As data has crept in over the past few months, it has become incontrovertibly clear what we already kind of knew since the Princess Diamond days – that IFR is ~1%.
Consequently, unless Corona mortality “hotspots” were a figment of our collective imaginations, the percentage of people who have been infected with the novel coronavirus in most places around the world, even in hard-hit countries, are still in the single digit percentage points (often low single digit). Outside a few towns in Northern Italy, the hallowed “herd immunity” is still a mirage.
Spain
Estudio Nacional de sero-Epidemiología de la Infección por SARS-CoV-2 en España (ENE-Covid), Ministerio de Sanidad, Consumo y Bienestar Social.
El Pais: Antibody study shows just 5% of Spaniards have contracted the coronavirus. “Five percent is the equivalent of 2,350,000 cases. If there were around 27,100 deaths, that means that the fatality rate is between 1 and 1.2%.”
Though note that Spain’s excess deaths outnumber official COVID-19 deaths by 25% (see NYT), so real IFR could be 1.4%.
France
Salje, Henrik, Cécile Tran Kiem, Noémie Lefrancq, Noémie Courtejoie, Paolo Bosetti, Juliette Paireau, Alessio Andronico, et al. 2020. “Estimating the Burden of SARS-CoV-2 in France.” Science, May.
Projects 4.4% of French population to have been infected by May 11, with an IFR of 0.7%.
Italy
Davide Piffer: “I calculated IFR by AGE group using excess deaths and IR from serological data for 2 worst hit towns in Italy. This is likely an upper bound as hospitals and nursing homes were totally unprepared since they were hit first. Here are the results (percentages).” So, ~1.5%.
Modi, Chirag, Vanessa Boehm, Simone Ferraro, George Stein, and Uros Seljak. 2020. “How Deadly Is COVID-19? A Rigorous Analysis of Excess Mortality and Age-Dependent Fatality Rates in Italy.” Epidemiology. medRxiv.
This recent Berkeley study calculated that the Population Fatality Rate (PFR) is 0.26% in Lombardia, Italy – and 0.58% in Bergamo, the very epicenter of Italy’s outbreak. Note that this is not the IFR, since even there, far from everyone would have been infected – as such, they merely constitute a lower bound.
Sweden
Josh Michaud (Foreign Affairs): Sweden’s Coronavirus Strategy Should Not Be the World’s
Independent modelers believe four percent to seven percent of the country’s population has been infected to date, not much different from their estimates for France, Italy, Spain, and the United States, which range from four to nine percent. For the city of Stockholm, two seroprevalence studies conducted by Swedish universities in April and early May found that 7.5 percent and ten percent of people tested there had SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. Finally, based on the reported deaths in Stockholm County (1,855), and Sweden’s own COVID-19 infection fatality rate estimate (0.6 percent), it is possible to generate a crude estimate that 12 or 13 percent of residents in the Stockholm region have been infected to date.
So, IFR ~0.6%.
USA
UPDATE May 23: Imperial College Report 23 released today, estimated IFR = ~0.8-1.0% across most US states, with 4.1% spread in USA.
New York State has 12.3% seroprevalence, so IFR ~0.8%.
Analogous results in Boston, where ~10% seroprevalence with IFR ~0.8%.
Wilson, Linus. 2020. “SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19, Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) Implied by the Serology, Antibody, Testing in New York City.” estimates IFR of 0.86.
Steve Sailer: Only 0.72% of Baseball Employees Have COVID Antibodies, Implying Herd Immunity Is Far Off
Global Meta-analyses
Meyerowitz-Katz, Gideon, and Lea Merone. 2020. “A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Published Research Data on COVID-19 Infection-Fatality Rates.” Epidemiology. medRxiv.
This very recent, as yet unreviewed, meta-analysis puts global IFR at 0.75, with authors pointing out there is high heterogeneity across regions.
Ioannidis, John. 2020. “The Infection Fatality Rate of COVID-19 Inferred from Seroprevalence Data.” Infectious Diseases (except HIV/AIDS). medRxiv.
This meta-analysis with the most optimistic IFR estimate that I have come across gives 0.28%. Studies looked at in this Google Spreadsheet.
Princess Diamond
Russell, Timothy W., Joel Hellewell, Christopher I. Jarvis, Kevin van Zandvoort, Sam Abbott, Ruwan Ratnayake, Cmmid Covid-Working Group, et al. 2020. “Estimating the Infection and Case Fatality Ratio for Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Using Age-Adjusted Data from the Outbreak on the Diamond Princess Cruise Ship, February 2020.” Euro Surveillance: Bulletin Europeen Sur Les Maladies Transmissibles = European Communicable Disease Bulletin 25 (12).
IFR of 1.3%; not age-adjusted (cruise passengers way older than population average), but also not everybody had died yet.
Russell, Timothy W., Joel Hellewell, Christopher I. Jarvis, Kevin van Zandvoort, Sam Abbott, Ruwan Ratnayake, Cmmid Covid-Working Group, et al. 2020. “Estimating the Infection and Case Fatality Ratio for Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Using Age-Adjusted Data from the Outbreak on the Diamond Princess Cruise Ship, February 2020.” Euro Surveillance: Bulletin Europeen Sur Les Maladies Transmissibles = European Communicable Disease Bulletin 25 (12).
Age-adjusted estimate for Princess Diamond IFR was 1.6% as of April.
UK
BBC: One in 400 people in England has coronavirus, tests suggest.
China
Verity, Robert, Lucy C. Okell, Ilaria Dorigatti, Peter Winskill, Charles Whittaker, Natsuko Imai, Gina Cuomo-Dannenburg, et al. 2020. “Estimates of the Severity of Coronavirus Disease 2019: A Model-Based Analysis.” The Lancet Infectious Diseases, March.
IFR of 0.66%, mostly in China.
Riou, Julien, Anthony Hauser, Michel J. Counotte, and Christian L. Althaus. 2020. “Adjusted Age-Specific Case Fatality Ratio during the COVID-19 Epidemic in Hubei, China, January and February 2020.” medRxiv, March, 2020.03.04.20031104.
IFR of 3.0% in Hubei, China and 2.4% in Northern Italy.
Other
Ben Gardiner: Calculating The Death Rate Isn’t Actually That Hard
This all means the fact multiple teams from Oxford have made low and incorrect IFR guesses centrepieces of their research is very poor. As a result, sadly, there is no way that 30–50% of the population have had it, or that herd immunity is just a few weeks away, or even that “excess deaths” are likely to be 35–70k.
Henrik Jarlov‘s summary of global serology data in Google Sheets.
Lyman Stone: “Useful thread showing that most sero studies confirm an IFR in the 0.5%-1.5% range.”
Here is The 5th installment of COVID-19 Literature updates with @Ericmeyerowitz and me, covering 5/6-5/18.
Watch here: https://t.co/OzDgKRz2Pi
Key points and slides below (full slide deck at the end)
— Aaron Richterman, MD (@AaronRichterman) May 18, 2020
The case for low spread coupled with IFR = ~1% is now overwhelming.
Incidentally, 1% is what I estimated in the earliest days (Jan 29). I likewise firmly dismissed the theories based on underpowered/unrepresentative initial seroprevalence tests (most notable the Stanford study) that a large part, or most, of many European and American populations had already been infected that were in vogue in March/April.
I will subsequently not waste words on caveats or substantiation when using this 1% figure.
Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.
If you are new to my work, start here.
What is the IFR?
AK: Infection Fatality Rate.
To summarise: corona infects less than 5-10% of people, more under ideal virus circumstances in cold, dumpy ski resorts or in NY-London tenements. Among infected it kills about 1%, almost all over 65, with those over 80 having a 10-20% chance of dying.
And they shut down the world, because ‘corona‘. This is a policy of ‘do anything to protect the old’ even if it means enslaving the young, a gerontocracy that would be unthinkable in the past.
It is dawning on even the most fanatical corona fans that the data won’t change. Now we hear about a ‘second wave’ – why only one more? Or that the restrictions stopped a disaster – one of those ‘what if’ historical speculations. But the best one lately is that ‘we didn’t know anything, nobody knew‘.
Right, who knew? One can justify anything by embracing ignorance: “I know nothing, but you must do what I say.” This is one is better than WMDs, lier loans, or Putin personally flipping votes in Michigan in 2016…West is really growing intellectually. I can’t wait for the next one…
Maybe the antibody tests are all overshoots, and a majority of false positives? So only 5 percent at most of NYC is infected? And the real IFR is closer to 3 to 5 percent? I mean they only found that 2 to 3 percent of Wuhan’s population is infected based on hospital sample.
Cultures that believe in sacrificing the elderly to save the economy are barbaric in nature, nothing different from cultures that practice pedophilia and human sacrifice, and the people there are nothing but savages like the Aztecs.
Old story: Coronavirus spreads EXPONENTIALLY!!!1! and that’s why we are all doomed.
New story: Coronavirus “spread low” and that’s why we are all doomed.
That is in 2-3 months since initial infections and it was enough to completely overwhelm organized healthcare in some places and strain very hard in most places, then all those loathed protective measures kick in and the spread slows because of it. If there were no such any measures taken anywhere in the world growth would become explosively exponential very soon and those 5% would increase tenfold.
True.
This goes too far. Aztecs were ripping out beating hearts and wearing costumes of human skins, you know. Gruesome death was the point and it was celebrated.
This is just greed leading to rationalizations leading to unnecessary deaths.
Do you think that massive use of PPE by everyone can largely prevent widespread transmission while still enabling societies to be open? That is, might it be unnecessary to shut everything down as long as everyone wears masks?
I had been under the impression you were brighter. Epidemics always spread exponentially, though the exponent varies.
I never claimed that we are “all doomed”, whatever that even means. Go knock over some more straw men.
Well the Chinese are saying that only 5 percent of Wuhan is infected, I doubt whether Stockholm or NYC is more heavily infected than that, and likely less.
Why do Western countries have to do months long lockdowns? Based on a chart of industrial production, the Chinese lockdown only lasted for about a month or so in most places, with Wuhan getting locked down for 2 months.
Why exactly is ~1% overwhelming? Where would it need to be in order to be considered negligible?
AK: “The case for” is overwhelming, not the actual IFR.
Because China’s lockdown in Wuhan was more hardcore than anything in the West.
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/1245455974753808384
OT but the IQ post makes it useless to compare data where IQ scores between countries are near, it also makes it useless to compare whether East Asian countries really have higher IQ than White countries like Austria or the Netherlands, given that the margin of error within a single country is 10 points or more, no better than sheer quackery.
So if the actual IFR is ~1%, how would you characterize this number? Is this better than the 0.62 that you mention in #14? I just want to make sure.
AK: That isn’t the IFR, it’s the r0 – see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number
A lockdown in a lot of places seems to be justified on the basis of the fact that even if you are middle aged, the chances of hospitalization are still around 5 percent, and in the US going to the hospital for a week or weeks can leave you bankrupt.
Related to my previous question, given that the virus is not as easily spread as was feared, how safe would you feel say, on an airplane or a train if you and everyone around you wore masks?
What about if everyone around you wore masks and they were also prescreened (it is understood that prescreening would not catch all cases)?
I’ll still probably stay home until we have a vaccine.
So why did the Chinese cities outside Wuhan only shut down for 16 days and not as strongly as Wuhan and quickly clear the virus?
Thanks for a great list of resources! Incidentally ongoing studies from the COVID-19 stricken USS Roosevelt – a closed ecosystem like the Diamond Princess but with relatively young, fit crew members – should be interesting. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2020/04/23/roosevelt-coronavirus-epidemiology)
A couple of thoughts (and apologize if they may be in some of the links you mentioned):
While it’s good to know what the “average” IFR is, IMO it’s as important from a policy point of view to know what the conditions in which it varies and how much (based on current treatment options) it can vary by. Speaking purely statistically, a mean of 1% with a 95% CI of 0.9-1.1% is significantly different from one of 1% with a 95% CI of 0.01% to 2%.
Here are some factors that we already know significantly impact hospitalizations/mortality:
Inherent Factors:
– Age (easily the biggest known variable for impacting IFR, likely correlated with immune system response)
– Gender (men more susceptible than women (around 30% more?)
– Co-morbidity (correlates with pre-existing damage to tissues throughout the body and sensitivity of receptors/immune response)
– Prior coronavirus history (??? One paper claims that recent infection with coronavirus that causes the common cold may offer cross-reactive antibodies to SARS-Cov-2 https://www.lji.org/news-events/news/post/first-detailed-analysis-of-immune-response-to-sars-cov-2-bodes-well-for-covid-19-vaccine-development/)
– Blood groups (??? Contradictory/not fully vetted data claiming for example those with ABO antigen type A more susceptible to infection progressing than type O, B, AB)
External Factors
– Early detection and treatment before severe symptoms
– Medical care availability
– Tailored treatment cocktails (evolving but reports that each country/region gaining experience on identifying optimal treatment regimens depending on patient)
– Optimal use of ventilators (reports that though low blood oxygen is first presented, automatic intubating may often make things worse)
– Lethality/Infectiousness of different strains (?? Non-peer reviewed studies claim for example at least three major strains that differ in infectiousness/severity which are found dominant in different regions.
There may be more (eg BCG vaccine (a theory I don’t buy for reasons too long to go into here); past use of nicotine etc; ethnic genotypes etc).
But the point is, based on even current, rapidly evolving knowledge, IFR varies widely based on known/speculative factors, which should inform response policy from severity/types of lockdowns/social restrictions to medical responses in addition to efforts to prevent infection in the first place.
I don’t get it. 1.5% IFR is for 65+ only. Higher for over 65. But what percentage of society can be 85+ years old? The IFR for under 14 is 0 and 15-64 is 0.08-0.23. For average IFR of 1.5%, the average age of the society would have to be 65.
Is it because only old people are catching it mainly? That the I in IFR is average age of 65?
AK: No, see the table to the right, Piffer gave an “All” IFR of 1.21% for Alzano and 2.06% for Nembro.
Considering that it is the millennials, zoomers, and the Gen x to an extent who are responsible for the rise of globohomo, it is people of your ilk who deserve to die. I read that the Chinese used to cut up alive into 100 pieces the children who kill their own parents.
The culture that believes in sacrificing the many for the few will discover it has sacrified both.
Let us talk about this again, basically, how much of international travel is really necessary, the cheap labor travel? White pedos vacationing in Thailand? A lot of mass tourism just leads to places like Queenstown, Kyoto, and Venice being trashed, driving the locals out, and losing their local culture, and 95 percent of business travel are really junkets that can be replaced by videoconferencing.
Given that the current crap state of Western culture is that responsibility of SJW millennials and zoomer maybe it is they that should be sacrificed? How much will the world lose anyway? The world was much better off before they came here. They are the ones who are responsible for things going off the deep end the past decade or so. Look at how much better Star Trek the next generation was compared to the crap now by JJ Abrams.
I liked very much the paper by the Berkeley physicists: Modi, Chirag, Vanessa Boehm, Simone Ferraro, George Stein, and Uros Seljak. Epidemiologists and all kinds of statisticians could learn from them how to write transparently. One of the reason there are so many papers written poorly is that the authors often have to obfuscate as they do not really understand what they are doing. People can be taught how to use statistical software packages like SAS, SPSS, R w/o really understanding the underlying mathematical routines.
