Millions of Americans are already out of work due to COVID panic shutdowns, and COVID alarmists want that number to increase sharply.
There have been 68 COVID-19 deaths in the US, and almost half of them were at one nursing home in Washington.
Compare this to the 12,000 to 30,000 flu deaths which had already occurred in the US by February 1.
Flu season is hitting its stride right now in the US. So far, the CDC has estimated (based on weekly influenza surveillance data) that at least 12,000 people have died from influenza between Oct. 1, 2019 through Feb. 1, 2020, and the number of deaths may be as high as 30,000.
This Is How Many People Die From the Flu Each Year, According to the CDC | Health.com
There have been 7,000 COVID-19 deaths globally, compared to far more flu deaths.
Globally, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that the flu kills 290,000 to 650,000 people per year.
This Is How Many People Die From the Flu Each Year, According to the CDC | Health.com
COVID alarmists make these claims :
- COVID-19 is much more transmissible than flu
- Death rates are much higher than flu
- COVID-19 will overwhelm medical services
- Most COVID carriers are asymptomatic
The total number of deaths should be proportional to the transmissibility and death rates, yet the total number of global deaths from flu is 40-100X higher. You can’t have higher transmissibility and death rates, and come up with a much lower total number of deaths. The mathematics don’t work.
Every single one of the 12,000-30,000 flu deaths in the US this year has involved a person becoming critically ill before they died. Why didn’t that large number of critically ill flu patients, or the comparable number of automobile accident deaths overwhelm the system?
Crashing the economy would put millions of people on the street with no shelter and no health care. How many people would die from that? How many tens of millions of people would be killed by a worldwide depression?
Something very seriously wrong is going on here.
Sunday night / Monday morning I commented to friends that I was wondering if the cure wasn’t worse than the disease. No easy answer to this one but the spreading of the virus in Italy & the over whelming of the medical facilities freaked everyone right out. For some reason Italy’s outbreak seems to have been particularly strong.
Italy has a large number of cultural enhancers from Africa. The stats never mention race or ethnicity or even point of origin but you can bet the Africans are involved. They come from countries infested with the Chinese neo-colonialists. The Chinese use few of the locals for the work, bringing in their own from China. Chinese New Year in 2020 was 25th January. You can bet most of those Chinese pillaging Africa went home and returned within a week. Just enough time for Africans to contract the Wuhan Flu before setting off on their invasion of Italy, the preferred first stop from northern Africa. Add to the mix that Italy (and Europe itself but it has been winter and is cold) is one of the most preferred destinations for Chinese tourists (they love copying the culture) then you have a mix ready for a pandemic.
a great site for up to the second corona virus stats is
https://corona.help
The reason Italy is in such bad shape (as is most of the EU countries) is (dare I say it) immigration.
Italy had a pretty good health care system (for socialized medical care), then when 100,000’s of persons from 3rd and 4th world countries of northern africa and the middle east were allow to land and or pass thru things went wrong. These immigrants lacked the health care in the countries they came from (and thus suffered from many illnesses, which were treated in the socialized medical care facilities). These people had little or no sanitation training growing up . When they came to souther Europe they carried all kinds of ailments and diseases, which in turn infected the native populations.
With the influx of new people and now infected native people they have overwhelmed the health care system that was barely meeting the needs of the population prior the influx of new, less healthy people.
The result was inevitable.
Italy has a very large percentage of older people compared to other countries. Older people die from this virus. I just read that 23% of Italy’s population is over 65. Italy median age is 47.3, in the U.S. it’s 38.3.
Other sites, such as: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
give different daily stats.
And how many people got COVID-19 and never knew they had it? Add all together and the COVID-19 ‘scare’ is being pushed by the MSM.
That’s a good site. Looking at Italy, there is a slight indication of new cases leveling off. We should know in 2 or 3 days for sure if that is the case.
That is the exponent is declining somewhat.
According to https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
the numbers of detected cases, infections and fatalities are growing perfectly exponential, and almost exactly as in Italy (just 10 days delay) with more than 2000 fatalities for now.
Mortality is much higher than for a flue, and there is zero immunization in the population. I don’t know if inaction wouldn’t lead to a much deeper depression.
