Five million, huh? What’s that, a month or two’s worth of third world immigration?

Think I’m kidding? Wait til after the November election.

This will be good for Democrats as it will mostly be Trump’s voter base i.e. White boomers, who will be affected the most.

Trump should cancel his rallies, the virus will spread like wildfire there as all the rubes are screaming and shouting and their bodily fluids are suspended in the air which thousands of people will be breathing.

I wonder if the East Asian countries will loosen controls over summer and see how things go?

How does this work in year (season) 2 and beyond? Similar to AIDS, or Polio (pre vaccine), where every year someone remembers that grandparent or kid that got coronavirus and died? Or does the layers of transmission (how many people/connections it runs through, to get to you) matter? Meaning, does it become less lethal or serious if you get from a long line of people who got it, vs. early catchers in say, China or Italy?

I also ask because I heard a doctor say that such a virus gets less serious the further away from its epicenter, which to me only makes sense if he/they actually mean what I am asking–meaning, it gets less lethal/serious as it moves down the generations. Because otherwise, someone flying in from China who has it, standing next to me at a grocery store, is no less viral than if I was standing next to them at a Bat soup market in Wuhan…their distance from the Epicenter would not seem to matter…since they would be “early generation” of the virus.

So is this just as deadly for a 20 year old, or a 70 year old, in November 2020, or Feb 2021?

Some faulty assumptions. No idea why you’d use China numbers. S. Korea, who did a poor job of managing this, has 7700 cases and 60 deaths. That’s a sub 1% death rate assuming they caught everyone who has it. Your model is using 2.5-3% rate. Seems like fear mongering.

Also, on what premise are we assuming everyone will be infected? This has no basis in reality so far. The U.S. has a lower population density than all these countries, at the very least. Exponential growth, sure. Infinite growth, unlikely based on reports so far.

If it’s really that contagious, then tens of thousands probably have it here already with minor unreported symptoms. (What healthy person calls the doctor for a fever and cough?). an NBA player was getting ready to play a game with it, for example. This would drop the death rate for the general population by quite a bit.

I agree with social distancing. But even if you did nothing, I would bet against that 5 million number. Let’s keep an eye on Germany since they’re essentially doing nothing.

Just to keep harping on my little theme, a German health official told the media some days ago that our r0 is just under 3. That was before our sad ban on gatherings of 1000+ people, which I’m sure has put us under 1.

This is the whole reason everyone knows that biowarfare attacks are a totally insane thing to do.

Not to mention morally reprehensible.

All is fair in Love and War.

Tucker Carlson’s new found, or at least extremely expanded attacks on China are obvious. He is actually insinuating that China released the Covid-19 on the world. It is quite obvious Carlson has a strong hatred for China or he is minding his masters…I lean toward the latter. He has become a disciple of, the discredited, Gordon Chang. US good China bad. For sure China has plenty of internal problems. But one of them is not economic growth, surpassing the US…wherein lies the problem. The ones controlling this country will lose much, if not all of their wealth and power if China is to prevail.
My observation is that Carlson has turned rabid in his attacks on China. I single out Carlson because he has been a little more responsible on his program…in relation to the other MSM assholes.

What a bunch of wusses! No more than 500 will kick the bucket due to the virus.

If the US released the virus in Wuhan near the Chinese bioweapons lab so as to give cover, how easy would it have been for Chinese scientists at that same lab to modify the virus so that it also attacks non-East Asians? Or I suppose nature alone could have done that. That’s the problem with bio warfare – nature may not cooperate or act the way you intended. In short, way too much risk of blowback or friendly fire.

I have a simple population model that predicts a pair of mating rabbits will produce enough offspring in a year to cover the planet.

Whatever they say it’s still likely the seasonal flu , all the numbers being spouted by the media (the propaganda arm of the globalists and plutocrats) are lies as there are still no accurate or reliable tests in the field for COVID-19 .
This hoax pandemic is the work of the globalists ( for lack of a better term) see:
“Understanding the Hegelian dialectic [PROBLEM-REACTION-SOLUTION]” jeremiahproject.com and “The Hegelian dialectic applied to COVID-19” in the same article.

This will be good for Democrats as it will mostly be Trump’s voter base i.e. White boomers, who will be affected the most.

Maybe, maybe not. Trump’s base is in low density portions of the country. The Democratic base is densely concentrated around the big cities. This could have some implications on both spread and willingness to go to the polls.

Also keep in mind the concomitant economically pathological phenomenon of the Leviathan Health Care Monster wildly engorging itself from hyper-inflated Covid treatment bills that are almost completely unbounded. Multiple zeros will pad every cotton ball and ibuprofen handed out to patients. And the meter is always running with redundant tests and $300 drive-by chart reviews.

For the Covid patients who are admitted to health care institutions, even if 90% are treated uneventfully and discharged, expect average bills to be between $100,000 and $200,000.

If 10 million patients are treated over a year as in-patients, that’s gonna cost between 1 and 2 Trillion bucks.

The problem remains that a very low R0 leaves the population vulnerable to a subsequent breakout. Barring really, really tight borders, the problem just comes back.

The advantage of applying moderate measures is that stalling likely won’t require waiting out 5-6 years. Stall until somewhere in year 2 when a vaccine should become available. However, like flu, we may find mutant strains emerge. This in turn may force us to rethink the current vaccine certification protocols.

I thought that. R0 assumes everyone is susceptible. Within family clusters suggest only 10% of people develop symptoms.

The other evening I was shopping at one of America’s large box stores. It was the day Steve had published his piece about the Chinese woman who was complaining that everywhere she went, people stared at her and even asked her if she were Chinese or from Wuhan etc. and how it upset her that people were so stereotyping and how the world must change so that her feelings would never again be hurt in the future.

Anyway, just by coincidence, I entered the store right after an Asian dude who certainly could have been Chinese and I immediately flashed upon that article. He looked at me and I at him and I gave him a look that said “No sir, I’m not stereotyping you. I’ll even walk in your wake without fear. I’m not a bigot.” And I thought to myself how ridiculous my own behavior was, acting out this thing in my brain in reaction to her article….

So later I was inspecting some beef and I heard this loud clacking off to my right. I looked over and it was him–the Asian dude!–rifling through the Porterhouse steaks, loudly tossing each aside as he ostensibly searched for just the right one. Fair enough, I was doing the same thing in my section.

But later yet I was again near him and didn’t see any meat in his cart. Ah ha! Busted. Obviously he was an agent whose mission it was to spread Corona by leaving the virus on everything his infected paws touched! How clever those Chinese!

So, Corona isn’t an American attack on the Chinese, just the opposite. Consider.

(1) They had a plan in place to deal with it effectively and immediately.

(2) They immediately began a media campaign of disinformation in which they accused the United States of being the source of the virus and in weaponizing it in an economic war against China. Part of that campaign appeared right here in the pages of Unz.

(3) They know that the U.S. will be caught flat footed and that Western “democracies” are incapable of united collective effort so the ultimate effects will be far worse in the West.

The moral of this story is that you can read anything you want into the behavior of other people. Those predisposed to see the U.S. as evil will place the blame in their court. Those who see the Chinese as evil schemers will do the opposite. What we need to do is what Steve proposes and that is focus on an effective response. We can worry about who dunnit later.

Always ask, “Who benefits?”

And the answer is always the same…….

Gary Burnett : “Was the Coronavirus created as cover for the imminent economic collapse?”lewrockwell.com

I think the public perception of how Trump is handling the crisis will have a far greater effect on his re-election chances.

Some countries, such as Taiwan and Singapore, have clearly done a far better job handling the situation than has the US. Other countries, such as Iran, have clearly done a far worse job. Some, like North Korea, keep all data secret so we can’t tell.

If the voters think Trump has done a smashingly great job handling the Coronavirus situation, he will be re-elected. If they think he failed miserably, say hello to President Biden.

Why is this “seasonal flu “ triggering a collapse in the Italian health case system (in the more organized north of Italy ) in 2020 whereas previous “flu seasons “ did not stress the Italian health system ?
Maybe it is different this time …

For decades, America government and society has become more and more crazy

And then you respond with your own insane conspiracy theory. Da Joos dun it! Or maybe it was the CIA? The pot is calling the kettle black.

S. Korea, who did a poor job of managing this, has 7700 cases and 60 deaths.

Massive testing in south korea, 20k people a day, yields a lot of people in the denominator who would count as healthy everywhere else. We don’t get to have a “south korean” death rate unless we have south korean testing. With Euro testing we have to live with a different Euro death rate. Another question would how many “European” or “American” cases (i.e., cases in that are symptomatic enough to get officially recorded in Europe or America) does south korea have? Then we could productively compare death rates.

Also, south korea is doing a lot compared to the west outside Italy:

In south korea right now, mobile testing centers are dispatched to places with new positive results and widespread testing occurs, followed by isolation of positive cases.

They have closed schools. Universities throughout the country postponed the start of the semester when only 31 official cases existed. Major buildings have thermal imaging at their entrances. As many people as possible in public are wearing masks.

To all of that comes the fact that the South Korea outbreak was idiosyncratic, over half of all cases emerging from Patient 31 associated with the Shincheonji church in a single city, Daegu, which made containment easier.

Let’s keep an eye on Germany since they’re essentially doing nothing

Aside from testing, and it is unclear how widespread this is though we are told it is very awesome and comprehensive and the absolute best. 2,120 cases right now in the earliest stages of the pandemic.

The numbers here aren’t making sense for what we know about King county.

It appears that over 60 staff and first responders were infected in the Lifecare incident and yet the increase has been linear. The original outbreak was nearly two weeks ago but has been mostly contained to a single county despite visitors of the center being spread across the state.

However the New York case was highly contagious and fit the model.

I’m inclined to believe there is a missing variable in all this. Something like inconsistent immunity or a second strain.

Then there is that other thing that is infecting increasing numbers of Americans.

This is OT but have you seen this?

What is the R naught of anti-White hate? It spreads via many vectors, including media and pop culture. Has anyone plotted a curve of where it will lead and whom it will harm?

plausible speculation that the Coronavirus was a US biowarfare attack against China (and Iran).

Ron, no!

Apart from the fact that the prior is quite low (whereas the prior that it is just a bat-borne disease is about 1.0), I have not seen ANY supporting evidence.

In fact, this “bioweapon” idea is squarely in the range of “comets explains disease” ideas.

cat $post | sed ‘s/plausible/crazy-ass/g’

> “We can take care of ourselves, go away!”
> “We are so suppressed and zombie-like helpless, give us money!”

this only affects partial americcans or so called “americans”, all evidence is that it does not do anything to pure blooded europeans. so unless you have some sort of “exotic” ancestress that is mongrelizng your blood fking go out, have a beer or two or three and relax already.

Nonsense! USA is China’s customer. There is no interest in China to decrease their customer base.

Was the Coronavirus created as cover for the imminent economic collapse[of Italy for one]? Probably why Italy is getting “hit” so badly , it’s Greece 2020 .By some estimates it’s going to take $700 billion to bail out Italy, Europe doesn’t have it ,the Federal Reserve (it ain’t federal and there’s no reserves)will have to come to the rescue . As Elizabeth Warren discovered ,years later , the Fed rescued foreign banks and financial institutions to the tune of $16 trillion dollars(?) after the 2008 financial panic.
Just another part of the Globalist agenda behind the fake(?) Coronavirus pandemic .

Big cities are the most dangerous places to be. Country folk may be safest. Goodness me.

Totally off topic and the song is terrible.

I would have [AGREE]‘d, but I couldn’t just due to the number 500. Maybe it’ll be an order-of-magnitude higher, maybe 2. I doubt it will be that big a deal either.

South Korea appears to have successfully deployed a potential COVID19 treatment with a zinc ionophore to inhibit viral replication:
500 mg tabs of chloroquine, an old 40s generic used for RA arthritis and parasites including malaria, previously.

Watch these three Medcram videos for a conventional medical explanation of viral inhibition by intracellular zinc:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eeh054-Hx1U intracellular zinc introduced
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm7UrZeu-74 Zinc cont’d
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7F1cnWup9M China and S Korea actually use this stuff!

Of course our backups are early IV vitamin C at ~75 grams/dose, three IVC doses on the first day then tapering down, oral vitamin C to near bowel tolerance, and 50,000 iu vitamin D3/day for a week or so, and other immune related stuff.

If all do, this might limit coronavirus to a few thousand fatalities in the US. Those that don’t could drive it much higher.

Ron, with all respect, I think you should spend less time reading your blog content and more time on keeping the software running nicely, as it does, and any of your political matters. I am specifically referring to the side with the views that are not only controversial, which is part of this blog’s greatness, but Anti-everything-American.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s not much I do like about the US Feral Gov’t, how it’s run, and just the sheer size of the Beast. I appreciate all writing that points that out, with the obvious solution of decreasing its size and power. However, many of your writers and the commenters thereunder, just hate everything about the country and people. They can GTFO and/or go to hell.

If we impose Chinese-style controls

And now we’ve arrived at the heart of the matter and the reason they concocted this phoney virus in the first place (why else would they need the MSM to fan the flames of panic and hysteria?).

I can’t be the only one who well remembers the Wild West days of the Internet that went on for years after September 11th 2001 when people said that the next False Flag would come in the form of a virus.

It wasn’t for nothing that the great cultural historian Morse Peckham* titled his masterpiece

Explanation and Power: The Control Of Human Behavior.

Just as it’s also not for nothing that almost no one today knows who Morse Peckham is (was).

A mini-Peckham bio follows for the purpose of illustrating and substantiating a point well worth making.

*Morse Peckham (1914 – 1993) Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvannia and the University of South Carolina. Considered by many as the greatest scholar of Romanticism and the greatest literary theorist of the 20th century.

If we take a look at China, and when the outbreak actually started; we’re behind by about 2 months in any response. Meaning, I believe a good number of us have already been infected, and gotten past it.

If this spreads as quickly as the flu, and there was international travel to and from China for 2 months before any restrictions were put in place; it’s already too late for any precautionary measures, it’s here full blown.

Also, why isn’t anyone asking why this isn’t spreading through Africa like wildfire? They have no test kits for the most part, and nor will they. Why isn’t their mortality rate off the charts?

For this sort of pure evil regarding look
to Ft Detrick, Nez Ziona, Porton Down.

Did vaping scare begin before Wuhan?
Blaming vaping for Ft Detrick activities?

Either an intentional attack to bring down entire world
or a mistake by geniuses from elite/not-so-elite schools.

Anyway,

all life activies canceled.

Will personal/family sized
bubbles be offered for sale?

5 dancing shlomos

Whatever the death toll and economic carnage, this epidemic will likely also have people feeling even more isolated and atomized than ever. Less bread, no circuses, just constant media panic. And now you could “catch your death” even from the most trusted friend or relative.

Err TC is really angry at the US Dumb State or Deep State’s outsourcing so many industrial ecosystems to China. The Chinese pretend that they are “a US strategic partner..” Tucker is treating that globalist propaganda with the contempt that it deserves

I guess medical tourism isn’t an option in this case.

The early returns on Trump’s latest speech are not encouraging — the stock market was put in an induced coma and many viewers noted Trump himself did not look or sound well

There’s a tendency for viruses to attenuate over time. This is thought to be an evolutionary adaptation to increase fitness. For example, some very common viruses have mild symptoms in most people, because that helps with their spread. If a virus kills everyone who gets it in a day, for example, it won’t spread as much. To what degree and over what time span this will apply to the WuFlu I have no idea. But yes it’s possible that in the future the virus will be less deadly.

Yeah, but isn’t five million dead Americans a tiny fraction of the number Al Gore and Greta Thunberg say are gonna die because of climate change?

And again, consider the two other factors which could play a huge roll in the reason the Covid19 virus proved to be so deadly in Wuhan.
1)Extreme levels of air pollution
2)Extreme effects of 5G(rolled out in 2019 in Wuhan)on oxygen molecules, which makes it hard for the human body to uptake oxygen.
These two factors are never even mentioned in the many articles posted here on UR, even by Ron himself.
So I’ll keep posting and try to warn all of the real dangers we face here in America; The roll out of 5G and; The vaccine they will try to force on all of us, once it is rolled out.
https://drsircus.com/general/virus-5g-and-pollution-combine-to-destroy-wuhan/

Trump should cancel his rallies, the virus will spread like wildfire there as all the rubes are screaming and shouting

He doesn’t have any rallies scheduled.

Here is a video of the NBA player with Covid-19 trying to infect other people (he should be charged with public endangerment). This is a great example of abject black stupidity…a black millionaire purposely trying to spread Covid-19, thereby killing his opportunity to make more money from stupid Whites.

At least one good thing maybe coming from Corvid-19…it is killing professional sports and hopefully putting an end to making millionaires of dumbass athletes.
In the video, when it is announced that the game is being postponed, the fans (overwhelming White) boo…they would rather take a chance contracting Covid-19 than miss watching dumbass blacks, many of which hate Whites, make many times more money in one game than they will in a lifetime.
One big problem in this country is people wasting time and money attending children’s games, being played by adults.
Looking at the fatuous prime time lineup on ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC it is little wonder that this country is on a shit slide to hell.

I’ve often pointed out the negative consequences of having a country run by its Ministry of Propaganda.

This would point to the positive consequences of having The Unz Review available to a critical mass of the public who might one day put the Ministry of Propaganda out of business, forever.

Though unlikely, there’s no question the thought has its charms.

They’ve got math models for damn near everything today, Dan. Didn’t you know? There are models of the entire Earth’s climate. They may be missing a half-dozen or few dozen physical process, but that’s what assumptions and fudge factors are for, so’s they can match reality and all…

(I ran out of [Agree]s and [Thanks] this morning, is what it is.)

I’m not totally convinced by the idea of bio warfare, one thing I did notice though was just how conformist the narrative on this was right up to a few weeks ago. This inept and authoritarian handling would be “China’s Chernobyl”. Google that phrase. Even below the line commentators were using it, and tended to agree that the communists were toast.

Look at the assumptions in this NYT times piece and then the conformity of opinion in the NYT picked comments. The assumption was that China was losing control of the virus and public opinion. I’m old enough to remember late February 2020 and China was clearly getting a grip on the crisis by then.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/business/china-coronavirus-propaganda.html

It all seemed contrived, a controlled narrative similar to the Corbyn is an antisemite propaganda.

Anyway its not china’s, but it may be the west’s Chernobyl. We’ve forgotten how to be authoritarian when needs be, which used to be fairly common for the democracies when faced with an existential threat. Democracy probably won’t die but it won’t be seen as the ultimate system even by westerners. And goodbye too to the open borders movements, visa free travel even for tourists wiil be curtailed, without a medical check. European passports were golden a few days ago, now they are no good in much of the world.

We are entering a world which could be as changed as the post war world, if what comes to pass is as extreme as the worst predictions. Or even close.

Isn’t Joe a boomer? And one with the preexisting condition of dementia? Although I agree as a deplorable Trump doesn’t get reelected. Nor should he.

