A few days ago, I joked on Twitter:
The choice isn’t between boomer genocide and an economic collapse.
The choice is between boomer genocide and economic collapse, or producing millions of 5 cent masks and making people wear them.
Reality is, it is only boomer genocide that isn’t a choice.
74% of Americans support a national quarantine, and that even includes 72% of Republicans. In France, there is a near consensus on lockdown at 96%. In Italy it is 94%.
In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro – the only President of a major democratic polity who continues to insist on treating coronavirus as a nothingburger – has been made into a lame duck, his commands ignored by 24 out of Brazil’s 27 governors and even by his own Health Minister.
Meanwhile, as predicted by Ron Unz, Trump has performed a volte face, extending federal social distancing guidelines past Easter up to April 30 and now touts 100,000 deaths as a “good scenario.”
Which is just as well, because as we know see, modern democracies are simply incapable of “powering through” even through what is a fairly low-mortality pandemic in historical terms.
Consequently, the one choices are:
- Nip it in the bud early on through mass testing-tracing-treatment, border controls, and limited lockdowns, resulting in limited economic damage.
- Wait until later, necessitating progressively more massive, longer, and economically ruinous lockdowns.
So the only correct move is to clamp down close to the start, and to clamp down hard. This is what was done in all the East Asian polities, be they chaotic democracies, city-state technocracies, or Communist single-party states.
Because in the latter scenario, there will eventually come a time when you are simply sidelined by your own underlings and by regional authorities, adding a political crisis on top of a healthcare and economic one.
In my post on Trump’s initial decision, I speculated:
Far out scenario: Blue states may outright defy Trump on abandoning containment measures, in which case they too would be doing starkly better than Red states (unless it also sparks a Constitutional crisis into the bargain).
Well, on that note, here’s a Tweet from California governor Gavin Newsom today. That’s some interesting wording there:
California is an enterprising, modernizing, nation-state. 40 million strong. Together, we will get through this. pic.twitter.com/PBTc7ukmak
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) April 1, 2020
So again, good on Donald Trump to have come to terms with Corona reality and averting what could have become a very dangerous experiment.
This brings us to another interesting question: Will we get a “clean” experiment anywhere?
As per above, I don’t think it’s going to happen in any democracy. Britain backed away from its “herd immunity” idea two weeks ago, on realizing that their models didn’t include a term for ventilator shortages. The Dutch followed soon afterwards. With Sweden’s coronavirus mortality trajectory beginning to radically diverge from those of its Nordic cousins, I believe it is only a matter of time before they go into lockdown as well.
My guess is that our best “hope” – inappropriate as that expression may be – lies in Belarus, which is run by a decidedly non-coronapilled dictator.
Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.
If you are new to my work, start here.
“ Reality is, it is only boomer genocide that isn’t a choice.”
I think the worst-case death tolls aren’t happening, nor even the middling estimates.
Nonetheless, agree completely that a stopping CV is pretty unlikely and the ChiCom shutdown idea will be a disaster that doesn’t even accomplish a major reduction in deaths.
Here’s my “compromise” proposal with Team ShutItDown:
“Here’s a deal: let’s not do a long shutdown, and reduce sickly boomer mortality 20 times more than a ChiCom style shutdown would by banning cigarettes, Chinese space heaters, motorcycle riding past age 60, and Big Gulps.”
Related: What is Putin thinking in dropping out of the OPEC+ deal, especially now, when it seemed to be working for them decently?
“Let’s kill US shale” didn’t work when the Saudis tried it, won’t work here. Indeed, the Saudi attempt just led US producers to take cost containment measures that made them more competitive long term.
I’d love to catch US oil stocks near their bottom and ride them up 3x when WTI gets back above 45. But I cannot figure Putin’s motivation so cannot figure out the timing.
A glass of vodka a day can’t hurt. Bought myself a bottle just before the lockdown.
The blue states are doing everything they can to destroy their economies. It is silly to believe the blue states will come out of this better than the red states.
BTW, the John Ringo novel (The Last Centurion) which is probably the best fictional depiction of a REAL pandemic (one that kills 30-60% of any given population) has it where the red states get it right about 50% of the time and the blue states, about 7% of the time.
There is a lot of good philosophy in this novel as well. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00APA1HKC/
It’s not just up to Trump. State of Florida still refuses to implement a lockdown. In Texas religious gatherings are exempt from restrictions. Things are gonna get messy in USA.
I for one am looking forward to the still-planned Victory Day parade in Minsk
There is an exception to East Asian countries. Japan still seems to be clinging to the mitigation strategy they had decided on back in February. They followed those old flu pandemic guidelines that the Western countries came up with and gave up on containment as soon as community spread was confirmed. Although now that the Olympics are officially postponed there are concerned voices within the government. The growth of new daily cases is slow but it’s not getting slower and at some point it will become unmanageable. At that time they will have to shut down anyway and deal with a geographically widespread epidemic instead of a few epicenters they had a few weeks ago. Honestly not sure what their endgame is unless it’s geronticide.
Belarus might require a humantiarian intervention by Russia if things get really out of hand. With an epidemic within the country and Lukashenko himself not taking it seriously there is a real chance he himself will go down soon.
Whilst public support for these measures is practically unanimous NOW, I suspect that if this thing drags on for months, as it’s likely to do given the extent to which it’s already spread, those percentages will drop quite fast. Given the very low recovery rate for severe corona cases on ventilators making sure enough are always available seems like a bit of a red herring.
If Batka does actually pull this off, I wonder whether they’ll be able to close the gdp gap a bit with the west.
Wouldn’t be so bad if everyone had a home gym like this:
https://russianmachineneverbreaks.com/2020/04/01/alex-ovechkin-dances-to-russian-music-with-son-while-working-out-in-gym/
Throw in a heated (for colder weather) outdoor long course 50 yard or meter pool.
Meantime, many, if not most and perhaps all healthy people, are seeing a decline in their health. Suggestions in the US that the lock down will continue thru at least May.
Why would they compromise tho?
Olympics were the reason why business as usual was their preferred choice.
http://archive.is/8yC7n
It cannot be nipped in the bud. Suppression will not end it. Mitigation is the only way forward.
There is no vaccine. The ones under discussion are failed leftovers from SARS1. To believe that there will be a new vaccine in 18 months is wishful thinking. Most vaccines take the best part of 10 years to develop. 15 years later, we do not have a vaccine for SARS1. Corona viruses are notoriously unstable. Any vaccine will be temporary with diminishing effects.
Treatment will be little better. No tested treatment has been shown to work. There is no reason to believe these will work. By hearsay from a California AIDS epidemiologist, retrovir has already flaked out. If a hundred ill people are tested, 98 will get better anyway. To have a statistically valid trial with 95% confidence 384,000 people will need to be put through the trial. 128k with the treatment. 128k with a placebo and 128k with somethink thought to work. A drug that is aimed at reducing the death toll for the 2% must not increae the death toll and other harm for the 98%. The various quinines do. They cause cardial fibrillation, hypos in the dabetic and blindness. None of the prospects worked against SARS1. Stay off the G&T until the tests are done. In the US, all that is required of a drug is that it does no harm. It can be prescribed without needing to be useful. In the UK and some other parts of Europe drugs have to be demonstrated, not only to be useful but to be more useful than existing treatments. If you live in the US, beware of quack remedies. 30 people or 300 people is not a trial. 98% of people get better anyway. As one person died and two got worse in the original 36 patient French trial (cut to 30 who lived to complete the course of treatment) I would be cautious. – one moved away and 2 refused to complete because of side effects.
Serology works. It is also extremely expensive and requires skilled surgeons. Mass use is as far away as a vaccine.
Testing is pointless once community transmission has started. Nurses and kits will be tied up showing that 99% of the population does not have it. (Iceland last time I looked).
SARS2 is, unexpectedly showing community transmission in warm countries. Summer may not stop it or slow it down much.
It is almost unstoppable. The main issues are overloaded healthcare – the US is proposing treatment in tents and reducing the number of vulnerable who die.
The only thing that can reduce the virus is a high enough level of herd immunity. Suppression is just delay with massive economic damage. Herd immunity can be “let it happen’ Swedish style or managed, the original British plan before a forecast from a climatologically influenced epidemiologist.
In my opinion, the current lockdowns will allow the virus to spread to Key Workers while we still have capacity to treat them. That will take three to four weeks and will not be 100%. Then, moderate numbers of the young and fit can be released onto the streets, particularly those in food supply chains. Every few weeks more can be released. The old and ill should remain at home in self quarantine until herd immunity is so high that the virus becomes self limiting. Hygeine measures, above all removing shoes and hand washing, less so mask wearing, gloves (both of which I do personally), removing outdoor clothing in house, keeping a clean house – mostly the sort of thing people did before anti-biotics anyway will slow things down.
The biggest danger is a large moderation in the summer, followed by the return of SARS2+++ in the autumn. Societies which have suppressed then released rather than mitigated are at risk of severe economic and social damage.