The tests are worthless, thus the stats as well. The only thing in shorter supply than toilet paper is critical thinking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_AyuhbnPOI&feature=youtu.be
This WUWT post is particularly interesting.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/03/16/diamond-princess-mysteries/
I agree with his analysis.
Personally, I think we’ll see somewhere between 3 and 5 doublings of cases and deaths in the U.S., then it’ll flame out like in China. So somewhere around 50-100 thousand cases and 900-3500 deaths.
I could be totally wrong, and CDC is calling for 200,000-1,400,000 deaths. I hope that I’m more right than they are.
I agree and well said, Martin. COVID-19 is a zoonotic virus: unstable, quick to mutate, and potentially able to use other animals as hosts. The original source does seem to be a bat, as the genomes match about 97%.
We have all been exposed to various influenza viruses and have some immunity against them, but one can see by the ‘curve’ of infection rate that we have no immunity to this one.
‘Social distancing’ helped to end the plague, and it will limit this until the vaccine is worked out and available to all. It is not worse than the disease by a long shot, and as you said, inaction could very well lead to a much deeper depression.
Apologies for the large, completely unrelated photo. First comment here, on one of my favorite websites, and thought the image was for the avatar…
How to make an entrance. Superb. :-)
Check the Daily Change graphs for South Korea and for the Chinese provinces, (Hunan in particular), on this site.
https://corona.help/
Coronavirus (Covid-19) Live Infections and Deaths Updates
Fed cuts rates to zero, ramps up QE
https://youtu.be/ixelsjTCW-g
There are no atheists in foxholes; there are no free-market capitalists in a recession. If we fought WWII with bailouts, like the way we’re fighting coronavirus, we’d be speaking German now.
Peter Schiff
Northern Italy is currently the most beaten region within the EU with mortality of 5-8%. (Published number differ). However, the Spanish influenza 1918/1920 which as it seems has started in Kansas and in the end had killed some 20-50 million humans globally had a mortality rate of 2-3% and a multiplication factor of approx. 2.5 which is actually quite close to the rate of COVID-19. I feel that there is good reason to be worried about even if it kills ‚only‘ elderlies, as was posted in some distasteful comments here. If the restrictions taken in the EU are justified, will see, won‘t we.
This ‘new’ coronavirus doesn’t look like more dangerous than the common flu. Either there is a master plan behind this madness, like let’s say fight an imaginary dangerous climate change by crushing the world economy. Either the reports of this coronavirus acting like HIV, replicating in the CD4 cells and thus destroying the immune system by replicating i in the CD4 cells, are true, and this would be a global mess with a long term lockdown of populations.
I do not understand your conclusion: something “very seriously wrong is going on here”
I do not understand your concluding thought: “Something very seriously wrong is going on here.”
So what are you suggesting? That the left wing loonies worldwide are trying to crash the global economy as a ploy to regain power? (so many regions have rejected the lunacy in recent times)
I think in part the idiot bureaucrats simply can’t do math… The graph from the CDC website shows an “n=960” value for the total cases they plot, while in other paragraphs they report total cases over 3500.
So are they fostering panic and shutdowns in part due to TDS and to try to thwart re-election of Trump? Or is there a genuine concern to stop the virus by limiting host to host transmission? Or are they just incompetent idiots? Or some combination of all 3?
To be brutally cynical, since they want to catapult us back into the stone age, murdering 7 billion people is a necessary first step. They don’t just want economic collapse. They want nothing less than the eradication of humanity as it exists currently.
And the MSM whips people into a hysterical, frothing panic over a fairly benign disease because “if it bleeds, it leads.” Ragebait is the new money maker: how obscenely over-the-top can a headline be? Apparently, there is no upper limit…
Compare the media coverage of swine flu or SARS to this, and you can see a totally different reaction. This whole debacle is ridiculous.
The last time the owners of the FED destroyed the economy
by artificially shrinking the moneysupply.
As result the FED,that was officially created to avoid financial crisis and bank forclosures ,created the biggest financial crisis ever just a few years after its creation and more banks went bankrupt than in all the years your country exists before the FED was created
and many small businesses and farmers went bancrupt.
This virus will have similar results.