I think it’s highly unlikely, to the point of being impossible, that the US released this virus as a bioweapon. The insanity of using bioweapons against a major power like Red China would have to be beyond the Pale even for the crazed eggheads in DC. A more likely scenario is that the Chicoms released it to put an end to the growing anti-government protests that began in Hong Kong and were reportedly spreading. If this is what Xi did, it appears to have worked since there has been no word of any recent protests and has probably permanently cemented his position.

From afar, it seems like the USA’s absurd health care system is going to push the body count higher than 5 million. Even people who have coverage are expected to hand over $100-$500 for a test, $1600 or thereabouts for the uninsured.

5K seems like possible upperbound; 5M is way too many. The analysis omits a major factor: behavioral sociology is very dynamic. People are already worried about the CV. If we see a few thousand deaths, the news will be so deafening that the nation will come to a complete standstill. There won’t be any travel, schools, work or any activity. At that point, the infection has to stop spreading.

Sometimes I think (hope) you are trolling your readers.

@iSteve

5 million?

Ok – it’s time to take a break from this topic. This isn’t worthy of you even in the sense of “if we did nothing”.

It may be time for a mass movement to simply refuse to pay such exorbitant medical debts.

Alternately, I’d have no problem with a federal government measure to payoff all large non-discretionary medical bills at 20 cents on the dollar (I.e. not cosmetic surgery). The crook doctors can eat the rest.

Looks like Trump is holding classified meetings on Corona Virus because they talk about China. What exactly do those talks involve and why keep them classified?

This supports that Covid is a bioweapon. Did China already send a counter attack against America? If so why is Trump not testing anyone which would be an obvious counter?

This bolsters the idea that Corona Virus originated in America and spread elsewhere. That’s why they don’t want to test!

Reuters: A fifth source familiar with the meetings said HHS staffers often weren’t informed about coronavirus developments because they didn’t have adequate clearance. He said he was told that the matters were classified "because it had to do with China."

— Vincent Lee (@Rover829) March 11, 2020

Reportedly, the average age of people who die of CoV-19 is 80. Italy has the oldest population in Europe, the second oldest in the World, after Japan. That’s probably why Italy has been hit so hard. That, and all the kissing.

We’ve all heard of police riots. This is shaping up to be a Public-Health riot.

Matt Drudge might has well put an image of the Grim Reaper just below his banner. He’s hyping every new development as if it were a major disaster. Tom Hanks has CoV-19 now! If Tom Hanks can get it, who among us is safe? What will we do? The Drudge Report didn’t make such a big fuss over the 2009 Swine-flu outbreak that killed nearly 300,000 people. What’s the difference? Matt Drudge is 11 years older, for one thing.

The Boomer Media is getting old, and they all live in or near travel-hubs. They have touted diversity and the free interchange of people – cornerstones of the neo-liberal order – their whole lives. Well, the free interchange of diverse pathogens is a consequence of that neo-liberal order.

And if, say, China has successfully eradicated the virus in year 1, they are going to be pissed as hell if you reintroduce it back into their population in year 2.

China has no room to be pissed. They did this to themselves, and to the world. If they had halted all outbound flights the day they shut down Wuhan on 1/23/2020, the world would not be looking at a pandemic right now. Instead they whined and threw a fit about countries wanting to ban their travelers from coming in, and insisted on flying their people everywhere, so now here we are, and they are getting it boomerang back to them through foreigners now entering their country. Karma is a biatch.

As an added bonus, now the world hates China and the Chinese. All the hard work they did cultivating their image in the last 2 decades is shattered in one month. Penny wise, pound foolish. No one to blame but themselves and their greed, pride and myopia.

Note for future: All world leaders need to wise up, as soon as a virus such as this happens, the first step is lock down the country of origin, stop all outbound flights. Individual countries can go in and evacuate their citizens, and quarantine them upon repatriation.

The only good thing that could come out of this fiasco is an end to globalization. America and China needs a total and complete decoupling. We need to produce more of what we consume, they need to consume more of what they produce. And it’s also time for the world to get a true alternative to the JWO. USA-Israel vs. the rest of the world. Let’s kill this parasite living among us once and for all.

Why doesn’t Trump use his big gun and sanction Corona into oblivion?

Or make a bunch of snarky tweets poking crude fun at Corona and shame it into oblivion?

Or give another huge tax break to his billionaire buds? That will teach Corona to not mess with the US.

Maybe this will teach the USA to not experiment with those deadly pathogens that occasionally escape into the public and cause havoc, but I doubt something that sensible takes place.

I agree that Tucker is taking the China thing over the top. Yes, China is worrisome, and we shouldn’t be dependent on them. We should never have allowed ourselves to become dependent on them. And that happened because we were cheap and greedy and wanted cheap crap from Walmart. There’s a lot of blame to go around on that score.

But I don’t see any value in attacking the “Russia as boogeyman” or “Iran as boogeyman” theme, which Carlson has done and rightly so in my opinion, only to replace it with “China as boogeyman”.

The outcome distribution is too broad for ordinary people to get their head around.

In real life, a lot of things are exponential. To a point. But they hit some sort of constraint, and you get the commonly noticed S curve in the growth of something or another. Like a rapidly growing business.

The only example which comes to mind is flu. Which is a perfect analogy until it isn’t.

The only thing that comes to mind is the public reaction to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The NYT was fond of showing pictures and diagrams of a massive oil slick covering thousands of square miles. Along with photos of clumps of gooey oil causing problem, like birds covered with it. Implying that it was possible to have something both so wide and so deep. Oil slicks covering thousands of square miles are always very thin, and thick fouling cover acres, not square miles. Or miles of coastline, but never square miles of coastline. The massive oil slick broke up in a few days after the well was capped. Some groups seemed disappointed.

Their are examples of infectious diseases that are both widespread and severe. Like plague. But they are rare.

How does the corona virus scare help the globalists?

It seems to me to be doing the exact opposite–making more and more people aware of the dangers of globalism and massive immigration.

Yeah. I love how Phil Giraldi is the source for this “theory.” The guy who tongue bathed Obama during all of his regime changes, military surges and “humanitarian” drone bombings. And now Giraldi bans any poster who reminds people of his record.

I wouldn’t worry too much about Brown Power. They travel around with quite a load: multiple turntables, computers, mixers, microphones, and so on. They are slaves to beats; you can hear them coming from miles away. And following the trajectory of intersectional squabbles, Brown Power will invariably clash with Black Power which gives White Power a chance to sneak out of the burning room.

If the US released the virus in Wuhan near the Chinese bioweapons lab…

While the Chinese military has a presence in the Wuhan lab, it is far from being a bioweapons lab. The CDC also has a military presence. That doesn’t make it a bioweapons lab, of which the US has several.

I think Carlson is maintaining his creds
since he has been honest on so many
other issues. China is a traditional
bad guy, so TC can’t go too far.

I ignore his China comments.

5ds

Congratulations, you wrote a very useful article. Playing with the R0 will be a major theme in the coming period (can be years in the worst case). There has also been some very good news. What was already clear by looking at the numbers for a few weeks is now supported in this paper, – https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3550308 – , the virus is far less contagious in much colder and especially much warmer weather. This will give an unique chance to kill off this virus once and for all in July and August in the southern Hemisphere. Not sure if its possible but there will be extremely severe pressure by the whole Northern hemisphere to eradicate the disease in cities like Capetown, Port Elizabeth, Buenos Aires and Montevideo. I can imagine that China, Korea, Japan, Iran, Europe and USA don’t want a repeat of this catastrophe in the coming winter.

One thing I think most will agree about is that this COVID-19 event has, if nothing else, spawned a plethora of nutty theories. About nearly everything.

Just pick your favorite.

While some are based on what is said to be science, few of the weird ones emanate from actual scientists. (I’m not referring to the main article above, BTW.) Many are pseudo scientific in that they take some isolated factoid gleaned from some journal or online discussion, then extrapolate that into the ozone, “proving” just about anything and everything. Bio weapons, deliberate by X, Y, or Z, or genetically affecting only those with “this or that DNA, etc.”.

Then there are the further crazy ones. Usually political. Endless kvetching about what “wasn’t done” soon enough, or “caused” by this or just deliberate inattention. “Not enough, or fast enough” testing is common. Yeah, test for some virus no one heard of three months ago. How is that supposed to happen? Where are those millions of “test kits” kept for the stuff we’ve never heard of now?

Like small children and ignorant savages, and nearly everyone 200 years ago, we want blame, finger pointing and instant solutions to problems that are barely and often incorrectly understood.

There are highly educated medical doctors (epidemiologists) who along with others study these diseases and how they spread for a living. More than a few in the US; many world wide. Based on historical evidence and serious biology. But they are ignored by crackpots and “internet sleuths” who can magically, with a few keystrokes, discover hidden facts and broadcast their truths at will.

So believe who you want. You’ll find a wide choice of theories. The better ones are hard to understand. Skepticism now masquerades as wisdom and knowledge. Conspiracy theories are the bottom of this pit. Go ahead, take a bite. It won’t kill you. Maybe.

I predict that at least a few who get this virus will intentionally try to spread it towards those they socially and politically dislike. Id like to be wrong here, but this country really has extremists (mostly on the left) who despise millions of Americans who dont vote the same way they do.

Has anyone ever really studied why neither side used gas during the Second World War? It seems rather facile to say it was out of fear of retribution. I can’t believe neither side used it on the eastern front.

The NYT now has a section of free coronavirus coverage, including our live briefing, maps of confirmed cases and advice on how to prepare for the outbreak https://t.co/fK5EPBzjhF

— Austin Ramzy (@austinramzy) March 12, 2020

Total population 327 million

Yeah, right. Add 20 million to that.

We’ll know shortly. Census Day is three weeks away.

I think the only person more shameless than Zionist is old open borders Ron. I think Steve-O calls your tactic here Ockham’s butterknife. My grandpa would call it Jewtspah.

Thanks, Steve. Note that this is a pretty simple model, and doesn’t account for a lot. In particular, it’s not handling population structure or local communities, just a globally mixing population.

To respond to a couple of commenters’ points:

* Of course this wasn’t a bioweapon. You don’t use bioweapons without some kind of control measures available – i.e., smallpox where you can vaccinate your guys, or pneumonic tularemia where you drop it and sicken the people right there, but it doesn’t spread person-to-person. Trying to use a coronavirus you don’t have a vaccine against would be mind-bendingly stupid, and I know some guys doing weapons development for the feds, and they’re not.
* As Steve said, once you get the R0 well down below 1, and start containing the spread, you can loosen up within a month or so. As long as you keep R0 below 1, it won’t grow again, and you can do that with a small outbreak with contact tracing and relatively easy-to-implement controls. Can’t do that with 100,000 cases, though, you need to break its back first.
* @Polynikes The key thing that kills people in this model is running out of hospital capacity. South Korea isn’t at that point yet. Italy is, and they’re seeing a 6% death rate. Also, I’m not assuming infinite infection rate. In the uncontrolled case, this model estimates about an 80% infection rate. That’s probably on the high end, due to the model assuming a randomly mixed population.
* Re this point: “Within family clusters suggest only 10% of people develop symptoms.” Yeah, that’s the model. In fact, my model assumes only 5% of people need critical care and are at risk. The other 95% are just spreading the disease. I can rerun it with 10% and give you a higher number if you want me to. Hell, do it yourself, the code is up on the website in the appendix.
* Re general idiocy: God, if only it were true that this will all blow over.

It would be interesting to read you two debating each other, but Jack, you need to up your game now. I know you can, because I have seen you do it.

This is the dialectic in process, which Ron Unz facilitates here.

My own opinion is that this particular virus is indeed serious, but that our media have pumped it up high, like an approaching hurricane, to the point that the worthless stocks I wisely sold years ago are demonstrating their lack of real value. I’m fine, and I hope you both are too.

Please, continue. Warm weather and the accompanying humidity will lower this excitement. Long study will show that age, lung problems and smoking are the biggest contributing factors that make this any different from a big flu event.

“The pot is calling the kettle black.”

It is reasonable to conclude the Chinese regime is evil. But we have our own kind of evil in the West, the epicenters in the U.S. of said evil being DC, the financial sector, and Silicon Valley. Hollywood is the Fool, the court jester of these three epicenters. In this scenario, Evil versus Evil, my weasel paranoid brain leads me to believe COVID-19 was created in a bio-warfare lab. The corrupt elites in China and the U.S. are both capable of releasing this biological weapon. This storm will pass, and hopefully those we love will still be with us. But in its wake good men in this country must act in a number of ways, using their skills and talents, to seek vengeance, and finally, justice.

Ron was pretty sure the CIA shot down that passenger plane to until the Zionist released that mind control agent in Tehran and got the Iranians to falsely take responsibility for it.

But it does beg the question why’d the cia stop with Iran and China? Why not Cuba and North Korea? What the cia couldn’t sneak a few special forces across the Ukraine border and let Russia have a little taste. For a rabid mad dog imperial power we only have two enemies? Hell that’s less than those noble warrior poets in Iran have.

Enough already!!!!!!!

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/disease/the-cyclical-nature-of-disease/

1. Examine the infectious disease deaths per day graph: Two of the top three are Tuberculosis and Pneumonia. Three of the next five – AIDS, HEP A, and Shigellosis are in large part Dick-up-the-Butt diseases. Tuberculosis, an ongoing worldwide pandemic, is not being worried about, despite the unalterable fact that every third word ARTB resistant Jose hopping the border fence will, in the fullness of time, kill some number of Americans.

2. Then, reread the part about the WHO defaulting on its bond obligations. In my experience, there is no profession in the World more money hungry, money grubbing, and willing to lie about money than the Medical Profession. Just in Medicaid\care scamming alone, nobody knows how much they are stealing.

and then:

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/03/no_author/italy-is-second-country-with-coronavirus-outbreak-preceded-by-a-tuberculosis-epidemic/

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/03/bill-sardi/covid-19-coronavirus-vaccine-could-kill-8-16-times-more-senior-americans-compared-to-no-vaccine-at-all/

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/downloads/public-health-management-decision-making.pdf

How fast can you go to “no risk”?

That page contains all the total cases along with number of deaths for each country. An interesting observation, the country with the largest number of cases and no deaths is Norway 632 (o deaths), then Denmark 615(0), close behind is Sweden 500 cases and only one death.

Seems the Nordic folk battle this virus well.

one word — force majeure — sorry that’s two
US health insurers ain’t gonna pay
hospitals love that because they then default to chargemaster rates which are 10-20x negotiated rates with insurers
it is so financially asymmetrical that it is inevitable

My guess is you’ve never been to a wet market in China, because if you saw the chickens stacked above the civets stacked above the turtles and salamanders, all drooling and shitting and peeing on each other, you’d probably give much more weight to the conventional explanation. The Chinese are well known for really bad hygiene practices.

When assigned to two completely arbitrary groups for the purpose of a psychological experiment, the members of each will for no legitimate reason begin to attribute good qualities to their own group and disparage the other group. I think Ron wants people to consider things ‘ veil of ignorance style’ and be as suspicious of the US as any other country. And because it goes against human nature he gets frustrated and applies shock therapy.

I had a bowl of bat soup and a side of civet cat pickled spinkters and a cup of civet cat poop coffee and I am just peachy

Assume 5% of cases are critical, 2% of those critical cases die with ICU care, 5% with general hospital care, and 50% with no care. 90,000 available ICU beds and 900,000 available hospital beds.

Yeah, but are these assumptions anywhere near accurate? GIGO. In particular, a 2.5% mortality without treatment seems extremely high.

Also, I wouldn’t think that we would limit ourselves to current hospital beds and deny treatment to everyone else. The Chinese converted warehouses and built makeshift hospitals overnight.

And what does “ICU care” for flu/pneumonia really entail? Isn’t it mostly just providing fluids and watching out for secondary infections. Seems like a lot of medical professionals besides doctors, or even civilians, could be pressed into service to help with the mass treatment in any worst case scenario.

1. It is serious. It’s not the end of the world Zombie Apocalypse serious, but pretty serious nevertheless. By all accounts the mortality is maybe 10x that of seasonal flu and as of now there’s no vaccine. It is going to kill a fair number of (mostly older) people before it is done. In the meantime, it is going to be (already is) highly disruptive to the world economy. It has pretty much killed the travel and tourism industry (which is one of the biggest industries in modern economies) for this year at least. Any hotel company or cruise ship line with mortgages to pay (all of them) is instantly in serious trouble. Airlines, concert venues, sports teams – all are suddenly in deep doo doo.

2. I thank Ron for being our host but I have no desire to debate him. I do not take his conspiracy theories seriously to the point of considering them to be worthy of debate. Even engaging with them is giving them more credit than they are worth, which is nothing. Besides Passover is coming up and I busy working on finding a Christian child so I can make my matzos.

The NYT’s new coronavirus section no doubt will feature its own op-ed page, with daily “Women and Minorities Hardest Hit” essays

reasonably plausible speculation

LOL

If Covid19 is as bad as “they” say, then soon EVERYONE will have someone in their extended family who will have died from this “horrible” infection. I predict with certainty that this will never happen. This whole epidemiological narrative is a scripted farce. And now, believe it or not, Tom Hanks has Covid19, an interesting bit of casting. It will be fascinating to follow his commentary on the personal progress of his “illness”. I wonder if he will be written out of the story by dying a horrible death, or if he will courageously wage a long protracted battle with the virulent pest and then ultimately triumph against the odds? We shall see, as each episode of the serial unfolds.

Tucker Carlson’s new found, or at least extremely expanded attacks on China are obvious.

It’s a deflection to keep the ruling class media from attacking Donald Trump and pinning all the blame on him. They are already trying to do exactly that. Granted, some of the blame could perhaps be pinned on him and his corrupt “tax cut for the rich” GOP through their unwise CDC budget cuts and lack of preparation, but the media would have blamed Trump regardless of what he did or didn’t do anyway. I’ve already seen a clip of that imbecile Don “black hole” Lemon making a fool of himself on television while interviewing John Kasich on the subject. There will be more attacks from the likes of Seth “imma expert cuz I got dis liberal arts degree” Myers and company. The same media spent months downplaying the situation and accusing concerned citizens of racism. They should be held to account when this is over.

He is actually insinuating that China released the Covid-19 on the world.

Well, they did — sorta. They were warned about those wet markets but did nothing. This was totally avoidable. Many Americans will die due to their negligence.

It is quite obvious Carlson has a strong hatred for China or he is minding his masters

Some of both, but certainly the latter. As I have pointed out before, the only way conservatives can avoid media bans is to be seen as useful to the ruling class. That entails attacking the Chinese. The CIA funds lots of anti-Chinese YouTube channels, for instance. The few conservatives who seem immune to social media purges repeat the party line. If the Chinese want to change that, I’d advise more aggressive efforts at funding alternatives. D-Live may be a nascent example of that.