Deaths caused by CO-19 is still hard to verify. There were two cases in the district of Constance (282 000 inhabitants). I know (and have spoken to) relatives of both of them. – Both were ca. 80 years old and had severe comorbidities. Same is true for a Dr. who died not long ago – lots of comorbidities and trust in homeopathic medicine, too.
Now Co-19 is hardly spreading. People do social distancing though and wear masks when shopping or in public transport. I don’t expect the number of deaths to rise much more in summer. Autumn and winter – I hesitate. But I’d risk a bet that the number of deaths caused by CO-19 will continue to be quite low.
I’d agree, that maybe 10 months of life lost on average for every CO-19 related death might be true. All in all, the big danger seems to be a thing of the past, whereas a serious recession might well be waiting for us just around the bend.
This calculator from EveristHealth (= SanfordHealth?) estimates one’s risk as a function of age and current health.
https://profile.covid-age.com/calculator/
How wrong can you be. You do realise:
1. infection rates were declining before the lockdowns
2. countries without lockdowns have followed a similar path in terms of infection rates.
3. Countries (like Spain) that went back to work have not had a second wave
Mandatory masking and some restrictions on massive gatherings have been effective in reducing SARS-2’s reproductive rate below 1 wherever they have been imposed. The most important aspects of economic life can proceed with only those modifications. Then if a vaccine arrives, those so inclined can go back to living beyond their means, or ticking off bucket-list locales, or however they spend their time so as to avoid accomplishment in their lives.
I’d caution you to rethink your belief that China actually “crushed” corona.
There is plenty of evidence that the Chines government simply realised coronavirus was not that dangerous and decided to reopened. Of course it is not in the CCPs interest to tell public this so the deaths are just chalked up where possibke to the other medical issues (the opposite of what happens in the West).
One study cited here but there are others
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/12/leaked-chinese-coronavirus-database-number-cases/
i don’t think the Chinese actually did clear the virus. Plenty of evidence all their stats are lies
I think this
is formally correct from the definition of R0. However do we really know the value of R0? All the mathematical methods to retrieve R0 from the daily cases or daily deaths profiles need the assumption on what is the time duration of one ‘generation’. So I would say that the absolute values of R0 can be questionable also because there is lots of noise in the data but obviously if two different profiles have different relative slopes the one with steeper one has larger R0 on the way up and smaller R0 on the way down.
Among some more important things*, the Great Coronahysteria of 2020-? has been revealing in one interesting way: who’s fooled and who isn’t by a simple trick? If you want to keep fear going, as our rulers observably do, it turned out to be a matter of confusing “died with” and “died of” the virus. Even Ferguson, lockdown proponent par excellence (but not for himself!), conceded that as many as two thirds of deaths are “with” not “of”. Maybe it’s 90%. Maybe it’s virtually 100%.
An interesting curiosity is that, at least in the UK, the official releases of death counts do not claim “died of” but the mass media usually present them as such. So the gullible public think there is a “coronavirus death toll” of 36,000 (as of yesterday). What is it really? Has the virus, alone, infecting a previously healthy person, actually every killed anyone? Not a question to be asked by a government-paid scientist who values his job! More surprisingly, not one asked by some commentators who present themselves as questioning and willing to think for themselves.
Focusing on total IFR is a red herring. What matters is who falls into the 40–70% share of the population needed to get to herd immunity.
We now have decent data on this from Sweden.
On May 3, about 380,225* Swedes aged 20–60 had corona antibodies [1]. Of these, about 316** had died as of May 21 [2]. IFR for this group, then, is about 0.083%. Similarly, IFR for the under-20s is 0.0%***.
I agree that the spread of the virus seems less advanced than hoped. I would put the true figure of total infected Stockholmers somewhere between Michaud’s 12–13% and Tegnell’s current estimate of 20%. Note, however, that projecting the final death toll from these figures still gives a (very rough) total IFR of 0.36%****, which I wouldn’t say is very near your estimate of 1.0%. And if we can keep the over-65s from catching the virus in high numbers, the final IFR will be far lower still.
There is also the question of how well these antibody tests measure the actual infection rate. From an interview with a Swedish immunologist commenting on the recent antibody survey:
** 8 + 12 + 37 + 119 + 140 (half the figure for the 60–69 group, so the true figure will no doubt be lower) = 316
*** 0 / [0.047 x 2,347,000] = 0
**** 1,855 x [60/13] x [10,000,000 / 2,377,081] = 36,017.0245
Epidemiology uses R0 for an intial reproductive rate when a pathogen first invades a naive host population. Re is the designation for later when immunity begins to exist and, for human beings in the current pandemic, host behavior changes.
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/when-will-it-be-over-an-introduction-to-viral-reproduction-numbers-r0-and-re/
My understanding is that people had to a large extent locked themselves down (including in Sweden) prior to the official lockdown, and then they kept breaking the official lockdown rules to some extent, so that the official lockdown had very little effect.
I half agree with you here. It’s certainly the policy, but I’m not sure it’s actually boomers driving it. Sailer notwithstanding, the most hysterical proponents of this house arrest seem to be millenial women. Almost boomers I know have the ability to put this into some kind of perspective. It kind of makes sense as even they’ve got a 90%+ chance of surviving this thing (it’s silents who is deadly to) and, if i were in their shoes, if rather roll the dice on it than spend the 10-20 quality adjusted life years I’d have left in some impoverished socially distanced dystopia.
It depends on the model. Many models include public measures and the like in R0, while others treat them as a variable of its own.
One of the things the map of Spain makes clear is that herd immunity ain’t gonna happen. The disease is just too feeble…
More broadly, the virus simply is refusing to conform to any of our expectations.
For example, you can pick out Madrid — the 13.5 — and Barcelona — 7.1. Fine: the virus is most contagious in big cities.
…so what about Valencia? It’s either the 2.3 or the 2.8. Seville?
Maybe it’s mobility. Fine — so the Canaries should be sky-high. People from all over Europe must have been swooping in and out of there for a few days in the sun whilst this disease was stalking the globe, unseen. Not to mention what all those degenerate Europeans get up to on vacation. It doesn’t even bear thinking about…
Whoops. The Canaries are really low.
I suppose some paradigm could be constructed to explain it all — but that’s exactly my point. We obviously understand very little about how this disease works — and yet our betters are all too sure what we should do.
‘i don’t think the Chinese actually did clear the virus. Plenty of evidence all their stats are lies’
Definitely. To a greater extent than any other state except perhaps Israel, when China makes a statement, it tells you exactly one thing:
what it is that they would like you to believe. Plausibility aside, the claims of the Chinese government bear no other necessary relation to the truth at all.
I had an investment advisor — who was Chinese herself — who used to rant about Chinese economic statistics. She was certain they were all manufactured out of whole cloth. I think she was right — and of course the Coronavirus would be the same thing. Indeed, the death rate they released — 2.4 per million, wasn’t it? — has become obviously utterly implausible in light of the subsequent experience of every other large country.
So who knows what happened, why it happened, or what’s still happening. If it matches what the Chinese claimed or are claiming, that’ll be purely coincidental. After all, we can all agree there’s nothing wrong with the truth — if it’s convenient.
Tourism is some 10% of world GDP. It’s going to take a massive hit, lockdown or no lockdown. Air travel took a massive hit before the lockdown, empty planes were flying often. While the official lockdowns undoubtedly led to a contraction in economic activity, a huge portion (probably most) of the economic damage would be incurred anyway. For example I will personally not be eating out in the foreseeable future (a vaccine would change that), and I did so at least every other month. It’s not very frequent, but I visited relatively expensive restaurants, so my reduced consumption probably disproportionately hits the higher end jobs in the sector. I know people who used to eat out more frequently (and in expensive restaurants), who are now staying home. Lazy people who had a gym membership to soothe their conscience will now feel less guilty if they just cancel it.
Some people believe that if we just restrict or basically shut down huge sectors of the economy, then the rest can still carry on as if nothing happened. That’s just wrong. People who work in restaurants or gyms are now going to reduce their own consumption, for example they won’t be buying new cars any time soon. This in turn reduces consumption by people employed (or previously employed) in those sectors.
So unfortunately no, I don’t think the rest of the economy could carry on like before.
How about this for moac (mother of all conspiracies): China released the virus on themselves intentionally, knowing that the virus wasn’t so deadly. Overdid the response on purpose, believing that the moronic west – when it gets hit – will try to compete with them response measures wise, thus collapsing their economies and letting China surge ahead past the west. The west can never compete with China lockdown measures wise – they neither have the stamina, nor discipline, nor social cohesion to do so.
The lockdown actions in the US were, by my estimation, about 6 weeks too late. 6 weeks earlier and maybe actions could have been phased in (monitor results) and not blanket panic. Even in that time frame we had serious suspicion of asymptomatic spread. We could have started masks for everyone, restricting air travel and cruises, isolated nursing home and started shutting down schools. Yes, I know children don’t get the large complications however, it beggars belief that stuffed in schools then going home; kids would not be vectors.
In any case the US economy was primed to collapse anyway. Losing the China supply chain was significant and would have happened even if no virus was found in the US.
P.S. I think it’s going to get worse; (I’m surprised it already hasn’t) but I think unemployment is going to be bankrupting states.
New UnHerd interview up, this time with Sunetra Gupta, professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford. From their summary:
If she is right, antibody tests are a poor measure of the true virus spread, and the declining death rate Sweden and many other countries have seen this past month is from immunity — not measures — lowering the effective reproduction number. Time will tell.
And then, of course, there is Knut Witkowski, and others such as:
https://unherd.com/2020/05/oxford-doubles-down-sunetra-gupta-interview/
So what are we take away from all this?
Basically that science is almost worthless.
Too many variables, and too much of an inclination to think you’re right cuz ‘Science™’.
In Wales, the Covid-19 death toll, although more rapid is looking like the 2018 flu for total numbers of excess deaths. About 2000 from a population of 3.5 million. Working back from say 1.5% IFR that would be 125000 infections out of 3.5 million. An effective Attack Rate of 3.6%. Then some places in Wales are remote and rural and were probably nevar attacked. Let’s say 5%.
So, is the end of SARS2 or will there be ripples of this wave and new waves of mutated perhaps stronger versions in future. Now I am a vendor of face masks, subject to writeen confirmation, I seem to have a vested interest in SARS2 sticking around, except that I am over 60, overweight (not actually obese), diabetic with a heart condition. Is it time to build a mansion deep in the Cambrian Mountains (which are fortunately not popular tourist haunts)? Reacquiring and restoring the ancestral pile might be more bother than building from scratch.
Wales. The area under the Covid excess death curve is barely more than 2018 flu.
https://twitter.com/PCOwen_a/status/1263478717998944256?s=20
This was my impression as well: the difference between Sweden “without lockdowns” and, say, NYC “with lockdowns” is a distinction without much of a difference. As AK points out Western “lockdowns,” while admittedly heterogeneous, are generally not particularly rigorous (at least by East Asian standards) and people are engaging in their own risk mitigation strategies. Here in the US air travel was never officially suspended and there very few interstate travel restrictions but our commercial airline passenger volume was at one point down by >95% (and we are arguably the worst Western country at social distancing!)
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/09/politics/airline-passengers-decline/index.html
How do they do they determine infections when the Covid 19 has not even been isolated. From what I have read the scientific method for identifying all pathogens is the Koch’s Postulate. That has not been accomplished on the fake virus. We know the PCR test is also fake since it gives ap. 200 false positives, does not identify one corona (cold) from another and is not quantitative.
This whole scam is a cover for the global bankers and corp. elite to plunder everyone else again as they did in 08-09. The FED now has over 6 trillion of bad loans and other “assets” for the taxpayers to pick up.
Anyone who believes in this virus fraud should be living in Agenda 2030-21 where all of us will be if the goys don’t start thinking for themselves instead of believing all the Zionist officials and the MSM whores. Why would anyone believe the official numbers when the hospitals are getting big money for tagging everything as Covid 19. The flu when it is real kills very few people. This time of then year even a lot less.
I wish we had more genetic data.
I bet that with the right data, a gene-chip with the right SNPs would be able to tell you your risk represented in multiples: x, 2x, 3x, 4x… It probably matters a lot what HLA group you have. Add in some other stuff, and I think the predictive effect would be significant.
The problem with the boomers – as always – is that they choose the wrong leaders. They might have individually some perspective, but as a group they have consistently followed any nonsense thrown at them. It is the infantilism that they are so proud of.
Don’t get me started on the millennial women…what the f..k happened there? It is as if a very shallow gene pool met with absurd and dystopian ideas, and it was then enhanced by a deteriorating environment. You are right, they are by far the most hysterical part of the society.
How is this a ‘sacrifice‘? It is just something that happens, a part of life, sickness and viruses. After all, the elder boomers have been preaching how all the misfortunes that they had implemented for the young are just the way it has turned out, the invisible hand speaking or some sh..t like that… If that is not a child sacrifice, how is letting nature take its course on the elderly a ‘sacrifice’? Try to think.
Lockdowns are actually just one of the possible protective measures and even can be described as the result of timely containment failure and inability to implement other less restrictive combined protective measures early, e.g. Taiwan reacted very early and seriously and was able to stop the spread without lockdowns.
Imho, even mass medical mask wearing alone would still be insufficient to stop the spread completely without border closings, mass testing&tracking ability and timely effective isolation of already infected people.
Of course it would be great if she was right. But a few facts look difficult to reconcile with her hypothesis of a large exposure to the virus in the general population and very low mortality rate:
The vast majority of people diagnosed with Covid-19 develop antibodies and they are detected by the serological tests, which suggests that this virus is not that different from others in that respect.
Large amounts of deaths in nursing homes hit by the virus, up to 50% in some particular cases. Her low IFR estimate for the general population is hardly compatible with such a strong impact in the most affected groups.
The very hard facts that keep coming in from the seroprevalence studies mentioned by AK. Discounting them because they are not very accurate or most people may not need to develop antibodies does not look very parsimonious at all.
Once again, lockdowns are just one of the many possible protective measures, but not the only one, and usually lockdown is result of failure to do timely containment and inability to implement other less restrictive combined protective measures way earlier.
If I’m not completely mistaken, even Sweden has such other protective measures implemented as some restrictions on mass gatherings, but imho sooner or later there will be lockdown implemented even in Sweden at some point till the end of this year.
btw, Spain didn’t even exit the first wave completely, so any talk about the lack of a second are way premature.
Results of an antibody test trial on a large random sample suggests 17% of people in London have been infected (about 1.25 million people). And about 5% in the UK as a whole (about 3million).
1% ifr = 30k deaths, which is about correct.
https://metro.co.uk/2020/05/21/17-londoners-5-rest-uk-have-coronavirus-antibodies-12739901/
Question: why has South Korea been so effective in containing this thing? As best I can tell their “trick” seems to be aggressive contact tracing and mandatory, enforced quarantine of both infected and exposed, but the English-language sources I’ve found are a bit sketchy on the details.
