Is $2 Trillion the Right Medicine for a Sick Economy? (Ep. 411) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "COHN: Never let a good crisis go to waste, and Washington was not going to let this crisis go to waste. And number two, every spending bill is looked at as a Christmas tree. And this is a really big Christmas tree. There’s some amazing ornaments on it. There’s $25 million for the Kennedy Center, which is an organization that is supported by great philanthropy. There’s seventy-five million dollars in there for Big Bird and public broadcasting. I’m not sure what they have to do with the coronavirus. So there are a lot of amazing ornaments and tinsel on this tree...
We cannot have every business in the United States shut down, terminate all their employees, and have literally, you know, 30, 40, 50 million people go on unemployments at once. The immediate effect of that would be catastrophic. But even more important, when the economy went to turn around, you would then have to re-create new companies and rehire people. And it would slow that process down. So that to me would be a horrible, horrible outcome...
COHN: I pretty strongly believe that we cannot have every business in the United States shut down, terminate all their employees, and have literally, you know, 30, 40, 50 million people go on unemployments at once. The immediate effect of that would be catastrophic. But even more important, when the economy went to turn around, you would then have to re-create new companies and rehire people. And it would slow that process down. So that to me would be a horrible, horrible outcome...
GOOLSBEE: So when you get in a crisis like this, where millions of people are losing their jobs and it automatically means they lose their health insurance, I think it is going to force — should force — a rethink. But I don’t have total comfort that it will. And the main reason I don’t is, at the depth of the financial crisis, I remember saying to the main political advisors, “This is awful. There’s nothing good about this. The only silver lining is that no one will ever again say that the answer is we should just deregulate the financial system and everybody should be left to do whatever they want because it led to this crisis.” And it literally was not 12 months before there were people back saying, “Oh, the problem of this is too much regulation. We need less.”...
ROMER: Actually, I think a really important point is to not be trying to make permanent policy decisions in the middle of a crisis."
Pork is only bad when Republicans do it
Of course some people claim that the economy can shut down for a minimum of 18 months - government can pay everyone and there will be no issues hiring everyone back and resuming business as usual after that period, and if you disagree you value profits above lives
Nancy Pelosi tells bald-faced lie when confronted over Democrats' far-left pork-filled COVID-19 bill - ""Everything we're suggesting just relates to COVID-19," Pelosi claimed. "It's not changing policy except as it applies here...
Included in the Democratic bill were:
A bailout for the U.S. Postal Service
Student loan debt forgiveness
Required same-day voter registration
Airline emissions standards regulations
Study on climate change migration
Collective bargaining provisions
Increased federal minimum wage for companies that accept government loans
Publication of race and pay statistics for corporate boards
House Democrats introduced their own COVID-19 relief bill after Pelosi torpedoed a bipartisan agreement reached by the Senate... House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) reportedly told Democratic colleagues last week that the COVID-19 emergency, in which the U.S. economy has come to a grinding halt, presented Democrats with "a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision." Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) engaged in similar rhetoric on Tuesday, defending the delay that Democrats have caused by admitting that they are requiring unrelated provisions for "the health of our democracy.""
Dan Crenshaw Posts Info ‘Everyone In America’ Should Read About Why Democrats Killed Emergency Relief Package - "The real reason House Speaker Nancy Pelosi intervened in the eleventh hour to derail the Senate’s emergency bill, Crenshaw suggested, was to push her own bill containing a series of non-crisis-related Democratic wishlist items, included some Green New Deal policies and collective bargaining powers for unions. The political stunt, he said, will not be forgotten... After killing the Senate bill, the Democrats blamed provisions that they said amounted to a “slush fund” for corporate bailouts, but which is, as Zanotti explains, is actually a zero-interest loan program designed “to compensate businesses harmed by government lockdown” and which contains “clear restrictions on the $500 billion set aside to assist firms that have not recovered from the coronavirus lockdown within six months, including limits on funding corporate bonuses and stock buybacks.”"
How Do You Reopen a Country? (Ep. 416) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "Like the rest of the U.S., Rhode Island has been sheltering in place. Only essential businesses are open and the economy has cratered.
RAIMONDO: There’s a lot of people now who — and maybe I’ll put you and a lot of my friends in this category — their lives have been inconvenienced, surely, but they’re not devastated. They grab their computer and their phone. They work from home. They’re still getting a paycheck. That isn’t the majority of Rhode Island right now. The majority of Rhode Island really is struggling."
Gina Raimondo, the governor of Rhode Island, just wants grandma to die!
Ontario’s COVID-19 lockdown is now harming health more than it’s helping, some experts say - "do we still need to be locked down? Provincial officials, who have extended Ontario’s emergency orders until June 30, would say yes. Some public health physicians, epidemiologists and economists would say no. Many worry the cure may now be worse than the disease.“I don’t question the need for a lockdown in March,” said epidemiologist Martha Fulford, chief of medicine for the McMaster University Medical Centre. “But now we have more information. And two months in, we are at a stage where the harm from lockdown is starting to look like it is going to be greater than the harm from COVID.“And that is the conversation I think we should be having.”Fulford is not talking about the fiscal harm to an economy in tatters. She’s referring to so-called “social determinants of health” or the health impact on millions of low- to middle-income Canadians — most of them women and newcomers — who have been thrown out of work due to the shutdown. “We know there is a correlation between poor health and poverty and disenfranchisement,” Fulford said in an interview. “And if we’ve got massive unemployment and massive job losses, that is going to lead to poor health, which is going to lead to premature death.” Public health officials say Ontario has successfully flattened the curve and spared its health-care system. “But there doesn’t seem to be an exit strategy to deal with the worsening collateral damage of non-COVID mortality that we are seeing,” Fulford said. “And it’s not being tracked or clearly documented.”Vivek Goel, a professor with the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health and the university’s vice-president of research, innovation and strategic initiatives, is also concerned.“Shutting down your economy is like cutting off both your feet — or maybe a better analogy would be your head — to try to save the rest of your body,” he said. “It was never meant to be a long-term strategy.”... “So often the shutdown gets framed as a debate between health and the economy,” Goel said. “But the economy is health, too.”For example, studies on past economic downturns have shown that unemployment increases a person’s risk of death by about 1.7 per cent, Goel said in an interview.“If we compare the deaths in people age 25 to 60 from COVID versus deaths in coming years to unemployment, I certainly think we will have many times more” due to unemployment, he said. “Death is just the starkest thing. But there will be other health effects for those individuals as well.”... Fulford, who works mostly in pediatrics at McMaster, is particularly worried about the impact of the shutdown on children... “So if we are looking for an exit strategy and trying to ameliorate harm, why have we not reopened playgrounds, school yards, camp, pools?” she asked. “Depriving a child of their education or socialization is going to do nothing to prevent COVID but do a lot to damage those children.”Keeping camps and daycares shuttered further disadvantages the adults and single parents who can’t afford alternate care"... “Until now ... it’s all been: What do we need to do to control COVID, and the rest can go to hell,” Schabas said. “And that’s a serious mistake from a public health perspective.“If, in our attempts to abolish deaths from COVID, we end up causing far more deaths from other things — deaths that will haunt us, or damage to our health that will haunt us for decades to come — it’s not a good trade.”Canadians are “spooked” by COVID-19 deaths because they are broadcast daily in the absence of any context... Almost 300,000 Canadians will die every year from cancer, heart disease, stroke, motor vehicle crashes, suicide and a myriad of other causes, he noted. Since mid-March, for every Canadian outside long-term care who has died of the novel coronavirus, 50 have died of something else... The great majority of people in Canada are at very little personal risk of death from COVID-19, Schabas said. For most people under age 60 and for older people without serious health conditions, the risk of death from the coronavirus is about the same as dying from influenza... the country is facing both a tragedy and a crisis.The tragedy is COVID-19, a respiratory virus that has the potential to cause the deaths of tens of thousands of Canadians who are overwhelmingly old and infirm, he said.The crisis is our attempts to control that virus that have the potential to cause “severe and lasting damage” to the country’s economy, education, social and cultural institutions and mental health that will have public health repercussions for decades... “The tragedy is a natural disaster that saddens me and saddens us all,” he said. “The crisis is a self-inflicted wound that frankly terrifies me.“It offends social justice because the burden of the crisis falls disproportionately on children, young families and blue-collar workers,” he said. “The more we focus exclusively on COVID, the greater the danger to our public health.”"
Suicide & Coronavirus -- California Doctor Calls for End to Lockdown due “Unprecedented” Spike in Suicide Attempts - "“I think, originally, this was put in place to flatten the curve and to make sure hospitals have the resources to take care of COVID patients,” he explained. “We have the current resources to do that and our other community health is suffering.”"
600 Physicians Say Lockdowns Are A ‘Mass Casualty Incident’ - "“The downstream health effects...are being massively under-estimated and under-reported. This is an order of magnitude error," according to the letter initiated by Simone Gold, M.D., an emergency medicine specialist in Los Angeles.“Suicide hotline phone calls have increased 600%,” the letter said. Other silent casualties: “150,000 Americans per month who would have had new cancer detected through routine screening.”... One patient died at home of a heart attack rather than go to an emergency room. The number of severe heart attacks being treated in nine U.S hospitals surveyed dropped by nearly 40% since March. Cardiologists are worried “a second wave of deaths” indirectly caused by the virus is likely. The physicians’ letter focuses on the impact on Americans’ physical and mental health. “The millions of casualties of a continued shutdown will be hiding in plain sight, but they will be called alcoholism, homelessness, suicide, heart attack, stroke, or kidney failure. In youths it will be called financial instability, unemployment, despair, drug addiction, unplanned pregnancies, poverty, and abuse.“It is impossible to overstate the short, medium, and long-term harm to people’s health with a continued shutdown,” the letter says. “Losing a job is one of life’s most stressful events, and the effect on a person’s health is not lessened because it also has happened to 30 million [now 38 million] other people. Keeping schools and universities closed is incalculably detrimental for children, teenagers, and young adults for decades to come.” While all 50 states are relaxing lockdowns to some extent, some local officials are threatening to keep stay-at-home orders in place until August. Many schools and universities say they may remain closed for the remainder of 2020.“Ending the lockdowns are not about Wall Street or disregard for people’s lives; it about saving lives,” said Dr. Marilyn Singleton, a California anesthesiologist and one of the signers of the letter. “We cannot let this disease change the U.S. from a free, energetic society to a society of broken souls dependent on government handouts.”... “Even patients who do get admitted to hospital, say for a heart problem, are prisoners. No one can be with them. Visitation at a rare single-story hospital was through closed outside window, talking via telephone,” she wrote us. “To get permission to go to the window you have to make an appointment (only one group of two per day!), put on a mask, get your temperature taken, and get a visitor's badge of the proper color of the day.”How many cases of COVID-19 are prevented by these practices? “Zero,” Dr. Orient says. But the “ loss of patient morale, loss of oversight of care, especially at night are incalculable.” Virtually all hospitals halted “elective” procedures to make beds available for what was expected to be a flood of COVID-19 patients. Beds stayed empty, causing harm to patients and resulting in enormous financial distress to hospitals, especially those with limited reserves."
600 doctors just want grandma to die!
Coronavirus: Hongkonger without travel history confirmed as infected
Even banning foreigners forever won't be enough to "defeat" the virus
Over 100 Coronavirus Cases in South Korea Have Now Been Linked to One Guy’s Night Out Clubbing - "the man tested positive for coronavirus, and now, authorities are frantically trying to track down 11,000 people who may have been exposed in a desperate bid to prevent a second wave of COVID-19 infections."
Eternal lockdown is necessary to prevent a second wave!
Personal information collected to fight Covid-19 is being spread online in China - "When the data leaks started, people from Wuhan were the first victims. But now people across China are grappling with whether the personal information they surrendered to fight the pandemic is being well protected.Around the time of the Lunar New Year holiday in late January, many people traveling back to their hometowns from Wuhan were receiving less-than-friendly phone calls and WeChat messages from strangers. Some angrily told them to return to the virus-stricken city. Others asked if they had been eating wild animals, an unconfirmed theory about how the deadly coronavirus first reached humans.This harassment was the result of wide-ranging doxxing online, with personal information being shared in spreadsheets passed around in WeChat groups, according to Chinese media reports. The data included real names, national ID numbers, phone numbers and home addresses, resulting in spam calls and online harassment.The victims' only sin was living in Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak... The leaks are perhaps made easier by how much China's fight against the coronavirus relies on troves of personal data collected to trace who has contact with potential coronavirus carriers. This data collection also helps enforce strict social distancing and quarantine measures that some describe as draconian... Even some shops and restaurants are collecting data from customers. One report from Xinhua says some shops, restaurants and residential neighborhoods asked people to write down personal information on notepads at their entrances. This has triggered concerns that the information isn't well protected. In one case mentioned in the report, a neighborhood's property management staff asked residents to fill in their income... many Chinese media reports show that personal information leaks from anti-epidemic efforts are happening on a large scale in China. And in some cases, those in charge of the data are the ones leaking it... CAC's Tianjin arm found that seven apps and mini programs designed to help track the coronavirus were illegally collecting personal information. The programs were developed by private companies, universities, government departments and residential neighborhoods. Many of them didn't have privacy policies, didn't inform users about the purpose for collecting the personal information, or didn't offer features allowing users to change their personal information and register complaints... In some cases, fake online services outright lie to collect personal information. In one case reported by CCTV, a man surnamed Xue was arrested in Jiangsu for allegedly making a website that claimed to let people register to get face masks. Xue didn't actually have any face masks and was collecting information for marketing purposes... In more liberal countries, it's generally accepted that limitations on rights can be justified in the name of public health, but they should be proportional and no more than necessary, Mr Hargreaves said. This means these measures should be removed once the threat of the pandemic has passed."Of course, the [Chinese] central authorities approach the question of surveillance in a different way," Mr Hargreaves said. "So it may be the case that measures introduced under the guise of preventing the spread of Covid-19 remain in place there far longer than elsewhere.""
We know everything – and nothing – about Covid | The Spectator - "Is Covid-19 transmitted mainly by breath or by touching? Do children pass it on without getting sick? Why is it so much worse in Britain than Japan? Why are obese people especially at risk? How many people have had it? Are ventilators useless after all? Why is it not exploding in India and Africa? Will there be a second wave? We do not begin to have answers to these questions. As a result, we don’t really know what works. It is possible that washing your hands, not shaking hands with others, not gathering in large crowds, and wearing a face mask in public, but no more than this, might have been enough, as Sweden seems to suggest. Forcibly shutting schools and shops and aggressively policing sunbathers in parks may have added little in terms of reducing the rate of spread. There is one vital fact that emerges from the fog. Countries that did a lot of testing from the start have fared much better than countries that did little testing... The horrible truth is that it now looks like in many of the early cases, the disease was probably caught in hospitals and doctors’ surgeries. That is where the virus kept returning, in the lungs of sick people, and that is where the next person often caught it, including plenty of healthcare workers... The evidence from both Wuhan and Italy suggests that it was in healthcare settings, among the elderly and frail, that the epidemic was first amplified. But the Chinese authorities were then careful to quarantine those who tested positive in special facilities, keeping them away from the hospitals, and this may have been crucial. In Britain, the data shows that the vast majority of people in hospital with Covid-19 at every stage have been ‘inpatients newly diagnosed’; relatively few were ‘confirmed at the time of admission’... If Covid-19 is at least partly a ‘nosocomial’ (hospital-acquired) disease, then the pandemic might burn itself out quicker than expected. The death rate here peaked on 8 April, just two weeks after lockdown began, which is surprisingly early given that it is usually at least four weeks after infection that people die if they die. But it makes sense if this was the fading of the initial, hospital--acquired wave. If you look at the per capita numbers for different countries in Europe, they all show a dampening of the rate of growth earlier than you would expect from the lockdowns. This idea could be wrong, of course: as I keep saying, we just don’t know enough. But if it is right, it drives a coach and horses through the assumptions of the Imperial College model, on which policy decisions were hung. The famous ‘R’ (R0 at the start), or reproductive rate of the virus, could have been very high in hospitals and care homes, and much lower in the community. It makes no sense to talk of a single number for the whole of society. The simplistic Imperial College model, which spread around the world like a virus, should be buried. It is data, not modelling, that we need now... An analysis by Dr Muge Cevik of St Andrews University of 14 similar studies concluded that prolonged and close contact is necessary for transmitting the virus and the risk is highest in enclosed environments: households, long-term care facilities and public transport. She adds: ‘Casual, short interactions are not the main driver… Epidemic intensity is strongly shaped by crowding.’... Gabriela Gomes and colleagues at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine looked at what would happen if the susceptibility of different segments of the population to the virus is very different, and concluded that in some circumstances effective herd immunity could be achieved with as little as 10 per cent of the population immunised. In the words of the study: ‘Individuals that are frailer, and therefore more susceptible or more exposed, have higher probabilities of being infected, depleting the susceptible subpopulation of those who are at higher risk of infection, and thus intensifying the deceleration in occurrence of new cases.’ If this is right, then it is good news. Once the epidemic is under control in hospitals and care homes, the disease might die out anyway, even without lockdown. In sharp contrast to the pattern among the elderly, children do not transmit the virus much if at all. A recent review by paediatricians could not find a single case of a child passing the disease on and said the evidence ‘consistently demonstrates reduced infection and infectivity of children in the transmission chain’. One boy who caught it while skiing failed to give it to 170 contacts, but he also had both flu and a cold, which he donated to two siblings. Children appear to have ACE2 receptors, the cellular lock that the coronavirus picks, in their noses but not their lungs. This makes shis based on flu, a disease that hits the young hard, misleading. The more the coronavirus has to use younger people to get around, the weaker its chances of surviving. Summer sunlight should slow it further, both by killing the virus directly and by boosting vitamin D levels. Vitamin D protects against colds and flu, and especially at the end of winter is often deficient in obese, dark-skinned or elderly people, all of whom have proved more susceptible to Covid-19. In a study in Indonesia, Covid-19 cases with deficient vitamin D were an enormous 19 times more likely to die from the disease than people with adequate levels... The British government took the paternalist view that we could not be trusted to take advice but must be ordered into lockdown. It rushed through some terrifyingly illiberal legislation. With a few exceptions, the British people appear to have become willing, even censorious, assistants in the enforcement of the rules. The problem is not now people disobeying the rules, but being terrified to give up the extreme safety of lockdown and relaxed about staying at home on taxpayer--subsidised wages. In the light of what we know, it is vital that the government now switches from urging us to stay at home to urging us to return to as much of normal life as possible."
