Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

[Joe Hillshoist]

FWIW, here is a genetic study in which

Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591- ... pJW_19NvFw

I was initially very suspicious about the possible laboratory origins of the virus, but I have to admit that I'm now leaning more towards the conclusions of this paper. Not 100% convinced though.

Same here.

Honestly wouldn't have thought it was a deliberate release. (Except for the worldwide anti gov protests that were happening last year, there really is no need for it. We are already controlled to the point of being cattle.) I know people who import and work thru businesses in China and a couple of them reckon there has been a bad respiratory condition killing people for about 10 months now. Han people, esp men have twice the expression of ACE2 the protein the virus seeks out and attaches to. So maybe the US military dropped it during the international military games. But the anecdotal evidence of that respiratory condition goes back to before August.

Corona viruses in general are a BSL-2 disease iirc. Heaps less security about that sort of thing, much easier potential to escape from a genuine research project.

Also, fwiw I know someone else who claims the death toll is approximately 10x higher in Wuhan than what the Chinese gov reckons are the official figures.

And MacC. You'll be pleased to know that medical students in Victoria Aust are getting ready to work during this situation as it gets worse.

[undead]

Not 100% convinced though.

I'm not going to pretend to fully understand even half of that paper, but did you read the 'debunking' of it here? It's, erm... passionate.

The argument regarding 'origin' feels a little 'pod planes' to me. A distraction that can never be fully answered, but keeps us busy chasing phantoms and arguing while the main act plays out.

Intentionally engineered is a red herring, misdirection from the very obvious possibility that it accidentally escaped. Accidentally escaped from the level 4 biosafety lab built 5 years ago, 100 yards from the animal market they are blaming it on. Lyme disease was most likely the same thing. They had cows that were kept outside, and then brought into the lab to be injected with pathogens and then fed to ticks, which were then studied. All it would take is one cow that got naturally infected with borrelia spirochetes (unknown at the time) from a natural tick. If that cow was selected to become a tick colony (dead cow with thousands of ticks eating it in a sealed room in the lab) then that would equal unintentional mass production of "Lyme disease". This possibility was suggested by Wily Burdorfer, who discovered Lyme disease, to Michael Carrol, author of "Lab 257". Plum Island had multiple containment breaches that coincide with the outbreak of Lyme disease.

Or, somebody who worked at the lab could have pricked themselves with a needle, or done a number of things to accidentally let it out. In the long run the chances are much higher that an accident will happen, and it is legitimately insane to think that an accident will never happen. It is still the fault of the people who built the lab and designed the system either way. Calling it an intentionally engineered thing is cartoonish and over the top in the case of Wuhan. Lyme disease not so much, since it was officially a bioweapons lab. Also what we call "Lyme disease" is a mix of pathogens, multiple strains of borrelia spirochetes plus babesia, bartonella, erlichia, anaplasmosis, and more.

It doesn't make sense to me that someone would do this intentionally - for what reason? To make money? There are easier ways to make money. To reduce the human population? That's already being done, why get obvious about it and give the game away?

[identity]

https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/study-accuracy-nudge-could-curtail-covid-19-misinformation-online

Study: ‘Accuracy nudge’ could curtail COVID-19 misinformation online

On February 19 in the Ukrainian town of Novi Sanzhary, alarm went up regarding the new coronavirus and COVID-19, the disease it causes. “50 infected people from China are being brought to our sanitarium,” began a widely read post on the messaging app Viber. “We can’t afford to let them destroy our population, we must prevent countless deaths. People, rise up. We all have children!!!”

Soon after came another message: “if we sleep this night, then we will wake up dead.”

Citizens mobilized. Roads were barricaded. Tensions escalated. Riots broke out, ultimately injuring nine police officers and leading to the arrests of 24 people. Later, word emerged that the news was false.

As the director-general of the World Health Organization recently put it, “we’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic.”

Now a new study suggests that an “accuracy nudge” from social media networks could curtail the spread of misinformation about COVID-19. The working paper, from researchers at MIT Sloan and the University of Regina, examines how and why misinformation about COVID-19 spreads on social media. The researchers also examine a simple intervention that could slow this spread. (The paper builds on prior work about how misinformation diffuses online.)

