curves.
Yes the virus spread is a log/exponential process. But over a short time window like one week, a polynomial is a reasonable approximation. And plotting the “instantaneous” quadratic terms shows more clearly the wave like nature of the transmission, which is not so evident in a log plot of numbers. That’s all this is about – making the acceleration component visible and seeing the waves of infection.
Just look at the daily deaths on a log scale and see if the trend is a straight line (exponential) or is curving down off the trend line. When the trend curves down the rate of increase is subsiding.
Then look at the daily death numbers for a peak to see if it has been reached.
For an example, Italy’s exponential death growth rate has been falling for over two weeks, and it’s peak in deaths was about a week ago. The expectation is that these positive developments will continue, like they have in other countries similarly. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/
Looking at Italian cases in your link, there’s a dip on the 10th March when the restrictions came in. It seems they could not workout how to submit reports that day.
Around 15th there was a dip which would be about the right time for an effect to show but the exponential then kick off just as strongly as it was before.
A log plot would be better for comparing the rate of the exponentials which is what I have been showing. I can’t see any effect at all there. If there is one it’s lost in the noise.
Not the sort of thing you are going to destroy your country’s economy for.
Many major issues with total lockdowns in the US:
-There’s not enough police and military combined to enforce a lockdown statewide let alone nationwide and that’s not mentioning the illegality of using military for a lockdown. You might, and I mean might, be able to lock down a smaller city using all the state cops, county cops and borrowing city cops from surrounding communities. For example Portland, Oregon had that mall shooting 7-8 years back, they were pulling in cops up to 100 miles away just to try and lock down one mall and surrounding area. I was driving south on I5 at the time and watched the steady stream of cops speeding along in the northbound lane responding to the shooting. They pulled in every available cop they could get to respond. Then there’s the small cities most states are populated with, these small cities have tiny police forces. Less than a dozen cops in total are common, just how in the heck are they suppose to lock down a city? That’s not even enough to watch all the roads in and out of a city 24/7.
-How exactly are people suppose to get supplies to their home if they are locked down? Most people I know living in small apartments/tiny homes don’t have more than a few days to a weeks supply of food in the kitchen. There’s not enough storage area to lay in a much supplies and why should they normally when the store is 5 minutes away? People in homes generally have more storage space but not always, I constantly see homes with limited supplies storage unless you plan to wholesale take over living space. Not exactly conducive to always keeping a months supplies on hand but can be done with some warning if there’s not hoarding. So the government is going to have to open soup kitchens just to feed the masses, doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose of a total lockdown? Alternative is to let them starve to death instead of possibly dying from COVID-19.
-Prescription meds have the same issue as food. Just how exactly do you plan to get meds to people if we completely lock things down? Are the police going to drive to your closed local pharmacy, raid the shelves and deliver to your front door? Once they’ve raided the shelves bare where will they get more medicine to deliver?
I can go on with the issues caused by a total lockdown, it’s a nightmare to even consider. Death toll will go through the roof and not because of direct infections of COVID-19. This isn’t 1850 when we were a mostly agrarian society, a time when people had to lay in enough supplies to last through the lean times or face death.
Some interesting headlines to ponder. Can we trust ANYBODY or ANY source? The CDC is beginning to look as corrupt as the WHO and the IPCC.
Milan University Study Estimates 20 Million Italians with Coronavirus – Case Mortality Rate May be in 0.25% to 0.30%, Much Lower than Predictions
CDC Tells Hospitals to List COVID-19 as Cause of Death Even if It’s Only “Assumed to Have Caused Or Contributed to Death” – Lab Tests Not Required
What’s so underhanded about that is the CDC states in their test Instructions for use that a positive test indicates presence of the virus, but the virus may not be the definite cause of illness. Then it turns around and instructs hospitals to do presumptive diagnostics without a test. They’re trying to inflate the numbers any way they can.
That certainly seems to be the case. Project fear once again.
They know that confinement is going to be a hard sell to the american public and that the 2nd amendment gives them a means to challenge govt.
Long term mis-management of the health system and an unhealthy population leaves them with massive problem and scaring the crap out of people may seem like the only way to convince them to stay home .
1. Most of the anecdotal ‘information’ on here seems to come from the media. How many primary news services are out there in the world? Only two or three apparently. What do the others do? Repackage the same information I guess.
2. All of the ‘data’ seems to come from the ‘Oracle of Worldometer’. Where does this data come from? “… from official reports, directly from Government’s communication channels or indirectly, through local media sources when deemed reliable (!) … Worldometer’s Covid-19 data is trusted and used by Johns Hopkins CSSE, Financial Times, The New York Times, Business Insider, and many others.” Seems like a rather circular process to me. And then you can factor in the so-called ‘data’ from China, Iran, other dictatorships, poor African countries etc etc … and North Korea that is still yet to report a single case!
