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The discussion of coronavirus has taken some sharp turns. One such turn is the claim that the mortality rate is not high enough to justify shutdowns. But the mortality rate is not the reason for the shutdowns. The purpose of the closedowns is to reduce the exponential rate of infection. Covid-19 is much more contagious than flu, people can spread the virus for days and weeks prior to developing symptoms, the seriousness of each case is not predictable in advance, and it is a new virus about which little is known including treatment. Therefore, the highly infectious virus can easily overwhelm health care systems—just ask New York City and Italy. This is the reason for trying to reduce the rate of infection. There is no good information on mortality rates as there is no reliable or widespread testing, and the payment incentives result in hospitals reporting the virus as the cause of any deaths that can be associated with it.
What has happened is that the mortality rate, which was not the reason for the shutdowns, is now the reason for reopening. The overlooked question is: If the closedowns did not drop the escalating rate of infection, what did? Did the virus simply give up? If we experienced a high rate of infection prior to closedown, what will happen on reopening? The public authorities did not use the period of the closedown to prepare the public with masks or attend to building ventilation systems. Are New York and Italy also hoaxes? And is it a hoax that China and Japan are again closing down large cities? Do we really think this virus can be reduced to a plot?
Japan has had to reclose a city that had been cleared of the virus. Reopening simply was accompanied by a second wave of infection. This and reports that those “cured” of the virus have amazing low antibodies against it raise a serious question about relying on herd immunity. Perhaps all Sweden is doing is establishing the virus in the population, not immunity to the virus.
As my readers know, I am the last to trust the presstitute media which includes the Internet. As this virus is new little is known about it, including by medical personnel and ER doctors. I have posted views of experts who have spent their lives studying viruses and the immune system response, and have been entertained by uninformed narcissistic know-it-alls shouting them down. It is amazing how many people know more than experts. If a life of research doesn’t provide a clue, how do people who have never been inside a lab know?
Reactions to the virus have shown how weak is our sense of social responsibility. Big Pharma and Bill Gates want to use the virus to advance their agenda of vaccination. Police agencies want to use the virus for more control. Libertarians complaining of the infringements on their freedom of movement show an inadequate sense of social responsibility when they insist they shouldn’t be limited as the virus only kills old people. Youth are only interested in their recreational activities.
There is no doubt that shutdowns are economically costly and that confinement creates problems of its own for some people. Perhaps it will make them more empathetic for those confined to prison for taking drugs and engaging in other victimless crimes or framed up in order to shut them up as appears to be happening to former British ambassador Craig Murray ( https://www.opednews.com/articles/Former-UK-Ambassador-Craig-by-Ray-McGovern-Charged_Craig-Murray_Innocent_Jail-200427-315.html ).
During the period of closedown, public authorities have taken no steps to prepare for reopening. There are still no masks, no or not enough reliable tests, no attention to building ventilation systems, and effective treatments still encounter some official opposition. Just the other day there was a news report, perhaps a hoax, that the FBI had raided a medical facility for engaging in fraud for treating Covid patients with intravenous vitamin C.
In a recent posting ( https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/04/25/coming-out-of-lockdown-unprepared/ ) Marc Wathelet explains how to have a successful reopening. It is extraordinary that during the period of closedown no steps were taken in this direction.
Dr. Roberts once again reminds us of the virtue of reasoned discourse. Facts matter, but one needs to evaluate the correct facts to make a correct decision. The issue with the virus is about the capacity of our system to cope. Our reliance on employer based private health insurance has over the past twenty years wrung any “surge” capacity out of our medical care system. We ordinarily expect hospitals and clinics to operate at nearly full capacity so not a penny of profit is lost. In times of virus that means absent some social controls–like making folks stay inside to avoid contact–the virus will overwhelm and crush the medical care system.
What is the long term answer? Better attention to work places so that there are not incubators of disease. Perhaps we need OSHA rules on ventilation and minimum distance at workplaces to make them safer. We also need universal government run health care that can afford to keep “surge” capacity in our health system.
Looking forward to more good sense from Dr. Roberts.
PCR says: I have posted views of experts who have spent their lives studying viruses and the immune system response, and have been entertained by uninformed narcissistic know-it-alls shouting them down. It is amazing how many people know more than experts. If a life of research doesn’t provide a clue, how do people who have never been inside a lab know?”