US health insurers ain’t gonna pay

If you have health insurance then your coronavirus is going to be covered the same as any other disease. (After your deductible is exhausted) the insurer will pay the hospital at the negotiated rates – Blue Cross doesn’t pay $100 for an aspirin. If you ever see a health insurance claim, the hospital will bill you $500 for item X and then they accept $25 as full payment from Blue Cross because that’s the pre-negotiated rate. One of the advantages of having health insurance is that, even if you haven’t reached your deductible, you only have to pay the $25 out of pocket and not the $500 they would bill some poor uninsured shmuck.

Force majeure is meaningless in insurance policies when the force majeure is itself the covered risk. When your house gets hit by lightning and burns down the fire insurance company can’t say they’re not paying you because it was an act of God.

If I had to pick the best scenario–for the survivors–it’ll be just let it happen. No quarantine. If we delay it a year, people who will need a respirator are only going to be a year older, a year more diabetic/hypertensive/more lung damage from their smoking habit, and actually MORE likely to die a year later than if they went through it now. All the Boomers are late middle age to elderly. Age all the Boomers 1 year, and they will have more deaths from Covid-19 a year later than this year. Some of those who might die a year from now may survive long term if we develop herd immunity this year.

Secondly, this thing is mutating. We could get a worse strain next year. That’s what happened to the Spanish flu. The second wave was the real killer.

The big constraint is not personnel but equipment. If the pneumonia really gets going the only way they can save you (and it doesn’t always work) is to put you on a ventilator and there are only so many ventilators. ICU is really shorthand for ventilators.

No not smoking because the Wuhan deaths have been not been mainly men (relatively few women smoke in China).

https://www.bmj.com/content/368/bmj.m606/rr-10
The interesting article by Dr Xiao-Wei Xu and coauthors (1) follows another nice contribution focused on the clinical features of SARS-CoV-2-infected patients from Wuhan, China2. In the latter work diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular disease (CVD) were reported to occur as frequent comorbidities in hospitalized patients with CoViD-19 (CoronaVirus Disease 2019) (2), an interstitial pneumonia caused by the newly discovered SARS-CoV-2,

Hypertension is the condition that makes you most likely to die of the Coronavirus, and hypertension is common in China, 90% of elderly Chinese have it.

“Indeed, based upon the clear-cut evidence of an ACE inhibitor-induced upregulation of ACE2 previously shown in murine models (7), this could additionally speed-up viral uptake and host’s pulmonary tissue colonization, should a similar mechanism of ACE2 upregulation take place also in SARS-CoV-2-infected humans”

So you are better off smoking than taking medicine to lower your blood pressure.

Five million USA deaths is nothing. Even fifty million wouldn’t make much of a dent.

Even half-a-billion deaths in India or China would hardly be noticeable.

People don’t realize how crowded and unpleasant the world is becoming.

The ‘virus’ is no big deal for people under retirement age. The rush to political action is telling. Just like some prior events people here can name. Fastest market melt down in history. To force political action, the rush to act with no sober second look, no reservation of judgement.

Unconscionable use of nocebo effect to cause harm in the aged. Disgraceful.

Yes, we might eventually be done in by Covid 19 (aka Coronavirus) but it won’t be the virus itself. It will be the hyper-response, including the promotion of fear and panic. Welcome to the Kali Yuga Main Event (maybe).

a pandemic virus is not the covered risk in generic (BCBS) health insurance contracts — therefore force majeure
in any case, I hope that you are correct and that wall street is wrong
have a great day

Sorry, Jack, I meant to hit LOL!

But that isn’t actually what Ron does. Ron shifts between hyper credulity and hyper skepticism purely on the basis of Who/Whom? And what’s even worse is he specializes in Ashkenazi-like weaponized projection. So in this case the plausible claim that a chemical weapon leaked from the nearby Chinese chemical facility is rejoined with “-uh the disease didn’t even arise naturally in China it was released by meanie Americans. Why else would America’s two biggest enemies have it?“ (leaving aside the fact that Unz is lying about those being America’s two biggest enemies, a lie that isn’t even necessary except that Unz is just a petty drama queen). This is how four year olds argue. Nuh-uh I didn’t eat the cookies in fact you probably ate the cookies? Why else would have a baked them?

This is the entire narrative of the right wing media. Breitbart constantly refers to it as Chinese coronavirus, ditto for Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller. Townhall refers to it as Wuhan Virus. Breitbart the Zionist mouthpiece is working hard to plant the idea that China is unleashing the virus in the Uyghur “education camps”.

I say let them have at it. We need a complete decoupling between US and China, the sooner the better. The many Chinese citizens who love to immigrate here are still living under the delusion that America loves them. They need to wake up. Move the hell back. Help China become successful so it can fight the real war. America is fighting for its own survival from the grips of the world’s most vicious and unscrupulous parasitic tribe, both left wing and right wing, they are conspiring to drag this country over the cliff with endless wars, endless immigration and endless cultural degeneracy.

The world needs a true alternative to the JWO. China-Russia-Iran-EU will help put an end to this insidious tribe and their evil plan to rule the world.

That was a pretty disjointed message from the hippocampus.

Fastest market melt down in history.

Bubbles inflated by easy money coupled to “traders” who are really low-grade pattern matching algorithms shooting from the hip: Priceless.

Besides Passover is coming up and I busy working on finding a Christian child so I can make my matzos.

LOL I like your humorous trend of late. At least I think it is of late. Either way, I like it. Enjoy your gentile kid meat. LOL

No he just really hates America because Ron thinks he should be president and he got embarrassed running for governor of California. This was after he did all he could to tank Prop 187 because he was worried it would make it harder for a wannabe nerd caudillo to get elected.

What all and anything like this shows is what we all should have learned in high school: There almost always are many variables in any problem. We can learn by practicing with limited variables, but real life presents many.

What’s the Chinese word for hasbara?

Exactly. In fact our own resident feminists, Alden and Rosie, have recently taken to whining that White men aren’t “manning up” to protect White women from brown and black savages.

White men haven’t forgotten that our own women have been telling us we’re scum and they don’t need us since the Sixties.

All we have done for them, from the wheel to the semi-conductor, and this is how they show their gratitude. I’m comforted by a vision of roving “brown” gangs slaughtering one another over the last can of Campbells soup among the collapsed ruins of any American city circa 2120. They won’t be singing then.

Per WSJ death rate outside of Wuhan in China is only 0.7%, consistent with S. Korea which tests lots of people, even those without symptoms. Italy’s real infection rate is probably way higher than the people they actually tested, same with Iran, because they only tested people with symptoms.

The virus began in the US biological warfare labs in Maryland (which were shut down by the CDC just before the epidemic) and carried to Wuhan by American soldiers who had spent time in Maryland the war games.

Waterloo. The fake news of Napoleon was quickly dispatched and when this fake news reached the London Bank existing markets crashed …And then guess who bought everything possible and propelling themselves to the richest and most influential family in the world?….Dont think this is happening now?

The first assumption would have to be, the variable is testing, but I don’t know how widespread that is in King County. Perhaps testing is more comprehensive in NY, so you see the exponential growth there. If you imagine a lot of cases in WA, as you must, maybe the apparently linear growth is just an artifact of the (linear?) expansion in testing capacity, and the lack of comprehensive testing throughout WA, because what tests there are, they’re spending near Life Care.
There are 30 WA deaths now, right? So if we think mortality from 0,5% to 2% and 2-3 weeks to die, that is 1500 to 6000 (totally hidden) cases in WA towards the end of Feb. But mortality among some elderly was maybe much worse. If it was as bad as a harrowing 15% ironically things look better with only 600 cases in late Feb.

Feb 9, 2020 Coronavirus – THT in 10 minutes

Jan 21, 2020 Vaccine Safety #1 by
Dr. John Bergman

Show me where it says in your BCBS contract that pandemic diseases are not covered? Flu is a pandemic virus too.

Mortality in WA was concentrated in that nursing home so mortality was much greater than .5 to 2%.

Well thank goodness we have creative Desi imports doing their best to help during this crisis!

An opportunistic business owner looking to make a buck in New Jersey has now been summonsed by New Jersey officials for endangering the welfare of children and deceptive business practices.

Manisha Bharade, who owns a 7-Eleven store in Bergen County, NJ was charged after mixing foaming sanitizer not intended for resale with water and packaging the mixture in small bottles she sold, according to the NY Post.

New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal commented: “Let me be perfectly clear: If you try to take advantage of our residents during a public health emergency, we will hold you accountable. Retailers who try to make a quick buck by exploiting others will face civil and criminal consequences.”

The burning was caused by an apparent chemical reaction from the homemade mixture and it left four young boys, including three 10 year olds and an 11 year old, burned on Monday. Police visited the 7-11 after photos of the products were posted to social media along with photos of one boy who had burns on his arm and leg.

Notice the NJ Attorney General is a Sikh. New Jersey is really, really getting Desified.

What if it originated in a bat cave rather than a US or Chinese lab? Vengeance is rarely a good idea. Justice is rarely found in this unjust world. Where is justice for the families of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 ? Sometimes you just have to accept that you are never going to know the truth and that even if you know it there is nothing that can be done about it.

Dr. Blair (Wilford Brimley) models the spread of contagion- from the movie, “The Thing.”

I don’t think you can call it hyper credulity while he is talking about probabilities, it is certainly extreme openness to unpalatable viewpoints, although without settling on them as the truth. He generalises broadly, but in the final analysis keeps his options open.

When potential deaths range from 5k to 5 million, you’ve got a bad model. Or, at the very least, shaky underlying assumptions.

That said, I still don’t get people’s obsession with it being a bioweapon. Occam’s Razor, it’s easier to explain this as a Chinese researcher who accidentally was exposed to a virus (either bioweapon or otherwise, like getting ahead of the curve on future pandemics) because of shoddy discipline, equipment, or guidelines. We already know that the Chinese aren’t the best at following procedures, or implementing bad procedures because orders came from the top.

That seems infinitely more likely than some bioweapon being released, especially without being able to foresee the exact consequences. It’s like if a country were to give dirty bombs to blindly-selected terrorist groups, with no idea who their targets might be.

That’s the nature of the emotion .Otherday , someone told the NPR about her support for Biden .Why was she ?
Her answer :” all these talks on Trump ! I just want him go away .”

It makes no sense . There is no doubt that incessant focus – 24/7 on Trump’s body brain family business escapades, tweet, misogyny , travel , immigration – everything has been exhausting . But was it his fault ? Not at all .
Has he done anything different from previous ? No.
Will Biden be different ? Not really .

Everywhere people follow the path of least resistance .

Blaming Trump is easy lazy exercise .

But the criticism of system is valid
Crtics evaluate USA from the knowledge and experiences they already have about US . They don’t compare to NK or UK or Nigeria . And they shouldn’t .
It’s the fall of US that makes peopel sad angry worried and confused .
So blaming US is perfectly logical and normal and valid .

The ‘virus’ is no big deal for people under retirement age

Just think of all the barely used Buicks that will come up for sale. There will be a glut for sure.

Oh wait. I drive a Buick.

The first US containment zone is a one mile area around a synagogue: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/albertsamaha/coronavirus-containment-zone-new-rochelle

Stall until somewhere in year 2 when a vaccine should become available.

Your optimism is heartening. Do you realise that they have been trying to develop vaccines for other corona virus strains for 17 years – without success.

In fact, their tests showed that the animals they were testing on died when they were later infected with a slightly different strain as their immune systems did not activate. That was a real shocker.

I am sorry. I could not find the link on Google. It has been buried below thousands of nonsense articles like this one:

Researchers rush to test coronavirus vaccine in people without knowing how well it works in animals

If it had happened on the Eastern Front, we would know about it. The Soviet Union wasn’t shy about highlighting Nazi atrocities, and German expellee groups aren’t shy about highlighting Soviet atrocities.

Census Day is three weeks away.

Don’t count on it. Everything is being canceled, postponed, whatever.

Maybe yes, maybe no.

In summary, with a range of possible deaths running from 5,000 to 5,000,000, what we choose to do matters. — OP

So all that to arrive at a simple and easily deduced conclusion — “…what we choose to do matters.” Well no shit sherlock, who’d a guessed.

One thing I’m reminded of here, as well as on other far less erudite blogs, is simply this — not everything is a conspiracy or the result of one. That’s not to say high level conspiracies do not exist, nor that governments, elites and power brokers do not take opportunistic advantage when accidental or unforeseen incidents occur. But given the complexity and contradictions of human existence and modern global social, economic and financial arraignments, unpredictable events will naturally happen and this is especially true in pioneering efforts on the frontiers of technology.

Jess Phillips 😂

Is there an outbreak in New Rochelle that isn’t getting much press? Why would the well-connected people there allow the “containment zone” otherwise?

Theories like this often require time machines.

Coronavirus was in Wu Han since at least early December, maybe earlier.

This reminds me of the old KGB conspiracy theory that the US developed AIDS in a lab in the 1970s.

Then it turned out that biopsies of frozen tissues showed that AIDS had been seen in England in the 1950s.

Oops.

Or the West African medicine men had treatments for AIDS (actually HIV-II, which was seen in the west later but was actually the earlier variant) for hundreds of years.

Oops.

Then a KGB agent, after the Wall fell, admitted to having started the rumor to discredit the US.

Oops.

When the KGB agent made his admission, I was teaching a science class at a college in NYC. I mentioned that the KGB agent admitted to making up the AIDS conspiracy theory to a college class. I pretty much had a revolt. Every African American student in the class was shouting at me. (A Nigerian student was on my side, because she knew the truth about the Nigerian medicine men.)

Some of the iSteve posters laughed at these silly left-wing Negroes when I posted this story in the past. No way a wise alt-right white would believe a silly conspiracy theory like that.

Oh, wait…

Ship Traffic Warning: humble nsa daily walks the 200′ sand cliffs overlooking the Straits of Georgia with his 70 lb terrier girlfriend. Normally, there are 2 to 4 ocean going cargo ships or super tankers within sight at any time, going to or from Seattle WA or Vancouver BC. For the last week, have not seen one tanker or cargo ship in the Straits…..not one! Looks like trade with Asia has collapsed entirely.

How to solve the Social Security insolvency issue?

Because the media hype is driving people to seek medical help that they wouldn’t ordinarily seek. Same here in the US. The actual number of serious cases that require treatment are not collapsing the system any more than the usual seasonal respiratory illness season.

That being said, Italy seems to have a little more than its fair share. But we will see after the dust settles, that excess deaths are minimal if not nonexistent.

Trump still looks and sounds much better than Biden.

Trump may lose if too many Trump voters die. this virus is projected to kill 700,000 elderly Americans this year , mostly whites since 82% of the elderly are white, it may well cost him the election in Pennsylvania , Michigan and Florida.

Last year alone 123,000 white Pennsylvanians died, while just 14,000 people of color died in PA. Trump won PA by 40,000 votes in 2016. There will be less white voters in Pennsylvania this year because the white population is in decline. Coronavirus will speed up the demographic changes, making it more difficult for The GOP to win elections.

well that’s a bit tough to do actually, so grow up or shut up

reread post 18 in which that writer asserts total costs of $1-2 trillion

do you really believe that health insurers are going to pay out on this thing to the point that it imperils their existence? They won’t pay and will settle it all 5 yrs later with the regulators.

Where I live, one of the health insurers that has been mentioned devotes vast resources to not paying claims. One of the others based in MN is nothing short of a well-documented criminal enterprise. You don’t work for them perchance, do you?

You really think they are going to just sit down and start writing checks individually when today they can estimate some sort of high-low bounds on their total liability? Said another way — when they can see it coming?

I strongly disagree. They fight like hell on the little stuff. No way they will pay out on this, not when they can see it coming.

You got out of bed today looking for an enemy, and I am not it. Look elsewhere.
Have a great day.

It was never going to be 5 million deaths. I don’t know how they arrived at these numbers. There may be a few thousand deaths in the United States. May not even get to 5,000.

But we’ll have pushed the total collapse of the economy. Worry about that!

They weren’t safe in Haskell county Kansas in 1915-1920

Stock and bond markets are predicting 2nd and 3rd Q recession. Your observation seems to match, even if anecdotally. Big ones like Boeing, GE etc. may need bailout a la 2009 due to air traffic collapse. Cruise business is probably dead for good. OTOH, Biotek may get a boost when it becomes obvious that Bio manufacturing is critical to prevent population die off due to pandemics.

Is there any chance of the proven Chinese style quarantine being carried out in the USA? It seems to be a must right now.

It is better to be over cautious than to be caught unprepared and pay the price with deaths.

Lots of people here denying the potential spread of the virus because they think that the exponential growth won’t happen. It will. There’s nothing to stop it because there’s no immunity. The virus is highly contagious anyway, you just have to look at Italy. All that the lock downs will achieve is to give us time so as to not overwhelm the system. The flu hits 10% of the population even though many people take vaccines which will stop the transmission and many others have built up immunity. Until we get to 60% of people (or a credible vaccine) there’s no immunity. You will probably get this. Someone you know might die.

In this scenario, Evil versus Evil, my weasel paranoid brain leads me to believe COVID-19 was created in a bio-warfare lab.

The history of millions of years of calamities visited upon man and beast alike by Mother Nature suggests that you are reading into man a mastery of the elements that simply doesn’t exist, and may not exist, ever.

Ron isn’t really white and he’s not really right wing. But you are right buying into silly conspiracies is part of the human condition.

How to solve the Social Security insolvency issue?

Are you suggesting there was a mass conspiracy by the evil Illuminati to use this bio weapon to solve the SS insolvency issue and make boring, late model American cars widely available to millennials?

I had a very similar experience. Large-box store. But happened in the produce section, and the product was stuff like pineapples, not meat. And at a U.S. west-coast airport first week of February, I saw at least one, seems like probably two or more, protective-masked Asian man (men?) somewhere between the gates and the street, not carrying anything (such as luggage). My memory is that he/they wasn’t/weren’t headed in any particular place. My memory is clear that his knees were bent and feet a few feet apart, and his arms were moving. My thought was, “that’s an effort to incite panic about that
virus over in China.” And I didn’t want to give it much thought. This was first week of February, 2020.

Err TC is really angry at the US Dumb State or Deep State’s outsourcing so many industrial ecosystems to China.

That is being done to increase the wealth of the Deep State.

The Chinese pretend that they are “a US strategic partner..”

It is not China’s fault that the US is using them as a cheap labor source.

I direct you to comment 136. Openness to unpalatable views (which bear in mind Unz would love it if it were proven the US did this so it is more like wishcasting) would also concede that more palatable and likely options are possible.

For instance let’s say you come home and your wife is unexpectedly not there. If one person says her car is in the driveway she’s probably over at the neighbors and another person goes your wife is off banging the pool boy. And he then precedes to overlook all evidence to the contrary- he isn’t just keeping you open to unpalatable possibilities. he’s trolling you/ he is warped by hatred for you.