3. Does Worldometer distinguish between those dying either ‘of or with’ the disease? I’m yet to receive their reply on that, but if not the death rate (number of deaths / number infected) is probably vastly overstated,
4. Some professionals in the field also point out that, because no one was looking for it prior to Wuhan, it has potentially been around unnoticed for years, thus potentially expanding the denominator in the above equation and further reducing the actual mortality rate. As has been recently pointed out by several medical professionals (see link below), accurate-enough figures are not yet available to even hazard a guess at the true picture.
5. Although the issue has been characterised here as a binary’ passive versus active’ approach, it may be more helpful to look outside of this limited scenario to what some of the professionals in the field are saying. A summary of some of these ideas has been collated and updated daily since mid-March, with relevant links to sources, videos etc. at the following location: https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/
How can you possibly rely on incomplete data for you doubling rates? I personally know many people who have symptoms of some sort but aren’t being tested, and in the early days we were limited by tests, not by cases. Also, we know for fact some of the deaths have been labeled as Coronavirus yet other causes were more likely.
–Performing a similar calculation for each day until April 2 would lead us to conclude that there were not 26,500 cases of infection in total by that day, as reported by the U.S. administration, but 36 million. Curiously, if this were true it would not be all bad news. For the death rate would then be less than 0.02%, rather than the WHO’s 3.4%.–
I think it is a bit more than 0.02%
“What is more, since only 6000 deaths have been reported in the U.S., the vast majority of those infected would have suffered symptoms little worse than those of the common cold and have recovered, in which event the “herd immunity” of which the British public health commissar spoke is being built up at a rapid rate.”
Yes, I think in terms of herd immunity, US is doing it the right way, unlike UK.
Though not sure US planned this, though it seems more of matter of luck.
“If the death rate is only 1%, it is possible that 123 million people – more than one-third of the U.S. population – are already infected. If, however, it is 10%, as for SARS, then about 12 million U.S. citizens are infected.”
I think it’s more than 12 million but probably less than 90 million.
One could say New York City did a lot “herd immunity” and large fraction of people of the City caught flu, and have no symptoms and have developed immunity to China Flu. New York state main problem is they have large backlog of case due to long recovery time for severe cases. Which also main problem with Italy {though seems to be lessening] and Spain, and UK.
It seems Germany did best job in Europe, and I think they have a fair amount of herd immunity. Germany early testing was the best aspect and if they continue their aggressive testing, and ramp testing to determine the level of their herd immunity, they will be out of lock down and business as usual the quickest.
I think South America could become as bad or worse than Europe. And we see it how bad it gets in next two weeks.
Sadly I fear US may fair less well than Europe. First cause of death in US is heart disease and this seems a common comorbidity in COVID cases, along with obesity, their other strong suit.
Still, if they keep seizing everyone else’s face masks, I’m sure they’ll pull through.
US at moment has total of 8,454 deaths, when do except US deaths from Chinese virus to be over 40,000 ?
And when do except European States deaths per day to total less than 1000 per day?
Yesterday’s deaths of 4 European states: Spain: 749, Italy: 681, Germany: 169 and France: 1,053
has total of 2,652 deaths.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
And those 4 EU states have less population than the US.
They have a totaled population of 256.92 million people.
South Korea held a SARS drill in December 2019. They were ready.
Meanwhile, in the US, the CDC had for decades prepared for entirely the wrong virus. They only prepared for a virus that spreads when symptoms appear, like Ebola. They not only didn’t test except under the strictest of conditions, but told private labs with patients showing symptoms not to test they if had not been overseas or had come in contact with a known carrier. This plan was also based on bureaucratic ideology, their reasons supposedly being to ‘protect’ people from ‘unreliable’ private industry labs. They took an eternity in January -February 2020 to wake up to the fact that this virus was spreading without symptoms, meaning their entire plan was seriously flawed. The virus said thank you very much.
They should have learnt from SARS 2003-2003 and MERS 2012, 2015, that if a deadly virus actually got to the USA in significant numbers, then this meant it must be able to spread without symptoms. They were asleep at the wheel. SARS in 2002-2003 scared a lot of health professionals, because of the severity, and death rate, and the threat to health workers, but one thing about it was it only spread when symptoms appeared, meaning it was relatively easily contained by isolation. But many knew if a SARS type virus appeared that spread without symptoms, all bets were off. This has now occurred. The CDC should have been preparing for exactly this scenario but for various reasons which will be looked at, it missed the boat.
Heads should roll at the CDC.
“But many knew if a SARS type virus appeared that spread without symptoms, all bets were off. ”
Probably what the Chinese were trying to create at the Wuhan lab. Fortunately what they leaked had the long incubation period but lacked the mortality of SARS.