This is true, but what Paul Roberts ignores is that other experts have suggested other remedies like Senior Swedish epidemiologist and former Chief Scientist of the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, Johan Giesecke and his colleague Anders Tegnal. They have created a policy that does not stop the economy or impose the same restrictions as they have in the US and elsewhere.
Sweden is now in a good position to lift more restrictions in the coming weeks without having decimated their national economies.
Maybe a similar policy is impossible in the US, I don’t know, but I do know that a policy will have to be created that addresses our two basic requirements of saving as many lives as possible while fighting infection as best we can.
As for “herd immunity”, Roberts makes a valid point, but it is a moot point. We must hope that herd immunity will help fend off the infection because there is no viable alternative. Absent a vaccination, we will have to hope for sufficient antibodies to fight the virus because, eventually, the economy will be forced to reopen one way or another. It cannot be postponed forever. That is not an option.
I have never known Mike Whitney to miss a point, but he missed my last one. The question is not whether to reopen, but whether to prepare first and then reopen. There has been no preparation for reopening, so why expect any difference from before the closedown?
Herd immunity is at this time only an assumption. Evidence so far suggests that “cured” patients have insufficient antibodies to prevent reinfection. As of present knowledge, we don’t know if Sweden is achieving anything other than planting the virus in the Swedish population. It other words, Sweden’s policy is based on a hope, not on knowledge. I am in favor of the hope coming true, but the second wave closedowns in China and Japan are not encouraging.
Many of the closedowns came too late to prevent a period of rapid infection, but apparently the closedowns have reduced the rate at which new infections appear. If not, then the policy was a gamble that sacrificed the economy. In Sweden’s case, the policy is a gamble based on saving the economy, perhaps at the expense of the people. In either case, it was a gamble. If neither gamble proves to pay off, the situation appears more desperate.
You are wrong. There is a viable alternative. It’s called containment. It worked with SARS-CoV-1 in 2003 and it worked with SARS-CoV-2 in China in 2020.
Sweden is experiencing an exponential increase in infections. An apt and powerful comparison is Sweden vs. Norway. You can see the results here:
https://ibb.co/7KRff1J
Proving Covid19 exists, PCR testing problems, Antibody test confusion, Pollution and Covid19
1. Proving Causation – Raising the Question in Three Quotes
“The ‘gold standard’ in testing for COVID-19 is laboratory isolated/purified coronavirus particles free from any contaminants and particles that look like viruses but are not, that have been proven to be the cause of the syndrome known as COVID-19 and obtained by using proper viral isolation methods and controls.” -‘#JulianRose’
“Contrary to popular belief (even in the science world, where the students have been trained up on certain suppositions), there is far less known about the connection between a ‘virus’ and the disease it is purported to cause. The reason it has been so difficult to demonstrate causation is that pathogens (that is, viruses) themselves are almost never ‘purified’ (extracted from all other elements). This is the first rule of testing as passed down from the 1800s from the German bacteriologist Robert Koch. If you cannot purify the virus itself, you cannot prove it was the cause of the disease.
In typical form, the recent coronavirus has not been purified. At least, there’s no paper in the scientific community that has shown to have done this. This isn’t really a unique ‘conspiracy’ because one of the great scandals of modern medicine in th[e] last hundred years is that viruses are never purified anyway. Yet they are communicated to the public via mediators as having been scientifically proven to cause specific diseases (influenza, etc).” -#CJayEngel
“Has [Tony Fauci’s] NIAID or any other laboratory in the world rigorously, with electron microscopy, isolated and purified samples of patients tested SARS-CoV-2 positive for Covid-19?” #FWilliamEngdahl
2. What does PCR Testing Actually Measure?
This cause for doubt is raised by many and perhaps can be encapsulated in this quote but the link offers a number of articles worth considering on this point:
“But aside from all these concerns, aside from what we might call the lack of integrity in the transparency of the case-confirmation counting, I mostly wanted to drive straight to the very heart of the matter: the very possibility of testing for this thing in the first place. If the test itself is fraudulent, that is, if its authority rests on nothing more than a declaration of its authority, the ‘science’ in all this is difficult to distinguish from religion after all.”