Besides economic crisis ,all small banks,businesses etc will be wiped out while the big ones are too big to fail.
Before the banking “crisis” 2008 big banks controlled less
than 1/3 of the money supply,after the crisis they controlled 50+%.
This virus is also extremly helpfull in removing conservative voters it seems and helps installing police & surveillance states
and if it’s true that there is no immunisation
then we have the perfect weapon to reach a sub 500mio world population within few pandemic cycles.
A tailor-made NWO virus.
Federal Reserve Act: maximizing employment, stabilizing prices, and moderating long-term interest rates.
So they failed miserably especially in stabilizing prices. They want inflation of 2% every year thereby destroying peoples savings bit by bit. If you flood the market with tomatoes they become worthless.
I have been looking at the published numbers. Unless we are missing over 90% of the number of infected people in the US, the virus is not spreading nearly as fast as predicted. Based on what the WHO says, we should have between 40 and 60 thousand infections by now. The mortality rate is also lower than predicted.
The news media is causing most of the panic.
Death rates from Covid19 have gone down in China because of draconian policies. Transmissibility (R) was way over 2 (R2 means that each person infects two more) but is now below R1 which means the disease is dying out. In the US we could see a huge increase in cases if it matches the development in Wuhan. That’s not to say that I agree with the draconian policy in the West. If the virus killed children I would agree with the policy but as it selects the old and infirm (that includes me, a 68 year old asthmatic) it is arguable that the economic damage – unemployment, company bankruptcies, a worldwide economic depression – far outweighs the disease.
It depends how much you value human life.
Focus on the number of deaths and how they are increasing. Worry about a second peak in China and what it may mean. Here are two good sites:
https://clustrmaps.com/coronavirus/
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
Because testing is not uniform among countries, and not all countries are transparent, it is difficult to draw inferences, even with the number of deaths. The CDC data are a subgroup of the total US data, which they freely admit to because not all testing is reported to CDC. The general prediction that the number likely to die of COVID-19 versus seasonal flu will be at least an order of magnitude lower seems vindicated by looking at the current China data, which we have to take with some skepticism. Hoping for the best.
Qui Bono?
The social engineers, the busy bodies, the control freaks, the corporate-government partnerships.
The shutdowns will wipe out most of the independents leaving only corporate businesses in various retail and service sectors. The social engineers will establish precedents as will the busy bodies and control freaks. Expect many restrictions, bans, and so on to become permanent. Meanwhile savers are being punished to bailout the connected players and possibly some of the people who have no work.
Harry Browne said the government breaks your leg and then hands you a crutch and says without it you wouldn’t be able to walk. Vastly more people will fall under government dependency. Once so they are much more easily controlled. The more people controlled the easier it is to engineer society.
CO2 driven climate change is only one piece of the implementation of a technocracy overseeing an engineered society.
Right now, the United States is a big black box with regard to Covid-19, due to the lack of testing, which was botched by the government (CDC and FDA, apparently). It’s much scarier when you don’t have good numbers for transmissibility or absolute numbers for those who have had/still have Covid-19.
You could ask, who benefits?
I’m certain that the national Democrats couldn’t wait to crash the economy, because it proves that it’s better to have a nation full of people on their knees begging the national government to assume all power and all responsibility, rather than a nation of individuals who stand on their own two feet. They tried it in the fall, and achieved gratifying results, but it was obviously their fault, so they let things go back to normal.
Now, though, they can blame it on the virus. So yes I’m suspicious.
I say, we engineer a belief in the efficacy of wearing masks, and then test and follow up on all cases, which is how Hong Kong survived SARS with their economy intact.
Read carefully. But the results of three unrelated studies reported in this post seem to indicate that this very inexpensive anti-malarial drug will treat active COVID-19 infections and act as an efficient prophylactic medication as well.
Watts Up With That is typically conservative in their posts, so this report carries, for me, more than a little weight.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/…/an-effective-treatment…/
I like Tony’s analysis from an engineer’s perspective. He provides many relevant facts that are missing from the MSM stories. My blog entry on “What About the Coronavirus?” issued today also provides many relevant facts that should be considered. See https://www.heinzlycklama.com/2020/03/17/what-about-the-coronavirus/
Heinz
Personally I believe that this virus is very serious for older people but not serious for younger people. The answer is for older people to shut themselves up, like I have , and for younger people to get on with life as normal. If that were to happen the financial problem wouldn’t be great. But it’s not what governments are proposing and the financial consequences will cause more deaths and depression than the virus will.