What’s the military or political aim of such “weapon”?
It would seem to be economic. China released it in one city, exported it to the entire world. Recovered first and as most economizes are now shut down China has a change to gain even more world market share. Plus this gives China an excuse to crackdown in Hong Kong and Tibet, and maybe even invade Taiwan.
I am not saying that is the case, but you asked for a reason. If the virus was from developing a biological weapon, and I am not saying it is, I would not think it was purposely released, but an accident. That is the danger of any country developing biological weapons, once released, how do you control them?
Sorry for the typos, spell check change them. economy’s and shut down and
a change to gain
Your fabricated and non specific term “Chinese virus”, is blatantly racist.
The name for the virus is COVID-19
re: “Your fabricated and non specific term “Chinese virus”, is blatantly racist.
The name for the virus is COVID-19”
Click “Play” in the upper right of this graphic and note the country-of-origin:
https://nextstrain.org/ncov?dmax=2020-01-17&dmin=2020-01-08
This is a ‘track-back’ apparently based on looking at the progressive mutation of SARS-Cov 2, which is the actual virus itself.
Dr Burns
First off COVID-19 is the name of the disease, not the virus. Secondly, “Chinese” refers to the name of a political region, i.e. a country, not a race. It is like remarking about “Chinese food,” which is largely a cultural reference.
How can you conclude that the lockdowns seem to be working. The control test in this experiment is Sweden, which has not done a lockdown and shows as good or better slowing than countries with a lockdown.
Well spotted David:
Now that all EU countries seem to be over peak COVID, they all need to get serious about how you unwind the economic mess these panic reactions have got us into.
Monckton’s own figures show Sweden starting at 2.1 days doubling time and ending a 7.9 days.
By some kind of dyslexic reasoning he sees that as getting worse.
I hadn’t looked Sweden before today because it’s a smaller country and Scandinavia does not seem particularly hard hit.
Now I’m not sure the data means Sweden is a representative example of how moderate, voluntary social distancing measures work, but they are not the basket case he is trying to imply.
Lord Monckton’s point was that Swedish daily new cases have stayed stuck at around 10% of the previous day’s total cases for about 3 weeks now, which is exponential growth. Japan, another country with a moderate lockdown, is showing something similar.
On the other hand, Sweden’s neighbour Denmark, which does have a lockdown, is showing much the same pattern of exponential growth over the last 3 weeks as Sweden, as you can see at a glance from the portion of the logarithmic plot of Total Coronavirus Cases that looks like a straight line here: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/denmark/ .
and Denmark is now reported to be looking at gradually removing its lockdown, despite its new case figures continuing to compound daily at around 9%: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/breaking-danish-prime-minister-announce-21816173
Can anyone tell me the total deaths in the US for March 2019 versus 2020. This is truly a very important statistic in final mortality increase due to Covid. I cannot find it. Thank you. I would bet our death rate is less in 2020.
In response to Mr Skapik, I don’t have the figures he asks for, but in asking the question he implies that he is about to make a mistake that has been made by several commenters here: to assume that the figures for March are the ones to compare with previous years’ death rates.
At present, the pandemic is in its early stages. Therefore, the rate of increase in cases, and the rather higher rate of increase in deaths, is still exponential. That means there will be perhaps two to five times as many deaths in April as there were in March. Already, the global daily death toll is twice that for flu.
“Here is the test for the world excluding China and occupied Tibet (whose Communist regime cannot be trusted to tell the truth about case numbers, or about anything else much)”.
Your remark above implies that every other country except China CAN be trusted to be truthful. You seem an intelligent person. Are you having a ‘senior moment’ on this subject?
I could spend hours reciting from memory the instances in which the governments of Canada and the USA have deliberately misled their constituents. And having intently followed the torrent of verbiage offered by those governments, and that of France, during this pandemic, I have yet to detect any signs of candor.
Statistics of death by COVID-19 are clearly bogus, first, because the infection itself is established by poorly tested and reportedly quite unreliable procedures, and secondly, because no distinction is made between dying “with” as opposed to “of” this virus. I have not seen or heard of any reports indicating how many of these reported COVID-19 victims have been autopsied. Have you?
If so, please share. Nor have I been able to find any breakdowns by age and sex of the reported victims of this disease.
The waters have been so muddied that this pandemic has become an opportunity for the perfect mass murder. And anyone with an analytical streak can’t help but wonder whether this situation is by design.
Functionally, what is being proposed is a modern, globalized version of putting the old folks on the ice for the polar bears to snack on. Because, as others have previously remarked here, it is very likely that these isolation/lockdown measures will kill many more old people than any virus could.