FWIW, I think the virus was up and running in Wuhan in December mostly among older people. Steel towns seem to be amongst the earliest places infected. I started looking for a connection with TB but I have concluded that steel industry personnel from Wuhan, a major centre of the Chinese industry were travelling the world in December and January infecting Lombardy, Toledo (near Madrid), Qom (a steel town with a new Chinese built rod mill), Lorraine and Gwent, all now hot spots or more accurately early infections. The leather industry mattered too. How it broke out no longer matters.
Mitigation to build herd immunity, the more closely managed the better, is the only way out. Christians have been waiting for salvation for 2000 years. Still not here.
4-5 million people die each year from air pollution, as a result of industial processes, as well as burning fossil fuels for transport and energy.
However, we justify these 4-5 million additional deaths from air pollution created by burning fossil fuel and industrial process, as quite necessary and unremarkable sacrifices for the cause of economic growth and modern industrial life.
So, superficially “sacrificing some feeble people to a virus for the economy” (“herd immunity”), does not seem crazy or at least inconsistent with status quo practices, when you consider how few people protest against historically famous smogs of London, or a black sky of Krasnoyarsk, or the regular mass suffocations in Beijing and New Delhi.
Problem is that it is a false dichotomy, as it is technologically very easy to both prevent such respiratory epidemics and keep the economy working at almost normal levels, if people would simply wear basic personal protective equipment (and if people are too stupid to buy it, then the government should now learn to mass produce and distribute gasmasks).
Some modern gasmasks even have drinking tubes, so should be no barrier to going to Starbucks for cold drinks at least; many have voice diaphragms so you can speak in the office – instead of locking down the countries, people should have been living almost as normal now, just everyone in gasmaks.
Post nuclearwar aesthetics would even have added amusing “variety of scenary”, and everyone’s lung health would have improved from the particulate filters. The year in which people wear gasmasks, would have ended with the net increase in average citizens’ health and life expectancy.
I don’t understand what is so difficult about equipping everyone with a gasmask.
With some higher quality equipment, like a Dräger FPS 7000 (like a German fireman) everyone can safely return to the office, and sit in the cinema, and go on the bus and tram and metro – without any chance of infection.
The cost is less than a smartphone, and yet we can equip everyone with a smartphone.
Just some simply and elegant German engineering, which if they produced several hundred million – would allow everyone in Europe to return to “business as usual”.
blob:https://imgur.com/d33915b0-ba13-4a8b-9ecf-5070212bedc9
Without an exit strategy, the run and hide option doesnt really appear to be any more reasonable than taking it on your feet.
China is starting up again.
The whole plan just leads to decay and eventual anarchy.
Why is that a win?
Would make for a great dieselpunk aesthetic.
https://cs9.pikabu.ru/post_img/big/2017/03/17/8/1489758190129269758.jpg
The exit strategy is twofold:
(1) Containing Corona will become progressively easier as prompt and universal testing-tracing-treatment is introduced and perfected.
(2) Contrary to what Philip claims, a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2:
https://twitter.com/PeterKolchinsky/status/1240498037958545410
The SARS vaccine was not pursued for the understandable reason that it was suppressed anyway, making it commercially meaningless.
Powerful.
Sweden has double the population of Denmark or Norway, that link is a little suspect. Anyway the relevant statistic is hospilatisations, deaths will happen anyway, just on different timeframes, the argument is that the healthcare system gets overloaded. My relatives in Sweden are worried about the damage being done to the British economy.
https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson/status/1245416486879051778?s=20
There is no such thing, you have jews bribing corrupt evangelist leaders to serve Israel and thats about it.
New York versus California is an interesting comparison: two blue states, with one doing much worse than the other so far.
Yes.
Also, anyone who disagrees with Lukashenko’s main point – that there is a “mass psychosis” surrounding this virus – is a complete fool.
We agree completely here. This is the real point you should be talking about. It’s nice you’re finally acknowledging that which is bolded.
You’ve been pushing your “Corona pills” for weeks now without blogging a single time about the verifiable fact that this pandemic is, to borrow from Dr. Fauci’s co-authorship rather than from his panicky public statements, not drastically worse than 1957 and 1968.
So, why is America in need of an “unprecedented” sort of “lock down” when 1957 and 1968 did not require such a response?
The truth seems to be four-fold:
1) We let childless women have a massive say in our bureaucracies and media. They’re bound to scare the dog piss out of everyone. They don’t scare me with what they say, but they do scare me simply by virtue of being in positions of power.
2) A disastrous American policy of unrequited free trade left us woefully short of certain equipment, e.g. masks.
3) Our particular brand of health care capitalism probably has reduced our hospital capacity beyond what it was in the 1960s, but I haven’t got the time to check.
4) Certain people involved in running America knew in advance the economy was gonna have a downturn soon, so they have no problem with letting the whole thing tank by way of telling certain businesses (but not abortion clinics or weed shops) that they are “not essential.” That way there will be all the more distressed assets for Globohomo to buy up, adding to its accumulated stores of capital for pushing more sodomy, more porn, more death, etc, etc, etc.
The libertarians are wrong because they believe there can ever be such a thing as an economy that isn’t planned. The libertarians are right, though, when they perceive this “lock down” as a transparent ploy to grab more power and money.
Certain members of the Dissident Right are wrong because they just about jack off at the slightest sign of authoritarianism, and because they hate “The West” Запад. And HBDers are bound to exaggerate Wu-Flu because they want nature to vindicate their (often correct) criticisms of everyone else.
I’ve seen the stats from Italy and am well aware that something like 1.4% of dead Italians (off the top of my head) died strictly from COVID, with no other causes, as opposed to WITH COVID and with other causes. Living in America, which is a land of fat people, I have relatives and friends who qualify for the higher levels of risk.
Nonetheless, people should be focusing more on asking why the West is in a state of mass psychosis over this “fairly low-mortality pandemic in historical terms.” Everything else might as well be buffalo shit.
Obviously on a cost benefit basis a lockdown is so much more damaging that it is pointless analysing in detail, hence why the Swedish public health authorities have not pursued such an option. Legally politicians in Sweden can’t interfere. So the other issue, apart from rate of hospitalizations, is the level of infections already, in particular those of a mild and asymptomatic nature, in order to get the actual ifr. We await an accurate antibody test, but some countries cfrs, and the speed of transmission suggest it will be on the lower scale.
The other question is has the Italian lockdown proven a success, I say no, not at all.
Given the weather, car culture and low density I would think Florida could get by with just some relatively mild public health measures.
And I forgot to say,
This truth can’t be emphasized enough.
The ENTIRE argument for “lock downs” is that we can’t allow the system to get overloaded. That’s it.
Well, I’ll say it for the umpteenth time: WHY were we so much stronger in 1957 and 1968?
Now, due to Ron Unz’s 3 comment per hour restrictions (with which I normally have no problem), I’m gonna respond to another of your comments here while I have time to edit this one.
Wait, why can’t Swedish politicians legally interfere?
Incidentally, I saw the Guardian is now trying to sway world opinion against the Swedes. They had an ooh-scary article a day or two ago, full of quotes from some Swedish scientist who says she’s scared the government is leading them to disaster.
So far the neo-liberal media seems amused and happy to let Belarus do its own thing. But Belarus isn’t a fair comparison to Sweden, which has higher levels of competence and better resource.
Reaching preposterously high levels of absurdity, Andrew Cuomo and E. Michael Jones (who now has columns here) agree on this. I’m not sure if Cuomo will act accordingly, but last week the NY Post quoted him as saying that it wasn’t the best idea to force the sick under the same roofs as the healthy.
Ron Unz has explained it pretty well, I’d think. The “shelter in place” order in California happened a week earlier than in NYC.
Add in NYC’s much higher density, Corona-optimized current weather, and metro system and you probably don’t need much more in the way of explanatory factors.
“Some modern gasmasks even have drinking tubes…” – What about smoking? You seem to know a lot about gas masks.
A Vaccine Wildcard From Big Tobacco
On Wednesday, Lucky Strike owner British American Tobacco said that its U.S. biotech division is working on a potential vaccine.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-vaccine-wildcard-from-big-tobacco-11585760118
Just for the benefit of new and/or less attentive readers – that has been my position all along.
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/corona-will-kill-millions-crater-the-world-economy/ – “All manner of COVID-19’s were a mundane thing a century ago and earlier. Today, they are a freak occurrence on whose mitigation China and much of the world seems willing to sacrifice a significant proportion of their GDP. That sounds almost Pinkerian.“
Where we differ is on prescriptions.
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/1243186541691895809
France provides a leading indicator on how those who oppose Judeo-Christian values are likely to respond.
There have been many reports of Orthodox Jews in NY/NJ also not responding. Like Muslims they seem to lack our “Judeo-Christian” values.
It’s probably atheists who have the most “Judeo-Christian values.” 🙂
seems like a smol brain take from AK. he’s set out his position early and has to stick with it to maintain credibility, regardless of details or evidence that doesn’t line up. i respect him a lot based on his previous years of work on lots of various topics. but on this virus he’s not up to his usual standards. because disaster LARPing is fun, he enjoys this, and he hopes lots of people die in America. no, i don’t think he dislikes America or Americans. it’s simply funner that way, if Murkins get wacked, and more gooder for his blogging and traffic and hits.
i generally agree with RamzPaul on the virus, although he should be less emphatic, and use numbers more.