https://www.facebook.com/groups/461110314347228/permalink/944232809368307/
3. Measuring Anti-Bodies
This is Jon Rappoport discussing the anti-body test, a short worthy read for skeptics. Here’s a quote:
“Generally speaking, before 1984 a positive antibody test was taken to mean the patient had achieved immunity from a germ. After 1984, the science was turned upside down; a positive result meant the patient ‘had the germ’ and was not immune. Now, with COVID-19, if you just read news headlines, a positive test means the patient is immune; but if you read down a few paragraphs, a positive test means the patient is maybe…maybe not…immune. Maybe infected, maybe not infected. Maybe sick, maybe not sick. And, on top of all that, antibody tests are known to read falsely positive, owing to factors that have nothing to do with the virus being tested for.”
https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/…/covid-here-come-the…/
Bonus: Multiple Causes – Industrial Disease
This is where I am now in terms of raising questions. Are we simply dealing with yet another cover-up for a life-blind system that destroys human health? This one discusses the connection with fracked natural gas (highly toxic) and its use in ‘hot spots’ around the world for incidents of ‘Covid19’ (as well as high pollution locales in general).
COVID Pandemic 2020: Environment Omitted
https://harvoa-med.blogspot.com/2020/04/COVID2020.html
I’m a retired professional, a Ph.D. with thirty years of off-again-on-again work in epidemiology, ending my career with a fifteen year stint as an epidemiologist in my state’s Department of Public Health. I predicted the likelihood of a pandemic back in January of this year, when I saw the preliminary data from Wuhan.
Later I made reasonably accurate projections up to the present for numbers of infections and deaths in Massachusetts, the USA, and the world. There’s a partial trail of these in my comments on the sites of various Unz Review commenters, so anyone who chooses to can check the veracity of this.
I have changed my opinions as new information roles in. I’m certainly not as dogmatic or ignorant as those who’ve launched ad hominem attacks against me for daring to post grounded and reasonable comments on the subjects of SARS-CoV-2, the Covid-19 Pandemic, and policies for dealing with these.
I’ve respected Paul Craig Roberts’s previous posts on this subject. Here is some of my latest thinking on these issues:
Small and scattered studies, which suggest that perhaps close to 90% of those who appear to have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 experience mild or no symptoms, have led me to the hypothesis that there might be a genetically inherited resistance to Covid-19 and that only those with a bad luck genetic draw might be susceptible to the disease. Here’s some support for that hypothesis: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/27/study-of-twins-reveals-genetic-effect-on-covid-19-symptoms
Unfortunately, in conjunction with growing evidence that a SARS-CoV-2 infection does not provide protection against re-infection, this suggests that populations will not develop “herd immunity” against Covid-18 until natural selection removes some susceptibility to this disease from the population. Boris Johnson’s original policy may have been right even though he grossly underestimated and then blanched at the amount of deaths and illness it implied.
One thing that we really need is good and adequate testing for the presence of SARS-CoV-2. This is a good argument for that assertion: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/26/opinion/coronavirus-test-asymptomatic.html
First of all, I agree with Paul Roberts that we are woefully unprepared for reopening. The government has had plenty of time to create a more effective and widespread testing regime and they have failed. The same with masks. Where the hell are the masks??
Its a disgrace. I’m starting to think that the government doesn’t give a hoot about public safety even in middle of a crisis. The emphasis seems to be on public relations rather than performance.
So, yes, I missed the point and got sidetracked. My bad.
Levtraro says:
There is a viable alternative.(to herd immunity) It’s called containment. It worked with SARS-CoV-1 in 2003 and it worked with SARS-CoV-2 in China in 2020.”
The Swedish epidemiologist addressed this issue of containment when he predicted that fatality rates would spike dramatically when the lockdowns are ended. He believes that –when we look back a year from today– the fatality rates will be much-the-same everywhere across Europe regardless of their policies. I have no idea whether he is right or not, but it sounds reasonable to me. In any event, it is premature to argue that “containment” has worked. (Of course, I am assuming that you do not mean permanent containment which would be impossible given the impact it would have on the economy.)
How much preparation? We can’t go on like this forever. What about people’s mental health? The need to socialize etc. This is in addition to the economy.
Nice job characterizing a “libertarian” position (yes sarcasm) Let’s just add to the concept a little bit.