The market melt-down is being assisted by two things. Older retired Boomers own a lot of bonds. Some of are madly selling these bonds to get cash they intend to invest in the stock market once it hits bottom. They see a big opportunity to make a ton of money, and they’re right. They could make a killing.

Secondly, Democratic activist investors want the market to crash. These are big investors who would are large-scale Democratic party donors. They want Trump out of office, and they’re trying to help the crash along by selling everything they’ve got. They really don’t want the market to recover before the election. They want to see Biden in office and market recovery under him, not Trump.

If we don’t quarantine, we’ll take our lumps more quickly and the market may be back up significantly in the Fall before election time. This is what Democrats dread.

However, anyone selling the market now is going to have to pay a sizeable capital gains tax. They’re not going to like tax time next year, although it will be good for the US Treasury.

Well, they did — sorta. They were warned about those wet markets but did nothing. This was totally avoidable. Many Americans will die due to their negligence.

There is no evidence that is how Covid-19 started…or that it actually started in China.

As I have pointed out before, the only way conservatives can avoid media bans is to be seen as useful to the ruling class.

Your argument is conservatives should comply with the MSM propaganda to gain favor…ridiculous.

Because fear makes the citizens of the World and the US accept changes against their interests that they would not normally do so.

off-guardian.com : “REALITY CHECK-Coronavirus Fear Porn”
“Generally speaking, fear is always useful. If you can frighten people they do whatever you say. A fact known to leaders and propagandists for centuries.” As a result of the Coronavirus pandemic people are more likely to accept the following :
1. Cashless society – China is already burning cash and the US is refusing cash from China as it may carry the virus
2.More cooperation between countries to fight the virus leading to more globalization and eventually a one world government
3.Mandatory vaccinations with no exceptions for philosphical and religious reasons (see what just happened to a referendum in Maine on this subject
4.Increased spending on wasteful medical projects to the benefit of the pharmaceutical industrial complex (PIC) . Trump just signed an $8.3 billion spending bill which will mostly benefit “big pharma” and line the pockets of the PIC.
5.More surveillance , more censorship, less freedom to assemble and to travel.
It’s the Hegelian dialectic at work – PROBLEM-REACTION-SOLUTION

Well, there’s a pretty convincing case that the Soviets used Tularemia at Stalingrad, though that’s not well known. The question is why no use of poison gas? It’s a question right up there with the German declaration of War on the US.

I concur with Ron. I analyze data for a living, and also I think all world events need to be looked at in the “cui bono” framework. To summarize:

1) the timing of release (New Year)
2) the places of release (two enemies, one disobedient child)
3) the genetic diversity of each release (implying lab production, no time to evolve that much diversity)
4) the circumstantial evidence of presence of enemies at time of release (Wuhan)
5) the apparent gene editing which includes AIDS sequences (weapon lab)
6) the prior attacks on the poultry industry (Iran and China) and pork industry (China only, Iran does not eat much pork) in the last 6-9 months
7) and of course cui bono (apart from enemies being hit, a justification for an unavoidable market crash as the repo crisis continues unabated)

all help define a sharp probability peak. I dare say Ron underestimates the probability, it is higher than 99% IMHO. Just the random probability that 2 out of 3 worst enemies are hit in the first wave, with 210+ countries available, is of order 0.01%. Why Italy? Perhaps the same reason why, as Ron recounts, Frum included North Korea in the “Axis of Evil”. To confuse. And also an ideal place to generate a market crash. Milan’s stockmarket has lost 30% value in just two days.

The Chinese now seem to believe that this was a US attack: https://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-official-says-us-army-maybe-brought-coronavirus-to-wuhan-2020-3

Which is the world’s scariest graph: this one or the one depicting future African population growth?

Just the economic impact on US based corporations renders the use of this as a bioweapon by the USA on another state as one the worst decisions ever. It’s a big sh*t sandwich and every nation has to take a bite.

Cui bono? Who benefits? Always the most important question.

Remove the respective national governments from the equation, and think of a global group of ultra wealthy, non state actors, who have the resources to manipulate markets thus the juice to massively short markets and then buy it all up cheaply, and that would be who benefits.

A group like that would resemble the fabled Phoenix. Burning the old, to be born new, from the ashes (wealth) of the old. Empires come and go, but they always survive. That would be the group that would deploy a global pandemic as a social engineering tool.

Why Trump Will Win — Green Voters are at Risk

How many potential DNC voters will be claimed by Unclean Green?:(1)

The COVID-19 outbreak is giving new meaning to those “sustainable” shopping bags that politicians and environmentalists have been so eager to impose on the public. These reusable tote bags can sustain the COVID-19 and flu viruses—and spread the viruses throughout the store.

Researchers have been warning for years about the risks of these bags spreading deadly viral and bacterial diseases, but public officials have ignored their concerns, determined to eliminate single-use bags and other plastic products despite their obvious advantages in reducing the spread of pathogens.

Will hip, urban, “bring your own bags”, food boutiques eradicate DNC voting vegans with low performing immune systems? Let’s be honest, have you ever seen a GOP vegan?

When will COVID-19 get its new name?

The GREEN Death

Inquiring Minds Want to Know!

😷 ROTFL 😷
__________

(1) https://www.city-journal.org/banning-single-use-plastic-bags-covid-19

What will be the death total there?

“Coronavirus will speed up the demographic changes, making it more difficult for The GOP to win elections.”

Of course, it still depends on how things work out for exact numbers, but still.

Top comment, IMHO.

Lol maybe the cornovirus spawned from the batshit accumulating in Ron Unz’s brain.

Keep in mind guys Ron Unz was kicked out as publisher of the American Conservative for his inability to cover the funds he promised in order to become publisher. We know China has been throwing a lot of money around in the west buying up journos and professors. Ockham’s Razor is if the guy blaming the US for coronovirus has a history of money problems he’s probably getting his shekels… excuse me…his rice bowl filled by the PRC.

The scenario you describe involves “abductive logic”, introduced by the great American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. It’s the logic of detectives – generating hypotheses from the conclusion. It’s the reasoning Sherlock Holmes engages in in his stories, although Doyle erroneously describes Holmes’s method as “deductive”. Deduction derives conclusions from hypotheses. In abduction, you reason backwards from the conclusion to the hypothesis. You generate hypotheses that would explain the conclusion.

Ron is being extremely logical here, it’s just that he’s engaging in a type of logic that most people don’t recognize, abductive logic. You’re engaged in deductive reasoning – you’ve assumed a certain premise or hypothesis and have deduced a conclusion from it e.g., it’s more likely that the wife would be at the neighbor’s, so if she’s unexpectedly not home, she’s probably at the neighbor’s. Ron is doing abduction e.g. the wife’s unexpectedly not home, the pool boy’s shorts are at home, the pool boy’s phone number is in the home telephone’s call log, the wife’s not picking up her phone, etc., and generating plausible hypotheses that would explain this conclusion e.g. the wife’s at the neighbor’s, or she’s banging the pool boy, or she’s gone for a walk, etc.

It is easy to unwittingly and mainly unconsciously ascribe intent to the virus.
The virus wants to reproduce and to survive as a “species” (I know that is the wrong word but do not know the correct generic word for a virus).
It has no “intention” to be more or less “deadly.”
To humans or any other host or victim.

Dresden.
Nothing more to say.

Exactement!

Carlson is choosing his battles.
He probably has to do some China bashing as a penance for the interview with Roger Waters, giving Waters a platform to defend Assange.

First put this link at Giraldi’s Corona article.
Will repost here.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/china-coronavirus-shocking-update/5705196

Pulmonary problems given to vaping came and went in sept?

5ds

These frightening mortality rate numbers are unlikely to hold. The true case fatality rate, known as CFR, of this virus is likely to be far lower than current reports suggest. Even some lower estimates, such as the 1 percent death rate recently mentioned by the directors of the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, likely substantially overstate the case.

In past epidemics, initial CFRs were floridly exaggerated. For example, in the 2009 H1N1 pandemic some early estimates were 10 times greater than the eventual CFR, of 1.28 percent. Epidemiologists think and quibble in terms of numerators and denominators—which patients were included when fractional estimates were calculated, which weren’t, were those decisions valid—and the results change a lot as a result. We are already seeing this. In the early days of the crisis in Wuhan, China, the CFR was more than 4 percent. As the virus spread to other parts of Hubei, the number fell to 2 percent. As it spread through China, the reported CFR dropped further, to 0.2 to 0.4 percent. As testing begins to include more asymptomatic and mild cases, more realistic numbers are starting to surface.

In China, 9 million people die per year, which comes out to 25,000 people every single day, or around 1.5 million people over the past two months alone. A significant fraction of these deaths results from diseases like emphysema/COPD, lower respiratory infections, and cancers of the lung and airway whose symptoms are clinically indistinguishable from the nonspecific symptoms seen in severe COVID-19 cases. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, the death rate from COVID-19 in China spiked precisely among the same age groups in which these chronic diseases first become common.

During the peak of the outbreak in China in January and early February, around 25 patients per day were dying with SARS-CoV-2. Most were older patients in whom the chronic diseases listed above are prevalent. Most deaths occurred in Hubei province, an area in which lung cancer and emphysema/COPD are significantly higher than national averages in China, a country where half of all men smoke. How were doctors supposed to sort out which of those 25 out of 25,000 daily deaths were solely due to coronavirus, and which were more complicated?

Italy has one of the oldest populations on the planet and experience 2000 deaths each day. The US is also aging and has 7500 deaths a day. Most of the deaths in both places are elderly in Italy the oldest patients are being denied care due to a shortage of icu beds increasing mortality rates while in the US many deaths were residents of nursing homes, and the most debilitated of the elderly.

Complete overreaction by people I think. The elderly should be fearful, but not anyone under 60. The consequences of these overreactions will cause far worse problem for society than deaths from the virus. How many people ignore heart attack symptoms for fear of virus. How many suicides and bankruptcy due to financial problems caused by loss of income. How many die due to lack of medicine caused by supply disruptions?

But your own Lance Welton says only East Asians will die. He’s said is many times in several articles here on this site. So which is it?

Lance says only East Asians die. Make up your minds.

The only thing engineered about coronavirus is the panic, and subsequent shutdown of American society.

It’s been pointed out before, but…..sighhh…. apparently it bears repeating;

Swine flu, on Obama’s watch, infected 60+ millon Americans and killed nearly 13,000 of us. Over 1000 were already dead before Big Daddy O could be arsed to address it as a public-health crisis. Worldwide, more than 600,000 people died.

Nobody jumped out of windows. No industries collapsed. Harvard and Yale did not shut down and send their charges home. No major sports leagues cancelled their seasons. Toilet paper was abundant on the shelves, as was hand sanitizer. The stock market was already in the toilet (but then, nobody bats 1000). The NY Times did not publish editorials entitled “Let’s just call it Obamavirus.” (They wouldn’t have dared; nobody would’ve.) People didn’t make great big blouse-wearing ninnies of themselves invoking 9/11, the London Blitz, or the Black Plague.

Now….given those body counts two paragraphs back, perhaps some hysteria and extreme measures would have been warranted. It’s likely many lives could have been spared. But that would have meant someone, or several someones, publicly suggesting that the Great and Mighty Obama was dragging his feet during a major emergency, and….uhhh… do you recall what 2009 was like? Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize was the least of the adulation and hero-worship he received, 99% of it from a starry-eyed media elite. Atheists one and all, they chalked up the swine flu to an act of God. And like that – the memory-hole yawned, and beckoned, and was fed. (Pardon? Swine who?)

Who knows? Perhaps if this latest pathogen were called “bat flu”, or “snake flu”, instead of being designated as Covid-19 – which smacks of a lab-engineered bioweapon out of Lang’s METROPOLIS – saner if not cooler heads might prevail. (Then again, had “swine flu” been monolithically referred to as Covid-14, or 17, or what-have-you, perhaps Big Daddy O would have been a one-term Messiah.)

As a hated ‘boomer’ (and one diagnosed with COPD besides), I represent one of the few people really and truly at high risk by the march of what has quickly become The Great Anti-White Hope; but from where I sit, the only lesson to be drawn from this epidemiological disaster is that if you continue believing that “Big Brother” is the government in some fashion – and the various weavers and tenders of the official narratives its subservient handmaidens – you are woefully….and probably fatally….behind the times. For one thing, there’s no one left in either party with that level of evil or cunning. Like Pogo never lived long enough to say, We have met the enemy; and he’s coming from inside the house!

A bioweapon.
Intentional or accident?

If I remember attention to vaping
as a cause of pulmonary problems
came before anything in China noticed.

Attention span for vaping problem short.

Definitely from Detrick,
Question: accident or intentional?

Read link at my comment #167.

Previous comment fine.
Maybe a word or two off.

5ds

De deaf plague comin’!

(stock up on toilet paper)

I’m going to assume from all the details you have an intimate knowledge of the pool boy banging wife- far more than life long bachelor Ron would have. Ill add that you are confusing inductive and deductive but whatever that’s a garden path discussion.

Abduction which is kind of a fancy way of saying spitballing with Ockham’s Razor is precisely not what Ron is doing. He is in fact starting from a premise- my paymasters in Beijing (I’m abducting here) are saying run inteference for China and blame America. China land of the wet markets and dirty dirty people doesn’t need help from the cia conjuring up contagion. Add in the fact that Wuhan is home to chemical testing facility and what do you know- it isn’t actually that plausible that the cia was responsible. I’ll add that Ron claims that Iran was targeted as well- if the method of infection is US soldiers in country then that’s an issue for his Iran hypothesis.

Ron and you hate America- it’s fine but don’t pretend you are being objective and just following the facts. Someone truly committed to abduction would entertain the possibility that a country suffering from growing internal discontent would benefit from a nasty diseases scare justifying quarantine and discounting public protest. But that is not what China is paying for.

Lol where do you think Ron got it from. Unz.com exists because Ron couldn’t pay his bills at the american conservative. Where does a guy with cash flow problems, animus for the United States, and a (small) media platform go to get his rice bowl filled?

Imagine you have a cold, a bit fewer while driving to get some food and got into a checkpoint of fewer control. They force you to make a covid 19 test…which is positive. You get into a hospital and they lock you into an Incubator tent. You remember that you are not Jack Nicholson and cant make a party there.
You have almost nothing to do so you start to watch your breathing.
You remember that your female Yoga teacher told you to breath quiet and deep.

You are surprised that your breathing goes more heavy and a kind of breathlessness starts. You try to breath deeper but after a while you hardly can open your lungs.
Panic and fear comes now with every heartbeat….they told you: you have a deadly virus! They give you oxygen but after two days your breathing musculature and the lungs are inflamed.

As a breathing therapist I can tell you that this progress and symptoms I have watched also on dozens of AIDS patients…..AFTER they have been tested positive!

All this symptoms are not induced by a virus! The virus is just a marker.
We have here the same fraud as the HIV causes AIDS theory which was such a incrediable success for the big pharma and their media & pressitutes.

How such a strategy works you can see here at the “EVENT 201, a global pandemic exercise held on 18.October 2019 (in partnership with the Melinda & Bill Gates foundation) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OYryQuzRuM&feature=youtu.be

The really funny part is the implication that Christian children are now so rare that it’s a consuming task to find one.

But then perhaps it’s just a matter of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” which we know was the case with Weinstein, Epstein, et al.

They may “Have More Fun” but they’re disappearing from the planet, unless you count the bleached variety.

I’ve been having fun with that one, searching the MSM reports for the text string “syn” –and coming up blank of course.

Also fascinating is that the closure was announced with 48 hours advance notice. Very effective.

Yeah, the demographics do look disturbing. And speaking of old people, I noticed the Dems gave Biden a shot of B-12 and who knows what else and sent him out there today trying to act presidential. So they see an opening and want to cash in

Well put, Achmed.

Based on extreme common sense:

China didn’t create it since it killed 3000+ Chinese and cratered their economy, unless they are extraordinarily brilliant (to synthesize a new strain) and extraordinarily stupid (to prevent it from killing themselves and destroying themselves economically) simultaneously. Doesn’t add up.

Also: They sequenced the RNA and gave recipe for test kits to WHO within a few weeks of diagnosing the first patients.

US didn’t create if it kills 3000+ Americans (likely to happen) and craters the economy (already happened), unless we are extraordinarily brilliant (to synthesize a new strain) and extraordinarily stupid (to prevent it from killing ourselves and destroying our economy) simultaneously. Doesn’t add up.

Also, it has been 10 weeks since the first Chinese infection and we don’t have a clue how to mass produce the tests. That doesn’t sound like mastery over bio-weaponry if we can’t hack a lab test at scale.

So, it is not a bio-weapon.

Might have something to do with the warm weather. I’ve read that the virus doesn’t like temperature above 86F, and doesn’t like sunshine. It might also be why the infection rate is quite low in Southeast Asia, Central America and other tropical countries.

Why is the virus spreading faster on Americas East coast than the West? Last week California had ~60 who had tested infected, and New York about half that. Currently New York has more who have tested positive, ~200; California less than 200. Are more New Yorkers getting tested than Californians? California’s population is about double that of New York, 40M vs 20M.

4D chess

corona outbreak

census cancelled

drumpf redoes the census this time with a citizenship question

MAGA

While the coronavirus might be novel, the situation where ventilators run out during an epidemic is not new, it just hasn’t happened recently. In fact some fairly important advances in ICU care were spurred by these shortages.

The canonical example is the Copenhagen polio epidemic of 1952. A good synopsis can be found here:

https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/japplphysiol.00184.2005

Essentially what happened was this: the epidemiologists at the local children’s hospital noted an outbreak of polio. Their early data indicated that there were going to be more kids with respiratory failure than they had iron lungs. Iron lungs, at that time, were the only way to ventilate people in respiratory failure.

Iron lungs use negative pressure ventilation–they reduce the pressure outside the body and you suck air in, just like when you use your diaphragm to breathe naturally. Recently anesthesiologists had started ventilating patients during surgery by inserting a tube in the trachea and forcing air in using a positive pressure ventilator (actually you don’t even need a ventilator, just a rubber bag will do…) It was believed that you couldn’t ventilate somebody long term using positive pressure ventilation because it wasn’t ‘natural’–it was only safe for a relatively short time during surgery.

But, they had no choice because the lungs were going to run out. So they made a plan that when the iron lungs ran out they would get anesthesia to intubate the patients and squeeze bags. Their projections of the magnitude of the epidemic proved accurate and soon they ran out of iron lungs, and started implementing the plan to bag ventilate people. Of course, to make this work somebody has to squeeze the bag 24/7 so they shut down the local med school and made all the med students squeeze bags in shifts until the epidemic had passed.

Their mortality rates were excellent and it turned out that positive pressure worked just fine. So that was the end of the iron lung.