Chloroquine, an 80+ year old anti-malarial drug with an outstanding safety profile and costs only $0.04/pill wholesale, can be both curative and preventative according to research that is going to be published today or tomorrow.
Don’t send people checks. Ramp up production and send everyone a 6-day supply. And for Pete’s sake, get businesses open again!
Interesting stats available-
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6
As at today, 17 March, there have been 71 reported deaths.
Each NHS Trust reports their own hospital deaths on their own websites.
So farn all of the NHS Trust press releases state that the patients all had underlying health conditions.
So far, none of the NHS trust press releases state that their deaths were caused by coronavrius, just that they had tested positive for it.
The media then convert these carefully worded press releases into “died from coronavirus”.
So far, mo information from autopsies has been published at all.
MG
* 71 deaths in the UK
MG
“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves”. William Pitt, 1783
“How is seasonal incidence of influenza estimated?
Influenza virus infection is so common that the number of people infected each season can only be estimated. These statistical estimations are based on CDC-measured flu hospitalization rates that are adjusted to produce an estimate of the total number of influenza infections in the United States for a given flu season.
The estimates for the number of infections are then divided by the census population to estimate the seasonal incidence (or attack rate) of influenza.”
Now if they will just replace the actual deaths with estimated deaths from the estimated total occurrences . . . . we can finally kill off those pesky polar bears.
The reason the MSM is pushing it in the US and therefore the poison flows out into the rest of the world through the polluted internet where the low IQ dribbling dross exist, is that they are trying to destroy Trump. Firstly they are trying to “prove” he isn’t doing anything or it’s too late or it’s not enough, even though he has done demonstrably more and better than Obozo in 2009 for H1N1. Secondly it’s a great way of deflecting attention from the two old stupid white rich men (Comrade Sanders the stupid Soviet style Marxist; and Biden who is just plain stupid) who are fighting it out (yeah right) for the Democratic nomination.
MBS and Putin will sort it by giving you low gas prices until after the election.
that’s how they will help trump
I am sure if you did a cluster map of a regular flu and recorded the deaths etc it would be horrific. For the most part it is people who are waiting for an excuse to die (not deliberately but they are old or already sick).
We do know the cure will be worse than the disease.
thanks for this;
my wife and I started on keto 2yrs ago: like nearly all that do it: (ditch the carbs!) we have had very good results; so to do that, I did a lot of reading.
…. however look to orthodoxy and they say eat the carbs; and look at the diabesity/obesity problems they have created;
so only middle of last year did I start reading about “climate change” and it was like deja-vu all over again: it was the cholesterol con in another guise; in a strange sort of way I chucked as I recognised all the same old stuff: the “consensus” etc (Al Capone also worked on consensus!!)
… now with corona .. it’s like ….. same old stuff. Thanks Tony for your work on this; I have forwarded your data to friends; it is curious how quietly one on one folks will say they think the hysteria is crazy; but they must go with the masses in public.
Tony this is a really good analysis using maths and statistics to derive conclusions. It is worth reading: https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca
Thank you for that very informative link!
John Droz also has a good collection of info, here:
http://wiseenergy.org/Energy/US/COVID-19_Summary.pdf
Here’s another enlightening link:
https://youtu.be/p_GaYdae4j0
The best disinfectant is global warming. We need a nice, springtime heatwave where everyone is outside soaking up Vitamin D. Viruses don’t seem to do so well in the sunshine and warmer surface temperature. We need a robust changing of the seasons. 4 more days until the first day of Spring.
Well our St. Patrick’s Day present in Ireland was 140,000 workers made unemployed since last week by restrictions. That’s a great many in this small country. There are rumours of another 200,000 to go. Our Taoiseach (Prime Minister) flew to the USA last week and then lobbed back a ‘grenade’ shutting Ireland down, before he flew back home.