When the “State” has enormous power over the lives of its citizens, bad things happen. There are often starvations, genocides, wars, unrest, black markets, organized crime, unchecked graft and corruption, poverty, and so on. These things are “Bad” for public health.
Many of us understand that a pandemic is a perfect excuse for the “State” to assume more control than people would otherwise put up with. There are very influential people who are trying to move their agenda forward right now.
In a free society, you are free to isolate yourself, wear a mask, wash your hands, stay home from work and even insist the nursing home you sent grandma to has strict protocols to keep her safe. It may be that enough people would do this voluntarily to in effect “shut down” economic activity.
But this isn’t what these “shutdowns” are. The shutdowns are coercive actions by government to force people to do things they’d rather not.
Free people deserve to decide risk on their own. In this very moment you can witness how government officials are using political and ideological reasons to determine risk that have NOTHING to do with the sensible observations of this article.
We need to refuse to allow these politicians and technocrats to substitute their reasoning for our own.
This is NOT a “lack of social responsibility”. Rather, it is exceptionally responsible to insist on retaining liberty even in the face of this pandemic, or other calamities.
The author is enamored of the power of government. I remain unimpressed and suspicious of their actions. Death and disease are a natural part of the human condition, but liberty not so much. They are gunning for our freedoms right now, and this author is walking with them, hand in hand.
An increase in cases in Sweden is not a cause for alarm. The virus is sweeping through the population.
Their hospitals are not swamped. The epidemic will peak, then decline. In the mean time Sweden has not destroyed their economy. Another advantage of their approach is that there will not be a second wave. On the other hand, by locking down Norway will damage their economy and have a second wave. According to Sweden’s lead epidemiologist fewer people will die if the epidemic is allowed to pass as quickly as possible instead of dragging it out.
The question I have for Dr. Roberts is simple. In the lack of an adequate plan for reopening the economy, which the U.S. does not have and will never have, should the economy reopen anyways?
“The second wave [of coronavirus], if any, will be minor, at most.”
— Dr. Knut Wittkowski
(From “Against the Corona Panic, Pt. V: A Hero of the Hour, Dr. Knut Wittkowski.”)
“The author is enamored of the power of government. ”
Exactly! He’s also a socialist-going on-communist in complete denial of his socialism, which explains exactly why he has always been “enamored of the power of government” [and therefor anti individual freedom] , and why he is essentially no different from 99% of the writers featured on this very site.
The truth of the matter is that the only thing that needs to be permanently locked down is the government, and the sooner the better.
And so it goes…
Regards,onebornfree
What I like about this comment is that finally soneone is speaking who has even an inkling of understanding about the extreme nonlineararity of EPIDEMICS.
I am sick and tired of hearing from MDs, virologists, immunilogists and other braindead big pharma ‘experts’ who don’t have a single whit of understanding on the subject.
And piss off (generally everyone) because yes, I am published in the subject, though having an infinitesimal knowledge of it-more than the goons leading us through this.
“How much preparation?”
Making high-quality surgical masks and N-95/N-100 “disposable” respirators readily available in abundance would be an outstanding first step.
I cannot get over how bizarrely incompetent the Federal government is at effectively managing a nationwide health emergency that is evidently, in a historical sense, epic. What if this virus was not only extremely contagious but extremely virulent also? I guess we should count our lucky stars.
No, the claim is that the total amount of deaths from Covid-19 is no worse than a bad flu season so therefore a shutdown was not necessary.
No. Trump was told by Fauci and Birx that 2.2 million Americans would die if he did not shut down the economy. Do you actually think that Trump would shut down the economy if he knew that the total number of American deaths was going to be no more than a bad flu season regardless of what he did?
The only important data point is the total number of deaths. Actual infection rates and mortality rates can never be known because we will never know the total number of infected. We do know that the reported Covid-19 mortality rates have been fraudulently inflated by the inclusion of the those dying with Covid-19 instead only those dying from Covid-19. In fact, in an attempt to save their apocolyptic predictions, they are now including those they suspect dying of Covid-19 without ever doing any testing.
It’s clear from the Sweden data that closedowns do nothing to decrease the total number of Covid-19 deaths. It’s also clear that closedowns cause great harm by increasing suicide rates, depriving people of preventative medical care and causing economic ruin.