In the hospital we have plenty of ambu-bags and jackson-reese bags, far more than we have ventilators, since these are disposable items used for patient transport. So if we run out of ventilators, that is a backup option. But, you will need people to squeeze bags…

We in Canada are 20 years ahead of you on that front.

Enjoy the… wonderful diversity that these fine people bring to your country 🙂

Full text (380 pages) of Beyond The Tragic Vision: The Quest for Identity in the Nineteenth Century at:

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015008194832&view=1up&seq=9

See Ron’s comment #137 above. He explicitly says he doesn’t see any real evidence that it’s a bioweapon attack.

Ron has mentioned other hypotheses in some of the other threads such as the Chinese government releasing it to crush internal dissent or to reduce its elderly population and associated retirement costs.

Most normal people stick to assuming certain mainstream premises, and deduce conclusions from those, or they abduce hypotheses that are within the mainstream to explain a set of circumstances. People like Ron who abduce and discuss a wider range of possible hypotheses, which are necessarily going to include less respectable ones, come across as autistic and are off-putting to normal people.

Is the country that is suffering growing internal dissent the US, or China. The Bio warefare hypothesis is weak on both sides, but it definitely wasn’t the Chinese. Not deliberately anyhoo. Infecting your own people makes no sense. And if they did how could their slow reaction to the virus be explained?

I’m not saying the US did this (it would be rogue actors within the deep state if it were true) but it is the kind of thing that the us would do.

“Complete overreaction by people I think.”

Absolutely no question about it. I personally would like to thank Ron Unz, Steve Sailer, and anyone else that I didn’t mention here at TUR for assisting in whipping up hysteria over this latest world ending disease (Sars, Swine, Bird, Cow, Zika, Ebola were all also world ending diseases that failed to live up to the hype, but hey at least a bunch of MSM outlets were able to rake in some add revenue, and I’m sure Big Pharma made a few dollars!) Your efforts rival those of the MSM in generating unnecessary panic in the citizenry

Yes, this new virus will kill people with weak immune systems/poor respiratory systems, and that is unfortunate. But now millions of normies who don’t have bunkers to hole up in get to feel the real effects of the fallout. Fear of liability is now forcing everyone to close their businesses down. Schools are closing even though young people are relatively safe. Job sites are closing down. So now how many hundreds of thousands of people are going to be out of work because our aging elite are cowardly nanny-staters who also get some perverted pleasure out of manipulating the masses?

Every time one of these exotic viruses come along it’s played up to be the end of the fucking world – because this time it really is the end of the world – and every time it’s a bust. So much for pattern recognition.

I’m not a domain expert, but given the profusion of truly professional-grade trolling, I’ll venture a bit of logical exposition.

It either is or isn’t a bioweapon. None of us here have the data to make that determination. Fewer even have the expertise needed to parse it even if we had it.

Saker and others demand proof before allowing consideration of the possibility of it being a bioweapon, but is it really so much more of an extraordinary claim that this could be a bio-weapon, given the relevant literature, documented history, etc

We could just as well demand proof that it was natural before even being willing to allow consideration of the scenario as a thought experiment.

Given all the misinformation flying around, if there was evidence of it being a bioweapon, that information might surpressed. And vice versa.

There have been reports biomed research finding unnatural attributes in the Covid19 variants — there have been several variants around the world, something that may or may not be accounted for by natural mutation.

I think that pretty much sums it up. There is no way for larping internet queens to know if it was or it wasn’t a bioweapon. Some here would like us to pretend that the consideration of the possibility of it being a bioweapon is equivalent to considering “comets to cause disease”. Rhetorically speaking, who is stretching credulity here?

Intellectual dishonesty has been defined as the avoidance of the central or important point in a discussion. A central and important point: If it was a bioweapon, and the target wished to retaliate symmetrically with a racially-tuned bioweapon (according to the literature such things are are developed), they would not accuse but simply release their retaliatory agent in such a way as to appear an organic growth of the original agent (as per the fake main narrative).
We would see exactly what we’ve seen, ‘the’ virus spreads to Israel, Italy, USA etc. It would be a different family of virii actually.

I notice Saker (and fellow travellers on this issue here) avoids:

1. the well-documented angle of racially-tailored bioweapon research. He’ll say “obviously no one would attack with bioweapons because it will leak back” which is avoidance of this point, and not true, especially if there are bunkers for political elites and they don’t care about the population in general.
2. the obvious possiblility of multiple variants being employed during a military-political bioweapon engagement, both by the attacker and defender.
3. How obviously batshit stupid and crazy a political elite clique would have to be to run 9/11 — is it really so much greater in this case?
4. Saker (and local equivs) claim it’s not deadly enough to be a weapon, ignoring the point that a politcally/economically valuable weapon wouldn’t kill so many so fast, it’s enough to have threshold levels for disruption.

I don’t think it is credible Saker(and thread-local equivalents) doesn’t see these obvious holes in their so-called arguments.

Do I think it was a bioweapon? It doesn’t matter what I think at this point.

What I think is important is that we’ve passed a Rubicon in the last few weeks. I’ve seen it in the alternative media, ZeroHedge getting taken over, the blogs generally are getting more boring. Unz has this silly but valuable site and it is getting inundated with trolls. I bet the trolls and operatives here outnumber the curious 10 to 1.

And ‘curious’ is all we are. People trying to make some sense of their world as it proceeds to circle the drain around them.

What we’re seeing in terms of this Covid19 thing is exactly what we should expect to see if it was actually biowarfare. Biowarfare is considered valuable for creating confusion and sowing disruption, it’s very high in plausible deniability.

This could be a naturally occuring family of virii, coming out and attacking the world at a rather convenient time of economic system implosion, ongoing hybrid wars, etc, etc. I kinda feel like this is the more extraordinary claim in this case therefore requiring extraordinary evidence, but maybe that’s subjective. Anyway it’s my opinion.

So I guess I’m leaning towards it being a bioweapon, but open to being totally wrong on that guess.

If it is a bioweapon, who done it? No fucking idea. None. The more I think about it, the more suspects emerge. Again, in this case, a larping internet douche shouldn’t feel defeated at failing to solve this one on the data, it’s just not there. Could be USA, China, any of the lower state or non-state actors… Could have been started by one, and then we see retaliation but interpret it according to the main narrative, as part of the original pandemic. If there is a biowar, there will be different bugs flying in different directions, even if the main narrative is still playing the fairy-tale of it being a singular bug spreading organically in a natural pandemic.

However, even though we can’t know, superpower-level intelligence agencies together with big-data analytics probably have a very good picture of things going on, so we’ll pick up snippets of indirect information through the media.

In general it seems media is under more of a control attack. We may have less and less useful media going forward. If they blow Unz out of the water… ZeroHedge is basically MSM for people who want to feel a bit edgy at this point. That’s me reading the headlines in the last few weeks, they’ve really gone over the top. The few bloggers around seem to be well-managed, like small noisy dogs.

Unz is clearly under attack in this thread. So that is in itself indicative of something. The intellectual dishonesty on the issue from Saker and actual trolls is likewise indicative of something.

When 9/11 first happened I thought they might have allowed a real attack to take place; it was a long time before I accepted the idea that they would pre-plant explosives, for exactly the reasons Saker gives for discounting the possibility of them considering a biowar attack — too much risk of getting caught! Is it more or less risky to get caught murdering thousands of innocent Americans versus getting caught employing a bioweapon on a strategic rival? I don’t know. This is another bit of evidence that Saker is not being really intellectually honest. Maybe with good intentions, I don’t mean to impute otherwise. But truth has an end of its own, and a means to go with it.

“Do you realise that they have been trying to develop vaccines for other corona virus strains for 17 years – without success.”

But part of the reason for the lack of success is quite possibly the simple fact that the funding simply dried up, so that the development stopped. Moreover, in the case of SARS and MERS, both viruses simply stopped being a major issue without any vaccine. Whereas new diseases like ebola and zika generated more attention, and received more funding.

According to the respective wikipedia pages for both MERS and SARS,

Camels are believed to be involved in [the spread of MERS] to humans but it is unclear how. Spread between humans typically requires close contact with an infected person. Its spread is uncommon outside of hospitals. Thus, its risk to the global population is currently deemed to be fairly low.

As for SARS, “No cases…have been reported worldwide since 2004.”

I guess old people still drive American cars in the Midwest but on the coasts they switched to Camrys 20 years ago or more, after their last Oldsmobile was a lemon.

How do older whites in urban areas vote? Would the GOP be harmed by an outbreak in the NYC / NJ area, or the SF area, or the Boston area?

My guess is that older whites in those liberal areas might just be voting Dem. If they can contain the outbreak to the large cities the GOP might even benefit.

Of course, if it gets out of hand and sweeps across the heartland the GOP is truly fucked. Especially in Florida, NC, Georgia, and Texas, where old white people are right wing as fuck.

The main difference that I can see is that Italy was already in the grip of a TB epidemic, and that was opportunistically changed into a Corona epidemic. It was just a matter of changing the wording of the press releases.

So, China isn’t a horrible, dystopian authoritarian state? It’s totally fine that they make 95% of our antibiotics?

Well, that’s one less thing to worry about Thx.

…destablizing that it totally disrupts economic activity, which, presumably is the whole point of what they’re all about.

Actually, the point is about “market correction” necessary for the system to go on. Boom/bust circle thing. Time for the “bust”.

How to do it?
a)Admit that system isn’t quite O.K?
b)Admit that the checks and balances done after 2008 are incorrect?
And all that in the current social-political climate, when the proles ARE asking some questions?
No way.
c) Use a flu strain and PUMP IT UP. When the economy “corrects” itself the virus will take all the blame. And, of course, as a bonus, more system control will be imposed on societies.

Now, you tell me it’s not working like charm?

There is one thing I am trying to figure out.
Some projections are that the “crunch” will result in 0.5 % GDP growth this year. Now….what that exactly means, for a common “deplorable”, is something I am trying to picture.
Or…how much of job loss, mortgage defaulting, loss of spending power….etc….it will be?
In simple terms: what will the cost of recession for us little guys?
I know it won’t hurt the top.

Did those three Americans hundred troops drop in for a surprise party with the ayatollahs after they poisoned the Chinese?

One coincidence I’ve noticed is that whenever a proposal to stem the impact of globalism’s tip of the spear, immigration, is put forth little Ronnie always seems to be on the globalists side. Strange that.

I guess old people still drive American cars in the Midwest but on the coasts they switched to Camrys 20 years ago or more, after their last Oldsmobile was a lemon.

Buick, however, is a top brand in China. It’s not your Chairman’s Oldsmobile.

Hands Off! These 6 Buicks Are Only For China

A large chunk of larger employer sponsored health insurance is fully paid for by the employer. In which case the ‘insurer’ is just a 3rd party administrator. There is no risk transfer. So why dont they simply administer the plan themselves. One (of several) reasons is that saying no is a miserable job. Employees hate their own insurance company, resent paperwork, dislike deductibles and copays, and on and on. The employer implies that they are customers, just like the employees.

Secondly, the insurers have their secret handshake deals with providers. So they won’t pay large markups on this stuff. Nothing will be paid for at list prices.

As far as multi employer plans and individual plans, and residual market schemes – I dont know, but the same basic dynamic is at work.

I live about one mile from the containment zone. Went to the local urgent care facility 2 days ago. Presented with the identical symptoms I’ve read are signs of covid-19. Massively high fever, chills and body aches. They didn’t have any CV tests on hand, but they also told me “I didn’t have it” because I didn’t have a sore throat.

It seems to me that the doctors are doing triage. They know this thing spreads like wildfire in dried out woodlands. But it’s not nearly as lethal as feared. They just don’t want to have the system overwhelmed. Thus, we won’t be able to read the CDC tallies of this anymore. They’ve given up on counting them. Which prompts the question, how can they ever know if containment is working?

If the number of infections continue to grow exponentially, there could be 50 million infections by late April, and if the death rate is 1-2%, then a million deaths are not out of the question. Obviously, the hope is that the precautions now being taken will break the exponential curve.

“They have touted diversity and the free interchange of people – cornerstones of the neo-liberal order – their whole lives. Well, the free interchange of diverse pathogens is a consequence of that neo-liberal order.”

Agree. What irony if Krugman himself fell victim to Krugman’s Plague.

“Subtle is the Lord, but malicious He is not.” – Albert Einstein

Wow.

Good comment, but unless your name is Jeremy, it’s not yours.

Rather, it looks like you did a chop job on and plagiarized parts of Jeremey Samuel Faust’s original article in Slate: “COVID-19 Isn’t as Deadly as We Think” without giving any attribution or indication that your comment is someone else’s work.

Additionally, you left out probably the most significant parts of Faust’s article:

But the most straightforward and compelling evidence that the true case fatality rate of SARS-CoV-2 is well under 1 percent comes not from statistical trends and methodological massage, but from data from the Diamond Princess cruise outbreak and subsequent quarantine off the coast of Japan.

A quarantined boat is an ideal—if unfortunate—natural laboratory to study a virus. Many variables normally impossible to control are controlled. We know that all but one patient boarded the boat without the virus. We know that the other passengers were healthy enough to travel. We know their whereabouts and exposures. While the numbers coming out of China are scary, we don’t know how many of those patients were already ill for other reasons. How many were already hospitalized for another life-threatening illness and then caught the virus? How many were completely healthy, caught the virus, and developed a critical illness? In the real world, we just don’t know.

[…]

This is where the Diamond Princess data provides important insight. Of the 3,711 people on board, at least 705 have tested positive for the virus (which, considering the confines, conditions, and how contagious this virus appears to be, is surprisingly low). Of those, more than half are asymptomatic, while very few asymptomatic people were detected in China. This alone suggests a halving of the virus’s true fatality rate.

On the Diamond Princess, six deaths have occurred among the passengers, constituting a case fatality rate of 0.85 percent. Unlike the data from China and elsewhere, where sorting out why a patient died is extremely difficult, we can assume that these are excess fatalities—they wouldn’t have occurred but for SARS-CoV-2. The most important insight is that all six fatalities occurred in patients who are more than 70 years old. Not a single Diamond Princess patient under age 70 has died. If the numbers from reports out of China had held, the expected number of deaths in those under 70 should have been around four.

https://slate.com/technology/2020/03/coronavirus-mortality-rate-lower-than-we-think.html

Beyond that, we have no way of knowing the general health of the six patients who died aboard the Diamond Princess. “Healthy enough to travel” says a little, but did they smoke, drink, etc.? In Wuhan, it is said that there are high rates of smoking among men, much less among women, but there is only a 106:100 ratio among patients, men:women.

I have no desire to debate him. I do not take his conspiracy theories seriously to the point of considering them to be worthy of debate. Even engaging with them is giving them more credit than they are worth, which is nothing. Besides Passover is coming up and I busy working on finding a Christian child so I can make my matzos.

I am always dazzled by the exalted.
Especially one who makes humor from
the Chosen’s historical, ugly peculiarity.

I’ve read, somewhere, this tactic is called, “deflecting truth”.

Oh,

the brilliance melted my secretary’s glass eye.

5ds

Unz.com exists because Ron couldn’t pay his bills at the american conservative. Where does a guy with cash flow problems, animus for the United States, and a (small) media platform go to get his rice bowl filled?

I think it’s an excellent move. Better unz.com than a sickly version of National Review that insults its audience. I don’t agree with the blog sponsor on just about everything. On this subject, I think it was a genius move.

They weren’t safe in Haskell county Kansas in 1915-1920

Yup.

And there are plenty of Chinese who have ties to Wuhan that have and will travel all over the US in their Mega and Lucky Star buses.

I’ve been following this guy on Iran and he has been money on just about everything. He says Rohani has Covid-19.

https://mobile.twitter.com/hectorology/status/1238232015859642369

Bingo! You got it.

? Unz wrote:

“There are something like 250,000 Chinese living and working in Italy, mostly in the Lombardy area, and probably some of them carried the virus back from China after Lunar New Year. It’s the same sort of process that is starting to cause infections in various other European countries and the US.”

Anyone that wants to see China and (notably) Iran weakened. Anyone that wants a depression to buy back all of those assets at a fraction of the cost – while still collecting interest from debtors, just like last time and the time before.

Who could it be now?

This is the entire narrative of the right wing media

This is just cobblers.

Here is a video showing CNN using those phrases for the last few weeks until like everything, it simply became another vector for an attack on Trump.

This is brutal pic.twitter.com/bHTRnr2ypG

— Peter J. Hasson (@peterjhasson) March 12, 2020

Are you sure about that?

Here is video of some scientists from Wuhan lab collecting bats to make vaccines, and worried about infection…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=ovnUyTRMERI&feature=emb_logo

The only thing engineered about coronavirus is the panic, and subsequent shutdown of American society.

It’s been pointed out before, but…..sighhh…. apparently it bears repeating;

Swine flu, on Obama’s watch, infected 60+ millon Americans and killed nearly 13,000 of us. Over 1000 were already dead before Big Daddy O could be arsed to address it as a public-health crisis. Worldwide, more than 600,000 people died.

Nobody jumped out of windows. No industries collapsed. Harvard and Yale did not shut down and send their charges home. No major sports leagues cancelled their seasons. Toilet paper was abundant on the shelves, as was hand sanitizer. The stock market was already in the toilet (but then, nobody bats 1000). The NY Times did not publish editorials entitled “Let’s just call it Obamavirus.” (They wouldn’t have dared; nobody would’ve.) People didn’t make great big blouse-wearing ninnies of themselves invoking 9/11, the London Blitz, or the Black Plague.

Now….given those body counts two paragraphs back, perhaps some hysteria and extreme measures would have been warranted. It’s likely many lives could have been spared. But that would have meant someone, or several someones, publicly suggesting that the Great and Mighty Obama was dragging his feet during a major emergency, and….uhhh… do you recall what 2009 was like? Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize was the least of the adulation and hero-worship he received, 99% of it from a starry-eyed media elite. Atheists one and all, they chalked up the swine flu to an act of God. And like that – the memory-hole yawned, and beckoned, and was fed. (Pardon? Swine who?)

Who knows? Perhaps if this latest pathogen were called “bat flu”, or “snake flu”, instead of being designated as Covid-19 – which smacks of a lab-engineered bioweapon out of Lang’s METROPOLIS – saner if not cooler heads might prevail. (Then again, had “swine flu” been monolithically referred to as Covid-14, or 17, or what-have-you, perhaps Big Daddy O would have been a one-term Messiah.)

As a hated ‘boomer’ (and one diagnosed with COPD besides), I represent one of the few people really and truly at high risk by the march of what has quickly become The Great Anti-White Hope; but from where I sit, the only lesson to be drawn from this epidemiological disaster is that if you continue believing that “Big Brother” is the government in some fashion – and the various weavers and tenders of the official narratives its subservient handmaidens – you are woefully….and probably fatally….behind the times. For one thing, there’s no one left in either party with that level of evil or cunning. Like Pogo never lived long enough to say, We have met the enemy; and he’s coming from inside the house!