Why is spread so low? Lot of experts kept insisting lockdown measures were too lax Eg Greg Cochran, but seems they were wrong. They were saying hospitals would be overrun by now with the measures currently in place. If they’re wrong suggests R0 maybe significantly less than thought.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by “diagnosed,” but her view is that a majority of those who catch the virus do not develop enough antibodies to test positive for them:
Her theory is parsimonius in that it explains why so many countries, with such unlike policies, have seen similar falls in deaths and ICU cases, but sure, it might also be that simple behavioral changes in people was enough to push RE below 1.0, which would lead to a similar downward trend across the world.
You are a doomer. And not just about COVID but other thing too.
Come on, embrace it!
Nothing’s wrong about it. Being a doomer is fun (when you are young and have no kids) and occasionally doomers are right about some things.
(And a separate LOL at “exponential growth” with R ~ 1.)
What are “excess deaths” and how are they calculated/measured? Aren’t “excess deaths” a projection? So the rate is using a projection to plug into another projection? Seems quite unreliable, even if it is the only thing we have. Certainly not something a normally rational person would rely upon when deciding whether to destroy the world economy. Unless you want to destroy the world economy and need a pretext.
Which leaves three possibilities – (1) we are not dealing with persons who possess normal amounts of reason, (2) we are dealing with persons who want to destroy the world economies for whatever reasons, or (3) some combination of the two.
My theory is this:
(Humor)
BAT GUAVA?
As in a Guava Plant / Bat hybrid?
I mean I know what a Guava is…..
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/02/guava_id.jpg
It is moments like this when I wish I had PhotoShop skills….
Wait…. I am being told that I have an immature sense of humor….
Is that true?
Ummmm…
… That is a rhetorical question
… No answer required
… Really
… You don’t have to
I think the Lockdown is making me strange.
Wait… I am being told that the correct grammar is… “The Lockdown is making me stranger.”
Hey! What is that supposed to mean? Put down that Guava, you don’t know what bat it has been hanging around with.
{Sounds of scuffling}
{Fruit squishing sounds}
(/humor)
According to this document from the CDC:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios-h.pdf
Based on data to 4/29/2020 the best estimate of overall Symptomatic Case Fatality Ratio is 0.004 and 35% of infections are asymptomatic.
That suggests the actual IFR is around 0.003 (or 0.3%).
Of course that is the overall value. If you are over 65 then the SCFR is 0.013 and adjusting for the unsymptomatic is more like 1%.
Traditionally we instinctively knew that only a young virgin would restrain a diety.
Why would a God want an old geezer who’s not long for this Earth anyway?
I am still waiting for someone I know in any of a number of countries to get infected. I guess they must all have some resistance. Some people believe that previous exposure to other coronaviruses (e.g. the common cold) infers some protection.
The one thing that is blatantly obvious to even the most blinkered of observers is that it is a dying pandemic. In fact, in many places, it was dying before this locking nonsense got its political momentum.
Here are the latest charts from Germany – one of the places where the lockins started after the peak infections/day. The data is correct up to May 15, 2020.
There is absolutely no reason for maintaining lockdowns in Germany, even assuming they work. This means that this whole process is a political decision without any scientific backing. It is being done for some ulterior reason.
Visits to doctors for a chest infection (by age)
http://alongchat.com/stuff/germany2.jpg
Deaths from chest infections
http://alongchat.com/stuff/germany1.jpg
Source: Influenza-Wochenbericht – Influenza Weekly Report (German)
Epidemics always spread exponentially, though the exponent varies.
By changing the exponent as time advances, you can draw any chart you wish to have as your fake result. It is an open invitation to cheat.
This exponential nonsense has to be laid to rest. Where is the exponential behaviour in the charts for Germany that I have posted above?
They don’t exist because it is nonsense. If you don’t like the data, you should not be writing these articles. I am getting really angry with people who deny reality. People who pretend we have never had infections like influenza before – that they have not been studied for 100+ years.
This article needs help. What is IFR? AK: Infection Fatality Rate. Googling isn’t hard.
The only justification for wearing a mask is to avoid facial recognition technology. Wearing a mask is counter productive and increases the danger of hypoxia. Hypoxia in turn supresses the immune system and too much carbon dioxide in the bloodstream creates confusion. Moreover, wearing a amsk increases the concentration of virus in your system and means that it is re-breathed and concetrates in the lungs.
But your question is based on a false premise. There is no need to shut down any society for this virus. It has way too many privileges.
Agree wholeheartedly, but have exhausted my ‘Agree/Disagree’ limit.
She is wrong. Everywhere we look in countries were people don’t take medicine when infected the IFR is 0.5% if the nursing homes are protected and over 1 % when the nursing homes are not protected, like in New York, Bergamo, Spain, France, UK, Belgium and Netherlands. If you have quick testing and immediately take combinations of effective medicine you can reduce the IFR by maybe 60%-80%. One combination of effective medicine is HCQ, Zinc and Azithromycine, but this is of course not the only one. In many countries they are experimenting at the moment. It would be wise if many people follow what is going on to see what is effective and what is not. The Medical establishment in the West will not do it. They are far too arrogant and incompetent. Some countries for instance have a very low IFR. An example is Qatar. What is going on there?
I’ve been using ~1% for a month just because I got tired of the +/- figures. LOL.
You twist my words. And we all understand the ripple effects of any given segment of the economy taking a hit. I was arguing that mandatory masking would solve the problem of having an economy that provides groceries, shelter, transportation, and educational and medical services. Those represent the crucial elements of an economy. Objectively speaking, restaurants and gyms are economic excrescences. People can eat and exercise without them. Nail salons, hair stylists, etc are even less essential. Of course the economy will contract, and a percentage of workers must seek new jobs. But the economic damage is apparently much less in countries that responded with masks rather than lockdowns, e.g. South Korea, Taiwan. The enemies of economic recovery are not those who personally wish to avoid becoming infected, but rather those who call masks “face diapers.”
The real problem is that the pandemic occurred exactly when my own model of price action suggested that it was time for a multi-decade bear market. If one believes in large-scale financial cycles, as I have reason to do, then one might suppose that the virus appeared at a particularly effective time to cause economic havoc. If I were as inclined toward conspiracy theorizing as is Mr. Unz, I would have to suggest that the CCP released the virus to weaken rivals (the U.S.), competitors (India) and resource-colonies (Brasil and Australia).
So do I! I still don’t know anyone who knows anyone who has had Corona. But my own economy has collapsed, as has that of most of my colleagues and acquaintances. I know about rising suicide rates and about people suffering from using masks…
And still Ron and Anatoly are eagerly ramming their reputation into the ground.
I remember the story that when Hitler came to power, they called his gang the Faschingskabinett (carnival ministry), as it happened on January, 30th. People did still not see it coming. In the back of his pathetic lunacy, there was the real issue that Germany had been wronged after WWI and that the Weimar republic had run the country into economic disaster.
So, this time round at the back there is the real issue that modern society is spiritually empty and living at the expenses of the world’s poor who have to keep them going.
Anatoly Karlin wanted comments to stay on topic. As his topic is corona lunacy, this is on topic and hopefully I am giving hin a hint to write something more substantial.
I know he can do it.
Not everyone seroconverts. Those who are asymptomatic which may be as high as 25-50% of infections may not produce long lasting antibodies since their innate and cellular immune system cleared the virus too quick. They are basically naturally immune but wont test positive for antibodies
Also, the antibody tests have false positives. A 98% specificity test used in a population where prevalence of sero positive infections (past or present) of 10% will have a false positive rate of 20%
Furthermore the death counts are overstated. Those who die with Covid are counted as Covid deaths even if the cause of death is something else (example a patient with heart disease who recovers from covid by has a heart attack 2 weeks later is counted as a covid death). Furthermore CDC tells hospitals they don’t need a test but can use their judgement and the CARE act pays more for treating covid patients. The death count is overstated.
Also, the IF rate whatever it is appears to be much lower for younger people. Elderly skew the number significantly
Everything the mask does is that it nails down in your brain that corona is real and that everyones’ breath is a mortal danger. In East Asia masks are worn during flu season in highly contagious environments, not as a permanent accesoire.
But to explain to anyone who has no experience in psychology and has no connection to his own body is a sad task. Keep up with the mask and become an Asthmatic sooner or later.
My son has been on the front line against Covid now for many weeks.
Working 12/7 and in many hospitals etc across England from Birmingham south and even Wales.
The other day he was given the chance with others involved to have an antibody test.
Bearing in mind all are involved frontline in a non medical but support work with the virus.
100 of them tested…..
Only 4 had antibodies.
So much for its infection…
He also says the hospitals are almost empty.
They closed the Nightingales -London after a mere 48 patients – Birmingham never really opened.
He is familiar – worked on both.
Private hospitals – empty whilst cancer patients suffer…the government paid millions to take them over for the virus.
Finally the NHS is starting trials to put its staff on the Hydroxychloroquine.
This from another site
Dr. Vladimir (Zev) Zelenko
Board Certified Family Practitioner
501 Rt 208, Monroe, NY 10950
845-238-0000
March 23, 2020
To all medical professionals around the world:
My name is Dr. Zev Zelenko and I practice medicine in Monroe, NY. For the last 16 years, I have cared for approximately 75% of the adult population of Kiryas Joel, which is a very close knit community of approximately 35,000 people in which the infection spread rapidly and unchecked prior to the imposition of social distancing.
As of today my team has tested approximately 200 people from this community for Covid-19, and 65% of the results have been positive. If extrapolated to the entire community, that means more than 20,000 people are infected at the present time. Of this group, I estimate that there are 1500 patients who are in the high-risk category (i.e. >60, immunocompromised, comorbidities, etc).
Given the urgency of the situation, I developed the following treatment protocol in the pre-hospital setting and have seen only positive results:
Any patient in the high-risk category even with just mild symptoms is treated.
Young, healthy and low risk patients even with symptoms are not treated (unless their circumstances change and they fall into category 1 or 2).
My out-patient treatment regimen is as follows:
Azithromycin 500mg once a day for 5 days
Zinc sulfate 220mg once a day for 5 days
The rationale for my treatment plan is as follows. I combined the data available from China and South Korea with the recent study published from France (sites available on request). We know that hydroxychloroquine helps Zinc enter the cell. We know that Zinc slows viral replication within the cell. Regarding the use of azithromycin, I postulate it prevents secondary bacterial infections. These three drugs are well known and usually well tolerated, hence the risk to the patient is low.
Since last Thursday, my team has treated approximately 350 patients in Kiryas Joel and another 150 patients in other areas of New York with the above regimen.
Of this group and the information provided to me by affiliated medical teams, we have had ZERO deaths, ZERO hospitalizations, and ZERO intubations. In addition, I have not heard of any negative side effects other than approximately 10% of patients with temporary nausea and diarrhea.
The whole thing is an outrageous scam.
By lockdown they have deliberately sabotaged any chance of herd immunity.
Both Fauci and Ferguson, who pushed lockdown in the USA and Britain, funded by Gates.
All three should be under arrest for crime against humanity.
All about the vaccine – profit – the nano chipping – greed – and control.
Where is Sherlock Holmes when he is desperately called for?
Plenty of anecdotal evidence points to something like Corona virus spreading during the autumn of 2019, maybe even already during summer. China is like a black hole of information in this regard but there are anecdotes about suspiciously Covid-like outbreaks in care homes in the US. It has been acknowledged that the US was hit by what was touted a particularly bad flu season. Many patients who are diagnosed with the seasonal flu do not actually get tested for flu viruses.
The Corona virus epidemic simulation conducted by the Gates foundation in the autumn of 2019.
The CDC actively preventing doctors and researchers from conducting serological tests in the autumn of 2019 and into 2020.
Corona virus showing many signs of being man-made. Watch Chris Martenson’s videos on that. The spike protein has nearly 100% homology with a spike protein from a pangolin Corona virus. All the other proteins show their highest homologies with proteins from different bat Corona viruses. Virus chimeras without any traces of genetic manipulation in their genome have been created before.
Apparently, there were road blocks around the Wuhan laboratory sometime in October 2019. Watch one of Chris Martenson’s videos on that.
The furin cleavage site is what sets the Corona virus truly apart. It cannot be found in any other related viruses.
Strains A, B, and C have been identified of which strain A seems to be the oldest one. It is most prevalent on the US West coast and seems to be less infectious than the other two.
Sherlock, how can all this tied together? A hybrid Fort Detrick/natural selection/Wuhan theory perhaps? The virus escaped, Fort Detrick was shut down immediately, further research was transferred to the Wuhan laboratory, from where it escaped again in the October time frame. A cover-up was in place in the US.
The version that escaped from Fort Detrick did not have the furin cleavage site. The furin cleavage site got added “in the wild” by adaptation to humans at some point along the way, possibly by transfer of HIV RNA in AIDS patients. The research at the Wuhan lab was initiated because the mutation was recognized, or maybe even without the mutation having been recognized. At any rate, conducting any further research in the US itself was considered inappropriate. The Gates foundation got in on it with Gates himself feeling terribly guilty about having funded much of all this. That’s why he conducted the simulation and also why wants to vaccinate everyone. The US and China have no mutual interest in truly getting to the bottom of it all. China attempted its own cover-up because it knew about the cover-up in the US, thinking that what had worked in the US would also work in China. The mutation that the virus had gone through (either naturally or in a lab) rendered it impossible and forced a complete turnaround.
Hidden immunity? You mean RT-PCR and this and that nano spy glass do not tell us everything we need to know with 99% confidence? Oh, dear. Oh do I LOVE it.
Somebody just walked their dog over AK’s wet cement.
Buck this 2D binary bunk. Or if you must, plug in the 14 dead on Diamond Princess with the 3700 total on board and you indeed get a scary 0.38% test tube fatality rate, particularly because they were all packed together and — on average — older than Bennie Goodman’s baton.
But how in the world does this justify national house arrest, let alone Trump’s Operation Warp Speed? If I got it straight, this invites The Army into our backyard. My understanding is that They are not supposed to implement domestic policy. Please forgive my initial barb, Mr. Karlin, but what is your honest position on this bold new plan — with all its emergency powers — to quick bake and force vaccinate everyone in America for a retrovirus with an FR of — okay have it your way — 1%?
the most hysterical proponents of this house arrest seem to be millenial women.
Excellent point.
These women are a menace to us all.
Seemingly intent on destroying our western societies.
Neo liberalism gone mad.
Its obvious the psychiatric community is correct in increasingly accepting these women are mentally round the bend.
Craving the ‘feel good’ and ticks on their face book pages – the rush of the hormones or whatever in their pea sized brains.
Without the slightest observation or understanding of the enormous damage their stupidity and ‘me’ obsession is inflicting on our society and our future.
I am impressed how the corona doomsters so determinedly stick to their original forecast despite the overwhelming evidence contradicting it continuing to roll in.
This is even more sociopathic when you consider that, according to scientific evidence, most of the infections are caused by those that are infected but do not have symptoms, i.e. mostly the younger than 60.
The scenario that the Chinese deliberately spread the virus globally and exaggerated its lethality is more plausible than the CIA memes being pushed by the usual suspects.
Where the problems is here is that many people are already immune to COVID 19 due to prior immunity to previous COVID infections. You can’t just look at “herd immunity” in respect to who has been infected with this specific variant of COVID. In any case, these figures of 0.6% – 1.5% seem very high…figures I’ve seen and calculated myself come in at 0.1% and 0.3% based on other studies and discussions I’ve seen with epidemiologists.
