Guest Survey by Kip Hansen – 17 November 2020
When I am puzzled by something, I try to find out what’s really going on. Years ago, I wrote “What Are They Really Counting?”. The lessons in that essay are even more important today than they were when I penned it at the end of 2015. Many governments of the world have largely shut down their economies and issued edicts restricting the normal every-day activities of their citizens because of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the illness it causes – Covid-19. We are bombarded in the media with screaming headlines of “rising cases” like this:
The curious thing is that among all my family, friends, acquaintances and colleagues, I know of only two people who have been sick with/from (or even suspected) Covid-19 during the entire pandemic period. My wife has one extended family member who was sick, hospitalized for 24 hours out of extreme caution, in Spain. No one I ask knows anyone who is sick with/from Covid-19.
For those of you with little time or no patience:
[if that does not work, click here to take the survey]
There is one exception, we have a friend with a daughter who is a nurse in a dedicated Covid-ward in a local hospital. There have been some sick Covid-19 patients there. Some have even died:
This graph shows the daily Covid-19 deaths for my local county. There have been 87 deaths in the county with Covid-19 mentioned in any way on the death certificate. Since June 2020, there have been only 8 deaths from/with Covid. With a population of about 180,000. This gives my county an approximate generalized death rate of 48.3/100,000. Even if Covid-deaths continue at the current rate and rise to 105 by the end of the year – our annual country-wide Covid-death rate would be only 58/100,000. New York State as a whole has a Covid-death rate of 175/100,000. The death rate of NY State is over 3.6 times higher than in my county. For comparison, the annual death rate from cancers, nationally, is about 160/100,000.
Our local NPR station out of Albany, NY, which I will call “WDNC” for obvious reasons, read letters in today’s “Round Table” program from several readers, all of whom claimed that they didn’t know anyone who had been or was presently sick with Covid-19, however, they were sure that the apparent-President-elect would do the right thing by issuing orders for every citizen to “wear a mask”.
Previous to this, I thought it might be a quirk that among my friends and acquaintances, my family, my county that there weren’t any/many sick people. However, emailing a friend in Portugal revealed that she too didn’t know any sick people, but had heard that there were some in Texas. During a rather unpleasant visit to my dentist earlier today, neither the dentist or any or his staff knew anyone who had been or was sick with Covid-19.
My father was a doctor, I come from a medical family, I studied Pre-Med originally before switching majors, several times. I did humanitarian work in a third-world country where the threats of malaria, dengue and yellow fever were real everyday worries. I know there must be sick people – there are people dying, after all. A lot of people dying, seemingly, but . . . . Total Deaths in the U.S. are not higher than normal for this time of year, despite Covid 19 according to CDC mortality figures. (To see Total Deaths, you must download the .csv file from the GREEN LINK near the top of the page.) The CDC figures for New York State show the same thing – Total Deaths are running even with previous years – despite Covid-19. (Same link – select State instead of the default National. The .csv file is by week, so compare previous years by week numbers. Note: The most current weeks will be incorrect – too low — not fully reported yet – back at least three weeks.)
So, just to try to get a handle on the actuality of the Covid-19 pandemic, as experienced in the real world by readers here, I have created this little three-question survey – I will publish the results here once there are enough participants or in a week, which comes first.
[if that does not work, click here to take the survey]
The survey is only three questions, with dropdowns for your numerical answers. Very quick and easy. If you wish to contribute personal or local information, or anecdotes, use the comment section.
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Author’s Comment:
Covid-19 is not a hoax. It is not a fantasy. It is not simply made up.
However, the responses of our governments, in the United States, and in many other countries around the world have been far more harmful that the pandemic itself. History will replete with books recounting the horrors caused by the worldwide Covid Pandemic Panic.
One of the first to hit the stands is: “The Price of Panic : How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic Into a Catastrophe” by Jay W. Richards, William M. Briggs and Douglas Axe. Available in hardback, e-book editions and in audible formats. I recommend it.
Keep following Watts Up With That to catch the survey results.
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I wish your drop down answers were a little more exact. For example my answers were 0, 1, 1. But for the last two answers had to pick 1-5. That is a big spread
But I commend you you for doing the survey. I have been wondering the same thing
Including myself, my brother’s household (4), and my employer (350+/-) infected.
I recovered, 3 people in my brother’s household recovered. My brother died as have 2 co-workers
Bryan, sorry for your loss.
I’m truly sorry to hear you’ve lost your brother in this mess.
My deepest condolences regarding your brother.
Only dead person I’m aware of was Sean Connery died last week—he was 90.
He didn’t die of COVID. He died of old age.
Don’t split hairs, just mark it down as COVID.
I was talking to the local pharmacist last night, she told me that family doctors, who normally get paid 25 euros per consultation, here in France. If they diagnose COVID19, get paid 55 euros.
Guess what is happening? Many cases of common cold end up getting marked down as COVID.
Same thing in hospitals. A person recently died from cancer. The family were surprised to see COVID on the death cert. They questioned it and were told that the hospital gets extra money for each COVID patient who dies ( presumably justified as elevated costs, somehow ).
The net result is the stats on which descisions are being based and used as justification for destroying our way of life and liberties are begin BOUGHT. Quite simply.
Trump was widely excoriated for merely suggesting that any doctors or hospitals would ever do any such thing as over report a disease.
From what I have read, the entire medical profession is struggling, as people are avoiding pretty much all care that is not a severe case of covid.
Initially, I kind of scoffed when people started reporting that deaths from covid were being conflated by people that merely dies WITH covid.
But I have come to see that this is a very real and serious issue.
It may explain much of the disparity among various countries of the number of covid deaths and the rates of such.
Germany is a notable example, with a markedly lower number and rate of deaths, given as deaths per million of population, as nearly every adjacent country.
Something peculiar is going on with this.
Since there are no real international standards for how to report, it should likely be taken as a matter of fact that the stats are not comparable from one country to another, at least not necessarily so.
And this does not mean anything shady is going on.
It can be explained by two places simply deciding to use a different standard of what counts as a covid death.
Someone who was gonna die soon because they were at end of life stage, may be called a covid death by one person, but not so by someone else that wanted to know how many people died who were not about to die anyway.
The average age of non covid deaths in the US is 84. The average age of covid deaths is 84.
Shutting down the economy has not saved anyone.
I think the numbers are closer to 78 for both.
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/disease/switzerland-to-prosecute-covid-skeptics-welcome-to-tyranny/
And I thought the Swiss had no sense of humour (second only to the Germans) 🤣
That Germans have no sense of humour is just another ridiculous stereo-type by the media.
I had the same issue. Mine was 0,1,0 but recorded 0, 1-5,0. I’m sure it will work out though.
+1 Mine was also 0-1-0
there is a slight problem with the survey that will create criticism
i completed it 3 times
And you wonder why you don’t get invited to more informal surveys.
Mine was easy. All zeroes, thank you God. I’m 79 and my new wife is even older (I’m not allowed to say 😊).
Does that mean god didn’t like those other people?
No.
Last Friday, Nov. 13, 2020, my wife tested positive for Covid-19. She had been sick for nearly a week and we suspect she caught Sars CoV-2 which later developed into Covid-19 from the hospital where she had gone for a minor surgical device implant to monitor her acid reflux.
She is 66 and I am 54. We both have numerous co-morbidities and she is far more prone to colds, flu and other corona virus type illnesses.
Due to my bad health, I went to my doctor months ago and asked if I could start hydroxychloroquine and a regimen of zinc so the zinc would be more readily absorbed and it could help prevent Sars CoV-2 from being able to successfully bind and affect me via my nasal passage and lungs. My doctor agreed with my desire to be proactive to combat the virus and it has worked very well for me. My wife, her doctor and my niece all poo pooed my plan and now both my wife and niece are infected with Covid-19. My niece hasn’t been tested but she has the same symptoms as my wife and she had been coming to our house daily.
My wife is on oxygen at home and we are all three quarantining by order of our county health board but there is a remarkable difference in our health as I appear to be completely unaffected by either virus. I hope they recover soon.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/newly-published-outpatient-study-finds-that-early-use-of-zinc-hydroxychloroquine-and-azithromycin-is-associated-with-less-hospitalizations-and-death-301094237.html
The death rate was artificially boosted in States that didn’t have severe lockdowns in nursing homes. When you weed out this data, death rates drop to just above a bad flu season. In our State of Washington, the current weekly death rate is around .3%, hardly a cause for general lockdowns. The positive rate from Covid tests is also around 3% and with a reported false positive rate of 2%, actual Covid positives could be quite low.
The death rate was also artificially boosted by iatrogenesis. Covid was misdiagnosed as ARDS, and still is to a large degree, resulting in many patients being treated with ARDS protocols that destroyed their lungs, health and lives.
icisil
Sorry, but I don’t understand your terms. Could you explain please.
Thanks much.
Reeve => “Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) occurs when fluid builds up in the tiny, elastic air sacs (alveoli) in your lungs. The fluid keeps your lungs from filling with enough air, which means less oxygen reaches your bloodstream. ”
“Definition of iatrogenic : induced inadvertently by a physician or surgeon or by medical treatment or diagnostic procedures oxygen they need to function.”
Kip,
It is the same (only more draconian) here in the Scottish gulag. I keep asking if any one knows anyone who knows anyone who knew anyone who died of this flu and this flu only. I have yet to find that elusive being.
On the subject of ARDS I wonder if re breathing a large amount of the 40,000 ppm Carbon Dioxide we exhale, which is then trapped by these masks, which Joe Biden wants to mandate, could cause ARDS.
Certainly those poor people who are forced to wear a muzzle all day (like 2 of my grandsons) must be subject to brain damage at least, if not mild ARDS.
Your medical opinion would be welcome.
A friend of mine had this problem in November last year. He went to the local clinic (Polichnitos, Lesvos, Greece) He was treated with anti-biotics and sent home. Told not to lie down. If it didn’t get better within two days they were going to put him in hospital.
Apart from that, and, yes, I know it was November 2019, I do not know anyone who had anything relating to the current “worse pandemic EVVA!”
Submariners breathe air with 5000 ppm CO2 for months on end without getting ARDS.
Iatrogenesis is when a medical treatment harms/ki!lls a patient.
ARDS (Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome) is an overly broad diagnostic definition consisting of various pathophysiologies that have no specific etiology (cause). Basically, low blood oxygen and bilateral lung opacities in a chest x-ray qualifies as ARDS, no matter the cause. Mechanical ventilation is frequently used as a modality (“treatment”) for ARDS. And in fact, ARDS is a diagnosis created for a technology, i.e. mechanical ventilation.
Decades ago when it was determined that mechanical ventilation caused high mortality, trials were done that resulted in the ARDSnet protocols, which determined the ventilatory settings that best reduced mortality (what they ironically call “lung protective strategy”).
When covid hit, Chinese doctors communicated to the world that covid causes ARDS, which normalized and created the expectation of intubating covid patients; and the WHO followed with the recommendation that covid patients be intubated early to prevent aerosolization of virus.
Astute doctors in the West, however, noticed that many covid patients did not act like typical ARDS patients (they have good lung compliance, can carry on conversations, no trouble breathing), and hypothesized that mechanical ventilation with ARDSnet protocols was doing more harm than good ( a clinician’s careful way of saying ventilators were ki!lling them).
It is now generally recognized (by those who IMO are competent) that the high PEEP (Positive End Expiatory Pressure, i.e., the air pressure at end of expiration) designated in the ARDSnet protocols overdistends alveoli in many covid patients causing lung barotrauma and biotrauma. Biotrauma is the activation of systemic inflammatory pathways that can lead to thrombosis, multiple organ failure and death, i.e., basically what they claim covid does.
So in summary, covid misdiagnosed as ARDS created an iatrogenic tragedy in many patients.
Here’s something I found today that describes how covid differs from typical ARDS, and how covid patients don’t do well when treated with ARDSnet protocols designed for typical ARDS.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00134-020-06281-2?wt_mc=Internal.Event.1.SEM.ArticleAuthorOnlineFirst&utm_source=ArticleAuthorOnlineFirst&utm_medium=email&utm_content=AA_en_06082018&ArticleAuthorOnlineFirst_20201022
And another
Advanced respiratory monitoring in COVID-19 patients: use less PEEP!
https://ccforum.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13054-020-02953-z
Mechanical ventilation itself may not be the problem. Here’s an example that shows the difference between mechanical ventilation using ARDSnet (AC/VC with PEEP) and then APRV (Airway Pressure Relief Ventilation with zero PEEP), for which no trials have been done. Notice after only 3 hours on APRV the lungs have cleared remarkably.
https://twitter.com/EPKnott/status/1298406139688779778
Appreciate all of the anecdotal comments. I am the only person I know of who actually called the CDC several weeks ago. I specifically asked to talk to someone who deals with the data, a technician. The reason was so that I would not have to talk to a “manager/supervisor” or public information officer. This conversation lasted about 30 minutes. The tech was required to read a statement about the recording of covid-19 deaths pertaining to the data being dissimenated by the CDC. The disclaimer listed more than 10 symptoms that a “health care professional”could use to base his diagnosis for covid-19 on. The last one was” if I think it is.” All health care providers in the US, territories etc. Any place the US has jurisdiction.
I had reviewed the data on their website before this conversation, so I had a good idea of what the data actually represented. Basically asking questions that I already knew the answers to.
Ask these”news people” how much research have they actually done, if they have studied the data, did they read the footnotes. I suspect that number is extremely small.
I have also studied research from Sweden, Cambridge university. Jama and apa and other sources. The internet can be a wonderful thing. apa, american pediatric association, requires one to pay to access their data. The reason I went there was because a person I know threw out some statistics that were troubling to me. Obviously related to mortality in certain age groups.
Anyone who believes that this”pandemic” is real has had the wool pulled over their heads. Anyone who can read an excel spreadsheet, who takes the time that they need to understand the data could easily understand that what our government and msm are telling us is not accurate, or even remotely plausible.
Please, people, at least open your minds to the fact that we have been played. I have fallen for cons before, none of us is perfect. We can always be humble and say to ourselves, “I was wrong”
icisil: Thanks for the very lucid – and chock-full of definitions – article…
++
I’m an MD who has been involved in Covid treatment. Icisil’s comments are consistent with my understanding.
The most important point is that in covid pneumonia the lung tissue remains pliable and does not require high pressure to ventilate. Indeed, the high pressures used to treat most ARDS, wherein the lung tissue becomes stiff, are destructive in covid——what is referred to as “barotrauma” caused worsening in many patients early on back in March.
COVID is a disease of the epithelial cells, and it took time to work that out. There are a number of predispositions to one person suffering more than another. Vitamin D deficiency is one, and it is associated with skin pigmentation in the higher latitudes. No one dare mention this but the consequences are dire for those concerned. The increased risk of death is blamed on poverty and racism. Pre-existing conditions are another (most serious) problem.
It would be good to separate the illness/severity/deaths figures before and after it was understood that the original diagnosis that it was a “lung disease” was incorrect. When the treatment regime was better tuned to the cause, the outcome changed dramatically. That matters.
The other major thing is nosocomial deaths of which there has most likely been tens of thousands in the UK. A friend of mine’s mother contracted covid in hospital and died from it. Yes, she was not in the best of health but would likely have recovered were it not for being infected in the hospital.
Covid cases should never have been taken to hospitals but put in isolation hospitals or at least wards. But the UK was using the response plan for a flu epidemic as it had no plan for SARS despite being given warning it needed one frequently over the last 15 years which would not have used isolation. Belatedly some isolation facilities are being built. A Surrey hospital has built one in 4 months.
And I suppose the older you get the weaker the lungs and the rest of the system. Of Course there are also many more people getting older than it used to be like we see with diabetics. But that doesn’t make them stronger. In the past most would not reach 50. Now many live to be 80 or older. They have gained 30 years or more.
US 350 Million people.
Let assume we all become 85 so 350 Mp / 85 = 4,117,647 dead people / year .
4,117,647 people / 365 days year = dead 11,281 per day.
US 2020 Covid 247.696 deaths = 22 normal days
The daily death rate, which is seasonal with winter taking more older folks via respiratory diseases, is somewhat lower than your estimate. Your logic is correct.
Covid deaths account for about 30 normal days of death, but since they are spread out, and amazingly flu deaths have all but disappeared, there haven’t been significant excess deaths since springtime.
For reference: Euro MoMo (Morbidity Monitoring) has very clear graphs of European deaths for all ages and from all causes. Every winter there is an influenza outbreak, with characteristic spikes in total “excess” deaths (i.e. deaths above the baseline of about 53,000 deaths per week. A year with no influenza would have roughly 2.76 million European deaths). Excess deaths are plotted, week by week, in the top graph here: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps. The 2017-2018 influenza season had a double spike, 2019 was a mild season, and 2020 had a large sharp covid spike that ended in week 22 (around May 28th).
I painstakingly integrated under the 2018 flu season (143,015 excess deaths) and the 2020 covid season (174,944 excess deaths). Simple math reveals that in Europe, the 2020 Covid spike was 22% higher than the 2018 seasonal flu.
The total morbidity in each flu season (July-to-June) is equal to the baseline 2.76 million deaths plus the excess deaths. Total European morbidity in 2020 was about 1% higher than total morbidity in 2018.
Without doubt, this surprisingly low impact of Covid is due in part to the extraordinary efforts of the Eurpoean public health workers, and the sacrifices made by every locked-down citizen.
But it also provides a possible answer to Kip Hansen’s question “Where are all the sick people?” In Europe at least, there just weren’t all that many more gravely-ill people than usual.
There is similar data for Canadian all-source morbidities here: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1310076801
It shows a similar very mild spike from Covid, restricted almost entirely to people over 65y.
A plot of US statistics is here: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-death-count. Unlike the European and Canadian plots, this graphs shows a clear second-wave in August 2020.
“Without doubt, this surprisingly low impact of Covid is due in part to the extraordinary efforts of the Eurpoean public health workers, and the sacrifices made by every locked-down citizen.”
BS – prove it. I have many doubts that either the “extra-ordinary” efforts (please define) for gravely sick elderly patients or that locking up not-at risk populations had any significant effect on the final total outcome in terms of number of deaths.
Partick B
Well, I concede your point to some extent – I should not have said “without doubt.” But you have to admit that we have no data for “what would Europe have looked like with medical interventions and lock-downs,” because that experiment was not run (at least for the whole European continent). So though I share your doubt, I can’t really draw conclusions about your conjecture.
The average daily deaths in America are about 8,000 a day from all causes. World wide about 153,400 people die everyday from all causes, about 2 every second.
John, More than 90 % people who test positive have no symptoms . Correlates with 90% false positive results. The false results are part of The Plandemic.
I believe the fact that the United States uses an extremely high Ct (Cycle threshold) when testing for COVID-19, causes our numbers to be vastly inflated.
Check out these articles:
https://www.thestkittsnevisobserver.com/covid-confusion-on-pcr-testing-maybe-most-of-those-positives-are-negatives/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testing.html
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/infectious-positive-pcr-test-result-covid-19/
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/covid-19-test-reports-must-also-state-ct-value-doctors/articleshow/77956302.cms
Or, just watch this video:
To me the covid deaths are the more important metric – as flawed as those numbers might be. I checked 2020 auto fatalities in Tennessee yesterday and compared the numbers with covid deaths. Covid was about 4K and auto was 1k so its running 4-to-1 so far this year if you believe the covid numbers. Covid mostly takes the older less healthy and auto deaths are at the younger end of the age range. Another good place to look is the USA total deaths curve on **worldometers.info**. The USA total deaths curve has remained relatively straight since early July. On the other hand, the USA active cases curve is looking more like a hockey stick. Since there is a lag between active case numbers and deaths, we’ll just need to wait and watch.
The message to me is: “stay young and healthy and if you can’t stay young, at least stay healthy.”
“Covid-19 is not a hoax. It is not a fantasy. It is not simply made up. ”
Yes, it is a hoax, it is a fantasy and it was made up. 3 for 3 wrong.
As the virus has never been isolated in pure culture and characterized and shown to cause the purported symptoms, the virus actually does NOT exist factually. Sure there is one or more viruses that made people sick, but no one can point to a specific virus. It’s a joke.
Instead, we have the flu season salad of influenza and coronaviruses. One can contract more than one of these viruses at a time and present with a variety of symptoms, which is exactly how they describe Covid-19 syndrome. In January, they were even blaming hiccups on the virus.
Then, we have to PCR test which by definition cannot be specific for a virus no one has isolated. One group determined 37 base pairs of a virus isolate (again not a pure virus), then had a computer fill in the remaining 30,000 base pairs, and published the sequence. This means that this supposed virus C-19 was fabricated by a computer, which, again, by definition, used already known sequences from other coronaviruses.
The antibody test is equally nonspecific because, again, there is no specific virus identified.
And a vaccine against an unidentified virus simply cannot do what they say. So, what are they using or putting in these by-definition false vaccines?
Bingo!
https://newswithviews.com/investigate-cdc-time-to-convene-a-federal-grand-jury/
Sorry, but this is nonsense.
SARS-CoV-2 has been fully sequenced tens of thousands of times by groups all over the world. They assemble the sequence to a consensus framework, but the genomic structure has been corroborated tens of thousands of times.
There are computational algorithms (pangolin for example) that automatically classify different strain sequences into clusters, which replicate the global dynamics of a highly contagious pandemic.
I think the hysteria is overblown, but the science underlying the genetic sequence and specific molecular detection designs are very sound.
Can you name or point to sources of some of those groups that have fully sequenced the virus “tens of thousands of times”?
https://www.gisaid.org/
212,000 submissions now, from all over the world.
I agree. It is a hoax and made up. It doesn’t exist. They simply renamed ordinary cold and flu and killed some people on ventilators at the start. This is my conclusion after eight months of first hand observation in the middle of New York City.
I’m also a John, from the State of Washington. Answers for me: 0, 0, 0
Our county (Kittitas) officials — and people – – are pushing back on Jay Inslee’s latest.
I think the last death in this county was on Augurst 2nd.
Businesses and people are being crushed by the closures.
The Covid death rTe absolutely boosted in the States. I’ve had to work the Covid units in my facility and it is very common for a patient’s death to be attributed to Covid when it is an incidental comorbidity. That is not to say that I have not cared for patients who are seriously ill from Covid. Primarily older patients with underlying respiratory illnesses…. precisely the population most vulnerable.
About that flu season…we are not having one.
Compared to recent years, there are almost no cases of flu in the US.
Look at reports from this year week 45 and last year week 45.
2020:
https://idph.iowa.gov/Portals/1/userfiles/79/Reports/Flu%20Reports/IA%20Influenza%20Report%20-%20Week%2045%202020.pdf
2019:
https://idph.iowa.gov/Portals/1/userfiles/79/Reports/Flu%20Reports/IA%20Influenza%20Report%20-%20Week%2045%202019.pdf
It is early yet, and there is some indication of an increase.
But also, many stats are for ILI…influenza like illness, and not necessarily lab confirmed cases, and so there many be conflation with covid cases, or so it seems may be the case.
Here is the CDC flu tracker page:
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm#ILIActivityMap
Center for Disease Control data updated 11/4/20 in three simple graphics.
Looks like the C-19 death roller coaster has culled about as many from the herd as it needs.
NYC and 6 states together have more C-19 deaths than the ENTIRE rest of the country combined.
NYC and the top 9 states represent over 70% of the C-19 deaths.
There were more C-19 deaths among the 75+ demographic than the ENTIRE rest of the population.