Temperature significantly changes COVID-19 transmission in (sub)tropical cities of Brazil - "In this study, which features the tropical temperatures of Brazil, the variation in annual average temperatures ranged from 16.8 °C to 27.4 °C. Results indicated that temperatures had a negative linear relationship with the number of confirmed cases. The curve flattened at a threshold of 25.8 °C. There is no evidence supporting that the curve declined for temperatures above 25.8 °C"
Special report: The simulations driving the world’s response to COVID-19 - "“Forecasts made during an outbreak are rarely investigated during or after the event for their accuracy, and only recently have forecasters begun to make results, code, models and data available for retrospective analysis,” Edmunds and his team noted last year in a paper that assessed the performance of forecasts made in a 2014–15 Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone. They found that it was possible to reliably predict the epidemic’s course one or two weeks ahead of time, but no longer, because of the inherent uncertainty and lack of knowledge about the outbreak."
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin on Twitter - "Dear epidemiologists,
We feel for you.
Love,
Climate scientists"
How ironically fitting, given how shit the Imperial model is
Scarlett Strong - " The Imperial College modelers released the source code a couple of days ago to the model that shut down the world economy. It's not the original model code but was rather original source code turned over to volunteer programmers who re-wrote it so that is more readable. I have done some model review of financial models in the past but without the source code I would not be able to do a full review of the Imperial College model. Now that we have the source code (sort of), I can.Any such model ought to have been independently reviewed before it is ever used for real policy decisions. Policy analysis is awash in models but no one ever really checks them. Going forward, health policy makers should ask for and disclose independent validation of any model before using its results to make recommendations of any consequence...
Overall conclusion: this model cannot be relied on to guide coronavirus policy. Even if the documentation, coding, and testing problems were fixed, the model logic is fatally flawed, which is evidenced by its poor forecasting performance.
Imperial College Model Applied to Sweden Yields Preposterous Results - "Last week I examined some of the problems afflicting the most prominent epidemiology models for COVID-19, particularly the Imperial College-London (ICL) model that popularized a projected death toll of 2.2 million for the United States.Even though this model outlined a variety of scenarios with milder human costs, its alarmist claims grabbed headlines and the ears of politicians. The ICL’s doomsday projection played a prominent role in convincing President Trump to back the social distancing guidelines behind most state-level lockdown policies. Its lead author Neil Ferguson was also on the advisory group that convinced British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to abandon an earlier “herd immunity” strategy for virus mitigation, and adopt a lockdown to avert a predicted 510,000 deaths in the UK.Although the ICL model’s main paper has been out for over a month, an odd series of missteps continue to hamper external scrutiny of its predictive claims. In an unusual break from peer review conventions, the ICL team delayed releasing the source code for their model for over a month after their predictions. They finally released their code on April 27, 2020 through the popular code and data-sharing website GitHub, but with the unusual caveat that its “parameter files are provided as a sample only and do not necessarily reflect runs used in published papers.”Put another way, they released a heavily reorganized and generic file that would permit others to run their own version of the COVID model. They do not appear to have released the actual version they ran in the March 16th paper that shaped the US and UK government policies, or the results that came from that model (a distinction that was immediately noticed by other GitHub users, prompting renewed calls to release the original code).As of this writing, the data needed to fully scrutinize the model and results behind the March 16th ICL paper remains elusive. There may be another way though to see how the ICL model’s COVID projections are performing under pressure... The latest numbers from Sweden contain several hints that it has “flattened the curve” and its death rate per capita is consistent with, or below, most other western European nations although also higher than its neighbors Denmark and Norway. It will likely take many months before we can say for certain how Sweden’s strategy played out, but at least as of this writing the predicted failures of two weeks ago have not come to pass.That’s where an interesting twist on the ICL model comes into play... So how is the model’s projection performing? Sweden’s government stayed the course with its milder mitigation strategy. As of April 29th, Sweden’s death toll from COVID-19 stands at 2,462, and its hospitals are nowhere near the projected collapse.Although only time will tell how the comparative strategies continue to hold up, these early results do not speak well of the accuracy of predictions built around the ICL model."
Coding that led to lockdown was 'totally unreliable' and a 'buggy mess', say experts - "The Covid-19 modelling that sent Britain into lockdown, shutting the economy and leaving millions unemployed, has been slammed by a series of experts.Professor Neil Ferguson's computer coding was derided as “totally unreliable” by leading figures, who warned it was “something you wouldn’t stake your life on".The model, credited with forcing the Government to make a U-turn and introduce a nationwide lockdown, is a “buggy mess that looks more like a bowl of angel hair pasta than a finely tuned piece of programming”, says David Richards, co-founder of British data technology company WANdisco.“In our commercial reality, we would fire anyone for developing code like this and any business that relied on it to produce software for sale would likely go bust.” The comments are likely to reignite a row over whether the UK was right to send the public into lockdown, with conflicting scientific models having suggested people may have already acquired substantial herd immunity and that Covid-19 may have hit Britain earlier than first thought. Scientists have also been split on what the fatality rate of Covid-19 is, which has resulted in vastly different models.Up until now, though, significant weight has been attached to Imperial's model, which placed the fatality rate higher than others and predicted that 510,000 people in the UK could die without a lockdown.It was said to have prompted a dramatic change in policy from the Government, causing businesses, schools and restaurants to be shuttered immediately in March. The Bank of England has predicted that the economy could take a year to return to normal, after facing its worst recession for more than three centuries... In its initial form, developers claimed the code had been unreadable, with some parts looking “like they were machine translated from Fortran”, an old coding language, according to John Carmack, an American developer, who helped clean up the code before it was published online. Yet, the problems appear to go much deeper than messy coding. Many have claimed that it is almost impossible to reproduce the same results from the same data, using the same code. Scientists from the University of Edinburgh reported such an issue, saying they got different results when they used different machines, and even in some cases, when they used the same machines... it has prompted questions from specialists, who say “models must be capable of passing the basic scientific test of producing the same results given the same initial set of parameters...otherwise, there is simply no way of knowing whether they will be reliable.”It comes amid a wider debate over whether the Government should have relied more heavily on numerous models before making policy decisions... Sir Nigel Shadbolt, Principal at Jesus College, said that “having a diverse variety of models, particularly those that enable policymakers to explore predictions under different assumptions, and with different interventions, is incredibly powerful”... Experts remain baffled as to why the government appeared to dismiss other models. “We’d be up in arms if weather forecasting was based on a single set of results from a single model and missed taking that umbrella when it rained,” says Michael Bonsall, Professor of Mathematical Biology at Oxford University.Concerns, in particular, over Ferguson’s model have been raised, with Konstantin Boudnik, vice-president of architecture at WANdisco, saying his track record in modelling doesn’t inspire confidence.In the early 2000s, Ferguson’s models incorrectly predicted up to 136,000 deaths from mad cow disease, 200 million from bird flu and 65,000 from swine flu."
When I shared an earlier critique of the Imperial model, some people got very upset and claimed that wasn't science. Covid-19 eschatology is very comforting to some
Is the chilling truth that the decision to impose lockdown was based on crude mathematical guesswork? - "In the respective words of four experienced modellers, the code is “deeply riddled” with bugs, “a fairly arbitrary Heath Robinson machine”, has “huge blocks of code – bad practice” and is “quite possibly the worst production code I have ever seen”.When ministers make statements about coronavirus policy they invariably say that they are “following the science”. But cutting-edge science is messy and unclear, a contest of ideas arbitrated by facts, a process of conjecture and refutation. This is not new. Almost two centuries ago Thomas Huxley described the “great tragedy of science – the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”... the committee meets in private, publishes no minutes, and until it was put under pressure did not even release the names of its members. We were making decisions based on the output of a black box, and a locked one at that. It has become commonplace among financial forecasters, the Treasury, climate scientists, and epidemiologists to cite the output of mathematical models as if it was “evidence”. The proper use of models is to test theories of complex systems against facts. If instead we are going to use models for forecasting and policy, we must be able to check that they are accurate, particularly when they drive life and death decisions. This has not been the case with the Imperial College model.At the time of the lockdown, the model had not been released to the scientific community. When Ferguson finally released his code last week, it was a reorganised program different from the version run on March 16... the code does not allow for large variations among groups of people with respect to their susceptibility to the virus and their social connections. An infected nurse in a hospital is likely to transmit the virus to many more people than an asymptomatic child. Introducing such heterogeneity shows that the threshold to achieve herd immunity with modest social distancing is much lower than the 50-60 per cent implied by the Ferguson model. One experienced modeller tells us that “my own modelling suggests that somewhere between 10 per cent and 30 per cent would suffice, depending on what assumptions one makes.” Data from Sweden support this. Despite only moderate social-distancing measures, the epidemic stopped growing in Stockholm County by mid-April, and has since shrunk significantly, implying that the herd immunity threshold was reached at a point when around 20 per cent of the population was immune, according to estimates by the Swedish public health authority."
Some people love to proclaim that we must follow the science (when the science agrees with them). But science teaches us about uncertainty - and is positive, not normative
Do lockdowns work? A counterfactual for Sweden - "A paper by Benjamin Born, Alexander M. Dietrich and Gernot J. Müller study the case of Sweden – one of the few countries without a lockdown – and use synthetic control techniques to develop a counterfactual lockdown scenario. They find that a lockdown would not have helped much in Sweden."
Sunetra Gupta: Covid-19 is on the way out - "It’s the biggest question in the world right now: is Covid-19 a deadly disease that only a small fraction of our populations have so far been exposed to? Or is it a much milder pandemic that a large percentage of people have already encountered and is already on its way out?If Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College is the figurehead for the first opinion, then Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, is the representative of the second. Her group at Oxford produced a rival model to Ferguson’s back in March which speculated that as much as 50% of the population may already have been infected and the true Infection Fatality Rate may be as low as 0.1%... the antibody studies, although useful, do not indicate the true level of exposure or level of immunity. First, many of the antibody tests are “extremely unreliable” and rely on hard-to-achieve representative groups. But more important, many people who have been exposed to the virus will have other kinds of immunity that don’t show up on antibody tests — either for genetic reasons or the result of pre-existing immunities to related coronaviruses such as the common cold... Observing the very similar patterns of the epidemic across countries around the world has convinced Professor Gupta that it is this hidden immunity, more than lockdowns or government interventions, that offers the best explanation of the Covid-19 progression:
“In almost every context we’ve seen the epidemic grow, turn around and die away — almost like clockwork. Different countries have had different lockdown policies, and yet what we’ve observed is almost a uniform pattern of behaviour which is highly consistent with the SIR model. To me that suggests that much of the driving force here was due to the build-up of immunity. I think that’s a more parsimonious explanation than one which requires in every country for lockdown (or various degrees of lockdown, including no lockdown) to have had the same effect.”
Asked what her updated estimate for the Infection Fatality Rate is, Professor Gupta says, “I think that the epidemic has largely come and is on its way out in this country so I think it would be definitely less than 1 in 1000 and probably closer to 1 in 10,000.” That would be somewhere between 0.1% and 0.01%.Professor Gupta also remains openly critical of the Government lockdown policy... longer-term lockdown-style social distancing makes us more vulnerable, not less vulnerable, to infectious diseases, because it keeps people unprotected from pathogens:
“Remaining in a state of lockdown is extremely dangerous from the point of view of the vulnerability of the entire population to new pathogens. Effectively we used to live in a state approximating lockdown 100 years ago, and that was what created the conditions for the Spanish Flu to come in and kill 50m people.”...
Professor Gupta is clear that she believes that lockdowns are an affront to progressive values"
Oxford University scientists urge faster exit from lockdown - "Professor Sunetra Gupta says there would be a 'strong possibility' that pubs, nightclubs and restaurants in Britain could reopen without serious risk from Covid-19... Prof Gupta called for a "more rapid exits from lockdown" based on factors such as "who is dying and what is happening to the death rates". She said it was feasible Britain could have fared better with the Covid-19 crisis by doing "nothing at all" or at least by concentrating on protecting the people most vulnerable to the disease... Prof Gupta said there was a "strong possibility" the UK could return to normal without great risk."
In Britain, virus hits ethnic minorities hardest - "When Amer Awan's father died of coronavirus, mourners congregated with little thought of social distancing... "Visitors to the house were not wearing any masks or not wearing gloves. They wanted to hug me," the 44-year-old property developer from Birmingham, in central England, told AFP."And I said, no, I'm sorry, I'm not gonna hug you. You know, you need to understand I've just lost my dad because of coronavirus and you are not taking this seriously."... Despite only making up 14 per cent of the population of England and Wales, they represent a third of the patients in intensive care because of the coronavirus... In terms of patients, people from ethnic minorities are more likely to live in London or in the West Midlands — another hard hit area — and suffer more poverty and ill health."South Asians live in more deprived areas and have more cardiovascular disease and diabetes," said Kamlesh Khunti, an expert in ethnic minority health who led the ICNARC study.They also often live in larger, multi-generational households and so "social isolation may not be as prevalent".Zubaida Haque, deputy director of the race equality think tank, Runnymede, said ethnic minorities were also more likely to be in low-paid jobs or be key workers — as transport and delivery staff, healthcare assistants, hospital cleaners and social care workers."
COVID-19 ’ICU’ risk – 20-fold greater in the Vitamin D Deficient. BAME, African Americans, the Older, Institutionalised and Obese, are at greatest risk. Sun and ‘D’-supplementation – Game-changers? Research urgently required. - "COVID-19 (Coronavirus) mortality disproportionately impacts BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) UK individuals, African Americans, Swedish Somalis, and the institutionalised; particularly care-home residents. COVID-19 severity and mortality, appear related to vitamin D deficiency, helping explain higher COVID-19 mortality rates in BAME and the obese. Obesity is a strong COVID-19 risk factor, as are co-morbidities, including diabetes, cardio-vascular disease; and sedentary lifestyle; all are dependent on mitochondrial functionality (Gnaiger). Fat cells accrete vitamin D. The obese consistently have proportionately lower vitamin D status (serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D])... Surprisingly, vitamin D may be a larger relative COVID-19 causative agent than socioeconomic-factors"
Damn racism, explaining why minorities are at greater risk!
Why herd immunity to COVID-19 is reached much earlier than thought - "Very sensibly, the Swedish public health authority has surveyed the prevalence of antibodies to the SARS-COV-2 virus in Stockholm County, the earliest in Sweden hit by COVID-19. They thereby estimated that 17% of the population would have been infected by 11 April, rising to 25% by 1 May 2020. Yet recorded new cases had stopped increasing by 11 April (Figure 1), as had net hospital admissions, and both measures have fallen significantly since. That pattern indicates that the HIT had been reached by 11April, at which point only 17% of the population appear to have been infected... variation between individuals in their susceptibility to infection and their propensity to infect others can cause the HIT to be much lower than it is in a homogeneous population. Standard simple compartmental epidemic models take no account of such variability. And the model used in the Ferguson20 study, while much more complex, appears only to take into account inhomogeneity arising from a very limited set of factors – notably geographic separation from other individuals and household size – with only a modest resulting impact on the growth of the epidemic... the number of fatalities involved in achieving herd immunity is much lower than it would otherwise be."