Good to know I’m winding all the wingnuts up.
Huh?
I guess closely managed mitigation means R is as close to 1 as possible so it doesn’t overwhelm the healthcare. If you have the confidence that you can do that then why not take the next step and push it slightly below 1? It’s possible even without a vaccine, at least in most developed countries. There are dozens of ways to reduce R by a few percent that are much more cost effective than extensive lockdowns or lying back and thinking of England every time there is a new Corona strain. If we adopt enough of them at once we won’t have to deal with extreme options.
There is more than a billion people confined to their homes right now. Most of them have learned more about infections and hygiene in the last several weeks than they would during their whole lives otherwise. At least some of them are thinking about how they can better avoid diseases and a few of them even come up with practices that will spread. Sanitation standards are being updated across the globe. Relevant products are being developed by corporations. Killing germs in the air is more in demand than ever. Soon most offices and shops will look like a cybergoth rave at a laboratory.
Spanish flu changed a lot of old habits and this pandemic will too. A lot of filth will be cleaned up. It might turn out that Corona will save more boomer lives in the long run than it will reap because with all the measures that are being implemented to contain respiratory diseases seasonal flu is going away too.
I suspect Bolsonaro is going to start looking a lot better in July when the numbers mature. He might not be popular now, but eventually this mass hysteria is going to pass. When the hysteria passes and everyone is far poorer, the so called “civilized world” is going to look very stupid.
This type of “pandemic” happens every year. The coincidences surrounding how the Chinese seemed to first encounter it on their turf may have lit some alarms, but… none of the hysteria seems justified in the face of the numbers.
If you tell relatively healthy young people this their flu-like symptoms aren’t the flu, but a uniquely evil doom virus… there aren’t going to be enough hospital beds. You are going to have the Italian sadness as folks who would have normally stayed home sick crowd the elderly out of the hospitals.
Seems short term if enough red voting boomers in FL and TX die from Corona this year.
The last two times that the Olympics were cancelled were in 1940 and 1944. The global disruptive power of Corona-chan should not be underestimated.
You are an optimist. With that moron dead Belarus would be much better off. However, I wouldn’t hold my breath. These are the laws of nature: the gold sinks, the shit floats.
What do you think will happen with Belarus if it collapses from Covidet incompetence? Will it go with Russia or the west?
New York has more old people, also.
Is that why Thalidomide was a massive problem in Europe, particularly in Britain, but not in America? A whole generation of circus freaks with squiggly salamander arms is still around in Britain. Maybe you know some Phil. Maybe you are one yourself.
So much British winning.
AK edit: Insert more tags for such content.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/y2lhmSCunrI/maxresdefault.jpg
There is a “clean” experiment potential
Send asymptomatic carriers EVERYWHERE. Go for instant 100% infection rate and maximum mortality. Call it dagoth ur pilled, divine disease and that shit. Basically instead of flattening the curve turn it into a spike
Too bad something like that would only be sone under Saparmurat pbuh
So, a Belarusian/Minsk Maidan?
https://nypost.com/2020/03/30/brooklyn-man-arrested-for-hoarding-masks-coughing-on-fbi-agents/
How does that man manage to do so much physical work in the fields and still maintain such a relatively wrinkle-free face, pale complexion, and well-manicured appendages? Good genes, daily sunscreen, or both? I’d not mistake him for one of the barge haulers on the Volga, no. So whatever he’s having, I want it.
The solution of this mystery is disappointing: he is always talking the talk, but never walking the walk.
This video clip alone is reason enough for the UR’s existence!
Well, here’s a question for you…
Let’s suppose the US had followed through on the “Brilliant Boris Johnson Herd Immunity Strategy,” and just assumed that 60-70% of our entire population would get infected.
Let’s say 200M infected Americans, probably over a period of 2-3 months. The resulting death-rate would initially be 1% or 2M Americans.
But since there would be 40M hospital admissions, our entire health-care system would collapse, and the death-rate would quickly spike to 5%.
That’s 10M American deaths over a period of 2-3 months. Offhand, I don’t recall reading anything about 10M Americans dying of “the flu” in either 1957 or 1968, but I’ll admit I’ve never researched the topic. Perhaps you can find a link to an old news story describing it…
However, you missed the key difference when making your joke.
-1- Self-Segregating Orthodox Jews who insist on having a major events like weddings place themselves at risk.
When they need treatment I hope they self-segregate at their own hospitals where they won’t put non-Orthodox Jewish medical staff and other members of the general public at risk.
As a programmer I’m lucky enough to work from home, and I enforce an isolation for my gran. Ironically Lukashenko isn’t wholly wrong, a tractorist doesn’t meet many people in a day they will be relatively safe.
Anyways, following this I reckon Luka is nigh over. 50/50 either tolik’s wet dream of a Belarus-Russia annexation or some maidan copycats, except Luka won’t be too pussy to send in OMON to clean up the streets properly unlike Yanukovych and with EU outcry will be forced to turn East. Either way congrats to anatoly, russian nationalists and associated autists this will probably be a front you win on
If, when working outdoors (or going for a walk) you roll up your sleeves so as to expose your arms to Sunlight Vitamin D, then Lukashenko is right; read the articles by Bill Sardi over at LewRockwell.com.
Vitamin D, especially sunshine Vitamin D, is one of the best ways to naturally strengthen your immune system against viruses, including flu and coronaviruses.
Yep.
At this stage most people don’t realise that they’re looking at the prospect of complete economic ruin. They haven’t figured out that most of the stores that have shut down won’t be reopening. They haven’t figured out that job losses are going to be permanent. They haven’t figured out that they’re likely to be looking not at a short-term recession but at an economic depression from which it might takes years to recover.
Once they do figure out that the economy is going to be just a blackened burnt-out shell they’re going to get real angry.
Great post!
You forget one thing. Masks. Masks are marginally worse than herd immunity, maybe.
In defense of Sweden’s strategy, one might also offer this crude estimate:
As of April 1, Sweden has 239 deaths, 393 serious and critical cases, and 4,212 “mild cases” (for now). We can’t know how many infected people it took to get to these figures, but a recent Imperial College report put the number of infected Swedes at about 310,000 (as of March 28).
If these figures hold over the course of the epidemic, Sweden will end up with something like
10,000,000 infected
7,700 deaths (239 / 0.031)
12,700 serious and critical cases (393 / 0.031)
135,900 “mild cases” (4,212 / 0.031)
Which doesn’t look all that terrible.
Some of the “mild cases” will end in death, of course, as will many — perhaps most — of the serious and critical cases, but even then, we are looking at a death rate of well below 1.5%. The death rate should also be lowered quite a bit by herd immunity, which will kick in at about 7,000,000 infected.
Until you can provide just a single reason why America imploding is not a good thing, I am correct, no true nationalist can say America existing is a good thing.
Except that it’s the non-Western countries that are reacting in a very heavy-handed fashion, not “the West”.
“The West” (USA,UK, Sweden, Holland, etc.) initially tried to ignore the coronavirus, they had to be dragged into lockdown protocols kicking and screaming by the rest of the world.
Like I said, perhaps China, Russia et al., have information about the virus that you don’t.
If you can work in the fields you would be a challenge for COVID-19; I don’t know if a glass of vodka is a good idea right now. https://youtu.be/RyTTbLA3AZY?t=35
Population density is a key factor:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-01/coronavirus-in-young-people-ny-patients-skew-younger-some-die
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/opinion/coronavirus-viral-dose.html
The correct strategy, so why is Sweden doing it this way? It is hardly a secret that it is a hard left land, and that the “if it could only save one life” hysteria would be the expected mantra there.
I was as alarmist as our hosts when this started, the data since then all indicate it is not as bad as I first feared and have adjusted my opinion accordingly.
https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson/status/1245490884336128000?s=20
“the Constitution prohibits the government from meddling in the affairs of… the public health agency.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/world/europe/sweden-coronavirus.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
Sweden is not a hard left land. It is an oligarchy that is masquerading as a left-wing country through the use of token policies like LGBT and multiculti that do no harm to the oligarchs. It is totally expected for Sweden to optimize their strategy for big business and the capitalist class as that is what Sweden always does.
Sweden only has low income inequality that’s flattened by heavy progressive taxation. It has some of the highest accumulated wealth inequality with a really high number of billionaires for a small country. The very rich people do no labor and pay no labor income tax, capital gains like the profits of landlords and shareholders are not taxed heavily. Sweden has no inheritance tax, no wealth tax etc.
Basically Sweden is an oligarchy that freaked out over the popularity of socialism and the Russian revolution and pre-emptively crafted a system of income transfers from the middle class to the working class with the oligarchs sacrificing nothing. Some of the oligarchy dates centuries back, the kind of people who live in castles staring at portraits of their ancestors who fought at Poltava and daydreaming about getting revenge. They survived World War I, World War II and the Cold War without sacrificing anything at all so why would they be willing to lose money over some bug?