24% of deaths occurred in nursing or hospice care.
Sorry excuse for a highly contagious, lethal, wide-ranging pandemic.
More like a SCAM-demic.
Graphic found here:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nicholas-schroeder-55934820_data-covid19-pandemic-activity-6730259531730952192-PKhb
Nick you forgot to say that results show the Democraic controlled stafes won the c19 race God help us if Hunters dad takes control
CDC data in Table 2 at https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm shows that the US all-causes mortality from Feb. 1 is 11 percent over the 2017-2019 average. However the city of New York is 60 percent over the previous three years. Excluding New York city and the rest of the state, because of Gov. Cuomo’s sending COVID patients into nursing homes, would knock the US excess deaths down several percentage points.
I only know of one person that was COVID positive. She had lung cancer too and died
0,0,0
As I too
I entered 0,0,0, but then thought about the local bridge club, it should have been 1 case and 1 death if you count acquaintances.
Same. Nephew had recent flu, but got tested & it wasn’t the dreaded CHIIINA virus.
Kip,
In my extended family we have a relative who is 84. She is a widow and lives alone. She keeps in contact with her circle of similar aged friends by phone. None of her elderly friends have even been ill, let alone died.
At a nearby old folks home, undergoing strict isolation none of the 75 resident all aged over 70 has tested positive ever, and certainly none have died from Covid.
Do I know of anyone dying? Yes a very good friend took his life because he could not endure lock-down.
Anon ==> Thank you for your input — condolences on the loss of your friend.
I’m glad your relative is ok at 84, but I bet she hasn’t seen a doc in a while, if she did I’m sure they would have found something wrong, I really and truly hope she stays in good health
You’re right that Covid-19 is not a hoax. You’re right that it is not a fantasy. You’re right that it is not simply made up.
It was blown way out of proportion, purposefully. That’s what it is.
The problem is that we only have one weapon against plagues. Isolation.
This is the same weapon for today’s COVID or today’s Ebola. We have just one weapon. We ant to use a scalpel but all we have is a machete. At least it does cut the virus.
It’s been this way for centuries. We stay apart and let the virus burn out all the potential victims in it’s tiny pit. And then we can breathe again.
When we get vaccines the plagues last less than 100 years. This is better than the Black Death. But we aren’t there yet.
We do have public health information to help improve our immune status. Or we should have, but it seems to be falling down on the job.
Adequate levels of Selenium are a preventative for many viral diseases, e.g. Hanta, Ebola, HIV, Covid19 . Adequate levels of Vit D reduce chances of infection by Covid 19 and improve chances of ICU recovery to 97.5% in one Indonesian study. Vit D plus Zinc and Vit K2 and an ionophore such as Green tea, Astragalus tea Quercetin or a quinine based Tonic Water would further reduce one’s chance of infection, co-morbidities aside. There are studies for some of these these statements, and many videos by medical experts, but I’ll leave you to do the searches from some of these clues, I’m tired, got up at 5.30, had a busy day and it’s past my bed time for an 88 year old 😉
Yes, the real crux of the matter isn’t how serious Covid-19 is or isn’t, but the fact that we have effective treatments/preventative measures for Covid-19 that are being actively suppressed, and this should make us all wonder why this is happening.
Hydroxychloroquine is a case in point, as this is a harmless preventative treatment as used in the low-dose, five day regime of something like the Zelenko protocol, yet this treatment has been viciously fought against even to the point of one of the world’s foremost medical journals, The Lancet, publishing a paper about it so blatantly bad that it had to be retracted shortly thereafter.
So, we are all to wear masks and social distance to do everything we can to “stay safe”? Why not ensure that we have adequate vitamins A, C, D, etc. so that our immune systems are operating top-notch and that oxidative stress, as would be induced by an infection, is adequately countered by the premier anti-oxidant, vitamin C, which serves to harmlessly replenish the body’s numerous other antioxidants so they can function properly to maintain redox equilibrium? In layman’s terms: infections screw up electron transfers which in turn have a cascading effect on molecular mechanisms, and a “broad-spectrum” reducing agent, such as vitamin C, helps restore elections and maintain equilibrium.
Vitamin C is but one tool we have, as Julian mentions, to fight this disease without resorting to onerous dictates that destroy jobs, livelihoods, and liberties.
Quercetin, readily available, is, like hydroxychloroquine, an ionophore for zinc (helps zinc get in to cells), and zinc is what stops Covid-19 replication in cells.
M, completely false statement. We now know more about Vitamin D and how important it is for the body to heal. Yet too many Americans are vitamin D deficient (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/vitamin-d-deficiency-united-states/) and with the forever shouting about sunscreen and covering up it’s no wonder. Yet skin cancer rates have not fallen dramatically even with more people using sunscreen/avoiding the sun, and are actually rising (https://health.usnews.com/health-care/for-better/articles/why-is-skin-cancer-rising). So that begs the question: Is our avoidance of the sun and use of very high SPF sunscreens actually contributing to not only skin cancer, but obesity, diabetes, and yes, respiratory illnesses?
We also are chronically Vitamin C deficient in some segments of the population, i.e. low-income and smokers, which tend to be one and the same (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19675106/) and these also tend to have higher mortality rates for Covid/flu/pneumonia.
Vitamin D3 coupled with K2 and Liposomal Vitamin C are relatively inexpensive supplements that should be encouraged and taught to everyone.
We eat too many grains, the wrong balance of Omega 3/Omega 6, too much sugar, not enough water. Now couple that with keeping everyone inside during the crucial months of summer when you should be outside getting fresh air, sunshine to promote Vitamin D production, and you have a recipe for disaster.
Pile on the stress of job/income loss, isolation, leading to cortisol levels skyrocketing, which will further inhibit healing, increase in alcohol consumption, and what do you think will happen?
This has all been insanity on a massive scale.
Germany (worldometer)
285,649
Currently Infected Patients
282,213 (99%)
in Mild Condition
3,436 (1%)
Serious or Critical
Last updated: November 17, 2020, 18:35 GMT
Krishna Gans ==> Thanks for the German numbers — as an aside, I am not a fan of World-o-meter, too many undefined stats, too few references of source of numbers.
I have been told that in my home state of Minnesota the hospitals are at 100% capacity with COVID-19 cases. However in talking to someone who works at the local hospital, I found they are nowhere near capacity; they even had a couple of ICU beds available. They are not even back to full staffing levels yet because a lot of people are still putting off “elective” procedures. As far as I can tell, the “100% capacity” claim is a prediction based on some sort of model. Kind of like the “2 million US dead by the end of the year” claims we heard so much of last spring, and even into the late summer, depending on who you were listening to. It’s now apparent we won’t even reach 25% of that level. That’s good news for the general population, but doesn’t say much for the credibility of the “experts”.
It was never about credible experts. it was always about using it as an excuse to shut down the economy to give Quid Pro Joe a boost in the election
We are back to lockdowns both to distract from the evidence of systematic, comprehensive, ballot fraud, and to hopefully wind COVID down before Quid Pro’s inauguration. And you can count on the media to not bother to actually check with the hospitals to see if they are really overwhelmed–they just repeat whatever the Dem expert tells them.
It is also highly probable that the less lethal COVID we are seeing now is a mutation, one for which the vaccines will not work. At this point there will be multiple strains of COVID on each continent. COVID will be here forever as another seasonal virus.
I’m not sure about ‘less lethal’. It was never particularly lethal unless you let it run rampant in care homes.
The panic should have been over as soon as we saw the actual death rates from the infected cruise ship, where many people didn’t catch it even when in the same room as someone who had it, and only about 1% of a relatively elderly population died.
But Muh Great Reset.
A sister-in-law was on the Grand Princess.
2 weeks of free room & board after docking in Oakland.
She’s fine.
The COVID Milieu has temporarily replaced the Climate Change Milieu, but now that they’ve figured out how to do it, the Climate Change Milieu will be patterned off the COVID Milieu in the future.
I see Economic Lockdowns and Travel Restrictions to “save the environment” in my crystal ball.
Paul, every state I have checked on for any reason has a great website setup with all kinds of info about cases and available beds and empty beds and surge capacity that can be brought online quickly.
Beyond that there are contingencies for setting up facilities in large buildings like hockey areas or convention halls.
They had built a bunch of those last Spring and wound up taking them all apart unused in nearly every case, as far as I know.
That hospital ship they had in NYC went unused and was sent back to where ever they keep it.
Minnesota appears to have as good of a website as nay other.
Looks like for the whole state there are over 1800 ICU beds (including the ones that can be brought online within 72 hours if there is a need) and about 1150 are in use. 292 are covid patients.
~9000 beds total, 6545 in use. 1172 are covid.
I think it is typical for hospitals to be over half full, with some rarely having more than 10-20% of total beds not in use.
It is expensive to have hospital beds ready and waiting, especially ICU beds.
So they have more than are usually needed by some small percentage, and others that can be set up if the need arises.
And it is also common for patients to be routed depending on how busy a particular hospital is at the current time.
It is an ongoing every day thing for doctors to call around for a open cardiac intensive care bed, for example, when someone comes in and is found to have some special circumstance better served somewhere else…or just because the best hospitals tend to be the ones that are on the full side at any given time.
And those that are in the centers of large cities.
For an example, most people are probably aware that every year about 35,000-40,000 people are killed in auto accidents.
But fewer may realize that most people who are badly injured are saved.
Maybe one in ten people that are gravely injured typically dies these days.
It may be even more than ten times as many injured than killed.
And auto accidents are not even the majority of accidents overall.
They are a small fraction.
Hospitals are normally very busy places, as anyone who has had to go to an emergency room knows well.
Oh, here is that website for MN:
https://mn.gov/covid19/data/response-prep/response-capacity.jsp
This type of research and information has been put out by Tony Heller for months now. There just isn’t any problem with this disease but the governors just keep up the pressure. My state of Oregon has just instituted another sever lockdown for “two weeks”. Last time they did this in March it lasted six months. They (Democratic governors) are killing the economy and many people besides. Why? I just don’t get why. And when will this idiocy be over? Must we wear masks every time we go in a store forever? I talked to the manager of a liquor store the other day and asked him what happens to the store if they don’t require masks. He said you get fined by OCEA. (Don’t know if that is the correct acronym.) Up to $10,000. So are there government people going around checking on this? Or are ordinary people ratting on these store owners? These lockdowns and forced mask wearing are the biggest threat to our Constitutional rights that has ever come along. We have to stop this madness.
Michael Nagy ==> In NY state, our governor has tasked the State Police with busting restaurants, stores and other businesses t ensure that they are complying with his mandates. He is using the State Liquor Licensing Agency to threaten bars and restaurants with loss of license.
Does that mean if I move back to NY, and drive like a lunatic, as I did as a teenager, there won’t be radar traps to nail me — with the police too busy spying on restaurants? Now there’s one reason to live in New York.
From PA, we used to drive up to NY to buy beer.
Are your reflexes as good now as they were then?
Why? Originally is was to win the election. Blaming all deaths on Trump, kneecapping the economy, allowing Biden to hide instead of campaign publicly, and making ballots as unsecure and easy to fake as possible were all needed.
When will it end? When they decide that making Biden look good by defeating the virus and restoring the the economy is more useful than the expanded powers.
I think the media and politicians are conflating positive tests which lie around 10 million in the US, with deaths from Covid. What I can’t understand is why the health professionals in the state governments are not educating the governers and other state politicians as well as the public. I was out walking in the river forest (Bosque) in Albuquerque this morning and there were very few people walking and cycling but all were wearing masks. They have been led to believe that the virus is out in the atmosphere floating ready to attack. There are signs that were put up Sunday telling people it is mandatory to wear masks in the outdoor public space. No understanding of how the virus is transmitted ie proximity to someone infected for at least a few minutes according to the CDC. A large Walmart was admitting only about 50 people at a time yesterday. Amazing!
Mad Mac ==> The media is PUSHING cases actively because it is NEWS. This is the very reason for this survey –lots of Positive Tests reported as “CASES” but very few actually sick people.
It will cease to be NEWS if and when Biden walks into the Oval Office. That might sound cynical – but anyone who has watched the MSM through several Administrations must agree. Just look at the reporting of combat casualties under Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama, and Trump. Then compare them to the actual casualties for each Administration.
I don’t think it will cease to be news. I think more and more draconian measures will be enacted. And the severity of the virus will be blamed on a lack of action by Orange Man Bad.
Jeff, you may be right. They’ve gotten a taste of serious power to control people, and they like it. They won’t let it go easily.
Yes, but don’t forget, this is world-wide, and only our American friends can “blame” Orange Man (and will, for everything, for the next three years, when they’ll have to switch to “give us four more years”).
Here in Canada we have the hideously unqualified Prime Minstrel Junior Sockboy Castro happily signing away our grandchildren’s grandchildren’s GRANDCHILDREN’S future every day, trotting out the “science” to “prove” every single policy that more or less contradicts the “science” that “proved” the LAST policy.
Oh, and the moron actually uses “cupping” as part of his extensive knowledge of medicine, so forgive me if I retch a bit.
And don’t think that, even if we rid ourselves of COVID19, they won’t roll out the same policies to “bend the curve” the next flu season. Just watch them.
“If it saves only one person”.
Book it.
And don’t think that, even if we rid ourselves of COVID19, they won’t roll out the same policies to “bend the curve” the next flu season. Just watch them.
Agreed fully – I’ve been saying that for several months now.
“happily signing away our grandchildren’s grandchildren’s GRANDCHILDREN’S future every day”
My great-grandchildren are a decade away from being of an age to have children. Generations can take less than 20 years each.
Let us leave an environment and society where everyone for uncounted generations finds it a joy to be alive.
https://www.fool.ca/2020/07/13/canadas-debt-to-hit-1-2-trillion-what-does-this-mean-for-investors/
“Last week, the federal government released its fiscal snapshot for 2020. It wasn’t pretty. Forecasting a $343 billion deficit, it projected that federal debt would hit $1.2 trillion by the end of the year. $1.2 trillion is about $31,000 for every Canadian — including children and retirees. That’s a significant amount of debt per capita, and about $9,000 comes from the projected 2020 deficit alone.”
Yeah, let’s do what you said…
I am sure health professionals know that you are unlikely to be exposed to the virus when walking or cycling alone. The blanket rule is designed to get people to automatically use a mask when they leave the house, rather than argue about each instance. If it was left up to each person’s individual choice as to where or where not to wear a mask, there would be even more arguments than there are now! Yes, the extreme cases (walking alone in the woods) do appear silly, but better than having to adjudicate on every individual argument between people in shops etc over whether masks should be worn in this situation.
You are arguing from the premise that masks actually work against viruses. Do you get paid to “normalise the narrative” on the internet? Please tell me where I can apply, i also need free money for nothing.
The problem is that medical authoritarianism, such as we’re seeing now, if often associated with, and can conceivably be used as an excuse for, political authoritarianism.
US eugenics: what was its purpose? To keep us safe from degenerates, was it not? We can now see that it was simply a tool for the egregious violation of personal liberty to protect what some supposed was “the greater good,” when our real greater good is the firm preservation of individual liberties as an insurance against any insidious and backhanded encroachment of authoritarianism. We should never suppose that our greater good is something other than that.
One of the most frightening things about what’s happening now is this tendency toward medical-political authoritarianism. First, dictates were justified to “flatten the curve” but it hasn’t stopped there, has it?
I have had one extended family member test positive. He was sick for two days and had a nagging cough for two weeks afterward. Beyond that he’s been fine. I know of no one personally who died. If you count those who died in personal care homes with COVID approximately twice the number of people have died with COVID as have died in traffic accidents in my province. If you remove those who were in personal care homes at the tie they died with COVID the number drops by 90% to far less than die in a year in traffic accidents. I don’t know how one could protect people in nursing homes while opening up society but we really need to figure out how to do this.
Justin Burch ==> In my opinion, governments and health departments should have locked down old folks homes, nursing homes, and issued guidance to families with vulnerable older members and allowed society in general to get on with it.
0,0,0
Except I was REALLY sick last late Dec – early Jan with the mystery Not CV19 Not the flu.
#MeTooEarlyImpossibleCV19
January 4th 2020 for about a week, just 2 days in bed, fairly fit 67-year old. The loss of taste was the weird thing, so I had to force myself to eat.
Rich.
I also had the “cold from heck” back in mid January…..I swear I think I might have had the Corona Virus even though supposedly it didn’t make it to US shores until sometime in February. I’ve never had a respiratory illness that lasted 4 + weeks and where I had to go thru 4 and a half boxes of cold/flu OTC meds. I’d get better and then it seemed to fire back up, like it didn’t want to give up. I never went to the dr. but I was real close to doing so near the end. Worse yet, my employer demanded I work (and I care for vulnerable elderly people) so I wore a mask long before they were required. And I’ve had the flu, so I know what that’s like. Also gave blood in August where they test for Corona antibodies, and I was negative, but then again, antibodies don’t last that long.
That said, I know three people who had the Corona Virus. One is a friend/business associate, and the other two are her parents. All three had it in February and said it was no worse than the flu or a bad cold. And my friend is very obese with some chronic illnesses and her parents are in their 70’s.
@ Rich
Jan 10th here and it ripped through my office from one person to the next all down the line. We all got it and we were out for 2 -3 days each. The loss of taste was the weirdest I’ve ever experienced but I knew it wasn’t the flu. I know what the flu feels like and this wasn’t it. And since I had sick days, I can look up my record for the exact dates I was sick.
My cousin got it, her husband brought it back from Mexico, both of them tested positive, were out sick for a few days, took about a week to recover…same loss of taste and they are better now. Other than that, my son’s friend tested positive and was out sick for about a week.
My biggest problem has always been this: it’s a coronavirus, it’s not the superflu. It’s not the boogieman hiding behind the store front doors ready to spring into action and get you sick. It’s a coronavirus, one of many and I do mean many. So why the panic? Why the inflated numbers, clutching of pearls, running around like chickens with our heads cut off, screaming to the skies above, and rampant and I do mean rampant misinformation, misleading information, and excessive modeling? This is bigger than US Politics.
Usually the simplest answer to the question is more of the truth:
1. A vast media conspiracy filled with tens of thousands of complacent individuals.
2. US Politics coup across the globe.
3. WHO conspirators to redistribute wealth.
4. Big Pharma lining their pockets and biding their time until they can produce the “cure”?
OR and we’ve seen this before in our own history: an idea takes hold and people spread that idea across the globe.
My money is on the last because there is evidence of it in our own history. What has changed from then to now is very simple, the ability to spread information fast across the entire world. What has also changed is the added ability to debunk that information, but debunking cant happen while people are still racing around with the whites of their eyes showing.
So I will do what I have done since this started. Keep my head down and wait for it to pass and not come back (it’s just taking forever it seems). Smug and superior that I did not get caught up in the rhetoric…LOL (yes that part was sarcasm).
Ditto.
They found a case outside of China in early September, I don’t remember where it was.
It was wedged between a dumpster and a urine-soaked wall. Used to belong to an American, left California looking for a place with less communists. He tried to hide his case while surreptitiously trying to panhandle train fare off bewildered Myanmaris, got arrested for social decrepitude, but he lost his case in the kerfuffle. Poor sod never even made it into China! Please ship his case back to his mum in Poughkeepsie.
Probably Italy:
https://nypost.com/2020/11/15/covid-19-may-have-been-in-italy-as-early-as-september-2019/
Probably NOTHING to do with the large number of Chinese workers imported to work in the textile factories…
Quite a few people I know of in New Zealand had an odd flu or respiratory problem from December 2019 to February 2020 (southern summer, first full lockdown in March). I had a 2 day cold/respiratory something in January which is very unusual for me. Professor Dolores Cahill said in an interview that the infection would have been round the world within 3 weeks and we have probably all been exposed to it, well before anyone in authority got busy making regulations. I know of no one who has been diagnosed officially.
Locking down the “vulnerable” is really cruel for their families and carers – in my opinion (and my husband is in dementia care at 76) it would be better just to let people visit and let the chips fall where they may. Prolonging life in late age for people with co-morbidities should not really be a major goal. Quality over quantity would be my preference.
My 90 year old dad here in Canada had a very bad, congestive cold sometime in February…hmmmm.
0,0,0 here too, though I did have a cold in February for a week or so. And lost taste and smell for about 5 days after.
I do know one person who says her son (who lives in a different city) had covid.
in Aus a 3+day fever that wouldnt break muscle aches that had me near crying and a nonstop cough with lots of phlegm took myself to hospital when i started to feel short of breath
tst result?
no cold no flu
wtf?
took about 6 weeks to recover n 2 abiotic courses to throw the pneumonia I definitely did have
that was oct/nov ?2019
The Chinese military supposedly locked down all their military bases in Wuhan province on about November 1, 2019, so that might be a good indication of when the Chicoms realized they had a problem on their hands.
Like every story. Told by the media it has a political motivation, Trump is to blame after all he said it was nothing to worry about.
Living in Germany and asking friends NOT one knows of a virus person, but all know that the media is like CNN Chit Not News.
I know 3 people who tested positive. One had a slight cough. The other two never got so much as a sniffle.
I know several who tested positive back in March, none since then.
Among family and friends during this period, 3 have died, none with CV-19. One heart attack, one cancer and one lung disease.
Cov-19 is a golden opportunity to take control.
Doris Johnson came into contact – so they say – and then, despite his immunity, self-isolated. He has apparently tested negative…
Boris Johnson tests negative for coronavirus – but will remain in self-isolation
https://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/boris-johnson-tests-negative-coronavirus-4709324
Carrie must be on the warpath.
Boris is being isolated as prophylaxis,
to protect society…
I have 300 employees, spread over three countries. We have had four total cases. One is current, but the other three are long since back to work. As things were heating up way back when, we sent more people home in a week with regular flue than the total number of COVID cases we have had in the nine months since.
As the article states, COVID is real, it’s just not anywhere near as pervasive as those in money would care to have us believe.
RG ==> Thank you for your business perspective.
During influenza season, we all knows lots of people who get and recover from the flu. Some flu seasons are really bad — 10-25% absenteeism from work places, some schools forced to close because too many teachers are ill, etc.
Covid-19 — not s much.
Many people (such as me) will be living in areas that have not even had a proper first wave yet, because they got locked down and/or isolated. Some people say that is success, others (such as me) say that is failure. Vaccines may justify the claim of success, but to me govts must always cater for the worst case, which is that vaccines may never be able to suppress a mutating virus.
And I forgot to mention, all of our cases came after a mask policy was in effect.
RG ==> Informed readers will know that masks –except very specialized ones –do not prevent the wearer from viruses.
Most masks are a reminder to be nice.
It is odd to see a person outside alone, or a driver alone, wearing a mask.
Saw each type today.
My box of masks provided by my employer is quite clearly a Chinese fake with the airflow of blotting paper. Good for virtue signaling though.
Try blowing a candle out while wearing a mask. Is it more difficult than when not wearing a mask? Obviously it is. So when you wear a mask, even a poor mask, you are not spreading the virus as far as you would if you were not wearing a mask. So masks, even poor masks, have some benefits. You don’t think doctors and nurses are stupid because they wear masks, do you? They probably have a good reason for wearing them, wouldn’t you think?
A little common sense and logic go a long way.