Another thing is that the virus clearly affects almost entirely only very old people, over 70 y.o. The logical thing to do on this basis would be to isolate these people – e.g. using masks around them, giving them trained medical support etc. – until they can be vaccinated. This is tricky if there is no “herd immunity” likely.
This is the best assessment I’ve seen of our current situation….
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that all of this is correct. So then…what exactly is The Plan here? We have several options:
(1) Take extreme measures for a relatively short time. Totally suppress the spread of the virus, so that it dies out before most people are infected.
(2) Vaccinate the public before most people are infected.
(3) Let the virus spread until herd immunity is reached.
Now, (1) is effectively impossible. The virus is too widespread. And (2) is probably not viable either. We don’t know when (or even if) we’ll have a vaccine. It could be years. And measures needed to reduce the spread until then would have catastrophic effects on the economy, leading to more suffering than the virus itself would cause (along with a lot of outright death).
Which leaves (3). And the effects of this strategy could be reduced if we make intense efforts to protect nursing homes and other vulnerable groups, so that people at low risk are the ones building herd immunity for everyone.
This was basically the plan we were sold anyway! “Flatten the curve” was about maintaining hospital capacity, not reducing the number of people eventually infected. We’ve flattened it. And hospital capacity was mostly a proxy for ventilator capacity, and we now know that ventilators are less effective than originally thought. So maintaining capacity is doable.
So…what exactly is the plan, if not option (3)? And if we’re taking this route, shouldn’t lower risk groups go back to normal life as quickly as possible?
This is one of these dubious epigrams which contain a grain of truth but which are misleading if taken literally. If you want a world where we lockdown every flu season then fine…otherwise you aren’t making much sense…or are morally showboating…
Well the main point she is making is that many people actually have antibodies already due to their prior exposure to other strains of COVID. The issue is in treating COVID 19 as a new disease rather than as a variant of an old one. The future trends depend on what % of the population is already immune to the disease as well as the % of the population which is asymptomatic. Depending on these we can possibly reach “herd immunity”….
“This is a policy of ‘do anything to protect the old’…”
No, the architects of the policy do not care about protecting the old, or protecting anybody, really.
This policy is about reshuffling the global financial deck, about looting what’s left of the United States, about defeating Trump and bankrupting his base of supporters, about politically castrating White Americans for good, about further implementing methods and tools of societal mega-control, and about re-defining the structure of the global power system, viz a formal shift from US/West to China/Asia.
This is a deliberate “reset” gambit, somewhat akin to turning over the chess board and spilling all the pieces and forgetting what the position had been. In that way it is the same gambit as the Second World War, whose purpose was to turn the major empires Britain, Germany and Japan into house cats, and re-figure the world into a game now owned by the United States and the Communist East.
The present debt-fueled, contradiction-burdened system had become exhausted by its own internal ruptures. Time to tear it down, and while us peons are struggling through bankruptcy, unemployment, new and insane forms of tyranny and a global depression, the overlords will construct something new and even more unpleasant.
The (entirely artificial and unnecessary) virus-panic was the upheaval equivalent of a neutron bomb: lay the whole system to waste, but keep the real estate and the infrastructure.
The coronavirus lockdowns and shutdowns are not about protecting boomers or anyone else, if that hasn’t become clear by now, then there is little hope. It’s all about control, vaccines and depopulation, with boomers to go first. If you don’t believe me ask Bill Gates.
Hi yeah , so what if genius is the ability to make connections where others cannot – in the comment section this may appear in a form that to you just , lawd have mercy , seems incongruent with your latest formalized presentation…
For instance , I have been reminded of messages or topics in song lyrics by a number of articles here at UNZ and so I went ahead and posted the video only to have it , and the possible NONLINEAR perspective offered , disappeared by the ultra-rationalist gatekeepers of said sections… LAME !
Try thinking of the comment section more like poetry and stuff … getting anywhere healthy is gonna require that we open up the clamp here a lil bit – ok PointDorkster ?
Fer cryin out loud…
CFR shill. Taken at face value vis à vis the others, Sweden’s approach is precisely the one the world should follow.
Small but important correction: the age range is really 20–64. This was a typo, however, so all other figures are correct. Also note that these figures are upper bounds (the infection fatality rate for the 20-64 group is at most 0.083% — but probably many times lower).
Can you stay home for 18 months? Because that is the timescale they are talking about and I am not sure they have ever made a vaccine for a virus, as opposed to bacteria. Whatever, 18-month-long lockdowns are not going to happen.
Then why didn’t you bring in Germany, which has a large population, much of it urban, extensive testing and an IFR of .2%?
Otherwise your gobbledygook is a pack of assumptions and bad math.
You are mixing up CFR (Case Fatality Rate) and IFR (Infection Fatality Rate). This last figure can only be calculated if you know the true number of infected, which obviously wasn’t the case in the countries you list:
I had it coming on back in March and immediately gargled with warm salt water. It was gone by morning. Since then, brandy is the best treatment.
You can feel any flu coming on and, if you have a brain, head it off. The z-pack has been effective for years. I also started drinking tonic water.
This shutdown is a criminally inspired enterprise designed primarily to mask the financial collapse, which everybody saw coming last summer when retail disapeared.
My take on Petri Dish of the Seas was they intentionally allowed the virus to run its course as a somewhat controlled experiment. I was amazed after knowing what happened there, that they shut down the entire world economy. There was always a sense that somebody was playing 4D chess, but the question was always to what end?
Quite correct. A SCAM.
https://i.redd.it/3w6jtm3jmqx41.png
What a dumb comment. You go wrong in your very first sentence, when you mindlessly confuse 5%-10% seroprevalence rate with the virus “infects less than 5%-10% of people”.
That’s how many it’s ALREADY infected in some major countries, Sherlock. Your assumption that everyone who has avoided it so far will continue to avoid it is based on nothing.
1% IFR might be a high estimate, but unless better prevention and treatment happen (which I’m optimistic about), even 0.5% means a million dead Americans and 20-25 million dead worldwide using optimistic assumptions for herd immunity.
You OK with a million dead Americans? Or is that a big enough number that you’re willing to conceded this is a big deal?
I’ll be 60 next year. The actuarial tables say I’ve “only” got another 30 years left, although I’m counting on more, but if you think it’s ok to have a million dead people because only 100,000 of them will be an age you consider worth caring about, you’re positioning yourself as my enemy, and that’s not wise.
What are “excess deaths” and how are they calculated/measured? Aren’t “excess deaths” a projection? So the rate is using a projection to plug into another projection?
No and no.
Excess deaths are calculated by taking the actual number of deaths during a period and subtracting the number that are expected to occur within that period.
Since February 1, 2020, there have been 113,139 excess deaths in the U.S. Officially, 96,370 Americans have died of COVID-19.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
You will probably zero in on the term “expected to occur.” Don’t expected deaths vary for all kinds of reasons? Yes, they do. If we take the uppermost bound for expected deaths, we get a lower figure: 84,891 deaths.
A lot more Americans are dying than usual.
Because China’s lockdown was real (as per AK), and because it was accompanied by aggressive testing, contact tracing, and quarantine (extrapolating from South Korea’s response), things the US has not done, that’s why we’re #1 – in cv c ases and deaths.
How anybody can take Anatoly “Nostradamus” Karlin seriously after he was more of a doom monger than Fauci himself at the beginning of this Corona-mega-hoax, is a question nobody can answer.
Just for the record: I disdained his personality and his articles even before this Corona-mega-hoax. Now he is just a clown fighting for his dwindling audience.
AK: “Will martial-art-fag Anatoly Karlin, who was especially obnoxious with his stupid hysteria, be shunned from now on?” Weird that you can’t take your own advice – I’ll help you out. Banned.
Are you suggesting the input assumptions used in the Imperial College model have been vindicated and that the death projections (510,000 in the U.K. and 2,200,000 in the US) were reasonable estimates?
This is getting silly. A simple glance at avg deaths per year show no differences. Calling as many deaths as you can Covid does not make it true.
Anyone still falling for this hoax is proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that they have a low IQ.
Actually, I did the calculation wrong.
The overall IFR, based on the CDC document is 0.26%. For those over 65 it is 0.86%.
At 0.26% that puts it in the same range as the 1957/58 Flu pandemic.
If you are a science denier you are free to ignore the CDC document.
The real people sacrificed are, of course, the young. Ruining lives as demanded by the cult’s bizarre rituals.
It is a sacrifice in a real sense, with strong religious overtones (the Corona Cult). The Corona-Cult’s demands its god be appeased by the sacrifice of the young.
Everyone’s time is limited and everyone’s time has value. Those in prime of life, in formative years, are at an especially important time. Disrupting lives for months with unnecessary, demagogic shutdowns and triggering a major recession will waste millions of aggregate life-years, both literal early deaths (if body count alone is all you want) and also wasted years (just as important).
For the young: unemployment, disrupted social lives, missed opportunities due to the above, and other things less predictable will absolutely swamp (by hundreds of times, plausibly even well over 1000x) the effect of this one virus on those of non-retired age, and society as a whole, and civilization as a whole.
To take one example alone, marginal suicide deaths alone look possible to exceed deaths to this one flu virus by those under age 70. Measured by aggregate-life-years-lost instead of body count, the suicides alone will would swamp the Coronavirus’s direct effect.
And then the quantifiable (starting about mid-December 2020 and through 2021, maybe well beyond) fertility crash caused the the wackos taking over the asylum.
These are real sacrifices, pretty much in the old “kill the healthy to appease the angry god(s)” sense. They can be measured in terms of body counts if you work at it, but of course there is no bloodthirsty media drumbeating demanding such or flashing suicide numbers on screens at people. We are told it takes months to calculate suicides, so just stop:
Exactly. The Corona Cult demanded the sacrifice of the young.
See age of death distribution for corona-positives deaths in Sweden. Exactly zero born in or after 1990 died positive for the coronavirus. That is with a large sample size near 4000. Practically none born after 1970 have died. The age profile is even older than that for natural deaths.
The sacrifice (in lockdown countries) is by the young, who will have to pay a debt of years of their lives. Many more will commit suicide; fewer will have children. That is true sacrifice, not a death hastened by six months by a 90-year-old with cancer.
I agree with the first part of your comment, but the second (“hoax,” “low-IQ”) is missing something. Clearly many of the Corona-Believers are not low-IQ people or necessarily those easily duped by hoaxes. Something else is going on here.
The way to understand Corona(-belief) is that a religious cult formed around it. It was a religious trigger event. The exact process is left to be argued over and sorted out (and I am sure will be for years), but in one sense the media-led coalition of pro-Panickers converted en masse following a religious vision of the apocalypse, thereby conjuring up its own AXIS MUNDI, a term from the study of religion.
The cult broke through. The cult seized power as state religion. The cult suppressed dissent and suppressed skeptical inquiry. Science is blasphemy. Data is blasphemy. Believe Science became Believe Corona.
I wrote a long investigation into the idea here: “Is Corona a Religious Cult? An Anthropological Study” (May 18). I now see this as the only thing that makes sense to explain Corona.
As of 2020-05-22 the CDC data has North Carolina missing week 16 for 2020. The rest of the states are complete.
The entire USA has an “excess death” rate about 5.5% (50,331) higher than the 4 year average. It will be interesting to see what the 6, 8 and 12 month rate is.
In some online discussions some were suggesting using “excess deaths” to see what effect the covid-19 disease is having and I thought that would be a reasonable approach as it gets past the deaths “with/from” issue.
All the data is from this CDC page:
https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/mortality.html
The script and all related files are here if you want to kick the tires:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/fh9x5fngmfbeiiu/AAAH-OtOMqiY_R9qqG6YccCRa?dl=0
The script generates data for all 50 states plus DC and New York City (CDC treats it separately from New York State).
The “reports.xlsx” file has the accumulative totals for all reports.
May 12, 2020 NY To Hire Army Of 17,000 Gov’t Spies For Contact Tracing
Andrew Cuomo and Michael Bloomberg’s plans to create an army of government contact tracers to spy on New Yorkers.
https://youtu.be/fngJRqIz93c
May 9, 2020 It Is Not About A Virus… It Is About Control!
We have been covering many aspects regarding the pandemic of COVID1984, one very important aspect that we really haven’t touched on, which is detrimental to life as we know it, is food. Henry Kissinger once said, “Control oil and you control nations, control food and you control the people.”
https://youtu.be/DgQNmMih-vc
Apr 25, 2020 We Are The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For
https://youtu.be/EJgl8g3xjmI
06 May 2020 REVEALED: 66% of New York state coronavirus hospitalizations are people staying at HOME and NOT essential workers – which begs question: Does lockdown even work?
In a study of some 1,000 new patients over the last week, 66 percent were not essential workers and were staying at home. More than 80 percent had not taken any public transport.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8293417/66-New-York-coronavirus-hospitalizations-people-staying-HOME.html
Gast, you need to look at things differently. What cannot be taken seriously must be taken as a comedy. All AK ever writes about is this virus, a topic people, even those that are brain dead, are weary of and bored with. AK must have a room filled with charts, graphs, statistics, notes, articles and pieces of paper. He probably stocked up on toilet paper so he could brainstorm on same while taking a shit. Almost every day he comes up with another load of doo doo. As time goes on and the “experts” see their “expert opinions” crumbling before them so much back pedalling is taking place that it looks like the Indy but in reverse. I had a good laugh when he mentioned in authoritative prose it is uncontrovertically and focustitiouly clear and surreptitiously transparent that what we knew from the Princess Diamond days the IFR was 1%.
DUH ! I knew that from my dollar store calculator back in March! What ever happened to those millions AK said would die. Next he is going to write he saved millions of lives LOL.
I dont know what he is going to do when in a few months this Corona thing is a dim memory, go back to potato farming in some medieval dismal Russian village lost in the Steppes ? Unz readers have an obligation to find other work for this doofus after all many have been entertained by his bullshit.
Great post Germ Theory. You have succinctly nailed it. Thanks.
Nostradamus is a dwindling brain fighting for a dwindling audience. When his predictions are mocked he bans dudes from commenting meaning, he is unable to defend his horse manure. His next set of articles will be how he fits that sword right up his ass while sitting down to write more crap about Corona. On a scale of 1-10 I rate him lower than a black pimp say around -5 ?
AK: No, I just ban people who make personal attacks on me (unless they otherwise amuse me). I don’t ban idiots, just hide their comments when I can be bothered to.
I disagree. we should stay home, pull the curtains in case the virus comes through the windows, self quarantine under our beds insulated by rolls of toilet paper and have everything delivered to us by licenced delivery persons who walk.
I am new to your work and your work is shit ! Fuck you and your fake Corona hysteria.
AK: Happy to save you from it. Banned.
The way to understand Corona(-belief) is that a religious cult formed around it.
Understanding comes from critical examination of all ideas, including one’s own.
I can countenance the possibility I’m wrong. Can you?
The small-sample-size, early-outbreak Gangelt study came back at an adjusted rate of 0.25%. Gangelt was also studied specifically because it was the worst-hit place in Germany and gained media attention. The true, all-Germany rate is likely to be no more half that, in line with everyone else’s. Not distinguishable from a strong strain of influenza, the kind that circulate once every few years.