The question is, how to we prevent hysterical, suicidal responses in the future? The answer is by making the doomsayers responsible for the panic and devastation they cause. Fauci especially needs to be criminally prosecuted for shouting fire in crowded theater and sued for the financial harm his doomsaying has caused. This should at least discourage any future doomsayers and maybe get current doomsayers like Michael Mann and Jim Hansen to be more equivocal and more circumspect in their predictions as well.
“Marc Wathelet explains how to have a successful reopening”…all he has to do now is explain how to pay for it & exactly how long it will take in a country the size of the U.S. It’s unlikely that all the “uninformed narcissistic know-it-alls” will shout him down, if indeed, he can. It is amazing how many people listen any more to “experts” who have spent their life inside a lab on a govt. grant or with tenure & could just as comfortably go on doing that for as long as need be. “If a life of [remunerated] research doesn’t provide a clue” how do people who have, know that those “who have never been inside a lab” can just go on waiting for another lifetime, until (or if) they do figure it out? Even now the heads of Tyson Foods, Smithfield & others are warning of an imminent breakdown in their food supply chains at processing plants. How long will it be before that spreads to other suppliers, grocers & retailers & deliverers? Will the tens of millions of unemployed run out of money first or the stores run out of food first? Rather than make those under house detention “more empathetic for those confined to prison for taking drugs and engaging in other victimless crimes or framed up in order to shut them up”, it’s liable to make them horde more & scrap more viciously with their neighbors & kin. One doesn’t justify the other, regardless. If “Police agencies want to use the virus for more control”, then you hardly need be a Libertarian to feel enough “social responsibility” to complain of infringements on our, of all ages, freedom of movement. It’s only natural, that youth have many urgent interests to satisfy, economic & social, as well as valid recreational activities; they can hardly be blamed for that. The well-off can afford to dither at leisure, most of us can’t.
A convicted double murderer in New Zealand, then pardoned, has been charged with rape and indecency. He was due for trial in March. But I have seen nothing in the media since the first public report. The coronavirus shut down co-incided with the trial. I have chosen my words carefully after reading the charges faced by Craig Murray for his blog. British and Commonwealth Courts are very strict on Court procedures. People in N Z have been hauled up before the Courts for disclosing Court information on their Facebook pages. Craig Murray may have got himself into this predicament.
I hope (for Swedes) you are right, we’ll see in due time if your predictions are correct.
It’s not premature to say that containment has worked. This paper in Science clearly demonstrates, at the highest level of technical expertise, data richness and ingenuity, that containment succeeded in China in stopping infections by depletion of the susceptible population (i.e. the virus could not find more humans to infect), which was the proximate target:
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abb4557
There is previous paper also in Science by Chinese authors with a detailed mathematical model of the epidemilogy before and after containment measures were implemented and which used a rich database of people’s mobility donated by the Tencent telecom
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abb3221
and that shows too that containment works in stopping the spread of the virus.
However, the Swedish epidemilogist you are quoting could be right that in the longer term the fatality rate could be rather similar lockdown vis-a-vis no lockdown. That is a really pessimistic perspective. I guess we just have to wait and see what will be the true result of the different policies, a few months down the road.
(I understand that the death and misery caused by the very probable ensuing economic catastrophe after the policy of containment could be great; the death and misery caused by engaging the virus in direct combat (==herd immunity) could also be great though, even greater; perhaps there is not enough time/expertise to do that kind of modelling/forecasting righ now so policy targets have to be for the short term and precautionary for the longer term).
This is true…but he accomplishes it by providing none.
This “issue” of dying from or with is absurd. Comorbidity is real. Deal with it using logic, OK?
We have known since the 1800s through Farr’s law that pandemics follow some sort of bell curve distribution regardless of mitigation because diseases take out the sickly and old first and then the remaining healthy people are less likely to succumb. Since this is the natural course of all pandemics, your paper, assuming you are describing their contents correctly, proves nothing.
You should take your own advice.
Way back when this panic started I wrote: Covid-19 is Y2K 2020…prophetic that.