Masks may keep larger particles from spreading farther, but they definitely don’t stop tinier aerosols that hang in the air longer. So we’re constantly breathing in what other peoples’ lungs have expelled as we move into their formerly occupied space.
so we are all infected is that your logic? I have not blown on anybody lately in my travels about and the size of the virus is so small that it if you had it spread mask or no mask. It’s like trying to stop a mosquito with a chain link fence, good luck. Please do some research and stop watching MSM as they are the devils that chant lies to all that will listen. I wish you a safe and happy life but please again do some research.
I had one friend who died from Covid, and another who died with it (he had cancer, so Covid simply hastened his death). The friend who died’s wife also got Covid, but did not have to be hospitalized. The key here is hospitalizations, which we know are rising rapidly. Deaths are a lagging indicator, however I believe the death rate has fallen, due to better care now, and even some workable treatments.
The whole “wear your mask” thing is merely a pacifier, meant to calm people’s fears. It is nothing more than a belief, based on little evidence, that they do much of anything. They may in fact, make things worse. That said, it is probably wise to stay out of bars and restaurants, and pretty much all non-essential indoor (and even some outdoor) gatherings, at least until a vaccine comes out. This, unfortunately includes most Thanksgiving family gatherings. I have heard people use the flimsy, retarded excuse that “family is important”. Really. Even to the extent of risking people’s health, and possibly even their lives?
Some people think obsessing over an illness that has a 99+% survival rate is retarded.
Yes, retarded people might think that.
No, icisil was correct. You are the one obsessing over a disease that is very survivable, which is a sign of being mentally unwell.
Some folks need to grow up and think like adults regarding mortality. Covid-19 primarily kills the aged with multiple comorbidities. The lockdowns will soon be seen, if not already, to be far more deadly than the virus, especially for anyone under the age of 60 or so.
Bruce stop projecting. icisil is spot on. The mortality rate is very low (and extremely low for the young and otherwise healthy). Do you obsess over automobile deaths? by your logic you’re retarded if you don’t because tens of thousands in the US die every year in automobile accidents. Do you obsess over drug overdose deaths? by your logic you’re retarded if you don’t because tens of thousands in the US die every year from drug overdoses. Do you obsess over home fire deaths? by your logic you’re retarded if you don’t because thousands in the US die every year in home fires.
The fact is lost of people die from lots of different causes every year, yet we don’t obsess over the causes of those deaths. Given the mortality rate, there’s little reason to obsess over COVID any more than one obsesses over any other particular cause of annual death tolls, and in fact if anything is to be regarded as retarded it would have to be the needless obsession over an illness that has a 99+% survival rate. (note “not obsessing” does not mean “ignoring” or “doing nothing”).
icisil is spot on. you, on the other hand Bruce, are the one that is exhibiting “retarded people thinking” on this subject. (or as Working Dog so elegantly put it, you need to “grow up and think like adults regarding mortality”)
It is the assumption that somebody else needs to govern my behavior, or tell me how to save myself that is at issue. If this was truly a severe disease there would not be a need to mandate masks, people would do it on their own.
I have heard people use the retarded excuse that they know better then ME what is a risk to MY life telling ME not to have a Thanksgiving family gathering.
We will be having a nice Thanksgiving family dinner, just like every year. At this time NO ONE IS SICK!
If that changes, our plans may change. We will use OUR judgment, not YOURS Busy Body Bruce.
RE: “The key here is hospitalizations, which we know are rising rapidly.”
Hospitalizations of “Laboratory-Confirmed COVID-19-Associated” patients were ticking down during the first week of November. By November 7 (the data here is one week behind) my state, Colorado, was averaging 11.7 covid-associated hospitalizations per 100,000 population. During the April 4 peak we were at 18.2. Hospitalizations due to covid, despite a few rolling surges between then and now, are fewer.
This “Covidnet” of hospitalizations across 14 states provides an interesting contrast to the graphs showing sharply spiking hospitalizations. The msm and local news prefer to impart an alarmist tone to every report, but the key question to ask about hospitalizations and deaths is whether these are patients who only secondarily test positive to covid, or whose other ailments finally became intolerable for them, forcing them to check in the the Hotel California despite the real risks of nosocomial infection.
Typical of such alarmist graph from tonight’s news in Denver, at 2:10 :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uLLrwe9LWw
The scary headline is “Colorado Hospital Beds in Use Due to Covid-19” and it shows 1,443 total hospital beds in use, higher than at any other time since March. I would argue that “Due to…” likely means “…in addition to other patients already hospitalized…” The Covidnet figures (above), on the other hand, shows only the covid-caused internments. Nationally there were 10 hospitalizations per 100,000 in April (average of all age groups); last week we were around 6.7.
I think the “real story” unfolding has a lot to do with the near-collapse of the healthcare system, and the alarmism of the media. Nurses are now threatening strikes across the country, and hospitals hit by sudden lack of normal moneymaking procedures – electives and emergencies – have become chronically understaffed as they cut salaries and employees to manage costs. Mayo clinic, for example, had to cut 1.6 billion in employee pay after suffering 3 billion in revenue loss. How many hospital workers have been let go because of budgets in April? How many have been rehired for the successive waves of the pandemic?
CNN estimates the total number of hospitalized Covid patients currently in the U.S. at around 60,000. Whatever the current number – or their primary cause of illness- it appears that clinics and hospitals are understaffed because of some systemic flaw. It’s been seven months since America’s first wakeup call, and, if reports are to be believed, they are no better prepared in November than they were in April. The tipping point: a few thousand sick people in each state.
What should worry us all is that Dems spin the current financial-based hospital disaster into a need for more government control funded by government money. Trump has been acquiescing to this model by becoming one of the biggests spending presidents since Roosevelt. Even pre-covid he grew government at a higher rate than every president except Obama. How to fix the for-profit healthcare system is beyond me, but it should be at the top of the agenda for Republicans mulling why they’ve been out-maneuvered in the last election.
To see the Covidnet for 14 states, please select “weekly rate” and check the “overall” for population group.
https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/covidnet/COVID19_3.html
As part of another answer down the thread about what bureaucrats like me count
https://coloradosun.com/2020/08/17/denver-coronavirus-deaths-heart-attack/
“Looking at data on ambulance calls in Denver, they found that, while overall calls for service went down during the stay-at-home period, the number of people dying from cardiac arrests at home shot up…. likely that people who were having heart attacks tried to brush them off to avoid going to the hospital. Without treatment, that would lead to damage in their hearts that would cause a cardiac arrest.”
Want to hazard a guess as to the difference in having a heart attack at home and not going to the hospital vs. getting to a hospital?
Oh, and as for the Mayo:
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/900-mayo-clinic-staff-midwest-contracted-covid-19/story?id=74280544
Over 900 Mayo Clinic staff in Midwest have contracted COVID-19 in past 2 weeks
I did it, but I should be allowed to specify. The death was one, and was almost terminally ill with other comorbidities and on his 90’s.
In my province, the average death from/with COVID is 82yo… the average life expectancy is 80yo… go figure
Furthermore, we are wasting ~$1.5MMDD/day in testing. The only silver lining on that is that it shows, quite beautifully, empirical proof of Farr’s law.
Covid mortality basically follows natural mortality. In other words, covid is a midget that appears only able to pick off low hanging fruit; fruit that would get picked off by something anyways.
From a clinical perspective, it’s pretty much bad bedside manner for a clinician to tell the obese Type 2 diabetic with asthma and high BP that they are “low hanging fruit.”
Even if they are thinking it.
Reminds me of the scene in “The Crown” where King George VI is dying of “lung blockages”.
A doctor eventually gathers the nerve to tell the Royal Household that its time to “put a name to those blockages”.
We had a very mild flu season here in Canada two years ago. So, basically, most of those dying of COVID survived that flu season…and got another year of life.
Francisco Fernandez ==> Thanks for your input — Can you share your province and country?
2% death probability on average.
Not so much. It is not a black death.
However, it is not so low to be disregarded.
I know one person who died and another one who is seriously ill.
More like 0.2% in the general population.
And pretty much zero for people under fifty years old. Hence most of those who die from it already having exceeded the average lifespan.
I think people are too well nourished today for this to be a real thing, unless it’s been weaponized deliberately for a worldwide political purpose. It’s much easier for the god-state to just classify as many deaths, no matter the real cause, to covid. Next is the gruesome “models” that are reported as measured fact which have nothing to do with reality. Isn’t it amazing that the same people like Mr Gatesofhell who are such big “population control” backers who are so concerned with everyone’s health and want to save us all with their vaccines etc, the logic is contradictory on the surface but has a terrible revelation underneath. Those empty ER videos on yt are probably all gone now by decree. It’s empty here has been for a long time, the Navajos have their own ambulances that pickup their people in the border towns and take them to some offsite offres place for “processing”. Hospitals etc get lots and lots of extra money for every diagnosis, hm no conflict there! Sheesh.
Big Medical doesn’t know??
Andrew
I’m so confused (as usual). Per BioNTech’s news release a few weeks ago, “Pfizer’s partner in the vaccine is German company BioNTech. Ugur Sahin, MD, BioNTech co-founder and CEO, said in the release that researchers will keep collecting data until 164 confirmed cases have been studied.” And “… the primary “endpoint” of the clinical trials is to evaluate confirmed cases 7 days after the second dose of the vaccine. Pfizer will also include a secondary endpoint of evaluating confirmed cases 14 days after the second dose.”
This is out of the 43,000 people enrolled in their clinical trial. That mean’s 21,500 have received the placebo. The infection rate seems kind of low. And I have similar comments about the Moderna-vaccine results released yesterday.
I know that this would cost money and would be outside the scope of the trial, but it would be neat if another group of people would be added, equal to the number given placebos in the trial, but th3e last group would be given a placebo injection, and told that’s what they’re given, to see if the “placebo effect’ influences the outcome.
OT–couple of other comments about the vaccine — I read that the vaccines need to be kept in dry ice. What is all this dry-ice going to do as to the amount of co2 in our atmosphere? Also, if people who are in the study groups opt to receive the real vaccine, when available, how is this going to affect the studies?
The dry ice is just cryogenically distilled from the air or (better) from a CO2 concentrated source like a combustion exhaust flue. So the real CO2 emissions are not the dry ice (that is net zero), but the likely fossil fuel energy needed to perform the work for chilling/refrigeration and distillation processes.
All clinical/pharmacology/vaccine studies employ professional statisticians to help design the study’s group enrollment sizes. The study Experimental group size and the placebo-control group size must be large enough to ensure sufficient “power” exists at the end -point in the expected results to draw statistically sound conclusions on efficacy. Ahead of time, during the study design phase the statisticians calculate how many must get sick in with COVID in the control group to compare that number to the Experimental group to draw conclusion on efficacy and that that conclusion is statically solid. These numbers are documented in the study design for approval. This ensuring sufficient statistical power is all part of any study certification and registration process to the NIH.
Having an under-powered study is just a huge waste of money if insufficient numbers were enrolled in order to make a sound conclusion at the designated end-point.
Dry ice?
Dean Koontz’s Jane Hawk.
adjusted
My two teenagers had it. Didn’t know anything about it till after a week of the sniffles they couldn’t taste anything.
Nobody else in the household had had anything despite the poor hygiene and shared cups, leading us to believe we were exposed and had something in January when my wife had a terrible cold that lasted weeks.
Lots of acquaintances have had it, siblings, most of my elderly uncles and aunts, lots of people at work. And most cases very mild. I know of a small handful of hospitalizations and one death.
I also had “something” in January, but think it was the norovirus, which had been running rampant in our area. I felt like I got run over by a truck, and my scalp was sore (for me that’s an indication that I’m very sick). I didn’t feel like getting off the couch all day. Surprisingly, the next day I felt fine, but things tasted kind of strange that day.
littlepeaks – Sore scalp always meant the flu for me, along with knees aching, couch-ridden, truck runover feeling. Same symptoms ever since i was a kid, long before China had biowarfare labs.
Always thought norovirus was a GI, diarrheal-type disease.
I was running significantly short of breath in Aug-Sep time frame … felt like pneumonia, could hear bubbles pop on a full exhausting of the lungs … first noted the lack of bloodstream O2 when I tried mowing tall grass in the backyard and could not ‘breath’ enough to satisfy my need for O2 … had been bicycling since March, so had built up some additional lung capacity up to that point, then the C-19 hit … back to normal now. No shortage of lung capacity/O2 to blood now. Never seemed to have a lost of taste.
I think the wife and I had it in March, three week headache and six week recovery time. Could not stay warm or cool during the first three weeks. Both of tested negative for antibodies but the way we had it from what I here it that does not mean much, it looks like most of the testing is at best a guess. We both have bad lungs, thank God it did not settle in there, I did suck on the emergency inhaler more than normal during that time. GI track was touchy also. Though I had got back to the super lacteous/gluten intolerance problems again those clear after six weeks. Had far worse problem in August, something with 30% fatality rate, I was luck it was not a bad as it could have been. COVID no longer scares me, my other problem does!
Paul
Think, what did it do to the election
The media won the election with the C19 BS
The in person voted landslide for Trump.
We knew that politics and climate had become intermingled, but now it seems it is politics and health as well. The usual scare tactics from the media, all of whom saw this as a means of eliminating Trump rather than Covid, is my interpretation! Anything to destroy the world’s economy! Here in New Zealand, the timing was superb in aiding the election of a far-left government with daily television appearances by our very own Florence Nightingale, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Now we face the unpleasant medication!
My wife works in a hospital in the DFW (Texas) area – she can point you to the sick people. They are filling up the ER to the point that social distancing just doesn’t apply anymore. They are sometimes forming lines outside the ER doors. They are filling the hospital beds. According to my wife, it is now worse then last July at her hospital.
And the strangest thing is I would feel exactly as the author does without this external insight into what is going on. Nobody I directly know has contracted the disease (or at least know they have contracted the disease). I suspect the disease is mostly clustered around social groups that I am not a member of, but I do not doubt the disease is out there and spreading.
As a thought experiment, let’s say the disease eventually kills 1 in 600 people in the U.S. (that is less than 0.2%). I know about 30 people directly of which I would notice they are missing. So the chance of one of my direct associates/friends dying in this case is about 1 in 20 – and that assumes the deaths are spread evenly through the population, which isn’t likely. So while the number of deaths is staggering, it’s still a very small number of people considering the size of the population.
Robert of Texas
“I suspect the disease is mostly clustered around social groups that I am not a member of….”
You only have to look at the White House and how quickly and efficiently it has moved through there to see what happens what you drop your guard.
Simon,
TRUMP! and the White House staff virus cases started AFTER the Cleveland debate where MULTIPLE of the Debate Committee staff tested positive for the virus after the debate but BEFORE the TRUMP! team. A super spreader event surrounding the meetings setting up the debate, but only among those who met with the TRUMP! team.
No one who coordinated with the Biden team got the virus.
What a coincidink.
I know this because our great media reported on this, NOT!
Umm No… Trump got it (and the people around him) because they were carefree in their attitude to this highly infectious disease. He scoffed at those who wore masks (in particular Biden) and minimised the risks. In short he got bitten.
But I” humour you… who were these debate committee members who infected him?
I stated STAFF not committee members. Nice try. You don’t think the higher ups who planned the super spreader event would allow themselves to become infected, do you? It is always the foot soldiers who are put in harm’s way, not the leftist mucky-mucks.
Look it up. I put “Cleveland Debate Staff” in Google and it completed “test positive”. Just click, read and learn.
So Umm No. If it was all TRUMP!’s fault, why did the debate staff get sick? It was an intentional action meant to infect the TRUMP! team. The problem was the White House apparently did not have a “readiness” team preceding his staff taking swabs of all surfaces to which they would be exposed. If they had, they would have discovered the contamination purposely placed on surfaces to initiate the spread of the virus. Wearing a mask or “social distancing” does NOTHING to protect a person from surface contamination. So now we have the correlation of meetings at the Cleveland debate location and numerous people getting the virus.
As we know from leftist climate science, correlation = causation. The Cleveland debate facility was the source of the virus spreading into the TRUMP! staff AND the debate staff members.
Just cover your eyes and ears Simon, nothing to see or hear here!
So nothing to do with the RRR (Russian Roulette Rallies)he continually held against the advice of his staff, including the infamous Rose Garden event.
Read all about it….
https://www.statnews.com/2020/10/19/seeing-rose-garden-superspreader-convocation-as-a-never-event/
Of you can believe some BS about the Dirty Dems setting out to infect the poor guy. Still, if they were out to infect him, given his blindingly stupid carefree behaviour(including that of his trailer trash family) he was an easy target. Silly him I say.
Thanks Robert. After reading your comment, I went back to the survey, but considered all illness and all deaths among my family and close acquaintances over the last 6 months or so. My answers: 2, 1, 1. The death was an elderly women. My point is that in western countries we are fortunate not to experience a high death rate among our family and friends. Even with an epidemic, we may not know anyone who dies. Over my life, I can think of only one person I knew who died of influenza, and that was an 88 year old, after a serious operation. Apart from natural deaths due to old age, the highest cause of death among family and friends has been car accidents, followed by cancer.
Robert of Texas
“So while the number of deaths is staggering, it’s still a very small number of people considering the size of the population.”
That’s a very good observation. Kip’s survey may be of some scientific use, but probably more suited to one studying some variation of the ‘incredulity fallacy’ (the belief that a proposition must be false because it contradicts one’s personal experience), rather than one studying the spread rate of Covid 19.
Up until last week, I could say I only knew two people….me and my eye doctor I caught it from…..way back at the end of March first of April…no, I couldn’t get tested….the criteria was “have you been to a Chinese wh0re house in the past 2 weeks”….he went to the hosp and tested pos
…but I’m 100% sure…..that I’m 99% sure…it was what I had
Last week our neighbor went to the ER….couldn’t breath, coughing….she tested pos….and is the poster child….late 80’s, way over weight, diabetic…..kept her in ER one day…immediately started her on antibodies and remdesivir, maybe some other things I’m not sure…..second say she was out of intensive care…..4th day she called, said she was fine…..bored out of her mind…..and waiting on them to dismiss her
The part that I don’t understand are the voluntary drive-up/walk-in testing sites.
Why would any healthy person volunteer to go get tested? If you think about it, it makes no sense except in some very special cases.
– You can be negative today, but get exposed an hour later and be infected/positive the next day when you get the results from yesterday’s test telling you “negative.” A PCR test for a highly contagious respiratory virus is simply a snapshot of a moment in time. It says nothing about your status past that time point.
– The nasal swab PCR tests for SARS-CoV-2 variously have reported specificities (false-positive rate) of between 2% to somewhat below 1%. Because of that, I have to laugh every time I read the local Tucson Pravda when they give the latest testing results from UofA students and faculty. It is usually something like “631 people were tested last week and 3 were found +ive with COVID.” I just laugh. That is probably mostly the FAR rearing its ugly statistical head, because they never come back and say if those 3 positives were retested and the results of that. I know that. I spent years doing RT-PCR work and I know how occasionally one sample out of dozens will go wrong, even sometimes controls where a microtube sample was supposed to be either + or – but wasn’t.
– If you are feeling ill with cold-like symptoms, getting in your car to go get tested it nuts. Just stay home. Tell those who’ve been around you they might have been exposed and to watch for symptoms. Because…. if you are sick go get tested and it confirms that what you already guessed, “Well congratulations,” you just put a small army of contact tracers onto your household and acquaintances including maybe that your barber/hair stylist you visited the day before, and anyone else you may have had a causal conversation with in the last 72 hours. Contact tracers from the local health authority who may demand all those contacts isolate for 2 weeks with a threat of legal enforcement if they refuse. Simply nuts for what is largely a cold virus.
It’s because people are following the narratives – they’ve been told that asymptomatic carriers are the new problem – same way their guilt-tripping everyone who’s not personally scared for themselves into obeying the new fascist dictators that used to be called governors.
The irony is the entire US Civil Rights movement that began in the 1940’s, that the Democrats today like to Crow about, was about stopping the civil rights abuses coming out of states and local governments almost exclusively run by Democrats. History repeats.
History repeats, yet we (collectively) never seem to learn.
Joel O’B ==> See this NY Times article — which everyone ignores:
Your Coronavirus Test Is Positive. Maybe It Shouldn’t Be.
Many of those positives are “not actionable”. Current standards produce tests on tiny tiny amounts of RNA — “the amount of genetic material in a patient’s sample would have to be 100-fold to 1,000-fold that of the current standard for the test to return a positive result — at least, one worth acting on..”
In the 8th grade we all took a TB test. I was the only one in my class to test positive.
Why? Because I’d had tubercular meningitis when I was 18 months old. I’ll test positive for the rest of my life.
How many of these positive Covid-19 tests are people that had it and recovered months ago before testing was widely available?
They may have just thought they had a cold (if even that) at the beginning of the hysteria.
I’m 66, still work in an essential job. I’ve never been tested. At the beginning of this mess, I had a couple of the symptoms of being sick. (The Covid-19 symptom list was pretty short back then.) I called in to work and was told to call the health department. I called and was cleared to go back to work. Since then they’ve added symptoms to the list. Those very same symptoms would put me in quarantine. Did I have it? I don’t know. But if I took a test tomorrow and it came back positive … do I have it or did I have it and recovered 6 months ago?
Even if I took a test and it came back negative, I’d have to stay in quarantine for 14 days.
“The Covid-19 symptom list was pretty short back then”
A few weeks ago I was at my local pharmacy picking up a script. LONG lines and chaos as they had just started to give out the flu shots. Nobody knew where to stand (social distancing), etc.
I had to wait and was right beside a poster about the flu shot. Listed TWENTY-SEVEN symptoms of COVID19 that you should be aware of so you can report any. Yeah, beyond fever (easy measurable) and “can’t breath lying down”…pretty much every other one was basically either “its getting cold out” (i.e., sniffles, sore throat, cough) or in my case, getting old (aches and pains, etc.).
I can understand an overabundance of caution, but c’mon, things have to MEAN something, or they mean nothing and people will tune out.
Somebody said Kroger was handing out gift certificates to people to be tested. So, there are some financial incentives to this.
Took the survey
An older couple good friends.
A shirt tail in-law that I know and would probably recognize.
An older couple at my son’s wedding that I wouldn’t recognize.
Like you I ask people if they know anyone, and so far zero.
Considering the reported rate of infection, a statistician should be able to say that a random U.S. citizen is likely to know of x number of cases among family friends & acquaintances.
Its big in the cities for sure. My nephew is in London and knows several elderly people who have died.
Out here not even in a village, I don’t know anyone locally who has died at all, or got it.
FWIW from my own personal circle of family/friends:
I do not know of a single friend who has/did have Covid. Zero.
Our 2nd daughter, her husband and their 1-year old daughter at the time contracted Covid through their daughter bringing it home from daycare. The three of them quarantined for 2 weeks. The baby had cold symptoms for about a week, but never overly sick. The son-in-law felt mildly ill for 2-3 days, but nothing that stopped him from normal daily life. Our daughter was sick for 2 weeks and as she described it, it felt like having a mild hangover from drinking the night before. All 3 have fully recovered and have dismissed it as nothing more than an annual flu. Life goes on for them and they laugh at the media continuing to portray the virus like it’s some out of control death wish.
Two weeks ago in Bavaria, they where wondering about the strong increase of positive tested people. Testing again they realised 58 out of 60 test were wrong positive.
In general, the complete charge of tests had to been retracted, but I didn’t read about.
Maybe no wonder the number of “infected” increases.
Corona breakdown in Bavaria: 58 out of 60 positive tests wrong – Munich
According to a newspaper report, a large Bavarian laboratory has produced a series of false positive results in corona tests.
