By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
It’s déjà vu all over again, and, frankly, nostalgia ain’t what it used to be. On the climate question, the totalitarians told us we must believe, just believe the experts. As a hard-headed British engineer once defined it: “Expert: x, an unknown quantity; spurt, a drip under pressure.” On the Chinese virus, we are told the same.
Pity the governments that have had to attempt to take rational decisions on what to do about the Chinese virus when, as with climate change, the data are inadequate and incompetently kept, the world body nominally in charge is inept, corrupt and – to put it mildly – deferential to totalitarian regimes, and the soi-disant “experts” cannot agree among themselves.
In Britain, it does not help that the Prime Minister, on five occasions at the beginning of this year, failed to prioritize his time in such a way as to take the trouble to attend and chair the weekly intelligence meeting held in Cabinet Office Briefing Room A.
It is these meetings that are intended to be the gathering-place for information garnered by Britain’s various intelligence services around the world, under the aegis of the Prime Minister and the Chief of the Joint Intelligence Committee. Had Mr Johnson attended those meetings, he would perhaps have intervened to do something about the then-alarming daily case-growth rate at least a month earlier than he did.
As it was, he dithered until two weeks after Mr Trump – who was himself late in acting – declared a national emergency. The consequences are now becoming all too apparent. It is possible that Britain has now lost more of her citizens to the Chinese virus than any other country except the United States and China. We don’t know for sure, because a third of all British deaths arise outside hospitals and are thus ingeniously excluded from the Government’s daily counts, though the Office for National Statistics is now publishing a weekly parallel series giving the real numbers.
Among the truly half-witted advice given by the “experts” are three points that deserve urgent correction. Neil Ferguson, the epidemiologist whose model HM Government chiefly heeds, said yesterday that large gatherings are not particularly important for transmitting the virus. On this point, the South Koreans would beg to differ. Their elaborate and determined contact-tracing has shown that the infection first got its boots on at a large church assembly, to whose members many of the first cases in South Korea were traced back.
Secondly, most Western governments, with less recent experience of fatal infections than those in the Far East, have still not quite learned the importance of asking their citizens, when outside their own homes, to wear some form of face-covering.
As South Korea’s chief of public health has bluntly said in a recent interview, homemade face-masks are by no means perfect, but they help a great deal by preventing droplets from coughs and sneezes from traveling well beyond the 6 ft that most countries have adopted as the minimum “social distance”. Even with masks, 16 ft would be better than 6 ft. Without masks, 6 ft is a dangerously inadequate distance.
Mr Trump, in his three-phase plan for bringing the lockdown to an end as soon as it is safe, has gotten the point about do-it-yourself face-coverings. His plan strongly recommends them. HM Government, however, continues to dither on this as on much else. Unlike Mr Trump, it has proven wholly unable of even giving a hint of what an exit strategy from the lockdown might look like, and people are becoming justifiably alarmed that their elected representatives do not trust them.
The worst of all the pieces of bad advice handed down by the “experts” is the idea that the best way to deal with this pandemic is to let as many people as possible get the infection and acquire what they chillingly call “herd immunity”.
As the South Koreans have discovered, it is far from clear for how long the immunity acquired by those who have recovered from the infection will persist. Until that central question is answered, it cannot be safely assumed that population-wide immunity will be rapidly or effectively acquired.
Here are today’s graphs showing the daily compound growth rates in cumulative confirmed cases and in deaths. As always, they are seven-day averages, so as to iron out random fluctuations in the data. Note that it is cumulative cases, and not just new cases, that determine the future rate of transmission.
Fig. 1. Mean compound daily growth rates in cumulative confirmed cases of COVID-19 for the world excluding China (red) and for several individual nations averaged over the successive seven-day periods ending on all dates from March 28 to April 18, 2020.
Fig. 2. Mean compound daily growth rates in cumulative COVID-19 deaths for the world excluding China (red) and for several individual nations averaged over the successive seven-day periods ending on all dates from April 4 to April 18, 2020.#
Ø High-quality images of the graphs are here.
Monckton at his most risible, joining in the witch hunt along with the rest of the media…Johnson bad, Trump bad, kill thousands, all their fault etc, ad nauseum etc…
Check out the timeline with WHO and China, and tell me how serious everyone was taking it back then. You really really should know better.
And, i’m afraid your compound method isn’t actually showing the reality either. I was actually quite impressed with the method at first, but it isn’t following reality. As it seems to be with models, it doesn’t really matter whether they’re right or wrong so long as the maker of the model can justify it’s continuing existence. And here we are, another post…
Have a look at the ONS figures, and try and do something to show where all non-hospital dead are coming from, and why, and how and what they have died of. Clue, hospital admissions are down 60%.