If a more strict (or very strict) lockdown ultimately eliminates the virus, it might be a necessary measure. Otherwise there would always be a large number of infected people who would infect more people and even people who have recovered from earlier infections (in case immunity doesn’t work). Infections would go on indefinitely. Maybe the third or fourth time that someone gets sick again, he woudln’t be able to cope with the disease and die. If that is the case, a complete lockdown for weeks might be the only option that we have.
But if the virus doesn’t disappear completely because when the people recover the virus becomes inactive but still present, then a complete lockdown wouldn’t help to eliminate the virus. The virus would always survive and come again after a certain time. This is also what happens if there is no lockdown or if lockdown is lax or flexible.
However, in both cases – whether the virus disappears with a complete lockdown or doesn’t disappear completely – a more or less strict lockdown might be necessary in order to reduce the rate of infections so that hospitals can cope with the cases and treat them, or as a temporary measure until we hopefully have more effective treatments or a vaccine. In any case, the situation is difficult and we cannot just ignore it as if it were nothing. Yesterday television showed Brazil were the situation in hospitals is quite bad: not enough medical capacity to treat patients, dead and alive people in the same rooms and so on. We cannot live without food and we need a few other things. But other than that, the priority is to find a way to deal with corona and everything will have to be secondary to that. I agree completely with PCR.
What if this virus was not only extremely contagious but extremely virulent also? I guess we should count our lucky stars.
Yes, exactly. We chose a disastrously expensive method of reducing transmission because we didn’t have enough masks to reduce the rate of transmission. It’s a good thing healthcare did not collapse, which was the goal of reducing transmission. We got lucky.
Try leaning a bit more about scientific and logic matters. It helps. What Fauci reccomends is what is being done in the whole world, even to some extent in Sweden (many measures there are reccomended and followed, some are obligatory). You say: “We do know that the reported Covid-19 mortality rates have been fraudulently inflated”. What we know is that they have been deflated in many cases. It was reported that the real numbers of dead caused by it in the UK, by instance, is more than twice the official number, this might also be the case in Italy.
It simply cannot be possible that the government PCR worked many years for (in high places) would create or USE such a mild flu (30,000 ventilators were needed in NY and they used 5) to implement their power grab.
It simply cannot be.
(Now when this woman who obviously understands what she is talking about starts to tell us about what is really going on in NY, please remind PCR that it simply cannot be that the government is wholly inept and evil). I mean, he worked there, so….
If the genetic specificity that you describe is indeed the case, is that unusual for a naturally occurring virus pathogen? If so, how unusual? Rare?
Re Boris Johnson, recall a few days ago, Trump was ragged in the media for wondering out loud, why not let the virus “wash over the country”.
A person with end stage kidney disease dies of kidney failure. This person also tests positive for Covid-19 and is therefore included as those dying from Covid-19. How is this not completely illogical and fraudulent especially considering that the majority of people testing positive from Covid-19 have no symptoms?
I have posted views of experts who have spent their lives studying viruses and the immune system response, and have been entertained by uninformed narcissistic know-it-alls shouting them down. It is amazing how many people know more than experts. If a life of research doesn’t provide a clue, how do people who have never been inside a lab know?
I thought that most of our problems were due to listening to other experts. You know, the ones that told us that having the US manufacture low tech items like PPE wasn’t efficient. We also had other experts tell us that excess productive capacity and inventory also wasn’t efficient.
There is one universal trait about experts though, that unlike most of us, they will never admit that they are just taking a wild ass guess.
Very true. There’s no doubt that their approach resulted in a higher number of deaths so far. Basically, their government “erred on the side of caution” in favour of economic considerations. Maybe they realised that the local vibrants would have made proper lockdowns impossible or maybe they just wanted to accelerate the departure of “old & white” segment of the population. Who knows. It sure looks like the average Mohammad won’t have to pay for that many Swedish granny pensions once they release him from prison.
Lockdowns buy us time – which should be used to figure out effective treatments and instant, cheap, accurate tests. Either of those could make lockdowns unnecessary.
[emphasis added]
Just read the paper … before replying … don’t be lazy.
So your scientific argument is that because everyone is doing it, it must be correct? If everyone was jumping off cliffs, would you do that as well? My mother taught me the fallaciousness of the everyone is doing argument when I was 3. Clearly there have been some gaps in your upbringing.