The study is authored by the University of Regina’s Gordon Pennycook, MIT Sloan researcher Jonathon McPhetres, MIT Sloan PhD student Yunhao Zhang, and MIT Sloan associate professor

In the first experiment, roughly 850 people were split into two groups. One group was asked to classify several news headlines about COVID-19 as accurate or not; the other group was given the same selection of headlines and asked whether or not they would share the story on social media. The result demonstrated that, for false headlines, 50% more people considered sharing them than rated them as accurate. In other words, people were 50% more likely to share misinformation than to believe it.

“Our participants could fairly effectively identify the accuracy of true versus false headlines when asked to do so, but they nonetheless were willing to share many false headlines on social media,” Rand said. “This suggests that the problem of people sharing misinformation is not that people just can't tell true from false.”So why might people share what they know to be false? Not out of malice, the researchers propose, but, rather, because social media draws their attention to motivations besides accuracy, like attracting the recognition and plaudits of friends and followers. Whether true or not, evocative content is attractive.

A second experiment then looked at ways to counteract, or subdue, this impulse. Might a small intervention be available to reduce the sharing of misinformation? Participants were again split into two groups. Mirroring the first experiment, one group was asked their willingness to share news based on headlines, some true, others false. The second group was also asked about their willingness to share stories, but only after being asked to rate the accuracy of a single headline. This small “nudge” to get people thinking about accuracy made them more discerning when it came to sharing true or false news. Those who performed the task were less likely to share inaccurate news, and more likely to share accurate news.

And though the effect was small for these individuals, Rand noted this may not tell the full story. Downstream network effects can be far greater. “Improving the quality of the content shared by one user improves the content that their followers see, and therefore improves the content their followers share,” he said. “This in turn improves what the followers’ followers see and share, and so on. Thus, the cumulative effects of such an intervention may be substantially larger than what is observed when only examining the treated individuals.”

Whether these results pertain to worlds beyond social media remains an open question. What about information shared by email, or text, for example? But the basic finding is clear and urgent. Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms could add periodic pop-ups or in-page content showing a random headline and quizzing users about its truthfulness.

“Our experiment suggests that nudging people to pay attention to accuracy can improve the quality of COVID-19 related content they share online,” Rand wrote in an email. “This is a scalable intervention that social media platforms could easily implement. I hope they will!”

Fighting COVID-19 misinformation on social media: Experimental evidence for a scalable accuracy nudge intervention
Covid-19 fake news ms_psyarxiv.pdf
https://psyarxiv.com/uhbk9/

Sure glad some people out there are confident about the accuracy of any information re: COVERT-911!

[Nordic]

...


phone tracking using location data




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cq2zuE3ISYU


...

This should actually terrify anyone who understands what they’re actually seeing here.

[Nordic]

Looks like the U.K. isn’t really concerned about it being a highly infectious disease any more. Who knew?

Status of COVID-19
As of 19 March 2020, COVID-19 is no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious diseases (HCID) in the UK.

The 4 nations public health HCID group made an interim recommendation in January 2020 to classify COVID-19 as an HCID. This was based on consideration of the UK HCID criteria about the virus and the disease with information available during the early stages of the outbreak. Now that more is known about COVID-19, the public health bodies in the UK have reviewed the most up to date information about COVID-19 against the UK HCID criteria. They have determined that several features have now changed; in particular, more information is available about mortality rates (low overall), and there is now greater clinical awareness and a specific and sensitive laboratory test, the availability of which continues to increase.

The Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens (ACDP) is also of the opinion that COVID-19 should no longer be classified as an HCID.

The need to have a national, coordinated response remains, but this is being met by the government’s COVID-19 response.

Cases of COVID-19 are no longer managed by HCID treatment centres only. All healthcare workers managing possible and confirmed cases should follow the updated national infection and prevention (IPC) guidance for COVID-19, which supersedes all previous IPC guidance for COVID-19. This guidance includes instructions about different personal protective equipment (PPE) ensembles that are appropriate for different clinical scenarios

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/high-conseq ... f-covid-19

[JackRiddler]

What does that categorization even mean, in terms of what they expect the fallout from it to be? Assessment is from 18 March, before they turned around and declared emergency, ordered the whole country shut down. The same page has a clearly later announcement, right at the top:

Coronavirus (COVID-19): what you need to do
Stay at home
Only go outside for food, health reasons or work (but only if you cannot work from home)
If you go out, stay 2 metres (6ft) away from other people at all times
Wash your hands as soon as you get home
Do not meet others, even friends or family.