I think Sweden is actually right, by the way, and their strategy would work perfectly if they were still populated by Swedes. The disease is hitting the migrants, especially Somalis, who just ignore all the hygiene and other recommendations. But I suppose they will eventually freak out and destroy their society with lockdowns like everyone else, getting the worst of both worlds.
“…they’re going to get real angry.” – This anger will be funneled against the external enemy, China. The whole world against China.
Open border and bringing lots of immigrants and refugees to Sweden is part of the ploy of the oligarchy to dismantle the welfare state and establish neoliberalism now when they do not need to fear communism or demands for socialism from their population who has bought into the dream of individual liberties and freedoms.
Well look up what happened after the Western Roman Empire or Soviet Union collapsed
Sure this will be geopolitically beneficial to Russia, but it’s also ushering in an era of difficult times for all, and ensures that millions might lose their lives (millions of whites too)
What will happen to that 2nd largest Nuclear Arsenal scattered across the continent? We got lucky in 1991, will we be lucky now?
Worst case scenario (but like 1% chance of happening):
What if General Secretary LaQueesha Rodriguez Uruk’haiberg of the Transfluid States of AmeriXa decides to take vengeance on the racist Russians and Hungarians for being so authoritarian and orders a nuclear strike on Bratislava
Fear works its magic…many people are stupid.
Really a lot of old people in Florida.
“producing millions of 5 cent masks and making people wear them” – Agree!
Government’s emergency stockpile of protective equipment ‘has nearly run out’ but 1.5million masks will be distributed to ICE and TSA and NOT to hospital workers on the front line of the coronavirus crisis
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8174509/U-S-emergency-medical-stockpile-nearly-protective-gear-demand-rises-officials.html
The true scale of China’s medical stockpile is revealed: More than TWO BILLION masks were imported into Wuhan in just one month as the coronavirus crisis escalated
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8178365/China-imported-2billion-masks-peak-coronavirus-crisis.html
The nuclear weapons can be dismantled by paying for it or with force if needs be. If you read sites like this then you would be aware that America is becoming ever more fanatical by the day, the threat of a nuclear strike from future SJW regimes will become almost inevitable. The sooner the USA ends the better, not just for nationalists but nearly everyone in the world, the current status quo is the worst possible future.
Handwashing is a lot more effective.
If we trust the worldometer data, Sweden has about the same number of cases than Norway (but a higher death rate). So it doesn’t seem that having or not “lockdown” or not changes much the number of cases. Actually Norway has a smaller population so they proportionally have more cases. However why does Sweden has the double of deaths? In that case it could be that they cave much more untested cases. The more important data is the one of deaths (again assuming the worldometer data is trustable – and assuming that this is not mostly media-fueled panic and hysteria, as Belarus dude says).
People are drunk with fear now but there may be a hangover later. Remember how George Bush was scoring 90 % approval ratings after 9/11 but now everyone who was involved with his wars is trying to erase that part of their past.
Even as this creates a worldwide depression they’re going to try to claim that they saved the world with this. For that reason I hope that there are some countries who don’t wreck their societies with excessive measures so that we can point out to them as comparison once the dust settles. (Sweden? Belarus? Preferably white countries because Turkmenistan and North Korea aren’t going to make convincing comparisons.)
Unfortunately there’s a lot of historical precedent for disastrous megalomaniac policies creating true believers, like commie regimes wasting lives of political prisoners on massive useless infrastructure projects and getting praised for achievements in industrialization.
Some ultra-Orthodox Jews are ignoring Israel’s coronavirus rules, despite a warning to ‘wake up!’
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/31/middleeast/israel-coronavirus-ultra-orthodox-intl/index.html
Syria, Yemen, Libya, Cox’s Bazaar, South Sudan will not be practicing quarantine. SARS2 has escaped. It will come back from these reservoirs. The2nd wave of Spanish Flu was the worst. That is the concern now.
Thalidomide was the turning point for drug testing world wide, half a century ago. Things have prgressed greatly since then.
Yes, I have met some.
There isn’t much travel between Cox’s Bazaar and the UK.
In a few weeks containing a few hundred strong localized outbreak won’t be a problem even without hard measures. Testing is becoming better, contact tracing is becoming better, PPE production is being ramped up, institutional response is becoming better, individual response is becoming better. Every little measure lowers reproduction number a little bit. If we can reduce R_eff to below 1.5 without lockdowns then there isn’t really any point in shutting down anymore since our response will continue to get better faster than the disease will spread.
We need short term lockdowns now because these little measures need to become a reality first and the number of currently infected needs to be significantly lowered. We don’t want to freeze the situation at the current level because healthcare is already overwhelemed in some places.
I wear a mask despite small boys laughing at me. My instinct is that masks help. My daughter is a specialist publich health official in infection control. She is quite firm that masks actually cause more infection. They make you touch your face more often gloved or not. The virus is a fomite – it lives on surfaces and transmits faecal matter to them. Hence the emphasis on handwashing. Surfaces touched include the face. Judging by my daughter’s debate, not enough people wash their hands well enough to protect others from their fomites.
I believe my daughter to be very bright. I have respect for her opinion. Thus I am avoiding the debate. I think a strategy of wearing gloves outside the home and taking them off to adust your mask might optimize the strategy. I also have alcohol wipes for my car steering wheel and front door handle. (I already had a supply building up before this).
In fairness, Belarus claims to have performed 30,000 tests as of March 30, which is similar to Russia’s 536,000 tests in per capita terms. So unlike Ukraine (3,000 tests, of which almost 25% are positive), the Belorussian figures of 163 confirmed cases are probably not totally inaccurate. So the situation can still be easily salvaged. I would not be surprised to see Luka perform an about turn before too long either.
https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/charts/united-states-jobless-claims.png?s=ijcusa&v=202004021303V20191105
US Initial Jobless Claims (000s)
Pre-2020 all time high was 637,000 (October 1982).
It’s a wonder to me that Bolsonaro ever got elected in the first place, it isn’t clear to me who he is even supposed to represent in Brazil. In the US, Trump predominantly represents conservative white Americans, that is his support base and frankly everyone knows that even if they don’t openly say it.
However, conservative white Brazilians I would imagine are a very small minority of the Brazilian population, so it’s demographically impossible that he was elected by the white vote alone in Brazil. I’ve seen it speculated that Bolsonaro didn’t actually win the popular vote and that he was corruptly installed as president to serve US interests in the region, especially re Venezuela. Not sure what truth there is behind that but it would make sense as Brazil doesn’t seem like the sort of country that would democratically elect someone like Bolsonaro and it would explain why most Brazilian states are ignoring his demands.
US shale has never been competitive, and there have never been any effective cost containment measures. The industry has never made any money, not with oil at $100, or $20. They are hundreds of $billions in debt and blowing up US junk bond market as we speak.
After the price crash of 2014, they simply found more idiots to throw money at them. Those idiots are now going bankrupt. Oh sure, there may be a well in the Permian that may have a $20 break even if you squint at it just right and commit slightly less than usual amount of accounting fraud. And there are also people who win a lottery. Doesn’t represent average lottery player outcome though.
Buying lottery tickets is still better than buying shale plays though – much better chances of seeing your money back. Shale will not die fast – they drilled and capped a lot of unprofitable wells, and creditors will force the drillers to open those up to recover at least some cash flow, but those wells will shoot their wad in two years. After that, shale will need new wells, and you would have to be delusional to commission new projects on the patch even if oil goes to $100.
Bolsonaro is not a Republican and it’s weird to compare American politics with Brazilian politics.
Bolsonaro obviously represents the evangelical (neo-pentecostal) majority of the population, not the “white vote”, which is mostly progressive in Brazil (or perhaps center left, with a few on the right).
Also Bolsonaro was riding a wave of anti-PT feeling in the population (PT or the Worker’s Party had been in power for roughly 18 years and there was a lot of corruption in the end).
Bolsonaro is not completely wrong, there’s a lot of hysteria and panic about coronavirus. Hysteria and panic do not help.
Maybe Sweden will yet be shown to be the country who took the best approach (i.e. voluntary reducing of contacts, without locking people in, and without hysteria). We will see.
Why wouldn’t it? I’m sorry but you seem to know very little about Brazil or Brazilian politics. Many governors are political rivals of Bolsonaro so of course they are against him. Besides that, even if Bolsonaro were right, it’s impossible to go against worldwide consensus that COVID-19 is the worse thing since Spanish Flu and “everybody must be locked inside and the economy must be crushed.”
I’m not a great fan of Bolsonaro but in this case he is the one being attacked, basically for being a bit more commonsensical than the rest.
This supposed to be a satirical comment about – Boris Johnson?
Well I am sure you could put a cigarette to the filter and suck in the smoke. If you only have the P3 particulate filter, then you will still get some mild taste and smell of chemicals in the cigarette smoke.
P3 particulate filter will remove nicotine, as nicotine seems to be mainly attaching on particles 0,9-1,9 microns ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19496699 ), while P3 filter is certified for removing 99,95% of particles above 0,3 microns. Although in reality they remove most down to 0,07 microns.