By what mechanism have the Covid-19 deaths been deflated? Is it because they are now using the fraudulent CDC method of reporting Covid-19 deaths and including those who died with Covid-19 instead of only including those who died from Covid-19?
People should take preventative measures. These include zinc & baking soda supplementation { Goo9le ‘ baking soda cure for the flu ” }. I did this ,and, only suffered two days before I was ready to go back to work. I am 74 yrs. old with a couple of chronic health problems. I was a perfect candidate for death by corona virus. It didn’t happen. Zinc was found to be a ” silver bullet ” for the corona virus in the early 1970’s. Homeopahic doctors like Dr. David Brownstein seem to be having a lot of success fighting this virus. Check out his channel on ” you tube ” God Bless Everyone , and, stay healthy.
As if you would know them if they bit you in the ass…self awareness is in order for you.
Another issue presents itself in the concept of ‘we will base our opinions on SCIENCE’.
What is ‘SCIENCE’? If anything, it is a plethora of opinions, not a single opinion.
Which basically means it has limited use and that prudence and common sense must prevail.
For instance, let me present ‘Masks Don’t Work’.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340570735_Masks_Don’t_Work_A_review_of_science_relevant_to_COVID-19_social_policy
Everything about this response is inaccurate.
1.) “Containment” worked with SARS in 2003 because SARS was not nearly as contagious and–get this–they caught it early. Only 8000-some people ever showed signs of having caught it.
By comparison, the first case of Coronavirus was in November; the Chinese didn’t even blow the whistle until early January, and the Chinese/WHO didn’t admit that it spread by person-to-person contact until mid-January. The disease was allowed to circulate for almost two months, all over the globe, before any real measures were taken to contain it.
But I digress, the notion that containment ever “worked” in China for this latest Coronavirus is laughable–anyone with a brain knows that the Chinese numbers are completely bogus. The Chinese are not behaving like they’ve actually stamped out the disease.
But even if you’re a big enough sucker to trust the Chinese–who have consistently lied about Coronavirus–we’re well past the point of containment. The overwhelming majority of cases are mild or asymptomatic. Results from the initial antibody tests are showing that the number of infected is anywhere from 45-80 times the number of reported cases–i.e. tens of millions of Americans have already had it. Unless you test everyone daily, you’re never going to catch even a fraction of the overall infected.
2.) Sweden is not experiencing “an exponential increase in infections”–at least not symptomatic infections. They’ve done comparatively nothing relative to the rest of the Western world, and their curve looks oddly like everyone else’s. Again, really makes you wonder what effect the lockdowns are actually having. Also makes you question whether the lockdowns–and the attendant economic catastrophe–were worth it for a disease that kills roughly .15% of the people who catch it.
The only thing we know for certain about Wuhan Flu is that the projected numbers by the experts were wrong . . . catastrophically wrong.
The “bite” was barely a nibble.
Re Sweden vs. Norway, let’s look at the numbers in a year, after the inevitable second and, possibly, third wave have culled the dwindling numbers of old and infirm and see if destroying the world economy really moved the needle.
How many extra deaths and how did you determine this extra death number?
No, the epidemic is already over in Sweden:
The vertical lines designate seven-day periods starting Sundays. You can see that the epidemic’s “hit” lasted three weeks, as expected and as usual with flu epidemics. There is nothing unusual about the Wuhan coronavirus strain except the media hype. (From Swedish Response Vindicated in Coronavirus Epidemic.)
Here is the same epidemic curve (deaths; in blue) graphed against the wacko Ferguson predictions:
“We, the Swedish government, decided early in January that the measures we should take against the pandemic should be evidence-based. When you start looking around for the measures being taken now by different countries, you find that very few of them have any shred of evidence basis…”
— Dr. Johan Giesecke, world-renowned epidemiologist, adviser to the Swedish government, and the man who hired Anders Tegnell to direct the Swedish coronavirus pandemic strategy, speaking April 17
Excellent post. Shows clearly that the doomsayers should be jailed and the the shutdown did nothing except destroy the economy, destroy peoples lives and cause extra deaths from suicides.