In response to the furtively pseudonymous “NeverReady”, who calls me names from behind a cowardly cloak of anonymity and thus contravenes site policy, both Mr Johnson and Mr Trump were late in realizing that decisive action was necessary. The elementary epidemiology of new pandemics is that they spread in a near-strictly-exponential fashion. Like it or not, it is essential that governments should act promptly and that, to prevent the same mistakes being made next time, those that did not act promptly are called out for their dithering.
I have much sympathy with both Mr Trump and Mr Johnson, for the experts were divided in their opinions, which shows just how inexpert those who did not understand the need for immediate, swift and determined action actually were.
Spare a thought. At least he didn’t call himself , Lord Never ready.
Not really sure what to say to this missive…but grow up might be apposite.
Thanks for your input.
“…furtively pseudonymous…”
My email is given when I commented and my name is Nigel. And calling the comment in your article “risible” is calling you names…?
Everyone was late in recognising the “dangers” of C19, this was largely due to the WHO, the Chinese and in the UK various “experts” who stated that it was nothing to worry about, and a media that has as it’s first priority a lamentable policy of publishing seemingly contradictory “facts” and “evidence” that all only lead to the one certain outcome of “Bungling Boris bad” and everyone else good . This led to the “dithering” response.
This is not to say I don’t recognise the woeful response of the UK, it’s just that it should be taken in context when used in comparison. And I cannot see where I was disputing the need for decisive or prompt action. The only countries so far that appear to have acted decisively and promptly are those countries who have a control over their society that we would find unacceptable.
Your model does not appear to support observation, although like I said I was impressed with the methodology when I first came across it.
Your model is suggesting that the lockdown in the UK is necessary and is having an effect in the reduction of deaths attributed to C19.
Your model uses ONS data, but you do not attempt to make any corrections based on real world observation (not interpretation) to the data in anyway but simply just use their numbers.
The ONS numbers, methodology of categorisation and continuing re-categorisation, adding numbers to previous weeks numbers (or not, but instead adding previous weeks deaths to the current days numbers, but with no explanation of either allocation of death numbers…very arbitrary) due to a lag in reporting essentially renders the ONS numbers as not quite useless. My guess is that this obfuscation is deliberate.
The lockdown may very well have no effect whatsoever, and may indeed, and in all probability does, result in an increase in non-hospital deaths. With an observed reduction of 60% (down from 160,000 to 60,000, week 14 comparison 2019 and 2020) in A&E admissions, amongst the 100,000 or so who have not attended A&E some will die. Is that because of C19, some other condition? Who knows?
So, in short, death numbers due to C19 could be under reported or over reported. Non-hospital deaths could be reported correctly or incorrectly, under reported and then over reported. The ONS numbers cannot usefully be used to assert anything.
Even in the so-called “light cases”, Covid-19 disease is not like flu. The crisis that comes five days after the onset of symptoms brings awful pressure in the lungs, and the fever reaches 40 C.
This is a light course of the disease that does not qualify the patient for the hospital.
You’re skipping over the light course of the disease that has no symptoms whatsoever but carry on.
If any place could open up I would think NYC can since it appears a large portion of population already infected.
From news reports and web postings we are reading of odd happenings
resulting from the virus now among us.
I’ve started to call such things Panic 2020 items.
Here are 3:
A person washed her hands dozens of times each day – apparently not leaving her home – until the skin became raw.
In California, Venice Skate Park was covered with sand – keeping people from getting fresh air.
In Washington State: fishing – another open air activity – is banned.
There are many more, funny/sad/tragic, actions to be recorded.
Give it a try.
Panic 2020 . . .
There was that middle aged man who choked a teenage girl because she wasn’t practicing good social distancing with her friends.
In a NYC hospital, a young women shoved an older woman who was not keeping her distance.
The older woman fell, smashed her head, and died.
The young woman was charged with disorderly conduct and released.
Nicholas
It sounds to me that at the very least she should have been charged with negligent manslaughter or homicide. But then, with the current situation, they are probably trying to minimize court trials and incarcerations.
