Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

[Cordelia]

Phew! Glad that got fixed.

Also lucky it happened to be something we agreed on anyway.

Giving an edit button on all posts is a standard moderation function in phpBB. It's a tribute to the care of all our past moderators that this may have been the first time someone clicked that by mistake and submitted an accidental edit of someone else's post. And so I will take care to make sure it's the last, at least from me (cos it gave me a scare too, I can tell ya) and I hope one more sorry (to everyone who was just alarmed by it) will suffice.

Relief to know you're not a perfect prefect!

[Elvis]

Don't feel bad, Jack, I've almost done something similar a couple of times.

The rest of youse, yes mods can edit or delete any post, and we occasionally do so on a poster's request, and in rare cases of legit censorship.

[Elvis]

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"This makes me realize that if America was attacked by aliens, our first response would be to lower interest rates."

—Michael Nguyen

[MacCruiskeen]

jesus, jack, ofc we should care for them! wtf?

(minime, u r a narse.)

[minime]

(minime, u r a narse.)

That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me.

Be well. Stay well.

[alloneword]

More from the 'Swiss Doctor':

March 23, 2020 (I)

• A new French study in the Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, titled SARS-CoV-2: fear versus data, concludes that „the problem of SARS-CoV-2 is probably overestimated“, since „the mortality rate for SARS-CoV-2 is not significantly different from that for common coronaviruses identified at the study hospital in France“.
• An Italian study of August 2019 found that flu deaths in Italy were between 7,000 and 25,000 in recent years. This value is higher than in most other European countries due to the large elderly population in Italy, and much higher than anything attributed to Covid-19 so far.
• In a new fact sheet, the World Health Organization WHO reports that Covid-19 is in fact spreading slower, not faster, than influenza by a factor of about 50%. Moreover, pre-symptomatic transmission appears to be much lower with Covid-19 than with influenza.
• A leading Italian doctor reports that „strange cases of pneumonia“ were seen in the Lombardy region already in November 2019, raising again the question if they were caused by the new virus (which officially only appeared in Italy in February 2020), or by other factors, such as the dangerously high smog levels in Northern Italy.
• Danish researcher Peter Gøtzsche, founder of the renowned Cochrane Medical Collaboration, writes that Corona is „an epidemic of mass panic“ and „logic was one of the first victims.“

March 23, 2020 (II)

• Former Israeli Health Minister, Professor Yoram Lass, says that the new coronavirus is „less dangerous than the flu“ and lockdown measures „will kill more people than the virus“. He adds that „the numbers do not match the panic“ and „psychology is prevailing over science“. He also notes that „Italy is known for its enormous morbidity in respiratory problems, more than three times any other European country.“
• Pietro Vernazza, a Swiss infectious disease specialist, argues that many of the imposed measuresare not based on science and should be reversed. According to Vernazza, mass testing makes no sense because 90% of the population will see no symptoms, and lockdowns and closing schools are even „counterproductive“. He recommends protecting only risk groups while keeping the economy and society at large undisturbed.
• The President of the World Doctors Federation, Frank Ulrich Montgomery, argues that lockdown measures as in Italy are „unreasonable“ and „counterproductive“ and should be reversed.
• Switzerland: Despite media panic, excess mortality still at or near zero: the latest testpositive „victims“ were a 96yo in palliative care and a 97yo with pre-existing conditions.
• The latest statistical report of the Italian National Health Institute is now available in English.

That last one's interesting - note that the percentage of the deaths amongst people testing positive for CORVID-19 who had no underlying medical condition appears to have leapt from 0.8% to a staggering 1.2%.

Also:

8. Deaths under the age of 50 years

To date (March the 20 th ), 36 of 3200 (1.1%) COVID-19 positive patients under the age of 50 have died. In particular, 9 of these were younger than 40 years, 8 men and 1 woman (age range between 31 and 39 years). For 2 patients under the age of 40 years, no clinical information is available; the remaining 7 had serious pre-existing pathologies (cardiovascular, renal, psychiatric pathologies, diabetes, obesity).