If you use a ABEK P3 filter you probably remove majority of the interesting tasting chemicals from the cigarette smoke. https://www.draeger.com/Products/Content/ab-filter-selection-guide-fl-9046529-en-gb.pdf Although for virus droplet protection you just need to buy the little white particulate filter.
When I was doing disposable mask hauls, late January and early February – peoples in different household good stores, were laughing and said that Chinese men had come into their shop to buy hundreds of stock, which almost emptied chain’s warehouse of brands like 3M. This is in Europe. Chinese men were buying all disposable paper masks though, so due to their cheap tastes, better masks were all still available to buy in Europe.
Right, lottery winners. And even that is flawed, because it doesn’t account the need for reinvestment and capital burn required for it. Shale oil as a whole has never generated positive cash flow. Top lottery winners (like top 10% of the companies) have only been able to generate cash by culling capital investment. This works for about two years, after that time your best prized wells run out of oil and you need to drill again. And given depletion rates, you pretty much need to drill constantly to maintain output. There are accounting gimmicks you can do to to postpone the inevitable (long term debt vs short term etc), but in the end, unless shale production is nationally subsidized, it is not worth it.
Most nationalities in the world today would be ruthlessly crushed by stronger powers if not for the U.S. dominated world order arbitrarily maintaining static borders. I doubt there are many causes in which all “nationalists” would agree on. That seems more like a fantasy from politically inept alt-right people.
Why are white Brazilians so different to say white South Africans in their political/social position? Both are minorities in a largely non-white country with a high violent crime rate, yet there doesn’t seem to be anywhere near the antagonism against whites in Brazilian society that there is in South African society.
Someone like Bolsonaro would have zero chance of being elected in South Africa, in fact a white person of any political view would have zero chance of being elected there. A white president being elected by a non-white majority is just something that would be impossible in South Africa, yet it happened in Brazil. What’s the difference? If I were to guess I’d say it’s because even most non-white Brazilians have some degree of white ancestry and therefore don’t feel so distant to whites as black South Africans do and also Brazil is much more culturally homogeneous than South Africa is. All Brazilians regardless of race speak Portuguese natively and have more or less the same culture, whereas that is definitely not the case in South Africa.
Missing a zero. Even 3M disposable masks can filter out most particles at 0,007 microns, if we can believe this blog post.
https://smartairfilters.com/en/blog/coronavirus-pollution-masks-n95-surgical-mask/
Really? I don’t see much evidence of the US protecting different nationalities/peoples from domination by stronger powers other than when it suits US interests to do so. An example would be Tibet and Xinjiang, China has aggressively asserted its control over those two places for decades with minimal opposition from the US.
An example in Europe would be that the US has actively supported a united Ireland and Irish republicanism for decades, even funding the IRA for years, yet backs Spain in its struggle against Catalan and Basque separatists. Obviously an independent Ireland (and possibly Scotland) suits US interests (the Irish Republic is now an EU tax haven for US corporations), while in contrast Spain remaining one country obviously suits US interests as well despite the two positions being contradictory. It seems to me that the current arbitrary world borders are mostly a result of what suits US interests rather than the US making any great efforts to protect people and be fair.
I wholeheartedly agree.
I think this is a mass hypnosis mind control event emanating from the TV.
It’s disheartening to see so many people so easily pushed into hysteria.
Who would have thought that a few images of hospital workers in tyvek along side a few coffins would have this much effect.
https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/madison.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/3/25/3253636f-b3d8-517e-a34c-e5d7e7c9f1b1/54416ef773f4a.image.jpg
https://www.snopes.com/tachyon/2020/03/GettyImages-1207345854-e1584978930408.jpg
Your vacuum cleaner is not too bad. The issue is the aerosol size not the virus particle.
https://www.breathingspace.co.uk/blog/what-is-a-hepa-filter-and-what-are-their-benefits/
I’ve read it claimed several times before that Italians, particularly Northern Italians, cluster with Ashkenazi Jews on those DNA ancestry tests. The fact that both groups appear to be particularly susceptible to Coronavirus suggests there might be something in that.
This is true … most of the time, but we can also be unsentimental pragmatists when the situation calls for it. Swedes are an odd lot.
Most? We live in the atomic peace – that keeps the big ones nice to each other. Not to mention low fertility. Perhaps, a few small ones would be annexed – though I am not really sure about that – other powers might have the same goals as the US.
But I’m not sure why the average European should really care anyway. I don’t think countries like Qatar or Kuwait really help nationalism. They end up being foreign military bases, and importing experts from globohomo, and I don’t consider them well-wishers anyway.
Masks don’t make you touch your face more – a good mask will make it impossible to touch your face.
Well, perhaps, uncomfortable disposable shit Chinese masks, could cause people to touch their face. But the problem there is that people are provided shit masks, without good fitting.
A well designed mask has external surfaces and filters far from the face. It’s also unlikely you will touch your face when you remove it unless you are an idiot – but here there is a need for 10 minutes of public training in how to decontaminate when leaving the threat zone.
I have little familiarity with South Africa but it’s clear the countries are very different:
a) Apartheid. Right or wrong, this certainly created a lot of resentment in blacks, which you don’t see in Brazil so much (there was slavery, but that was everywhere and long ago)
a) Brazil had much more racial mixing, actually the majority of the population is not black nor white but a tri-racial mix of mostly Europeans, Africans and Amerindians. Pure blacks are more common in the North, a bit less in the South.
c) There is a certain anger by some against the mostly white (*) elite, but it’s very diffuse, also, Brazilians either because of the culture or of Amerindian blood, tend to be pretty easygoing and passive (well, except when they aren’t). There’s a lot of economic crime, but also a lot of economic interdependence between the poor and the middle class/rich, maids etc.
d) Most politicians in Brazil are white or light-mestizos, you don’t have many important black or brown politicians. Brazilians don’t necessarily want to be represented by a mestizo/black, actually they seem to prefer a white person. Even Lula, the closer Brazil had to someone from poor origins in the presidency, looked pretty white (not fully white, but, not very mestizo-looking either).
(*) European (Portuguese/German/Italian), Lebanese, Jewish. Three of the richest people in Brazil are Jewish.
Bolsonaro appeals to evangelicals (poor) and to people fed up with previous governments (middle-class). But he may yet be a victim of corona, economy will of course go down the tubes and his popularity is dwindling fast.
Maybe, maybe not. I can see how immigrants might get worse hit from having more intergenerational households than ethnic Swedes (as well as more smokers, etc.), but I doubt that’s enough to make our government give up this strategy partway through. When the economy is at stake, such considerations tend to take the back seat.
Yes droplets containing the virus will be a lot larger than the virus size itself – but it’s evident that P3 filters on gasmasks remove particles a lot more smaller than they are formally certified to (i.e. smaller than the 0,3 microns), and that even unaccompanied virus particles would be filtered by them.
As for HEPA filters for using in your homes – they are nice to have, although obviously this is not relevant to protect you from infection. I have had a Winix Zero Pro air purifier (made in Korea) to remove pollen, and recommend them to stop hayfever symptoms in the house. It takes about 10 minutes to clear the rooms.
I never said anything about fairness or protection. The world isn’t run on fairness. The current UN world order tends to frown on annexations and promotes the idea that every nation has a place. All of this is supported by international law, international courts, etc. The U.S. created this system as a replacement for colonial empires. The position was first formally advocated as Wilsonianism after the first World War.
The question is if a world other than the current U.S. dominated one would have more stable and defined national borders or less. You’re trying to find exceptions as if I am claiming I have a theory that the world 100% operates under. I take for granted that humans are not like that. I also take for granted that world powers try to construct the world to suit their interests. The natural implication is that Wilsonianism, the United Nations, international law, the concept of human rights, and all of the rest of this garbage was at least partially constructed to suit U.S. interests.
They were sending them back to their families in China
“hauls” – rarely used word by men
“cheap tastes” – are you transitioning, Dmitri.
Short answer: Catholicism. Long answer: Read E. Michael Jones.
This is just one doctor’s analysis using one day’s data. Still, it’s startling: Analysis: Coronavirus now third-leading cause of death in US
Right. There are some shares of Whiting Petroleum for sale now, I hear. Sound business, if you believe that get them while they are hot.
FYI, my information is about shale oil, not gas. Gas is even worse.
“Suppression will not end it.”
Are the Chinese and HK people lying then? Serious question.
“The only thing that can reduce the virus is a high enough level of herd immunity. “
Has it been demonstrated that herd immunity is possible with this virus? A cold doesn’t go on forever, but you can get another one three months later. Won’t you only have a form of herd immunity once the unhealthy have all died, and people are becoming unhealthy (age, obesity, accident etc) all the time? In other words when average life spans have dropped by a couple of years?
Re masks, if they are so bad why are NHS staff screaming for them? Is it the way people use them?