How to prevent overwhelming hospitals and build immunity - "With global coronavirus cases heading toward half a million, Harvard infectious disease experts said recent modeling shows that — absent the development of a vaccine or other intervention — a staggered pattern of social distancing would save more lives than a one-and-done strategy and avoid overwhelming hospitals while allowing immunity to build in the population... The problem, the researchers said, is that while strict social distancing may appear to be the most effective strategy, little population-level immunity is developed to a virus that is very likely to come around again... Depending on seasonality, the models show that social distancing occurring between 25 percent and 75 percent of the time would both build immunity and keep the health care system from overloading. As time passes and more of the population gains immunity, they said, the restrictive episodes could be shorter, with longer intervals between them."
COVID-19 Conspiracists and Their Discontents - "Conspiracism always flourishes when people are faced with uncertain, open-ended sources of suffering or evil. The mind abhors a vacuum of explanation. So when gaps in knowledge open up, the empty spaces are filled with available explanations that, however implausible, seem morally compelling. Usually, conspiracists target the suspected evildoers they had their eye on anyway. Plagues and pandemics are especially popular feedstock for conspiracism because their causal agents—bacteria and viruses—remain invisible to the naked eye (and were invisible, full stop, until the invention of powerful microscopes). But the Jews targeted by medieval mobs for poisoning wells and other imaginary acts of biological terrorism were not invisible. Nor, today, is Bill Gates, whom some members of the pro-Donald-Trump QAnon conspiracy movement accuse of seeking to undermine the Trump administration now that impeachment efforts have failed. Anthony Fauci, the medical lead on the American government’s response to the pandemic, often is lumped in with this alleged “deep state” movement supporting the Gatesian agenda. An analysis by the New York Times found over 70 accounts on Twitter promoting the hashtag #FauciFraud, with some tweeting as frequently as 795 times a day... This is one of the great ironies of conspiracism: Unjustified fears about fictional conspiracies can themselves be leveraged by governments to facilitate their own very real machinations, which in turn reduce public trust. Thus does the cycle of conspiracism continue."
What happens if a coronavirus vaccine is never developed? - "Instead of wiping out Covid-19, societies may instead learn to live with it. Cities would slowly open and some freedoms will be returned, but on a short leash, if experts' recommendations are followed. Testing and physical tracing will become part of our lives in the short term, but in many countries, an abrupt instruction to self-isolate could come at any time. Treatments may be developed -- but outbreaks of the disease could still occur each year, and the global death toll would continue to tick upwards... "We've never accelerated a vaccine in a year to 18 months," Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, tells CNN. "It doesn't mean it's impossible, but it will be quite a heroic achievement... In 1984, the US Secretary of Health and Human Services Margaret Heckler announced at a press conference in Washington, DC, that scientists had successfully identified the virus that later became known as HIV -- and predicted that a preventative vaccine would be ready for testing in two years.Nearly four decades and 32 million deaths later, the world is still waiting for an HIV vaccine... In 1984, the US Secretary of Health and Human Services Margaret Heckler announced at a press conference in Washington, DC, that scientists had successfully identified the virus that later became known as HIV -- and predicted that a preventative vaccine would be ready for testing in two years.Nearly four decades and 32 million deaths later, the world is still waiting for an HIV vaccine... HIV poses very unique difficulties and Covid-19 does not possess its level of elusiveness, making experts generally more optimistic about finding a vaccine. But there have been other diseases that have confounded both scientists and the human body. An effective vaccine for dengue fever, which infects as many as 400,000 people a year according to the WHO, has eluded doctors for decades. In 2017, a large-scale effort to find one was suspended after it was found to worsen the symptoms of the disease.Similarly, it's been very difficult to develop vaccines for the common rhinoviruses and adenoviruses -- which, like coronaviruses, can cause cold symptoms. There's just one vaccine to prevent two strains of adenovirus, and it's not commercially available... it is the testing process -- not the development -- that holds up and often scuppers the production of vaccines, adds Hotez, who worked on a vaccine to protect against SARS. "The hard part is showing you can prove that it works and it's safe." If the same fate befalls a Covid-19 vaccine, the virus could remain with us for many years. But the medical response to HIV/AIDS still provides a framework for living with a disease we can't stamp out... if a drug can decrease a patient's average time spent in ICU even by by a few days, it would free up hospital capacity and could therefore greatly increase the willingness of governments to open up society... any treatment won't prevent infections occurring in society -- meaning the coronavirus would be easier to manage and the pandemic would subside, but the disease could be with us many years into the future."
Not to mention not everyone will get vaccinated even if there's one
Trump Says To Drink Lots Of Water, Media Reports He Told Everyone To Drown Themselves | The Babylon Bee
Exclusive: A quarter of Americans are hesitant about a coronavirus vaccine - Reuters/Ipsos poll - "A quarter of Americans have little or no interest in taking a coronavirus vaccine, a Reuters/Ipsos poll published on Thursday found, with some voicing concern that the record pace at which vaccine candidates are being developed could compromise safety... Some 36% of respondents said they would be less willing to take a vaccine if U.S. President Donald Trump said it was safe, compared with only 14% who would be more interested... College-educated white women - a politically important demographic that has moved sharply away from the Republican Party during the Trump era - were particularly concerned about how quickly the vaccine is being developed. More than 40% said Trump’s reassurance would make them less willing to take it"
Trump Derangement Syndrome means cutting off your nose to spite your face
Corona: What Autopsies Can Reveal about COVID-19
Soaring joblessness could shake U.S. economy, politics for years - The Washington Post - "Mass unemployment on a scale not seen since the Great Depression has erased the economic gains of the past decade and now threatens to linger for years, fueling social discord and shaking an already polarized political system.Almost overnight, it seems, the U.S. economy, which just two months ago boasted abundant jobs and soaring stock values, has become a shambles. Not since the government began collecting official data in 1948 has a smaller share of the U.S. population been employed. The unique character of this economic collapse, triggered by an ongoing public health crisis, may lead to an enduring decline in the demand for labor. While the pandemic rages, companies are developing new ways to operate with fewer people, replacing the lost workers with machines that are impervious to illness... In the 1930s, before publicly funded social insurance insulated most workers against the vagaries of the market, the Great Depression’s chronic joblessness helped give rise to fascism in Germany, Spain and Italy... Barely 51 percent of the population is employed, the lowest mark since records began... More than 23 million workers are without a job. In February, just 5.8 million lacked work. The good news is that 78 percent of the unemployed say they expect to be recalled to their old jobs once the pandemic ebbs. If that happens, the economy could recover quickly.A greater share of temporary layoffs has historically meant a faster economic rebound, according to recent Goldman Sachs research... In a working paper released this week by the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute for Economics, a trio of economists concluded that “42 percent of recent layoffs will result in permanent job loss.”"
Coronavirus: Leading economist warns of 10 years of depression and debt - "Economist Nouriel Roubini has warned of a prolonged downturn and sluggish recovery from the coronavirus.Nicknamed Dr Doom for his gloomy predictions, Professor Roubini said there are some jobs that simply will not come back after this crisis.Even if the global economy recovers this year from the impact of the coronavirus, it will be "anaemic".He warned of "unprecedented" recession... "During the global financial crisis it took about three years until output fell sharply," he told the BBC's Talking Asia programme from his home in New York."This time around it didn't take three years, not even three months. In three weeks there was a freefall of every component."... When asked whether holding a negative position for so long meant that at some point he would almost certainly be right, he told me he prefers the name Dr Realist, to Dr Doom."When everyone said that China was going to have a hard landing in 2015, I said it will be bumpy," he told me. "I've actually been more optimistic than Wall Street was. The people who say I'm a broken clock that is right twice a day have not followed me.""
Economía y coronavirus...
I was told that no one believed in eternal/long term lockdown, but I saw 3 people I'm connected to on Facebook sharing this ridiculous video, which claims that even one death to avoid economic collapse is unacceptable and ignores deaths due to lockdown and other losses, as well as pretending that empathy leads to good decision-making
How the Economy Will Look After the Coronavirus Pandemic - "Economists used to scoff at calls for countries to pursue food or energy security policies. In a globalized world where borders don’t matter, they argued, we could always turn to other countries if something happened in our" own. Now, borders suddenly do matter, as countries hold on tightly to face masks and medical equipment, and struggle to source supplies. The coronavirus crisis has been a powerful reminder that the basic political and economic unit is still the nation-state. To build our seemingly efficient supply chains, we searched the world over for the lowest-cost producer of every link in the chain. But we were short-sighted, constructing a system that is plainly not resilient, insufficiently diversified, and vulnerable to interruptions. Just-in-time production and distribution, with low or no inventories, may be capable enough of absorbing small problems, but we have now seen the system crushed by an unexpected disturbance. We should have learned the lesson of resilience from the 2008 financial crisis. We had created an interconnected financial system that seemed efficient and was perhaps good at absorbing small shocks, but it was systemically fragile. If not for massive government bailouts, the system would have collapsed as the real estate bubble popped. Evidently, that lesson went right over our heads."
Kishore thinks after China has screwed everyone, the world is going to rely more on China
Germany would like to localize supply chains, nationalization possible, minister says
Food Rotting in the Fields But Shortages in the Stores - "The USDA normally buys food that can be stored for a long time. It cannot easily deal with Fresh fruits and vegetables and things that do not store easily.
Grocery stores stores stock 1-2 pound packages. of cheese. A pizzeria might buy 50-pound containers. It is expensive to retool plants to package things differently for what is supposed to be a temporary disruption.
People eat vegetables more often when eating out than they do at home. There is a collapse in demand for many items.
With diminishing need for raw milk to produce cheese farmers are dumping it. The same is in play for many fruits and vegetables. Strawberries are rotting in the fields and farmers are plowing under beans.
At the meat packing plants, the workers work very closely to each other. Covid-19 is spreading rampantly. Plants had to be closed.
Store shortages are mainly meats, dried foods and canned foods. Price of beef has soared in the past week due to closure of processing plants. At times I have had a hard time finding canned tomato sauce. I see holes where boxes of au gratin potatoes should be. People hoard items that store well."
China Created a Fail-Safe System to Track Contagions. It Failed. - The New York Times - "The alarm system was ready. Scarred by the SARS epidemic that erupted in 2002, China had created an infectious disease reporting system that officials said was world-class: fast, thorough and, just as important, immune from meddling.Hospitals could input patients’ details into a computer and instantly notify government health authorities in Beijing, where officers are trained to spot and smother contagious outbreaks before they spread.It didn’t work. After doctors in Wuhan began treating clusters of patients stricken with a mysterious pneumonia in December, the reporting was supposed to have been automatic. Instead, hospitals deferred to local health officials who, over a political aversion to sharing bad news, withheld information about cases from the national reporting system — keeping Beijing in the dark and delaying the response.The central health authorities first learned about the outbreak not from the reporting system but after unknown whistle-blowers leaked two internal documents online. Even after Beijing got involved, local officials set narrow criteria for confirming cases, leaving out information that could have provided clues that the virus was spreading among humans.Hospitals were ordered to count only patients with a known connection to the source of the outbreak, the seafood market. Doctors also had to have their cases confirmed by bureaucrats before they were reported to higher-ups.As the United States, Europe and the rest of the world struggle to contain the coronavirus pandemic, China has cast itself as a model... Aggressive action just a week earlier in mid-January could have cut the number of infections by two-thirds, according to a recent study whose authors include an expert from Wuhan’s municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention... The government has vowed to fix flaws exposed in the disease surveillance system, but similar promises were made after SARS. Fresh efforts to repair the system now could also falter under a political hierarchy that leaves experts — doctors, even public health officials — unwilling to take on local leaders. In China, politics often ends up overriding the very safeguards created to prevent interference in the flow of information. The failures in the first weeks “greatly reduced the vigilance and self-protection of the public and even medical workers, making it harder to contain the epidemic,” said a study of the epidemic by 12 medical experts from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. “Only precautions in ordinary times can prevent great disasters from arising.”... “Viruses like SARS could emerge anytime, but there’ll never be another SARS incident,” Gao Fu, director of China’s disease control center, said in a speech last year. “That’s thanks to how well our national contagious disease surveillance system works.”... The national center for disease control has pointedly avoided saying in announcements that it had been notified by Wuhan, instead noting that it had “learned of” the outbreak. Local officials have hedged over when and how they told Beijing."
Global Backlash Builds Against China Over Coronavirus - The New York Times - "Across the globe a backlash is building against China for its initial mishandling of the crisis that helped loose the coronavirus on the world, creating a deeply polarizing battle of narratives and setting back China’s ambition to fill the leadership vacuum left by the United States.China, never receptive to outside criticism and wary of damage to its domestic control and long economic reach, has responded aggressively, combining medical aid to other countries with harsh nationalist rhetoric, and mixing demands for gratitude with economic threats.The result has only added momentum to the blowback and the growing mistrust of China in Europe and Africa, undermining China’s desired image as a generous global actor. Even before the virus, Beijing displayed a fierce approach to public relations, an aggressive style called “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy, named after two ultrapatriotic Chinese films featuring the evil plots and fiery demise of American-led foreign mercenaries. With clear encouragement from President Xi Jinping and the powerful Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party, a younger generation of Chinese diplomats have been proving their loyalty with defiantly nationalist and sometimes threatening messages in the countries where they are based. “You have a new brand of Chinese diplomats who seem to compete with each other to be more radical and eventually insulting to the country where they happen to be posted,” said François Godement, a senior adviser for Asia at the Paris-based Institut Montaigne. “They’ve gotten into fights with every northern European country with whom they should have an interest, and they’ve alienated every one of them.” Since the virus, the tone has only toughened, a measure of just how serious a danger China’s leaders consider the virus to their standing at home, where it has fueled anger and destroyed economic growth, as well as abroad. In the past several weeks, at least seven Chinese ambassadors — to France, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Ghana and the African Union — have been summoned by their hosts to answer accusations ranging from spreading misinformation to the “racist mistreatment” of Africans in Guangzhou. Just last week, China threatened to withhold medical aid from the Netherlands for changing the name of its representative office in Taiwan to include the word Taipei. And before that, the Chinese Embassy in Berlin sparred publicly with the German newspaper Bild after the tabloid demanded $160 billion in compensation from China for damages to Germany from the virus... in the longer run, China is seeding mistrust and damaging its own interests, said Ms. Shirk, who is working on a book called “Overreach,” about how China’s domestic politics have derailed its ambitions for a peaceful rise as a global superpower... Recently, the German government complained that Chinese diplomats were soliciting letters of support and gratitude for Beijing’s aid and efforts against the virus from government officials and the heads of major German companies.The same has been true in Poland, said the U.S. ambassador to Warsaw, Georgette Mosbacher, in an interview, describing Chinese pressure on President Andrzej Duda to call Mr. Xi and thank him for aid, a call the Chinese heralded at home.“Poland wasn’t going to get this stuff unless the phone call was made, so they could use that phone call” for propaganda, Ms. Mosbacher said.There is some unhappiness in China with the current diplomatic rhetoric. In a recent essay, Zi Zhongyun, now 89, a longtime expert on America at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, sees parallels in the harsh nationalist and xenophobic rhetoric of the Wolf Warriors of today with the period around the Boxer Rebellion against Western influence in China.Ms. Zi said such reactions risked getting out of hand.“I can say without a doubt,” she concluded, “that as long as Boxer-like activities are given the official stamp of approval as being ‘patriotic,’” and as long as “generation after generation of our fellow Chinese are educated and inculcated with a Boxer-like mentality, it will be impossible for China to take its place among the modern civilized nations of the world.”"