You can spread the virus even if you don’t have symptoms.

[JackRiddler]

.

UN Secretary makes the old college try at a global ceasefire:

Join the UN Secretary General's call for an immediate global ceasefire:

"Our world faces a common enemy: COVID-19.

The virus does not care about nationality or ethnicity, faction or faith. It attacks all, relentlessly.

Meanwhile, armed conflict rages on around the world.

The most vulnerable — women and children, people with disabilities, the marginalized and the displaced — pay the highest price.

They are also at the highest risk of suffering devastating losses from COVID-19.

Let’s not forget that in war-ravaged countries, health systems have collapsed.

Health professionals, already few in number, have often been targeted.

Refugees and others displaced by violent conflict are doubly vulnerable.

The fury of the virus illustrates the folly of war.

That is why today, I am calling for an immediate global ceasefire in all corners of the world.

Join the call for an immediate global ceasefire.

It is time to put armed conflict on lockdown and focus together on the true fight of our lives.

To warring parties, I say:

Pull back from hostilities.

Put aside mistrust and animosity.

Silence the guns; stop the artillery; end the airstrikes.

This is crucial…

To help create corridors for life-saving aid.

To open precious windows for diplomacy.

To bring hope to places among the most vulnerable to COVID-19.

Let us take inspiration from coalitions and dialogue slowly taking shape among rival parties in some parts to enable joint approaches to COVID-19. But we need much more.

End the sickness of war and fight the disease that is ravaging our world.

It starts by stopping the fighting everywhere. Now.

That is what our human family needs, now more than ever."

- UN Secretary General António Guterres

[JackRiddler]

So I didn't even know until now there was this thing called Instacart, a temp-labor app for hiring people to go do your groceries for you, with options for customers to do remote observation and get the shopper-worker to pick out what they want from a given shelf. A self-isolated friend who is particularly afraid due to her pulmonary condition described the latter to me the other day. Anyway, they're on strike today, and so were the Whole Foods workers, on the heels of the Amazon workers yesterday (both Bezos companies).

[Project Willow]

As to origin stories, yes they are highly relevant.

There is an open, public history of critique and official policy changes regarding gain of function research, which is odd considering that most bioweapon research (and ongoing human experimentation of all kinds) is highly classified and doesn't see the light of day. This should not be ignored. It plays no small role in how we got here.

As always, the devil is in the details. Who are the scientists who authored the Nature article, do their salaries depend on their taking sides, does Nature itself have a conflict of interest, and so on. It's folly to cut off this line of inquiry, as it may well constitute a bread crumb trail of sorts.

The blog I linked to up thread suggests that the virus mutated in certain RNA segments whilst being tested in lab animals (ferrets!), thus making it appear to be naturally zoonotic when in fact it was purposefully developed in a lab.

Who was doing this work, and for whom, and where? Who in the wide world is tracking this? It's telling (and frightening) in of itself that it's so difficult to find any independent, expert voices in this area. But it's not unexpected. None of us has any idea what's going on in experimental labs these days. It's been several decades since I was escorted through a terminal bio lab. It was terrifying enough back then.

[identity]

Anyway, they're on strike today, and so were the Whole Foods workers, on the heels of the Amazon workers yesterday (both Bezos companies).

There's loads more where they came from, all now desperate for a job, any goddamn job will do!

hiring fair.png

[8bitagent]

And of course the American news media was all ready with bells and whistles for Covid-19 to reach the "2996" 9/11 death count today(of course that doesnt take into account all the countless people who died from Bush and Obama's 9/11 based wars or the rescue workers/citizens who died or are suffering from ground zero illnesses)

Yeah it ain't clever, but COVID-9/11 as a word composite makes sense. When health officials are saying if only 200,000 Americans die, it'll be a relief? As I said two months ago in this thread, H1N1 allegedly killed way more people in America and the world, yet military martial law and suspension of all rights wasnt put into place in 2009 worldwide for that.