This was noticed during inspections in a hospital in Taufkirchen / Vils in Upper Bavaria, reported the “Münchner Merkur” on Wednesday. There 58 out of 60 positive tests turned out to be false
I should add that I have an elderly relative, she’s 84 and has been locked up in her nursing home room for the last six months. Visiting her or taking her out to her vacation cottage for a weekend is out of the question.
I have been looking for the many media reports regarding the many — read: extraordinary, beyond typically seasonal volumes — Chi-Com flu cases, hospitalizations, deaths of the EMPLOYEES at:
[1] your local grocery stores;
[2] your local convenience stores;
[3] your local pharmacies;
[4] your local WalMarts, Home Depots and all the “Big Box” stores; and,
[5] etc. for all other services which are open and exposed to countless “general public” encounters.
And, by the way, where are the reports of the MASSIVE USA WUHAN SURGE — attributable to our election day encounters at the polling stations — since our in-person-election?
This also goes for the athletes — mostly on collegiate and professional levels — where I, for one, read every day, it seems, about another 2, 3, 4 or whatever, that have tested “positive”; however, so far, I have heard of “0” CASES which have actually been hospitalized, let alone, have died. [Thank God.]
One would think, in reading much of the media, that these massive numbers of frontline workers, with such disproportionately heavy and intense exposure, would be flooding the aid stations; with many even dying. Where are they? Do they exist?
Hmmm … maybe, I am just reading the wrong media sources, but, so far, since we here in the USA have been well into this pandemic, I have seen “0” such articles.
I recognize that I could be wrong on this assessment — hardly, do I read “everything” — so, certainly, I am open to receiving and reviewing links for the appropriate articles and overall info. TIA.
Looking at the data from Johns-Hopkins
https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6
Their daily chart in the lower right corner displays the tabulated daily cases (as reported)
Accordingly, the data indicates
11-1 76k new cases
11-3 123k new cases (voting day)
11-4 102k new cases
11-5 125k new cases
11-6 124k new cases
11-7 128k new cases
11-8 109k new cases
11-9 119k new cases
11-10 140k new cases (7 days post voting)
11-11 143k new cases
11-12 160k new cases
11-13 177k new cases
11-14 166k new cases
The Johns-Hopkins data does appear to contain a jump in infection rate 7 days after voting
(Caveat) Depending on how accurate their data is
“athletes — mostly on collegiate and professional levels”
https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/columnist/brennan/2020/11/15/masters-dustin-johnson-covid-19-augusta-national/6305601002/
It was just a month ago that Johnson spent 11 days by himself in a Las Vegas hotel room, quarantining after a positive COVID test. He had “very minor” COVID symptoms, he said.
“I felt like I had a cold. A little bit of a fever for maybe 36 hours. But after that, I felt fine. The worst part about it was the quarantining in the room for so long.”
or
Freddie Freeman goes from coronavirus to NL MVP after stellar 2020 season
https://sports.yahoo.com/freddie-freeman-goes-from-coronavirus-to-nl-mvp-after-stellar-2020-season-235241693.html
I live at the epicenter of the UK outbreak, well we recorded the earliest clusters locally, although it is likely it was present in the UK months before undetected.
My town has a population of 110,000 and is known for it’s high elderly population. Since the start of the year there have been 86 deaths with CV19 on the certificate, 1144 other deaths. So 7% of deaths had CV19, 78/100,000.
A large proportion of the deaths in the first wave were in care homes. The average age of death with CV19 in the UK is well over 80, it’s actually higher than the average age of death.
I know no one who had it/has it/died of it – or of anything else!
An interesting fact on the news today is that there are no excess deaths in London during the second wave, although there are in other areas of the country.
I’ve been asking the same question whenever I’m around someone new. Answer is nearly always no, or at worst, yes, but wasn’t a big deal. One distant relative of mine by marriage in the Philippines died from COVID, but she was a doctor and was repeatedly exposed in the early stages of the pandemic. An elderly cousin in the US had a very severe case, but recovered. That’s it. Nobody else in our fairly large, widely dispersed family even knows of other cases.
Navy Bob,
Exposure the inoculating dose certainly matters. Every research immunologist who has worked with infecting animal models with virus and bacteria pathogens to study a disease pathology understands that first hand.
15 years ago, back when I was doing mouse virus immunology experiments, we had to be very careful to give the correct and same amount of virus to all the mice in the test cage, because infecting with too much or too little virus (I was doing Vaccinia Virus at the time) would wildly skew the results from careless lack of ensuring the correct viral titer. It was very easy to give too much virus to a mouse and then it die while the rest got sick and recovered. It is very hard to study the memory immune response on a dead mouse.
Joel O’Bryan, interesting — I have been surprised by the general similarity in shape of a insecticide dose: probability of mortality graph and a (insect biocontrol) viral dose: mortality graph.
It seems (to casual onlooker) that nearly all the action occurs over two orders of magnitude or less.
Do mammal’s virus dose: mortality curves show a similar sort of behaviour?
To be fair, while I am regularly aware of people having the flu, I never recall anyone that I know dying from it…yet it kills some 40k people every year in the US.
I think that’s the point, the numbers appear big, but they need to be put in context.
Apparently getting on for 3 Million people die in the USA each year, 600K in the UK.
And remember that many people had flu shots. Was that ever recorded?
I know of two acquaintances with serious COVID complications.
Our across the street neighbor is an EMT, and was in the hospital for about a month [including over a week on a respirator] back in June. He tried going back to work in September, and ended up back in the hospital. Now on disability.
My wife’s ortho surgeon also was hospitalized in late spring, and seems to have had a personality/attitude change. She will be seeing a different surgeon for the other knee replacement.
If masks are so great, lock downs work, and social distancing is good then why are cases still occurring?
Death rates are significantly down since March, Is it because treatments are more effective or democrat governors quit putting infected people in nursing homes?
Many of the most susceptible have already been exposed, and since recovered or died is one hypothesis.
@Michael Jarosz. Maybe because a lot of people are refusing to wear masks, breaking lockdowns and not social distancing? Videos coming out of the USA appear to show large gatherings of unmasked people standing very close together. Are these faked?
Re social distancing, the experience has made me more aware of way personal space works, or doesn’t. Even with the best of intentions, it is hard to keep a distance from people, even strangers. A local cafe sells coffee through a slot in the door. There are painted marks on the footpath (sidewalk!) 1.5m apart to help people distance while waiting. Even so, people tend to drift together as they chat or as they pass to collect their coffee. Some individuals tend to move towards others unconsciously, even if constantly reminded! An opportunity for an interesting research project?
According to the CDC a couple of weeks ago, nearly 90% of people who caught The Corona recently habitually wore masks.
They don’t work to protect people, which is why The Narrative switched to ‘but they protect others from you.’ And they probably don’t even do that.
Muzzling the population is the goal, not protecting anyone from a disease they have a 99.75% chance of surviving.
I have never been concerned about catching the SARS CoV2 virus, but seeing all the people around me wearing masks – even outside – makes me a little nervous. Fear combined with uncertainty can be contagious. So I don’t wear a mask outside, but I do in stores and building lobbies. When I walk down the block without a mask, people veer off the sidewalk and walk in the street against on coming traffic. They are more likely to get killed by the crazy, too fast drivers than the virus! Ironic isn’t it?
As far as my susceptibility goes, I am 66 now and used to work in an active solid waste landfill for 16 years and then inspected asbestos contaminated sites and oil spill sites wreaking of petroleum volatile vapors. Nothing has killed me yet. It was much more of a danger working around the bulldozer and compactor operators at night at the landfill, than any other hazard. However, the operators were trained to watch to government monitors on the ground. I made sure to keep up good relations with all of the heavy equipment operators.
Aside, from all this, I was usually covered in a light dusting of leachate saturated dust from standing there monitoring the work. Even the inside of my monitoring SUV and my office had a veneer of this nasty dust. My colleagues worked under the same conditions. No one cared and we were never told to wear masks or respirators! The leachate, itself, was generated at the open work face as rain fell on the torn up garbage consisting of exposed baby and adult diapers, medical waste, rat poop, dead animals needing to be buried, household garbage, spent hypodermic needles, old smoke detectors with Americium still inside, urine from the equipment operators, and more!!!! I’m sure we all inhaled SARS, influenza, cold and other viruses, multitudes of bacteria species and maybe a few parisites. BUT!!!!! I only had a few colds while at the landfill in 16 years and no colds or anything during my latter 16 years of other environmental work. Go figure.
“Raphael Ketani November 17, 2020 at 11:55 am
I have never been concerned about catching the SARS CoV2 virus, but seeing all the people around me wearing masks – even outside – makes me a little nervous.”
It actually makes me laugh because it is completely ridiculous given the fact most of the face nappies are not medically, N95, rated. IIRC, I have seen only one person wearing a mask that had “N95” printed on it. Whether it was N95 rated or not I have no idea. I see many wear the “re-useable” types which are completely useless.
I have worked throughout the whole sc@m, using public transport, going to the shops etc etc. I do not know a single person who was infected and a lot of my family work in nursing including aged-care facilities.
What we were supposed to do was “flatten” the curve below what our hospitals and ICUs could handle. Instead, we implemented regulations and guidelines that suppressed cases far below that level. The lack of herd immunity is biting us in the butt now, especially in states which were not hit hard previously.
It’s great if you are isolated like New Zealand and can stave-off any influx of infections until vaccines are available. That isolation doesn’t exist here in the US.
Even in NZ they have to keep the rest of the world out until a large part of the population has been vaccinated with a successful vaccine. Even in the most optimistic scenarios, that is probably late 2021 to early 2022 (the SH summer after this one). How long can NZ economically stand to do that before the costs to mental health (suicides, alcoholism, domestic violence) and financial health of the entire country outweighs the potential of COVID deaths?
Joel
I wonder how effective NZ has been. I read an article yesterday that China was complaining that meat and its packaging from NZ was contaminated with the virus. If the claim is true, there may be a large number of asymptomatic cases in NZ that the government is unaware of.
Why would it take so long to vaccinate such a small number of people?
I really wish this site would stick to climate issues. Every time it veers off into other things — particularly politics — it looses credibility.
“looses credibility” Irony alert!
As if climate isn’t blatantly political?
This is the other side of the same coin.
Unless you can furnish a more plausible explanation.
There are a clear parallels between Climate Change Public policies being enacted and COVID-19 control policies.
COVID-19 lockdowns are decimating economies and lives but doing little to stop the infection outside of a few special cases like islands (NZ) where the population can isolate itself from the world. Lockdowns at best only slow the virus spread. Then when lockdowns ease, as they must, the virus cases spike again. Duh.
Climate Change policies are decimating energy affordability and thus compromising both current and future living standards for the general populations in both the industrialized countries and developing countries while doing little to nothing to slow emissions and their alleged role in global warming.
Both afflictions claim to have group of “science experts” that must be followed. Both while seemingly starting out justified, have each become little more than Trojan Horse commandeered by Elitists for a path to Global Socialism.
Meanwhile Communist Chinese, both the source of COVID-19 virus and delayed warnings to the West about its spread last December and the biggest CO2 emitter by far, plans its path to World Supremacy with the slow demise of the US and the West’s economies under COVID lockdowns and ruinous Climate energy policies. And with the slow demise of economic might, military might will follow.
Coincidence????
my book talks exactly about that
phonyclimatewar.com
@ Don,
Why did you read it? Why did you comment? Why are your panties in a twist?
Don Jindra ==> Politics is defined as: “the activities associated with the governance of a country or other area”
The essay is very mildly political in any other sense.
“Don Jindra November 17, 2020 at 12:06 pm
I really wish this site would stick to climate issues.”
Have you read the about page?
I really wish this site would stick to climate issues. Every time it veers off into other things — particularly politics — it looses credibility
Hate to break it to you, Donny-boy, but “climate issues” are the number one most political thing this site covers. I’d say you loose all credibility by pretending that isn’t so, but that would falsely imply that you ever had any credibility to begin with. Go back under your bridge, concern trolls aren’t welcome in polite society.
The media blew it way up to make Trump look bad, IMHO. The media are grasping at straws.
There is high degree of exuberance here in the UK about supposedly 94.5% efficacy of newly launched Covid vaccine. I went to over to Wikipedia and looked it up. Company was established September 2010, i.e. 10 years ago.
It states: “As of November 2020, Moderna was valued at $35 billion, and while none of its drugs had been approved, its COVID-19 vaccine candidate was close to obtaining emergency use authorization. ….
In 2014, Moderna moved to focus on lower-margin vaccines, given that an mRNA vaccine – efficacy issues aside – will always stimulate a level of antibody development in subjects…
In March 2013, Moderna and AstraZeneca signed a five-year exclusive option agreement to discover, develop, and commercialize mRNA for treatments in the therapeutic areas of cardiovascular, metabolic and renal diseases, and selected targets for cancer. The agreement included a $240 million upfront payment to Moderna ….As of May 2020, only one candidate has passed Phase I trials….
In January 2014, Moderna and Alexion Pharmaceuticals entered a $125 million deal for orphan diseases in need of therapies….However, by 2017, the program with Alexion had been scrapped as the animal trials showed that Moderna’s treatment would never be safe enough for use in humans ….” , etc.
Then there is this
‘Bad Optics’ Or Something More? Moderna Executives’ Stock Sales Raise Concerns
“Taylor said Moderna’s stock-selling practices appear well outside the norm, and raise questions about the company’s internal controls to prevent insider trading. “On a scale of one to 10, one being less concerned and 10 being the most concerned,” said Daniel Taylor, an associate professor of accounting at the Wharton School, “this is an 11.”
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/04/908305074/bad-optics-or-something-more-moderna-executives-stock-sales-raise-concerns
Moderna should consider suing Wikipedia and NPR.org for casting doubt on activities of the company.
P.S Survey: 0,0,0
But it’s so exciting being alive in a historically notable time. That’s what’s driving it for the sheep populace.
I live on Vancouver Island in BC Canada,our health area has 8000,000+- population, these are the stats.
Death rate per 1000 population
All BC 0.08
VI 0.01
“Cases” per 1000 population
All BC 5.67
VI 0.43
Active cases per 1000 population
All BC 1.51
VI 0.08
Hospitalization per 1000 population
All BC 0.05
VI 0.00
ICU per 1000 population
All BC 0.01
VI 0.00
Last week we had an “outbreak”, 5 people of the local hospital staf tested positive, youy would have though the end of the world was nigh. The important point, which was played down, was that of the 5 only 2 were hospitalized.
We are living in a looney bin
Nope you’re living on a fairly isolated island similar to Hawaii. The Loony Bin of which you speak is the CONUS area directly south of you. It gets crazier the farther left you travel.
Kevin,
When it is not obvious why a person or government acts a certain way, look for unobvious reasons.
Case include past (e.g. viral fragments, antibodies), probable (e.g. symptoms), possible (e.g. proximity), and progressive (i.e. disease).
n.n ==> Correct — what they really count and what they report are entirely different things.
cases include the fast test….and it’s so inaccurate it’s worthless
I know two people (and know of a third) who have had Covid. One of them was bad enough they put her in a medically induced coma and put her on a ventilator. When they tried to wake her up, they found she had experienced a couple of strokes which had not been noticed, because coma. While I have not seen the death certificate, icthink we can be confident that this was listed as a Covid death (in California) even though she had fully recovered from Covid. Well, at least the hospital got a bunch of extra federal money for the Covid diagnosis and ventilator usage.
Obviously there are more sick people at present than earlier in the year, as there are more in hospital.
But…
I am retired, and am still around quite a few college students due to research, and so I know of several kids who have tested positive. Yet, they never developed any symptoms, and though they exposed all of their roomates, none of those developed symptoms either. These seem to me to be the very definition of a false positive. Probably the most common conversation that I overhear around town is the same and ends with “no rhyme or reason.”
If a students tests positive, then they must quarantine for ten days, after which they are considered immune and do not test again. You can all imagine how this policy might go wrong. Then there were false negatives, and students who figured out “hacks” to keep from being tested when they had symptoms. It has been something like the Keystone cops around here, and the epidemic has had a wild ride for the past 11 weeks, but no one is really sure how many people are truly sick. Never mind. Our public officials are very angry that we mere mortals cannot keep the virus at bay.
I suggested just sending students home to put an end to all this, and strangely the University began doing just that last Friday. We will see in a couple of weeks how much difference it makes to stop doing 15,000+ tests per week on people without symptoms. I will report back.
Kevin kilty ==> There is a huge Testing Madness factor…..
I took the survey but the numerical categories are broad. I know no one at present sick enough to stay home, I have known only one who was actually sick enough to stay home, and an older acquaintance died last summer. He had other problems. I cannot recall how many students/staff tested positive and had to quarantine, but none I recall ever showed symptoms; and part of my accounting problem is that other people were forced to isolate themselves due to having stood next to someone who tested positive — can’t sort it out. To give you an idea, I could include the freshman football team, cheer squad, wrestling team, and cross country team. As you say, it’s testing madness.
With a 1-5% rate of false positive rate and more than 15K tests/week, how long would it take for the majority of the student population to be sent home?
To hear it from some, all the sick people are completely overwhelming the ICU’s.
I find cdc excess deaths graphs more useful: https://public.tableau.com/profile/dataviz8737#!/vizhome/COVID_excess_mort_withcauses_11112020/WeeklyExcessDeaths
Aged care/Nursing homes
The overall effort or quality of care in aged care homes across a region is enough to explain the difference in deaths per region.
Here in Melbourne Australia, most aged care facilities have ramped up their PPE efforts and restricted visitors. Since July they have also implemented a “voluntary” staff ban from working at more than one facility.
The extra costs are of the order of $2000-3000 per resident.
These simple efforts greatly reduce the risk of covid in aged care and thus reduce or skew the nations overall death rates.
What is becoming apparent, is that in theses facilities this years death rates will drop dramatically because the extra efforts are reducing flu deaths by 1000s. This further skews death rates.
Interesting statistical thought
Because covid mainly impacts the very old different jurisdictions based on their lockdowns will have interesting death rate and life expectancy blips when analysed in future years
COVID-19 infections are very clumped. Not uniformly spread in the population. The same is true of the spreading of covid. When the R value is above one so it is increasing in the population, most infected people don’t spread it but a small number spread it to a bunch of people at super-spreading events.
So it’s not surprising that many people will not know any victims.
In the US DoD military active duty there are currently about 1.3 million service men and women.
Since early March testing began, there has been EXACTLY 1 (one) US military Active Duty death attributable to COVID-19.
This death was a 41 yrs old petty officer (an NCO) on the USN carrier Teddy Roosevelt who died after the ship pulled into Guam harbor with a bunch of COVID afflicted sailors.
Now the Active Duty military population by active control is a generally healthy young population compared even to the Reserve and Guard components that are older (both mean and median age, much older) and generally not as physically fit as active duty population. This is to be expected. In the US DoD Guard and Reserve there have been a total of around 8 or 9 COOVID-19 attributable deaths out of a 1.0 million serving there.
Compare all this to the 1918 Influenza where many tens of thousands of Army recruits and soldiers (18-21 yr olds) were struck down, badly sick with flu and thousands died. Now I realize this was before antibiotics that today largely prevents a secondary bacterial pneumonia mortality, but still many young healthy teenagers and young adults still die today from H1N1 and H3N2 influenza, where very few actually healthy young have died from COVID-19.
By far and away the most robust conclusion is: the H1N1 Influenza-A as a viral pathogen is far worse on a healthy than this novel corona virus with a naive-to-the-virus immune system.
And also to consider is that the US Army is seeing a spike this year in suicides in young soldiers. What are the real costs of COVID-19 versus the Responses to it by political leaders? I think intuitively we all know that answer by now.
the US Army is seeing a spike this year in suicides in young soldiers
Why? Trump has ended Obama’s wars. He has resupplied the military. They should be training, resting, and in good spirits.
Don’t be so obviously stupid n.n with a serious subject like suicide.
Young very healthy men and women have been isolated in barracks. Their social activities eliminated by leadership told to isolate them from what for that demographic is cold. They are not allowed to travel if they are stationed in places like Ft Drum NY or out in California, by Blue State Demo-Governors stupidity.
Their deployments to AFG, Iraq, and other shitholes around the world have been lengthened to reduce travel and turn-over deployment demands.
Those all have real consequences on mental health, and thus suicides.
“very few actually healthy young have died from COVID-19.”
Virtually always I have found those tested positive, but died of something unrelated to covid. When that’s the case the more honest media will say they died of complications from covid. Like the actor who got VAP from a ventilator, the boy band member who had acute strep, and the nurse who died of sepsis. Media said they all died of covid.
In reply to: Joel O’Bryan
The US military if they know HCQ plus Zinc is an effective and safe treatment for covid, they will not let US soldiers die because of politics and they will use the HCQ, to protect service personal lives.
I see, there are more and more published peer reviewed studies that show the HCQ cocktail is a cheap and effective early treatment of covid.
And because covid is monitored by senior military leaders, the US senior military…. do not get their facts from CNN.
The US senior military will know there is deep state corruption concerning covid. The US military also have independent high tech medical research labs, that are staffed and controlled by the military with independent non political analysis and reports.
Independent analysis shows covid was a manufactured virus. It contains pieces of multiple viruses that have been modified, using AI virus software to invoke specific body responses. There was a HBO program that discussed virus AI software …. it explained how the new AI virus software works and included an interview with one of the designers of the perfect virus simulation software.
The perfect virus simulation software enables a person using an AI like system to design viruses that will have novel like features that could help or hurt people depending on the designer’s intent.
Recent research has found that covid anathesizes the throat… …. so there is little pain as it starts its infection, in the throat.
This novel special feature of covid is the reason why covid spreads so easy. The first throat infection is not as painful as normal throat infections because the covid virus has been engineered to deaden the pain at the point of first infection.
In 0.05% of the population who have a genetic mutation, covid cause the body to produce an antibody that attacks one’s own body. It is the novel feature of covid that cause weird long term serious side effects that are very difficult to treat.
The 0.05% attack the body using the body’s immune system covid novel feature, helps make people afraid of covid, due to the weird dangerous, in some cases life changing health changes.
Done, Kip. And my answers were 0,0,0, thankfully.
Regards,
Bob
PS: And I’m an old fart.
Bob Tisdale ==> #OldFart-MeToo
flatulant GHG emitters you both.
Is this something I have to look forward to in old age?
Joel, overcoming gravity by suspending oneself on a column of hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and methane is most entertaining.
Regards,
Bob
PS: How else do you think magicians levitate?
Along the same lines…when I hear a commercial for a pill that reduces the severity and duration of the common cold, I wonder how are they measuring this? Seems like a difficult metric to measure, impossible really.
Granny, on the Beverly Hillbillies, had a cure for the common cold. Mr. (?) Banker was very excited about it … he would get rich, it seemed.
She cooked up some funky stuff for him, made him breath in some funky stuff, told him to drink a lot of liquids, & to stay in bed for a week or so, and he would be cured….
John Bell ==> Most of those commercials are, bluntly, fraudulent. Some get away with it as there are a few sketchy studies that show increasing your intake of Vit C might reduce the severity of your common cold.