China's peaceful rise indeed
Coronavirus Survivors Want Answers, and China Is Silencing Them - The New York Times - "Lawyers have been warned not to file suit against the government. The police have interrogated bereaved family members who connected with others like them online. Volunteers who tried to thwart the state’s censorship apparatus by preserving reports about the outbreak have disappeared.“They are worried that if people defend their rights, the international community will know what the real situation is like in Wuhan and the true experiences of the families there,” said Mr. Yang, who is living in New York, where he fled after he was briefly detained for his work in China.The crackdown underscores the party’s fear that any attempt to dwell on what happened in Wuhan, or to hold officials responsible, will undermine the state’s narrative that only China’s authoritarian system saved the country from a devastating health crisis. To inspire patriotic fervor, state propaganda has portrayed the dead not as victims, but as martyrs. Censors have deleted Chinese news reports that exposed officials’ early efforts to hide the severity of the outbreak.And as more voices overseas call for China to compensate the rest of the world for the pandemic, the party has cast its domestic critics as tools being used by foreign forces to undermine it. The party has long been wary of public grief and the dangers it could pose to its rule... Three volunteers involved in Terminus2049, an online project that archived censored news articles about the outbreak, went missing in Beijing last month and are presumed to have been detained... To the authorities, it seems no public criticism can be left unchecked. The police in Hubei, the province that includes Wuhan and was hardest hit by the outbreak, arrested a woman last month for organizing a protest against high vegetable prices. An official at a Wuhan hospital was removed from his post after he criticized the use of traditional Chinese medicine to treat coronavirus patients, which the authorities had promoted.The crackdown has been most galling to people mourning family members. They say they are being harassed and subjected to close monitoring as they try to reckon with their losses... “They spend so much time trying to control us,” Mr. Zhang said. “Why can’t they use this energy to address our concerns instead?”In March, the police visited a Wuhan resident who had started a chat group of more than 100 people who lost relatives to the virus, according to two members of the group, one of whom shared a video of the encounter. The group was ordered to disband. Mr. Yang, the activist in New York, said at least two of the seven Wuhan residents who had contacted him about taking legal measures against the government dropped the idea after being threatened by the police.Even if the other plaintiffs were willing to move forward, they might have trouble finding lawyers. After Mr. Yang and a group of human rights lawyers in China issued an open call in March for people who wanted to sue the government, several lawyers around the country received verbal warnings from judicial officials"
C.I.A. Hunts for Authentic Virus Totals in China, Dismissing Government Tallies - The New York Times - "American intelligence agencies have concluded that the Chinese government itself does not know the extent of the virus and is as blind as the rest of the world. Midlevel bureaucrats in the city of Wuhan, where the virus originated, and elsewhere in China have been lying about infection rates, testing and death counts, fearful that if they report numbers that are too high they will be punished, lose their position or worse, current and former intelligence officials said.Bureaucratic misreporting is a chronic problem for any government, but it has grown worse in China as the Communist leadership has taken a more authoritarian turn in recent years under Mr. Xi."
No, China will not get away with rewriting history - Nikkei Asian Review - "Chinese propaganda is more internally focused than externally targeted. The CCP's primary concern is always internal stability.... Mixed signals suggest that even the Chinese establishment is not of one mind. Since not everyone in China is accepting the CCP's propaganda, why should we assume that others will? There is another reason this rewriting will not give China a purely triumphant narrative. China's recovery from COVID-19 cannot be complete unless its economy recovers too, ensuring social stability, a serious concern to the CCP.But China cannot recover economically unless the U.S., Europe and Japan, buyers of its goods, recover... Claiming victory cannot be neatly separated from taking responsibility for the bad as well as the good. The latter is the inevitable counterpoint to the former"
𝕊𝕒𝕞𝕒𝕟𝕥𝕙𝕒 𝕊𝕒𝕞𝕒𝕟𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕟𝕘𝕥𝕠𝕟 on Twitter - "Honest question: why do you think the United States is the only country on earth that is protesting being locked down?"
"Because people who have never truly been oppressed are being inconvenienced for the first time in their lives and don't understand what it means to sacrifice in the name of the greater good. Individualist culture, institutionalized racism, commodity fetishism and selfishness."
Ironically, it is very American to believe in American exceptionalism - even in thinking the US is uniquely bad. Also ironically, I'm sure these people also mock Americans for being ignorant of what is happening in the rest of the world while being unaware that there're protests in many countries
BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Coronavirus: Where did all the food go? - "'If you just look at the euros or pounds spent in Europe on food, about half of it is spent out of home. But now of course with all restaurants, hotels, bars, cafes closed across Europe, people are eating much more in home than it really is different by category as well. You know, there's some things that people are hoarding all over Europe and I think including in the UK, you know, things like canned soup, pasta, rice. But then there's some things that are very specific by country. You know, in the UK, we're seeing much higher alcohol sales. That's not so much true in Europe. And in the US, which is a big market for us, we're seeing significant hoarding of big tubs of ice cream, which are really seen as a staple and a must have in America'…
‘What have the Dutch been hoarding?’
‘Peanut butter, interestingly enough, and sausages, so there you go, not the healthiest of diets either.’..
‘Have any of your factories had to switch to making those in demand products as well to cope’
‘Yeah, that that we're doing right now. So we're switching to the hot items. So you know, the 27th variety of Coleman's mustard you may not find because we're really focusing on the, on the top sellers at the moment.’"
Dr. Emily Cousens, and all that is wrong with fashionably leftwing academia - "Dr. Cousens is horrified that if her country wins the “race”, there might be a swell of pride throughout Albion—a little glow of British patriotism.And nothing could be more evil than British patriotism, right? To a certain kind of British academic, that’s exactly right. Emily Cousens gets even daffier. She is also upset that British people may think less of China (yes, really) as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic... Apparently Cousens knows nothing of Beijing’s obfuscations during the early months of the outbreak—a communist cover-up that cost thousands of lives, both in China and elsewhere.Or—more likely—-she simply ignores these facts, because the troublesome Chinese cover-up doesn’t fit her narrative. She takes several swipes at her own PM, Boris Johnson, in her Huffington Post essay. She has not a single word of criticism for Xi Jinping or the Chinese Communist Party... I have to admit, I am still astounded when I encounter moonbats like Emily Cousens, whose primary concern is putting their racial and cultural guilt on full display, at every opportunity. Even a global pandemic doesn’t alter their priorities. They see a global pandemic, and they desperately hope that their own country doesn’t develop a vaccine and end up looking too good as a result... Chinese people don’t think like this. Nor does the average person in Japan, Nigeria, Turkey, or South Korea.Only white leftwingers addled by the guilt-trip of identity politics think like this. Only white liberals of a progressive bent are obsessed with tearing down their own culture and their own history... For the white progressive, self-loathing identity politics overwhelms almost everything else. They feel obligated to contrive Evil White Male™ plots everywhere—even in the race to develop a vaccine that could potentially save millions of lives, white and nonwhite alike... For roughly the last 50 years, a perverse ideology has taken root in academic circles within the Western, English-speaking world. To despise one’s civilization, one’s heritage, and one’s own ethnicity (if you’re white) has become the height of sophistication and virtue.This is a secularization of the Christian concept of Original Sin, twisted to fit leftwing racial obsessions. If being white and British (or white and American/Canadian, etc) is the Original Sin, then Redemption is achieved by constantly expressing disdain for one’s race and culture. And the more public these displays, the better.This ideology is not new. An all-consuming obsession with identity politics is part of a larger leftwing orthodoxy that has gradually been established in the halls of higher learning over the past five decades. It took root among leftist college students in the 1960s. When I was a college student in the 1980s, it was already in its second generation. Emily Cousens is a member of the third generation of that academic tradition. She has never learned to think for herself, so she parrots all the identity politics slogans that her professorial elders have taught her over the years.And she’s less than convincing when she parrots. She recites her lines almost at random, often without any recognizable context... Emily Cousens sounds a bit like a staid Victorian claiming to be outraged by rising hemlines. This is a textbook example of virtue signaling–the public display of the “proper” attitudes.And yes, leftwing virtue-signaling has a lot more in common with Victorian conventionality, or even Puritanism, than with rebellion or Bohemianism. There is nothing rebellious, in 2020, about tweeting bland affirmations of one’s support for transgenderism."
More on the "myth" that liberals hate their countries
Socialism Victory! Workers No Longer Being Exploited Thanks To High Unemployment | The Babylon Bee - "The pandemic has been troublesome for many, but one group is celebrating a victory: socialists. “Capitalism is all about exploiting workers,” said Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a congressional representative from New York and the world’s smartest socialist. “But now there’s, like, nobody working, so they can’t exploit anyone. Take that, billionaires!”... “Yay! We’re winning!” Ocasio-Cortez exclaimed. She hoped even more people would leave jobs -- except for the people whose job it is to print money. She emphasized that without them working day and night, we would be in big trouble."
Beyond parody: CNN taps Greta Thunberg for expert coronavirus panel - "The brave, hard-hitting journalists over at CNN are hosting a town hall Thursday evening called Coronavirus: Facts and Fears. Our First Amendment warriors are only bringing viewers the best of experts, such as former CDC Director Richard Besser, former HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and … teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg.You literally cannot make this stuff up. This would be a masterful parody. It could have been one of the Babylon Bee’s finest works. Yet no, this is actually the reality of CNN in 2020... Reliable Sources (ironic) host Brian Stelter regularly tut-tuts Fox News (sometimes justifiably) for having unqualified guests speaking on expert subjects. But at least they don’t tell their viewers to take their coronavirus wisdom from 17-year-old, troubled teenagers"
Castle Rock Restaurant Owner Continues Defiant Stance, Says Colorado Coronavirus Restrictions ‘Seem Backward’ - "Despite an order to close, Monday was another busy day for C&C Breakfast and Korean Kitchen in Castle Rock.“I had one person call me a Nazi and a white supremacist, and I said well I’m not even white so… I’m Spanish and Korean. We’ve had people say they want to burn the place down and hope we all die from coronavirus,” said restaurant owner Jesse Arellano."
Liberal logic is really strange. Defying covid-19 shutdowns makes you racist? Then again they've already stretched terms until they've lost any meaning
Tushar Ismail - "Super Mums In Ang Mo Kio Create Homemade Hand Sanitisers, So Residents Can Use Them In Lifts"
"“Hence, several bottles of DIY disinfectants are now available in lifts to prevent more cases of Covid-19. These efforts highlight a mother’s love can keep many people safe.”
No, actually what these efforts highlight is that a, “a mother’s love” or a mother’s intuition is no substitute for medical or evidence-based advice. And that the path to hell is paved with good intentions.
“Oh, Tushar, you’re such a hater - what have you done? At least they’re trying”
I’ll tell you what I haven’t done - spread bullshit that doesn’t just spread a false sense of security - but also provides an actual surface which will see increased contact from multiple people multiple times a day and actually raising the probability of infection. I don’t admire, “heart and spirit” when it actively endangers a population. The only positivity they’re bringing is that more people might test positive for the virus.
Why haven’t they been POFMA-ed yet?"
Lives vs lives – the global cost of lockdown | The Spectator" - "We know the national costs. In the United States, there is joblessness on a scale not seen since the Great Depression, with more than 33 million unemployed. The Bank of England forecasts the UK economy will fall by 14 per cent this year — the steepest decline since 1706. Similar trends can be found across the industrial world. The global economy is veering toward an economic depression not seen for generations... We have the health impacts in the rich world. To keep hospitals available for the Covid-19 patients who never showed up, patients delayed non-urgent but essential healthcare, including vaccinations, cancer screening, and even chemotherapy. The death toll from this will manifest over the coming years as old infectious diseases find new life and cancer mortality rises. In the UK, cancer deaths have been predicted to rise by about 18,000 due to the disruption in treatment. Harder to predict will be the lives claimed by the new epidemic of unemployment... The United Nations forecasts that even if the world economy rebounds in the second half of the year, the economic downturn would increase the numbers in extreme poverty up by anything from 84 million to 132 million. The recession would reverse years of progress in the fight against child mortality in the developing world. The UN’s World Food Programme predicts that by the end of the year, the numbers facing acute hunger will double to 265 million. These are staggering figures. If this were to be the result of a natural disaster, it would be worldwide news. Now, it’s just seen as a footnote in the side-effects of lockdown... If lockdown is to cost us two years’ growth, as some have argued, it would end up taking nearly six million young lives in the coming decade. Combine this with a return to levels of childhood mortality of just five years ago, and this would lead to a loss of more than 20 million young lives over the next ten years... Those in our countries most at risk from the virus are predominantly elderly (in Britain, most of those who have died have been aged over 80) whereas the people most at risk from a global economic depression will include many children. Ending lockdown does not mean abandoning the elderly. Low-cost interventions are available: protecting nursing homes from epidemic spread would pose little or no economic harm and much benefit.Unfortunately, the public debate to date has left little room for our political leaders to consider how our response to the virus impacts lives elsewhere. Each government assesses its success or failure by its own number of coronavirus-related deaths. The scoreboard charts that we see, judging countries on Covid-19 deaths alone, tend not to factor in those killed by the reaction to the virus — at home or abroad."
Millions Had Risen Out of Poverty. Coronavirus Is Pulling Them Back. - The New York Times - "Famines that once plagued South Asia are now vanishingly rare, and the population less susceptible to disease and starvation.But that progress may be reversed, experts worry, and funding for anti-poverty programs may be cut as governments struggle with stagnant growth rates or economic contractions as the world heads for a recession... “The tragedy is, it’s cyclical,” said Natalia Linos, executive director of Harvard University’s François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights. “Poverty is a huge driver of disease, and illness is one of the big shocks that drive families into poverty and keep them there.”... The owner told employees that even after the pandemic, he may no longer have work for them. The demand for clothing in Western countries may drop if people have less to spend"
So much for economic growth being an unnecessary evil
Great Depression Had Little Effect on Death Rates - "there was more going on in the 1930s than just and economic downturn. The 20th century was a period of great change, particularly in terms of sanitation and health care, two factors that could account for much of the decrease in mortality during the Great Depression. In addition, the New Deal---the economic programs instituted between 1933 and 1936 to respond to the crisis---and Prohibition may have also had positive effects on health."
Plus, a shutdown of 2 years would have more severe effects than the Great Depression
Unicef: 6,000 children could die every day due to impact of coronavirus - "As many as 6,000 children around the world could die every day from preventable causes over the next six months due to the impact of coronavirus on routine health services"
Unicef warns lockdown could kill more than Covid-19 as model predicts 1.2 million child deaths - "The risk of children dying from malaria, pneumonia or diarrhoea in developing countries is spiralling due to the pandemic and “far outweighs any threat presented by the coronavirus”, Unicef has warned.In an exclusive interview Dr Stefan Peterson, chief of health at Unicef, cautioned that the blanket lockdowns imposed in many low and middle income are not an effective way to control Covid-19 and could have deadly repercussions... In some countries the public are also avoiding hospitals and health centres for fear of picking up Covid-19, while services have also been diverted to focus on the pandemic. Vaccination campaigns against diseases including measles have also been disrupted - at least 117 million children worldwide are likely to miss out on routine immunisations this year.Dr Peterson warned that these trends have resulted in a reduction in the “effective utilisation of services” - a shift which, in some places, could be more dangerous than the virus itself. And lockdowns have a heavy economic toll, which could trigger a rise in poverty and malnutrition... research has shown that in 2014, during the Ebola outbreak in west Africa, more people died from indirect effects than the disease itself. But the scale of the pandemic means the consequences will be far greater... he was concerned that the current battle against Covid-19 was turning into a “child’s rights crisis” and robbing a generation of their health, education and economic prospects"
School closure and management practices during coronavirus outbreaks including COVID-19: a rapid systematic review - "School closures were deployed rapidly across mainland China and Hong Kong for COVID-19. However, there are no data on the relative contribution of school closures to transmission control. Data from the SARS outbreak in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Singapore suggest that school closures did not contribute to the control of the epidemic. Modelling studies of SARS produced conflicting results. Recent modelling studies of COVID-19 predict that school closures alone would prevent only 2–4% of deaths, much less than other social distancing interventions. Policy makers need to be aware of the equivocal evidence when considering school closures for COVID-19, and that combinations of social distancing measures should be considered. Other less disruptive social distancing interventions in schools require further consideration if restrictive social distancing policies are implemented for long periods."
Children at Risk of Lasting Psychological Distress from Coronavirus Lockdown - "Almost one in four children living under COVID-19 lockdowns, social restrictions and school closures are dealing with feelings of anxiety, with many at risk of lasting psychological distress, including depression. In recent surveys by Save the Children of over 6000 children and parents in the United States, Germany, Finland, Spain and the U.K., up to 65 percent of the children struggled with boredom and feelings of isolation."
The costs of lockdown are irrelevant. All that matters is avoiding deaths from covid-19! It doesn't even matter if you die from lockdown
From opera to bread line: Italy's surge in the 'new poor' - "La Repubblica daily has estimated that 11.5 million Italians, half the official workforce, have stopped receiving income and started applying for aid.Last month, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development forecast that 27 per cent of Italians could fall into poverty were they to forgo three months of income, in a report based on 2018 data... he has seen people shopping in Milan grocery stores rushing for the door without paying, a phenomenon also reported in Italy's south.Businesses "have to start up again because if we’re stuck another month, we'll have civil war," Mr DiGregorio warned."People are desperate."... Worse off, she said, were the homeless in her area who continue to rummage in vain through rubbish bins."Now they can't find anything," she said. "No one's throwing anything away.""