The UK’s Covid-19 today’s (Monday) update:
http://www.vukcevic.co.uk/UK-COVID-19.htm
The red line (cumulative hospitalisations) is well-fitted by Farr’s Law:
N=A*(1+erf((d-D)/T)) with A=80,000 , T=15.7, D=11/Apr/2020 and d measured in days. The red line shows a maximum slope (dN/dd) at d=11/Apr, with a daily rate of about 7.2%. To be precise, it is (200/√π)/T. (The “tipping point” doesn’t show up very well on a logarithmic vertical scale. With a linear vertical scale you can see the sigmoid curve and its point of inflection, which is the point of maximum daily rate of infections. Logarithmic scales work for the early stages, but obscure the end-game.) If Farr’s Law is a skilled predictor, it would make the cumulative total around 160000 (being 2A) and the daily rate dropping below 100 (that is, 0.1% per day) round about 11th May. We are well clear of the 20 to 30% per day rise daily rise in new infections in early March.
To what extent, if any, this normal distribution pattern’s shape (especially the peak daily rate) and parameters were influenced by lockdown, social distancing, counting, attribution or testing strategy is an entirely different discussion which doubtless will go on for months, presumably long after the Nightingale Hospitals have been put in store and we regain our liberty and are back in useful work.
Mr Expert The High lord Christopher Monckton,
You chose to take it upon yourself to be one of these so called experts and to use that position as a tyrant to proclaim how we cannot open because we do not have enough information.
But we have had enough information for weeks now. New York City is the single heaviest hit place on the planet. It is completely run by these worthless experts who cannot do much of anything right. And despite this lack of capability their hospitals were not over run and healthcare continued to be delivered to those in need. In fact, the hospital ship and the field hospitals put in place to help cover for lack of capacity were barely used.
The point of shutting down was to protect the healthcare system. The healthcare system is not under threat. Yet you demand we remain in lockdown in order to, well, I never actually tried to figure out what your perverted and twisted logic was trying to accomplish because once you argue that we need to remain locked down because that is the safe thing to do, I completely lose any interest in what you have to say.
The simple fact is the social distancing, the shutting down of non essential services, was done to “flatten the curve” and protect the healthcare system. And evidence indicates the lock down was not needed. Sweden is not outstripping the rest of the world with uncontrolled and extreme exponential growth of their covid-19 medical needs or deaths. New York City shows no evidence that they flattened the curve at all.
When every nation is lined up to an apple to apples comparison, for example when per population deaths are the same, and their progress through the covid-19 outbreak are compared, there is no rhyme or reason that shows that any actions by any government on social distancing or locking down accomplished anything. Hard lock down places match wide open place. Moderate lockdowns are in better shape than hard lockdowns.
And you chose to be the local expert, and you chose that you believed preventing lives lost in the short term only to be lost in the long term is a greater good than producing wealth and still losing the same number of lives.
Your point that Sweden is not exhibiting extreme exponential growth is a good one. Reportedly, Sweden tends to have relatively large nursing homes for the elderly, where a large fraction of its cases and deaths are derived.
In China, and Asia in general, nursing home are not very common. Culturally, children are expected to take care of parents. Could this also be a factor in Asia vs. the West?
I am afraid he is more like Michael Mann than we thought. Oblivious to the real data coming out and reliant on non peer reviewed work from Imperial college.
What exactly is it that you want peer reviewed?
There is no need because most people could run an epidemiological (compartmental) model which will give a similar – or more likely – worse outcome. To the best of our knowledge all 7 billion people on earth were susceptible to this new virus. Given this information and a decent estimate of R0 it should be possible to model the disease progression through different populations.
This is not the same as the Mann Hockey Stick. The sharp uptick in Mann’s reconstruction was an artefact of his PCA methodology. To make matters worse, he obscured the late 20th century decline in the proxy data.
If anyone has a problem with Ferguson’s model they should first produce their own and then, if there are significant differences, contact Ferguson to resolve them. If Ferguson is very wrong (he isn’t) that will more likely be because scientists have misunderstood how the virus is transmitted.
The man who led to this lock down has never got a prediction right.
Are we now in the situation that Neil Ferguson just has to mention 500,000 dead and we have to go into lock down.
We now know from the data that he was hopelessly wrong again.
Or the P.M. of NZ , Jacinda Ardern , to pull “80,000 NZers could die” out of the hat , on Public Television(TM G. Orwell)?
It happened.
But was it deliberately wrong?
Misinformation, disinformation, or the new chap malinformation (aka HateSpeech)?
Are we now in the situation that Neil Ferguson just has to mention 500,000 dead and we have to go into lock down.
Not true. The 500k figure related to an unmitigated response. The projection was for a 200k death toll under the measures up to March 23rd. Stricter measures were then implemented which were expected to result in 20k deaths.
We now know from the data that he was hopelessly wrong again.
It’s difficult to see how he could have been much nearer the mark.
Mr Stoner is entitled to his prejudice against preventing fatal pandemics from spreading unchecked. Responsible governments, however, have to act as adults.