So when Mac states:

NO ONE HEALTHY AND UNDER RETIREMENT AGE IS AT ANY SERIOUS RISK OF DEATH, OR EVEN SERIOUS ILLNESS.

I'm still struggling to find anything in the available data that suggests that this isn't true.

[JackRiddler]

jesus, jack, ofc we should care for them! wtf?

What I wrote was in effect a WTF to your statement:

NO ONE HEALTHY AND UNDER RETIREMENT AGE IS AT ANY SERIOUS RISK OF DEATH, OR EVEN SERIOUS ILLNESS.

It's one thing when one states the basic content of that sentence in an analysis of the currently available statistics (although the "any" would still be untrue, and "serious risk" would be far more accurately stated as "high risk"), as the "Swiss doctor" does in alloneword's post, and it can be soberly disputed or supported.

It's another when you put it in a way that implies, screams in fact, that it's no big deal, that there's almost something wrong with all these healthy under-65 people for worrying about the spread of a contagion that does represent a high risk of serious illness and death for vast numbers of people who aren't within our charmed circle (over here, I seem to be healthy and a mere going on 55, hooray, although I can name some immediate family members who are quite a bit older and less healthy).

So, you care, good, I figured, I knew. Still, many on this board (and this world) have one of the high-risk conditions and are older. And most important, those of us in the charmed circle do spread it. As relatively more mobile and active types, we do so more than the high-risk people, in fact. So it can still mean millions of people dying before the time they would have had if they had not got the infection (probably not reaching the higher estimates -- agreed -- but allow that it's still unknown and very much in flux).

And it can still mean medical and health systems overwhelmed, as we are seeing with the relatively excellent northern Italian system. Thus, a lot of collateral damage for others who also need to use the systems. Which also means, a lot of death for uninfected parties.

And all at the same time, it can still give a certain oligarchy its long-planned opportunity to make us all dance, dance, and to implement a lot of disaster-capitalist contingency planning that may in itself constitute even greater and more lasting disasters.

All of this can be true at once, and so I don't see why you need to put your objection with quite the vehemence and dismissiveness that you do.

.

[Blue]

Yeah, here's the deal. All you younguns calling it "Boomer Remover" or whatevs are ignorant. Maybe your odds of experiencing anything more than a bad cold are small...but

YOU ARE A VECTOR, A SPREADER to those who are more susceptible. Even asymptomically. And this virus is EXTREMELY transmissable. Do you really want to sicken and kill the older folks? Wait. You probably do. But it is pretty fucking stupid because you. are. not. immune to the disease or the ramifications.

Most if not all of the "Coronavirus is a Hoax/Scam/Psyop" info I have read rely heavily on death data. This pandemic will probably not go into the books for a huge death toll directly from the virus, but the death toll by overwhelmed hospitals. It really is that simple. Hospitals full of people on ventilators and more need them: you die. Spain just joined Italy in refusing to give those infected ventilators if they are over 65.

Hospitals full of the sick and dying. Health care workers are getting sick or are going to be burned out and there are no replacements. Who can care for you when you have a heart attack? Are in a car wreck? Are in labor having complications? All the other emergencies that happen in real life every single day?

Selfish paranoid pricks are the only ones who can afford to ignore this. But then again, no, they can't afford it either.

[8bitagent]

I haven't seen anyone calling it a hoax, other than some of the people with their "5G" conspiracies on Facebook.
However, it is wild that the news has said Tom Hanks and now Harvey Weinstein are infected with Covid. I literally think had Epstein not been found dead from "suicide", we would be hearing of him getting Covid, never to be seen from again(that Metro facility Epstein was being housed in has been reported to have had an inmate infected)
Speaking of Epstein, his best pal Bill Gates sure seems to have known what was up early on with this whole pandemic.

Whatever is happening, it seems to be rapidly accelerating toward something. So glad the CCP tho has it all "under control" tho.