Dr. Roberts, thank you for this cautionary note. Based on my reading of Dr. Wathelet’s concerns regarding the potential for herd immunity, I chose to reduce my enthusiasm and encouragements for an aggressive undoing of the shutdown, despite the questioning perspectives that I provided to you through your website. DISCLAIMER: I am not an epidemiologist, immunologist, virologist, pulmonologist nor a physician. I am a physiologist and I worked in public health for nearly nine years, but not involving airborne diseases (save Legionella which was of little consequence in my tenure). I am speaking here mostly as a layman.
FIRST: COVID-19 IS REAL, NOT A HOAX. it is clear that there is a separate disease process at work besides influenza and provisionally we assume this to be the result of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. I would hope that post-mortem samples are being conducted on deaths reported as due to COVID-19 and parallel cases that are not (control). These samples should correlate case data (including PCR and serological results relevant for diagnosing COVID-19) plus routine histological as well as electron microscopical images from critical tissues, particularly the lung. Considering locations in an equatorial Caribbean where there is no “winter flu,” we can see the rise and fall COVID-19 without the confounding effects of influenza or flu+pneumonia. (Dengue is a vector-borne disease, not an airborne disease, and peaks in the months from August to December. Symptomologically, it is easily distinguished from COVID-19 and influenzas.)
Yes, containment worked with SARS-CoV-1 as you admit and it required less effort. Containment has worked with SARS-CoV-2 too in China and it is working in the many countries that are applying it but this time it requires a lot more effort. The fact that this time the challenge is greater of course does not mean that the same solution applied on a larger scale will not work. You can understand that.
You doubt the data from China? Have you read the papers I have linked, published in Science? Forgive me but who are you compared to the referees and editors of the papers published in Science with Chinese data? These referees and editors considered the data solid. By the way, the data is available in the online Supplementary Materials of those papers, have you examined the data that you are questioning?
You assert that Sweden is not experiencing an exponential increase in infections. I did a formal statistical test of the Swedish data, exponential v.s linear, and the exponential model was superior in explaining the data. Can you offer something comparable, or just your contrarian words?
Have you looked at the plot of Sweden vs. Norway that I posted? It totally contradicts your assertion that the Swedish curve “looks oddly like everyone else’s”.
https://ibb.co/7KRff1J
This sounds reasonable. We are working on predicting the future, we are taking decisions in order to have specific results in the future. So let the future when it comes tell us the actual outcome. Perhaps you are right, perhaps containment won’t be worth the probable economic catastrophe. I guess you and I hope that you are wrong. I guess you and I hope that containment will work this time again.
Well, you say it is over in Sweden looking at the decline in the number of CoVid-19 deaths in the last 2 days until April 26th. Unfortunately, the number of CoVid-19 deaths in Sweden increased again after the last data point in your plot. Check out updated figures here:
https://ibb.co/7Y20FsW
The Swedish data has a lots of ups and down, in a generally rising trend. However, when looking at the top plot you see that there seems to be some kind of plateau being reached in the last 2 weeks.
So don’t rush to happy conclusions, it is not over in Sweden, far from it with hundreds newly infected every day (nearly 700 in the last data point, two days ago), but the rate of growth in newly infected and dead could be slowing down, which is a good signal.
Of course the situation is much better in Norway, as you can see, under the lockdown policy.
“An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field.” – Niels Bohr .
Hail is getting his numbers from the Public Health Ministry of Sweden which look nothing like the numbers in your plot. Where are you getting your numbers?
Good comment, but Dr. Brownstein is a holistic practitioner, rather than a homeopathic doctor. From his site:
“Dr. David Brownstein is a Board-Certified family physician and is one of the foremost practitioners of holistic medicine. He is the Medical Director of the Center for Holistic Medicine in West Bloomfield, MI. Dr. Brownstein has lectured internationally to physicians and others about his success in using natural hormones and nutritional therapies in his practice. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan and Wayne State University School of Medicine. Dr. Brownstein is a member of the American Academy of Family Physicians and the American College for the Advancement in Medicine.”
I will say it again, I would like to know of one person who was on a daily regimen of at least 10,000 IU of D3 who died from COVID-19. If everyone where to immediately go on D3 this thing would stop within two weeks.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=32252338&fbclid=IwAR0h0S4juwXUMcU_zX9DENdRdduk-AWrChlUPShsalznbX9KKYbnk-YLxhY
Paul, you can even look at the article you posted on your own website for the answer.
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/0418-Blaylock.pdf