Average age of a corona-positive death in Germany: 82, and not the most healthy among them either. What is the average age at death for aggregate all-cause deaths?
Number of prime-age healthy people dying: Zero. (Flukes possible in any large enough sample size; much less dangerous to that group than getting in a car on a regular basis.)
What is incontrovertibly clear is that the author is is an idiot or a propagandist taking the reader for an idiot.
The infection fatality rate for passengers on the Diamond Princess was zero for those under the age of 69.
What that means is that unless, like New York, New Jersey, Virginia, etc., you have a murderous policy of forcing care homes for the elderly to accept people infected with Covid19 who will spread the disease to other residents, the disease is mostly neither deadly nor particularly serious.
You are a disgrace to Russians everywhere with your doomsday rubbish. If your IQ were one point higher you would have the intellect of a worm.
AK: Banned.
Herd Immunity varies by virus and is affected by all kinds of other factors.
The rate of herd immunity with coronaviruses is known to be several times lower than for influenza viruses. Coronaviruses are also known to break through and begin circulating later in the season than other flu viruses. These are expectations from the known behavior of previous coronaviruses, and surprisingly enough reality is aligning with these expectations.
Of course, no one cared about coronaviruses before this and they were hardly studied. Even so, specialists have identified hundreds of them and they have been studied enough to generate those two general conclusions. Of course, the pro-Panic side was unaware (or willfully ignored) this knowledge.
Anatoly prides in the level of intelligence of his devoted readership …
So can being out of work for three months.
Lies…same can be said of Western stats. For one, Covid death numbers highly inflated as western doctors instructed to put all deaths Covid19.
Everyone seems to be missing the point. There will always be viruses around. Our bodies and immune system NEED viruses and bacteria around to function properly. An absolute sterile environment is NOT what you want because any pathogen will make you sick or kill you. Do you really want to be dependent on Big Pharma (vaccine, pills etc..) for the rest of your life? The human immune system needs to be constantly stressed….not overwhelmed. Live a healthy life and feed your body with nutrient dense foods and your immune system will produce all the anti-bodies required. It has been like this since the beginning of time.
Look at yourself in the mirror. Do you look healthy or more like an overweight, hormone injected animal with fat deposits in all the wrong places? Perhaps you are bone thin and underweight. Both body types are not ideal. Spend time researching food as this is where the majority of misinformation has been the last 40 years. Eating incorrectly has been the #1 cause of disease, death and virus susceptibility.
We have approaching-final data in hand for Sweden, since all indications are the epidemic is ending there. Across every indicator, the epidemic has been in decline for weeks in Sweden, after its mid-April peak (as expected).
We can see the epidemic curves approaching their end now (the solid-blue line reflects plenty of lag time allowing for delayed reporting; the decline is not a distortion, unless Sweden has suddenly got much slower in reporting deaths than it had been up to now):
https://hailtoyou.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/coronavirus-epidemic-arc-in-sweden-may-22-update.png
https://hailtoyou.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/coronavirus-deaths-in-sweden-actual-deaths-vs-ferguson-projections-may-22-update.png
https://hailtoyou.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/coronavirus-epidemic-icu-and-deaths-table-and-summary-may-22-update.png
Thoughts on why the Swedish Deaths curve does not follow an even-sharper bell shape (the higher peak in early April, the plateau lasting to May 4):
Anatoly,
I often appreciate ynur articles, you have been taken in by very stupid about this strain of influenza virus.
From your first article in Unz.com on this subject, your reporting and analysis has been outstanding Anatoly. Thanks and kudos to you!
I think your estimate of an IFR ~1% is the right ballpark. It’s astonishing, given all the data we have by now, that the order of magnitude of the IFR is still under debate. Very odd assumptions have to be made to infer a dramatically lower IFR, yet some academics such as Professor Gupta in Oxford are still inclined to make them.
In Australia and New Zealand the Case Fatality Rate is over 1%. Broadscale testing of asymptomatics is underway, but no new large pockets of infection are being identified.
I noticed one of South Korea’s leading epidemiologists reckons the true IFR in his country is approximately 2% (see from ~3.30 in the video below). In countries whose health systems collapse (which doesn’t apply, thank goodness, in any of these three cases), it is likely to go higher. I fear the worst of this pandemic will come when it really takes hold in the world’s poorest nations.
The “it’s just like the regular flu” assertion is clearly rubbish, yet it stills gets repeated – often with extreme stridency – as though reality is going out of fashion. I’ve been blocked by several folk on Twitter for not agreeing with them that the IFR is ~0.1%. Debate over the lethality of COVID-19 has become yet another important topic treated like a football match in dysfunctional democracies.
When shit is wet it tends to stick together. However with time it tends to dry up and blow away. This misguided “blogger” is disconcerted that his load of Corona manure has dried up and is slowly blowing away. He has been exposed not only for being a fake expert of hype and hysteria with stupid assumptions, but for being a talentless one topic blogger whose waxing and soap box jitterbug has become a dreadful bore. The poor fellow complains people attack him personally without justification and thus he bans them from commenting. No one on this site needs to “justify” their criticism of this miserable cretin, his own nonsensical articles are justification and condemnation all on their own In other words he gave his critics the rope and now he whines about being called to account and placed, without justification, on the gallows. What is even more startling is he portrays himself with a sword and all that. What happened in this man’s life that made him the way he is ?. His arrogance is dazzling though. Great writers of every nation, every genre and every age have been criticized and some even executed. This fellow feels he is above all that, that his numerous cut and paste plagiarised daily documentation, his constant vomiting of statistics and daily intestinal evacuations of information are above reproach and critique. The first rule of self improvement is self examination. This miserable worm is incapable of this and hence will remain an obscure figure with his daily dose of drivel, tripe and twaddle on Corona.
Retard, it is because of the partial lock downs you hate so much that the infection numbers are so low.
Stupid retards.
May 22, 2020 Not Alone
You can see that something is horribly wrong with the world. And you might feel like you’re the only one who sees it. But you’re not.
https://youtu.be/ZgJ3g-9k2Bk
May 15, 2020 The 2006 Origins of the Lockdown Idea
We didn’t lock down almost the entire country in 1968/69, 1957, or 1949-1952, or even during 1918. But in a terrifying few days in March 2020, it happened to all of us, causing an avalanche of social, cultural, and economic destruction that will ring through the ages.
https://www.aier.org/article/the-2006-origins-of-the-lockdown-idea/
It is like this retard doesn’t understand this is all due to the partial lock downs.
Fucking retards.
If you retards don’t want the partial lock downs, it is very simple.
Do a full medical quarantine for 6 weeks, coordinate with every country.
Virus fucking killed.
Epic fucking retards.
“Then why didn’t you bring in Germany, which has a large population, much of it urban, extensive testing and an IFR of .2%?”
Emslander – these are the latest COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2 stats for Germany (Situation Report 123 at https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/situation-reports)
So, the Case Fatality Rate in Germany is currently ~4.6%. If the IFR is as low as 0.2%, the actual number of past and present infected Germans must be approximately 23 times the level of infection detected so far. That’s >4 million.
Do you have any evidence that more than 4 million people in Germany have already been infected? If so, please share it. Otherwise I suggest you stop barking and snarling at the author, who has done his homework thoroughly. Mr Karlin’s commentary on the subject of COVID-19 has been remarkably accurate from the outset.
Could it be due to the intentional collapse of the US healthcare system and lack of treatment for non-Covid illnesses? Also, the spike in suicides, drug and alcohol abuse? Was it the lockdown or Covid that killed more people?
The dam is breaking!
Canada: 81 percent of Coronavirus Deaths are in Nursing Homes
https://36s81n24kn0c1i9se62v6acw-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/1-Coronavirus-Canada.png
So what happened to that aircraft carrier whose captain became a hero for capitulating very early on?
As I understand it, around 2000 out of a crew of 6000 got infected. One died. I hope that fake captain gets a kick in the pants. Officers in the Russian and Chinese Admiralties must be splitting their sides. 🙂
returns to sea after coronavirus outbreak
https://media3.s-nbcnews.com/j/newscms/2020_20/3294991/200403-uss-theodore-roosevelt-al-1426_1f0d9ceebbc9ba405fe8e2c42f4d166f.fit-2000w.jpg
Because they live in a homogeneous society without a hostile foreign (((elite))) ruling over them and creating tens of millions of conspiritards who think viruses are fake because they know their society is an empty shell being harvested, but have been so thoroughly brainwashed against noticing why that they suffer through cognitive dissonance and are only able to come up with schizophrenic explanations as to their plight.
It’s all part of the nazi jew george soros’s evil plan don’t ya know? This is my favorite one. Pay no attention to facts and statistics. So what if the average household wealth of a jew is 5 times that of a gentile. Whites are the real privileged class. Just forget that the ADL was founded because to defend Leo Frank after his murder of a little white girl, which he blamed on a african. Also forget that non-jewish whites aren’t allowed to collectively organize and create racial interest organizations like the ADL. That would make you just like the jewish nazi george soros. There is only ONE single solitary group that’s not allowed to be racist. And this is perfectly fair. And how it should be.
The only immunological survey conducted in Germany is, I believe, that conducted by researchers from the University of Bonn in the town of Gangelt. There, 15% of those tested were found to be positive for covid antibodies, somewhat less than the reported rate for New York City. Apply that number to the German population as a whole and you have twelve and a half million Germans infected.
So more barking and snarling, please.
And for a vastly more interesting perspective see: Israel Shamir fascinating Coronavirus Conspiracies here at UR.
Given a current death rate of 8,354 in Germany, doesn’t that produce an IFR of 0.07%?
What this means is that the epidemic may be abating under the given social distancing and with the most vulnerable in a considerable number of care homes now having died. Swedes have become better at
social distancing even though it is far less mandatory than elsewhere. Social distancing is in place in
anarchic and haphazard ways. Every person, every company etc. does its own thing. It is still effective.
By the Swedish health agency’s estimates, 20% have developed detectable antibodies. Given the
Swedish health agency’s record of whitewashing propaganda, that estimate is probably somewhat too high.
OTOH, political correctness prevents Sweden from testing specific ethnic groups for antibodies. Many care
home workers are from minorities. Compounding factors may be the living patterns and cultural habits in many immigrant communities. These factors tend to be almost diametrically opposed to how the average Swede lives. So, if a random sample turns up 20% with antibodies, then that may be due to immigrants in this sample contributing more than natives. If the 20% figure is too high relative to the entire population, then immigrant communities may still have a higher rate than 20%. Point in case, it was reported already a while agothat GPs in immigrant-heavy suburbs were seeing a declining number of Covid-19 patients. If there is going to be herd immunity in Sweden, then it ought to occur in these communities first.
The IFR alone does not suffice to gauge the effect of the illness on the population. There is a disturbing number of reports on people recovering while retaining severe, probably permanent lung damage. This report as of 19 May speaks of 860,000 persons exhibiting cold-like symptoms:
https://novus.se/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/20200519engnovusnumberofsickandsocialdistancing.pdf
You write with the confidence of someone who knows what he is talking about but undermine it with something as fatuous as
“Covid death numbers highly inflated as western [sic] doctors instructed [sic] to put all deaths Covid19.”
So your Grandma died of alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver and her doctor’s certification on the death certificate says “Covid 19”. Yeah, yeah.
Was it the lockdown or Covid that killed more people?
The rise in excess deaths began before the lockdowns began. The causes of death you mention — lack of medical treatment for non-COVID illnesses, suicides, drug and alcohol abuse — would have happened after the lockdowns began. In fact, there should be a substantial time lag between the beginning of the lockdowns and their alleged negative impacts. That’s not what we see in the data. The rise in excess mortality coincides with the rise in official COVID-19 deaths.
Are Americans so fragile that they would have immediately started killing themselves when the lockdowns were announced?
Very interesting piece. I have suspected for a long time that far more heat than light has been generated by Big Media, with most of the information that we are getting consisting of either flat-out bullshit or half-truth–and the latter is far worse. There is no question in my mind at this point that the effects of this virus have been exaggerated by a factor of “x”. The only question is: what is the value of “x”? Until the answer becomes more and more clear one is forced to take prudent measures to protect oneself.
The most dangerous virus of all is ignorance, and Big Media has succeeded abundantly in perpetrating THAT virus!
Hi CanSpeccy
I like Israel Shamir’s writings also, when he comprehends the topics he’s discussing.
There’s an article about Gangelt here. If you have a fuller or more recent source document about the University of Bonn study, please do share.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-05-team-covid-infection-fatality.html
Gangelt is clearly described in the article as an early “hotspot” for COVID-19. One would expect a significantly higher infection rate in such a location than the national average. The authors claim that five times the number of reported cases were actual cases of infection in Gangelt. That’s 5x – not 23x.. Not even close to 23x – in a hotspot!
Here’s an extract:
“Based on the IFR and the number of deaths, estimations about the total number of infections in similar demographic areas with different infection rates can be made. Comparing this number with the number of officially reported infections leads to an estimate of unreported cases. In Gangelt, this figure is about 5 times higher than the official number of people tested positively. With an extrapolation based on 6,700 SARS-CoV-2 associated deaths in Germany, a total of 1.8 million infections can be assumed.”
The authors make, in my opinion, a rather unreasonable extrapolation in the last sentence from Gangelt to the whole of Germany. Even so, they estimate a total of 1.8 million SARS-CoV-2 infections in Germany. But that’s less than half the 4 million ESTIMATE (23x Case Fatality Rate) implicit in the assertion you made in your earlier post – and way, way under your latest absurd guesstimate of “twelve and a half million Germans infected”.
Excuse me for remarking on your “barking and snarling”, CanSpeccy. It’s just that rudeness is the principal residue of your posts, once the unsupported assertions and flakey analysis is rinsed away.
the narrative s/n/b about the morality of culture , but about the generality of making a safe way to isolate one’s self from infection when in an infectious environment.
Inventing a ant infection or anti viral inoculation is like sending the one fisherman in the group to fish for all of the members of the group. the one fisherman should teach the members of the group how to fish so each member can feed his/her self.
In the beginning, we had automobile crashes without benefit of seat belts.. in the end, we have seat-belts to prevent being tossed out of the car through its window.. in this scenario we did not change the risk environment we changed the risk to conduct activities in the risk environment.
The need is not an antivirus, vaccine or whatever, the need is to develop comfortable to wear , acceptable to our culture to wear, personal protection equipment. Something that makes it relatively safe to engage activities in virus contaminated environment. Allow the virus to flourish, just don’t allow the flourishing virus to do so inside of a human host.
Instrument Flight Rules
I don’t think this is useful presentation of data in this article.
Preferable is a collection of over 50 studies and reports from around the world, clearly expressed and linked to relevant journals, which presents a much fuller and clearer picture of the medical opinion:
https://swprs.org/studies-on-covid-19-lethality/
Karlin’s estimate of ~1% IFR is about four or five times the average of these studies.
Those who pointed out in March that this virus is within the range of severe influenza (and that the response was disproportionate) have been vindicated time and again. The lockdowners have been shown to be wrong time and again. I don’t think anyone can really be arguing from a position of honesty if they are not listening carefully to those epidemiologists, virologists and immunology specialists who have been censored from Youtube and Facebook (Ioanidis, Wittkowski, Cahill, et al). There is only one reason to censor something.