What if immunity to covid-19 doesn’t last? - "people frequently got reinfected with the same coronavirus, even in the same year, and sometimes more than once. Over a year and a half, a dozen of the volunteers tested positive two or three times for the same virus, in one case with just four weeks between positive results.That’s a stark difference from the pattern with infections like measles or chicken pox, where people who recover can expect to be immune for life.For the coronaviruses “immunity seems to wane quickly,” says Jeffrey Shaman, who carried out the research with Marta Galanti, a postdoctoral researcher... “We really don’t understand whether it is a change in the virus over time or antibodies that don’t protect from infection”... Early evidence points to at least temporary protection against reinfection. Since the first cases were described in China in December, there has been no cut-and-dried case of someone being infected twice. While some people, including in South Korea, have tested positive a second time, that could be due to testing errors or persistence of the virus in their bodies... What’s unknown is how long immunity lasts—and only five months into the outbreak, there is no way to know. If it’s for life, then every survivor will add to a permanent bulwark against the pathogen’s spread. But if immunity is short, as it is for the common coronaviruses, covid-19 could set itself up as a seasonal superflu with a high fatality rate—one that emerges in a nasty wave winter after winter... people who got the same coronavirus twice didn’t have fewer symptoms the second time. Instead, some people never got symptoms at all; others had bad colds two or three times. Shaman says the severity of infection tended to run in families, suggesting a genetic basis... What sort of immune memory will covid-19 cause? Stephen Elledge, a geneticist at Harvard University says the severity of the disease could put it in a different category from the ordinary cold. “You might have a cold for a week, whereas if you go through three weeks of hell, that may give you more of a memory for longer,” he says.Other clues come from the 2002-03 outbreak of SARS, a respiratory infection even more deadly than covid-19. Six years after the SARS outbreak, doctors in Beijing went hunting for an immune response among survivors. They found no antibodies or long-lived memory B cells, but they did find memory T cells."
Some people claim that since there is no proof immunity lasts, we should lockdown till we get a vaccine. Apparently they don't know how vaccines work
Could We Be Living With COVID-19 Forever? | Discover Magazine - "even this kind of temporary immunity could be crucial in the short term. Doctors who have already been infected could treat patients without worrying about becoming sick. The same goes for other essential workers, like grocery store clerks, nursing home aides, delivery people and others.And even if someone gets sick with the coronavirus again, the second infection might not be as bad. With other viruses, there’s evidence that, even if someone is reinfected, their immune system might be better equipped to handle it the second time around... A virus’ mutation rate is another important factor in determining the severity of reappearances of an endemic virus. The flu is so pervasive because it mutates readily, swapping around the surface proteins that our immune systems rely on to recognize viruses."
China lockdown: Fears grow of new outbreak as Chinese region hit with strict quarantine
Clearly, we need eternal lockdown!
UK women bear emotional brunt of Covid-19 turmoil – poll - "Women in the UK are bearing the emotional brunt of the coronavirus pandemic, experiencing greater anxiety about its impact than men, polling has found. Although men are more likely to die from Covid-19, research by Ipsos Mori and the Fawcett Society found women were disproportionately affected in other ways."
So because are more neurotic, they are seen as bigger victims. Victim culture!
Coronavirus taken to Wuhan market by someone already infected: study - "A study found the coronavirus was taken to an animal market in Wuhan, China, by a person already infected with the disease, according to a report.“The publicly available genetic data does not point to cross-species transmission of the virus at the market,” said Alina Chan, a molecular biologist, and Shing Zhan, an evolutionary biologist... the two said they were “surprised” to discover the coronavirus was “already pre-adapted to human transmission.”... “The possibility that a non-genetically engineered precursor could have adapted to humans while being studied in a laboratory should be considered”"
If you just want an excuse to shut down wet markets, this won't matter
'The only plausible explanation': Coronavirus DID leak from a Wuhan lab - Australian expert says - "A respected author and China expert claims bombshell evidence suggests coronavirus must have leaked from a Wuhan laboratory - not from wildlife wet markets.'The argument that the coronavirus emerged from the South China Seafood market just no longer stacks up,' Professor Clive Hamilton told Sky News on Sunday night.Professor Hamilton said the earliest cases of COVID-19 were in people who had no contact with the Wuhan wet market, which was first blamed for the outbreak... The hypothesis came from Chinese scientists themselves and was all over the internet before disappearing, Professor Hamilton said.Internet uses all over China had even searched for the woman thought to be patient zero - who worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and 'seems to have disappeared off the face of the planet', he said... The wet market is located not far from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the only level four biosecurity laboratory lab in China.The lab researched a range of bat coronaviruses including by engineering them... two Chinese scientists had written a highly regarded paper saying the coronavirus came from a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.'There's a very plausible hypothesis here that someone became infected in the laboratory, walked out and started infecting other people in Wuhan,' he said.The short paper from February 6 was written by scientists Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao, both from Wuhan universities, and was called 'The possible origins of the 2019-nCoV coronavirus'.The paper noted the bats that carry the suspected virus live in habitat 900km from the seafood market, the bats are not eaten by Wuhan residents, and that 'no bat was traded in the market'.Many scientific and medical professionals are also becoming sceptical of the first Wuhan wet market explanation. UK-based medical teacher Dr John Campbell, who provides daily evidence-based updates on the coronavirus pandemic on YouTube, said there doesn't seem to have been an intermediary species between bats and humans after all.'People thought it was pangolins at first but that doesn't seem to be bearing out'... Dr Campbell noted it was a large coincidence that the pandemic originated so close to the Wuhan Virology Institute and said scientists may have been conducting animal research on the coronavirus and one of the lab workers may have sold some animals to the nearby Wuhan wet market. US-based pathologist Chris Martenson said a suspicious sequence of nucleotides in the RNA coding of the Sars-Cov-2 coronavirus appear to have been inserted as they do not occur in any of the close or even distantly related viruses.Even more suspicious, the nucleotide sequence appears right at a point in the RNA sequence called a furin cleavage site, a place where the enzyme furin can precisely cut proteins, he said.'None of the closest (viral) or even distant relatives have this site,' he said in a YouTube analysis.'Those that do only have 40 percent of the same genome.'... An analysis of private cellphone location data has also allegedly shown that the Wuhan Institute of Virology shut down from October 7 to October 24, and this may indicate a 'hazardous event' sometime between October 6 and October 11... Chinese scientists with military ties had now infiltrated Australia's largest universities...
Beijing was outwardly downplaying the outbreak on the world stage while secretly scrambling to bury all traces of the disease.China's alleged actions involved 'destroying' laboratory samples, bleaching wet market stalls, censoring the growing evidence of 'silent carriers' of the virus and stonewalling sample requests from other countries."
China admits to destroying coronavirus samples 'for safety'
Clear proof there was no coverup!
Covid 19 coronavirus: Coalition of 62 nations, including New Zealand, backs virus probe - "New Zealand is reportedly among 62 nations that have come together to back Australia's call for an independent inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic."
Flying During the Coronavirus Pandemic: What to Know - The Atlantic - "The things we miss most about our pre-pandemic lives—dine-in restaurants and recreational travel, karaoke nights and baseball games—require more than government permission to be enjoyed. These activities are predicated not only on close human contact but mutual affection and good-natured patience, on our ability to put up with one another. Governors can lift restrictions and companies can implement public-health protocols. But until we stop reflexively seeing people as viral threats, those old small pleasures we crave are likely to remain elusive."
Legacy news, social media giants converge in new era of censorship - "New York Times reporter Davey Alba coaxed YouTube to remove a video by Aytu BioScience regarding a possible UV light treatment for COVID19 because it “backs up Trump's idea … that UV rays kill coronavirus.”... Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee cried foul after YouTube yanked a video starring two California doctors questioning the government’s stay-at-home mantra."These guys are medical doctors," Huckabee said on Fox News. “They are scientists. For heaven's sake, they didn't say anything that was really disputable. They were giving facts [and] figures. I thought the most salient point they made in the course of the video — which I did see before it got pulled — was that historically when you have a pandemic, you quarantine the sick people — not the healthy people. And that was sort of like, you know, the light bulb went off.”That clip, according to Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, rang up more than 5 million views on YouTube before the site took it down. The “critical questions” posed by the doctors are ones “we should all be asking, including and especially our policy makers,” Carlson said before paraphrasing one doctor’s summation.“Dissent of any kind is no longer tolerated in this country,” he said. “Fact-based honesty, which is the soul of science, is under attack, even in hospitals.”... “In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong,” wrote law professors Jack Goldsmith and Andrew Kane Woods. “Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.”... These censorial trends didn’t start with the pandemic. Twitter began banning political ads last year, while Facebook faced significant pressure from the left, including “Borat” star Sacha Baron Cohen, to follow suit.More recently, Facebook caught heat for banning posts tied to government lockdown protests. Not to be outdone, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki declared on CNN's "Reliable Sources" that pandemic-related content that would "go against World Health Organization recommendations" would be subjected to removal from the site as "a violation of our policy." Adam Guillette, president of Accuracy in Media, says Big Tech’s allegiance to that government body comes at a curious time. The W.H.O. recently disagreed with itself, first suggesting COVID-19 survivors could get re-infected before reversing course, Guillette notes.Earlier in the spread of the virus, The U.N. system health organization also put its authority behind the false claim of Chinese health authorities that virus was not transmissible from human to human and opposed the curbs on international travel from infected hot spots that many have credited with helping to contain the virus and spare many lives.The bigger issue, as Guillette sees it, are platforms acting with an unearned level of authority. “Social media titans are defining themselves to be the experts on what content we should and shouldn’t be allowed to see ... [while] the so-called experts are regularly contradicting themselves,” he says. “In such a confusing environment it’s outrageous for sites to be censoring information.”"
YouTube must stop policing the corona debate - "Big Tech censorship is out of control during this pandemic. Social-media platforms’ determination to censor supposed ‘misinformation’ has morphed into policing the debate about the pandemic itself. While many platforms have been guilty of this, YouTube is in a league of its own. Recently, it deleted a video of two medics discussing their own testing data and arguing that California’s lockdown should be lifted. Then it deleted an interview with Knut Wittkowski, an epidemiologist who is fiercely critical of lockdowns. Now it has taken down an interview that Professor Karol Sikora, a professor of medicine and former adviser to the World Health Organisation, gave to UnHerd... what’s particularly concerning here is that Professor Sikora is hardly a huge dissenter. He supported the UK’s lockdown; he just thinks it should now be eased. And he is generally more optimistic about the pandemic burning itself out sooner rather than later. For this, he seems to have been put into the same category as conspiracy theorist David Icke (who has also had his interviews, about 5G and associated nonsense, removed by YouTube). The platform clearly isn’t just tackling ‘misinformation’ — it is now censoring anything that doesn’t conform to the most extreme, pessimistic, pro-lockdown line. This corporate censorship must be opposed."
Since YouTube is happy to be a publisher and not a platform now...
Dutch official advice to single people: find a sex buddy for lockdown - "Single men and women in the Netherlands are being advised to organise a seksbuddy (sex buddy) after criticism of rules dictating that home visitors maintain a 1.5-metre distance from their hosts during the coronavirus lockdown.In a typically open-minded intervention, official guidance from the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) has been amended to suggest those without a permanent sexual partner come to mutually satisfactory agreements with like-minded individuals."
Opinion | 10-4: How to Reopen the Economy by Exploiting the Coronavirus’s Weak Spot - The New York Times - "People can work in two-week cycles, on the job for four days then, by the time they might become infectious, 10 days at home in lockdown. The strategy works even better when the population is split into two groups of households working alternating weeks... Models we created at the Weizmann Institute in Israel predict that this two-week cycle can reduce the virus’s reproduction number — the average number of people infected by each infected person — below one. So a 10-4 cycle could suppress the epidemic while allowing sustainable economic activity.Even if someone is infected, and without symptoms, he or she would be in contact with people outside their household for only four days every two weeks, not 10 days, as with a normal schedule. This strategy packs another punch: It reduces the density of people at work and school, thus curtailing the transmission of the virus... Businesses would work almost continuously, alternating between two groups of workers, for regular and predictable production. This would increase consumer confidence, shoring up supply and demand simultaneously.During lockdown days, this approach requires adherence only to the level of distancing already being demonstrated in European countries and New York City. It prevents the economic and psychological costs of opening the economy and then having to reinstate complete lockdown when cases inevitably resurge. Giving hope and then taking it away can cause despair and resistance.A 10-4 routine provides at least part-time employment for millions who have been fired or sent on leave without pay. These jobs prevent the devastating, and often long-lasting, mental and physical impacts of unemployment. For those living on cash, there would be four days to make a living, reducing the economic necessity to disregard lockdown altogether. Business bankruptcies would also be reduced, speeding up eventual economic recovery."
Covid-19: face mask rules more political than scientific, says UK expert - "The researchers found all face masks without a valve, including cloth masks, reduced the distance exhaled air travelled in a forward direction by more than 90%. But they added that fit was essential, pointing out that “surgical, handmade masks, and face shields, generate significant leakage jets that have the potential to disperse virus-laden fluid particles by several metres,” and that such jets tend to be directed downwards or backwards. Dr Simon Kolstoe, senior lecturer in evidence-based healthcare and university ethics adviser at the University of Portsmouth, said when it comes to the science there “isn’t that much to argue about”. He said the new study backs previous evidence that cloth masks were not as effective as FFP1 or FFP2 masks – equivalent to N95 masks – when it comes to preventing the transmission of viruses, but can direct the breath in different ways.But Kolstoe said there was limited evidence about how effective cloth masks were, or whether they have a big impact. The upshot was a debate that was more political than scientific. “My feeling is that this is becoming more of a statement, a statement of solidarity. By going out and wearing a face mask you show that you are taking action, you show other people you are concerned about this, you are concerned about them, you are concerned about yourself. But perhaps conversely by not wearing a face mask that is also a statement as well,” said Kolstoe, pointing to a recent Politico article with the headline “Wearing a mask is for smug liberals. Refusing to is for reckless Republicans.”... Describing homemade face coverings, Kolstoe said: “I don’t think it does any particular harm to wear, them I don’t think it does any particular good to wear them – and as a consequence you are going to get people jumping on either side of the bandwagon. [If there was evidence showing cloth masks] make a massive difference, then we wouldn’t be having this argument.”"
Jogger Runs Couple Of Miles While Wearing Mask, Ends Up With Burst Lungs - "news about two young teenagers dying on the track field while running and wearing masks hugged the headline. Reports say the boys, who were in separate schools and died a week apart, were performing runs in a physical examination"
Palestinian Authority Refuses Coronavirus Aid From UAE Because It Came Through Israel - "The Etihad Airways flight from Abu Dhabi to Tel Aviv was the first of its kind, as Israel and the UAE do not have formal diplomatic relations. However, ties between Israel and the Gulf states have been warming in recent years due to the mutual threat from Iran... Palestinian government sources told the Middle East Monitor, “Palestinians refuse to be a bridge [for Arab countries] seeking to have normalized ties with Israel.”“Sending [the aid] directly to Israel constitutes a cover for normalization,” they said.Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei agreed, writing on Twitter shortly after posting a genocidal image calling for Israel’s destruction, “Today, some Persian Gulf states have committed the biggest treachery against their own history and the history of the Arab world. They have betrayed #Palestine by supporting Israel.”“Will the nations of these states tolerate their leaders’ betrayal?” he asked."
Naturally, this is Israel's fault
Coronavirus: scientists promoting chloroquine and remdesivir are acting like sports rivals - "Rivals Usain Bolt and Justin Gatlin trash-talked each other before the 2016 Olympics, with Bolt calling Gatlin “old man”, and Gatlin calling Bolt “middle aged”. The banter was entertaining but vanished into insignificance when Bolt won. After the race, both athletes shook hands and accepted the result.Something like trash-talking is happening in the race for a treatment for COVID-19, but – unlike with Bolt and Gatlin’s race, which decided the matter – there is no fair test of the two top contending treatments being conducted. The two competing treatments getting the most press are chloroquine, or its cousin hydroxychloroquine (usually given with an antibiotic), and remdesivir. Like almost all medical treatments, they both have benefits and harms... Remdesivir, a drug developed by Gilead Sciences, has been shown to work in monkeys, but it flopped in the first trial for treating humans with COVID-19.Revealing the dangerously non-transparent nature of the science in this area, the World Health Organization (WHO) initially posted the results of the failed trial and subsequently took the data down. Simultaneously, Gilead Sciences accused the WHO of “misrepresenting” the trial.Another trial that didn’t test the drug against a control group, reported by industry-funded authors, found that 36 of the 53 patients who took remdesivir had improved lung function. Yet 60% of the patients had at least one side-effect, including abnormal liver function. Most recently, the US National Institutes of Health funded a trial comparing remdesivir with placebos in 1,000 patients. The drug seemed to reduce the length of stay in hospital from 14 days – which was how long those who took a placebo were in hospital – to 11 days. However, Fauci announced the results on national television before the study was reviewed, so nobody can confirm independently whether it was a fair test.A problem with Fauci’s trial is that the protocol was changed after the trial started. Initially, they were supposed to measure death, which is barely susceptible to bias. They changed this to length of stay in hospital, which is more susceptible to bias. Changing the protocol mid-stream is sometimes justified, but no rationale was provided... there were almost 100 trials of either hydroxychloroquine or remdesivir registered worldwide. The problem is that none of them amounts to a fair side-by-side trial. A fair comparative test of a treatment is (conceptually) no more complex than a 100m race. Such comparative tests are the heart of evidence-based medicine... we will continue to get biased opinions, sometimes fuelled by conspiracy theories that inform treatment decisions"
Of course, since Trump promotes chloroquine, it must not work
Doctors worldwide say malaria drug is the best coronavirus treatment - "Doctors around the globe report that the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine seems the most effective treatment they've tried for coronavirus patients"
This ties in with how many doctors aren't very good at science. This doctor on Facebook proclaimed that she knew that masks worked against covid-19 and refused to consider the RCTs, and when I brought up the RCTs showing surgical masks didn't help for post-operative infection, just mocked me.