[stickdog99]

Thought experiment: Imagine that we did not live in an oligarchy in which every crisis, no matter how horrific, was always used as yet another means to transfer even more wealth from the 99.9% to the 0.1%. What would a rational response to COVID-19 from a representative democratic government entail?

1. Like all other first world governments, this government would have guaranteed healthcare to all its citizens decades ago in order to save trillions as well as to prepare the healthcare infrastructure necessary to respond to inevitable health crises such as flu pandemics.

2. This government would have moved to ramp up US production and manufacture of all necessary healthcare supplies such as masks, viral particle trapping air filters, gowns, and ventilators years ago. At the first sign of the COVID-19 pandemic, this government would have provided grants to develop and manufacture millions of tests and antivirals in response to an impending COVID-19 crisis.

3. This government would have utilized its vast military capabilities to do something useful for its citizenry for once by readying mobile MASH units to be deployed to any localities that experience spikes in COVID-19 victims that overwhelm these localities' hospital capacities. Strict protocols would have been put in place to test anyone who sees any healthcare professional for any reason. Those who test positive for COVID-19 would have been sent to an isolated field hospital equipped with all the necessary respirators for the duration of their infectiousness. Those who fully recovered and now enjoyed COVID-19 immunity would then be offered high paying jobs providing healthcare for the duration of the crisis.

4. Of course, it goes without saying that any "economic stimulus" package considered by our beneficent fantasy government would first and foremost provide immediate relief to all citizens whose lives are economically threatened by this crisis in the form of free food, free utilities, free rent, free internet access, and covered mortgage payments at least for the entire duration of the crisis. At the barest minimum, all evictions, foreclosures, and utility cutoffs would be immediately suspended. Businesses would be eligible for billions in monthly emergency relief only if they demonstrated that they were following best practices in all of their employee policies during the crisis and only if they could document that they used these bailout funds to pay and/or retain their current employees.

5. This government would quickly move to employ as many currently unemployed people as possible in socially useful jobs such as free grocery delivery to the elderly, free COVID-19 testing for anyone who wants it, and even socially useful projects such as community solar power installation, affordable housing construction, long overdue infrastructure repair, free internet installation, and free online computer training classes. As a condition of employment, all new government workers with any contact with the public or other workers would be continually tested for COVID-19 testing and would be required to wear free masks during the performance of any work requirements that force them to come into contact with others.

Please add your suggestions. I realize that I have only scratched the surface here.

To me, the weirdest thing about performing this thought experiment is that the oligarch handmaidens who currently govern the USA are so antithetical to benevolent democratic representatives that it has become almost impossible even to attempt to conceive of how different things would be if were instead to have governmental representatives who actually cared about their constituents.

[norton ash]

I'm sure that all those healthy young contrarians coming home... and home is all over America... from Spring Break in Florida will have no effect at all on the spread of COVID. Relax.

[Agent Orange Cooper]

It's a hoax. Obviously.