0.1-1% deaths would not have led to a lock down.
Neil Ferguson is a dangerous man whose non- peer reviewed madness has led to utter misery.
Prejudice: preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience.
The world has had pandemics before. I have read about many of them throughout my schooling years. I never once read about federal governments shutting down their entire economies to fight any of them. So, based on reason and actual experience, what I recommend follows the norms of society at large. A society that has brought about the greatest period of human advancement ever.
Your solution to the pandemic is novel, like the virus. Untested, never been done before, and outright guaranteed destructive.
Evidence clearly shows that the economic shutdowns are not accomplishing the mission of protecting the healthcare system. No individual countries that have shut down are performing so well against the open economies that they can claim the shut down has worked. The argument you will make against this is that every place is different so you cannot know, and the rebuttal is the exact same. Thus the evidence that shut down economies everywhere are not performing better than open economies everywhere is the evidence to use.
The healthcare system is safe. Every bit of evidence that has come out has said the healthcare system is safe. How many people are with the disease and symptom free. Far larger than thought at first. How many with symptoms are such they will not go to the doctor? Far more than thought at first. Of those that go to the hospitals how many are well enough to be sent back home. Far many more than thought at first. How many need to be in the hospital? Far fewer than originally thought. How many need ICU? Fewer than thought. How many need ventilators? Far fewer than thought and ventilators have been found to be more destructive to life than helpful for life. You see the direction this is going? How widespread is the disease? 50 to 300 times as widespread as the current testing has proven.
So, an average of 175 times as widespread as thought, and the hospitals are doing fine. So what is the reasoned thought on the disease? It is not bad enough to commit economic suicide over. We have experience. We have seen the enemy and faced it down. We have effectively defeated the idea that our medical system will collapse if we are open for business. Rational thought would conclude what I have. Time to open for business. Irrational thought will be fear driven and not evidence driven.
I never said anything about allowing it spread unchecked. There are many things you can do short of the unbelievably destructive way you and yours have chosen to check the pandmeic.
Responsible governments can act. They can build field hospitals. They can set up testing for the virus and quarantine of the infected. They can recommend social distancing practices. They can buy and distribute face masks. They can order medical supplies and demand certain companies switch over to manufacturing certain needed items. They can coordinate responses. They can restrict travel between places with significant outbreaks and places without such outbreaks. They can pass legislation to cover the costs at the states for taking actions to care for their people.
On the other hand, arbitrarily shutting down some parts of the economy, throwing 22 million and growing people out of work. Causing panic. Destroying the larger part of economic output for months on end. Without having a clue, as you already admitted, to what the threat is, is not responsible. It is out and out irresponsible and dangerous.
The Great and upstanding amazingly smart High Lord Christopher Monckton of Brenchley is a tyrant enabler and the funny thing is that he pretty much finds absolute terrible faults in the actions of every last one of the tyrants and their enablers and still finds himself siding with the tyrants he has found so many faults in. I imagine these days the Great Lord Monckton has terrible headaches and sleepless nights as the cognitive dissonance must be reverberating like tsunamis in his self destructing cranial cavity.
And the projection of his own prejudice must be causing him some additional harm.
I am not prejudiced against preventing fatal pandemics from spreading unchecked. I am rightfully fearful of tyrannical governments imposing their flawed and low quality acts against me and everyone. Something the good lord should be fearful of.
You sir are no longer worthy of the respect I used to have for you. Even if you find yourself on my side of thought, I will not entertain your blatherings. No one should. You should be treated like the guy in the joke that got caught with a goat…
Christopher
“… act as adults.” Is that a euphemism for patronizing behavior towards their subjects? How about a referendum to ask their peers how much risk they are willing to accept in exchange for more freedom of movement? Or alternatively, providing more protection for the high-risk group? There are logical alternatives to strict lockdowns, which you seem unwilling to even entertain, let alone recommend.
China dictates what alternatives are available. If you try something else, one of their minions in academia will create a “study” to show you that you are wrong, and their minions in the media will spread that “study” far and wide and then if you go against them, they will scream that you killed every last person who dies afterwards.
China is in control. Christopher is just one of their useful idiots who thinks he is the adult in the room.
astonerii wrote: “ The healthcare system is not under threat. ”
Actually it is. Many hospitals and clinics are going bankrupt. From the best surgeons
to the sweeper of the floors, folks are not working and not earning.
The Wall Street Journal has a very small (partial) list. Read it and weep.
Sending Hospitals into Bankruptcy {subscription needed}
Editorial Board, WSJ
Sorry, I meant they are not under threat of being overrun in capacity terms. As in, the great influx of the infected can be cared for with what we have and what we can build in the field.