Lord Moncton,
https://www.distributedbio.com/covid19
https://www.foxnews.com/media/dr-jacob-glanville-antibody-neutralize-coronavirus
http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/
The nature paper that implied that it is impossible to create the covid-19 virus in a laboratory is fake in that there is no science in it, only a firm conclusion which people can quote.
It is a fact that it is now possible to synthetically produce from a computer code, a man-made virus that is chemically and biologically an exact copy of any virus on the planet.
Two countries that I know of have this new, new technology, the US and China.
Jacob Glanville is the CEO of the US company, Distributed Bio.
Distributed bio has made an exact copy of the covid-19 virus, from computer code and is using their AI to develop an optimized antibody to attack the virus. They are currently working with the US military who will test the new antibody in their secure laboratory.
If all goes well the human trials with sick people are scheduled for August. If the covid patients tests go well, the antibodies will be mass produced and used to stop the virus, starting in September. The same company developed antibodies to treat Ebola.
Jacob Glanville said he wants to talk to someone about the covid-19 origin question. He said that during the NetFlix show, Pandemic which I would recommend.
Distributed Bio have developed a specialized ‘AI’ that can answer those type of questions. How likely virus interactions can occur.
Glanville was recently interviewed on the Tucker Carlson, Fox show.
I know you, also were interviewed by Tucker.
Could you please contact Tucker and ask him to get you in touch with Glanville? Glanville said he has something to discuss. He is also an honourable person.
What we would like to know is: What is the likelihood that the covid-19 occurred naturally?
This needs to be open up for public discussion as quickly as possible and with great sensitivity if we are to avoid a conflict.
China is talking very aggressively about this subject.
This really is an attack on our way of life, in addition to the attack on our lives.
Sincerely,
William Astley
https://www.breitbart.com/asia/2020/03/18/chinese-media-wuhan-coronavirus-the-u-s-and-europes-new-chernobyl/
The economic shutdown is more harmful than the Chinese virus and is based on terribly flawed models.
The only way to make fact-based policies is to conduct the following:
1) Run large-scale viral and antibody tests to determine the denominator to get a real death rate.
I would be surprised if there are 6~8 million Americans that have or recovered from the Chinese virus and didn’t even know it, which would mean the real death rate is very similar to the standard flu.
We just don’t know, which is insane.
2) There is overwhelming evidence that hydroxychloroquine and azanthromycin have substantial prophylactic and healing properties against to Chinese flu and need to be urgently prescribed to millions of Americans ASAP; forget the stupid bureaucratic red tape.
3) A streamlined vaccine approval process for private and public sector labs needs to be devised so we have a vaccine before the next flu season starts, and a 10-year tax holiday should be awarded to the company that first develops an approved vaccine.
4) Parts of the economy must be allowed to reopen in low-risks areas, and workplace protocols established to minimize infections.
5) High-risk segments of the population (over 70 with secondary illnesses) must continue remain in lockdown until either a vaccine is found or until the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin are known.
We’re making terrible decisions based on flawed data which needs to stop.
Yes, because what we all need is more untested drugs that “fix” the immune system, as they have no risk of causing autism, MS, various other neurological diseases, allergies, diabetes, narcolepsy, paralysis, or death…
re: “Yes, because what we all need is more … ”
… ya … The WORST part is getting advice, warnings and cautions from confirmed idiots like yourself!!!! Idiocracy, here we come! Someday, ng, you may become president, like Joe Bauers in the movie Idiocracy, rising far above your fellow idiots by just a few critical IQ points, enabling you to ‘solve’ critical national problems of your (future) day, like how to ‘make ice’, boil water, pick apples from the tree …
You were unable to answer any of my requests for evidence of the benefits of ANY vaccination program.
I have humiliated you.
You may now hide under a rock.
re: “You were unable to answer any of my requests for ..”
You’re a phucking idiot.
Samurai is of course correct that it would be ideal to know more than we do about the rate at which the virus is spreading, so that we can determine a reliable case fatality rate. However, Dr Fauci’s best estimate at present – for what it is worth – is that the virus is about ten times deadlier than flu, in which event active measures to prevent the previous, and present, rapid transmission rates are essential.
The “overwhelming evidence” about hxchloroquine is chiefly to be found in a single French paper that found some benefit in just six patients. Because it has strong side-effects, it is better to check with your doctor before taking it. A single daily 25-microgram (1000 IU) gel tablet of Vitamin D3 daily has been compellingly demonstrated in numerous clinical trials and in an important meta-analysis of 2017 to reduce the risk of infection and the severity of symptoms in respiratory diseases in more than 10,000 patients.
Vaccine approval cannot be streamlined until proper testing has been carried out, or more harm than good can be done. Remember thalidomide.
One cannot allow partial reopening of the economy until universal testing both for antigens and for antibodies is available.
Everyone except essential workers should, therefore, remain isolated for the time being.