Kip
A little anecdotal story about Vit C. Back in the days when I was teaching, I had to teach some chemistry labs to fill out my contact-hour load. One day we had a substitute teacher fill in for another chemistry professor. I had time to talk with him while supervising a lab. He had worked personally with Linus Pauling. He was a strong believer in Vit C and assured me that large doses were quite safe. He was quite convincing. For two or three years after that, I tried to abort colds by taking up to 1 gram per hour during my waking hours. There were no noticeable side effects. There was also no noticeable curative powers. I invariably ended up with a secondary bacterial infection in my upper respiratory system, and had to see a doctor for antibiotics. I finally decided that I had given Vit C a fair trial, and it didn’t live up to expectations, at least for me.
Incidentally, since I got my Prevenar-13 pneumonia vaccine, I have not had any secondary bacterial infections when I have caught a cold. That is in contrast to almost always getting secondary bacterial infections from my 20s on.
The most useful vaccine so far is the Russian Sputnik, a modified adenovirus. It can be stored at room temperature. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are mRNA vaccines which require storage at -70 to -80 C, requiring expensive equipment and problematic for many countries with limited infrastructure. Hard to hear of course, regarding the racial enemy to the east, but true nonetheless.
Phil Salmon ==> I believe the Moderna vaccine can use simply placed in a refrigerator freezer for storage.
I’ll check – I thought they said -70.
I would guess from biochemistry that -70ºC freezers for long term storage, but -20ºC freezers are okay for short periods < 60 days… as long as it is not a "frost-free" freezer.
Freezerology-101: Frost free freezers are bad for biosamples because of the defrost cycle (periodic heating) they use.
I have had a few family members catch it, but all have recovered. The first two were a police office and his nurse wife. The next cousin works in schools, and a niece who works in schools. Then a nephew brought it home from high school and gave it to his dad and brother. All recovered.
It is all so weird, really. Fact is, we know precious little about this virus. Such epidemics usually take 2 to 3 years to fully run their cause. And we are not even a year into this one. It will be a couple of years before we get to know all relevant statistics about this virus, i.e. its true fatality rate, just how dangerous it is, the ways it spreads in countries varying so hugely demographically, culturally, racially and genetically – and that on the background of enormous differences in the strictness of lockdowns and peoples’ obedience to those, etc., etc..
Looking at present European statistics, it appears as if the final death rates in the midst of this so-called second wave are all slowly merging, irrespective of the strictness of the lockdowns – or even if there were enforced lockdowns or not (viz. Sweden).
The news media are no help. All they are interested in is making fat, alarming headlines. We rely on free, independent blogs like WUWT to keep us informed (and to keep us sane!)
I am guessung that will generate data similar to the Zoe app in the UK which seems to provide accurate data about a week in advance of the official data https://covid.joinzoe.com/
The data showed the infections had levelled off before we went into the second lockdown which England is now half way through.
Paul C ==> Thanks for the link.
I’m 73 and I know hundreds of people. In my whole life I’ve known only 6 people who have died. I think people mostly live forever. This whole death thing is a hype designed to make you miserable.
Sarcasm aside, the TOTAL death rate in the United States is already up 15% over 2019. That has not happened in a century. Those on this website who minimize COVID are simply too scared to admit that such a threat could exist. Yes, it is true that this is not the Black Death that killed one in three. No one says it is. But the ostrich-like attitude shown here is why HUNDREDS of times as many Americans per capita are dying of this disease then died in S. Korean, Taiwan, New Zealand and China, where the government and the people dealt with the disease as the threat it is and protected each other from it. Ideas can kill and the idea that COVID is a hype has killed and is killing hundreds of thousands if not millions.
My calculation from CDC data is that the average of the first 6 months of data from 2020 is 14% higher than the average month in 2019. However, it appears that seasonally, the worst is over 2020, so that the monthly average for 2020 will come down.
I think that the Hong Kong flu in 1968 would be almost as high. In any case, low excess deaths one year leads to increased excess deaths the following year and vice versa. We’ll see.
Does that count your parents? You are mighty lucky. I am only 74, do not have a huge circle of friends, but I know a lot of people who have died, and some young: two suicides, car wreck, and one drug overdose.
I am sure some guys I knew in school got shipped to Vietnam. Don’t know if some didn’t come back.
This Covid is essentially harmless for young people. Let them live normal lives.
Eric Lerner wrote
“TOTAL death rate in the United States is already up 15% over 2019”
While I’ll readily accept it is my fault, I spent a couple of hours looking for CDC data on US total deaths. I could not find anything after 2018. I would greatly appreciate your link to information.
Andy ==> One source of Total Deaths, by week, is available at the CDC FluView site — you have to download the data for NATIONAL from the Green Link near the top. It comes as a .csv file, so can be opened in Excel (Or Excel clone) and you can sum the figures by month or year if your wish. The Total Deaths column is the one you want.
I take your point, Mr. Lerner, but the question is, how old were the people who died? That has always been the big fraud: that COVID-19 kills people of all ages. The fact of the matter is, if you’re healthy now, the chances that you will die of COVID-19 are statistically zero.
I’m 68, and I live in a seniors’ residence. (All our tenants are independent, which is to say that none of us have health problems so severe that we need professional home care visits.) In 2019, about fifteen tenants died. The thing is that, when a tenant dies (usually suddenly; he will be fine and then hospitalized, and then dead in about ten days), no one is really surprised. This is because we understand that human beings are mortal, and that death in old age is normal and natural. Young people will tell you that all deaths are tragic, but old people know that death in old age is often a relief, as it is an end to suffering.
So what’s my point? It is this: The pandemic is nowhere nearly as tragic as is commonly believed, because so few of the dead are young or middle-aged. COVID-19 and heart disease have roughly the same age-to-mortality graph. Heart disease kills many more people than COVID, and we don’t decide to sabotage the financial and social lives of the young to prevent heart disease. COVID-19 is really just another cause of death in the elderly, to go along with the many other causes that already exist.
A better question for the survey, compared to what other ailments?
I know zero covid fatalities, but 2 under 60 and 3 under 50 years old amongst my network succumbed to other causes.
That 15% increase is surely a bit of noise in a longer term statistical measure. 2 million seniors in America die each year from all causes. 80% of covid death is coming from that 65+ age group. With 500,000 alone normally coded as having died from heart disease. The other 1,500,00 from lung, cancer, liver, kidney etc. are all diseases that would, if you had them, be a co-morbid factor in your covid. You can die from one cause or the multiple complex interactions of co-morbidities, but it’s eventually got to end up registered in one CDC column or another.
So an 80 year old who passes in 2020 with covid and a bad heart will list as covid but will be reduced from the year’s heart disease numbers.
Looking back from 2025, perhaps life expectancy will have been seen to go down by some small amount, but the compression of a few months death will likely disappear in a three year rolling average.
Why the message from public health to wash and mask doesn’t mention vitamin D as another possible, cheap prophylactic perplexes.
“So an 80 year old who passes in 2020 with covid and a bad heart will list as covid but will be reduced from the year’s heart disease numbers.”
And that 80 year old probably survived a very mild flu season last year, yet very few would be indecent enough to point out he/she got another year of life out of it…
Basically, anything less than a five year rolling average of expected death rate for whatever jurisdiction you want to look at will be noise. We are only (basically) one year into something that could take another year to “fix”, being optimistic. Most data until then is cherry picking for whatever political flavour your choose.
My responses were 0,0,0. One of my neighbors knew someone who was seriously ill from CV-19 and required several days of hospitalization.
While I see where you’re going with this survey, I have to note that neither I nor most of my immediate family or acquaintances know “a lot” of people. Our circles are limited to people with whom we communicate on a regular basis, and do not necessarily include people we pass on the street or see in the shops, or even live on the next street over. I don’t know anyone who owns a Porsche, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t Porsche owners on the other side of town. 😉
PaulH ==> Yes, thus the survey — of a very complicated, dispersed, heterogeneous cohort — WUWT readers.
We will see what a larger sample of individuals turns up.
Kip,
I’m going to self identify as “a very complicated, dispersed, heterogeneous cohort”…
you’re never alone with schizophrenia (;-))
This interview with Dr Mike Yeadon is certainly worth listening to. His opinions on PCR, and evaluating the current situation in the UK make too much sense – so will be ignored by politicians.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZjtiqujql8&feature=youtu.be
No excess deaths here since the original spring spike.
Paul C ==> Thanks for the link.
Agreed Mike Lowe, the climate has become a political tool with which to convince the public, particularly in the West of the necessity of accepting gradual changes in their lifestyles which most are still unaware will slowly impoverish the mid-to-lower classes but enable the élite to enrich themselves further. Some players in this game claim their aim is to redistribute wealth more equitably across the globe. Maurice Strong was possibly the first in a succession of billionaires with strangely extreme socialist beliefs, all of whom sound quite fanatical when talking about the climate, yet clearly either don’t know much about “the science” involved, or don’t care if the base of their proselytizing is unfounded.
What is happening now is a group of these fanatics at the World Economic Forum are seizing on the Covid repercussions to try to accelerate the goal of redistribution and they make no secret of it. Will the MSM tag along or support it?
It’s all here:- https://www.weforum.org/agenda/global
https://sociable.co/technology/skeptical-great-reset-technocratic-agenda-waited-years-crisis-exploit/
My kinky socks himself let it slip recently:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE77utcasb8
They should have kept him in the dark, because he is too stupid not to let these plans slip out to the public. I heard the WEF had removed a video describing reset life in 2030. I have not confirmed this personally.
Kip, nobody ever talks about Sweden. The third chart at https://www.covid19insweden.com/en/deaths.html shows a lot of fatalities earlier in the year, but since the end of June they are indistinguishable from the average all-causes mortality in the previous five years. This achieved without massive lockdowns and or face mask mandates.
Ralph Dave Westfall ==> The same is mostly true in the United States. Total mortality in the US is running about even with the last few years.
In France, on october 28th, resident Macron warned us that without lockdown there will be 400,000 more deaths.
According to the WHO, the SRAS-COV2 infection fatality rate is about 0.2%.
So, in order to reach 400,000 more deaths this winter, there should occur 400,000/0.002 = 200 million more infections in a few months.
But in France, there are only 67 million inhabitants.
Covid clowns are just as dishonest and dumb as climate clowns and resident Macron is a conjunction of the two kinds.
Is he still using the discredited data? IFR/CFR that was fed into the models.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/09/08/covid-19-cfr-and-ifr-confused/
the missing question is ” do you know of anyone that has committed Suicide/died from an overdose in the last 9 months”
My answers 0/1/0/3
JG
John Gentzel ==> My condolences regarding your acquaintances that took their own lives.
Thank you
Looks like Denmark have fought off (for now) the next stage of the totalitatian state planned for us all. Apparently, there have been protests for nine days which have been ignored by the fake media.
https://truth11.com/2020/11/17/forced-vaccination-law-abandoned-in-denmark-after-mass-protests/
Do you have another source for this?
It looks like that “truth” website is way off in lala-land.
I went though two newspapers, one for sheeple and one that traditionally was conservative, at least when I left Denmark thirty years ago.
In both papers every second headline is about Covid-19, but I didn’t see anything about heavy protest over a forced vaccination. I may have missed it.
On the other hand, I did see a lot of scary titles about people getting rejected as scum if they turn out positive for Covid-19 (they probably mean SARS-CoV-2).
Here is another source Carl.
https://www.thelocal.dk/20201113/explained-what-is-denmarks-proposed-epidemic-law-and-why-is-it-being-criticised?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=LNCH%20%2020201117%20%20House%20Ads%20%20SM+CID_c97ef34eca81f6db9660be3ce3d68e5a
Thanks Paul C and tobyglyn.
This new Permanent Marshal Law (my interpretation of the “epidemic-law”) in Denmark is paving the way to fulfilling “1984”, Agenda-21 and what Yuri Bezmenov told us in 1983.
The new Danish Permanent Marshal Law is bound to be misused as it’s activation is solely in the hands of the sitting government. The government is not obligated to follow advice from the health institution or medical specialists.
Considering that every other year we have an influenza-like epidemic which, like SARS-CoV-2, has had little to no influence on mortality in Denmark, the Permanent Marshal Law cannot be defended from a health viewpoint, leaving only political reason for for the Permanent Marshal Law to be implemented and sustained.
I had previously understood the Danes’ enthusiasm for climate policy, as it adds considerably to the GDP by the export of wind turbines, just like cement and cellulose industry has been a valuable engineering export for over 100 years.
What I do not understand is that it has been possible to convert or “normalize” the previous freedom loving Danish population to invoke measures exceeding those in place during the country’s occupation April 9th 1940 to May 5th 1945.
I felt the path to DDR was on the way as early as the mid 1970s and patly the reason why I in periods began to live abroad in the US and Germany, for finally to migrate late 1989.
The authority and indoctrination from the academic left, had reached levels which became gradually clearer to those, like I, who from childhood on had lived in a very international environment and seen and lived with people from all corners of the world and all walks of life. You get love people, but also getting to see, understand and compare other major societies first hand.
Maybe I regret. It would have been easier and maybe happier to just follow the sheeple around me and pursue an economical better carrier.
It is like the boiling crap syndrome. The “normalization” is beginning slowly, for finally to accelerate exponentially. Will the US be able to slow or reverse this trend for itself and for the western world? – Let us fight and hope.
I have exactly two extended family members who tested positive–both had very mild symptoms for a day or two and likely would not have voluntarily stayed home from work if they were not required to be quarantined for 2 weeks. Otherwise I have heard about a couple other people who may or may not have had it. The assisted living facility my mother is in has not had any cases, either, but on the other hand is completely locked down now and has been in some version of lockdown for 9 months. The mental toll on her and everyone else is pretty bad.
My county has as many open ICU beds (23) as it has ICU beds with Covid patients (22)–and lots of beds with with lots of other patients (52). Six hundred non-ICU hospital beds are available and 138 ventilators. Only one half of all tested persons are symptomatic anyway. I don’t see too much of a problem.
I agree–where are the sick people??
An acquaintance died of the SARS-2 virus last spring.
My wife’s niece contracted it at college, but didn’t require hospitalization.
A mother and daughter (72 and 91) who live near a friend of my wife have been diagnosed. They hadn’t left their house in months except for medical appointments.
The husband of a mod at an online forum I frequent came down with COVID-19, but recovered at home. It took several months for him to fully recover. No one else in the household was infected.
I don’t know enough about medical models, but it seems that using data from the new NHS system https://opensafely.org/, they use a model in this study published in the infamous Lancet to erase a raw data benefit during COVID when patients had been treated with HCQ for another condition. It could be valid, but does seem like a BIG adjustment.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanrhe/article/PIIS2665-9913(20)30378-7/fulltext
The raw data shows a clear benefit from HQC, to a final result which shows no effect.
Overall, n=194 637 deaths=547 HQC n=30 569 deaths=70 Death rate=0.23% Untreated n=164,068 deaths=477 Death rate=0.29% 0.23/0.29 * 100/1= 79% of the deaths = 21% reduction in death. However, digging deeper, the average age is three years lower in HQC group, and a marginally higher proportion of women, so their adjustments for these narrows the difference, and everything else is pretty much on a par. Finally, “Our analyses used non-COVID-19 mortality as a negative control outcome”. Again, I am no expert, but what I think they are doing here is as follows – as there is a similar reduction in death rate in the HCQ group that has not been tested for COVID-19, they feed this reduced mortality expectation into their model, and completely wipe out the higher survival rate of the HCQ treated COVID-19 group. However, they have already adjusted for age, sex, etc. – so this is double counting. For example, if HQC reduced deaths by 99.9% for both COVID and non-COVID causes, the result of the model would be that HQC does not prevent COVID deaths at all, because there are also 99.9% less non-COVID deaths. In fairness to the study, they do conclude that HCQ at standard doses is safe to use in trials and those trials should run to their conclusion. Very useful summary of studies here https://c19study.com/
I so highly respect this website and your “math” minds – but on this one issue – many of you are dropping the ball. Please prove me wrong…
1. Regarding cases – about 3% of the country has tested positive. Since the tests tend to be for the symptomatic – and the symptomatic tend to be “old” – it makes sense to me that in a work place with 100 employees – you’ve quite probably had zero cases. Not a surprise. If you know 100 people – up close – MAYBE you know three who were sick. I know at least 10 – up close and personally – so probably someone, somewhere, doesn’t know any. It’s not a scam – it’s just data. Use it.
2. Regarding death – death itself, from any cause, is not common. Ask the question a different way: Of all the people you knew well, that died this year, how many died of COVID? On average…10%. Over age 50, it’s nearly 10% across the board. Of all 55 years olds that died – almost 10% were COVID. Go check it out. It’s true.
terrinot ==> “Since the tests tend to be for the symptomatic ” is not true in the United States. Almost all of the tests are voluntary testing of non-symptomatic people.
Kit==> The majority of POSITIVE tests are not for asymptomatic people. It doesn’t change my overall point anyway – “Where Are All the Sick People” is easily answered. Only about 3 in 100 have ever been tested as positively sick. Clearly some areas are worse hit than others. Stands to reason lots and lots of folks know or know of many sick people – while (necessarily) lots and lots of other folks don’t know anyone. The point is – the entire question is – based on the stats – just silly. The sick people are simply not that common. No one is saying they are. But plenty of people interpret the news that way.
The sick people are simply not that common
terrinot, that’s Kip’s point. the sick people are simply not that common yet if you follow the media narrative, you’d think nearly the entire country was stricken with COVID and going to die unless we follow the strictest totalitarian restrictions on our freedoms and liberties. The media is trying it’s hardest to make it sound much worse than it really is. And, sadly, all too many people buy into that narrative.
Almost all of the tests are voluntary testing of non-symptomatic people.
I don’t know if its “almost all” or not, but I do know it’s a very good percentage of them. If you get admitted to the hospital for any reason, you will be tested (a relative of mine tested negative on every test they were given during their recent stay at the hospital, a stay that had nothing to do with COVID). If someone you’ve been in contact tested positive (whether they show symptoms or not) you will be tested. Anyone can be tested whether they have symptoms or not as testing isn’t reserved for those with symptoms (and indeed, I’d say it’s likely the majority of tests, at least here in the states, are performed on people with no symptoms to speak of), which logically means that a good many of those testing positive won’t have had symptoms at the time of their testing.
Keep in mind, also, that just because someone tested positive, does not mean that they will necessarily develop symptoms, or that any systems that do develop with be anything more than mild, let alone require hospitalization. Which is why the focus on “cases” is so deceptive – It’s a big scary sounding number that paints a skewed picture.
Are the PCR test results used to announce number of infected?
I ask because in the German parliament Naomi Seibt exposed the uselessness of the PCR test in connection with general testing. The creator of the PCR test has stated that the test is not intended for general testing.
The reactions from the MPs let me to believe they were embarrassed, they just said thanks for the interesting information in a very piano voice.
Sadly they speak German in the German parliament (sarc), but here is a link to her excellent 18 minutes speech where she details, in simple terms, how the PCR test works. May still be too complicated for the MPs though (not sarc):
Thanks for the video link. I don’t speak German, but I think I get the idea. Hopefully someone will post an English transcript. (I wonder how soon before the censors “disappear” this video.)
Hanson usually writes good articles. One article that included the bizarre idea that calories don’t count for dieting was ridiculous and I told him so. He sent a crew of hit men to my house to get me , but I had moved to a safe house. I’ll take it easy on him because he says he lives in Ulster County NY — I grew up in Sullivan County, NY, not that far away. This article has problems, to be kind:
We are in the middle of a pandemic.
It is not over yet.
It is too soon for conclusions.
And there are no experts yet.
Most governments have “largely shut down their economies”???
How can you say that”
Global Real GDP for 2020 might be down 5%.
That’s not “largely shut down”.
The CO2 level in the atmosphere barely changed !
Yes, the lock downs are worse than the disease.
They just gave us a socialist President and communist Vice President.
And we might get a socialist Senate in a few montgs too.
C ID anecdotes about people you know personally to come to a conclusion?
What kind of “science” is that?
You must be kidding !
How about anecdotes to determine how serious global warming is too ?
First of all, very few COVID infected patients die, perhaps 1 of 1,000 now. But about 40 percent, and maybe more, have such mild symptoms they don’t even know they are, or were, COVID-infected.
Concerning causes of death:
As of last year, the CDC did not list influenza as a cause of death. The cause of death would be a failure of a major organ. As of last year, the CDC used computer models to estimate flu deaths. The flu does not have to be mentioned on a death certificate — there’s no CDC list of specific names of the people whose deaths are being blamed on “flu”. Most doctors say the CDC estimates were always too high, and they probably still are.
Virtually everyone who dies with the flu had some other medical problem, known or unknown, or a genetic defect, known or unknown. So it is a guessing game on what deaths should be blamed on COVID (or any other flu strain) .
I know five people infected, all based on testing. All healthy people. Two 60-somethings very seriously sick in March for 2, and 3 weeks,respectively. Both survived. One was a retired doctor cared for at home by her doctor son. He objected to the use of ventilators at his hospital. I heard he eventually got sick too, most likely from his Mom, but with mild symptoms.
Three others only had the lost taste and smell symptom. The two young people were not surprised by that but my 70 something friend got off lucky. Except, his 70 something girlfriend got sick, and blamed him. She had much more severe flu symptoms, and tested COVID positive…. We reminded her the tests were not perfect. So she got tested two more times, while still sick — negative both times! She did have flu, but just ordinary influenza. Not the COVID-19 that her partner had. Unfortunately this incident broke up their five year relationship … although I suppose there must have been other issues.
We both have very small families, but there were five COVID infections among our friends here in Michigan.
There are many nations that were barely harmed by the disease, such as Taiwan and Japan, Sweden and the US are not among them.
Richard Greene ==> You need to study up a bit. The CDC has tracked Influenza Deaths for a very long time. See FluView.
Hanson
I’ll type slowly this time so even YOU can understand.
While you are reading your beloved New York Times.
The CDC uses a computer MODEL to ESTIMATE “flu deaths”.
The death certificate may or may not mention flu.
Because flu alone does not kill people.
Except for SARS1 and MERS that were unusually deadly.
So any death certificate that blames death on the
flu will be judgement call, because there will
be other problems too. It’s rare for an otherwise
healthy person to die from flu alone.
They die from major organ failures.
Attributing a death to the “flu” is not a fact
that can be “tracked? in any way.
Ask your doctor(s) how many of their patients died
from the flu, and the typical answer will be none.
If the CDC claims 100,000 people died from the flu,
there is no list of 100,000 specific names
that someone could pick names from at random
and check whether the flu claim was correct.
ESTIMATING flu deaths with a COMPUTER model
is not the same as “tracking” flu deaths (in the
same way that climate models are not the same
as real temperature measurements).
CDC talks about their computer model estimates here:
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/how-cdc-estimates.htm
CDC causes of death ( warning — very depressing)
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/datalinkage/underlying_and_multiple_cause_of_death_codes.pdf
“…There are many nations that were barely harmed by the disease, such as Taiwan and Japan…”
It’s almost like being an island nation that can isolate itself from the rest of the world makes it less vulnerable.
Islands are Isolated???…go figure
Yeah, have to remind the Terminally Smug that all islands (New Zealand, Australia, Hawaii as well) simply can’t be measured equally.
Oh, and I strongly suspect population density might be a bit of a driver, too.
Japan was and is being affected.
Two things to note are that Japan has a tradition of not shaking hands and/or touching each other and there is strong evidence CV19, or a related form of it, started in spring of 2019 (they found the virus in sewage sample in Italy. The CV19 strain of coronavirus was also found in blood samples taken in Italy in September 2019. This suggests that a version of CV19 circulated in east Asia in at least last summer 2019, which suggests that people in those countries had developed a T-Cell and antibody response.)