Yes, sorry. I knew what you intended.
The Great left coast State of Washington fell into the quicksand.
Spent lots of money and effort on the non-event of capacity overrun.
Prepare for thousands of deaths. Bend the curve or else.
The curve bent, but we are still locked down because . . .
Gov. Jay says so.
I’m not impressed with the so-called “experts”.
Dr. Fauci has been wrong too many times. Dr. Birx has been wrong too many times.
Front line doctors, who see & treat patients have had a better handle on the situation.
(The so-called “experts” are a bunch of “desk jockeys”.)
It took a poll of 6,000 doctors who supported use of Hydroxychloroquine and countless individual reports of recovery using the drug before Dr. Fauci would back off his opinion that it was “unproven”.
The so-called “models” have been nothing but FEAR “factories” creating panic & hysteria.
And many responsible and well-intentioned people have been apologists for this rubbish.
Open business, let people support their families. Keep contacting your governor.
I got a volcano, maybe we should sacrifice to the fire god, Pele, by throwing all the “experts” in the volcano.
Sounds crazy, right? Well, so far for all the good the “experts” and their often unwitting apologists, have done regarding this situation, sacrifice to the gods would get better results.
Remember, at first the “experts” said two million would die in the U. S.
Second, they said 200, 000 would die, even if we did all the shutdowns and social distancing.
Now, they are “predicting” 60,000 will die (closer to reality).
At some point even a broken clock is right twice a day. beware of “desk jockeys” trying to tell you what it’s really like.
S. I. Hayakawa, “The map is not the territory.”
All “desk jockeys” have is a dodgy map.
Frankly, it feels like I’m a guinea pig in an experiment.
I don’t like being a guinea pig in some “expert’s” idea of an experiment.
Does anybody like being a guinea pig?
Or a micro-organism in some “expert’s petri dish…
Good gracious!
Of those 60,000 far less than 1/3 will die due to the infection and far greater than 2/3 will die of something else while infected.
Exactly!
Fauci knew this fifteen years ago :
Chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection
and spread.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41421-020-0156-0
At 1:30 PM EST, crude is trading at $3 a barrel for the May cintract.
There dollars!
Correction, now down to One dollar and 45 cents.
Now a dollar twenty.
And now it is changing by the second of course. I see prices flashing on my ticker as low is fifteen cents a barrel for WTI crude for the May contract.
I expect it to go negative if it has not already, while I was typing this.
IOW…they will pay you to take it.
Yup…a penny now.
They will pay you $2.83 per barrel to please take some cheaper than free crude oil.
OMG now the price is negative 8 dollars a barrel.
Just to complete the OT thread, oil closed in NNYC at -$35/barrel.
The contract expires tomorrow, and no one wants to take physical delivery.
US storage is full.
Congressional democrats blocked Trump’s plan to buy crude for the SPR.
Why the SPR is not tripled in capacity is beyond me. They should triple the capacity and increase the capability of both filling and draining it significantly.
Now would be the right time to go nuts storing for an emergency.
Nancy and Chuck blocked the plan to top off and then increase the capacity of the SPR.
They can be blamed, but it should have been done a decade or more ago. It is not like we have not been through the boom and bust of the oil market before.
At the close, Trump could have the government get paid over $35 a barrel to fill up the SPR.
He does not need any money from congress.
And I just found out that there is 80 million barrels of capacity unfilled.
And there is now a law allowing private companies to use the storage capacity of the SPR.
It can accept up to 4 million barrels per day filling max rate.
So anyone with a big oil tank can get paid 35 thousand dollars per contract to take oil.
Each contract is 1000 barrels.
But it is landlocked crude, I think in Cushing OK.
Too bad Trump didn’t have his personal broker step in to buy crude and then donate it to the SPR.
We can only hope that Arte produce another film-
“The ARTE documentary „Profiteers of Fear“ from 2009 shows how the mainly privately financed WHO „upgraded“ a mild wave of influenza (the so-called „swine flu“) to a global pandemic so that vaccines worth several billion dollars could be sold to governments around the world. Some of the protagonists of that time are again prominently represented in the current situation’
And I believe the A/H1N1 2009 flu hit the US hard ONLY because the Americans have a ridiculously high rate of vaccination.
It is reported at Zero Hedge that NZ has eased its lockdown.
farmerbraun in NZ reports that the NZ government yesterday extended its emergency lock-down , which was due to end after one month at Wednesday midnight out time.
It was EXTENDED to midnight next monday our time.
At that time , lock-down will remain as now , but forestry , construction and some manufacturing will be added to the “essential ” category.