A Facebook friend got very upset when I showed him evidence from some trials that chloroquine didn't work; masks and chloroquine serve similar psychological functions as security blankets regardless of whether they work or not
Only Half of Americans Say They'd Get Vaccinated Against Coronavirus, New Poll Shows - "nearly half of Trump voters, 49 percent, think that the antimalarial drug, hydroxychloroquine, is an effective treatment against the novel coronavirus, while 17 percent said they believe it is ineffective.In comparison, only 5 percent of those that voted for Clinton in 2016 said they believe the drug was an effective treatment while 73 percent said it is not."
Report: Over 100 Rikers Island prisoners freed due to coronavirus re-arrested for crimes - "More than 100 New York prisoners who were freed due to coronavirus concerns have been re-arrested... Overall, the recidivists still only account for about 4 percent of the 2,650 inmates released between March 16 and May 6"
Telstra - Posts - "TAKE DOWN 5G TOWERS THERE WEAPONS THAT CAUSE COVID!!"
"Hi James, The 5G towers will help download your conspiracy videos faster."
"Attention everyone. This isn’t real, but we wish it was. So we're sharing it now."
April travelers to Japan dropped 99.9% from year earlier to 2,900 - "The government is seeking to boost domestic tourism by subsidizing a portion of travel expenses once the coronavirus outbreak is brought under control.The ¥1.35 trillion ($12.5 billion) program could start in July if novel coronavirus infections subside soon"
Former Supreme Court Justice: 'This is what a police state is like' - "The former Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption, QC, has denounced the police response to the coronavirus, saying the country is suffering 'collective hysteria...
The real problem is that when human societies lose their freedom, it's not usually because tyrants have taken it away. It's usually because people willingly surrender their freedom in return for protection against some external threat. And the threat is usually a real threat but usually exaggerated. That's what I fear we are seeing now. The pressure on politicians has come from the public. They want action. They don't pause to ask whether the action will work. They don't ask themselves whether the cost will be worth paying. They want action anyway. And anyone who has studied history will recognise here the classic symptoms of collective hysteria. Hysteria is infectious. We are working ourselves up into a lather in which we exaggerate the threat and stop asking ourselves whether the cure may be worse than the disease... the tradition of policing in this country is that policemen are citizens in uniform. They are not members of a disciplined hierarchy operating just at the government's command. Yet in some parts of the country, the police have been trying to stop people from doing things like travelling to take exercise in the open country, which are not contrary to the regulations, simply because ministers have said that they would prefer us not to. The police have no power to enforce ministers' preferences, but only legal regulations - which don't go anything like as far as the government's guidance. I have to say that the behaviour of the Derbyshire police in trying to shame people into using their undoubted right to take exercise in the country and wrecking beauty spots in the Fells so that people don't want to go there, is frankly disgraceful. This is what a police state is like. It's a state in which the government can issue orders or express preferences with no legal authority and the police will enforce ministers' wishes... There is a natural tendency of course, and a strong temptation for the police to lose sight of their real functions and turn themselves from citizens in uniform into glorified school prefects. I think it's really sad that the Derbyshire police have failed to resist that."
Jonathan Sumption: 'You cannot imprison an entire population' | The Spectator - "The current rationale for the lockdown is incoherent. The old rationale was: ‘you must spread the infections over a longer period so as to allow the NHS to catch up’. So that was why there was the slogan ‘Save the NHS’. Well, they've dropped that part of the slogan – and for good reasons. Currently, the NHS has more than doubled its intensive care capacity. It's an impressive achievement by the government. But they need to follow the logic of it. The crucial fact is that [the government's] paper accepts that Covid-19 is going to be with us long term. That is the likely outcome. And it's consistent with the science. Once the a virus has taken hold in a population, it doesn't just go away until enough people have been exposed to the disease to acquire immunity or a vaccine turns up. So when the lockdown ends, whenever that is, the virus will still be there waiting for us.More than nine tenths of the deaths are cases in which the death certificate shows that there were multiple causes of death: Coronavirus was only one of them. This is a virus that attacks people with really serious pre-existing vulnerabilities. Almost all of these people are very old and suffering from conditions serious enough to be mentioned as a cause of death on the certificate. The overwhelming majority would have died. A bit later, but not much later.What I'm advocating now is that the lockdown should become entirely voluntary... We are going to have to live with Covid-19 because it's going to be around for a long time unless somebody successfully invents and trials a vaccine... Undoubtedly, there will be a few people who do not make sensible decisions. But you cannot imprison the entire population simply because a small minority is not being very sensible with their own safety.This lockdown is destroying livelihoods on a massive scale. It is doing enormous damage. And in my view, it has never been a price worth paying for the not-very-impressive results that can be directly attributed to the lockdown assumption"
The post Covid blocs are beginning to emerge - "We are beginning to see what a medium-term Covid world might look like. The ‘suppression’ strategy is winning out across the western and Asian world — country after country is opting to keep the virus completely at bay indefinitely, or until a vaccine.The other side of this, of course, is that once you have almost no virus you have to shut your borders to preserve the purity of your virus-free kingdom: New Zealand is now completely closed to visitors; Hong Kong tests everyone on arrival.One step further on from this will be pacts between neighbouring countries that share a common approach and similar levels of infection. In what has caused some understandable unease at a EU level, the young Chancellor of Austria has proposed a ‘travel corridor’ between Austria, Germany and the Czech Republic, that could even stretch as far as Greece, allowing the uninfected peoples of those countries to access the Mediterranean without fear of contamination... there is a sharp irony in the fact that those places most committed to an open, multilateral, progressive world (blue states in America, the EU, New Zealand, Scotland) look set to become the most closed and border-patrolled, while the ‘America First’ states and places like Brazil have the chance to look outwards like never before."
Generation corona has been handed a life sentence - "we will need to start paying employers and institutions to keep young people in work and study. That is a sentence to make fiscal conservatives and economic liberals baulk. But in case you have not noticed we are not in normal times and the normal rules do not apply.Evidence from other countries provides some evidence of the effectiveness of limited, targeted wage subsidies. A recent evaluation of France’s policy of small business hiring credits for low-wage workers, introduced just three months after the fall of Lehman Brothers in December 2008, found that it had strong and immediate employment effects. Another study of Sweden’s Anställningsstöd employment subsidy programme, which supports up to 85% of wages for underemployed workers, found that firms that hired through the scheme grew quicker than counterparts that did not... ministers should consider keeping some young people in education for an extra year. It is little unremarked upon, but it costs the taxpayer marginally less — around £4,000 a year — to support an 18-year-old in college than it does to support them on the basic Universal Credit allowance for a year. These costs fall even more if the effects of lower long-term unemployment on productivity and earnings are taken into account.Some young people may not want to — in which case we should not force them — but many might want to learn. Given the hammer blow dealt to university finances by plummeting international student numbers, there is a strong case for asking the best institutions to develop cheap one-year courses to upskill the coronavirus generation. It would be an elegant way for the Government, which has rightly resisted a sector-wide bailout, to support the best institutions through the next few years."
Up the workers: how Covid reset society's values - "where culture leads, policy follows. In the decades immediately following the shared national effort and trauma of the Second World War, social status attached to ideals of duty, hard work and sacrifice. To some extent war had been a democratising force: the Princess Elizabeth had joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service and trained as a driver and mechanic. When Buckingham Palace took a direct hit during the Blitz in September 1940, the Queen Mother famously said, “It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face.”Without idealising those decades, or glossing over their inequalities, there was nonetheless a post-war acceptance that it was the job of government to provide the public with broad access to decent healthcare, education, and secure housing of reliable quality. Orwell, writing during the war, had predicted that “this war, unless we are defeated, will wipe out most of the existing class privileges. There are every day fewer people who wish them to continue.”"
'Sugar Dating': Sweden Sounds the Alarm Over Coronavirus-Induced Underage Prostitution - "Swedish police and social services have sounded the alarm over a new phenomenon: young people selling themselves to make ends meet after admittedly having lost their jobs due to the Covid-19 epidemic."
Coronavirus: 'Baffling' observations from the front line - "it became apparent very quickly that it was affecting far more than just people's breathing.Viral pneumonia is a nasty disease - a serious infection of the lungs which causes inflammation as the body fights against it.But the worst cases of Covid-19 have been something new... For the critically ill, this is a disease of such severe inflammation and blood clotting that it attacks multiple organs and causes life-threatening problems that cascade around the body... Everyone agrees that unprecedented levels of inflammation in the lungs make this a very different disease. When the lining of blood vessels gets inflamed, the blood is more likely to clot. And Covid-19 creates incredibly thick sticky blood in seriously ill patients... all of these factors add up to Covid-19 being highly unpredictable - it is what specialists call a multisystem disease. That makes it much harder to know how best to treat any individual patient, and at the moment there is no textbook to tell doctors what to do."It's not just the lungs being affected," says Hugh Montgomery, "it's the kidneys, the heart, the liver. We've also seen severely inflamed muscle which is doing a lot of damage." More than 2,000 Covid patients admitted to intensive care have suffered kidney failure... the most common underlying conditions involved with Covid-19 are not respiratory problems like asthma.Instead, they are vascular conditions that affect the veins and the arteries - high blood pressure, diabetes and heart disease, along with associated factors such as gender, obesity and in particular old age."
Coronavirus hijacks cells in unique ways that suggest how to treat it - "A deep dive into how the new coronavirus infects cells has found that it orchestrates a hostile takeover of their genes unlike any other known viruses do, producing what one leading scientist calls “unique” and “aberrant” changes... within three days of infection, the virus induces cells’ call-for-reinforcement genes to produce cytokines. But it blocks their call-to-arms genes — the interferons that dampen the virus’ replication.The result is essentially no brakes on the virus’s replication, but a storm of inflammatory molecules in the lungs, which is what tenOever calls an “unique” and “aberrant” consequence of how SARS-CoV-2 manipulates the genome of its target... “there is nothing to stop the virus from replicating and festering in the lungs forever.”That causes lung cells to emit even more “call-for-reinforcement” genes, summoning more and more immune cells. Now the lungs have macrophages and neutrophils and other immune cells “everywhere,” tenOever said, causing such runaway inflammation “that you start having inflammation that induces more inflammation.”At the same time, unchecked viral replication kills lung cells involved in oxygen exchange. “And suddenly you’re in the hospital in severe respiratory distress”... taking interferons might prevent severe Covid-19 or even prevent it in the first place"
Wearing a mask can significantly reduce coronavirus transmission: Study - "Experiments by a team in Hong Kong found that the coronavirus’ transmission rate via respiratory droplets or airborne particles dropped by as much as 75% when surgical masks were used."
I am unable to find the paper, only news reports or the HKU press release. But for this study, the masks were placed between the cages for a week
So the analogue for real world use by humans would be:
i) Perfect, continuous mask use by individuals
ii) When continuously exposed for a week to infected individuals with continuous air flow
iii) With no change in behavior
All 3 of these conditions do not apply in the real world, even if we assume hamster epidemiology is identical to human epidemiology:
i) Individuals reuse masks, don't put them on properly, remove them sometimes etc. So real world mask effectiveness will be lower than that suggested by the study
ii) Even if you live with an infected individual you are not going to be breathing in each other's faces for a week at a time. So any incremental benefit of masks is going to be less (e.g. cutting risk from 80% to 60% is more significant than cutting it from 1% to 0.75% even though both are a 25% reduction in risk)
iii) This assumes individuals with masks behave identically to those without masks. But having a mask on may mean one spends longer outside, goes closer to others etc
Again, I draw reference to the RCTs for influenza, which show a weak effect of masks at best (and some show masks worsen the situation)
Masks are everywhere in Asia, but have they helped? - "The use of masks in parts of Asia with relatively low numbers of infections and deaths from the virus, including Japan and Hong Kong, has led some to theorise mask-wearing is making the difference.But experts are sceptical.Ben Cowling, a professor at the University of Hong Kong's School of Public Health, instead credits a range of public health measures implemented in these countries.These include "identifying cases and isolating them, tracing and quarantining their contacts, and also implementing social distancing in the community... Fukuda too cautioned against thinking of mask-wearing "as a magic X-factor"."Some places like Singapore have generally done very well without strongly emphasising masks," he noted.He attributes the smaller outbreaks to measures including contact tracing, good coordination, social distancing "and a general public that has been quite worried from the start and willing to work with health authorities"... some experts warn mask-wearing can backfire, even where supplies are plentiful."Masks may give people a false sense of security," said Simon Clarke, an associate professor of cellular microbiology at the University of Reading. Advocating mask usage, he fears, could also embolden people who are reluctant to adhere to social distancing measures."I can envisage a situation where people who are infected and therefore shedding virus, think their mask gives them licence to go out to public places or to work""
How Lockdowns Matter - "Researchers recently noticed that behavior drastically changed before regulations did...
1. Lockdowns can easily prolong behavior they did not initially cause. If the government stopped discouraging smoking, few people think it would mount a major resurgence in a year or a decade. But almost everyone thinks that people would start returning to normal life in a few months… unless draconian enforcement stops them.
2. Lockdowns clearly amplify behavioral changes. Look at Florida beaches: lots of people return the day the law changes.
3. The welfare cost of prohibition is much greater than the welfare cost of large behavioral changes. Why? Because the suppliers and demanders most reluctant to change their behavior have the highest consumer and producer surplus! Thus, if only 20% of people would eat in restaurants if it were legal, the value of those few meals could easily be half the value in the market...
4. The massive expansion of unemployment benefits coverage greatly increases the sustainability of the lockdown; new limits on evictions and foreclosures do the same. So if the question is, “How much do emergency policies matter?” rather than “How much do lockdowns matter?” there can be little doubt that the answer is “a lot.” Most people simply don’t have enough personal savings to stop working for months without massive help from the government. And even many people who do have such savings wouldn’t want to burn through their assets for a marginal increase in safety.What this means is that crisis policies make a big difference – for good or ill. People are taking many precautions voluntarily; but many other behavioral changes hinge on coercion and subsidies, especially after a few weeks of going corona-crazy."
The "libertarians" (who seem to be anarchists who call themselves libertarians because it sounds better) aren't going to be happy at this libertarian economist
Being Classically Liberal - Posts - "CLAIM: "The lockdowns have destroyed the economy, put tens of millions out of work, etc! We need to end them now!"... Many studies have shown at this point that stay-at-home orders either account for none of, or a minority of, the skyrocketing unemployment rates we have seen recently."
Short and long run effects are different - the longer you shut down the bigger the costs, and the longer the pandemic goes on the less the fear.
Dave Owen SoCal - "People are comparing masks and vaccines to “communism”. No communist country except Cuba has ever made vaccines compulsory. China has never even offered a vaccine for the flu let alone mandated one. Capitalist, free market countries did make vaccines compulsory and Scandinavia, often maligned as socialist, has more lax vaccine requirements than the USA. It’s almost like having a country free of pandemics is conducive to trade"
Covid-19 Patients Not Infectious After 11 Days: Singapore Study - "Covid-19 patients are no longer infectious after 11 days of getting sick even though some may still test positive, according to a new study by infectious disease experts in Singapore. A positive test “does not equate to infectiousness or viable virus,” a joint research paper by Singapore’s National Centre for Infectious Diseases and the Academy of Medicine, Singapore said. The virus “could not be isolated or cultured after day 11 of illness.”"