(A friend of a friend, quite senior in NHS, was in a hospital bed recently and reported that infection control practices were pretty poor, I hope he fed back to the hospital)
Car – you must have an automatic. I do the gear lever as well as the centre console controls and the door controls (windows, mirrors). We all take off shoes in the house, but only my daughter, working with potential cases, keeps her work shoes in a plastic box, changes at work, her work clothes go straight from the carrier bag to a 3 hr 60c wash cycle.
I would say the key data point is how many present (and previous) Corona cases there are in the population at large. As I wrote before, the present estimate is that Sweden had 310,000 Corona cases this past Saturday (as against the figure of confirmed cases, which then stood at < 5,000 cases).
There is obviously a world of a difference between the two. If the true figure is near the estimate, Sweden's figures are good — even very good — but if the true figure is near the figure of confirmed cases, they are catastrophic. We will know the answer in a few weeks' time.
Bantus and Germanic people happened to colonize South Africa at roughly the same time. Since both are aggressive, expansionist people they couldn’t come to a consensus and share or partition the South African clay.
In this deathmatch the Bantus are so far winning, and they’re not planning to stop.
The real mask hauls in Jewish Orthodox neighborhood.
https://www.unz.com/runz/the-government-employee-who-may-have-saved-a-million-american-lives/?showcomments#comment-3811837
The map shows departments in which the zones are located. The whole of Herault, for example, is far from being a no go zone, it’s a lovely place and you can enjoy a great holiday in the wine country. The only hint of diversity will be the African prostitutes on the Beziers ring road.
Well, I’m sure that’s the plan of the Deep State Neocons and what they’re telling Trump, but I don’t think it will work. Let’s go through the list…
Will the US be able to use the Coronavirus to get Russia to line up against China? Probably not, since it’s a stupid/crazy idea and Putin isn’t stupid/crazy.
What about Iran? Somehow I think Iran is more likely to side with China than the US. Similarly, Pakistan doesn’t like America and is a close ally of China.
Okay, what about the world except for Russia, Iran, and Pakistan?
Well, China is the main buyer of African raw materials, and I think the same thing is mostly true of Latin America. So I doubt either place would become hugely hostile to China because of the current epidemic.
In fact, I think about the only possibilities would be the governments of America’s vassal-states in the EU. But they’ve proven themselves so totally incompetent that millions of Europeans may soon die in the outbreak. Since China is the only possible source of financial/medical aid, I doubt they’re denounce China. Or do you think they’ll seek advice from the US in how to avoid epidemics?
America’s main strength these days is in its powerful propaganda. But when the reality of what’s happening in NY and the rest of the country becomes fully apparent, those propaganda organs will lose so much of their credibility, that their influence will greatly diminish.
So you think it’s up to any government to decide between economic damage (lockdown) or no damage (but maybe higher mortality)?
Here’s part of my comment I wrote elsewhere, I’ll copy it here because I’m lazy to make the same points again (it wasn’t very well-written, but, again, I’m lazy):
So most of the economic damage is done by the epidemic (or partly other governments), it’s simply not up to any individual government (not even the federal government of the US) to decide about the economic damage. The only thing they could decide is whether to control the epidemic – do you want economic damage and a pile of bodies, or just the economic damage?
Do you mean that mortality is not very bad? In South Korea it’s 1.7%, in Taiwan 1.5% of all cases so far (with still several active cases who could sadly die yet).
The solution shouldn’t be business-as-usual but business-as-unusual. Still, business-as-unusual is still business and better than no-business-at-all.
I say let business reopen and go into operation, but urge people to use distancing, wear masks, wash hands regularly, and don’t gather in large groups.
Business-as-unusual is what we need.
If you believe that Orthodox Jews are more dangerous than Muslims,
Neither RudyM nor I said they were “more dangerous”. It’s quite telling that you would resort to such shiftiness in language. Very unChristian.
They were just infected early.Lombardy from China otherwise, sSome communities have relatives scattered all across the world.
Well, I’m sure that’s the plan of the Deep State Neocons and what they’re telling Trump, but I don’t think it will work.
Yet Trump, who has been hostile to China since the 1980s, got zero neocon support. Neocons have been more hostile to him than much of the Left. Few neocons have ever shown much sustained interest in China as it distracts from their main concerns in the Middle East and Russia. IIRC in the 1990s they, along with libertardians, dismissed Buchanan as a ‘socialist’ for opposing liberalised trade with China. I’m sure some can be convinced to jump on the bandwagon but Trump’s views on China are more likely to be neorealist (eg. John Mearsheimer) than neocon.
Quick question regarding Luka. Is he popular in Belarus? I am fascinating by your country. You are only one country, which somehow bridge between Rusia and EU.
In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro – the only President of a major democratic polity who continues to insist on treating coronavirus as a nothingburger – has been made into a lame duck, his commands ignored by 24 out of Brazil’s 27 governors and even by his own Health Minister.
You’re still believing what you read in the international media about Brazil, Mr Karlin?
Bolsonaro does not treat coronavirus as a nothingburger. He wants “vertical isolation”: that is, quarantine for the most at-risk groups, especially elderly people. He hints – not much more than that so far – that when things go downhill more stringent measures might be imposed in specific areas of the country.
Let’s remember that Brazil is larger than the contiguous United States and has ~ 7000 cases, concentrated in the populous metropolises of the center-south. Even if this number is too low – and testing has only recently started to ramp up, so it certainly is – it is not “orders of magnitude too low”. Brazilian hospitals have not yet been swamped.
Now, why does Bolsonaro want “only” vertical isolation? Because it’s the only measure that might actually work. A little over half of Brazil’s workforce is employed in the “informal economy” – i.e., they work without papers. These people have no safety net of their own and can be dismissed at will. They WILL NOT respect a full lockdown no matter how many corpses pile up, because they’ll die of hunger within a week if they do. Coronachan is not the only cause of death and less so in the Third World.
What are the state governors doing? They’re proclaiming full lockdowns, which are being flouted by everyone who is not upper middle class or above, but which do disrupt the economy. This allows them to show off to the (100% anti-Bolsonaro) establishment press, to appear as saviors distributing basic needs such as food (creating great aglomerations of people which they themselves have decreed are illegal…), not to speak of enormous opportunities for graft (“This is a nice truck you have here sir, getting food from the farmlands to the cities. But you know it’s forbidden to go outside and drive them. Pity if something happened to it…”).
The choice, then, is not between a “milder, more restricted” quarantine (Bolsonaro’s position) and more rigorous lockdowns. Everyone, even Bolsonaro if you pressed him, would accept that more stringent measures will guarantee better health outcomes – but only in theory. Only if people respect them. Which they won’t, for if they do half the population doesn’t eat. So his “milder” position is the only one that has any chance of actually affecting the course of the epidemic, because it is possible that it be respected. And this is also what the Health Minister Mandetta says, although the Brazilian and international press do their darndest to find a way to say “there is disagreement between him and the president”. There isn’t. They already tried this manoeuver with the vice-president, the minister of the Economy, the minister of Justice… and so far they have always failed.
The icing on the cake is that when the federal government suggested it might declare a state of emergency – which would enable it to legally declare lockdowns around the country – all the media and the establishment politicians raised an uproar: “dictatorship”. Then the state governors started doing just that – something which they don’t have the legal authority to do! Only the federal government is allowed to do that. The Supreme Court is looking sideways, since it is entirely composed by nominees of the previous governments which looted Brazil to the hilt, but the end result is unimaginable legal confusion. Companies cannot (officially) work because of state-government-ordered lockdowns, but since these are illegal, they also cannot stop working in theory (since lock-outs are also illegal). You get the point.
There have already been protests against the state-government-ordered lockdowns in most of the major cities of Brazil. They are growing. There has not been mass looting by the poor, but there will be. Right now, Bolsonaro is growing stronger, not weaker. (This will change when the covid gets going to the hundreds of thousands and the bodies pile up, but this hasn’t happened yet).
In the meanwhile, the Armed Forces and the national laboratories are churning up millions of masks, diagnostic tests and chloroquine, and hospital ventilator production has been going up (now ~1500 per week being produced ). The government has announced a roughly USD 150 billion fiscal stimulus package, a large raise on the existing social programs (that cover about ~50 million people), a special payment for coronavirus emergency (should cover another ~50 million), and the government takeover of a third of the private companies payroll for the duration of the crisis. That’s a lot for a country like Brazil that was just getting over the most serious economic crisis of its entire history (2014-2017) after having been looted to the hilt. Far from being a lame duck, Bolsonaro managed to get all that done in a couple of weeks.
Bolsonaro is betting on revamped production of health essentials and support to the poor to get him through the thick of the crisis. And trying to guarantee that the economy is not disrupted to the point that there are shortages of essential products in the cities (90% of the population is urban). To do this, he’s beating up the governors, which are the now target of popular outrage. It’s a risky bet, for once the pandemic really gets going no one knows who the majority of the people will blame, but Bolsonaro has positioned himself as well as he could possibly have. I wouldn’t take any odds, but it just might work. And it’s not as if he has any reasonable alternative anyway. Brazil – and Latin America, or the Third World in general – cannot sustain a full lockdown even if it wanted to.
“ Do you mean that mortality is not very bad?”