Take your pick.
Well that’s interesting. The ZH story that fb referred to , which was on the first page of headlines 30 mins ago , now cannot be found on the first three pages, but is still reachable via fb’s history.
WUWT?
Can anyone else see it in the ZH headlines?
it’s all going to get very messy.
“WHO director has a long history of cover-ups”
https://www.wnd.com/2020/04/director-long-history-cover-ups/
Lord Mockton and Jo anne Nova as I said you know NOTHING about viruses as Willis shows ALL countries show the same metrics including Sweden and Belarus with NO lockdown. You are promoting the death of millions of you fellow British Australian citizens who will die of starvation, no work suicide ect If I was you I would not publish anything about corona viruses as here you may be held liable legally later on and I think you are a nice fellows and persons jo anne nova and I dont wish that on you as I happen to agree with you on AGW. My impression is that you know nothing about viruses whereas I do, I am a Veterinarian with 4 higher degrees from South Africa and Australia and have a journals that has published hundreds of articles about animal to human virus infections. Most seroius epiomologist from Germany and Sweden who actually know this stuff and you dont agree with you evaluations stay away from this thats my advice.
My impression is that you know nothing about viruses whereas I do,
he knows nothing about infectious diseases and how flu viruses work
The second quoted sentence brings into doubt the veracity of the first. If you know half as much about viruses as you claim, than you should know that the corona virus is *not* a flu virus. That you refer to it as such indicates that your claims of knowledge is greatly exaggerated (to be kind)
Elizabot……
Believe or not if the USA does not move fast you may have to have a military dictartorship to fix things the romans did this 2000 years ago when things get out of hand to bring things back to normal. I hope not necessary but Trump is not really responding as he should be Fauci needs to be fired immediately he knows nothing about infectious diseases and how flu viruses work and is wrecking the USA real fast my 2 cents worth
Your writing style is still a mystery. Surely you do not write journal articles the same way.
I’m trying to think who it reminds me of.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/17/nearly-90percent-of-the-us-navy-hospital-ship-in-new-york-is-empty-amid-coronavirus-fight.html
The arguments for ‘lock downs’ are producing the following result:
“While the technical treatment was a success, the patient died of economic strangulation.”
The ‘experts’ meanwhile are recommending the tourniquet they applied around the patient’s throat be tightly maintained for another month, just to be technically sure, lest any loosening cause a technical backfire….. also known as ‘gasping for economic breath’.
While everyone is nattering on about the nuances of the Wuhan virus, our economy is dying of strangulation. What are our greatest needs and highest priorities, right now? Freedom. Jobs. Paychecks. Paying the bills.
“What are our greatest needs and highest priorities, right now?”
That depends on the meaning of “our”.
Who are the “we”, whose needs shall be given the highest priority?
How many of us are there, and how does one gain admission to this exalted status?
Natter on, parsing your existential puffery….. as the bankruptcies pile up, as families are torn apart by financial distresses, as the life’s work and investments of small business people are destroyed, as our strangled economies crumble around your tone deaf ears, in front of your unseeing eyes. Why? Because a bureaucrat said the citizens freedoms, jobs, paychecks, and paying their debts weren’t ‘essential’. Natter on, exalted farmerbraun…
There is none so blind as he who will not see.
I think perhaps you misread that. Otherwise your ad hominem response makes no sense at all.
It is precisely all those things of which you complain, and more besides , that farmerbraun has opposed since the outset of this manufactured panic.
It is the very existence of this exalted fraternity, for whose benefit this theatre has been staged, that fb objects to.
Sorry to be overly cryptic. I thought the ironical tone in the last sentence was obvious.
I think I get it. You think I’m a rich farmer. Is that it?
Apologies. I don’t know your style of writing and I’m neither a mind reader nor clairvoyant. Use ” /s “, after cryptic sarcasm.
I’m completely exasperated by the host of commenters caught up in the nuances of viral administrivia, while their economic worlds are collapsing around them. ‘Oblivious’ seems an inadequate descriptor….
No apology necessary. I never use a sarc tag because I’m one of those grammar nazis 🙂
Irony and litotes are my thing , but they are both probably hate speech in the NWO.
even if they’re not considered outright hate speech, use of such certainly marks you as an -ist or -phobe of one kind or another 😉
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/7/3/01-7320_article
“This outbreak demonstrates the potential for rapid spread of influenza A throughout a confined population despite appropriate vaccination. The efficiency of human-to-human transmission is emphasized by the fact that there was no discernible difference in attack rates between various areas of the ship by the end of the outbreak. Although over 95% of the Arkansas crew were appropriately immunized with the 1995-96 influenza vaccine, at least 42% became ill with influenza; when definite and probable cases were included, the attack rate was 54%, for an estimated 46% efficacy of the 1995-96 influenza vaccine against the Wuhan strain’
Maybe the armies of the world need to take a hint that just because you want to train soldiers in the most inhumane way possible, doesn’t mean you need to sell them to Big Vaccine.