Oxford’s Covid-19 vaccine trial has 50% chance of success: Project leader - "The University of Oxford’s Covid-19 vaccine trial has only a 50% chance of success as the coronavirus seems to be fading rapidly in Britain, the professor co-leading the development of the vaccine has said.Oxford’s Jenner Institute has tied up with biopharma major AstraZeneca Plc to produce the vaccine on a mass scale if the results are successful.The experimental vaccine, known as ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, is one of the front-runners in the global race to provide protection against the new coronavirus causing the coronavirus pandemic.The upcoming trial, involving 10,000 volunteers, threatened to return “no result” due to low transmission of Covid-19 in the community"
Of course, many people still want to squash the curve
‘Give me liberty or … COVID-19’: The irony of coronavirus protests in the U.S. - "Their protests have mixed legitimate calls for economic help with bogus conspiracy theories about the virus, often while ignoring public health advice measures meant to prevent its spread... Protesters held signs decrying vaccines, quoting apocalyptic verses from the Bible and demanding the ousting of Dr. Anthony Fauci"
Presumably if there were a war, these people would be protesting the temporary loss of civil liberties too
Couples should wear face masks during sex, new study insists - "If you have an out-of-house coronavirus crush, the study says, besides keeping your mask on, you should avoid kissing, any oral-to-anal act and anything else that involves semen or urine. Shower before and after, and clean the space with alcohol wipes or soap."
One scary reality in case covid-19 causes a food shortage- the UN policy on food distribution is to only distribute food to women : MensRights
International air travel may not return to normal until 2023, says IATA - "Under the IATAs baseline scenario, it expects travel to return to normal by 2023, but under its ‘setback scenario’ - if lockdown continues into the autumn or if there’s another wave of the virus - travel might not return to normal until 2024."
Commentary: We will fly again. Here’s what’s needed to safely restart flights and resume air travel - "Everybody generally faces forward and doesn’t move around that much. And the seatback is a barrier for respiratory droplets jumping rows.There are some very important design features including the air flow in the aircraft. It flows from the ceiling to the floor so there is not much air movement backwards and forwards which can help reduce the spread. You might not realise that air is exchanged 20 to 30 times an hour with fresh air from outside the aircraft. That’s about 10 times more frequently than most modern office buildings.For the air that is recycled, it goes through High Efficiency Particulate Air filters—the same ones that are used in hospital operating theatres.I wish that I could say with absolute certainty that there is no risk of catching COVID-19 in the cabin. There is risk in every interaction we have with other people — when shopping, working, dining or flying. What I can say though, is that we haven’t seen that risk manifest in many cases of onboard transmission... the risk of onboard transmission appears to be low. And the measures that we have put in place will reduce it further."
One in five English people believe COVID is a Jewish conspiracy - survey
Anti-Zionism in action
Addendum: This clearly shows that Trump is to blame for calling it the China Virus
Gad Saad - Posts - "Good morning everyone. I wish you all a great day as we enter year 37 of the lockdown. Remember, in order to live, you must stop living indefinitely because bruh science. The lockdown will continue for another 264 years or will end tomorrow. My model will shortly clarify."
Guy Squiggs on Twitter - "When the government decided who was essential and who wasn't, resulting in over 30 million people unemployed, Leftists called it a failure of Capitalism. The government seizing control of production is certainly some sort of an ism... But it's not Capitalism."
Meme - "Please, I'm out of work, the unemployment system is a joke, I haven't gotten the stimulus check yet, the waits at the food banks are hours long, I am willing to risk death to provide for my kids"
"haha, mad that you can't get a haircut Karen?"
Scarlett Strong - "Here's a metastudy from John Ioannidis that reviews anti-body studies around the world. The general conclusion is pretty much what you'd expect if you have been following this research: for most people and under most circumstances, the risk of death from covid-19 is much lower than initially feared, along the lines of a bad flu season. However, it can be much worse in specific situations--when the pandemic is raging in nursing homes, when hospitals get overrun, when infections are nosocomial, etc. This study adds to the evidence that a general shutdown that attempts to protect everyone, albeit at an enormous economic cost, is not the right strategy. Amazingly, in a number of states including New York and New Jersey, covid-positive elderly patients were being sent back to nursing homes while the state economies were shut down. Going forward, we can only hope that states will identify and protect those at most risk."
COVID-19: Distancing Works, N95 Respirators Work Better - "The study reported that physical distancing of at least 1 meter, or about a yard, "seems to be strongly associated with a large protective effect," but that distancing of 2 meters or about 6 feet could be more effective... A subanalysis of 29 unadjusted and 9 adjusted studies found that the absolute risk of infection in proximity to an exposed individual was 12.8% at 1 m and 2.6% at 2 m. The risk remained constant even when the six COVID-19 studies in this subanalysis were isolated and regardless of being in a health care or non–health-care setting. Each meter of increased distance resulted in a doubling in the change in relative risk (P = .041)."
I know someone who claims physical distancing is useless, but masks are good
The certainty (from observational studies only) that masks help was rated as low (while it was moderate for physical distancing). The paper also notes that masks were more effective in healthcare workers, which reinforces the point about ideal vs real life mask use. Also this doesnt tell us much about community mask use. Out of 29 studies, only 3 were about mask use in non-healthcare settings (all from SARS), and 1 found that mask use increased infection. Furthermore, Lau et al 2004 which was supposedly about community mask use, really looked at mask use *during hospital visits by a household member*, and and Tuan et al 2007 was about wearing masks *when in contact with a SARS case* - i.e. neither was about wearing masks all the time
READ: Trump’s Devastating Open Letter To Schumer: ‘I Never Knew How Bad A Senator You Are’ | The Daily Wire - "As you are aware, Vice President Pence is in charge of the Task Force. By almost all accounts, he has done a spectacular job.
The Defense Production Act (DPA) has been consistently used by my team and me for the purchase of billions of dollars’ worth of equipment, medical supplies, ventilators, and other related items. It has been powerful leverage, so powerful that companies generally do whatever we are asking, without even a formal notice. They know something is coming, and that’s all they need to know.
A “senior military officer” is in charge of purchasing, distributing, etc. His name is Rear Admiral John Polowczyk. He is working 24 hours a day, and is highly respected by everyone. If you remember, my team gave you this information, but for public relations purposes, you choose to ignore it.
We have given New York many things including hospitals, medical centers, medical supplies, record numbers of ventilators, and more. You should have had New York much better prepared than you did, and as Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx said yesterday, New York was very late in its fight against the virus. As you are aware, the Federal Government is merely a back-up for state governments. Unfortunately, your state needed far more of a back-up than most others... Fortunately, we have been working with your state and city governments, Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio to get the job done. You have been missing in action except when it comes to the “press.” While you have stated that you don’t like Andrew Cuomo, you ought to start working alongside him for the good of all New Yorkers."
Biden Ad: Trump Left U.S. Unprepared For Epidemic, "Rolled Over For The Chinese" | Video
Naturally this is being slammed as "racist". Which explains why the word has lost its meaning and sting, and why liberals have moved on to calling everyone a "white supremacist". Strangely, blaming the Russians for everything isn't "racist". Someone claimed that "America doesn’t have a history and tradition of discriminating against Russians on the basis of their physical features, skin tone, or religion" - apparently he forgot about the Cold War and all the movies where the Soviets/Russians are the bad guys
Inside the Early Days of China’s Coronavirus Coverup | WIRED - "The dawn of a pandemic—as seen through the news and social media posts that vanished from China’s internet... “I never thought in my lifetime I’d see dead bodies lying around without being collected and patients seeking medical help but having no place to get treatment.”Yue thought that she had become desensitized, but this post made her fists clench: It was written by Xiao Hui, a journalist friend of hers who was reporting on the ground for Caixin, a prominent Chinese news outlet. Yue trusted her. She read on. “On January 22, on my second day reporting in Wuhan, I knew this was China’s Chernobyl,” Xiao Hui wrote. “These days I rarely pick up phone calls from outside of Wuhan or chat with friends and family, because nothing can express what I have seen here.”Unable to contain her anger, Yue took a screenshot of Xiao’s post and immediately posted it on her WeChat Moments. “Look what is happening in Wuhan!” she wrote. Then she finally drifted off. The next morning, when she opened WeChat, a single message appeared: Her account had been suspended for having “spread malicious rumors” and she would not be able to unblock it. She knew at once that her late-night post had stepped on a censorship landmine. What she couldn’t have realized, though, was that she had posted her screenshot at what seems to have been a turning point in China’s handling of the epidemic: Over the previous two weeks, the government had allowed what felt like an uncharacteristic degree of openness in the flow of information out of Wuhan. But now the state was embarking on a campaign of censorship and suppression that would be remarkable even by the standards of the Chinese Communist Party... Seasoned journalists in China often say “Cover China as if you were covering Snapchat”—in other words, screenshot everything, under the assumption that any given story could be deleted soon... By January, according to Caixin, a gene sequencing laboratory in Guangzhou had discovered that the novel virus in Wuhan shared a high degree of similarity with the virus that caused the SARS outbreak in 2003; but, according to an anonymous source, Hubei’s health commission promptly demanded that the lab suspend all testing and destroy all samples. On January 6, according to the deleted Caixin article, China’s National Center for Disease Control and Prevention initiated an “internal second-degree emergency response”—but did not alert the public. Caixin’s investigation disappeared from the Chinese internet only hours after it was published... a representative of the provincial commission vehemently denied that any medical workers in Wuhan had been infected. In fact, at least one infection of a medical worker had occurred at Wuhan Central Hospital two days before, according to a doctor quoted in Freezing Point. Soon after it was published, the interview with the scientist disappeared... Reports like this, even if they were short-lived, inspired some Chinese Weibo users to create an account called “Those Who Were Not Documented” on February 21. The crowdsourced page asked people to report whether they had relatives or acquaintances who had died outside of the hospital without having been tested—all to make sure there was a more accurate tally of the death toll. That account itself was purged within a day after it was created... Among journalists and social critics in China, the 404 error code, which announces that the content on a webpage is no longer available, has become a badge of honor. “At this point, if you haven’t had a 404 under your belt, can you even call yourself a journalist?” a Chinese reporter, who requested anonymity, jokingly asked me... it’s unlikely that the masses of people who watched posts being expunged from the internet will forget how they were governed in the pandemic"
Of course, China shills insist there was no coverup
The data is in — stop the panic and end the total isolation - "Fact 1: The overwhelming majority of people do not have any significant risk of dying from COVID-19. The recent Stanford University antibody study now estimates that the fatality rate if infected is likely 0.1 to 0.2 percent, a risk far lower than previous World Health Organization estimates that were 20 to 30 times higher and that motivated isolation policies. In New York City, an epicenter of the pandemic with more than one-third of all U.S. deaths, the rate of death for people 18 to 45 years old is 0.01 percent, or 10 per 100,000 in the population. On the other hand, people aged 75 and over have a death rate 80 times that... If you do not already have an underlying chronic condition, your chances of dying are small, regardless of age...
Fact 2: Protecting older, at-risk people eliminates hospital overcrowding... Even early WHO reports noted that 80 percent of all cases were mild, and more recent studies show a far more widespread rate of infection and lower rate of serious illness. Half of all people testing positive for infection have no symptoms at all. The vast majority of younger, otherwise healthy people do not need significant medical care if they catch this infection.
Fact 3: Vital population immunity is prevented by total isolation policies, prolonging the problem.
We know from decades of medical science that infection itself allows people to generate an immune response — antibodies — so that the infection is controlled throughout the population by “herd immunity.” Indeed, that is the main purpose of widespread immunization in other viral diseases — to assist with population immunity. In this virus, we know that medical care is not even necessary for the vast majority of people who are infected. It is so mild that half of infected people are asymptomatic, shown in early data from the Diamond Princess ship, and then in Iceland and Italy. That has been falsely portrayed as a problem requiring mass isolation. In fact, infected people without severe illness are the immediately available vehicle for establishing widespread immunity. By transmitting the virus to others in the low-risk group who then generate antibodies, they block the network of pathways toward the most vulnerable people, ultimately ending the threat...
Fact 4: People are dying because other medical care is not getting done due to hypothetical projections... Acute stroke and heart attack patients missed their only chances for treatment, some dying and many now facing permanent disability.
Fact 5: We have a clearly defined population at risk who can be protected with targeted measures... it is a commonsense, achievable goal to target isolation policy to that group, including strictly monitoring those who interact with them. Nursing home residents, the highest risk, should be the most straightforward to systematically protect from infected people, given that they already live in confined places with highly restricted entry."
Why Flattening the Curve is Overrated - "If we are truly only on lockdown for the next two weeks, it’s probably a cost we are all willing to bear. But I have some bad news for you – it won’t be two weeks. Not with the current psychology of this disease. We are starting with just two weeks because it makes it easier to accept. It’s comfortable. They’re keeping us calm. Easing us into it. The next announcement is coming. Two weeks will become four weeks. A month will become three months. This could drag on the rest of the year.The minute we lift quarantine measures, the second wave begins. Eventually the third wave. Or a fourth... If the mortality rate was 50% and 165mm Americans would die from this virus, I suspect we would be willing to live under strict quarantine for quite some time. We’d be willing to endure a total economic collapse because we don’t like the prospect of losing half our family.If the mortality rate is 1%, that’s 3.3mm Americans. That’s different.And that assumes 100% of us get it. Which we won’t. Even without a quarantine. Because that’s not how viruses work. There is no precedent for an influenza virus spreading to 100% of the population. Ever.Yeah, I’m willing to endure some economic hardship to avoid losing 3mm Americans. But how much? And how does my calculus change over time? That’s really uncomfortable to think about... Instead of 3mm Americans dying, what if it’s really more like 1mm? Or less? Heart disease kills 650k Americans each year – what if coronavirus kills that many instead? Would we accept a Great Depression in order to save them? If so, why haven’t we done so before now?...
We May Need to Stop Listening to the Doctors
They’re so used to giving orders, and we’re so used to following their orders, that it feels weird to say that aloud. But what if instead we think of them like lawyers? We take their advice and input. We consider their suggestions. We factor the risk. And then we make our own decisions. It’s easy for me to sit here and write that, less easy for the politicians in a fight to show who cares the most. Their race to out-caution each other or simply succumb to the same societal peer pressure we do is contributing to this mess.I love Dr. Fauci. He’s a straight shooter. But his incentives are not necessarily aligned with ours. He is trying to save every single human life. But at some point we may need to balance that with the grim reality of our entire economy grinding to a halt. And I suspect he’s not going to struggle to pay his mortgage...
There have been six influenza pandemics stretching back to the late 1800’s. With one notable exception, none of them have had a 1% mortality rate... The 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic is widely considered the most devastating pandemic in modern history... we aren’t in the middle of World War I with 30% of US physicians overseas and nearly every able-bodied American male living on top of each other in trenches. So there’s that little difference... There were no antibiotics to treat secondary infections like there are today. In a war zone. It wasn’t only the initial virus that killed them, it was the lack of antibiotics to treat subsequent bacterial infections, no doubt exacerbated by war time conditions. This is a big reason why subsequent pandemics haven’t had nearly the same mortality rate. And before you go all flatten the curve on me, it doesn’t require a hospital visit to get an antibiotic prescription."
From March. Prescient. And another example of the "myth" the the slippery slope
Black Death historian: 'A coronavirus depression could be the great leveller' - "The Austrian economic historian Walter Scheidel argues that throughout history, from the stone age onwards, pandemic is one of the only four events capable of bringing about greater equality. War, state collapse and revolution are the other three... could the pandemic of our era, already considered the greatest global crisis since the second world war, turn out to be a great societal leveller?Scheidel’s short answer is that the longer the pandemic wreaks havoc on the global economy, the greater the potential for radical equalising change... much of the coronavirus’s levelling potential will depend on our willingness to suffer significant economic losses in the short and medium term"
Once again, liberal equality is about making everyone equally miserable. Indeed, making the already miserable even worse off can be contemplated as an acceptable price to stiff the rich
Fast in, first out: Denmark leads lockdown exit - "Denmark last month became the first country in Europe to reopen schools, day-care centres and smaller businesses. It did not see a subsequent rise in COVID-19 cases.“The quick shutdown and the fact that Danes actually listened to messages from authorities about good hygiene and social distancing are the main reasons we’ve come this far,” said Hans Jorn Kolmos, a professor in clinical microbiology at the University of Southern Denmark.Contrary to the French and Italians, Danes are less likely to hug and kiss as a form of greeting, which has also been a factor in limiting the spread... Health experts now say Denmark is “very unlikely” to be hit by a second wave of the COVID-19 infection that has so far killed 548 people.With a population of only 5.8 million, the death rate in Denmark is on par with that of Germany with around nine per 100,000 - less than most other European countries, including 36 in neighbouring Sweden, 33 in the Netherlands and 52 in both Britain and Italy... The results have been achieved without mass testing and contact tracing. Denmark has not recommended the use of face-coverings, as many other countries have"
‘Nothing can justify this destruction of people's lives’ - "It is the first epidemic in history which is accompanied by another epidemic – the virus of the social networks. These new media have brainwashed entire populations. What you get is fear and anxiety, and an inability to look at real data. And therefore you have all the ingredients for monstrous hysteria. It is what is known in science as positive feedback or a snowball effect. The government is afraid of its constituents. Therefore, it implements draconian measures. The constituents look at the draconian measures and become even more hysterical. They feed each other and the snowball becomes larger and larger until you reach irrational territory... Coronavirus comes very fast, but it also goes away very fast. The influenza wave is shallow as it takes three months to pass, but coronavirus takes one month. If you count the number of people who die in terms of excess mortality – which is the area under the curve – you will see that during the coronavirus season, we have had an excess mortality which is about 15 per cent larger than the epidemic of regular flu in 2017. Coronavirus comes very fast, but it also goes away very fast. The influenza wave is shallow as it takes three months to pass, but coronavirus takes one month. If you count the number of people who die in terms of excess mortality – which is the area under the curve – you will see that during the coronavirus season, we have had an excess mortality which is about 15 per cent larger than the epidemic of regular flu in 2017... Any reasonable expert – that is, anyone but Professor Ferguson from Imperial College who would have locked down everybody when we had swine flu – will tell you that lockdown cannot change the final number of infected people. It can only change the rate of infection... look at Sweden. No lockdown and no collapse of hospitals. The argument for the lockdown collapses... In the Middle East, this virus is not really working. There are two reasons. One is that there is a very young population, and the other is that the climate is different. In the latitude of 50 degrees, which is Europe, and 40, which is the north-eastern United States, the virus is much more viable. Italy has the oldest population in the world apart from Japan. Italians are also are heavy smokers and very social people – they keep hugging and kissing. If you look at the numbers, in 2017, 25,000 Italians died from flu complications. Now you have around 30,000 dying from coronavirus. So it is a comparable number. You should not ruin a country for comparable numbers... The virus, like the influenza virus, is saying farewell to western Europe for sure. The same in the Middle East"
Brian Lynch on Twitter - "The way America is acting about following rules during the pandemic, proves If Gremlins were real, we’d be overrun by them in minutes.