James Hilton accurately if unwittingly predicted Covid-19 mortality in his 1934 short novel Goodbye, Mr. Chips, when right at the beginning a character says ” … anno domini, but that’s the most fatal complaint of all, in the end.”
Here comes Anatoli, cherry picking data to get too high a IFR number by maybe a factor of 3 (link below). The other thing wrong with this post is to assume that there is only one IFR. If you live in a place where the population is old, insulin resistant, and vit. D deficient, you can probably even get slightly above 1%. If none of those conditions are true, you can get well below 0.1%. Intermediate conditions will give intermediate results.
Then there is the intentional and often forced injection of nursing homes with covid patients, perhaps with the intent of beefing up excess mortality that was not budging one month into the media storm and 3 weeks into the lockdown. This has been widely reported in the UK, NY, and Lombardy, but there have been irregularities also in Spain. Why should anyone use those data, except journos on a deadline?
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zC3kW1sMu0sjnT_vP1sh4zL0tF6fIHbA6fcG5RQdqSc/edit#gid=0
There also was an Infection Fatality Rate of a goose egg for the many hundreds of infected crew members on cruise ships.
As of 2020-05-22 the CDC data has North Carolina missing week 16 for 2020. The rest of the states are complete.
The entire USA has an “excess death” rate about 5.5% (50,331) higher than the 4 year average for weeks 1 to 16. As a comparisson I checked the first 16 weeks of 2018 compared to the previous 4 year average and it was 7.2% (63,260).
In some online discussions some were suggesting using “excess deaths” to see what effect the covid-19 disease is having and I thought that would be a reasonable approach as it gets past the deaths “with/from” issue.
All the data is from this CDC page:
https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/mortality.html
The script and all related files are here if you want to kick the tires:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/fh9x5fngmfbeiiu/AAAH-OtOMqiY_R9qqG6YccCRa?dl=0
The script generates data for all 50 states plus DC and New York City (CDC treats it separately from New York State).
The “reports.xlsx” file has the accumulative totals for all reports.
The entire USA has an “excess death” rate about 5.5% (50,331) higher than the 4 year average for weeks 1 to 16. As a comparisson I checked the first 16 weeks of 2018 compared to the previous 4 year average and it was 7.2% (63,260).
The script and all related files are here if you want to kick the tires:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/fh9x5fngmfbeiiu/AAAH-OtOMqiY_R9qqG6YccCRa?dl=0
Sounds right. And within the 0.05 to 0.1% ball park assumed by Oxford University Professor of Epidemiology, Sunetra Gupta.
But in the course of this pandemic we have seen abundant evidence of the unscientific cast of the medical mind. The medical establishment has failed to go after the data needed to assess the problem with any accuracy. Hence, the general lack of effort to conduct serological surveys to determine infection rates, and the failure to investigate how adverse outcomes of infection are dependent on the age, residence (urban vs suburban vs rural, etc), health condition and other characteristics of those infected.
Equally, there has been a noticeable absence of interest in getting accurate cause of death data. So we don’t even know, within wide limits, how many have died of the disease.
In fact, the performance of the medical community is reminiscent of the mentality of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s partner in medical practice, a psychopathic genius who deplored efforts by the British Medical Association to prevent disease spread, arguing that, on the contrary, the Medical Association should devote its resources to blocking drains and poisoning wells, thereby to promote the business of the profession.
And promoting their own business is pretty clearly what the medical profession, as a body, is striving to do now. Hence the profession stands aside as politicians force care homes to accept as residents those known to be infected with Covid19, and as the lockdown has driven suicide rates sky high.
Thank God that the virus started in China first. No I don’t mean it that way. I mean thank God that the virus started in China so they could provide some leadership to the clueless west as to how to deal with the virus – lockdown.
It worked for the Chinese, why is not working for the west? Could this be a sign of the things to come – the west just following Chinese ideas like a little beatch?
What would have happened if the virus appeared first in the west and they had to come up with their own original idea as to how to respond to it?
There has been a lot of talk in recent years about China stealing “intellectual property” from the west. Isn’t the response to the virus a perfect example of the west stealing “intellectual property” from China? And what a property it turned out to be.
China should have patented the lockdown and sue the west for copyrights infringements.
Why is the lockdown the only legitimate response to the virus? Because China invented it? The only countries that dared to be different were Sweden and Belorussia.
And just one out of 585 cases on board USS Theodore Roosevelt.
All your statistics won’t change the fact that Murica and the orange baboon blew it. Nor will it ever stop the truth from coming out that Corona was an US manufactured bio weapon meant to cripple the Chinese economy and make the nation ripe for regime change.
Sadly, like always the US overreached its imperial arm and went after the Iranian government and now through its own incompetence and rejection of science, its own economy and population is being crippled by its own bio weapon 8 months after it first let it lose in the early summer days of 2019 creating the vapor smoke crisis and an outbreak of a strange summer flu/pneumonia epidemic in multiple nursing homes across America.
No doubt the 2019 US outbreak was a test run to judge how effective the weapon is by targeting its own citizens. And after all, the US likes to use its own weapons on its own people to the point of it being nearly a 75 year practice.
https://www.businessinsider.com/military-government-secret-experiments-biological-chemical-weapons-2016-9?r=US&IR=T
The entire USA has an “excess death” rate about 5.5% (50,331) higher than the 4 year average for weeks 1 to 16.
Why are you excluding the weeks of May from your analysis? Keep in mind that the highest daily death tolls have been over the past month or so.
The virus started in 2019 in a region of Minnesota that lies next to Fort Derrick. You may recall the 2019 summer outbreak of the e-smoke vapor sickness that produces a glass like x-ray effect perfectly similar to the glass like x-ray effect produced by corona and lets never forget that those victims got hooked up to respirators just like corona victims do today.
And that’s not mentioning the multiple outbreaks of pneumonia inside nursing homes in the same region.
Clearly, the US tested its new bio weapon on its own citizens in 2019 before unleashing it on China doing the 2019 war games in the Wuhan region where soldiers from around the world were all exposed to it along with citizens from the Wuhan city. Citizens that would go on to visit the wet markets and infect others.
#AmericaLiesMillionsDie
Every advanced country that had a massive overshoot in the number of old people dying did not take care of the.elderly in the care homes. In the UK and cities such as NYC. In fact a clusterfwck of bone headed decisions made the situation much worse for those in homes. Hyperventilating about useless ventilators which helped nobody in the end when production of PPE for frontline medical staff could have been easily ramped up – the oil riggers and fire-fighers use their own version of PPE too – simple things that could have been done were swept away in the panic caused by the headless chickens. But now the same chickens turn around and say “think of the elderly and the nurses”.
That’s true.
The Chinese response and propaganda cover is all about making the CCP look good. Except for farts like Bill Gates everyone one else who knows the mind games the Chicoms play understand this.
We should really be comparing it to the worst months in the last few decades. The months that were so and that barely anyone even noticed. It was weird when the BBC pointed out that our worst week just superceded the worst week (with a smaller and younger population) of the last 20 years. Not that anyone talks about that essentially equivalent week for mortality from 20 years ago.
Worst use of the word “clearly” I’ve ever read…
Peter Frost, it is obvious that Trm is rather eclectic in setting an arbitrary start of counting the access deaths. The count at the moment is 98566 and most died in the past 12 weeks. There were just 56 documented deaths by 1st March. So 16 weeks are not over yet and the count is rising.
OK, that’s settled then!
I don’t know how anyone could possibly take such a “paper” seriously; I mean, you could at least reference someone using R packages. But then, quite a lot of people at Unz seem vested in a certain outcome. TLDR “OK boomer.”
My Long Island daily, Newsday, is beginning to report that with all the research data coming in, it is being found that Corona Virus appears to be acting increasingly like a typical flu.
I don’t doubt the author’s accuracy in this piece. However, the reactions to handling the Corona Virus caused as many problems as the virus itself where those reactions were poorly implemented.
China is seen as the leading icon for a large country getting the virus under control quickly. However, China, it must be remembered, is more of an authoritarian society than what is found in the West and as such had the mechanics in place to be extremely strict with its population while enforcing restrictions.
In Europe, the good reactions came after a time of not doing so well. This was most severely seen in Italy. However, many European countries started to move quickly once they realized what they were up against.
It is in the United States that the initial reactions were so poor but mostly from the federal government from which the states were taking their cues from since most states did not have the mechanics of the federal government to enforce workable, legitimate, pandemic policies.
As we have all seen the US federal government was completely incompetent in its reactions and still is. This left the states to quickly develop their own mechanisms for taking care of their residents.
New York is now the top state in the US in terms of large population virus containment policies and we are now in the process of re-opening.
So though, as the author points out, the virus may be far less lethal than originally thought as well as less contagious, no one in the States had any inkling oft this for quite a while because they were taking their initial guidelines from federal level institutions, many of which have been completely underfunded by the Trump administration. And Trump himself has shown himself to be as inept as he is a buffoon, causing more issues and harm than could be simply attributed to honest mistakes….
Only COVIDIOTS believe in the HOLOCOUGH Hoax.
“So why did the Chinese cities outside Wuhan only shut down for 16 days and not as strongly as Wuhan and quickly clear the virus?” – Let’s assume this true. The answer is very simple. If Chinese lockdowns brings the reproductive number R0 to R0=0.3 then in the city with N=100,000 infected it takes 10 reproductive cycles to bring down the number of infected to N<1 while in the city where N=1,000 it takes 6 reproductive cycles.
Correct. The medical cartel is corrupt, controlled and dangerous. They don’t know what causes disease, nor how to cure disease. Allopathic medicine was created by Rockefeller to make money by weakening our immune system to create a steady stream of customers. Most doctors today treat symptoms with pharmaceuticals that they receive a kickback for prescribing. This is what they’re taught.
Best to use Naturopaths who understand cause and effect.
Covid is a worldwide agenda to control, enslave and sicken the population with vaccines. Corona means Crown. We can thank Rothschild for this and much more.
“Cultures that believe in sacrificing the elderly to save the economy are barbaric in nature, nothing different from cultures that practice pedophilia and human sacrifice, and the people there are nothing but savages like the Aztecs.”
What a dumb comment. Equating a natural process (eg, virus) with deliberate sacrifice (eg, tossing your kids into a burning effigy of Moloch) is just plain dumb.
They have nothing in common whatsoever. A better analogy is allowing the weak/elderly in a caribou herd to be killed by predators so that the young can survive.
Elderly people are worth less than young ones. Period. Ask any insurer. Why? Because they have lived most of their life, they are past their earning and breeding years.
You might not like it, but that’s how insurance companies and health care organizations work. Young people are worth more because they have many more years ahead of them.
The average IQ on Unz has been plummeting as it becomes more popular.
Introductory paragraph to, Lockdowns failed to alter the course of pandemic and are now destroying millions of livelihoods worldwide, JP Morgan study claims:
“Outside a few towns in Northern Italy, the hallowed “herd immunity” is still a mirage.”
The other mirage is the vast, mega death toll that we were promised.
Where are the heaps of corpses? Where are the millions of deaths?
This overblown virus is the most disappointing killer in history. We shut down our societies for this nothingburger?
I’d caution you to rethink your belief that China actually “crushed” corona.. – China crushed the epidemic. They were getting some flare ups because of some Chinese coming from Italy and Russia-China border traffic in the North. They know how to handle it. The border traffic control and quarantining procedures will get strict and better and the Chinese nationalists will rejoice it unlike the American ‘nationalists’ who are crying that economy is hurting because the borders are closed and airlines can’t fly. American ‘nationalists’ are really altruistic internationalist who agree to pay high prices for medication in order to subsidies (that’s what they are being told by libertarian think tanks) Big Pharma’s R&D so the rest of the world can have cheap drugs via price negotiation by their governments.
Anything that comes form Sweden has to be taken with the grain of salt. Their approach was the most ideological. For this reason plus the national pride plus saving face by the bozo Anders Tegnell the pressure on Sweden to lie is the highest. The cook the books. Undercounting the dead and over counting the infected.
A classic example of the uselessness of mathematical models in the absence of common sense.
Mostly, throughout N. America and Europe, Covid-related deaths have occurred in care homes for the elderly (81% in Canada). There, the elderly, rather than being protected during the lockdown, were dealt a death sentence by stupid political and medical people, urged on by mathematical modelers, who cleared hospitals of old people infected with the virus by sending them to care homes where they infected, and thus caused the death of, many other inmates.
Could we have some evidence of that? Or are you just bullshitting?
Please see Prof Dr Didier Raoult his findings, has a ifr0,5in his hospital where he threats about 3.000 patients , uses the médecine hydroxychloroquine with azithromycine.
“Sorry ’bout the hysteria and the 40 million thrown out of work.
#Coronahoax will end as soon as Trump loses in November.” –Donkeys
The “Dolan model” (which is recognized as being the most accurate analysis worldwide) says this killer pandemic is comparable to the WMD in Iraq or the six million dead in the holocaust.
At least they did it with a purpose: eating human meat. Maybe you are viewing dropping two atomic bombs on two cities as more civilized? Or attacking countries which did nothing against the USA (but have oil on their territories)?
https://www.reddit.com/r/geopolitics/comments/fnvvh8/some_thoughts_on_chinas_initial_handling_of/
One of the best if not the best comment I have read so far regarding Chinese handling of covid 19.
Came across it in depthhub of Reddit.
Edit:. Oooh, I had no idea it would expand the full text with editing intact. Awesome.
It is very sad to see your mental deterioration. All what is left is your anger and animus with disregard of reason and logic. About three years ago I noticed lack of coherence and ability of staying on the topic with frequent confusions leading to arguing against yourself. It seems that all what is left are out of context outbursts and rants.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/how-high-is-herd-immunity-level/#comment-3905202
According to the CDC’s current best estimate, the Symptomatic Case Fatality Rate (SCFR) of the coronavirus is 0.4% (the CDC estimates that 65 percent of all cases are symptomatic). This means the CDC estimates that the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) for all infections across all age groups, symptomatic as well as asymptomatic, is approximately 0.26%.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios-h.pdf
If that was about the same time the cancellation of the NFL season happened – maybe.
They had Chinese new year. There where 3 weeks delay after, then they delivered as always to me.
Inbetween was labor Day. There days shutdown, as every year.
Why is the lockdown the only legitimate response to the virus? Because China invented it?
Because that’s how it was planned by the Globalists. And that’s why it was absolutely
necessary for the first country on the list to set an example of proper response for the
rest of the world. It worked. The next steps will be also coordinated “from above”.
Why don’t just recognize the presence of that force and change the news accordingly ?!
The reason is very simple. The data at the CDC site is not even complete for April much less May.
As of 2020-05-20 the CDC data has Connecticut missing 5 weeks of the first 16 and North Carolina missing 3 weeks of the first 16.
As of 2020-05-22 the CDC data only has North Carolina missing week 16 for 2020. Getting there slowly.
Rest assured I shall be updating as the data is updated.
No “karel” I am NOT “eclectic in setting an arbitrary start of counting the access deaths”. First it is “excess” deaths not “access”. Second it makes sense to do it for the year to date because you want to see the effect it has over the whole year not just 2 months. So I start at week 1 and as more data comes in I’ll be updating it.