The French military being even more vaccine-inept than the French heath ministry, which is impossible in theory.
Well done , our Man in Korea. A very useful place from which to be observing proceedings.
farmerbraun thinks that routine public health measures , such as Mosh mentions -” slowing the virus was a simple as wash your hands, cover your cough (with your elbow) don’t touch your face or shake hands?” -, and some other obvious and routine measures , might have been a prudent first response step to an unquantifiable threat.
Could such public health measures be usefully encouraged ONLY by inducing a herd panic , and consequent calls for a “lock-down”, with its very obvious collateral damage?
So Willis on his coronavirus page breaks down the nations and lines them up with 10 deaths per 10 million population as day one.
There three main groups here, the band of Italy or worse, netherlands to switzerland, and portugal and better.
Sweden is the only nation not on economic suicide. All the other nations are on economic suicide with severe lockdowns in place.
The places doing Italy and worse are Italy, Spain, France, England, and Belgium.
The next tranche of nations are Netherlands, Sweden, United States, Ireland, and Switzerland.
Then the good going countries. Germany, Portugal, Austria and Denmark.
Right there, right smack dab in the middle of the various nations all will more significant lockdowns, is Wide open barely social distancing higher education only locked down Sweden.
The argument is that the lockdowns are slowing the spread of the disease. How can this be possible if the deaths are not in fact slowing any more for these nations than wide open Sweden?
The lockdowns are not needed. Never were needed. Simple washing hands and voluntary social distancing would have been just as effective and far less damaging.
So, why the lockdowns? When did locking down the economy become a method to fight contagion? As far as I know, the first economic lockdown happened in Wuhan, China and it was lifted rather quickly once the rest of the world followed.
Did China take a crisis and use it for benefit, or more to the point, as an effective weapon against the West?
They shut down for a little while and then once they conned the rest of the world to shut down, they reopened for business.
The claim was we needed to lockdown to save the healthcare system. The healthcare system was barely stressed anywhere except New York City in the United States of America and even there is was not crippled.
Stop letting China make a mockery of us. End the lockdown.
It’s not, “Keep Calm and Carry On.” It’s, “Panic, Hide and Don’t Come Out, Until I Tell You.”
There is a good reason to disregard face-mask manifestos. In a phrase, “slack human behavior”, and that’s even if the masks did what people hope, which I am in no way convinced that they do.
Allow me to give some examples of “slack human behavior” that I personally have witnessed and continue to witness:
(1) A woman in a grocery store, shopping for food, pulls her mask from her face, allowing the mask to rest around her neck, as she touches various food items in her quest to select her prize vegetables. Later, she places the mask back on her face, NOT having sanitized or washed contamination from her hands, which she now touches to her mask, thus placing a contaminated mask in the pathway of her own breath, which acts both to suck the contamination into her own lungs, and to propel the contamination further about the store via the pressure of her outward breathing.
(2) A woman in a home improvement store walks about the store with the mask covering her mouth, but NOT here nose (I see this everywhere).
(3) A veterinary assistant, in the heat of dealing with an energetic dog in the parking lot, looses her face mask, as it falls onto the pavement. She picks it up, places it back on her face, and rushes to finish her task, under the normal, inescapable pressures of performing her routine job in a timely, efficient manner, pressured by customers to get things done as quickly as possible.
(4) A concierge at a retirement living center sporadically wears her mask, to make a good appearance, placing the mask in her purse, without washing hands or sanitizing hands between times of touching it, … without sanitizing or washing the mask in between uses. The facility can neither afford nor has access to the quantity of masks required to keep the fresh every two hours for all employees. Besides that, the concierge is claustrophobic and fears the suffocating sensation of the mask on her face, which also steams up her glasses and interferes with her reading important data on the computer screen.
To top all this off, the fact is that any old mask will NOT do. If it’s not an N95, properly fitted, properly sanitized and handled, before and after each and every use, for the proper duration of time, then the mask is merely serving as a teddy bear that makes a child feel more comfortable and happy.
The wearing of masks in other cultures is a long tradition, rather than it is an established, rigorously proven defense against microscopic entities so small that 496 MILLION of them would have to be stacked end-to-end to amount to one inch.