No, but Italy pissed off the US government big time by signing on to the Belt & Road project. South Korea did as well along with Iran.

Meanwhile, nearby countries like Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, SE Asia with a lot more Chinese residents and tourists than Italy and Iran have been relatively unscathed.

The mortality rate was very high at the nursing home which is why the numbers aren’t making sense.

The employees and first responders should have infected other people by now if we are assuming greater than R1.

However the New Rochelle case fits the model of it being highly contagious. Practically everyone that made contact with the lawyer ended up getting it.

Since we are on the subject, perhaps it’s worth asking ourselves what the situation would be like if Joe Biden had been in charge instead of Donald Trump. In fact, we don’t really have to ask ourselves at all because he told us — he penned an op-ed for USA Today in which he denounced, without evidence, travel bans as “unproductive.” This was at the end of January, so presumably he would not have stopped incoming flights from the epicenter of the viral outbreak at that time, Wuhan China. In my opinion, this would have potentially worsened the situation domestically. Maybe we’d be where Italy is now.

He also demonstrates a profound lack of knowledge on the subject; most of the piece is filled with platitudes clearly written for him by his staff. In it, his polysci campaign managers note that Obama allowed a small number of ebola-infected patients to return to the United States. This is true, but it’s also irrelevant. The two viruses are not remotely the same. Ebola is a blood-borne pathogen spread mostly through close physical contact or the exchange of body fluids. The coronavirus, in contrast, is a dangerous, highly contagious airborne ailment; it can be spread by asymptomatic carriers who pass all traditional screenings like temperature checks before patients presents with symptoms. Biden’s plan to simply let people waltz into this country would have been disastrous. Worse, at the time he penned this article, we knew very little for sure about what was going on. It is not inconceivable that the mortality rate could have been twice or even three times as high and we wouldn’t have known for sure that it wasn’t at that instant in time — while all those people were pouring in under a president Joe Biden.

I think this bodes poorly for the United States going forward. As I predicted months ago, it looks as though the United States ruling class is determined to set things back to business as usual post-Trump. That means a return to outsourcing critical industry, acquiescing to foreign competitors, lax anti-monopoly enforcement, few meaningful social reforms, continual warfare (Russia, ME), and promoting divisive identity politics in order to maintain control — a Great ReeeAwokening cometh, I thinketh. The US is now less of a nation capable of defending its collective interests than it is an economy run by a small number of people who use it as a vehicle for defending their selective class interests, even if that conflicts with the great majority at the bottom or the wider national interest. Biden didn’t want to stop those flights because that would have hurt the democratic party’s financial interests — their donors. The lives of old Boomers in flyover country be damned. Welcome to serfdom.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/01/27/coronavirus-donald-trump-made-us-less-prepared-joe-biden-column/4581710002/

Great comment in all points, Mr. Anon. Re Drudge, I got sick of that guy a couple of years back.

It was never going to be 5 million deaths. I don’t know how they arrived at these numbers.

If 80% of 320 million Americans catch the virus, that is 256 million cases. If 2% of those die, that is approximately 5 million deaths.

Approximately 4 million Americans die every year. If 5 million more die from coronavirus this year, they will mostly be elderly people with pre-existing medical conditions and limited life expectancy. Like it or not, 5 million is a “blip”, which arises when (say) 20% of the people who were expected to die in the next five years succumb to the virus.

“China did it” is a basic bitch conspiracy theory because it’s completely acceptable to our rulers and their cuckold handmaidens in Washington DC. It’s pushed by one such cuckling named Tom Cotton.

Besides the relatively small conflicts in Vietnam/Cambodia, and barely mentionable border/island skirmishes: China hasn’t been at war much since the Korean war, a conflict that brought proto-globo-homo to it’s very doorstep.

How many wars has the US been involved in since the Korean war? How many of these wars has the US deliberately provoked?

Based on the model of past behavior predicts future behavior, what does basic probability tell you?

Ask yourself which theory is more acceptable in Washington DC and that should tell you everything.

Stay curious my friends.

Italians are East Asians? Who knew?

Jeno Paulucci founded Chun King.

During the 1940s, Paulucci developed the Chun King line of canned Chinese food products. In the book “The Very, Very Rich, and how they got that way”, Paulucci was quoted as stating his motivation that, while he loved Chinese food, he found it too bland and thought it would benefit from a little Italian spicing.

After making a batch and canning it, he took some samples to a supermarket executive to convince him to try it out, and to persuade him to stock it. On opening the can, Paulucci found, to his horror, that the top of the can’s contents included a whole, cooked grasshopper. Fortunately, the can had been opened in such a way that the lid was facing the executive, so that only Paulucci could see the contents. Thinking quickly, Paulucci told the executive, “This looks so good, I’m going to taste it myself”.

He then took one of two spoons that were lying on the table, reached into the can, quickly dug out a heaping spoonful (which included the grasshopper) and ate it. (According to Paulucci, “It didn’t taste bad.” Roasted or deep-fried grasshoppers are a popular street snack in Mexico City.) He then offered the can to the executive, who sampled a separate spoonful, liked it, and placed a large order.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeno_Paulucci#Career

Another suspicious element is how many very energetic shills suddenly show up—

The post may have been linked to by an outside website. Absent that, it is indeed curious. I’ve noticed it elsewhere on a host of topics, most recently just after that Iranian general was killed. I’m sure you didn’t miss all those new posters who suddenly showed up within moments and started agitating for war — peddling all kinds of debunked propaganda and obviously copypasted comments. A few regulars here noticed it as well and called them out. Many of those new posters seem to have faded away. Strange. The government maintains a budget ranging up to $40 million or more annually for propaganda purposes. Has anyone looked into where that money goes? VOA?

Perhaps. Definitely not the quarter million Chinese nationals who go back and forth to the homeland constantly.

There are 30 WA deaths now, right? So if we think mortality from 0,5% to 2% and 2-3 weeks to die, that is 1500 to 6000 (totally hidden) cases in WA towards the end of Feb.

Sounds reasonable until you learn that 23 were at the same location. They were all traced to a single case from Wuhan.

If they had testing available I’m sure they would have found at least 60 cases in staff, visitors and first responders given what was described at the time. That was nearly 3 weeks ago and they still have less than 300 verified cases.

There should have been a second wave of cases by now.

No, but Italy pissed off the US government big time by signing on to the Belt & Road project. South Korea did as well along with Iran.

Belt & Road – rapid, efficient transportation of oriental diseases!

It could be worse: the previous Silk Road allegedly brought us the Black Death.

Yeah, because 99.7% of people under 50 years old will live from this virus.

They have a bunch of cases in Aspen now. A group of Australians.

I was only just talking to my wife about this last night. She is a theatre nurse. Our hospital basically does the whole region, not just our city. Unfortunately there is a finite number of ventilators and if things go bad, like we saw in China ,then patients could be overflowing into the corridors. If a patient is ventilated for 3 to 5 days then you will see a situation unfortunately where new patients are assessed and put on hold awaiting the availability of another ventilator- which may never eventuate. So a patient ends up in the sad predicament of lying there slowly drowning in their own fluids, along with other patients and their families. And all they can do is whisper sweet nothings in their ear. A seriously ill pregnant mother will probably have a pre-term birth and so there’s another two for the icu. Would a 90 year old person receive a ventilator before a 50 year old? But of course when your time is up…… Most surgeries will be put on hold, to free up beds, unless it involves an an accident. Meanwhile Tom Hanks was last seen lying in bed nursing a coconut with a face drawn on it.

Trump will do a lot of bloviating and bullcrap and the borders will stay open…probably a million plus dead…

Too mamy corporate types want the border open….

Canadian here complaining again.
Sure, you guys have it really hard not having public medicare to help control and handle the virus. It does not look good for you. As many people on the net have commented a lot of Americans will not go to hospital or even get tested for CV because they can’t afford to. Result will catastrophic in terms of health and economy in America.
We in Canada don’t have it much better and unlike America any person is allowed in with screening which could only be called a joke.
Worse, we have a national broadcaster government owned. But one cannot post a single reasonable comment there without it being deleted. A hard core censorist site masquerading as the voice of Canadian people while channeling and controlling our every comment on the ‘National Broadcasting Site’ Also known as the CBC.ca
They sound nice and good and peaceful in theory but if you disagree with a single thing they say you will be censored. As in your opinion is no longer published on the CBC.ca the nation owned broadcasting site. I supported them for years seeing it as better than ad backed private sites, But having seen how they and the Canadian government have completely phucked up their response to CV and played us softly for the last six weeks about it I can no longer support them.
In fact I actually hope our leaders and the leaders of the CBC are the first to get the virus which they are importing into Canada while fooling the Canadian public into thinking we are ‘Special’.
Yeah, we are ‘special’ all right. Especially stupid to believe a word our stinking government says.

They can GTFO and/or go to hell.

Like many others, I GTFO, so go piss and moan else where snowflake.

By contrast, the huge outbreak in Qom, Iran seems extremely suspicious, especially since it apparently hit the Iranian political elites so heavily.

The alternate (and simpler) explanation is that the large number of elites means that the overall number of cases is grossly under-reported. I.e. that Iran has far more coronavirus cases than it is officially admitting.

As noted in the link, that explanation is supported by the large number of people that ordinary Iranian travelers have infected outside of Iran:

A paper by the University of Toronto’s Ashleigh Tuite and others noted that, by February 23, cases of Iranian origin had surfaced in Canada, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates. Given the volume of air travel between Iran and these countries, Tuite’s team estimated how many native COVID-19 cases must have occurred in Iran to produce one case each in these other countries. Their estimate for February 23: 18,300. Since the epidemic reached 100 cumulative cases, the official numbers have doubled roughly every three days. If that rate held, the estimate as of today would be 586,000 [whereas the official number is 6,566.]

“By contrast, the huge outbreak in Qom, Iran seems extremely suspicious, especially since it apparently hit the Iranian political elites so heavily.”

The alternate (and simpler) explanation is that the large number of elites means that the overall number of cases is grossly under-reported. I.e. that Iran has far more coronavirus cases than it is officially admitting.

As noted in the link, that explanation is supported by the large number of people that ordinary Iranian travelers have infected outside of Iran:

A paper by the University of Toronto’s Ashleigh Tuite and others noted that, by February 23, cases of Iranian origin had surfaced in Canada, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates. Given the volume of air travel between Iran and these countries, Tuite’s team estimated how many native COVID-19 cases must have occurred in Iran to produce one case each in these other countries. Their estimate for February 23: 18,300. Since the epidemic reached 100 cumulative cases, the official numbers have doubled roughly every three days. If that rate held, the estimate as of today would be 586,000 [whereas the official number is 6,566.]

Excuse the repost. I forgot to italicize the comment I was replying in the original reply.

Right, 25% mortality, 120 cases late February. But the math is worthless in any case because it’s a cluster of people in a nursing home.

How would we see the second wave if testing is inadequate? Elderly Life Care population gives you some deaths and raises the alarm right away, but many younger more or less healthy people might not even see a doctor. There are the invisible mildly symptomatic spreaders, and then the older vulnerable patients who become critical and die. Without testing everyone who has a temperature, we only see the latter. So Life Care gave early insight that it was out there, because a lot of them died, but then the virus went underground again, and absent massive testing that’s where it will stay until it hits a lot of old people and sends them to the hospital. In this case that’s just taking more than 3 weeks.

Intellectual dishonesty has been defined as the avoidance of the central or important point in a discussion. A central and important point: If it was a bioweapon, and the target wished to retaliate symmetrically with a racially-tuned bioweapon (according to the literature such things are are developed), they would not accuse but simply release their retaliatory agent in such a way as to appear an organic growth of the original agent (as per the fake main narrative).

No, you are making the mistake of thinking of rival superpowers as analogous to Stan and Ollie in Tit For Tat. The way to prevent an attack is by making it clear beforehand that an aggressor with face incalculable consequences. Instant and extreme escalation by the most lethal weapons immediately available in other words. Aat minimum they absolutely have to give the aggressor a shock, because that an attack has occured shows that the aggressor has a model of the likely retaliation that made them think it was acceptable. Merely confirming this non-prohibitive consequences prediction would encourage the aggressor to go further. For all the Chinese knew th Coronavirus could be a dress rehearsal for the real attack which would soon follow.

I’m not a domain expert, but given the profusion of truly professional-grade trolling, I’ll venture a bit of logical exposition.

It either is or isn’t a bioweapon. None of us here have the data to make that determination. Fewer even have the expertise needed to parse it ‘…

Well China certainly has, so they would know what had happened and they also have North Korea and an army that could invade Taiwan. Also nukes, which it has threatened to go strategic with if the US uses battlefield nukes to repel a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The mortal human beings of Deep State would be the first to die in a nuke two tits for tat by China, and a bioweapon attack on China would initiate a rapidly escalating series of actions culminating in a nuclear exchange.

A US Deep State cabal might false flag 9/11 while remaining alive well and in charge of the world’s most powerful country, but to mount a covert bioweapon attack on China, the members of the US cabal would have to have suffered an outbreak of mass suicidal compulsion.

“Drudge” is not Drudge anymore, he sold it. No idea how much.

Yes, the Iranian elite (the most likely to visit China) would want to trumpet that they are suffering, but downplay the fact that it is scything through the common people.

If I had to bet on “accidentally released lab virus” versus “bioengineered attack”, I would gamble on stupidity over malice every time.

Might this not also indicate that there is more contact between Iranian leaders and China than meets the eye? Contacts are how something spreads. This infection could function like a tracer.

Well, turns out we’re on opposite sides of the fence for the same reason… Only our assumptions are different. See comment 134 if interested.

It either is or isn’t a bioweapon. None of us here have the data to make that determination. — anon8383892

And while you make good points, there is no reason to hash it out since there aren’t enough facts, one way or the other, to settle the issue. In fact, I have to agree with Sailer and other commenters here, that we need to worry less about blame and more about getting a handle on the virus and bringing it under control.

But the issue isn’t moot — we need to fully understand how this thing got out, whether deliberate or accidental.

P.S. Interesting comments about alt-media in general and ZeroHedge in particular. Have noticed the same and am wondering — has ZH begun shadow banning (real) commenters?

I think you should spend less time reading your blog content and more time on keeping the software running nicely,

But he did! RUnzie Baby has completed his multi-year project of Very Important Software Work (VISW), and this is what it was.

I wouldn’t call Cotton a “cuck”.

Cotton is rumored to be CIA and was almost appointed to be CIA director by Trump when Pompeo left CIA to become Sec of State. He’s a hawkish neocon, but he’s embraced aspects of Trumpism. He seems to be positioning himself to lead the post-Trump GOP with an ideology that marries aspects of Trumpism with hawkish neoconservatism in foreign policy.

Cotton represents the hawkish, national security state wing of the Deep State that dominates the Pentagon and part of the CIA, while someone like Buttigieg represents the liberal wing of the Deep State that dominates the State department and a part of the CIA. These two wings basically operate to ensure peaceniks on the Left like Bernie don’t win, and isolationists on the Right like Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, etc don’t win.

I know you’re being sarcastic here, but apparently the patient zero in Italy is a 38 year old man identified as “Mattia”, who is a manager at the multinational consumer goods conglomerate Unilever, and Italian experts believe he got it via Munich from a German businessman who had traveled to China. If true, it brings to mind your recent post about the class angle of the spread:

https://www.unz.com/isteve/a-class-angle

“But it just seems highly suspicious that Iran would be hit so hard so quickly when its links with China are probably no greater than that of so many dozens of other countries.”

R_0 is not a constant, and given the stochastic nature of transmission, the spread of a virus (like the spread of any other organism) can show wide variability from place to place. One sick man who goes to a mosque or to his job as a food server can infect many people.

The commenter Sean already noted the unusual amount of kissing and general mutual manhandling that exists in Persian culture (as opposed to say, German culture), which definitely affects the spread of infectious disease. We also have the following aggravating factors from the NewYorker:

The first mention of the disease by the government was a report of two deaths in the city on February 19th. Initial reports indicate that the carrier of the virus may have been a merchant who travelled between Qom and Wuhan, in China, where covid-19 is believed to have originated. The outbreak is estimated to have begun between three and six weeks ago, which would mean that the two Iranians who died could have been sick and infecting others for weeks.

Within eight days of the first reported death in Iran, covid-19 had spread to twenty-four of the country’s thirty-one provinces. The number of cases has roughly doubled daily since Tuesday. Instead of closing down public sites, a measure that public-health experts have taken in other countries, the head of the shrine in Qom called on pilgrims to keep coming. “We consider this holy shrine to be a place of healing. That means people should come here to heal from spiritual and physical diseases,”…

Politics may have played a role in the government’s handling of the health crisis…. The outbreak coincided with two major milestones—the anniversary of Iran’s revolution, on February 11th, and the parliamentary election, on February 21st. “The government didn’t want to acknowledge that they had a coronavirus outbreak because they feared it would impact participation in these two events,” he said. “So for weeks there was a huge silence.”

A fair number of politically well-connected Jews (AIPAC) have also been infected. If one can rationalize that away as mere randomness and noise, it seems prudent to consider the simpler explanations in the case of Iran as well.

This will be good for Democrats as it will mostly be Trump’s voter base i.e. White boomers, who will be affected the most.

Blacks, and perhaps Hispanics, seem to be more severely impacted by respiratory infections. Their access to healthcare won’t be as good, either. Also, Democrats are more heavily concentrated in more population-dense areas, and in the Northern states. So the overall effect may be a wash, or it may even be skewed (quite heavily even) towards Democrats.

But if large numbers of Americans die because of this it probably won’t matter much which Americans those are, because the public will, fairly or not, blame Trump.

Incidentally, two things I noticed today:

1) The stores were slammed. Parking lots full at every grocery store I drove past. Friends reporting near-raids of grocery store shelves. Some people are starting to panic (ridiculously, I think).

2) The parking lot at one of the gyms I drive past each day was pretty full, too. So many people touching all that sweaty gym equipment that’s been touched by others. Other people aren’t nearly as scared as they should be. I wouldn’t be shocked if bars and dance clubs are still quite crowded, too.

But another thing I’ve noticed, looking at a map of US corona virus cases, is that they are heavily skewed towards the northern US. This disease spreads more easily in cold climates. A lot of people got in on ski holidays (i.e., cold, dry air).

This thing could die out as the weather gets warmer, especially if we work to slow its spread now. All we need to do is slow it in order to buy enough time to develop and produce a vaccine.

Agree to disagree, any association with (Zionist) neo-conservativism is political cuckoldry. This is subservience to a foreign power and it is treason. As you may have noticed I’m not alone in thinking this way and our numbers are growing.

Do you know this for a fact?

Or are you simply pursuing some personal vendetta?