Feel free to do up your own. I’ve provided all the sources, scripts and data that I used plus links to the CDC and instructions on how to download it.
No “karel” I am NOT “eclectic in setting an arbitrary start of counting the access deaths”. First it is “excess” deaths not “access”. Second it makes sense to do it for the year to date because you want to see the effect it has over the whole year not just 2 months. So I start at week 1 and as more data comes in I’ll be updating it.
Feel free to do up your own. I’ve provided all the sources, scripts and data that I used plus links to the CDC and instructions on how to download it.
Because they live in a homogeneous society without a hostile foreign (((elite))) ruling over them
If you want to know what it is like in a Jew-controlled country, try Ukraine. Their president and prime minister are Jews. The fake color revolution of 6 years ago was organized by American Jews and they installed Ukrainian Jews in power. The democratically-elected president had to be rescued by Russian agents and smuggled to Russia for his own safety.
Here is some news from the front page of their English-language newspaper:
1- A Ukrainian lawmaker has been found dead from a gunshot to the head at his office in central Kyiv, the Interior Ministry of Ukraine confirmed. Valery Davydenko, 47, an independent member of parliament, was found dead in the bathroom of his office with a gunshot wound to the head. A gun was discovered next to …
Ukrainian lawmaker found dead in central Kyiv
Please note that this politician was not Jewish. He did not work for the main Jewish-controlled parties in power. The headline is misleading. He was shot in his office. When is the last time a British MP was murdered in the British parliament?
2- Public ground transportation began running at full capacity in Kyiv on May 23, hours after Health Minister Maksym Stepanov said that the city isn’t ready to resume public transportation. An hour later, Stepanov changed his mind, announcing that the city now meets the government’s criteria to loosen the COVID-19 quarantine upheld since mid-March. The initial …
Ukraine loosens quarantine in some regions, Kyiv barely skirts by
3- The US Embassy has the following information to warn US citizens:
A demonstration is planned to begin at 1400 hours on Sunday, May 24, at Independence Square (Maidan Nezalezhnosti), located on Khreschatyk Street near the city center. Social media reports approximately 3000 people are planning to attend with potential for thousands more. The organizer and some of the groups associated with this movement have been linked to public disorder and have a history of confrontations with police and security forces.
Demonstration Alert (US Embassy Kiev)
It takes no genius to realize that this politician changed his mind to try and take the wind out of the sails of the protesters. The newspaper makes no mention of this demonstration.
My message is that so long as people do not protest, the Jews in power are going to keep you locked down. Nothing scares them more than the police swapping sides. Your choice.
https://www.kyivpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Vadym-Davydenko-11-800×520.jpg
https://www.kyivpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/20200523084855_PET_5650-1-800×520.jpg
In the UK, the excess deaths began after the lockdown commenced, and they have occurred largely in care homes.
Residents of care homes are being denied routine visits from family doctors and they are also being denied the opportunity to go to hospital in an emergency. As in many US states, elderly patients were rushed back to care homes from hospitals regardless of their infection status, and care homes were prevneted by law from refusing. So, in the name of “protecting our NHS” thousands of elderly residnts of care homes were sacrificed.
Since mid March all elective surgery has been cancelled, cancer diagnoses are way down, cancer treatments are being delayed, visits for conditions such as heart attack and stroke have dropped, and so on. Either these ailments have gone away an the NHS is no longer needed, or else there is a silent holocaust of deaths going on at home. One of the people pointing out the very obvious has been the nation’s leading oncologist, Dr Karel Silarki, and for that crime he has been removed from Youtube.
Do you have any evidence that more than 4 million people in Germany have already been infected? If so, please share it.
I suggest you look at my comment 69 and the charts for Germany. It is obvious to any barking dimwit that Germany has acquired herd immunity. Whether that is to your taste or not is another matter.
As an insult your comment is lacking in wit, pith or punch.
As a response to my comment, it is entirely vacuous.
In case you have an argument, I will repeat my contention:
That is all true. The lockdowns have in many jurisdictions resulted in more deaths than would otherwise have occurred.
And if you have evidence of the fraud and lying with which you charge the Swedish government and it’s representatives, let’s hear it.
In addition to the resultant excess deaths, the lockdown in the UK and elsewhere will have severe economic consequences, in which connection, here’s English historian David Starkey in a discussion entitled:
Covid-19 — Britain’s Disastrous Response
I think the world is very lucky that this virus didn’t happen in 1989. I am talking about the Tiananmen square and the Chinese government response to the requests for more “democracy” there.
Imagine if the virus happened in 1989 and the Chinese responded to it in their old fashioned way – by running the infected people down with tanks?
And then the stupid west decided to copy this medical procedure and started mowing it’s all sick citizens down with their democratic tanks?
What is wrong with this world, man? Since when does China get to decide what is a proper response to a worldwide medical crisis?
I think that there is a larger issue at play here. Once upon a time US self-appointed itself as a “leader of the free world”. I think China is aiming to become a leader of the quarantined world.
Measuring damage from Covid(or anything really) by “deaths” is entirely the wrong metric. The only proper way to measure the damage is Quality Adjusted Life Years lost. Nobody is doing this. If a cost/benefit analysis were carried out using QALY as the criterion then the horrendously damaging “lock-down” would not have been contemplated by humanitarian people(the criminal authoritarian career politicians would still have wanted it).
There are a lot of strange features in where the virus was deadly and not so deadly. Why so low in the Balkans, including Greece, where I am? There was quite a strict lockdown in Greece from March 23, although it loosened somewhat in late April and ended on May 4. The low death toll could be attributed to the lockdown but other states that locked down about the same time were still hit much harder.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The reason that lying with statistics is so easy to do is because statistical analysis always, by necessity, eliminates many variables which are often the most important ones and focuses on one (or maybe two) infinitesimally small part(s) of the overall question.
How often do you hear these self-proclaimed geniuses discussing things like weather, humidity, latitude, sunlight, wind currents, saline content of the air, obesity, diabetes, diet, clothing, food processing, washing habits, eating habits, cultural habits, air pollutants, water pollutants, etc, etc, etc. when discussing this so-called “pandemic”?
Let alone things like herd immunity which is orders of magnitude harder to accurately define and quantify than this silly piece implies.
No, these geniuses who managed to pass a high-school algebra class use their simplified-to-meaningless equations to manipulate people who flunked those classes.
If you think that ducking and diving to avoid the fake coronavirus will extend your span by 30 years then dream on. In any event Bill Gates is coming for you in a year or so with his vaccine, you’ve got five years if you’re lucky.
Talking about Utu there, I suppose, with his precise calculation of the way a lockdown drives down the virus reproduction number, all based on the ludicrous assumption of random human interaction.
What’s amazing is that the modellers have not already been dunked in a pond.
Here in Canada, as in most of the Western world, we have trashed our economy because of a virus that has, supposedly (i.e., based on extremely dodgy statistics), killed about six thousand people of whom, all but 1200 were elderly care home residents who received a death sentence from the medical establishment that decreed that sick old people with Covid19 should be moved out of hospital into a care home where they’d infect, and thus cause the death of, multiple other residents.
Twelve hundred deaths of non-care home residents is less than a third of Canada’s yearly suicide rate, one sixth of the annual rate of death due to diabetes (i.e., excess sugar consumption in a diet of which almost one-third of calories come from sugar), and one tenth of the rate of death due to accidents.
But apparently, to suppress a virus that has thus far killed fewer than the seasonal flu, we in Canada opted to wreck the economy, and gave our Communist dictatorship-admiring, Castro-loving, jet-setting environmentalist, Prime Minister Dress Up freedom to piss away about a third of the GDP paying people not to work.
I think the world is very lucky that this virus didn’t happen in 1989″
While every joke has a grain of joke in it, nothing like that could’ve taken place back
then. And not because the people were much smarter and knowledgeable than they are
now, or the Globalists didn’t exist or didn’t plan anything back then. But because
the world wasn’t even closely so technologically advanced and prepped in many other
ways for One World, One Government, One Etc., etc., as it is now.
There are some esoteric reasons too.
As for Since when does China get to decide what is a proper response to a worldwide
medical crisis? , the word “decide” is not a synonym for “show example” – and that’s
all it was. Decisions were made elsewhere.
So, whether somebody likes it or not, but the long ears of Globalists are protruding
from this clearly manufactured crisis.
Eventually, lockdown was very effective in China, and should limit the pandemic to a single wave in the country. Aboveall, their successful policy was interregional quarantine. (And lack of interregional quarantine is the greatest failue in response to the pandemic in Russia, as it means it can continue to burn through the summer, and result in the second wave in October).
However, the situation with China is not supporting rosy glasses or emulation. In Wuhan and nearby areas, there were over 20 thousand deaths from coronavirus. Coronavirus virus deaths in Wuhan were worse than London and Madrid, and similar to the situation in New York.
As was public knowledge and leaked in early February, China has lied about the number of deaths by more than 5 times. Of course, only an incredibly gullible and stupid person would believe data from Chinese Communist Party. Unfortunately, the governments of USA, UK et al, are apparently part of the category “incredibly gullible and stupid person”, and they really seemed to view this as a mild threat, that can be controlled with deaths in low thousands. And so the situation in Wuhan, was allowed to repeat in New York, London, et al.
In countries like Vietnam, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, et al, their governments know the Chinese statistics were lying by quite a few times, and responded to the pandemic with just normal levels of caution, and the results now are low deaths, lower probability of second wave, and ability to restore normal life in the intermediate time.
In Russia, the authorities know Chinese were lying with death numbers – and try to be adequately cautious -, but it is not Soviet times, and the authorities are too incompetent to design a basically coherent response, to implement interregional quarantine, to isolated infected people, etc.
If you study the timeline in China, they implement interregional quarantine before they even full lockdown is attained in Wuhan.
Virus spread was mainly limited to inside Hubei (where it was “out of control” – as in New York or Milan), and was easier to suppress in earlier stages with a short and sharp lockdown in cities like Peking.
Interregional quarantine was the greatest success story of China’s response to the pandemic. This is verifiable from the fact only two known to be infected people have entered Russia from China. In Northern China regions bordering with Russia, far more coronavirus has crossed now in the other direction (from Russia to China, than vice-versa), as interregional quarantine stopped the virus from entering large parts of Northern China.
If interregional quarantine in Russia (combined with isolating returning people from abroad into hotels in Moscow, rather than spreading them around the country), the pandemic could have been limited to Moscow. And they would not have needed two months of non-working days, which have already caused a shut down of 1/3 of GDP.
Simiarly, if interregional quarantine was in America, – then most of the country could have continued working as normal.
Interregional quarantine was the most basic assumption of anti-epidemic planning in the USSR (and seems to be still the foundation of it in China today). It’s strange how such basic knowledge has been lost.
That’s what one is inclined to suppose. But can you provide some reference that substantiates such belief?
Exactly. The media machine controls the “record” but has no bearing upon the truth. It is the “acceptable” framing of the issue which can then be pushed in the policy arena. The voice of the media and of “think tanks” simply smothers the voice of the electorate. Like cuckoos…
It did & does spread exponentially you human turd. We’re just two months on from the lockdowns. The biggest increases were all in March.
Corona really makes you see how many stupid people live among us.
What percent of people are immune without antibodies? Does anyone have any idea?
Herd Immunity Requires 70% Infection.
I understand how statisticians build their outbreak models and arrive at their “70% infection rate needed for herd immunity” conclusion. But my question is: when has any novel viral outbreak ever even surpassed 30% of the population? I don’t think ever, but perhaps I am just ignorant.
“Lockdowns Save Lives!”
Can this statement be substantiated by the evidence? What is the correlation between deaths per million and economic lockdown?
“Excess Deaths Indicate Higher COVID Fatality Rate!”
Or… do they imply higher deaths due to suicide, overdose, and refusal to seek treatment due to lockdown and fear?
My estimate is 80%. With some paid for stupids amongst them. Their strat is to bury every single comments section of every covid 19 articles under the stupidest comments imaginable.
Like really, really fucking stupid level of comments.
Like every other flu season for the last 15 million years, you human phlegm wad.
Coming from a guy who’s too dumb to spell the word “observer”.
Another retard fell for the trap.
The reason that lying with statistics is so easy to do is because statistical analysis always, by necessity, eliminates many variables which are often the most important ones and focuses on one (or maybe two) infinitesimally small part(s) of the overall question.
Correct. Experiments with System Dynamics have shown that intelligent people are unable to handle a simple model with very few variables. We are forced to concentrate on too few variables in order to make sense of anything.
A simple example is the stock market. When the market goes up, the pundits trot out a standard set of “explanations”. When the market drops, the come out with another set of “explanations”. But for every buyer, there is a seller and vice versa. Anyone reading these fake explanations could be excused for assuming that it was not so. 🙂
The market is moved by a vast number of circumstances. BTW, everyone should be now know that Warren Buffet sold most of his airline shares before the crash. More evidence that this hoax was widely expected among insiders.
Buffet Sold All Airlines In Advance?
https://youtu.be/VDE9ckVnu_M
In Russia … the authorities are too incompetent to design a basically coherent response, to implement interregional quarantine, to isolated infected people, etc.
Why the blatantly obvious lie about Russia? The Russian population is far greater than many other countries and yet their death toll is one-tenth of theirs. Here are some possibilities – maybe all three are correct:
1- The UK, the USA, Canada and so on deliberately sent elderly infected people back to their nursing homes.
2- Western doctors are misdiagnosing on the death certificates and labeling many due to the virus when they are due to other causes.
3- Western doctors are incompetent – they not using the appropriate treatment.
4- The Russians successfully isolated their elderly.
The media in the West is very unhappy with this. Bloomberg and the FT are unhappy that Russia has so few deaths.
http://alongchat.com/stuff/RussiaC2.jpg
As someone said: Using masks to stop a virus is like using a chain link fence to keep out mosquitoes.
A bit of a simplification. Or very much so. The unexplained excess deaths all assigned to the virus, when not even all those that are officially declared as such are actually direct results of it – in many cases they did not even bother to test the victims, but they surely must have died of “coronavirus”. As if none of them were the result of the lock-down…
Another thing is the anti-body testing and its results that are very unreliable and there could easily be 2-3x more people who actually have them but tested negative. So much for the 1-1.5% mortality, which in reality could be as low as 0.1%
In 6 months this virus allegedly killed 350k people. Flu kills 500+k every year.
You were whining about years off of your life expectancy.
That’s pure speculation based on what theory? Have you ever seen a coronavirus that only appeared once and then disappeared? No lock-down will ever stop the spread of a virus that already exists on this scale. The lock-down in Spain started on March 14. Thereafter Spain experienced sharp increase of cases and deaths. So how did it help?
“You OK with a million dead Americans? Or is that a big enough number that you’re willing to conceded this is a big deal?
I’ll be 60 next year. The actuarial tables say I’ve “only” got another 30 years left, although I’m counting on more, but if you think it’s ok to have a million dead people because only 100,000 of them will be an age you consider worth caring about, you’re positioning yourself as my enemy, and that’s not wise.”
We’re shaking in our boots!!!!