Sectarian/religious mass abuses already happening in India against Muslim migrants and in Pakistan against Hindus in the name of "sOciAl dIsTanCing". Seems like this, whatever it is just primed and ready to be used for all sorts of horror by bad actors on a global scale.

Tonight reports of US planning more full scale (c)OVERT action against Iran. Curious how Iran's leadership is allegedly riddled with Covid-19
https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/iran- ... raq-622701
Nearly 2800 Iranians have died from Covid-19, which has allegedly also ravaged the Iranian leadership with tens of thousands infected.

I don't know what to believe anymore. It feels like every possible feverish paranoid conspiracy is happening regardless if Shroedinger's Covid is the new Spanish plague or overhyped.

[JackRiddler]

Anyway, they're on strike today, and so were the Whole Foods workers, on the heels of the Amazon workers yesterday (both Bezos companies).

There's loads more where they came from, all now desperate for a job, any goddamn job will do!

hiring fair.png

I doubt that's going to work just yet.

[alloneword]

What does that categorization even mean, in terms of what they expect the fallout from it to be? Assessment is from 18 March, before they turned around and declared emergency, ordered the whole country shut down. The same page has a clearly later announcement, right at the top:

Coronavirus (COVID-19): what you need to do
Stay at home
Only go outside for food, health reasons or work (but only if you cannot work from home)
If you go out, stay 2 metres (6ft) away from other people at all times
Wash your hands as soon as you get home
Do not meet others, even friends or family.

You can spread the virus even if you don’t have symptoms.

Jack, That 'Stay at home' message appears at the top of every single page of the gov.uk website, and has done for some time.

You ask 'what does this catagorization mean' in terms of effect? The criteria for classification is right there:

Definition of HCID

In the UK, a high consequence infectious disease (HCID) is defined according to the following criteria:

acute infectious disease
typically has a high case-fatality rate
may not have effective prophylaxis or treatment
often difficult to recognise and detect rapidly
ability to spread in the community and within healthcare settings
requires an enhanced individual, population and system response to ensure it is managed effectively, efficiently and safely

Clearly, the Health Professionals that make up the '4 Nations Group' have reviewed the available evidence and decided that the above criteria are no longer met.

Whether this is solely due to Cov-19 being found to be less serious than initially thought, or some other reason (perhaps illnesses classified as HCIDs require treatment in specialist 'HCID' designated hospitals?), we probably won't know for a while.

What we do know is that this decision received virtually no coverage in the mainstream UK media.

[Sounder]

Project Willow wrote...

As to origin stories, yes they are highly relevant.

Some people cannot wrap their head around just how depraved a certain class of people can be. It's about much more than money. It's about imposing a new technocratic system, to be put in place before people wake up to actual parameters of their situation.

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=24353

Maybe it was an accident, but all those US biological labs set up close to Russia are not there accidentally, or simply waiting for accidents to happen.

[JackRiddler]

.

People who CAN wrap their minds around the depravity of certain classes, or who have observed it in other contexts, can also wrap their minds around the suppositions concerning the present events that is advanced or implied here (e.g., that it's a bio-engineered plague, or that it's an artifactual construct arising out of panic with opportunistic exploitation, or that it's an artifactual construct planned and injected with the design of launching a global social suppression program -- three or more not always compatible ideas).

Those who can accept the depravity of (for example) members of the globally networked billionaire class are legion, they are probably a majority of the politically thinking people on the planet at present. But many of them, such as myself, have not yet arrived at the same conclusions about the present events, seeing an absence of sufficient evidence to be definitive.

There are also people who cannot, or do not want to, wrap their minds around expressions of doubt, or a resignation to waiting and seeing. (At one extreme, there are those who want to exclude all conversation that isn't focused exclusively on the need to conform with measures during the declared emergency so as to save people, or the political incompetence with which the emergency is met.)

Waiting and seeing doesn't mean we don't keep observing, collecting, and thinking best we can. It also doesn't mean some of us don't call out and also fight (or support fights) against the shit that is visibly and undeniably happening, such as the imposition of violent police states, or the attempted hyperexploitation of the situation by capitalism as usual, or political malfeasance of many kinds, or the total abandonment of people in detained populations, or the impoverishment of whole new groups.

.