The decisions made by governments are based on the observed daily rates of growth both in reported cases and in deaths, which far outstrip those for flu, for instance.
Lord Monckton-san:
There have been many preliminary tests done in Russia, China, Japan, Belgium, Israel and other countries and all have shown an overwhelming effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine in the treatment of COVID19.
Hydroxychloroquine is very effective against COVID19 as it is one of only a few ionophores capable of transporting zinc through cellular membranes, and zinc inhibits COVID19 RNA replication, which why it works so quickly.
You are correct that there can be rare side effects to hydroxychloroquine, but its efficacy far outweighs its rare side effects.
Of course doctors must prescribe hydroxychloroquine and must explain the possible side effects to patients, which is true for any prescription.
Fauci and other medical “experts” are giving Trump terrible advice based on flawed data, especially in their absurd death projections. I doubt the US will have more than 30,000 COVID19 deaths compared to 60,000 regular-flu deaths we have every year.
If 30,000 possible COVID19 deaths is enough to shutdown the world’s largest economy, then I guess we have to shutdown every flu season from here on..
The US must rapidly rampup production of high-grade surgical masks other PPE for the general public and hospital staff, and commission the production of 40,000 respirators to be safe.
We’ll have to agree to disagree on the efficacy of the US economic shutdown. I just think the “cure” is far worse than the disease. We’ll see soon enough.
Cheers, Lord Monckton-san. I always enjoy your thought provoking posts.
Stay safe and I wish you well.
Btw, sorry, I meant to write ventilators, not “respirators”, although we need to urgently produce millions of N95 respirators, too.
Konichi wa Samurai
You claimed, “You are correct that there can be rare side effects to hydroxychloroquine, but its efficacy far outweighs its rare side effects.”
That is wishful thinking. The side-effects are not so rare. The prescription bottle warns about some of the more common and dangerous mental issues. My rheumatologist was sufficiently concerned about loss of color vision or blindness that she had me take tests to establish a baseline for my vision. The paperwork that comes with the prescription has a long list, demonstrating that the side-effects are not rare, just highly variable and unpredictable. In my case, I developed elevated systolic BP, which isn’t on the list. In the case of malaria, I would agree that “its efficacy far outweighs its
rareside effects.” However, the best study supporting its use is countered by another recent, similar, small-scale study that found no efficacy!Milord,
I reckon most of the society accepts even acute restrictions providing that there is some kind of ‘exit strategy’. And this strategy seems to be lacking. When we relax restrictions infection rate spikes again. When we keep restrictions after few months whole countries will go bust creating social strife and unrest, possible internal and international conflicts what may cause greater human cost than consequences of Wuhan virus itself. I’ve heard that in south of Italy desperate people already demand free food from local shops – they simply cannot afford buying it. Another alternative is a police state with total ‘tracing’, ‘immunological passports’ and eugenic segregation based on current health record. UK government is already threatening that it will lock people in homes if someone ‘abuses’ outdoor exercises. Methinks there will be quite strong ‘guerilla’ resistance, especially where there are first sun-rays for couple of months. In the end, desperate people will say ‘better fearful end than fear without end’.
Agree completely. We need to keep the heat on hospitals to do the tests and report the results in a timely fashion, not a week later. That’s the only way we can really learn from this.
Also related outcomes: Discharges/Deaths
There is one thing to repurpose and known and well tested drug for a different indication. It would be extremely foolhardy to start removing proper testing and safeguards when authorising a new vaccine. That could go badly wrong and would be irresponsible. Dismissing current testing and approval as “red tape” is just thoughtless and stupid.
They do not need any further encouragement. Anyone producing an approved vaccine will get billions worth of orders overnight. What is you proposed “tax holiday” supposed to achieve apart from increasing the cost to the nation?
Starting yesterday !
You are pretty free with the liberty of others. I guess you are not on of the over 70s in question. Like the greens who want to exterminate humans but never their own children.
If there is an active epidemic, no virus and little effective treatment most 70+ may want to keep their heads down and if they don’t , on their head be it. The age factor is a clumsy target, it is more because of a correlation of age with ill-health. Stats can be misleading especially if you are out to draw simplistic conclusions with no personal responsibility for the effects of you “must do” pronouncements.
@SAMURAI
The South Korean numbers seem pretty reliable from all the information one can get.
They have a death rate of about 1%. That is what makes me really concerned. Not about how it is compared to the general flu in deadliness but in combination that there is no herd immunity at all and it seems to be very contagious. For the flu many people have some sort of immunity and we do vaccination in addition to contain it.
What people don’t get about vaccination is that everybody produces DIFFERENT antibodies against a vaccine or a virus. So their antibodies work eventually very well against related viruses for some people just bc of the nature of their own specific antibodies are just by chance working against similar strains as well. If the similarity between the viruses is pretty high the antibodies will worked nearly all the time against both strains though I doubt one will achieve 100% just the way antibodies are produced by the immune system.