Something this small, driven by the various components of a fluid dynamic environment (air currents, pressure differentials, humidity, ventilation) are not beholden to our naieve rationalizations that fail to account for the dynamics of fluid escape between cracks, contamination accumulation after the fact of breathing that causes build-up on the inside of the mask that can weep through to the outside, only to be propelled by breath from cloth fibers by the pressure of human breathing.
And a seemingly overlooked consideration is the eyes. The virus can enter through the eyes, positioned, of course, immediately above the face mask, in line with escaping currents of air from the wearer’s own breath, as well as all manner of micro-material from the ambient environment.
The studies on all this that I have read use very tentative language that does NOT instill the sort of confidence that the popular message tries to push. I do not see a firm scientific basis for a face mask mandate, and to force such a mandate onto people, in my judgment, violates their rights to assess the evidence for themselves, drawing their own conclusions, as I have done.
You seem to be under the mistaken belief that the point of the public wearing masks is to stop the germs from spreading *to* the mask wearer. It’s not. It’s to stop (or rather limit) the spreading of germs *from* the mask wearer. Without a mask, breathing, coughing, sneezing etc easily expel the germs great distances (hence the idea behind keeping a “social” distancing of 6 feet, which some say isn’t nearly far enough). with the mask, not as much.
Many home made masks are not well adjusted, and people have to lift them many times. I don’t see how they can be useful if they are that inadequate.
OTOH masks for most people are NOT intended to protect from high risk situations, they are not worn by people who deal with heavily ill people, or to stand in from of sneezing people. They are intended to reduce contamination in case where people don’t take other risks. They can capture many water droplets. They probably let a lot of germs pass through or around, but they minimize the spread.
Here is some new partial research from USC which shows the likelihood that a great number of people have already been infected over the course of this pandemic, … https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/20/coronavirus-antibody-testing-shows-la-county-outbreak-is-up-to-55-times-bigger-than-reported-cases.html
This is the 4th or 5th study to show similar results. That means millions of Americans have already passed the test, so to speak. It also means that contact tracing will be of limited use.
Lock down kills-
“In a German retirement and nursing home for people with advanced dementia, 15 test-positive people have died. However, „surprisingly many people have died without showing symptoms of corona.“ A German medical specialist informs us: „From my medical point of view, there is some evidence that some of these people may have died as a result of the measures taken. People with dementia get into high stress when major changes are made to their everyday lives: isolation, no physical contact, possibly hooded staff.“ Nevertheless, the deceased are counted as „corona deaths“ in German and international statistics. In connection with the „corona crisis“, it is now also possible to die of an illness without even having its symptoms’
There is a tendency towards denial of the existence of “corona crisis response” deaths.
other factors to look out for-
“in several countries, there is increasing evidence in relation to Covid19 that „the treatment could be worse than the disease“.
On the one hand, there is the risk of so-called nosocomial infections, i.e. infections that the patient, who may only be mildly ill, acquires in hospital. It is estimated that there are approximately 2.5 million nosocomial infections and 50,000 deaths per year in Europe. Even in German intensive care units, about 15% of patients acquire a nosocomial infection, including pneumonia on artificial respiration. There is also the problem of increasingly antibiotic-resistant germs in hospitals.
Another aspect is the certainly well-intentioned but sometimes very aggressive treatment methods that are increasingly used in Covid19 patients. These include, in particular, the administration of steroids, antibiotics and anti-viral drugs (or a combination thereof). Already in the treatment of SARS-1 patients, it has been shown that the outcome with such treatment was often worse and more fatal than without such treatment’
Neil Ferguson predicted 150,000 people could die in the U.K. from mad cow disease. BSE has 177 deaths to date, not counting all those unnecessarily-killed cows.
He predicted A/H5N1 would kill 200 million. It killed 440.
When he predicted 2.2 million deaths in the US and .5 million in the UK from coronavirus, it was not “caution” to act on his advice. Caution would have been to take his projections with a truckload of slug salt.
Neil Ferguson predicted 150,000 people could die in the U.K. from mad cow disease
No he didn’t. In fact Ferguson went against conventional wisdom at the time. While there was incomplete data Ferguson’s model predicted no more than 50k but that was the upper bound of a huge confidence interval.
When he predicted 2.2 million deaths in the US and .5 million in the UK from coronavirus,
If no mitigating action were taken. Measures have been taken.
You are also confused about the other modelling projects.
Come on! When challenged he revised the figures to 20K then 6k the following week before mitigation could have had any effect on the numbers!
My father’s friend dies due to coronavirus. He had looks no symptoms of coronavirus. No fever, no flue, no throat problem, but the reason is he had corona.