I think excess mortality from CV in the USA for the under 55 population will be under 10,000. For the elderly it will probably be worse, but much of that will be just pulling forward the deaths of sickly comorbids by a year or two, similar to a particularly bad flu season.
In other cases CV will just be the opportunistic infection that kills someone who would have died from another bug.
“ do you want economic damage and a pile of bodies, or just the economic damage”
You make a better argument than other shutdowner, but it seems to me that excess deaths is the variable that won’t be changed much, but economic damage is.
Well, the correct herd immunity strategy is to warn at risk people (older than 60, asthmatics, etc.) to self-isolate. So the initial 1% would be far lower and you would not get near 40m hospitalizations. Of course this depends on the at-risk following through. Maybe it would take a few months before they can come out once the virus has swept through.
Since most of these people don’t work, you get little economic impact, no loss of civil liberties, and achieve herd immunity.
“Fed Temporarily Eases Capital Requirements for Big Banks” reads the Wall Street Journal headline. Fed does this today, Treasury does that tomorrow in response to ongoing developments on the economic front. No one questions these decisions as they are regarded as sensible responses to an evolving event.
But let Trump modify or reverse his perspective, stance or policy and our press and his Democratic critics keel haul him. They accuse him of not knowing what he is doing, of being an ignoramus, of being erratic. They react as though he should have a crystal ball and be all knowing.
As they see it, he is guilty of poor leadership because he modifies his views and changes his approach. It scares them that Daddy doesn’t have all the answers and is, himself, developing understanding as he goes along. But this is completely natural as the Fed and Treasury behavior shows.
Just shows that there is a double standard. Once again, Democrats behave shamefully and display no self-awareness or remorse. Sociopaths.
I wonder how perceptions would change, if one simply reversed the numbers. That is if Jews had the same global population, geographic spread, and same presence in the West, and same rate of influx into it.
If the Jews had invaded Spain. If it had been them attacking the walls of Vienna.
it isn’t clear to me who he is even supposed to represent in Brazil.
The two-thirds majority which holds very socially conservative values (and has enormous difficulties in living them, just as the Bible Belt Americans do). These people have been locked out of the political system since the 1985 settlement which restored “democracy”, in which two leftist parties divided up the electorate between them and blocked any more socially conservative voices out of the major parties and the Executive. Some got a refuge in the Legislative and managed to rein in some of the more outlandish leftist ideas (such as abortion), but we got all the rest – and, especially, we got a criminal justice system so obviously tailored to protect criminals that it is hard for foreigners to believe.
The biggest economic crisis in Brazil’s history, and the largest corruption scandal in the history of mankind, together, brought this arrangement down and allowed for Bolsonaro to be elected as an outsider. Bolsonaro does not have a party and does not have “his people” to put in the government. He decided on his VP nominee the night before the deadline because he didn’t have anyone even for that position. That’s just how far off the beaten path he was.
However, conservative white Brazilians I would imagine are a very small minority of the Brazilian population, so it’s demographically impossible that he was elected by the white vote alone in Brazil.
There is no such thing as “the white vote” in Brazil. Race is just not as salient as in the U.S., not to speak of South Africa. Five hundred years of Catholicism and miscegenation took care of that. Not to say it is irrelevant, much less nonexistent. But not as salient as you might expect. No Brazilian who doesn’t read the international press would understand what you could possibly mean by a phrase such as “the white vote”.
Brazil doesn’t seem like the sort of country that would democratically elect someone like Bolsonaro and it would explain why most Brazilian states are ignoring his demands.
Exactly 180 degrees backwards. The path to power in Brazil is social conservative in values and leftist in economics. Lula might have gone for this position if he had reined in the radicals in the Left, but he failed to do that when he could. Bolsonaro is exactly who the Brazilian people would elect if given a chance. He is only mildly off since he has now allied with the libertarian technocrats, which are needed to recover the Brazilian economy from the festival of mismanagement and corruption of the previous governments, but once that is done (and his first year of goverment had a good start at it, now being derailed by covid) all bets are off.
The states are ignoring his demands because their leaders are all opposed to the government. And they are all opposed to the government because Bolsonaro didn’t have a party nor people of his own before getting to the presidency by a previously-unimaginable confluence of factors. They want to pull him down in order to continue “business as usual”. This isn’t really possible anymore. They just might overthrow Bolsonaro, or perhaps make it impossible for him to actually rule. But then what will come next will be an even bigger shock.
Priss, your cleverness with words always provides you with bright, quirky insights.
I keep waiting for the mass hysteria to end, but there doesn’t seem to be a short supply of it.
What does it take to convince you idiots it’s literally THE FLU ?
Where’s the pile of bodies you morons keep predicting ?
The bodies are conspicuously failing to pile up.
The only apocalypse coming is the one you’re inflicting upon yourselves.
Let’s suppose you stop being a moron who pulls numbers out of his ass.
If this is true then Lucky Strike is indeed fortuitously named.
The original British policy in a nutshell.
Are the chances for a secession in Brazil and unlikely as they are in the USA?
“But when the reality of what’s happening in NY and the rest of the country becomes fully apparent, those propaganda organs will lose so much of their credibility, that their influence will greatly diminish.” – Perhaps you are appreciating enough the value of trust built on openness and transparency and you are forgetting about the natural empathy people feel for those who suffer. China squandered a great opportunity to portray itself as a victim during this epidemic by fearing to show its vulnerability and mistakes. It is in the genetic code of authoritarian systems that they only know how to project the image of strength to their own people and abroad: we do not make mistakes, our sh*t does not stink, USSR stronk, Germany stronk, China stronk, even Putin Russia stronk.
In the eyes of the world opinion the Apollo 1 fire was not a setback, quite the opposite while secretiveness and coverups by Soviets who only showed their successes post facto did not earn them much sympathy. People around the world were rooting for the fumbling Americans. How many American rockets blew up on the launching pad while being televised? Have you seen one Soviet mishap?
Latin America does not need to be hostile to China. They were not hostile towards Germany and Japan yet in the end many joined the Allies and some of them even sent token troops to Europe. And Africa more than any other place on Earth can be easily bought by bribing and intimidating its small elites. Then always there are embargoes and naval blockades that America can impose and enforce.
Let us not forget either that Brasil is a major industrial power. Brasil has sophisticated industry. Brasil even has a mature aerospace industry that exports combat aircraft to the United States.
Anyways, I suspect that when the hysteria winds down, what it means to be first or third world is going to have to get a serious looking over. Italy clearly needs to go into the third world category. Argentina is going to go from rivaling Angola in GDP to being a failed state with a Somalia like GDP. Uruguay’s alignment with Brasil and its compliant population seem to have it looking good without mandatory lockdowns. A mandatory lockdown with police checks here would actually increase transmission opportunities. Luis Lacalle Pou just has to hold course as a more sympathetic foil to Bolsonaro (scale lets him get away with this).
Most of Europe and North America appear to be in the tumbler and only time can reveal who falls into the first or third world. I’ve not been following too far outside my neighborhood, but stores here have shelves stocked with lines everywhere shorter than they would normally be.
I suspect the “civilized west” can’t actually afford the extreme control measures they are taking any more than the “developing world” can. This time next year Bolsonaro may look like a damned sage.
Probably for the family to sell at inflated prices, otherwise you wouldn’t need to buy hundreds.
Masks in Europe will be considered higher quality than ones in China, so I assume with especially higher demand there than local ones.
Ok, Ron Unz states 1% as the initial expected death rate. Since something like 95% of deaths have been of people over 60 years old, let’s say it’s 0.1% for those under 60.
We get much fewer hospitalizations but still a lot. So let’s say the hospital system collapses and nobody gets any care.
The question, is how many lives are hospitals saving? Let’s assume somewhat wildly that 50% of the dead have been diagnosed as being in critical or serious condition. Cause we assume that most (maybe 60% but probably an underestimate) would go to the hospital and at some point 90% of ones who would go on to die would be labeled as serious or critical. And let’s say that from the time diagnosed as such it takes an average of 1 week to die. So if the hospitals have zero effect we should expect:
deaths/2 = num critical/serious conditions 1 week ago.
Deaths/2 = 25.5k, critical/serious March 26=19k.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-cases/
I think this is generous to the hospitals cause probably of the reported deaths a lot more go to the hospital and get diagnosed as critical/serious. But if the average time to die is longer than 1 week, it means the hospitals are doing better.
So the hospitals are not that effective which jives with what we have heard about the efficacy of respirators and with things like what Robin Hanson says about medical care being largely about virtual signalling.
Maybe the hospitals are doing a lot for people with mild symptoms. But what would that be? If it’s anitbiotics for secondary symptoms, we could have a hotline for emergency delivery of azithromycin which is mostly harmless AFAIK.
So let’s double the 0.1% CFR to 0.2%. At 60% infection rate, that’s 396k deaths in the USA.
I think in most estimates I’ve erred on the side of more deaths. But this all depends on the at risks self-isolating.
Secession in Brazil is very very unlikely.
If it came about, it would be something like a black swan event – completely unpredictable chain of events.