That is the same mechanism behind using an intentional infection with the cowpox to prevent death by a smallpox infection. The whole word vaccine comes from the latin word vacca for cow bc it was the first application of this idea in history.
Unfortunately, for COVID-19 that is just not the case cause most people were not exposed to something similar ever making it as big as a problem as it is.
Has anyone looked into BlackRock Financial and their role in Green Energy/ Carbon Credits/ Economic Collapse?
Here is a link to Blackrock’s role in the Canadian Pension Fund (CPP) purchase of Industrial Wind Turbine contracts in Ontario Canada.
https://blackrocktransparencyproject.org/2018/08/27/how-canadas-infrastructure-bank-was-created-by-and-set-up-to-benefit-blackrock/
Has anyone investigated BlackRock’s role in US debt? I don’t have evidence for this, but is it possible that BlackRock is using Carbon credits (eg., from the EU) as a vehicle to purchase US debt?
There are a number of theories going around, both on Economic collapse and on Virus. I cannot verify the material (and the corresponding Q theories) but X22Report.com has been reporting on both for quite a while now. So far they have not connected the dots to Green Energy. Perhaps this is the missing piece.
Comments welcome.
Re: US debt
Is it labelled and attributed to each creditor?
Could the US threaten to make part of that debt conditional?
Kind of a nuke option, but the current US President is found of bringing nukes to the negotiation table.
Dear Dear Lord Monckton,
you – rightfully – seem to admire the way South Korea tackled the problem. I am curious to understand what you see as the main reasons European countries have not been able to be as successful in tracing infected people. I recall the story of the British super spreader early February who was infected in Singapore, went to ski in France and then spread the virus in a local pub (https://metro.co.uk/2020/02/10/british-super-spreader-gave-least-seven-people-coronavirus-trip-local-pub-12213565/). At that point tracing seemed to have been successful. Afterwards a lot of European cases were traced to ski holidays in Italy, couldn’t those people have all been put in quarantaine? Or did authorities at that moment already know it was too late? Where did it go wrong? It is particularly interesting that none managed to follow the Korean path, not even Germany.
As ‘Ratty’ and ‘Mole’ once said: ‘This whole affair is a complete disaster from start to finish, and that’s a fact, and no mistake!’
So, in a spirit of helpfulness, and since everyone else is at it, I have adapted the ‘one eyed’ modelling code for my own purposes. And, as you will know, in the land of blind models (where we are today, lacking consistent international standards for epidemic tracking data as we do), the ‘one eyed’ model is king.
What is that particular code? A simple one with which you will be familiar: ‘If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, quacks like a duck….’
Are weekly overall mortality rates consistent with the 5 year average for the time of year? In Britain, yes.
Could the Covid 19 virus have begun human to human transmission a great deal earlier than Nov/Dec 2019? A credible study published in Nature Medicine 17 March 2020 suggests that it certainly could have.
Are there significant differences in outcome between countries enforcing a lockdown and Sweden, which is not much? Errrr……not really!
Have changes recently been made to the basis on which mortality data are recorded? Yes. Covid 19 became a notifiable disease in Britain on 05 March 2020. Two weeks later it ceased to be regarded as a high consequence infectious disease in the same country.
Are impressively credentialled and massively experienced medical professionals asking serious questions of the models on which the lockdown is based? Well, they definitely are in Mainz, Brussels, Manitoba, Stanford, Tel Aviv, St Gallen, Bonn, Marseille, Yale, Minnesota, Copenhagen…….!
Do figures from Germany suggest that Covid 19 may be no more lethal than seasonal influenza? Not yet but Germany’s high level of testing gives it a much lower mortality rate than elsewhere, and testing still has a very long way to go….hmmmm…..?
Is Covid 19 any more lethal to humans than other coronaviruses? A credible study from France suggests that, certainly within OECD countries, it may very well not be.
So the ‘one eyed’ model says: ‘Enough! Probably a duck’! And you knew that anyway.
Time to get back to work.
Mr Bidie appears unwilling to understand the nature of the epidemic curve. In the early stages of a pandemic, where we are now, the rate of transmission is exponential. Therefore, to say as he does that at present rates of infection and death are not a lot to write home about is to fail to appreciate that in only weeks, at those present rates, we’d have a disaster on our hands if governments had not acted.
He is right, though, that universal testing is the best way to minimize deaths. That has worked in South Korea and, to some extent, in Germany.
On the current daily growth rates, by as early as end May the deaths will exceed those from the swine flu. Already, the deaths per day are double those from flu in a typical year, and we still have some weeks of near-exponential increase in deaths to come before the lockdowns begin to bite.