Government predictions are for 40-60% infection rate, at 4% mortality, which converts to 2 million infections and 80,000 dead (at 40%). However, in today’s Taoiseach’s speech it is to be only about 15,000 by the end of March which doesn’t seem to be maintaining the same trend.
In the past weeks, many Irish holiday-makers flew back from Northern Italy and Spain before the travel restrictions. Many were school children on skying holidays. Others, as is usual at this time of year, had flocked to the Cheltenham Races in the UK. None went into quarantine. As a friend said: ‘We should be dropping like flies’. We are not; at least not yet!
The government tells us they will know the next step at the end of March after a 2 week shut down in the presence of the disease. Wrong, says I. Are they not closely studying the trends in other countries, some of which started their outbreaks in January! That’s where they need to learn.
So to nail my colours to the mast, looking at graphs of Chinese provinces, South Korea and others (which I got on Corona.help) I see that the upward exponential curves (referred to above) are not maintained but flatten and roll over to form a type of bell curve (see Tony’s S. Korea example). Going on those graphs, I’d expect the peak infection rate to arrive here about 18 days after the disease has got properly going. That should be around the 27th March, and then, after the down-slope, we should have 6,500 infected. If I’ve underestimated by a factor of 10, then that will be 65,000 infected, still a far cry from the 2 million. Those are purely guesswork estimates of mine but let’s see how they compare to the media and government predictions. Let’s hope I’m closer to the truth. That will be interesting in hindsight.
South Korea didn’t impose the same restriction that we have here. Neither has our nearest neighbour, the UK. If they hold their nerve, then in a few weeks, we will be able to compare the effectiveness of their policies against ours. That will be also very interesting and we will also see who’s economy was harder hit.
Interestingly, China has the highest population in the world at 1.3 billion; South Korea is the 7th most densely populated country (leaving out city states of <5 million); Italy has the 2nd oldest population in the World. You can think about those things yourselves.
Meanwhile, in the event that this doesn't turn out to be as catastrophic as we are led to believe, I'm not looking forward to listening to the government telling us how their prompt and bold actions saved us all!
All the same, the jokes on What's App for the past week were only excellent!
Wishing you all good health on this St. Patrick's Day!
https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html?fbclid=IwAR2-1-0TUVDDFVBxtGgnpdLg0b7FiVbk7NVCf8wwu3ybBvUYWOd2O7qnyb8#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6
The address above looks nasty, but John Hopkin’s University has an excellent set of graphs that shows the problem. At this time there is a bit under 200k cases worldwide. In the larger scheme of things that wouldn’t be a big issue if we were at the end or near the end of the event. We are not anywhere close to the end.
Also there are about 8k deaths. Simple math tells me that’s a death rate close to 4% so we are talking about a serious problem here if we are not anywhere close to the end.
The graph that got my attention is the one on the lower right. It shows total cases in China, recovered and total cases in other parts of the world. I don’t trust the Chinese numbers any more than I can throw the Great Wall of China. It would be nice to see the ‘recovered’ line get closer to the total cases line. Anyway the third line about cases in the rest of the world is very telling. It’s generally skyrocketing. For example on Mar 1 there were about 8.5k cases. Today (Mar 17) we’re looking at some 116k cases. You do the math. Bear in mind nobody really has enough testing equipment to really tell how many people are infected. (Good news here is that means the death rate is probably lower than 4%, so far. It appears to be closer to 2-3% with elderly being the most at risk. I saw one chart showing the death rate for people above 80 being 20%.). Expect the numbers to shoot up like a rocket in the US as testing really gets going. The numbers have nearly doubled in the last few days.
Bottom line is this ***can*** become a serious problem if we don’t nip the infection onset in the bud. In any pandemic onset, the reality is worse than stats show. This is not fearmongering. This is reality.
I initially thought the reactions were over-reactions too. Now I’m not so sure.
Call me crazy but I believe this is all about Trump and taking him down. Nothing else has worked and making this the virus of the century is only going to hurt any administration. In this case, Trumps administration. Already as of today, his poll numbers according to Gallup have dropped from a high of 49 to 44. This plays exactly into the hands of those that want to see him stopped at any cost. Everything else was anything they could do clearly at any cost and none of it worked. Why not make this worse than it is. Hey, MSM still has a job at the end of this so they do’t care. I’m not saying this as a Trump supporter. I’m not. Just as a person who sees 24 hour news cycles repeating the same message over and over every few minutes as they did with Russia and impeachment.