Japan also has a flu season, despite non-touching AND much greater mask wearing.
I only know two people who were tested positive for COVID-19. My stepdaughter who attends college lives with six other college girls in a house, and one of them tested positive, who quarantined herself in her room for two weeks and recovered without any of the other girls being infected. My wife’s cousin, in her 60’s tested positive, and recovered in two weeks by taking only Tylenol.
The lockdowns may have been justified last March and April when it was believed that COVID-19 was highly contagious, with no known cure, and hospitals started filling up with patients on ventilators (most of whom were infected by recovered patients sent into nursing homes by governors of northeastern states, especially a CNN anchor’s brother).
But as we learned more about this disease, the strategies should have been adapted in consequence. School-age children seem to be naturally immune to it, and do not transmit it to each other or teachers, there is no logical or medical reason to keep schools closed.
Otherwise healthy working-age adults tend to fight it off with symptoms ranging from a mild cold to a two-week flu, so there shouldn’t be massive shutdowns of industry or office workers. Besides, therapeutics are available now (which were not known last April) that can lessen the severity of symptoms and/or speed the recovery, including hydroxychloroquine, zinc, remdesivir, dexamethasone, and the antibody treatments. Some doctors have even claimed that ordinary mouthwash can kill the COVID-19 virus if it is ingested with food. We don’t have to live in mortal fear of this virus.
Elderly people, particularly those with diabetes, heart, or lung disease, are the most vulnerable to COVID-19. But since most of them are retired, they can be isolated from contact with infected people with minimal effects on the overall economy, and should be the first to receive a vaccine when it becomes available.
Not all people who are “tested positive” develop any symptoms, because the testing procedure uses a reproductive technique to “amplify” the chemical compound indicating possible presence of the virus. Each cycle about doubles the concentration, and typical testing procedures use 30 to 40 cycles, which increases the concentration from a billion times (30 cycles) to a trillion times (40 cycles). Some of the “positive” test results are actually detecting fragments of dead virus that cannot cause disease.
The “lame stream media” have been driving the fear factor through the use of misleading statistics. When we see charts of “10 million cases”, that is the cumulative total of those who have tested positive since last March. The typical infected person either dies or recovers within two weeks. If we consider the start of the pandemic to be March 15, it has been about 35 weeks since then, so that for a cumulative total of 10 million positive tests, an average of 570,000 of these people are infected at any given time, or about 0.17% of the population, or about 1 in 600.
This means that the average person would have to come in close contact with over 300 strangers to have a nearly even chance of catching COVID-19. If those who are tested positive self-quarantine from the rest of society, the odds of catching COVID-19 decrease. Do we really need a total lockdown to avoid meeting 300 strangers? Or should we just wear masks in public and sit 6 feet away from strangers until there is an effective vaccine?
We also have about 250,000 cumulative deaths in 8 months from 10,000,000 total infections, for an average fatality rate of 2.5%, concentrated among people over 70 years old. But if the average life expectancy is 80 years, for a population of 330 million people, one would expect 4.1 million deaths (of all causes) in any given year. If 250,000 COVID-19 deaths in 8 months is projected to 375,000 deaths per year, then COVID-19 would have increased the normal death rate by 9.1%.
The fear of COVID-19 has been used by unscrupulous politicians to impose draconian rules in the interest of “public health” in order to increase their control over society, with disastrous effects on the economy and the education of our children. There is no logical reason why children should be deprived of education beyond last summer’s vacation–ALL school-age children should be in school right now, full-time, 5 days per week. Some unscrupulous politicians have even tried to cancel religious services and gatherings for Thanksgiving and Christmas–if a person knows that all family members are tested negative, what is the danger of a group of healthy people sharing a turkey dinner?
The lockdowns of last spring also opened the door to massive social upheaval. When the looting and riots started last May, without the lockdowns, the looted businesses would have been open to customers, and they would have had security guards and called police to protect their businesses, employees, and customers. But following the lockdowns, many of these businesses had been closed for two months or more, with no employees or security guards present, and plenty of unsold inventory ripe for stealing by rioters who knew they would get away with it.
The best strategy now is to get the children back in school, open up businesses (with masks and social distancing if needed), provide the best therapeutics available to those who need them most, and when an effective vaccine is available, distribute it widely and let everybody back to work like the “good old days” of last February.
“School-age children seem to be naturally immune to it, and do not transmit it to each other or teachers, there is no logical or medical reason to keep schools closed.”
Of course there is. The Democrat cities and states that are keeping schools closed are controlled by politicians who receive major donations from teacher’s unions and election assistance(phone bank volunteers, door knockers, etc.) from union leaders and their activist teachers. The teachers, you know
those most honorable of professions, ARE NOT essential to society. Wall mart workers are. Police and Fire are. UPS and Post office are. But NOT teachers.
This pandemic and the closing of schools by Democrat politicians is reason enough to eliminate all PUBLIC school systems. Give each parent a voucher and let them decide where their kid goes to school. The schools that stayed open would have more students than they could handle. Those run by leftists that stayed closed after the minimal level of hazard was understood (by the fall semester) would NEVER reopen.
This could have been the beginning of the end of leftist public school indoctrination of our children. Hopefully it still may be.
“Give each parent a voucher and let them decide where their kid goes to school.”
Federal aid should follow the child. State aid should follow the child. Schools should not be funded by property taxes but by sales taxes.
In the alternative give the money directly to the parent/guardian of the child. Perhaps they know their child will not benefit from any education but could benefit from expenditure in another venue.
Freedom of choice engages competition which lowers prices.
The downside of competition is that poor judgment has consequences. “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” — Abe Lincoln when all education cost real silver coin.
Kip, another way of looking at this is how many people had it and recovered. USA data at https://epidemic-stats.com/ shows 7,063,305 recovered to date.
This is obviously anecdotal , but how many well-known older people have had COVID and recovered quickly? Besides president Trump, here’s a story about football coaches back to health: https://larrybrownsports.com/college-football/head-coaches-tested-positive-covid-19-symptoms/565743
Ralph Dave Westfall ==> There are a lot of anecdotes about Covid. The purpose of the survey is to turn everyone’s personal anecdote into a overall view.
During the last 10 years two friends I had known for a long time have died after catching winter Flu, one would have fallen ito the vulnerable category for CV19. I don’t know a single person who has even tested positive, far less displayed symptoms.
Good News… this likely will end the need to isolate/wear masks (when we are vaccinated).
Two covid vaccines, super safe as they cause the body to do only one thing…..
And super effective, as that one thing is to produce a chemical that finds the hock on covid, which is like a super covid virus killing chemical.
Until now the very best vaccines developed had an efficacy of less than 70% and it took a year and a half to develop a vaccine …. (Dead virus technology)
That was because we used old technology.
mRNA is a biochemical delivery system which enters our cells and gets our cells to produce a specific chemical.
This is different than a dead virus that can in some rare cases cause the body to produce dangerous antibodies which attack one’s one body.
We now have two mRNA covid vaccines…. That have an efficacy of more than 90%. And that can be used to develop a vaccine in 8 months, with optimizing.
Fauci…. is part of the swamp. The reason why there is now a super covid vaccine is the FDA and the medical industry have been holding mRNA technology back.
“We don’t know yet what the efficacy might be. We don’t know if it will be 50% or 60%. I’d like it to be 75% or more,” Fauci said in a webinar hosted by Brown University. “But the chances of it being 98% effective is not … (William: it is not chance)
https://nypost.com/2020/11/16/moderna-covid-19-vaccine-nearly-95-percent-effective-in-trial/
Moderna released breakthrough research Monday showing its experimental coronavirus vaccine is nearly 95 percent effective and doesn’t need ….
…The results from the Phase 3 study — announced a week after Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech, said their shot was more than 90 percent effectivy
New RNA Covid Vaccine 95 Percent Effective
https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-details/modernas-covid-19-vaccine-candidate-meets-its-primary-efficacy
Phase 3 study met statistical criteria with a vaccine efficacy of 94.5% (p <0.0001)
For the Moderna vaccine, it was 100% effective at preventing severe COVID, which are the only cases that really concern anyone very much.
And there are at least 3 more vaccines in the US alone that are in the final days of phase 3 testing.
And behind them are 170+ additional ones that are moving through the process of testing and clinical trials.
So the news is even better than one might think just from reading the recent headlines about vaccines.
Survey: 0,0,0. Those answers the same for my wife, one sister and one sister-in-law (all of us retired) that I have queried today. Now, I have heard about relatives and/or co-workers of neighbors who have been sick, or even died, but of the four deaths I heard of, three were in dementia care facilities and one in a retirement home. All were elderly, the oldest was 99. At least in my state they backed out the deaths from gunshot wounds and car crashes that had previously tested positive for Covid-19. For awhile a positive test no matter when obtained was enough to get a dead person classified as a Covid-19 death.
Sometime in July, well into this Coronadoom (as William Briggs calls it) I was speaking with the manager of my local large chain grocery store. I asked how the staff was holding up; if any had become sick. “None,” he said. Same for other stores within the regional division the store was in. Guess those small retailers could have remained open after all; the virus really did not know or care about the size of a store it was in.
I’m exposed to many from the NY City area. So I’ve known 30 people forced to quarantine for 2 weeks due to exposure. 10 positives with symptoms, zero deaths. The symptoms ranged from slight cold to bad flu, one was hospitalized but only got IV fluids.
0-0-0. I’ve thought about this myself and have asked all my family members pretty much the same questions. 0-0-0.
I know 7 people who contracted COVID-19, all recovered without hospitalization and only 1 had it bad. Of those seven, 3 wars a mask religiously, 3 wears a mask frequently, and 1 hardly ever wears one.
I do not wear a facemask. I claim exemption under the Americans with Disability Act, or ADA. I will not under any circumstances or for any reason wear a non-medical facemask because these greatly increase your chances of getting sick. The medical ones cause me severe problems. I have not altered my routine. In my business, I see hundreds of people every month. And I don’t wear a facemask. Most say nothing, but the few that do I explain why I cannot wear the ones that might work. If they persist, I show them a multi-decade list of studies I have that prove they don’t work. I must emphasize multi-decade, because my studies proving how ineffective they are have been out for a very long time. Not even the cancel culture can silence the internet archive!
Oh, and I will not get tested for COVID-19 either, even if I feel sick. According to the New York Times, the tests being used are 100 to 1000 times too sensitive. (Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testing.html ) In other words, for ever 1000 positive cases, the real number of sick people is between 1 and 10. Does that sound scary to you?
Wade ==> Yes exactly right on “positive tests”.
Semi related.
Last week in my day job I was shocked to hear that one of the members in the next team had died. Given that many in his team had been working from home regularly for the last 6 plus months the fact I had not physically seen this person for a while had not even registered.
Apparently he had gone into the hospital for minor problem six weeks ago and walked out with knowledge he had an incurable brain condition and six months to live. Given the obvious personal nature of this very few in the office were made aware of this and hence the utter shock to discover his passing.
Discussing this after with some peers I was mentioning the horror of the suddenness of it all. It was, I had said, literally as if I had told someone I was going to be late to work tomorrow as I was getting a check up at my doctors and then not making it to Christmas.
“Yes’, my peer had said, “But remember he also had some pre-existing health conditions”.
So I nodded and we grimaced and I moved on.
Then five minutes later thought “Pre-existing health conditions? Oh. So just like Covid then?”
So we have situations where 80 and 90 year old die in nursing homes (so called because the people living there need ‘nursing’) and that is flagged as a Covid Death, while a man in his early 50s dies from a fatal brain disease and “yeah, but pre-existing medical conditions”.
Yes.
There is something very… casual about the way this nominally deadly diseases is being monitored.
Craig ==> In the US, your workmate would have been classified (inappropriately) as a Covid Death.
I work for a small family owned appliance company that sells and services major appliances. Since the beginning, we have not been shut down and have been running approx 100 service and delivery calls per week. We call each person the night before and ask medical questions about people in their household. Only 4 cancelled due to having some symptoms but not diagnosed with COVID. Our 4 employees who do all the deliveries and service calls are fine as with those of us who work in the store and deal in person with customers daily. This in spite of being in a community which has the highest per capita age group in the Country.
Now, at this time of the year, the snowbirds are arriving bringing with them all their nasty attitudes and diseases. We have not required customers to wear masks prior but now we do. Who knows what crap they are bringing down here from where ever they came from.
Did not take survey. But have some very personal knowledge. My son, his wife, and my granddaughter all tested positive last week In Chicago. Son has bad symptoms but thankfully no co-morbidities. Wife is positive but asymptomatic. Granddaughter has only mild symptoms.
So Sunday granddaughter told grandpa, ‘we are all sick, so going to watch Star Wars for the first time!”
That was my sons way of saying they will all be OK, via a Longstanding family joke—when he was about 3 or 4, he had watched Star Wars (first, ‘episode 4’ ) so many times on our then VCR that he ate the cassette box. So my wife sent the chewed box in requesting a replacement—and they sent it (just the box) complements to a true Star Wars fan!
Now he is a Harvard magna/HBS grad senior exec that will NEVER live that box story down at family reunions.
Best of luck to you and your family, Rud.
Hoping your son gets through it OK.
Just thought I would mention, taking an expectorant has been found to stave off the odds of a moderate case progressing to pneumonia.
Speeds up the mucociliary escalator, keeps the lungs from developing fluid buildup.
I don’t know anyone who has had covid-19. 0,0,0
I’m reasonably sure that I had the covid in April. It was mild; the symptoms were shortness of breath (gasping and wheezing when walking uphill) for about 15 days, then a mild fever and phlegmy cough for 4 days, followed by a persistent dry cough which still occurs for 10-15 minutes once or twice a day, even 6 months later.
I couldn’t get tested because the Ontario rule at the time was you needed a fever of 38.7°C or higher, and mine never went over 38.0°. None of the other three family members in the house had it.
But a strange thing occurred: for somewhere between 2 and 3 months after my assumed covid infection, I was perturbed by persistent gloomy feelings and thoughts of suicide, both of which are very unusual for me. We are starting to read occasional reports of psychological effects of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. I wonder how many suicides and cases of severe depression are going to be the work of the virus itself, exacerbated of course by lockdowns, job loss, evictions, etc.?
It’s already hard on children and their families. Kids are missing parts of their education (already attenuated by decades of progressive schooling); parents and other family members are getting stressed out by being stuck at home with kids who need an outlet for their boundless energy (in our part of the world, somewhere around a third of kids are kept home by parents worried from the incessant media coverage); and it must be awful for primary school teachers, spending time and effort making the little kids keep their masks on and keep their distance from each other. I wonder if the kids who do make it to school are actually learning anything.
Self fulfilling prophecy. Alarmist report that we’re in a second wave and more people get tested. Increase in positives are a results of more tests. The US is slowing deaths/capita which is the only measurement that makes sense since some infections cause little to no discomfort. Previous flue outbreaks didn’t involve the massive testing we’re doing now so there’s no comparison. Not trying to minimize the seriousness of #19 but trying to put it into perspective.
So far family wise, my youngest sister has had it (week and a few days off work, high fever bad flu feeling, was a concern as she lives with Ma and Dad who are in their mid and late 70s) May or June, my brother-in-law (different sister, have not heard that he was very sick, and sis who tested no at the same time still hasn’t had it) and just last week a Cousin has gotten it.
Another cousin, same age as the latest, figures he had it back early January as he lost taste and smell, and was hammered under for over a week, but no testing back then or even thoughts about anything new and most everyone he worked with got ill with what ever it was. Same sort of thing came through my work place around the same time, and as far as I know, none of those who’ve tested positive here since, were of those sick back then. Same for cousin’s work place, no one there has been affected, even those who had contact with someone ill since. Those I know who have been tested positive lately at work, and do show symptoms are apparently not nearly as sick as those who came down with it earlier in the year.
I also know of 4 people who “tested Positive” and never had testing done.
At least they are all alive, and not like the lady in Tennessee, who died in February and somehow tested positive in June, and got a letter telling her in August to quarantine.
not like the lady in Tennessee, who died in February and somehow tested positive in June, and got a letter telling her in August to quarantine
Now that right there is messed the F*** up.
No, that right there is bureaucracy, working exactly as expected, no more, no less.
That’s the same thing. bureaucracy is messed the F*** up most of the time.
Nope. The bureaucracy neither delivers too much, or not enough, but exactly what it needs to deliver, when it needs to deliver it.
It, of course, being life-long employment for the “differently abled” who can’t get a job in the public sector.
And I’ll put on my “absolute hypocrite” hat as I was a bureaucrat for 30 years, somewhat coincidentally… as a health statistician here in Canada.
I assume she also voted in November.
Just stumbled across this, figured I would share. From August: https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(20)30673-2/fulltext
We have proposed an algorithm based on age and comorbidities that allows for a large proportion to be monitored and treated at home during self-isolation with the aim of reducing the risks of hospitalization and death.
Well, here’s another vicious attack by the Guardian on Australian MP Craig Kelly.
“What do supporting hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid-19 and climate change denialism have in common?
Apart from a dwindling body of scientific support for either of them, the two causes have united some of the world’s most conservative politicians, from the outgoing US president, Donald Trump, to the Australian federal MP Craig Kelly.
Kelly, the Morrison government’s most outspoken climate crisis denier, has embraced the cause of hydroxychloroquine as enthusiastically as Trump once did.”
Wow! CO2 + C18H26ClN3O is a bad combination, it seems.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/nov/18/push-to-oust-liberal-mp-craig-kelly-gathers-pace-its-awful-to-be-the-laughing-stock-of-the-country
My niece is a nurse at an OBGYN clinic that had to close for a couple of months earlier in the year. She and a couple of the other nurses went to New Jersey and worked with COVID patients at a hospital on an eight week contract. During her time there, she said the people dying from it were on ventilators and would pretty much die shortly after being rolled to prevent bed sores. It seems to me the heavy blood clotting caused by COVID would likely be the culprit in these deaths. On a side note, four months after finishing her New Jersey work, my niece found out she has had COVID, and she had zero symptoms.
A bit off topic, sorry, but I have been trying to figure out why Covid19 is always reported as the number of positive cases and not as number of positive cases / number of tests. (% positive tests)
Up here, Health Canada has been reporting Respiratory viruses including Coronavirus as the number of tests and the % positive tests. Yet Covid19 is reported as the number of positive cases.
Would appreciate any input.
Thanks.
Gerry McIsaac ==> It seems that the media and those who wish to promote PANIC use Positive Tests to keep the public scared. The medical profession is just beginning to try to defeat this madness as nearly all positive tests are of non-actionable trace amounts of viral genetic material and do not indicate infection or infectiousness.
Thanks
Hydroxychloroquine & the Judgment of History by Canada’s Donna Laframboise
How a safe, well-understood malaria drug was demonized as a COVID-19 treatment. Because a politician (Trump) said good things about it.
In the aftermath of this pandemic, books will be written about how medical professionals responded. What treatments they tried, what worked, what didn’t – and how regulators and politicians assisted or hindered them.
In the meantime, a lengthy essay by Norman Doidge persuasively argued that history will judge many people and organizations harshly. Including most of the media.
Early in Hydroxychloroquine: A Morality Tale, Doidge says “politicization has started to penetrate the peer review process” of scientific journals. In fact, that process has been gathering steam for decades (see here, here, here, and here).
But this is a mere hiccup. Keep reading. Doidge methodically describes how boatloads of smart people suddenly started calling one of the world’s oldest, safest, and cheapest drugs dangerous.
Originally developed to prevent and treat malaria, Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) was later found to be helpful for lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. It has long been deemed an Essential Medicine by the World Health Organization, which describes the drugs appearing on that list as “safe and cost-effective.”
The US Food & Drug Administration gave HCQ the safety thumbs-up back in 1955 – 65 bleeping years ago.
A factsheet on the website of the US Centers for Disease Control continues to declare that HCQ can be “safely taken by pregnant women and nursing mothers,” and prescribed to “children of all ages.”
So what changed? Only this: US President Donald Trump began talking about HCQ as a promising treatment for COVID-19.
In the midst of a worldwide pandemic in which millions of people are infected, hundreds of thousands are dying, and doctors are perishing as they try to save others, some people are so addled by their dislike of a politician they’ve stopped thinking straight. These include journalists, public health officials, and many practicing physicians.
After compelling research showed HCQ halved the death rate of patients in six Detroit hospitals, CNN invited a panel of commentators to tear apart this research on air. If it treated all research this way (especially weak nutritional studies), that would be responsible journalism. Instead, this was a politically motivated hit job.
For additional reading, this Newsweek article is typical. It quotes the FDA which did a sloppy job of HCQ evaluation for OUT OF HOSPITAL EARLY USE, and in my opinion even Dr Fauci ignores that obvious fact and bad mouths HCQ. In my opinion, Peter Navarro had it right in the link below. This current up to date list of HCQ papers suggests over 1/2 of Covid-19 deaths could have been avoided with early use of HCQ + AZ + Z. https://c19study.com/
https://www.newsweek.com/trumps-trade-adviser-says-administration-sitting-millions-hydroxychloroquine-doses-1521372
The White House Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy Peter Navarro said the administration is “sitting on millions of doses” of hydroxychloroquine, the controversial anti-malaria drug President Donald Trump claims to treat COVID-19.
Navarro claimed in an interview on CNN’s New Day on Wednesday that half of Americans who died from coronavirus yesterday would still be alive if treated with the drug.
The disputed effectiveness of the drug has divided the Trump administration and health experts, many of whom have cautioned against the use of the drug, saying it is not effective in treating the virus.
“We’re in the middle of a pandemic where over 1,000 Americans died today. 1,000 Americans died yesterday. And if you have a medicine that there’s relatively little or no downside risk and possible upside; why would you not let the American people have it?” Navarro told reporters on Wednesday.
“Right now the American people really can’t have it because I can’t ship it to distributors or hospitals, because the FDA doesn’t allow it to off label use, and almost half the states have strict regulators, who won’t allow doctors to prescribe,” he added.
Navarro cited a new study that has emerged from the Henry Ford Medical Center, which suggested hydroxychloroquine could help patients who were mildly ill with coronavirus to recover faster.
Health experts were quick to point out that the patients in the study were not randomized and that patients were twice as likely to be given steroids as a placebo, which have been proven in trials to help.
On June 15, the FDA revoked the emergency use authorization of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 after clinical trials found the drug to be ineffective at “decreasing the likelihood of death or speeding recovery.” Director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci has also publicly opposed the use of the drug, clashing with Trump and Navarro.
Since the beginning of the administration’s pandemic response, Navarro has disagreed with the doctor, undermining Facui’s concerns about hydroxychloroquine and penning an op-ed titled “Anthony Fauci has been wrong about everything I have interacted with him on.”
The overview of studies here does look like HCQ has a very significant positive effect when used early https://c19study.com/
As vitamins C and D with zinc carry no credible risk at any standard dose, their benefits can be taken with no downside.
The overview of studies here does look like HCQ has a very significant positive effect when used early https://c19study.com/
As I posted downthread: https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(20)30673-2/fulltext
“Peer-reviewed journals” right?
The proposed protocol includes HCQ, Zinc, and Azithromycin.
Gerald Machnee ==> I have a file on the HCQ Wars, and will eventually write about it (after people quit dying from Covid).
The battle against HCQ has been entirely political — in the USA and in France.
The medical world as a whole was not looking for a cure for Covid — they wanted something that would save those reporting to the hospital for acute severe respiratory symptoms. HCQ is not that drug. HCQ is a drug that prevents people with early Covid from becoming hospitalized patients.