https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/

The mortality profile remains puzzling from a virological point of view because, in contrast to influenza viruses, children are spared and men are affected about twice as often as women. On the other hand, this profile corresponds to natural mortality, which is close to zero for children and almost twice as high for 75-year-old men as for women of the same age.
...
A report in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera points out that Italian intensive care units already collapsed under the marked flu wave in 2017/2018. They had to postpone operations, call nurses back from holiday and ran out of blood donations.
...
The Japan Times asks: 'Japan was expecting a coronavirus explosion. Where is it?' Despite being one of the first countries getting positive test results and having imposed no lockdown, Japan is one of the least-affected nations. Quote: "Even if Japan may not be counting all those infected, hospitals aren’t being stretched thin and there has been no spike in pneumonia cases.“
...
Italian researchers argue that the extreme smog in Northern Italy, the worst in Europe, may be playing a causative role in the current pneumonia outbreak there, as in Wuhan before.
...
In a new interview, Professor Sucharit Bhakdi, a world renowned expert in medical microbiology, says blaming the new coronavirus alone for deaths is "wrong“ and "dangerously misleading“, as there are other more important factors at play, notably pre-existing health conditions and poor air quality in Chinese and Northern Italian cities. Professor Bhakdi describes the currently discussed or imposed measures as "grotesque“, "useless“, "self-destructive“ and a "collective suicide“ that will shorten the lifespan of the elderly and should not be accepted by society.
...
An Italian study of August 2019 found that flu deaths in Italy were between 7,000 and 25,000 in recent years. This value is higher than in most other European countries due to the large elderly population in Italy, and much higher than anything attributed to Covid-19 so far.
...
In a new fact sheet, the World Health Organization WHO reports that Covid-19 is in fact spreading slower, not faster, than influenza by a factor of about 50%. Moreover, pre-symptomatic transmission appears to be much lower with Covid-19 than with influenza.
...
A leading Italian doctor reports that "strange cases of pneumonia“ were seen in the Lombardy region already in November 2019, raising again the question if they were caused by the new virus (which officially only appeared in Italy in February 2020), or by other factors, such as the dangerously high smog levels in Northern Italy.
...
Danish researcher Peter Gøtzsche, founder of the renowned Cochrane Medical Collaboration, writes that Corona is "an epidemic of mass panic“ and "logic was one of the first victims.“

[alloneword]

@ Blue

The question that needs to be answered (hell, I'd settle for 'asked', even) is whether the Corvid-19 pandemic is of a scale that warrants or justifies the 'reaction' to it - whether by Governments placing the population of most of Europe under de-facto house arrest, or by the hoards of terrified people who are clamouring for them to do it (and more) from behind their paper masks.

Yes, hospitals are full of sick and dying people. Many of them old, many of them with serious health issues. They generally are. Some years moreso than others:



here

Did the 26,408 deaths in 17/18 provoke this sort of response? How about the 28,330 in 14/15?

The fact is that every year thousands of people die from respiratory illnesses. Many of them are elderly, many have underlying health problems.

Yes, the Corvid-19 strain of coronavirus is nasty. Contagious, unwelcome. Like many diseases.

But the fact remains that I, just like most here, am statistically a lot more likely to be killed in a road collision on the way to the doctors than by the virus itself. Maybe that's not true for all, but if you're amongst them, it probably hasn't changed your odds all that much.

What has certainly changed is the ability of people in my local community to get access to healthcare, medicines and basic, essential supplies of things like heating oil and food. Now we're all in 'lockdown', I don't see that getting any better soon.

The most contagious thing that poses the greatest threat is the panic, not the virus.

[Grizzly]

“Main Core ” , PROMIS, COG.
https://www.mintpressnews.com/coronavirus-what-newsweek-failed-mention-continuity-government/265954/
Coronavirus: What Newsweek Failed to Mention About “Continuity of Government”
Though often discussed in relation to nuclear war or a similarly chaotic scenario, “continuity of government” plans can be triggered even by popular, nonviolent opposition to an unpopular war abroad. It exists solely to keep the current system in place, regardless of the cost.

A database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.”

Using PROMIS, sources point out, North could have drawn up lists of anyone ever arrested for a political protest, for example, or anyone who had ever refused to pay their taxes. Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon’s enemies list or Sen. Joe McCarthy’s blacklist look downright crude.”

Main Core and Bill Barr’s Power Grab

What Politico did not include in its report is that current Attorney General William Barr has spent the past several months fine-tuning and implementing a “pre-crime” program. Officially known as the “National Disruption and Early Engagement Program” (DEEP), it aims to “identify, assess and engage” potentially violent individuals “before they strike.” Barr first announced this program last October in an official memorandum and therein stated that the program was to be implemented sometime over the course of 2020 and would involve “an efficient, effective and programmatic strategy to disrupt individuals who are mobilizing towards violence, by all lawful means.”

The nightmare continues ...

[chump]

https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2020/03 ... ed-states/

Dr Anthony Fauci is now the President of the United States
by Jon Rappoport
March 23, 2020


(To join our email list, click here.)
—Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and infectious
Diseases—

HEADLINE: “In Dr. Fauci we Trust.” (Daily Beast)

The Daily Beast writes about Fauci: “…as he guides the nation through the coronavirus crisis…stands at the White House with President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence…introduce[s] actual truth to the coronavirus briefings…Fauci has been in charge from the start.”