One-eyed guess-it-and-hope-for-the-best models are not the responsible course. Governments are already finding their health systems overwhelmed. That is why they have at last acted firmly.
You are incorrect Tim, despite the vicious viscounts continued lies to bend the facts to support his biased position, Sweden has a rate of increase in new cases that most EU countries would k-i-ll their economies to have:
The initial rise was much steeper than it has been for the last month, which is totally the opposite of his claims it has got worse because of not having implemented confinement.
This authoritarian minded minor league aristocrat will go to great lengths to justify his government putting the entire country on house arrest. If that means turning the graph on its side, no problem , there’s an app for that !
It is too early to tell anything about the success of any measures taken in most European countries except for Italy cause the measures are in place the longest. The reason is the long incubation time but also the long time it takes for people to get hospitalized and also how long they are treated before they recover or die.
In total that is 3-4 weeks so all numbers related to deaths are actually the picture of 3-4 weeks in the past and the success of any measure can only be seen after that time as well. That is further complicated by delayed testing in many countries. AFAIK only South Korea has every test result in 24h ready. Germany is days behind in many cases it takes a week but they are also far away from whole population testing.
“…and we still have some weeks of near-exponential increase in deaths to come before the lockdowns begin to bite.”
The rates of increases in deaths are already falling – and the lockdowns can hardly have had a chance to start working on those, let alone “bite”.
Indeed, other factors are in play and the initial exponential doubling times are extending for both cases and fatalities, in all EU countries. Sweden is slowly rising at a fairly stable exponential , the limiting factors bending down other countries probably not yet effective with their low overall level of “herd immunity”.
Thanks for your response.
Why not listen to the real experts?
‘All these measures are leading to self-destruction and collective suicide based on nothing but a spook.’
Dr Sucharit Bhakdi, 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.
‘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.’
Dr Wolfgang Wodarg, German physician specialising in Pulmonology, politician and former chairman of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.
‘I have never seen anything like this, anything anywhere near like this. I’m not talking about the pandemic, because I’ve seen 30 of them, one every year. It is called influenza. And other respiratory illness viruses, we don’t always know what they are. But I’ve never seen this reaction, and I’m trying to understand why.’
Dr Joel Kettner, Professor of Community Health Sciences and Surgery at Manitoba University, former Chief Public Health Officer for Manitoba province and Medical Director of the International Centre for Infectious Diseases.
‘If we had not known about a new virus out there, and had not checked individuals with PCR tests, the number of total deaths due to “influenza-like illness” would not seem unusual this year. At most, we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average.’
Dr John Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine, of Health Research and Policy and of Biomedical Data Science, at Stanford University School of Medicine and a Professor of Statistics at Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences.
‘There is a very good example that we all forget: the swine flu in 2009. That was a virus that reached the world from Mexico and until today there is no vaccination against it. But what? At that time there was no Facebook or there maybe was but it was still in its infancy. The coronavirus, in contrast, is a virus with public relations. Whoever thinks that governments end viruses is wrong.’
Dr Yoram Lass, Israeli physician, politician and former Director General of the Health Ministry.
‘ We have reliable figures from Italy and a work by epidemiologists, which has been published in the renowned science journal ‹Science›, which examined the spread in China. This makes it clear that around 85 percent of all infections have occurred without anyone noticing the infection. 90 percent of the deceased patients are verifiably over 70 years old, 50 percent over 80 years……In Italy, one in ten people diagnosed die, according to the findings of the Science publication, that is statistically one of every 1,000 people infected. Each individual case is tragic, but often – similar to the flu season – it affects people who are at the end of their lives……If we close the schools, we will prevent the children from quickly becoming immune…..We should better integrate the scientific facts into the political decisions.
Dr Pietro Vernazza, Swiss physician specialising Infectious Diseases at the Cantonal Hospital St. Gallen and Professor of Health Policy.
‘This study compared the mortality rate of SARS-CoV-2 in OECD countries (1.3%) with the mortality rate of common coronaviruses identified in AP-HM patients (0.8%) from 1 January 2013 to 2 March 2020. Chi-squared test was performed, and the P-value was 0.11 (not significant).’
Dr Yanis Roussel et al, a team of researchers from the Institut Hospitalo-universitaire Méditerranée Infection, Marseille and the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Marseille, conducting a peer-reviewed study on Coronavirus mortality for the government of France under the ‘Investments for the Future’ programme.
And so on and so forth. There are plenty more where that came from. It really probably is a duck……..
Tim
“But I’ve never seen this reaction, and I’m trying to understand why.’ My feelings exactly! I’m glad that Sweden is resisting peer pressure so that we have something to compare against once the dust settles.
I think that an expedient solution would be to surround NYC with armed guards, and put Snake Plissken in charge of building a high wall around the city.