Strangely, here on unz.com – which is devoted to questioning the official narrative on quite a few issues – you don’t see anything other than “contact with virus = getting the disease” no matter who you are or where you live. There’s almost never any discussion of individual susceptibility and immunity or strengthening one’s overall health. No, we mustn’t have any of that – just wash those hands like you’ve got obsessive compulsive disorder, don’t touch your face (try telling little kids not to do that) and keep away from other people. Er…that’s it. Just about everybody here seems to have bought into the health-industrial complex’s propaganda.

Oh, yes, they occasionally do mention, by the by, that the overwhelming majority of, if not all, deaths and serious cases of this flu occur in old, seriously sick people. Then they turn around and say that all people, everywhere, have no options other than to keep on sanitizing themselves and their surroundings, day after day, obeying silently while the folks who run things send the world into meltdown.

There’s a conspiracy alright, but not quite the way you thought.

Replies to realist :How was Gordon Chang discredited?

I also find it odd that this is the 1st serious pamdemic to hit the States in a century…it seems weirdly timed….the 100th anniversary of the Spanish Flu….

mostly agree.

https://calvaccinefreedom.wordpress.com/2016/03/10/potential-loophole-in-vaccine-law-could-mandate-vaccines-in-children-during-declared-emergency/

The Depression might have been a good time for an epidemic in the USA – social disruption, lots of people on the move – but it did not happen as far as I am aware.

Have you read “The Hot Zone”?
https://www.abebooks.com/products/isbn/9780385495226?cm_mmc=ggl-_-COM_DSAETAFEED_Trade-_-naa-_-naa&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI4OGy0vWW6AIV9h-tBh1bjQDFEAAYAyAAEgJZmPD_BwE

Reads like a dark, dead-pan comedy, but it’s actually real-life investigative journalism. Strongly supports the “accidentally released” theory.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-scientists/coronavirus-may-have-reached-italy-from-germany-scientists-say-idUSKBN20Y35B

After extensive analysis, the Milan team has not yet identified the individual at the root of the worst outbreak in Europe, but they have matched the Italian genetic sequencing of the virus here to a case that emerged in Germany in January.

“The sequence closest to the base of the branch, which is the one that probably precedes the others, came from a person infected in Munich in all likelihood between Jan. 19-22,” said Massimo Galli, head of the university research group and of the infectious-diseases department at Milan’s Sacco hospital.

Galli added that the German patient had caught the virus after contacting someone who came from Shanghai.

He said their analysis showed that the Italian outbreak must have started between Jan. 25-26, well before the first patient was officially diagnosed in the northern town of Codogno.

“We can imagine that a person who contracted the virus in the context of those infected in Munich came to Italy and the area where the virus first spread without showing any symptoms,” Galli told Reuters.

The number of infected famous people with minimal symptoms suggests it is highly contagious but largely benign with a CFR well under one.

Let me get this straight. You really hate government control of the media, but you are pushing for MORE government control of healthcare. That’s gonna be a blast. Canadians! You crack me up, even without saying “abooot”.

OK, thanks. You don’t know how much, but do you know when? Maybe it coincided with him going along with the rest of the Lyin’ Press narratives.

From Hong Kong.

Something a little more positive from the China perspective

We are increasing our understanding of this disease. It is clearly very infectious, at least in some circumstances. As we have explained this means that the case severity is likely to be lower than the crude fatality rates in many media reports. We have explained the dilemma of mortality early in epidemics here. The academic consensus for mortality is currently around 0.3-1% (WHO). It could be higher but it could be lower if blood testing eventually confirms more widespread, mild disease. The hospital mortality over the age of 80 years is 15%. Another way of looking at this data is that of every 100 people over the age of 80 who contract COVID-19 and become ill enough to go to hospital. 85% make a full recovery.

China was hit at the absolutely worst possible time of the year,…

Could it not be more like “China was hit by the virus BECAUSE it was the absolutely worst possible time of the year?” I’m not sure if his terms are right, but they guy with his “abductive” and “deductive” logic has a point. I would think it’s more that the virus spread like crazy BECAUSE it was not just winter (a happy time for viruses) but the Chinese New Years’ Time.

Yeah, Chinese New Years is like our Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, and 4th of July combined, for visiting. If anyone lives far away from the folks, as 100s of millions have since the economic opening of the country, he’s going to travel home during the Spring Festival (better term for Chinese New Years). It’s not because that’s the time to hit ’em.

Then, in Wuhan, there’s this bio lab, one of only a handful of “Level-4” ones (whatever that entails). Wuhan is not China’s biggest city, yet has 11,000,000 people, and Chinese people like to live close together. Don’t get me wrong, I know they HAVE to in cities like this, but they LIKE to, also, even out in the country. That they live much closer together than any Americans not in NY City is hard for anyone to understand without him having been there – or I guess to other countries like this in the Orient. Expectorating a lot on the sidewalk really doesn’t help either.*

As Peak Stupidity has often noted, Quality is not Job 1 at China, Inc. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, in China. Now, would it be any kind of coincidence that Wuhan, with the lab and all, might be the place where this virus accidentally escaped due to people not following the proper protocols for avoiding contamination of the outside?

On Iran, that does arouse suspicions, but I don’t go all anti-American-everything based on that. I’ll tell you this though. I’ve not been to Iran, but I’ve been to Europe and S. America recently. There ain’t a country I’ve seen in which you won’t find a Chinese restaurant or many. Did perhaps, the ones in Iran have owners/employees who came largely from the Wuhan area? I’m just saying, because, where I live, for example, a large proportion of the owners come just from Fujian (across from Formosa).

.

* Hey, I like the Chinese people, and this one doesn’t really bug me very much, compared to the littering.

Anyone who thinks this is going to kill more than a few thousand is a tool. The real question is how many of the dead in Italy are Chinese.

I read you loud and clear the first time, haha! Chinese skiers, that’s the ticket.

It’s funny you wrote that, because the only time I’ve been night skiing has been in China, on a bunny slope, with the air temp at 0F, with a bunch of Chinamen only 1/3 who looked like they’d ever done this before. They were all having a blast!

Oh, why on the bunny slope, you pussy, you ask? Because after 3 runs I was freezing-ass cold and I just went inside. It’ll really make you miss the blue runs at Mammoth: 45-degrees, beautiful scenery in the sunshine at 9-10 thousand feet up, and powder snow half-way up the trees!

It’s becoming clear that ski resorts are the landlubber analogue to cruise ships in terms of their role in spreading corona virus.

It will be interesting to see if the ski business suffers like the cruise lines have. My guess is the media will be much kinder to skiing, since it’s more of an upper-middle class pursuit, while cruising tends middle and prole.

it seems like the USA’s absurd health care system is going to push the body count higher than 5 million

Agree.

The concept of Public Health does not seem to exist in the USA.

The dumb billionaires have not yet worked out that living in isolated communities far from the plebs is not of much help in this instance. They surround themselves with flunkies and bodyguards. Heck, their bodyguards seem to fuck their wives and daughters and they don’t seem to realise it.

When we hypothesize a biological attack then the possibilities are endless. However, plausible deniability would require that the virus (or something somewhat more innocuous resembling the most deadly form of the virus) spreads throughout the world. What if Wuhan, Qom and Rasht were subjected to a massive release of viral agent or another factor that would aggravate infections? This could explain the drastic responses in China and Iran, as well as the utterly bizarre way our media and government officials have responded to the crisis.

From Ron Unz’s mouth to Chinese Foreign Ministry’s ears:

https://www.stltoday.com/news/world/chinese-diplomat-claims-us-military-brought-the-coronavirus-to-wuhan/article_93d3cbd8-489f-5b25-be5b-226ed18eab84.html

I assume so. He used to live in HK for a long time his other comments are.

A very good friend of mine in Hong Kong can’t stop smiling at the hysteria. His friends’s in the very viral centre in Wuhan who are dealing with the epicentre of the virus, opine that the death rate in elderly Chinese men is down to the fact that a vast percentage of said men have smoked all their life, live in polluted inner-city air, and as such have limited lung and immune system defences. It is an easily catchable, nasty bug, but unless it mutates it will not have the bang to kill us all.

Funnily enough, he hasn’t stockpiled toilet paper.

Several footballers here have tested positive now, so you can guess how widespread it already is, how contagious and the likely every lowering fatality values will end up being

Yeah, because 99.7% of people under 50 years old will live from this virus.

But a large percent of those will still be dumb bastards and waste their time and money on entertainment instead of working to ameliorate the very serious problems in this country.

A proposition, from the top of the head, and to be worked out.

Have a hierarchy from “experts”, alas scientists with real experience in research on related fields, and and a budget for staff, directly sourced and administrated independently, reduced at the top to say a two figure entity of coordination, set up a multiple mirrored database with an html front, a “web page”, searcheable data open to all. With the incoming result of local testing and all other related data that can be useful. De facto, in less then twenty-four hours. These to the extend of two figure participants, would be locally based. Some Chinese in US centers, some Europeans in China, some US researchers at Afrika, a global amass of expertise, just serving here as a suggestion, the actual distribution should be better planned, but one gets the drift? The element of their distribution and every detail of their personal life should be verifiable openly, by direct channels top to bottom and could be heavily contested if need be. That would be part of the database set.

…From there on, analysis, probes, statistics, open to any-one with the necessary skills, and any-one with the interest to operate on the data. All would have access to meaningful data, the same data to all, across and over the top of thrifters and politicians, systems, nations, religions, age-gaps, territorial divides, walls(Gaza, Mexico), and other quite in-effecient separations to this particular matter. The financing should be accordingly, also transparent, a working scheme set up within these same twenty-four hours.

Could this be possible, assert all the necessary angles, give the human operators within the “lab” access to the necessary resources and have the independence necessary? Our feeling is that technically this could be real, mainly deleting the noise and filters that now make data-analysis highly ineffecient. The only real obstacle would be the human factor, individual psychology.

If an attempt is made, in such an extravagant case as present today, we welcome a new area of human probability. The internet would have been redeemed from passive data slobbering surplus populations medium, to a tool of value. The intermittent layers of thrift, the skimming and parasiting, the thrifting would get suppressed, in this single matter. That would be the promise of Covid-19, on the sideline, containment, the first real original effort of a twenty-first century homonim realm. Some contradictions would be lifted, only held in the head of the ones too simple to be our leaders, as Russia a provider for Space-engine parts, and subject to US trade sactions.

We are convinced that even within the space of a micro-community as unz.com, a lot of concepts and working them out, could be suggested. Imagine the whole of the project failing and unz.com as a secondary derivative taking on the restructuring from infinite narratives into a live page, fed with verifiable data, their sources, all subject to unsponsered, non-paying (both are corrupters), fully verifyable humanoids.

In the end, to solve the Twenty-first century, it is human ego versus organizational capabilities that hampers the way.

All this of course are sketchy notes, but along this pathway something might give.

This is the great opportunity of Covid-19, becoming a white paper for further implementation into issues that really matter as global population surplusses, the environment.

https://twitter.com/DonnellyStephen/status/1238406716540293122/photo/1

Graph of Italy, what does it all mean, I don’t know except they aren’t recording all cases. I wonder when they will peak, are they peaking already?

So, China isn’t a horrible, dystopian authoritarian state? It’s totally fine that they make 95% of our antibiotics?

No China isn’t a horrible, dystopian authoritarian state. It is in some ways more authoritarian than the US and in some ways less. It sure as hell is not as corrupt as the US…this country is in deep shit.
It is not China’s fault that the greedy son of a bitches in this country outsource everything to China. You’re buying the US propaganda.

Thank goodness the media will be sure to give a fair and objective analysis.

I forgot to address market manipulation , before 9/11 there was short-selling of stocks and particularly of airline stocks by insiders with knowledge of the psyop/false flag/staged deception see:

globalresearch.ca :”The September financial heist: follow the 9/11 money trail.” I believe that insiders with knowledge of the impending , fake Coronavirus pandemic probably shorted the market and with knowledge when the “fear porn” is going to end will be able to take advantage of stocks at much lower prices , in some cases more than 50% lower . As Warren Buffet (an insider) has famously opined “Be fearful when others are greedy , and greedy when others are fearful” and as Baron de Rothschild is reported to have said “Buy when there’s blood in the streets , even if it’s your own.”
And finally : “Order out of Chaos ” the motto of the 33rd. degree freemasons.returnofgnosis.com

They’ll have extra money to spend on lattes and vente cappachinoes in the coffee shops, so at least they can pound their fists on the tables and TALK about working to ameliorate the very serious problems in this country. Will that be good enough?

China is corrupt down to a low level, Realist. What they’ve got going for them is a government that doesn’t actively HATE the traditional population of the country. Government official at all levels may take bribes or just steal, and send their kids and money overseas, but one doesn’t need to HATE their countries original culture and way of life to do that. That’s just the way of life over there.

We have some corruption of the high levels, but what a lot of commenters call corruption is more like the Deep State simply going rogue. That’s what I see, a population that has lost control of the Big Government that it let metastasize over a century. If it IS corruption you mean, well, corruption only does serious damage when there’s a huge government to corrupt with.

Stupid, stupid, Boomers, Silents, GI’s, Lost’s, Missionaries, Gen-Xers, Gen-Y’ers, and now Millennials. All you people who’ve bad-mouthed the true Libertarians over the past century cause “muh free stuff” and “think of the chillins” can go suck it. Enjoy what you’ve enabled, Socialist Drama-Queens.

Another thought -“Buy low, sell high ” Insiders sell “high” before the panic, buy “low” knowing when the engineered panic is going to be ended . I believe that the massmedia will be signaling an end soon . To show how quickly the media can change the narrative,look how quickly Joe Biden went from being washed up to the Democratic frontrunner in a matter of a week or so.

Bit off topic but you mention Nixon.
I think Nixon attempted once maybe twice
to give USA a single payer health care system.

Ted Kennedy killed it once maybe twice.

Probably knew it would kill any chance for the White House.

5ds

Like many others, I GTFO …

You don’t know how relieved that makes me feel Biff. Thank you for your departure!

Wuhan was hit right after 300 American military officers had spent a week or so visiting the city, which also seems implausibly coincidental.

https://news.trust.org/item/20200312152307-rlv7m

Indeed I have. The part where an ebola infected man staggers back to his country, takes a taxi while falling apart, and dies waiting for a doctor while leaking toxic bodily fluids is a beautiful example of COMPETENCE IN ACTION.

If it was fiction, people would claim it was too ridiculous.

since 80% of the cases are supposedly mild and it’s possible that many of the very early severe cases weren’t recognized as caused by an unprecedented new virus.
….
it’s perfectly possible that the cases might have begun appearing in early/mid November. Keep in mind that the virus has an incubation period of perhaps 1-2 weeks by various estimates.

Cold weather tends to accelerate the spread of viruses. Warm weather limits the contagion.

Could the virus have started much earlier, possibly July or August?

The reason Wuhan-19 cases turned up in numbers at the beginning of October is the predictable consequence of more favorable seasonal weather accelerating spread.

PEACE 😇

167 got bumped to 172

5ds

Predictive programming/social conditioning : Dean Koontz’s “The eyes of darkness ” describes the
“Wuhan-400” virus

Anatoly Karolin has banned me, so I have to comment here!

See this requires pretending that China doesn’t have a history of killing off its own people. Even the bitterest of angry at America because their wife left them poster here can’t come up with a calculation that doesn’t demonstrate that the Chinese killed more of three own people in the hundred years than America killed foreigners combined. But it’s not hard to guess whether your ex-wife is happily remarried or not.

“I also find it odd that this is the 1st serious pamdemic to hit the States in a century…it seems weirdly timed….the 100th anniversary of the Spanish Flu….”

Moreover, the so-called Spanish flue is also now suspected of having originated in China.

Yes, I know the italian situation intimately. But, as LB also reports, patient zero seems to have arrived from Germany. I think your hypothesis is less likely, because the densest place by Chinese population is Prato, near Florence, which was not hit by the disease until recently.

Of course the real question is not which place has the most Chinese, but rather which place has the most people with ties to Hubei. My birthplace has every store on the main street now taken over by mainland Chinese born in China, (all people who got out when they got sufficient money, and who are buying every store with cash!) yet there were no recorded cases and the province was not included in the initial lockdown, even though the next province was.

I am merely a high IQ impeccably credentialed well informed person using my extensive knowledge and affinity for logic. Am I the Chinese bag man that hands him his 10K every month- no. But the facts paint a pretty clear picture.

But perhaps you are right maybe Ron’s behavior is explained by the fact he has a vendetta against the US because he was bullied for being a bastard and never achieved the levels of political power he though he deserved.

https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2820%2930627-9
http://www.thelancet.com Published online March 12, 2019 https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30627-9

“…we can suggest that the number of newly infected patients might start to decrease within 3–4 days from March 11. Similarly, we can foresee that the cumulative curve of patients who are infected will peak 30 days later, with the maximum load for clinical facilities for the treatment of these patients foreseen for that period.”

“Well, possibly. But that sort of personal behavior seems very common throughout the Middle East and also in much of Southern Europe. Yet the only prominent people who’ve so far died of Coronavirus anywhere in the world were Iranian, suggesting it started there very early and hit the elites directly.”

It seems like you’re looking for some kind of uniformity and order inside random events. As a physicist you already know that when a gamma-ray strikes a cloud chamber it sometimes causes showers and jets of particles. Whereas sometimes, nothing at all happens. When we try to generate random sequences in our head, they’re almost always too smooth and too evenly spaced out. Real random sequences tend to have more clusters and coincidences and boring repetitions, so much so that we have to generate and then discard several such sequences in order to find one that actually “looks” random.

Yeah, Iran’s elites are among the hardest hit. But based on the identities of those who spread the Iranian strains to other countries, so are the commoners. So is Italy. Are Italians (and we’re talking Lombards and Tuscans here, not Sicilians) on the Mossad’s or the CIA’s hit list? Are all the AIPAC lobbyists and Orthodox Jews who got sick some kind of false flag to cover the tracks of the ones who really got this virus going? Sure, some people are going to keep spinning wheels until they get the outcome they wanted from the start, but that looks an awful lot like confirmation bias.

Given the bushmeat that caused AIDS and the pangolin and bats that were still being sold in Wuhan markets as of last year (s0me of them perhaps castoffs trafficked from the local biolab), are you sure you haven’t overlooked some simpler explanations for how this might have gotten started?

You sound like Gamma Boy, self-described “elite athlete” and alleged High IQ polymath, Vox Day. LOL. Are you sure you’re not him, posting from your secret kingdom somewhere in the Alps?

Ft Detrick, CIA bat shit crazies out in force.
They do evil then swarm the exposers with BS.

I was alive when the world shut down.
Thank you, bat shit crazy elites and your dogs.

5 dancing shlomos

The only thing engineered about coronavirus is the panic, and subsequent shutdown of American society.

Pretty sure that a lot of this is due to the media-induced hysteria. Someone else here made the good point that there are a lot of liberal billionaires and millionaires that are liquidating assets to drive the markets down to damage Trump and by doing this they are pulling in institutional and retail sales to further drive the market down.