Only one person I know has died. Hospital had him on a respirator for weeks, which probably contributed greatly to his dying. Only other person I know that has tested positive (this week) is my future son in law. Daughter is waiting on her test results but is feeling better today. Wife and I have no symptoms, our clinic is saying they are testing only people that show symptoms.
“Hospital had him on a respirator for weeks, which probably contributed greatly to his dying”
Yep.
“”A standard treatment cannot be applied to an un-standard disease,” said Luciano Gattinoni, a world-renowned Italian intensive care specialist.”
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/ventilators-covid-overuse-1.5534097
See: “Aspirin Misuse May Have Made 1918 Flu Pandemic Worse”
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091002132346.htm
Lockdowns, social distancing, shutting down schools, and ………………… masks — don’t get me started on masks — Okay, DO:
https://discover.hubpages.com/education/A-Coronavirus-Face-Mask-Cult-Is-Bullying-the-World
He didn’t die of COVID. He died of old age.
Kip, I repeat the observation of one commenter that (IMO) the 1-5 category is too wide. Most of these 1-5s are likely to be one or two. A daughter’s family had 2 cases, her husband and her daughter, whom she isolated upstairs, serving them and caring for them. That is two and they are in the UK. I know of no one in our neighborhood in our city in Canada or elsewhere.
Our numbers are going down. I noticed that a resurgence in Quebec and Ontario (biggest cities) accounts for most of the new spike. A check into the John Hopkins U stats for Canada shows an upswing for Canada but almost flat death rate. This probably largely reflects more sanity in care and attention to elderly residents of assisted care homes.
Gary Pearse ==> You may be right — I would have preferred to have simple numerical answers but the survey app didn’t have that option. I tried to keep the survey as simple as possible.
Any news on this story?
Elon Musk Tests Positive For Covid-19 (And Negative)
With four similar tests, he claimed 2 each waay.
I’ve read the same from several different news sources. All tests done same day, same nurse, same equipment/method. Reassuring…… not.
I believe some celeb tested positive in one nostril…and negative in the other, same time.
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I must say, that within all my family, friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and anyone I interact with on the internet, there does now seem to be a general recognition that ‘something is not right’ in the actions of the government that transcends any notion that they are simply incompetent.
I’m mostly talking about the UK government here, but I guess it’s a similar story everywhere.
It’s certainly similar here in North Carolina, USA, Lurker Pete — excess deaths in the state caused by the alleged “pandemic” have been only slightly higher to lower throughout the whole episode, if I remember my graphs correctly, and yet there is talk of shutting things down again and limiting social activities.
Absolutely, insanely absurd! Things are so inexplicably crazy. What planet am I on?
Willis – Thanks for taking an interest in things and for thinking independently, and for giving us all food for thought. I downloaded the data as described in your post, and did a quick and dirty spreadsheet calc of excess deaths in the last 40 weeks with 100% data vs 52 weeks earlier. The total came to 284.047. Worldometer puts total USA coronavirus deaths at 254,255. So the total deaths data does not indicate that coronavirus deaths are way below what is being reported. It was a quick and dirty, and I might have got it wrong, so I would appreciate it if you could do the same calc and see how it comes out.
TIA.
Mike ==> Willis is not the author of this essay….
My brother wound up testing positive for Covid. He supposedly got it from some lady at his work. He had a couple symptoms but they were fairly mild. He stayed home the requisite 10 days or whatever then his county’s health department cleared him to go back to work. My dad (and mom) came down with regular colds after they visited my sister and her children up in Cleveland a while back. This is a fairly common occurrence as it has happened at least several times after they made a visit. The children are germ factories. One of my dad’s coworkers has a girlfriend/wife with health issues so he’s a bit more worried about Covid than others. As a precaution my dad went and got a Covid test. He didn’t get his results until about 13 days later! Real helpful… It came back negative as suspected. I guarantee he would have got his results a lot sooner if it was positive. Meanwhile he was at home twiddling his thumbs. At least his work paid him for his time off.
0,0,0 for me and everyone I know
My daughter spent the last 6 weeks of a twin pregnancy in hospital in isolation because you could not leave your room, 2 more weeks after the birth, then home with no visitors. I am really impressed at her still managing with 5 month old identical twin boys, still isolated from even the home visits of the social services normal after births. We are on the other side of Canada and have not yet met the babies. Needless to say she is scared silly about Covid and does not want us to break the rules and visit. Go figure.
Fran ==> Congrats to your sister and a hearty “Welcome Aboard” to the Twins! Thanks for sharing your story.
A family member is a supervising nurse in a hospice system, and reports no deaths from COVID-19 during the entire pandemic. Specializing in WW2 vets, so elderly. All with co-morbidities. Nursing home. Zero.
There was a round of flu-like symptoms taking some last December. Perhaps those were unidentified COVID-19.
Just one system that I know anything about. Take it with a grain of salt.
‘However, the responses of our governments, in the United States, and in many other countries around the world have been far more harmful that the pandemic itself. History will replete with books recounting the horrors caused by the worldwide Covid Pandemic Panic. ‘
This is shameful, utter nonsense…
Around 250,000 Americans dead so far and you hardly have it under control… compared to Europe you haven’t even tried lockdown.
Taiwan, s Korea and even china stopped it or massively reduced it – with far, far less control in the case of Taiwan.
If you’d have controlled it like Germany you’d have had only 38,000 deaths.
You haven’t seen it? I have: my neighbour off in an ambulance, gasping for breath even weeks later.
Get with the programme: stop being a snowflake, make a fll sacrifices for the public good
Griff,
The USA has less deaths per million than the UK while Peru, with the maybe tightest lock down anywhere, has had the highest deaths per million. It is also interesting that in Australia, it was the city of Melbourne in the state of Victoria, with the most draconian lock down as well as the most deaths.There does not seem to be much of a correlation between hard lock down and less deaths.
UK has apparently decided to have another taste of that bitter fruit. Good luck with that.
I found this presentation very interesting, maybe you will too.
“If you’d have controlled it like Germany you’d have had only 38,000 deaths.”
Germany operates according to a different paradigm regarding mechanical ventilation and apparently ignored Chinese consensus and the WHO recommendation to intubate covid patients aggressively. That may be a big reason for Germany’s lower mortality.
https://twitter.com/RS_Eng_Brain/status/1311652972397572102
Countries that followed WHO guidelines to intubate early to avoid aerosolization of virus routinely did so. For example, in the US:
https://twitter.com/signaturedoc/status/1250072724057264128
However in Germany that practice was considered to be unethical and avoided.
https://www.aerzteblatt.de/int/archive/article/214736
Taiwan is an island and they had plans in place from back when the SARS and MERS outbreaks occurred, and also bird flu.
it is obvious and has always been know that there is only one chance to stop an emerging disease outbreak, and that is before it has spread widely.
Once it had done so, efforts like contact tracing are an impossible task, even when the disease is something with a known pattern of progression, and clearly defined and obvious early symptoms.
The high number of asymptomatic cases, and the ease with which those who are asymptomatic can nonetheless spread the virus, made anything based on prior knowledge all but useless.
Our so called experts here in the US all promised us we had nothing to worry about, even as the virus was spreading widely without being detected.
By the time we had any idea what was going on, it was already far too late for the US.
Also, any discussion that looks at cases or deaths as a raw number ignores population size and is disingenuous.
The US has as many people as nearly the entire EU.
In that light, we are not faring any worse than most developed western countries.
On top of all of that, different standards of reporting cases and especially deaths make direct comparisons between countries problematic at best, and apples to salt shakers at worst.
what’s a “fll sacrifice” and how does one make one? Is it anything like sacrificing your brain, because going by your example of doing so, I’ll pass thank you very much.
John E. ==> Perhaps he meant “full sacrifice” or “flu sacrifice”…..
Grist says:
Around 250,000 Americans dead so far and you hardly have it under control… compared to Europe you haven’t even tried lockdown.
Fake numbers once again. The real numbers of deaths by CHIIINA virus ALONE in the US is prb’ly a fourth or even less of that number. Numbers are always the first thing the marxists manipulate for their evil purposes — don’t you know that by now?
I personally know one definite “case”, who unfortunately died, back in March and across the world in Canada.
Jon G ==> …and we all wish that no one had died from Covid — but that is life (and death).
I don’t know where all the sick people are, but I know where the dead ones are : in graveyards, lots of them.
Except during election season, then you can find them filling out their ballots – early and often.
François ==> And you are right, of course. DEAD PEOPLE are easy to count because it is easy to determine that they are, well, DEAD. TOTAL DEATHS for nations thus are the count one wants to look at. SARS-CoV-2 has caused a lot of deaths in the US and around the world, worse than some recent influenza annual pandemics, not as bad as some of the very worse.
Can Covid infections be stopped? Can they be eliminated? How? And at what cost?
Viral infections like SARS-CoV-2 (which causes Covid-19) are now endemic — existing widely and uncontrolled — throughout the world. There is no way to stop the unending transmission of the virus, probably for the rest of human history. Thus, every year from now on, it will continue to infect and kill he most vulnerable. Vaccination will protect some of those — but not all.
I have wondered about the COVID 19 situation in all the Homeless encampments, Los Angeles’s Skid Row, etc.
With the unsanitary living conditions, poor health, drug addictions, etc one would think they would be dying like flies, but I have yet to hear of an outbreak…
Dennis ==> I was born just a few blocks from there, in tvhe old California Hospital.
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75 yrs myself, some of my friends a bit below that, but still in the so called risk group
Already from the beginning of the lockdown policies around March or April, it became clear there were plenty reasons to doubt “official statistics”. Over at Jo Nova I suggested to start a “grassroots statistics” along the lines now started by Kip. Look around your family and friends and contacts and report what you see. It has been, and still is to this very day my observation the “corona devastation” is not visible in my own surrounding, and I hear the same from my family and friends.
For some strange reason Jo Nova was fervently in favor of lockdowns, nonchalantly brushing away it’s devastating side effects. In a short discussion with me about those, she responded like: “we all can live with a few weeks of holiday at home”. Sure Jo, a few weeks. Are you kidding me?
So no surprise my idea got no hold over there. There were, to be honest, one or two responses giving information about an incidental sick person in their surrounding. That was all. Someone suggested to start this “grass roots” data collecting on Facebook. I do have an account because of some friends, but I hardly use, and the smothering Facebook policy is the opposite of grass-roots to me.
I gave up there. It is not easy to organize something like that independently. You need some serious platform or a personal network and enough expertise and technicalities to give the data collection a basic robustness. That was beyond me. But I still think this is one of the best ways to go.
Jurgen ==> I am a fan of Jo Nova. It is simply false that “Great Minds Think Alike”.
Smart, well-meaning people can have differing opinions even on topics hat we ourselves think are “obvious”…..
In my opinion, we should have done everything we could to protect the elderly and sick — even locking down nursing homes and isolating our grandparents in a reasonable manner.
Sheltering nursing homes and the vulnerable and elderly was also for me the obvious priority. Of course it was. With Jo Nova I am talking about general lockdowns in social and economic public life, which is a completely different beast. Anybody not aware of this fundamental difference doesn’t know the fabric of society and lives in an ivory tower. For them somehow society is just a lot of people you can group in statistics. Or put in isolation. What is the difference?
From corona I learned a lot of “great minds” are in the latter category. Still great minds I guess, but I feel a bit more reserved about them now. In the end nobody is perfect of course and I am still visiting Jo. She does a great job.
As I offered you three zero’s, I feel I should tell you a little story that may or may not be relevant.
A few weeks back I went home late at night after visiting some friends. In the center of The Hague I was the second person to arrive at the sorrow scene of a young woman laying flat on the ground, face down, not moving at all, just hesitantly breathing once in a while. Another woman at the spot told me she noticed her falling down along her window. She didn’t dare touch her. I looked up and saw no balcony or something so I felt she jumped on purpose. She could easily have broken her spine or neck so all I felt I could do is not move her but talk to her that help would arrive soon. Which luckily happened. At that point I left, I was of no use there.
I never encountered something like this. Yes there were some suicides around me during my life from people I knew. But then, I heard from them later on. So although very shocking, it still happened at a certain distance. Not this time, if indeed it was a fatal suicide. Their number is predicted to increase anyhow, so I felt I should tell my story in this context. Maybe there are more recent experiences like this. Let us hope not.
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My dad is 92 and still drives, shops, gathers with his buddies at the airport where they work on their airplanes. No illness yet among all his older friends, fingers crossed in the SF bay area, USA.
I do not know anyone who has had it, and no one I have asked knows anyone who has had it.
My doctor told be several months back that he has not had a single positive test among all of his patients.
And his medical group is one of the largest in Sothern Florida, Millennium Physicians Group.
Nicholas McGinley ==> Weird huh?
Kip,
Yes it is.
It is hard to find anything about all of this that is not weird or in some way very unusual.
I spent some time a few weeks back looking into historical rates of deaths from infectious diseases, and how they have declined over time.
Most of the decline since 1900 took place prior to 1950, with a continued slow decrease into the 1960s
What is most notable, I thought, is that prior to about 1960 or so, the number of deaths per million from covid that have occurred would have been unremarkable.
In the US in 1900, there were about 8000 deaths, per million of population, per year, from infectious diseases.
There was a spike up to about 10,000 deaths per million during the Spanish Flu pandemic, and it took until the 1950s until the rate of deaths per year was below 1000 per million of population.
And at least one source I was looking at indicated that the lowest the rate has been is around 460 deaths per year per million.
That was in teh early 1980s.
By 1995 the rate was up to 630 or so.
Lower than we have so far from covid, but in the same ballpark.
IOW…we are not seeing anything that is objectively awful, on the basis of any rational historical perspective.
700-800 deaths per year per million of population would have been seen as miraculously low prior to the 1950s, and I think in those years after WWII, it was considered miraculous to not have large numbers of people dying every year from any of a large number of such ailments.
One source and a graph:
https://www.livescience.com/56968-infectious-disease-deaths-united-states-100-years.html
https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-b42fbf07d46b73121198298fc3c6a383
A better version of that graph:
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Death-rate-from-infectious-diseases-in-the-US-1900-1996-The-death-rate-dropped-over-the_fig1_341510122
About 3 in 100 people have had it – since March. It would not be unusual if lots of you don’t know anyone now, and don’t know OF anyone. It would be a huge surprise if you ALL knew someone.
This question is no mystery, and not worthy of this much headscratching and naysaying. It’s simply not that common (yet). 3% – over 9 months. Until very recently – I knew OF a few people, including 1 death. But right now – I know several, and it’s a growing list. I hope that you continue to know “no one” – and that’s entirely plausible – but to downplay the severity because you don’t estimate “just” 3% to be very serious – is just really without basis. It’s quite serious.
3% (cases, deaths is a much smaller fraction) is serious to the fraction of the 3% that have a bad case (a large portion of that 3% are asymptomatic or had the mildest of symptoms) and very serious to the even smaller fraction who end up dying. But it’s still a very tiny fraction of the population that falls into those two categories, so not as “quite serious” as you’d like to make it out as.
As I pointed out in another post, I live in one of the hard hit states, in a county that is currently considered a hotspot. Despite that there are entire towns in this county and this state that have had no reported cases (Zero, none, nada, zip). And I don’t mean little rinky-dink rural towns with practically no population to speak of. I’m talking about good sized suburban towns that have larger populations than some of the towns that have reported cases . Those towns aren’t doing anything special to avoid it (heck they probably have several residents with COVID but no symptoms for all anyone knows). Its just that it really is such small portion of the population that is badly affected, despite all the big scary numbers that get tossed around.
10% of all deaths in my local paper right now are COVID. How much more serious were you hoping it would get?
Anyway, the question (at the top) implied that something was possibly askew with the narrative, as many folks didn’t know anyone who’s ill. And I was just pointing out – the data says that’s a likely situation. Most folks here – especially the author – should realize that already.
10% of all deaths in my local paper right now are COVID
Yeah, so? Even if I could take that unsupported assertion as true (confirmation bias and a poor/small sample size – there’s what, all of 10 deaths in the paper that day and 1 happened to be with COVID – I suspect, is making you see it that way, regardless of the reality), that doesn’t say anything more meaningful as the fact that right now, as I’m typing this, I see in my local paper ZERO, ZIP, NADA, NONE of the deaths listed were COVID. And, as stated, I live in a hard hit blue state in a county that is currently considered a hot spot for the state, in a town that is in the top ten of the county for cases. So, to use your own flawed rhetorical: how much less serious (than ZERO) were you hoping it could be?
Today’s paper also had no obits that mention COVID in relation to the persons death. So far, over the past few days, the only mention I’ve seen of COVID on the obit page is a reminder that COVID protocols are to be followed at a persons service (masks, distance, capacity restrictions, etc). So what was that you were saying about how serious it is based on mentioned of COVID as cause of death in the paper?
Also, terrinot, keep in mind, death notices in papers tend to skew older (most of the death notices on any given day tend to be for the 60+ crowd) which happens to be the group most vulnerable to dying from COVID as well as the group most vulnerable to dying from a host of other causes. So it wouldn’t be surprising to see COVID pop up in the notice as a cause of death, but it really doesn’t tell you much of anything about “how serious” it is to the population as a whole.
It reminds me of a younger generation brought up with modern car safety when you grew up without seat belts let alone bub capsules and child seats etc etc. Once they hit child rearing stage suddenly big cars are safer and ANCAP ratings are everything not to mention 24/7 CCTV for the cot. Furthermore you hear them having arguments that unless your precious is rearward facing for at least 2 years you’re verging on child abuse. With our nutrition they can easily hit a toddler seat at 12 months and be facing the same way as mum and dad with head-rests. Well that’s because the most common urban accident is a rear ender so you work it out with whiplash injury.
Now while city driving is relatively safer than country driving fatality wise the major 4 causes of fatalities is excessive speed, alcohol/drugs), fatigue and inattention. Basically the nut behind the wheel dwarfs all other car safety considerations but suddenly car tech safety is everything. So to get them to see the wood for the trees and see it all in perspective as a non seat belt era survivor I’ve resorted to the Covid test too. Who do you know among XYZ that have been killed (or seriously injured) in a car crash and if you do was it caused by anything other than those top 4 reasons.
I live in a “hard hit” blue state. in a town that is in the top ten for the county in regards to number of cases – and my country is currently considered one of the hotspots in the state. Despite that:
1) No one in my family nor among my friends have got it (though the daughter of a friend of my brother’s caught it from a friend at a birthday party. The friend had symptoms but thought it was a cold and went to the party anyway! No one else that was at the party tested positive, despite many of them interacting with the two girls at the party)
2) as far as I’m aware no one in my particular neighborhood has got it. And the few neighbors I’ve talked to about it also report not personally knowing anyone who has gotten or died from it.
3) No one I personally know at my work place has got it (though there have been all of about 3 positive test results, no deaths, among the hundreds of people who work there as far as I’m aware of, including one person from another shift who sits just a few desks away from me)
4) The only death related to it that I personally know of (a co-worker’s son) wasn’t someone dying from COVID, rather it was the COVID shutdown that contributed to their death (to reiterate they did not have COVID and COVID itself had nothing to do with their death. If it weren’t for the shutdown they’d likely still be alive today, barring accidents).
And judging by the posts in this thread I’m not alone in having such a lack of first hand personal contacts who have been infected (let alone died) from COVID.
That not to say it doesn’t exist/is a hoax or fantasy. The other week I’d taken a relative to the hospital (for a non-COVID related problem) and the hospital was pretty full up/not many beds available. So clearly there are patients out there, it’s just that as bad as the “number of cases” and “number of deaths” totals that the media bleat on about make it sound, it’s still a very, very tiny percentage of the population. So much so that if you were to take a random sample of people and ask them how many people they personally know who has gotten (or died from) COVID and I suspect the answer would be ZERO way more often than not.
~331 million people in the US, 254,000 deaths.
768 deaths per million.
One person out of every 1300.
35,000 cases per million people.
That number is getting high, but it is still only one person in 30 or so.
But there are a few small areas that account for the large percentage of the cases.
And most of the fatalities are people who are getting on in years.
I do not think I know a lot of people much older that myself, and I am 59.
Regarding all the new cases, I have had a hard time finding out how many of those are people who have tested positive on antibody tests, but are not sick, and so might have had the virus months ago and be long over it.
My impression is a lot of the testing is now antibody testing.
So those would count as “new” cases, but only newly revealed cases, not newly infected, necessarily.
It makes it hard to draw much in the way of conclusions when the news is so incomplete.
I think they should only be calling a positive test a “case” if it is someone who has an active infection going on, symptomatic or otherwise.
Otherwise we are hearing about people who are actually immune, mixed in with those who are ill.
Nicholas ==> You are right, they are calling Positive Tests “cases” incorrectly. And the RT=PCR tests re being run way to sensitive to tag only actual infections.
Indeed. And even if we assumed all the cases are “active infections” there’s a big difference between being actively infected with mild or even no symptoms and actively infected and having symptoms so bad that you need to be hospitalized. If the vast majority are the former, then there’s really nothing to get so worked up over as that’s pretty much SOP for the flu and we don’t lockdown countries and destroy economies every time the flu goes around. Whereas, obviously, if it’s the later that would be a big problem as it would quickly overwhelm the health care system. Fortunately, for the most part, our health care system hasn’t been overwhelmed, indicating that it’s not the later situation but rather somewhere in between.
Not sure about the US, but in the UK they are here, plenty of them:
https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/Covid-Publication-12-11-2020_v4-CB.xlsx
Found on this site:
https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/covid-19-hospital-activity/
Incidence varies with region and regions vary by social class and ethnicity. If your UK responders are in a less affected area, they will not know any or many cases. Its not a demographically uniform pandemic.
Michel ==> As you know, those numbers show that 0.2% of your population is ill enough to report to hospital.
So yes, there are some sick people — as have stated.
Compare this to the last very bad flu season — when everyone knew many many people sick enough to stay home. In the 2014-2015 Influenza season, the UK had over 11,000 flu deaths per week for three months. 2016-2017 was nearly as bad.
In central IL, it appears to have made its presence fairly widely known as opposed to the initial wave. Death is uncommon, but sensationally received because “cases”. Hospitals are tense. Drive-up testing lines are overwhelmed. But if this were on the level of the Spanish Flu (650,000 dead out of just 100 million), we would be looking at 4 times the deaths and the echo chamber would have driven most of us insane by now. The Cootie factor is very, very much in play.
Also, essential businesses (hospitals and grocery stores included) are having staffing problems. That, to me, is the major concern for self-feeding hysteria.
The MSM is evil in their reporting and it would be naive to expect them to be honest about anything useful to report if it is against the desired narrative.
Look at who is pushing the lock down to see who the MSM are in league with.
I had a bout with bronchitis a few months ago, and I’m 68, so I went to the emergency room and told them I suspected that I had COVDI-19. They rolled their eyes, put one of those clip things on my finger that measures blood oxygen levels, found mine to be normal, and told me that no, I probably didn’t have COVID. Of course, the emergency room was almost empty, because the lockdown protocols here in western Canada at that time had resulted in the virtual shutdown of much of the hospital, so, because the ER staff had nothing to do, they gave me the full workout anyway. Blood sampling, chest x-rays, and an electrocardiogram. Also a fifteen minute interview with two doctors. They analysed the blood, read the x-rays and the electrocardiogram results, pronounced me in wonderful health, and told me that I had had an anxiety attack. And sent me home. It was actually kind of fun, and of course it had a happy ending.