“This is Gizmo, please don’t get him wet.”
“This is a free country!”
(Throws Gizmo into the ocean)"
"It's wild how the american understanding of liberty seems to be "if you try and tell me what to do I'll do the opposite just to prove I can". So like the preschooler conception of liberty"
"I just imagine the corpse of John Stuart Mill causing earthquakes from all the spinning in his grave everytime they misrepresent what liberty actually is"
"As someone who even leans libertarian...I have always said that most Americans don't endorse responsible freedom as much as they are just brats with oppositional defiance disorder."
"When everything the bluster of the country is built on is freedom, any small inconvenience seems like an affront to said freedom. Pushing back is almost seen as a civic duty."
A "libertarian" (really an anarchist) proclaimed that he was wearing masks voluntarily, but if the government made them compulsory he would refuse to wear them. I asked if he'd throw away any guns he had if the government made owning them compulsory. He dodged the question
M'sia lockdown: SBS employee 'touched to tears' by '5-star hotel' accommodation, says he 'die also won't leave company' - "Here's a translation of Liu Jiacheng's caption:
"Due to the lockdown, I ran to Singapore without even bringing a single piece of underwear. I thought I would have to sleep on the streets, but the company actually put us up at a 5-star hotel. I was so touched I cried, I won't leave such a good company even if you beat me to death!!! I love you SBS Transit!!!""
China Is Trolling the World and Avoiding Blame - The Atlantic - "The political scientist Andrew Michta has drawn controversy and accusations of racism for stating what any measured overview of the evidence makes clear. “The question about assigning agency and blame is pretty straightforward to answer,” he writes in The American Interest. The Chinese state, he says, is culpable... Well before the new coronavirus spread across American cities, the Chinese regime was already rather creatively trolling U.S. publications, expelling American journalists, and “weaponizing wokeness” over anything it perceived as critical of China’s role in mishandling the epidemic. To hear Chinese spokespeople use the language of racism and prejudice is somewhat surreal, considering this is a regime that has put more than 1 million Muslims and ethnic minorities in “reeducation” camps... A government is not a race. It’s a regime—and easily one of the worst and most brutal in our lifetime. Criticizing authoritarian regimes for what they do outside their own borders and to their own people is simply calling things as they are. To do otherwise is to forgo analysis and accuracy in the name of assuaging a regime that deserves no such consideration. Those American critics who raise the racism canard are themselves inadvertently collapsing the distinctions between an authoritarian regime and those who live under it. Too many also seem comfortable drawing moral equivalencies between the Chinese regime and Donald Trump. This attitude is hard to take seriously. Trump didn’t block the media from reporting on the coronavirus; he did not disappear his critics. The nature of a regime matters. And this is why I, for one, am glad to live in a democracy, however flawed, in this time of unprecedented crisis... this pandemic should, finally, disabuse us of any remaining hope that the Chinese regime could be a responsible global actor. It is not, and it will not become one."
Conceit and Contagion: How the Virus Shocked Europe - "the Spanish government actively encouraged all Spaniards to go to the streets and join dozens of very large marches for gender equality. When asked about the infection hazard, one minister publicly laughed. The images of those marches have acquired a tangible, pungent horror. You see them against the backdrop of the hundreds of dead since and the laughter, the hugs, and the claps from the marches stand as a lasting monument to human folly... In India, or Singapore, or Vietnam, people were dramatically changing their behaviour to adapt to the coronavirus... The reasons for this cultural difference can, I believe, be explained through history and psychology. The sense of uncertainty and of the fragility of human life that I saw in Asia over the past two months is easy to explain if poverty and disease are still an everyday occurrence or at most two or three generations in the past. Often, that historical experience is reflected in public institutions: The lack of advanced social security and public healthcare systems forces Asians to contemplate in their daily lives the possibility that their world might suddenly collapse. In Europe the general psychology too often reflects the ideology of development, the idea that the most serious threats to individual happiness have been definitively conquered. Why worry about an epidemic if you have excellent public hospitals available more or less for free? What no one considered was that a virus could bring this perfect system to the point of breakdown. Of course Europeans have their own nightmares and demons. But remember that the tragedy of the World Wars has been interpreted in political terms... the Italian journalist Mattia Ferraresi argued that the fundamental failure in Italy was not a lack of testing or slow political action but a social and collective failure: People just did not take the coronavirus seriously enough to even slightly adapt their habits. It is a brave argument. It would be much easier to criticize the government for errors of action or inaction, rather than risk being accused of blaming the victims"
We are told, regarding the George Floyd protests, that racism is worse than the coronavirus. Presumably Spain thought sexism was worse than covid-19 too
Covid-19 Pandemic Likely to Last Two Years, Report Says - Bloomberg - "The coronavirus pandemic is likely to last as long as two years and won’t be controlled until about two-thirds of the world’s population is immune... Because of its ability to spread from people who don’t appear to be ill, the virus may be harder to control than influenza, the cause of most pandemics in recent history, according to the report from the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. People may actually be at their most infectious before symptoms appear"
China Blew Opportunity to Lead During Coronavirus Crisis - Bloomberg - "In mid-April, China engaged in what appeared to be a particularly pointless fight. With France’s death toll spiking from the novel coronavirus and its economy shuttered, China could well have offered commiserations and support. Instead, it lobbed rhetorical grenades at Paris... Beijing pushed back, warning France that it risked damaging ties unless it canceled a contract to supply arms to Taiwan, which China considers a renegade province. Never mind that the contract simply involves supplying new equipment for frigates sold to Taipei almost 30 years ago. The nursing home remarks prompted an unusual public statement from Paris on an issue Beijing is highly sensitive about, as described by François Heisbourg, senior adviser for Europe at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). “The French went out of their way, sent a public communique saying, ‘Yes, we are sending this stuff to Taiwan in the framework of our contract with that country,’ ” says Heisbourg, who’s worked in the French foreign and defense ministries. “To make sure that the Chinese were getting our meaning, we actually went out of our way to piss them off.”... China had an opportunity to be magnanimous—and prove that its championing of globalization was more than just rhetorical... Rather than seizing the chance to bring countries further into its orbit, China appears to have sent the message that it sees its rise to global primacy as inexorable—and that other nations should simply bow to that fact... “Equality among nations is not a natural concept for them,” says William Reinsch, Scholl chair in international business at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and a U.S. Department of Commerce official in the Clinton administration. “They are busy telling the world that their model of a heavily state-directed economy and a repressive undemocratic political system works better than the Western system and is the wave of the future.” There were positive signs from China as the virus first spread outward. Beijing announced over several weeks it would send medical equipment and teams to other countries. It would help Italy, Spain, Serbia, Estonia, Greece, Bulgaria, Slovenia, and—yes—France. But some of the equipment proved faulty—or was followed by an invoice. China continued to respond stridently to criticism of its handling of the early stages of the Hubei outbreak. The narrative around aid turned to questions about the lack of gratitude from the beneficiaries of China’s munificence. Beijing’s state media started issuing lecturing commentaries. And the Wolf Warriors got to work on their Twitter feeds... One way to minimize domestic political damage is to rally people behind the idea that China is under attack overseas... China under Xi has become less sensitive to what the world thinks of it. “It invests heavily in propaganda and influence campaigns,” he says. “But these are essentially about convincing the Chinese people that the party-state is respected abroad, rather than genuinely generating that respect.”"
Hard-to-Trace Virus Cases Emerge from Japan’s Hostess Bars - Bloomberg - "While red-light districts all over the world are facing similar woes, Japan’s hostess clubs have a more ambiguous role in society, often used for business entertainment. Some successful hostesses compare themselves to geisha, who have a centuries-long tradition of entertaining guests at parties with music, dancing and conversation... The number of customers had dwindled in February, she said, after Japanese companies increasingly told employees they could no longer claim entertainment at the clubs as a business expense, a typical practice... From a prevention standpoint, it would have been better for the government to shut the clubs down quickly, while guaranteeing compensation, Mochizuki said. Enforcing a shutdown is not technically possible even under an emergency declaration in Japan... While those who run hostess bars say they provide clients with nothing more than drinks and conversation, they are required to register with the police under a law controlling “amusement businesses.” It’s a separate category from those offering sexual services. Yet even this category has a tainted image, meaning banks often won’t lend to them and the government won’t provide subsidies... Unlike gyms and other businesses where virus clusters have been reported, hostess clubs don’t tend to keep lists of who has visited -- privacy is part of the draw. Some known to have visited clubs have responded angrily when contacted, and refused to be tested... Japan’s hostess industry covers a broad range of businesses. There are almost 7,000 in Tokyo, stretching from the eye-poppingly expensive clubs in Ginza to the cheaper bars and cabaret clubs that exist in almost every community -- even on remote islands. Kohga is worried that financial need could force hostesses, especially those from the less exclusive end of the market in Kabukicho, to turn to the illicit sex trade... Some of the larger, more prominent clubs are adopting video-conferencing in a bid to keep clients loyal even without physical interaction"
Did Japan Just Beat the Virus Without Lockdowns Or Mass Testing? - Bloomberg - "Japan’s state of emergency is set to end with new cases of the coronavirus dwindling to mere dozens. It got there despite largely ignoring the default playbook. No restrictions were placed on residents’ movements, and businesses from restaurants to hairdressers stayed open. No high-tech apps that tracked people’s movements were deployed. The country doesn’t have a center for disease control. And even as nations were exhorted to “test, test, test,” Japan has tested just 0.2% of its population -- one of the lowest rates among developed countries. Yet the curve has been flattened, with deaths well below 1,000, by far the fewest among the Group of Seven developed nations. In Tokyo, its dense center, cases have dropped to single digits on most days. While the possibility of a more severe second wave of infection is ever-present, Japan has entered and is set to leave its emergency in just weeks... One widely shared list assembled 43 possible reasons cited in media reports, ranging from a culture of mask-wearing and a famously low obesity rate to the relatively early decision to close schools. Among the more fanciful suggestions include a claim Japanese speakers emit fewer potentially virus-laden droplets when talking compared to other languages... Experts are also credited with creating an easy-to-understand message of avoiding what are called the “Three C’s” -- closed spaces, crowded spaces and close-contact settings -- rather than keeping away from others entirely. “Social distancing may work, but it doesn’t really help to continue normal social life,” said Hokkaido University’s Suzuki. “The ‘Three C’s’ are a much more pragmatic approach and very effective, while having a similar effect.”"
This suggests that Levitt was right and lockdowns are useless
Some 42% Of Jobs Lost In Pandemic Are Gone For Good - "The University of Chicago estimates that 42% of the recent layoffs will result in permanent job losses.“We find three new hires for every 10 layoffs caused by the shock and estimate that 42% of recent layoffs will result in permanent job loss,” writes Jose Maria Barrero, Nick Bloom and Steven Davis from the Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago in a working paper titled “COVID-19 As A Reallocation Shock”"
The Most Important Coronavirus Statistic: 42% Of U.S. Deaths Are From 0.6% Of The Population - "Americans are vigorously debating the merits of continuing to lock down the U.S. economy to prevent the spread of COVID-19. A single statistic may hold the key to resolving this debate: the astounding share of deaths occurring in nursing homes and assisted living facilities... 42% could be an undercount. States like New York exclude from their nursing home death tallies those who die in a hospital, even if they were originally infected in a long-term care facility. Outside of New York, more than half of all deaths from COVID-19 are of residents in long-term care facilities... The tragedy is that it didn’t have to be this way. On March 17, as the pandemic was just beginning to accelerate, Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis warned that “even some so-called mild or common-cold-type coronaviruses have been known for decades [to] have case fatality rates as high as 8% when they infect people in nursing homes.” Ioannidis was ignored. Instead, states like New York, New Jersey, and Michigan actually ordered nursing homes to accept patients with active COVID-19 infections who were being discharged from hospitals.The most charitable interpretation of these orders is that they were designed to ensure that states would not overcrowd their ICUs. But well after hospitalizations peaked, governors like New York’s Andrew Cuomo were doubling down on their mandates. As recently as April 23, Cuomo declared that nursing homes “don’t have a right to object” to accepting elderly patients with active COVID infections. “That is the rule and that is the regulation and they have to comply with that.” Only on May 10—after the deaths of nearly 3,000 New York residents of nursing homes and assisted living facilities—did Cuomo stand down and partially rescind his order... Contrast the decisions by governors like Cuomo with those of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. In Florida, all nursing home workers were required to be screened for COVID-19 symptoms before entering a facility. On March 15, before most states had locked down, DeSantis signed an executive order that banned nursing home visitations from friends and family, and also banned hospitals from discharging SARS-CoV-2-infected patients into long-term care facilities... Florida also prioritized long-term care facilities for personal protective equipment, or PPE... The fact that nearly half of all COVID-19 deaths have occurred in long-term care facilities means that the 99.4 percent of the country that doesn’t live in those places is roughly half as likely to die of the disease than we previously thought. Many European countries have struggled with the same nursing home problems that we have. But based on the mounting evidence that serious illness from COVID-19 is concentrated in the elderly, Switzerland and Germany have reopened their primary and secondary schools. Sweden, for the most part, never closed them to begin with. Germany has kept most of its factories in operation, and Sweden’s restaurants remain open. All of these countries have stable-to-declining rates of hospitalization and death from COVID-19.The results in these countries should give us increased confidence that measured steps to reopen the economy can work here."
Someone claimed that the CDC forced Democratic governors to put Covid-19 patients in nursing homes. Apparently the CDC forgot to tell Florida
Sweden didn't lock down, but economy to plunge anyway - "Unlike most countries, Sweden never locked down during the coronavirus pandemic, largely keeping businesses operating, but the economy appears to be taking a hard hit nonetheless.Under the Scandinavian country's controversial approach to the virus, cafes, bars, restaurants and most businesses remained open, as did schools for under-16s, with people urged to follow social distancing and hygiene guidelines... Swedish officials insist their strategy was always aimed at public health, and never specifically at saving the economy... At first Sweden's export-heavy economy seemed to be doing okay, with GDP actually growing by 0.1 per cent in the first quarter... the European Commission has forecast a Swedish contraction of 6.1 per cent (compared to -6.5 per cent for Germany and -7.7 per cent for the eurozone)... Sweden's sharp downturn is largely explained by its dependence on exports, which account for around 50 per cent of GDP."70 per cent of Swedish exports go to the EU. Shutdowns in Germany, the U.K. and so on are expected to hit Swedish exports considerably""
I see lockdown enthusiasts crowing about this, but the reason why is clearly explained. And given that the UK, France, Italy and Spain did lock down and suffered worse economic damage, I'm not sure what their point is. If it's that Sweden still suffered economic damage, so reopening is pointless, one can say lockdowns still lead to people dying from Covid-19, so they are pointless
The psychology of lockdown suggests sticking to rules gets harder the longer it continues
Asymptomatic spread of coronavirus is 'very rare,' WHO says
So lockdowns, keeping healthy people at home, are almost useless?
WHO reverses yesterday's guidance that asymptomatic spread of coronavirus is 'very rare'
So much for that
"The happiest place on earth"
Wednesday, June 10, 2020
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