Swedish 7 day average new case rate is now down to 9.2%, corresponding to a 7.89 day doubling time. Their figures are released at 14:00 CET (08:00 EST) here: https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/09f821667ce64bf7be6f9f87457ed9aa
Sweden, starting on 4th March when daily cases first exceeded 10 / day ; 9.4% or 7.3 days doubling.
No sign of flattening the curve, nor of it increasing. Currently 95 cases per day. In three weeks that slow exponential will take them to about 700 / day. They probably will not want to be doubling many more times after that , if no other factors come into to play to bend the rate down.
This is the kind of post where software that allows one to find new comments since the last visit, is essential. A lot of comments are missed by a lot of people in a 500 or 600 comment article, because I doubt many people are going to wade throught the same 500 posts for several days looking for new comments. I don’t. I search on my name and then look to see if anyone commented to me on that particular post. And then I move on.
We used to have comment software that would highligh new comments each time you visited the page. VERY convenient!
I’m sure Anthony is doing the best he can with the software upgrades. He may be a little gun-shy since the last time he upgraded the comment software, it almost blew up the website. We don’t want that happening again! 🙂
You could search on “April 5” to find new comments today.
“We used to have comment software that would highlight new comments each time you visited the page. VERY convenient!”
I used to get email notices of new postings or replies to comments I posted. But that stopped many months ago, although I’ve religiously continued to check both boxes every time I post.
The only way I can find responses now is to return to the page and search on my name, then read subsequent posts looking for replies.
Lord Moncton,
Depending on what you find, I would suggest that you contact Tucker Carlson to get contacts for Sen. Tom Cotton and Rep. Liz Cheney. I suggest, you discuss your findings with both.
Senator Cotton tried to warn Trump about how deadly the Wuhan outbreak was and left the impeachment proceedings to present his findings.
Senators Cotton and Cheney have both spoken publicly about Chinese government activities and strategies that are criminal and a threat to our democracy.
I believe they will sound the alarm in the US GOP and will insure the appropriate permanent US congressional committees are informed and will get the US intelligence to assist, as well to inform the President.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/early-on-cheney-and-cotton-warned-about-the-coronavirus-they-still-face-push-back-in-the-gop/2020/04/04/d6676200-75df-11ea-87da-77a8136c1a6d_story.html
These aren’t moderate Republicans in swing districts or those facing tough Senate reelections in battleground states — they hail from the hawkish wing of the GOP. Led by Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) and Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark.), they are conservatives whose strident views on national security, particularly toward China, remain controversial.
Jacob Glanville is key.
He understands what the new and current biotechnology is capable of. The US and China have developed an AI simulation of human biological interactions which would enable a virus designer to make small adjustment to get a precise reactions in the human hosts.
I wish you luck. My thoughts are with you.
Best wishes,
William Astley
re: “nd China have developed an AI simulation of”
On what ‘platform’ does this run? Cray supercomputer? Beowulf cluster? In Intel i7 based desktop workstation? A VAX 11/780? What?
One eyed modelling really works.
Simply google: a swiss doctor on covid 19 – swiss propaganda research
‘New evidence has emerged from China (April 01)’ ‘Tom Jefferson, an epidemiologist and honorary research fellow at the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford, said the findings were “very, very important.” He told The BMJ, “The sample is small, and more data will become available. Also, it’s not clear exactly how these cases were identified. But let’s just say they are generalisable. And even if they are 10% out, then this suggests the virus is everywhere. If—and I stress, if—the results are representative, then we have to ask, ‘What the hell are we locking down for?’” Jefferson said that it was quite likely that the virus had been circulating for longer than generally believed and that large swathes of the population had already been exposed.’
British Medical Journal 02 April 2020
‘Overall deaths in Europe are currently beyond the range they define as normal; this can be seen as the green line Delay-adjusted number of deaths rises above the dotted grey line representing four standard deviations beyond the mean or Substantial increase. Notice, however, that Europe remains in a much better position now than it was in the previous three winters: 2017-01, 2018-09 and 2019-05 (the fifth week of last year). This raises the question: why are we taking such unprecedented measures with quarantines and shutdowns when this was not necessary in those years?’
‘In Proportion’ Data updated 04 April 2020
As more such data (and there is plenty more e.g. Northern Italy has been having unusually large numbers of pneumonia cases, unexplained, since 2018) continues to make itself available, it is difficult to see how OECD governments can possibly hold the line on lockdowns for very much longer.
Salutations to Sweden, a beacon of freedom and common sense for the rest of the world!
Tim
You quoted, “This raises the question: why are we taking such unprecedented measures with quarantines and shutdowns when this was not necessary in those years?’ I’ve basically been asking this question here for weeks and no one has taken me to task for my audacity or stupidity. The silence is deafening!