But I’m the only person I know who has been to a hospital with a suspected case of COVID-19.
“and of course it had a happy ending. ”
Are you sure you were at a hospital?
Ian was at the corner bar drinking heavily, followed by a visit to “The Museum”
( a clever name for a strip club ) He told his wife he was at the hospital all day visiting a sick friend.
Funny, Tom. Okay, it was a brothel. Are you happy now?
Did I mention that I was 68?
Ian,
Sorry, nothing personal, it’s just that the line was too good to pass up.
That’s okay, Tom. I was joking myself.
Ian ==> And like many “cases” and deaths being reported, the key word is “suspected” .
Me, living in Madrid, Spain. Of the people with which I have or have had close contact (and I mean currently meeting or having met in the past more often than six times per year with such a person or the person being a first or second grade relative), I know of 14 people who got the COVID. Of these, 12 passed it like it was a flu or even less, and 2 had a bad time for longer although they didn’t require hospitalization.
Among the people that I know but who were not so close to me, I have no idea how many cases there have been precisely because I had no close contact with them. I only know about some of the ones that did have severe problems. These include only 2 deaths (one was more than 100 years old, the other more than 70 and with a respiratory deficiency after having defeated a lung cancer years before which still left some permanent damage in his lungs). Apart from the deaths, I know of another 2 cases which had to stay long at the hospital in Intensive Care and, despite having left the hospital already several months ago, they have not completely recovered. COVID seems to have left them some permanent damage. Both of them were old too.
Nylo ==> Thanks for the report from Spain. Old folks are taking a beating from this virus, for sure.
My wife has a cousin on Majorca who has Covid for 24 hours…..
Seen on RT today:
Also Germany will also get their Permanent Marshal Law (my interpretation of the “epidemic-law”).
In Berlin there was a massive demonstration against dictates regarding the epidemic-dictate being turned into law, just like in Denmark nearly got it.
In the government building (Bundestag) the fight was going on as well, with the AfD party (pang-dang to Trump adm.) arguing against the new measures as unconstitutional, inhuman and stupid. The rest of the government shouting back with name calling.
When will the Swedish parliament also sh!t on the constitution and overrule the Swedish health board?
Japan has much the same idea, I am told, that the government cannot issue Marshal Law unless a real war is imminent.
All this insane fight against a bad flu-like virus is now increasing worldwide hunger according to WHO. There is still a long way though before we are down to 500 million people as Prince Charles and others wish for.
Looking forward to what Kip Hansen get of results. Does SARS-CoV-2 create much more havoc than flu,less or the same.
My understanding of the CDC “total deaths” at the link given in the article is that this means total of pneumonia plus influenza, NOT total from all cause.
The article led me to believe that “total deaths” meant total ALL CAUSE deaths, which, again, as I’m reading it that page at the CDC does NOT provide.
Is this correct?
Can’t find the chart, but saw one that basically charted COVID with pneumonia VS. COVID without…and it was virtually the same line, FWIW.
Robert ==> To see the Total Deaths, one must download the file from the GREEN LINK near the top that says “downloads”. Open that file in Excel or an excel-clone, and see Total Deaths in Column K.
Okay, I figured out that “total deaths” means total deaths from all causes, and I opened the file in LibreOffice, and I don’t know whether that program just does not load the cells properly or whether I just don’t understand when the CDC starts “week 1” and ends “week 52”.
Both the way the data chart downloads and the way the graph actually appears on the website does not make sense. I’m expecting to see “week 1” and “week 52” as weeks in the same year range, but the way the data downloads and the way the chart appears, “week 1” appears to start in the next year after the year for which it is labeled verbally in the previous year.
It really seems impossible to find this data in a clear, well displayed, understandable format.
I want a simple chart with years, weeks, and total deaths per week. Why is that so hard to simply put up, and why is that so seemingly obscure? Is the CDC trying to be obscure and hide this data? Do they just not know what the heck they are doing? What?
I don’t understand why Season 2020-2021 starts at “week 40” in that data set I downloaded from the CDC website. Where are weeks 1 through 39? Either the program I used to open that data set is just not compatible, or I really do not understand how the CDC defines their weeks and tabulates their data.
10% of all obituaries published right now are COVID. How much worse do you need it to get?
Give these guys enough time and they’ll be able to convince themselves that the virus is actually saving lives. Michio Kaku said there were no parallel universes in Denver. I think he must have been wrong. They seem to be everywhere.
“Give these guys enough time and they’ll be able to convince themselves that the virus is actually saving lives.”
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-23/coronavirus-restrictions-cause-flu-cases-to-drop-australia/12480190
“Australia has not recorded any flu deaths since April, with only 36 deaths recorded this year compared to 430 in the same period last year”
So…yeah, it kinda does if you look at it that way…
Yep, There’s no doubt about it, you were definitely a bureaucrat. That’s messed the F*** up think right there 🙂
While I was being a bit sarcastic as I’ve seen 30 years of over-managed, “fill this out in quadruplicate”, government waste close up…the question is about how to count things fairly.
You know the “if it saves one life” crowd, right? They’ll look at one number when they’ve implemented something they believe in…and ignore the rest of the data.
Just posted an article about hear attacks in Colorado during the lockdowns. Guess what? They went DOWN, or at least the “made it to the hospital” number. The “died at home because they were afraid to go to the hospital” went UP.
Cancer treatments being delayed are another issue. Etc.
So, yeah, I think its worth it to look at the flu numbers. Dead is dead, right? We know that most of the COVID19 victims would be flu victims in a bad season – with the added “bonus” that more of them would be younger, as COVID19 so far hasn’t affected under 18s much at all.
My daughter is a nurse in Denver. We have almost reached max ICU capacity in all hospitals and are close in others. Getting ready to deploy the Convention Center and other venues. This is no joke, folks. All our positivity rates are over 15% now. As a retired tourism and hospitality guy (now a Middle School Science Teacher) I feel for the restaurant and gym owners, but we have to consider shutting these down.
Walked into a place the other night that was supposed to be at 50% capacity. Packed. Large parties, no masks. Darwinian.
Are you sure that wasn’t a Biden victory party? Or a BLM protest? Or politicians meeting with donors (with health officials present as well?) Or politicians flying from mainland US to Maui (happened THIS WEEK?).
Those things are all ok, and clearly won’t spread the virus. Don’t you know, only protests against lockdowns, Trump rallies, or republican politicians going anywhere are huge virus spreaders. I’d add a /sarc but sadly there are actually people (in the MSM at least) that seem to think that way given the disparate way these things have been reported in the media.
Randomized controlled trials (RCT) have shown that masks do not significantly prevent transmission of influenza. A recent RCT found the same for covid.
https://twitter.com/JamesTodaroMD/status/1329084994820608002
Was just coming here to share – Just published it today. Here’s the study link https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817
There’s a reason that, at not other time in history, has quarantining the healthy been considered a viable option. it simply isn’t workable and does more overall harm than good. Quarantine the sick, definitely. Quarantining the most vulnerable (Ie the elderly with comorbidities) is doable and probably not a bad thing (certainly better than sending COVID patients in among them). Quarantine the healthy? Nope. waste of time and resources.
That said, other steps that are worth doing include good hand hygiene and keeping your distance from other people as best as possible. Masks, research shows, are iffy as to their efficacy but if it makes you feel better, by all means wear them.
Walked into a place the other night that was …. Packed. Large parties, no masks
What were you doing going out to such a place (even at 50%, half a of large parties are still pretty large parties) instead of sheltering in your basement if things are as bad as you claim? Hypocrisy much. Everyone else should stop moving forward with their lives but you? Totalitarian.
The CDC tracks all deaths. The chart about halfway down the page shows a pretty accurate depiction of what is really happening.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
BTW – My wife and I both tested positive for COVID last week. For her it’s been like a normal cold PLUS she had a headache and loss of smell/taste. For me….a minor fever, stuffy nose and loss of sense of smell. I’ve had much worse colds in the past.
What kind of pandemic requires that 2 million health care workers get laid off ?
The kind that incentivizes hospitals with obscene amounts of money to treat covid patients. NY only gets $12,000 per covid patient, so I guess that’s why they had to slaughter so many nursing home residents to get the volume up.
State-by-state breakdown of federal aid per COVID-19 case
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/state-by-state-breakdown-of-federal-aid-per-covid-19-case.html
While it sounds counter intuitive, the fact is health care workers cover a large variety of disciplines, not all of which are useful for treating those stricken by a virus like COVID. How many brain surgeons or cancer specialists do COVID patients require? Pretty much none. If all your beds are being occupied or reserved for COVID patients, how many brain surgeries or cancer treatments are going to be performed? Again, pretty much none. So why would the Brain Surgeon or Cancer Specialist be kept on staff when the work they were hired to perform isn’t happening?
This is particularly true in areas of the country where all elective surgeries were cancelled to make room for treating COVID. All the staff that normally would be doing the elective surgeries suddenly had nothing in their field of expertise to do. Why would a hospital (or any other health care business) pay someone to do nothing when that money could be better utilized going towards the needs of the pandemic patients? So yes, a pandemic can require millions of health care workers get laid off because health care workers are not interchangeable, some have skills that are applicable to the pandemic (those workers have more than enough work on their hands and aren’t getting laid off) while others don’t (they’re left with nothing to do, as the skills they have aren’t needed by the pandemic patient. those are the ones getting laid off).
My 67 year old sister had the Chinese virus, with classic symptoms, this last month. Transmission vector was probably from her son, daughter-in-law, and teenage kids, as all 4 of them had it first. They live in central Wisconsin. My 65 year old brother was exposed over several hours, during an on-site review of various construction projects with my sister, but has showed no symptoms since.
I had lunch with two people last weekend, and pointedly asked one who has worked in an elderly care extended facility the entire time.
She said not one resident contracted the virus, let alone hospitalized. Two workers at the facility tested positive with very minor symptoms.
I interact with two corporations on a daily basis, one in Laurel, MD, the other in Pacoima, CA. No one in either was contracted COVID-19. The MD company is full of young go-getters in their 20s who love to party.
No one in my extended family in VT, NC, CO and OR has contracted, nor do any of them know anyone.
The survey has been taken by about 2500 people. When the total reaches 3000, I will publish an essay with results.
I read the journal of the Chinese woman scientist that collected the virus for some little furry critters that lived below a bat colony. She took it back to a bio weapons lab that international inspectors had declared unfit for purpose. It was not person friendly so they attached some parts of the HIV virus to it.
It escaped the lab infecting a lot of locals at Wuhan. Flights from Wuhan in to China were stopped, but international were allowed to go ahead spreading it far and wide.Big surprise she disappeared.
One can only conclude that the communist ruling mob did it on purpose, thus I buy nothing made in China any more.
Another story. The Christmas gathering at my sister’s on one of the Gulf Ils just got cancelled. Reason: my brother in law owns a small ‘health food’ store with lots of prepared ‘organic’ food cooked on the premises. If any Covid turns up, he will be closed and perhaps never open again, let alone the loss from closing. However all the big grocery chains are allowed to stay open.
Does cause of death really matter if you are over 70?
During this panicdemic I do know some grandmothers who have not to see their grandchildren.
The only significant common factor in death is living a long time.
When my wife died the contributing factor were listed and those were all thing old people have. What was not listed was taking our granddaughter camping two weeks before. Or sitting around a campfire with friends the night before.
It is a simple point. Please do not protect us for our own good by taking away what is good.
Kit P ==> Yes — dying matters as life expectancy around the world is in the high 70’s to low 80’s. Many of the readers here report that they are in their 70s (as am I).
For the majority dying of/with Covid-19, are already seriously ill with some “comorbidity” — so “cause of death” for the aged is seldom clear cut. These are the same old folks that influenza sweeps away each year — though Covid-19 may be a bit rougher in this age group than most flu.
I expect/hope to have another 20 years to see my grandkids grow up and contribute what I can to the world.
So in that sense, CAUSE as listed on a death certificate is seldom important. There is the IMMEDIATE CAUSE of DEATH, and UNDERLYING CAUSES and CONTRIBUTING CAUSES. It is this vagueness that is resulting in so many COVID DEATHS being reported. The CDC and other agencies are calling a death a COVID DEATH if any of the the ICD-19 codes for Covid appear on any line of the death certificate.
I will have to write about this — some people think that Covid Deaths mean that a person died as a result of SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Kit P ==> For the CDC explanation of Death Certificate Cause of Death see this “Coding and classification of causes of death in accordance with the Tenth Revision of the International Classification of Diseases”
The phrase I have heard is: “Died with COVID, not because of it.”
It’s the sugar addiction, IF, metabolic syndrome, toxic government ‘nutritional guidelines.” That is the epidemic.
“So in that sense, CAUSE as listed on a death certificate is seldom important.”
Statistics can be useful if applied correctly to help us live longer.
For example the money spent on covid testing would be better spent on lots and lots of hand holds for old people.
After a safety meeting at a nuclear facility, I was discussing the statics of falls with a coworker who was also a volunteer EMT. I stated that when an old person falls and breaks a hip, it is a slow death. He replied that the hip breaks and the old person falls.
It is simple, if the root cause of a death is an accident, it can be prevented. If the root cause is getting old, then the quality of life should be considered in delaying death.
Covid is like a train wreck you can not stop watching. I travel north in the spring and south in the winter in my motorhome. At one point the governor of one state I visit said I could sleep on my sailboat but not my motorhome.
Go figure!
Since the goverment is not providing me useful rules for safely enjoying life, then I can use statics to figure it out for myself.
As mentioned earlier, the experience of the navy nuclear carrier provided enough information to know that covid was not the spanish flu. Second, I looked at the number of covid cases where I was travelling. Zero!
I did find an interesting statistic in Oregon. At the time, traffic deaths were down more than total covid deaths.
So clearly bedtimes hugs and keeping grandchildren safe are not mutually exclusive.
I was kicking the tires of a new motorhome a while back when the salesman asked if I had any questions. What is the milage? His response was, ‘if you have to ask?’
So if you have to ask, where are the sick people? The answer is always someplace else. 100% of the time when I have checked a fear mongering story , a reassuring story could be told.
Whoops … I meant “IR” which stands for insulin resistance.
My best friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s brother’s girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who’s going with the girl who saw Ferris pass out at 31 Flavors last night.
Dark Helmet: I am your father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate.
Lone Star: So what does that make us?
Dark Helmet: Absolutely nothing.
I know no one who has tested positive. I know no one who has died. Our county has 340000. 130 deaths. And a 21 year motorcycle victim counted as a Covid death since having tested positive. Yes, Covid is for real. But so are many many other things.
Overview
According to the latest immunological studies, the overall lethality of Covid-19 (IFR) is about 0.1% to 0.3% and thus in the range of a severe influenza (flu).
For people at high risk or high exposure (including health care workers), early or prophylactic treatment is essential to prevent progression of the disease.
In countries like the US, the UK, and also Sweden (without a lockdown), overall mortality since the beginning of the year is in the range of a strong influenza season; in countries like Germany and Switzerland, overall mortality so far is in the range of a mild influenza season.
In most places, the risk of death for the general population of school and working age is in the range of a daily car ride to work. The risk was initially overestimated because many people with only mild or no symptoms were not taken into account.
Up to 80% of all test-positive persons remain symptom-free. Even among 70-79 year olds, about 60% remain symptom-free. About 95% of all people develop at most moderate symptoms.
Up to 60% of all persons may already have a certain cellular background immunity to the new coronavirus due to contact with previous coronaviruses (i.e. cold viruses). The initial assumption that there was no immunity against the new coronavirus was not correct.
The median age of the deceased in most countries (including Italy) is over 80 years (e.g. 86 years in Sweden) and only about 4% of the deceased had no serious preconditions. The age and risk profile of deaths thus essentially corresponds to normal mortality.
In many countries, up to two thirds of all extra deaths occurred in nursing homes, which do not benefit from a general lockdown. Moreover, in many cases it is not clear whether these people really died from Covid-19 or from weeks of extreme stress and isolation.
Up to 30% of all additional deaths may have been caused not by Covid-19, but by the effects of the lockdown, panic and fear. For example, the treatment of heart attacks and strokes decreased by up to 60% because many patients no longer dared to go to hospital.
Even in so-called “Covid-19 deaths” it is often not clear whether they died from or with coronavirus (i.e. from underlying diseases) or if they were counted as “presumed cases” and not tested at all. However, official figures usually do not reflect this distinction.
Many media reports of young and healthy people dying from Covid-19 turned out to be false: many of these young people either did not die from Covid-19, they had already been seriously ill (e.g. from undiagnosed leukaemia), or they were in fact 109 instead of 9 years old. The claimed increase in Kawasaki disease in children also turned out to be exaggerated.
Most Covid-19 symptoms can also be caused by severe influenza (including pneumonia, thrombosis and the temporary loss of the sense of smell), but with severe Covid-19 these symptoms are indeed more frequent and more pronounced.
Strong increases in regional mortality can occur if there is a collapse in the care of the elderly and sick as a result of infection or panic, or if there are additional risk factors such as severe air pollution. Questionable regulations for dealing with the deceased sometimes led to additional bottlenecks in funeral or cremation services.
In countries such as Italy and Spain, and to some extent the UK and the US, hospital overloads due to strong flu waves are not unusual. Moreover, this year up to 15% of health care workers were put into quarantine, even if they developed no symptoms.
The often shown exponential curves of “corona cases” are misleading, as the number of tests also increased exponentially. In most countries, the ratio of positive tests to tests overall (i.e. the positivity rate) remained constant at 5% to 20% or increased only slightly. In many countries, the peak of the spread was already reached well before the lockdown.
Countries without lockdowns, such as Japan, South Korea, Belarus and Sweden, have not experienced a more negative course of events than many other countries. Sweden was even praised by the WHO and now benefits from higher immunity compared to lockdown countries. 75% of Swedish deaths happened in nursing facilities that weren’t protected fast enough.
The fear of a shortage of ventilators was unjustified. According to lung specialists, the invasive ventilation (intubation) of Covid-19 patients, which is partly done out of fear of spreading the virus, is in fact often counterproductive and damaging to the lungs.
Various studies have shown that the main routes of transmission of the virus are neither long-range aerosols (i.e. tiny particles floating in the air) nor smear infections (i.e. on surfaces), but direct contact and droplets produced when talking or coughing. However, in some circumstances, indoor aerosol transmission appears to be possible.
There is still little to no scientific evidence for the effectiveness of cloth face masks in healthy and asymptomatic individuals. Experts warn that such masks may interfere with normal breathing and may become “germ carriers” if used repeatedly.
Many clinics in Europe and the US remained strongly underutilized or almost empty during lockdowns and in some cases had to send staff home. Millions of surgeries and therapies were cancelled, including many cancer screenings and organ transplants.
Several media were caught trying to dramatize the situation in hospitals, sometimes even with manipulative images and videos. In general, the unprofessional reporting of many media maximized fear and panic in the population.
The virus test kits used internationally are prone to errors and can produce false positive and false negative results. Moreover, the official virus test was not clinically validated due to time pressure and may sometimes react positive to other common coronaviruses.
Numerous internationally renowned experts in the fields of virology, immunology and epidemiology consider the measures taken to be counterproductive and recommend rapid natural immunization of the general population and protection of risk groups.
At no time was there a medical reason for the closure of schools, as the risk of disease and transmission in children is extremely low. There is also no medical reason for small classes, masks or ‘social distancing’ rules in schools.
Several medical experts described express coronavirus vaccines as unnecessary or even dangerous. Indeed, the vaccine against the so-called swine flu of 2009, for example, led to cases of severe neurological damage and lawsuits in the millions. In the testing of new coronavirus vaccines, too, serious complications and failures have already been reported.
A global respiratory disease pandemic can indeed extend over several seasons, but many studies of a “second wave” are based on very unrealistic assumptions, such as a constant risk of illness and death across all age groups.
In several places, nurses described an oftentimes fatal medical mismanagement of Covid patients due to questionable financial incentives and inappropriate medical protocols.
The number of people suffering from unemployment, depression and domestic violence as a result of the measures has reached historic record levels. Several experts predict that the measures will claim far more lives than the virus itself. According to the UN 1.6 billion people around the world are at immediate risk of losing their livelihood.
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden warned that the “corona crisis” may be used for the permanent expansion of global surveillance. In several parts of the world, the population is being monitored by drones and facing serious police overreach during lockdowns.
A 2019 WHO study on measures against pandemic influenza found that from a medical perspective, “contact tracing” is “not recommended in any circumstances”. Nevertheless, contact tracing apps have already become partially mandatory in several countries. In some countries, such “contact tracing” is carried out directly by the secret service.
B.C. Canada where I live, the death rate of all cases is 1.3%, for all of Canada it’s 3.56%.
Seniors long term care homes account for 82% of all Canada’s covid deaths. For covid sufferers over age 65 they have a 6% chance of dying. I have an underlying illness so I may not fare well if I’m infected so I appreciate the masks and distancing by others, particularly younger people, I feel they are considerate of us others who are not fortunate enough to have perfect health and youth.
I think it’s a hoax and totally made up after eight months of first hand observation in NYC. I was born and raised here and by extension know thousands of people here, including more people who ignored the rules from day one than I can count.
They simply renamed ordinary cold and flu and killed some people on ventilators in March and April. That is what ‘covid-19’ is.
Most hospitals around here won’t give you any sort of treatment for cold flu or pneumonia anymore unless you are willing to be put on a ventilator. I heard this from an asthma patient who was refused oxygen.
Just finished reading a article on the Barrington declaration written by Jay Bhattacharya. I would nope that people would review it. After reading it to did some more research on it. I found a few articles that we’re trying to criticize. But, they did not address what he wrote. They wanted him to produce policy answers. They only wrote a protocol for handling C19. It’s up to the politicians to write how it’s implemented. I’m always amazed at ” experts” who critics offer zero solution. It also tells me that Barrington is probably the way to handle it.
The data file that downloads from the green link at the CDC website makes no sense to me. The years seem all screwed up.
Each flu season is deemed to start in week 40 of each calendar year and run into most of the next year. The file begins with week 40 of 2020 and continues with each of the weeks they have any data for during the current season. Next comes the data from the 2019-2020 season, starting at week 40 of 2019, going through the end of that year, continuing with the first week of 2020, u to the end of that season in week 39. The data then skips back a year to the beginning of the 2018-2019 season.
I’m currently positive. Me, my family, and my circle of friends all got it around the 6th of October. I’m still positive. I read a journal article where an elderly lady was actively infectious for 70 days. What do we have in common? We both have leukemia. I figured that when I became positive, that was probably it for me. I didn’t express that to anyone but that was bouncing around my mind. I didn’t start feeling bad until the middle of October. I ran a low grade fever for a couple of nights and then I was back to normal. But I’m still positive because of my leukemia. I’m not avoiding my friends and family who have recovered but I am avoiding everyone else. I’m running about 700 friends on Facebook and out of that number, I’m aware of one friend who became quite ill but has since recovered. My wife and 2 teenage boys have never been sick. None of my circle of friends became really ill. It was like a mild flu and everyone is better. So far, so good here, even with being positive since the 6th of October.
When I checked the data shortly after this post went up, Weeks 40 through 43 all showed 100% complete, with the last couple of weeks understandably incomplete. Downloading the data again two weeks later, the numbers of flu deaths and total deaths for ALL the weeks have gone up. Week 40 figures increased six weeks after the week ended.