There are strong regional “nationalisms” in many parts of Brazil (and in others parts this is almost nonexistent; it is complicated). The southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul, even was an independent country for ten years in the 19th century and has a strongly differentiated culture. The richest state, São Paulo, also has a reasonably strong “autonomist” tradition, for obvious reasons. Some parts of Northeast Brazil do also, ever since colonial times.
But I do not see anyone willing to make any sacrifices for secession under almost any conditions whatsoever in any part of Brazil. I suspected if you polled some regions, you would get apparently good support – say 30% – for secession. Maybe a bare majority in parts of southern Brazil. But if you polled the same people if they were willing to put their “life, liberty, possessions and sacred honor” on the line for it, I would guess much less than 10% would.
Another important detail is the position of the Armed Forces, which are strongly indoctrinated into the belief that they held Brazil together throughout the more difficult times in Brazilian history (and this is largely true). They would have to be neutralized and it’s hard to imagine how this could come about. Also, the more strongly differentiated regional cultures with a more martial flavor contribute a disproportionate share of the officer corps (a bit like the situation with the Southern U. S.).
I remember seeing estimates that the southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul, which based on past history and regional identity would be the likeliest candidate for wide support for secession, and which has about ~7 percent of the national population, contributes from one quarter to a third of the entire officer corps of the Army. This may be outdated nowadays, but not by all that much.
So, no. No secession is to be expected.
Look, roughly 100% of the Neocons were ferociously hostile to Trump during his insurgent campaign. But once he became president, they quickly gained control over most of his national security apparatus after purging his erstwhile supporters.
John Bolton was National Security Advisor, Pompeo is Secretary of State, Elliot Abrams is another top Trump official. Those are the “Deep State Neocons” to whom I’m referring.
Now you might think it “odd” that Trump put some of his leading critics in charge of his administration. I think it’s “odd” as well…but that’s what he did…
Meanwhile, Julian Assange, who probably played a crucial role in getting Trump elected, is on his way to prison. Roger Stone is already there.
Interesting…
I hadn’t heard about it, but apparently the Russian Foreign Ministry has been putting out strong hints in Tass about the “true origins” of the Coronavirus:
https://indianpunchline.com/russia-quizzes-us-on-coronavirus-parentage/
Suppose, as seems likely, that the Coronavirus devastates America’s economy and inflicts huge human losses upon our society. Suppose also that there are growing worldwide suspicions we’re suffering the blowback of our own bioweapon attack due to our own total incompetence.
Under that scenario, sympathy for America may not be very widespread, regardless of the quality of our media propaganda organs
Since that would be the most stupid possible response it’s probably what will happen, in the US at least.
Americans will respond as they always do, by wanting to bomb somebody.
There’s no question about that. America is already dangerously crazy and gets crazier by the day.
An unpleasant thought. It’s more likely that the US will blunder its way into a nuclear war. I remember seeing Dr Strangelove years ago and thinking it was a silly exaggeration. Now I think it underestimated American insanity. Those Chinese want our precious bodily fluids.
Sad but true. The United States has become a rabid dog.
And it’s not entirely the fault of wicked elites. Plenty of ordinary Americans see the solution to any problem as being to bomb or invade other countries.
The end of the Cold War had a disastrous effect on the US. It’s now obvious that the bad guys won the Cold War.
I agree, though for different reasons: I would truly love to see the shitshow of an uncontrolled epidemic. I don’t want the “but will anyone think of the Economy?” crowd have any credibility when the next pandemic hits.
The only shitshow you’re gonna see is the current mass hysteria.
The USSR froze borders within its sphere of interest, and there’s no reason to think a future hegemon won’t behave the same way. Hegemons love stability within their respective spheres of influence, and obviously want to prevent wars. The only issue is the increase in instability, contested areas between two (or more) great powers might see… interesting times.
With or without lockdown? What do you base this number on?
How do you know this?
Why not? Bergamo is not a very good example of an uncontrolled epidemic (it’s been in lockdown for several weeks now), but the raw mortality rate is quadruple of what it would be without the epidemic. I’d find it hard to believe that these would mostly have died anyway within a year or two.
In Bergamo four times more people died in March than in an average month. This with a lockdown. Not only were local hospitals full, but they had difficulties disposing of the bodies.
January-March 2019 deaths in Italy – 185,967
January-March 2020 deaths in Italy – roughly 170,000
Stop shitting yourself, it’s starting to smell.
There seem to be a lot of people assuming that it is possible. It’s seems to be a matter of faith. Those people have to believe it because they’re going to look very bad and very foolish if it turns out that herd immunity is a fantasy.
He spoke specifically of Bergamo, not the whole of Italy. I’m embarrassed for you that I have to explain this, but corona outbreaks are concentrated in regionalized hotspots, yet the whole country is on lockdown. Lockdowns save lives from non-corona related deaths, like car accidents. Do you understand the problems with your quoted stats, or do you need even more help?
If you can smell it, you’re not keeping proper distance.
I’m starting to pray for an actual plague to hit, just so morons like you go extinct
I’ll take it then that you cede the point. Anyway, it sounds like you’re having a very tough go of it. I sincerely wish you and your family good health, prosperity, and the strength to get through these trying times.
So we have this horrible plague that sticks to everything and is gonna kill everyone.
Yet somehow, it’s magically happening only in those tiny spots in which the television cameras are.
When this is over and you’ve stopped shitting yourself, you’re gonna have to take a good hard look in the mirror and admit you’re nowhere near as smart as you thought you were.
Whether I’m smart or not is not up to me to judge. The Dunning-Kruger effect would prevent me from realizing if I were dumb anyway. So I will keep being happy believing I’m smart. Have a nice day!
Even in this highly exceptional case, we need context. What good is any data without context?
On how many died vs. “an average month”: Which average month? Does “average month” mean YearlyDeaths/12? If so, this is already problematic since winter months always have higher mortality than summer months. A better comparison would be: MarchDeaths vs. PeakFluMonthDeaths or recent years.
If even Bergamo, seen as a worst-case scenario, is at/around the flu-death spikes of the 2010s, the entire CoronaHysteria has been a big, big mistake. The bloodthirsty media has long wanted it to be 25x or 50x as bad as the worst flu, and what they are getting is more like 1x the worst flu of the 2010s (i.e., equal to the flu peaks of the 2010s). An honestly made mistake, but a mistake. An overreaction.
It turns out we DO have some very good Total DeathRate data, for deaths that occurred by about March 26, at the national level for most West European countries (https://www.euromomo.eu/outputs/zscore_country_total.html). Here it is:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUpfxveXYAAYu9y.png
As I wrote yesterday about this new data, but which anyone can see for themselves:
The Italian Apocalypse, not in sight.
When looking at these graphs, note also the important fact that 2019-20 flu season had been one of the mildest in many years in most countries, with almost no excess deaths; the excess deaths in the past weeks are as a slight statistical correction. This is what the data is saying.
The USSR annexed large areas of Europe, including attacking countries like Finland for no good reason at all.
I would claim that the U.S. is in a unique position due to its geography, population, and size that makes it behave in ways different to most other powers. The idea that another hegemon would emerge which would behave in the same way as the U.S. I find implausible.
The USSR didn’t annex anything after 1945. It’s highly unlikely it would have annexed anything later on, had it become a global hegemon.
And then the USA did annex huge areas until it reached its present size, before becoming the global hegemon.
So stability of borders after hegemony has been reached is a likely feature of the world under any hegemon. The only issue is that to get there, we’d have a period of instability, while things would be in flux.
You don’t seem to be aware that basically all the uptick in Italian deaths is happening in Lombardy, a province of perhaps 20% of the Italian population. Even there, it’s concentrated in a few places, so not the whole province is affected that much. And it was enough not only to produce the uptick in deaths visible for the whole country (which includes places like Naples and Sicily with hardly any corona deaths), but to overwhelm the hospitals in much of the country (you realize that now they are transporting people with pneumonia to other places, not only in Italy, but now also in Germany?), because these pneumonia illnesses last way longer than the regular flu.
Had they let it unchecked, deaths would be off the charts, as is obvious to anyone who thinks this through. (Hint: it’s not rocket science.)
That’s certainly true.
The problem we have is that some people decided at the start that this was going to be the worst disaster in history and they’re not interested in any evidence that contradicts this. And some people wanted it to be no worse than ‘flu and they’re not interested in any evidence that contradicts this.
Some people wanted to believe that the economy could be completely trashed and would somehow magically come back to life and they’re not interested in any evidence that contradicts this. Some people wanted to believe that the economy would be permanently wrecked and they’re not interested in any evidence that contradicts this.
Cranks and believers in conspiracy theories look for confirmation of their crazy ideas and they’re not interested in any evidence that contradicts this. It’s all Trump’s fault! It’s all the Democrats’ fault! It’s all about humidity! It was an evil Chinese communist plot! It was a CIA plot! Chloroquine is a magical miracle cure!
People’s beliefs about CV are based on emotion and their own political prejudices and their own personal axes to grind. They’re not interested in the truth.