A lot of the sports owners and league directors are fully Woke, so they are also onboard with all the cancellations and shutdowns.

What type of man references another man’s or ex-wife in a serious discussion thread? I assume next you will inform us that you fucked someone’s mom.

Though that would still be more plausible than the “China did it” basic bitch conspiracy theory.

How would we see the second wave if testing is inadequate?

I am saying if we had testing the math problem would be all the more apparent. Right now it is speculation as to how many staff and first responders were initially infected.

but then the virus went underground again, and absent massive testing that’s where it will stay until it hits a lot of old people and sends them to the hospital.

This is exactly the problem I am talking about.

The virus went underground or first responders are really good at washing hands or something else. No one knows.

We have political leaders using a mathematical model and telling us how many people will be infected given a duration of time. Well this model does not match what has happened in King county so why are they using it with such confidence? It’s not slightly off, the deaths in King county are still mainly from the lifecare center which was over 2 weeks ago.

Biotek may get a boost when it becomes obvious that Bio manufacturing is critical to prevent population die off due to pandemics.

That is what I am afraid of. All we need is a quick, simple, cheap, accurate test.

Please see my reply

https://www.unz.com/akarlin/corona-cost/#comment-3767975

This form of greeting is not limited to Iran. It is common throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and Southern Europe.

It’s becoming clear that ski resorts are the landlubber analogue to cruise ships in terms of their role in spreading corona virus.

This is a great point.

I’ve skied for a long time. During peak season (Xmas, Spring Break, etc.) at peak times (lunch, end-of-day) ski lodges are absolutely packed with winded, sweaty people exhaling and their damp gear strewn hither and yon.

Bathroom hygiene in lodges is generally poor, with bodily fluids and aformentioned gear all over the place, sometimes mixed together.

The dumb billionaires have not yet worked out that living in isolated communities far from the plebs is not of much help in this instance. They surround themselves with flunkies and bodyguards. Heck, their bodyguards seem to fuck their wives and daughters and they don’t seem to realise it.

I predict a lot of this happening to the rich if the SHTF:

“Do you feel in charge?”

This is a slightly off track but I just read the site that was mentioned by HA . It explained how bushmeat caused aids. One of the causes that wasn’t mentioned was the unthinkable, sex between man and animal. I know it sounds bizarre but a tv show tracked down a hotel in Indonesia, and in a railway carriage behind , was chained up a female orangutan. You could see that somebody had denuded the poor ape of all of its hair, and people were paying to have sex with it. It’s a strange world that we live in. And as for the bat to pangolin to man transmission theory- on the radio last month was an interview with a leading scientist who said how she felt that such a path would not be possible. It was to much of a jump.

… are you sure you haven’t overlooked some simpler explanations for how this might have gotten started?

The simpler explanations would be:
Ft Detrick: 1) intentional; 2) accident.

Since we are dealing with, per their history, evil-scum, elite geniuses,
choose #1: intentional.

Given the bushmeat that caused AIDS and the pangolin and bats

Are the bats eaten raw? Soup with bats, cold?

Blame bats, ugly ant eaters, monkeys.
Not recent as food. Been eaten for a … long time.

Simpler explanation: Ft Detrick, Plum Island,
some other forsaken US lab manned by geniuses.

Should add: using PBS, similar propaganda outlet, not wise.

5 dancing shlomos

You don’t know how much, but do you know when?

It’s fuzzy. IMO he sold it last year.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/whats-going-on-with-drudge-rasmussen-claims-matts-not-there-anymore-word-is-he-sold/

Wiki isn’t sure, but that’s not news.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drudge_Report

Try this search.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22the+drudge+report+was+sold&t=brave&ia=web

The Chinese are said to have invented everything. I’m not surprised to read that the Spanish got their chimney parts from Chinese designs.

.

(Beat you to it, Reg Caeser – get over it.)

Covid-19 Middle East connection in British Columbia

https://vancouverisland.ctvnews.ca/b-c-health-minister-says-island-health-covid-19-patient-a-low-risk-to-public-1.4850393

Thursday, March 12, 2020 10:48AM PDT

The health minister said the patient is B.C.’s fourth recorded COVID-19 case linked to Egypt.

Health officials announced seven new cases of COVID-19 in B.C. on Wednesday, including one in the Island Health region, bringing the provincial total to 46.

New update from Italy: 17,660 cases and 1,266 deaths. Death rate is 7.1% This is what you’re likely to see in an elderly population with a significant amount of smokers. However, this death rate is also front-end loaded. The most feeble and elderly die first. The death rate should eventually start to drop.

I am concerned, however, that Italy may not be reporting deaths properly. If some people are not getting respirators because they’re over 65 or younger with co-morbidities, then we don’t know if their deaths are being reported as Covid-19 deaths. Thus we can’t tell if the real mortality rate is being reported.

I have been suspicious about accurate death reporting ever since I read that half the people in the US who have been discharged from hospitals for treatment for ordinary flu, still die within 30 days after leaving. I am not sure if their death certificates are labelled ‘died of flu,’ or something else.

Government agencies could easily use this measure to cut their reported flu mortality way down.

But if I were making a list of other countries, Iran and its Holy City of Qom would probably be pretty far down. So maybe they just got unlucky or maybe it’s more than pure chance.

There is a much more probable explanation.

— China is #1 at bypassing international sanctions and continues trading with Iran.
— Both China and Iran have massive State Owned Enterprises [SOE].

Any oil trade meeting will inevitably involve contacts between Chinese government officials and Iranian government officials representing SOE’s.

Iran is a much smaller country than China, so their SOE reps are much closer to top level officials. An infected Iranian Oil SOE leader would inevitably meet with other members of Iranian national leadership when discussing finances based on Iran’s top source of hard currency and national income.

In contrast, there would be several additional layers between Chinese national leadership and the managers within China’s SOE oil buying arm. Thus, even though Iran’s leadership is infected, there is no reason to believe Chinese leadership is at risk. And if only a few Chinese SOE oil buyers became ill, Chinese state media could easily avoid sharing that fact with the public.
_____

One may not like Trump, but there is no plausible case to be made that his administration ordered a bioweapon strike on China after clearly winning the Phase 1 trade negotiations.

If there was an attack, timing with U.S. troops present can only be plausibly explained if the attacker was targeting both the U.S. and China.

PEACE 😇

Let me try to suggests another metaphor from physics. The universe cosmologists observe seems to have some features/behaviors that can’t be explained with Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity so the cosmologists think of introducing the Dark Matter to make the universe to adhere to Einstein. But there are some who dare to consider modification of Einstein’s GTR (see MOND) to obtain the same result without postulating the Dark Matter. The former try to uphold the rules by which the universe is supposed to play while the latter dare to claim that perhaps the universe does not play by the rules established by Einstein. We have a choice between GTR with Dark Matter or MOND w/o Dark Matter. A universe with postulated unknown entity or universe with different rules?

Where is Ron Unz in this? He is not afraid to challenge the accepted belief about rules how the politics coming from Washington DC is played. He does not want to keep patching up the official model of how things work just to adhere to the assumed belief that there are things that American establishment won’t do, that there are lines that won’t be crossed. He does not want to be a part of ‘the dark matter’ that justifies what we are supposed to believe.

The Chinese are said to have invented everything.

I’ve never heard anyone say that in any context.

Does this guy sound like he’s motivated by the pursuit of social success and political power?

https://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1998/06/01/time/prop.277.html

No, Ron Unz says, it’s not true that he owns only two suits. He owns one. The other wore out weeks ago. And the one left “is on its last legs,” he says. “I’ve patched the pants a couple of times.” But it is true that he eats mostly at Burger Kings and pizza joints. And, yes, he lives in a house with no wife, no kids, no dog and hardly any furniture. “It’s pretty sloppy,” he offers.

He seems like an extreme nerd with an autistic like disregard for social convention, which leads him to entertain controversial viewpoints outside the mainstream.

China sends medical supplies, experts to help Italy battle coronavirus
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-respirators/china-sends-medical-supplies-experts-to-help-italy-battle-coronavirus-idUSKBN2101IM

“A team of nine Chinese medical staff arrived late on Thursday with some 30 tonnes of equipment on a flight organized by the Chinese Red Cross.”

“In contrast to China, Italy’s partners in the European Union earlier this month refused Rome’s requests for help with medical supplies as they looked to stockpile face masks and other equipment to help their own citizens.”

” He does not want to be a part of ‘the dark matter’ that justifies what we are supposed to believe.”

I have no problem with the “let’s consider the possibilities the mainstream seems to be ignoring” approach. But at some point, you have to tie up loose ends on whatever alternate theory you’re proposing. Too many times, people trace something back to a Jew becoming better off, or an enemy of a Jew becoming worse off (put those together, and you have a pretty sizable dataset), and then say “Aha, I knew it!” and leave it at that.

In this case, yes, we have a story where Iran plays a significant role. But so does Italy (and if it’s true that the virus came there by way of Munich, then the Chinese sweatshop workers were probably an aggravating factor as opposed to a direct cause, in which case Italy’s introduction to the virus is not so much different than Iran). And then you still have to explain New Rochelle and AIPAC.

If you’re going to brush off the high level Jews of AIPAC but not the high-level Iranian officials, that’s a tell for a weak case. That’s people saying “I knew it”, even though the “it” they claim to know is as nebulous as when it started.

Or so it seems to me. I’m willing to admit weirdness and eccentricities and puzzling question each time some complicated event happens. That’s how randomness works, in my experience. It’s NOT random, at least not to human eyes. The so-called random sequences that DO look random to our eyes are in fact far from random, precisely because they lack the quicks and clustering and seemingly suspicious gaps that real random data typically has.

This is what you’re likely to see in an elderly population with a significant amount of smokers.

The scary thing is that the French and Germans have an even higher percentage of smokers.

The smoking habit really needs to go. Everyone thinks it just affects the elderly but there is already a problem with smokers of any age getting flu complications and running up medical bills. Combine that with obesity and you have people that are taken out by the common cold. It’s not just the medical bills, all the extra sick days add up.

We have got to get a hold on smoking and obesity in the west. We have tried education and it isn’t working. Punitive taxes are the only way. I know that may offend conservatives but oh well. They don’t have any answers here.

It’s becoming clear that ski resorts are the landlubber analogue to cruise ships in terms of their role in spreading corona virus.

Not really. A cruise ship is entirely cut off from the outside world for the duration of its cruise. By contrast, a ski resort attracts people from all over the country, if not many parts of the world, with new arrivals daily I assume, among the many people who are into sliding down mountains on boards strapped to their feet.

“One of the causes that wasn’t mentioned was the unthinkable, sex between man and animal. “

I hear what you’re saying — call it the “Sam Kinison hypothesis” — but the monkey which holds the precursor of AIDS is small, as I recall, and is regularly feasted on by marauding chimps. Maybe male chimps do rape what they subsequently kill, and maybe some baby chimp or baby monkey did get used as a sex toy by a human at some point but given how prevalent the bushmeat trade still is in parts of Africa, and given the machete-hacking and other butchery involved, I think most people find the bushmeat explanation far more plausible, not just because the alternate you’re proposing is so taboo.

Moreover, women are less likely to transmit AIDS due to the biology of the vaginal wall and what it evolved to endure, and that presumably goes for the orangutan in your story as well. So you need to find examples of a male chimp or other primate who was trained to have sex with humans several decades ago. Or else, just a chimp who was hacked to death for his or her meat. I’m pretty certain that examples of the latter will be overwhelmingly easier to track down, and therefore that much more likely to be the original source.

In any case, if AIDS is indeed about a century old, as the current research would have it, it makes it less likely the CIA bio-engineered it. So that conspiracy theory takes a hit, though I guess I haven’t accounted for time machines.

The death rates are overestimated because the denominator (number of infected) is much much larger. And as you say the death rate is “front-end loaded. The most feeble and elderly die first. The death rate should eventually start to drop.”

https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2820%2930627-9
http://www.thelancet.com Published online March 12, 2019 https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30627-9
COVID-19 and Italy: what next?

“Of the patients who died, 42·2% were aged 80–89 years, 32·4% were aged 70–79 years, 8·4% were aged 60–69 years, and 2·8% were aged 50–59 years (those aged >90 years made up 14·1%). The male to female ratio is 80% to 20% with an older median age for women (83·4 years for women vs 79·9 years for men).”

Is it possible that oldest ones were ‘sacrificed’? Is it possible that because of hysteria too many youngish people seek help in hospitals? And they are the main reason why the old are dying. They receive help that they did not need?

And see this:

Ohio probably has more than 100,000 undiagnosed cases of coronavirus because of ‘community spread’ – despite official tally of just five, warns state health department expert
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8108389/Ohio-probably-100-000-undiagnosed-cases-coronavirus-community-spread.html

Does it frustrate you that not everyone here is a boomer burnout? My self description was actually a joke reference to Unz who is notorious for bragging about his IQ. I came from the class that has always seen IQ tests as a bit tawdry and arriviste so I have no idea what my IQ is and whether my credentials are impeccable well that’s pretty subjective and I certainly benefitted greatly from legacy admittance. Athletically I topped out at college football in a conference you’ve likely heard of notorious for pretty low athletic accomplishment at least since WW2. So I’m certainly not elite and mostly played in order to bang cheerleaders honestly. So no it sounds like I’m not your rival- rofl it’s kind of pathetic that you even have an online rival.

Or else, just a chimp who was hacked to death for his or her meat. I’m pretty certain that examples of the latter will be overwhelmingly easier to track down, and therefore that much more likely to be the original source.

This actually happens all the time in the Congo.

They take an AK to the forest and shoot anything that moves and turn it into meat.

It’s illegal but not strictly enforced.

Note that this wouldn’t be possible with their primitive weapons so the flow of guns into the area fits the timeline.

To suggest it was monkey sex is ridiculous.

Got it. What is the Mandarin word for the Chinese version of “hasbara”?

That was a long time ago and the rabid Zionists are at the helm of US policy now.

Italy was hit because Milan is the garment capital of italy, and chinese workers have exploded there to the tune of 300k. Well guess what we brought back from our new years festival? Yeah, c19. Italians were agnry that the chinese came there to make garments (Made in Italy) by the chinese. Priced the locals out of business. Then again, Asians and Middle easterners have the Ace2 receptor vs Caucasians have very little of it. Just say’n

OK, ALMOST everything, by a British Commie named Joseph Needham, who wrote 17-volume set of books on that.

He’s the “man who loved China” in the book by Simon Winchester.

Everything, airplanes, shrimp gumbo, fried shrimp, peanut brittle, you name it. ;-}

Yeah, but there are just tons of places around the world with large concentrations of Chinese people. They really get around, and they do well where they land. I was already thinking of Vancouver, B.C., Canada, when 5 s later I read Utu’s reply. Would the powers-that-be not be at all worried about areas close to home or areas that they like that have concentrations of Chinamen the intensity of Lombardy province?

I mean sure, it’s be nice for the real estate to go down a bit out in Hongcouver, but how bout NY City with its 3 that I know of (but I’ve been told 5) Chinatowns? Lots of these big shot live there too. To me, Iran is the only thing that makes one go “hmmmm”.

Haha, on Jeff Epstein!

Yes the guy who ran for major political office twice just hates political power. Who said anything about social success- i called him above (quiet wittily) a wannabe nerd caudillo. Ron like Romney thought he had the right stuff and American said nah. Both have acted like sulky bitches ever since.

“Stealing” my jokes but it’s good to have someone seeing the reality of this place. Steve deserves better.

ADL pays you to keyboard
idiotic harassment at Ron Unz?

How much?
I could do it better.

Couple of you at least.
ADL, similar turd scared.
Shitless.

5 dancing shlomos

With the cheek brush faire la bise, France has ten times as many coronavirus deaths as Germany. In Italy, where it is common for men to cheek kiss even male acquaintances, 250 people died yesterday puting the total coronavirus deaths in Italy to 1,266. In Germany so far there have been a grand total of eight, that is 8 deaths. There is plenty of travel between Germany and China and a fair bit between Germany and Iran. The Italians are claiming the first coronavirus case was someone who flew from China to Germany and them travelled through Germany to get to his destination in Italy. Iranians in China probably would be shaking hands

It was discovered only a few years ago that after people shake hands they always sniff their hand
How many people does a important politician/ member of the government shake hands with in an average week? The coronavirus is in excrement, they have open sewers in Iran. Islamic toilet etiquette is the anus must be washed with water using the left hand after defecating.

I will own up to being a by nature contrarian and instinctively commenting with countervailing slant to the dominant narrative, whatever it might be. However, appropriate weight to the human wish to not get into a nuclear war would preclude attacking China with a bioweapon unless it could be done is a very subtle and untraceable way. While Iran is a different matter because they cannot go toe to toe with the big boys, and Trump has hated Iran since the Embassy hostage crisis, the fact is if the coronaviris in Iran was a deliberate bioweapon attack by the US then the US were also doing the same to China and not really bothering to hide it. And that I think to be very, very unlikely.

China is pushing an unfounded conspiracy theory about the origins of the coronavirus: that Americans introduced it in Wuhan late last year. There's no evidence to support it, but it was circulating on China’s tightly controlled internet on Friday. https://t.co/tuxeZEoZgy

— The New York Times (@nytimes) March 13, 2020

Agree! The virus is a pretext for a systemic purging. As it is, 2000+ die daily in usa from Doctor/hospital malpractice.

Probably 40% of americans have chronic metabolic syndrome, type2 diabetes, obesity, nails etc etc… all vulnerable to a bacteria their gut microbiome is hardly equipped handle.
Then take the population in usa that has tight junction and gap junction permeability with further gut bacteria problems… bang zoom you flood emergency rooms with fat sick stupid shoppers as nd Don’s great black econ numbers are gone and biden clinton take over!

“I’ll admit I’m skeptical. It really would be an astonishing coincidence if the worst outbreak in Europe occurred at the exact same location as the highest concentration of Chinese in Europe but had absolutely nothing to do with the latter.”

That skepticism seems reasonable to me. If you check my posting history, you can see that I too was pushing the migrant-Chinese-sweatshop angle as being by far the most plausible connection. And it could still well be an aggravating factor, what with all those sewing machines and workers crammed together in some secluded area away from the immigration authorities and other prying eyes, even if the specific strain of the virus that took hold was introduced by way of Munich/Shanghai/Wuhan. Hardly anything grows and spreads in isolation, and there are lots of cofactors involved in producing the optimal breeding ground for a virus or other organism — pre-existing conditions common to certain areas of the world, gut biota and dietary preferences, immunity profiles, genetic factors, and so forth. Current medical practices tend to focus on trying to isolate the one ingredient that supposedly makes something work, whereas now it’s understood that it takes a village of sorts to raise most any living (or, in the case of a virus, semi-living) thing.

But even if the Chinese textile workers have no connection, it would bring home the point that sometimes the most obvious and plausible connection is in fact a red herring, which puts your maverick approach to looking at things in a better light.