The ECONOMIC DEVASTATION now consciously set in place, in the US, as a result of lockdowns, will last…how long?

If Fauci and his cohorts at the CDC and the World Health Organization say two months, the devastation will be two months. If they say six months, it will be six months. If they say a year, it will be a year.

Fauci is the medical front man. He announces how long “the epidemic” will persist. That, in turn, equals how long the lockdowns will persist, which in turn equals how long the smashing of the economy will go on.

As president, Fauci trumps Trump. Trump has been put in a box, checked and double checked.

As I’ve been establishing in many articles (full archive here), the epidemic itself is a misnomer: the dubious discovery of a new virulent virus; worthless, deceptive, useless diagnostic tests for the coronavirus, rendering case numbers meaningless; people suffering from a variety of traditional disease conditions and several new non-viral conditions, all re-labeled under the empty umbrella term, “COVID-19”; the media pumping of fear; medical/public health authorities put in charge of national policy; escalating mass surveillance and social distancing; AND THEREFORE BOTH THE BEGINNING OF THE “EPIDEMIC” AND ITS END ARE MANDATED BY ARBITRARY EDICT.

Not science. Not fact.

In an expanding number of countries, we are looking at medical coup. Palace revolution.

Media are blaring “coronavirus coverage” wall to wall and repressing the full picture of the economic war against the people, and its human cost.

Workers living from paycheck to paycheck, laid off. Rents not paid. Businesses close. Owners go broke. Small investors lose their shirts. Savings dwindle. Public venues shut down.

Picture this. In a small city, the university suspends classes. The majority of students go home. Overnight, all the money students would spend locally drains away. A week later, an order comes through: restaurants and bars must close. Workers are laid off. The owners, who were operating on small margins, are squeezed to the hilt and beyond. There is a major tourist attraction in town, a theme park. It shuts down. Tourist trade, which was already drying up, goes flat. A whole variety of shops shut their doors. Then, an order: non-essential stores must stop doing business, unless they can somehow limit traffic to ten customers at a time. A huge botanical garden and two museums close. Their employees are without jobs. And all this is just the beginning of the damage…the citizens themselves hunker down. They start abandoning their homes and moving in with friends and family—more people in smaller spaces…yet they try to practice social distancing. Hospitals in town are dealing with more and more people, who come in with coughs, sniffles, ordinary flu, long-term lung conditions and the belief they could be infected by the virus. Doctors are under the gun. They’re forced to diagnose some of these people as “presumptive COVID cases.” That means general wards will not do—because of “the contagion factor,” such patients must be shunted into ICU. But there are not enough beds…

Medical edicts run the whole country.

“This is not politics. This is science and concern and containment and healing.”

No. This is a coup.

This is an economic war.

An attack on freedom.

The front man, the president of the United States, is Anthony Fauci.

And in other countries? Read this, from Haaretz, in Israel:

“Israel’s PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICES CHIEF (my caps) told an emergency meeting of lawmakers on an intelligence panel earlier this week that the key to eradicating the coronavirus pandemic relies on the enforcement of strict isolation measures, and the timing of introducing that policy.”

“In her remarks to the Knesset Subcommittee on Intelligence and Secret Services on Monday, concerning the Shin Bet security service’s monitoring of coronavirus patients, Sigal Sadetsky referenced the Chinese handling of COVID-19. She told the panel’s chairman, MK Gabi Ashkenazi (Kahol Lavan), that it all depends on ‘when you start it and how strongly you do it,’ and that she believes ‘everyone will do the same thing’.”

“When MK Yoav Kish (Likud) sought to clarify whether she meant a total lockdown or curfew, Sadetsky replied: ‘A lockdown and personal monitoring of people, AND A TOTAL HALT TO PERSONAL FREEDOMS’.”