F’ing boomers. What a curse it is to follow you.
A good friend of mine committed suicide, as right when he got his life together, the President took the bait, and he lost the job that was the symbol of his turnaround.
As for myself, I know no one who has the damned virus. All the number crunching and fussing in the world won’t make me give a f***.
It has been very hard on young families, with domestic violence hotlines exploding.
We ruined our futures for a bunch of failed parents, who never gave a f*** about their kids. Yet we are supposed to care.
I’m disappointed, because this gay virus didn’t even put a dent in them. They’re still going to there, refusing to retire, insulting everyone younger, acting like they were parents of the century, because their kids didn’t die from malnutrition.
We should have ended the lockdown early, and when asked about why, we should have just said, “We’re not haaaaaaappppppyyyy.”
You know, the reason you left your spouse and kids during your 1sr, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th marriages?
“We’re going to die if we end the lockdown.”
“I’m not haaaaaaaapppppppyyyyyy.”
You’re the turd, Maciano, unwilling to accept that this was nothing worth fussing over.
Everyone of you idiots were claiming a cataclysmic fate lay ahead, and it didn’t happen.
100,000 boomers is bs. That’s not all that much more than those who die from sucking in too many chicken wings, while they’re watching Dontavius and D’Andre score plays during Sunday Night Sportsball.
Where are the million dead, which was the minimum who were supposed to die WITH the lockdown?
You guys need to accept that you were wrong. The lockdown was not worth it, and the virus was not what it was claimed to be.
A lot of old mfers don’t want to face death. I was less afraid in Yusufiyah in 07.
And these are the superior, much more courageous, “self-made” types who got “stabbed in the back” in Vietnam?
“Do you think that massive use of PPE…while still enabling societies to be open? “ – Taiwan, Japan and S. Korea I think gave affirmative answer to your question. And also the proactive contact tracing: identify potential contact and put them in a very strict quarantine. Neither was done in the US or Europe. Why? Can this be explained with incompetence or was it purposefully amplified incompetence to get us where we are?
“Because they live in a homogeneous society without a hostile foreign…” – No, because they do not have moronic recalcitrant libertarians (99% white) who believe this was a hoax or just a flu…
A little documentation to support your assertion.
This press release is posted on the CDC’s website:
You said March 14 lock-down, right? Here is the plot of daily deaths in Spain. March 14 +(two to three weeks) is between Mach 28 and April 4. Clearly you can see that daily deaths reached its peak implying that R0=1 and then began to fall meaning R0<1 just about 2-3 weeks after the start of the lockdown. Do you have more problems you can't think through by yourself?
https://i.ibb.co/VWZL9Q0/spain.png
The answer is (probably) all four.
is probably the biggest effect, and is seen as a bump in excess deaths starting well after the lockdown was implemented.
was used in the beginning, and was instrumental in getting countries locked down.
Is due to effective anti-viral drugs being inexpensive and not patented, which is a big no-no in the West.
I don’t know if Russians isolated the sick, but it appears that any civilized country would do so.
for example, if the exponent changes logarithmically with time, the epidemic spreads linearly.
If you exclude the 82% of deaths among care home residents, Canada’s death toll of around 1200 is comparable to Russia’s, and equal to about one third of the annual suicide rate, or one eighth of the annual death toll due to flu.
What is interesting is that having wrecked the economy supposedly to prevent the spread of a largely innocuous corona virus, Canada’s Castro-loving, Communist dictatorship admiring, black-face wearing Leader, Mr. Dressup Trudeau, is more popular now than ever before.
As they say, never let a crisis go to waste. And if you haven’t got a crisis, just fake it, and the media including the Unz Review, will give 100% support.
That looks very interesting. Can I suggest that you put it up on github or gitlab or both?
You can get free accounts to both sites.
Hmmm, maybe you don’t want people to know who you are …
What browser do you use?
Currently, that CDC site puts up a disclaimer and does not seem to let you go further. So, you cannot download the data.
OK, I had an issue with my browser … Brave. Chrome had the same issue and would not let me scroll to the bottom of the page.
Why bring libertarianism into it? There is no logical connection.
And on what basis do you say 99% are white? How do you know. Aren’t those kids of many colors in the ghetto selling drugs not libertarians, at least in general sentiment if not in some hifalutin theoretical way?
On what basis do you say there are people who believe this was a hoax? And what does it even mean to say “this was a hoax.” In what is the “hoax” supposed to consist? A fake virus, fake mortality data, or what?
And who’s saying this was “just a flu”?
The virus is a corona virus, the same type as the flu virus, but it is a novel virus and therefore cannot be just a flu if by “a flu” one means one of the previously characterized flu viruses.
What you perhaps meant, had you thought more carefully and spoken more precisely, is that anyone comparing the lethality of covid19 with the flu is a moron.
But a comparison of the lethality of covid19 with the flu, a virus of the same type is a perfectly sensible way to assess the hazard that it represents.
In that connection, if one discounts the thousands of sick and elderly care home residents reportedly killed by Covid19, the number of deaths attributed to this novel corona virus here in Canada total less than 1500 versus 8511 flu deaths in 2018, the last year for which Stats Canada provides data.
So even if you add in those who are said to have died of Covid19 in care homes, the result of a deadly policy hatched by government and its evidently incompetent medical advisors of sending elderly Covid-infected hospital patients to care homes where they passed the disease to both staff and other inmates, the total number of Covid19-attributed deaths in Canada does not exceed 2018’s flu death toll.
Good to see it worked. I use Chromium and Brave on Linux (Kubuntu) and both worked for me so I didn’t think to check it. Thanks
The current CDC numbers put the “symptomatic fatality rate” at 0.4% while noting that 35% of infected people are asymptomatic:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html (see table 1, right-hand column)
So that would give an infection fatality rate of just under 0.3%, which is right in line with the wealth of information presented on this page:
https://swprs.org/studies-on-covid-19-lethality/
1% is an overestimate.
NCOV19 =globalist effort to innoculate everyone with a vax designed to track you. Secondary purpose is to steal as much as possible from tax coffers around the world.
RESIST THIS PSY-OP
I don’t think so.
You are confusing case fatality rate with infection fatality rate.
Cases are infections brought to the attention of medical authorities. Infections include infections that are not cases.
The only way to determine infection rate is to survey the population for antibodies, something that most authorities outside of China seem determined not to do: perhaps because they can then befuddle people into doing what you have done, which is to confuse cases with infections and thus gain an exaggerated idea of the lethality of the virus.
Professor Sunetra Gupta of Oxford Univesity has estimated the covid infection fatality rate for the UK at about 0.05%. That is almost certainly much closer to the truth for most countries than your estimate which is six times higher.
Could you explain that? How does a vaccine make one trackable?
That pretty much sums it up. And it is breathtaking that all the deaths from despair that to some extend must be happening now are automatically assigned to the killer bug. That this would happen was clear two months ago.
I realize that now for three days in a row UR has no featured article on corona, which I see as a clear sign that the story is being called off. So Anatoly Karlin’s It-is-1%-mortality-and-basta article is probably meant to mark the end of the discussion.
Hopefully, at some point in the future we will have a relaxed discussion of what went wrong here and why.
Swedish Model Not the Smartest’: Ex-State Epidemiologist Reverses Herself on Lockdown Strategy
https://sputniknews.com/europe/202005261079416989-swedish-model-not-the-smartest-ex-state-epidemiologist-reverses-herself-on-lockdown-strategy/
“Linde, 72, who served as state epidemiologist between 2005 and 2013, described the Swedish model as “not the smartest in all respects” and pointed out that Sweden’s neighbours “succeeded quite well” in limiting the disease’s rampage by imposing weeks-long lockdowns.
Doing the same for a month’s time, according to Linde, would have allowed to protect the most vulnerable. Now it’s “too late” to impose lockdowns due to the spread of the disease, she ventured.
According to the country’s Public Health Agency, almost half of the country’s fatalities linked to COVID-19 occurred in residential homes and elderly care.
The Swedish authorities, with state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell in the lead, initially put their faith in herd immunity, voicing hope of reaching it first in May, then in June. However, merely 7.3 percent of the people tested appeared to have antibodies in Stockholm, the city hit the hardest, which is far less than expected. In a recent interview with Swedish Radio, Tegnell, a polarising yet symbolic figure both revered and hated for his strategy, said that Sweden found itself in a “terrible situation”.
Accumulated coronavirus deaths in Sweden have been many times higher relative to the size of the population than in its Nordic neighbours, with Sweden’s 4,029 deaths pitted against merely 235 in Norway.”
No, I’m not confusing them. I’m saying that according to the CDC’s own numbers, the IFR is much lower than AK’s figure of 1%. It may well be lower than the 0.3% I mentioned, as you suggest and the other source I linked to suggests.
Actually a quite good study had 7% infect in Stockholm a month ago. Probably much higher now
Speaking of reversing herself on lockdown strategy…
Top Norwegian health official: We could have controlled coronavirus without a lockdown:
Now reported to be 20%.
Thanks for the clarification.
Overall mortality rates are only about 0.1% (see https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/).
Mortality rates reported by the World Health Organization (WHO) are currently about 6.4% (see https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/situation-reports).
There is a huge difference between 0.1% and 6.4%. It is now very clear that the WHO’s data is completely inaccurate and unreliable.
Mortality rates is too generic a term. One must distinguish between whether one is referring to the Case Fatality Rate (CFR) or the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR).
The 3.4% or 6.4% quoted by the WHO is the CFR. By contrast, the CFR for the flu is 0.1%.
While the IFR for the flu is well established (0.04%), the IFR for Covid19 isn’t.
Neil Ferguson and his team that worked on the infamous Imperial College study assumed it was ~1.0%.
His counterpart at Oxford University, epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, thinks it ranges between 1 in 1,000 and 5 in 10,000 or 0.1% – 0.05%.
In time, the data will vindicate either NF or SG… not both.
The WHO is a political organization.
Truth is not in their lexicon!
Ferguson is a charlatan. No amount of data will vindicate him.
I would like to know if there are any cases of ‘herd immunity’ other than those caused by vaccinations. Does the yearly flu stop because of ‘herd immunity’ or something else? I think accepting herd immunity as the goal means universal vaccinations.
Now that Covid-19 is mostly gone in UK – it comes out that fatalities were the same as a bad flu year.
From the Off-Guardian:
https://off-guardian.org/wp-content/medialibrary/Picture-2-800×450.jpg?x10376
And the same goes for the worst. They seem to know what we all should do as well.
If I have to choose between the two, I will listen to my betters, because I am damn sure not listening to the clueless.
Well the death stats of the elderly are probably grossly understated. These people die in nursing homes or in hospice situations or in homes and when they die, if they do not die under any suspicious circumstances they go straight to the funeral home. They never get tested, is the point.
I am getting tired of mathematicians who know zero about virology.
People who are worth less are the ones left to die. Sounds barbaric to me.
CDC confirms a fatality rate of 0.26%…not 1.00%
https://www.technocracy.news/cdc-confirms-extremely-low-covid-19-death-rate/?fbclid=IwAR36bz1NeMfJpOlBX3ZG8mcucCp2mVnCUa8SMkeXj_phh3XsvtwbEBHcVeQ
I notice they have some interesting data here as well:
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/weeklyarchives2019-2020/data/NCHSData12.csv
You can simply use wget to retrieve that data.
I looked at using something like CasperJS to automatically download the required data for your scripts but it would take more time than I have available at the moment.
BTW, awk should be able to convert a string of the form “1,123” into a number so users can avoid having to load the CSV files into a spreadsheet.
‘Something is About to Happen’: Confidence in Swedish Government Slumps as COVID-19 Deaths Pile Up
https://sputniknews.com/europe/202006011079484211-something-is-about-to-happen-confidence-in-swedish-government-slumps-as-covid-19-deaths-pile-up/
“Sjören argued that confidence in the Swedish government and the authorities in general had been undermined by the recent debate about the deficiencies in elderly care, high COVID-19 death rates, the low number of tests, and Sweden’s strategy as a whole.
Sweden, which refrained from any lockdowns and instead put its faith into herd immunity, saw the number of infected and fatalities soar, exceeding the death toll in all it fellow Nordic states combined.
Last week, the Swedish death toll was the highest in the world, based on averages for the past seven days. At the end of April, Sweden recorded its highest mortality rate in a century.”
Some good news from Russia:
‘The world’s most promising drug to fight Covid-19’: Russia to deliver potential virus-buster to hospitals this month
https://www.rt.com/russia/490392-russia-covid-19-effective-drug/
“Avifavir is not only the first antiviral drug registered against coronavirus in Russia, but it is also perhaps the most promising drug against Covid-19 in the world,” said Kirill Dmitriev, CEO of the RDIF.
“It was developed and tested in clinical trials in Russia in an unprecedented short period of time, enabling Avifavir to become the first registered drug based on Favipiravir in the world.”
According to the developers, Avifavir disrupts the reproduction mechanisms of Covid-19, and has shown “high efficacy in treating patients with coronavirus during clinical trials.” A study revealed that the virus dies in an average of just four days when a patient takes the drug, compared to nine with a standard course of treatment.
On June 1, the RDIF announced that the 60,000 courses of Avifavir would be delivered to hospitals in Russia this month, with the first expected to arrive on June 11. The drug will not go on sale and will only be used in hospitals under the supervision of a doctor. Avifavir will not be prescribed during pregnancy due to a possible effect on the fetus.”
Coronafacts: IFR ≈ 0.2%, More Widespread
Introductory paragraphs to, Horowitz: Colorado antibody testing proves the CDC’s remarkably low fatality rate for coronavirus:
Introductory paragraphs to, ‘Prof Lockdown’ Neil Ferguson admits Sweden used same science as UK:
More food for thought…
Karl Friston: up to 80% not even susceptible to Covid-19
https://youtu.be/dUOFeVIrOPg
Description:
For me, Anatoly is one of the biggest draws on this website, and there is a lot of fine competition. Love the writing, research, topics, style, sense of humor, and generally agree with his viewpoints on world and Russian affairs. My wife and I hope to knock back a drink with him when we finally take the family to Russia someday.
I just don’t think he is right about the deadliness of this virus for the great majority of people who are not elderly with serious comorbidities.
Since it’s been admitted in multiple sources that the tests, both PCR and antibodies, have crap accuracy rates, I find it amusing that people are discussing the bizarre properties of this very common disease, albeit a new strain.
You get antibodies, but you aren’t immune. You get infected again and again. It doesn’t behave according to expectations. And similar…
Maybe the tests are complete crap???? Oh wait, the feds have already admitted such.
It’s not.
I made this point over and over when the whole TSA thing went down. For everyone’s bitching about being molested at the airport, it could have been scrapped if everyone just stopped flying, even for a short period of time. Oh well.
Prove it. You can’t, unless you have a time machine.
How about no? How about I gather with whomever I want and be able to breath fresh air?
We’re talking about people going back to work, enjoying their families and children playing at the park, going to museums and zoos. Who the heck are you talking about??? And you can shove your vaccines. (Vaccines == $$$$)
Again, nobody has proven anything. Computer models are not proof. Mathematical calculations bases on admittedly shoddy test results are not proof.
We can’t go through this every cold and flu season.
Wake up! We’re all being punked!