Tony wrote, earlier today, “There have been 68 COVID-19 deaths in the US,…”
That’s hours out of date. The number of U.S. deaths is now up to 108.
There are now 6,362 confirmed cases in the U.S.A. (rather than 3,487), and 17 confirmed recoveries.
Those are extraordinary numbers. The reason the number of confirmed cases is 37,323% higher than the number of confirmed recoveries is that the spread of this disease is extraordinarily rapid. The flu & SARS didn’t do anything like that.
Statistics from the cruise ship Diamond Princess suggest that as many as half of those infected, and presumably contagious, show no symptoms. That, and the disease’s high transmissibility, make it extraordinarily difficult to control.
Michael Peinsipp, the fact that so many people infected with this disease have few or no symptoms is not good news. From an epidemiological perspective it is very, very bad news. Human stupidity being what it is, it means that there are a whole lot of idiots running around infecting other people, while refusing to take proper precautions, because, “I feel fine.”
Do you remember Typhoid Mary? (If not, then look her up.)
Well, guess what: there are probably 5,000 or more “Typhoid Marys” running around in the U.S.A., spreading this disease, right now — and in three more days there’ll probably be twice that many.
This is a very real crisis. Classified by their reactions to this situation, there are three kinds of people:
#1. Those who are very concerned about it, and taking every precaution they can to minimize risk of disease transmission.
#2. Those who are panicking, hoarding toilet paper, etc.
#3. Those who are unconcerned, and not taking precautions to minimize risk of transmission.
#2 and #3 are idiots. Don’t be one of them, because stupidity is still a capital offense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMOCp3O7oxg
I’m seeing data (from the WHO) which claims that the mortality rate for this virus is 0.9%, across all age groups, for those with no comorbidity. Of that 0.9%, I’d bet most of that is people older than 70 years.
Why have we shut down our country, trashed the economy, and created a police state society of shut-ins over this nothing of a virus? I smell Democrat/newsmedia sabotage. My proof is that the new Democrat talking point is saying in one breath that calling the virus “Chinese” is racist, but the very next thing said is that Trump is to blame for all of it. The Democrats are trying like hell to pin the epidemic on Trump, and associate his name with coronavirus.
I’ve been tracking CDC numbers for US daily. Yes more people are getting sick. But the black death this isn’t. At least not now.
As far as how lethal it is, the number is vastly exaggerated because of the likely (very) high number who get it, and have little to no symptoms. Also, I’m not convinced we are tracking the people who recover, or their recovery process in the current statistics. I think we collectively actually know very little; we know when people are very sick; we know when people die of it.
Italy is beyond my understanding. So far, no where has had such a sudden spike of serious cases and deaths. I’m pretty sure that per million they have the highest death rate. Could just be luck of the draw though. And statistics cluster.
Media is way over-hyping this and yes it is causing lots of hardship. Here in Phoenix the schools are closed; the churches (mine included) are closed. The media hype is causing people to panic; self isolate and quarantine. There is a complete absence of careful rational reporting.
This was the age breakdown in Italy
Wow! Thanks for that. I didn’t know the details of morbidity. I still say that lots of people have this disease and have no / or mild symptoms. Maybe something will change and this thing will turn really bad; but the numbers don’t say that.
Compare this to the H1N1 pandemic in 2009. No panic there and more dead bodies. Something is very wrong with the reporting; either back then or now.
An addendum from Italy.
https://www.agenzianova.com/a/5e6bcf1da7fbe3.23491954/2851060/2020-03-13/coronavirus-iss-in-italia-i-decessi-accertati-finora-per-causa-del-covid-19-sono-solo-due
Mid-day Monday – the a report claims the USA has had 72 deaths.
Washington State claims 42 deaths. Why? This virus was in a nursing home of 120 elderly with prior health problems. How and why hasn’t been told. When deaths spiked above the normal (3 to 7 per month) someone finally noticed.
Officials still haven’t got a clue about what is going on, but continue to make decisions as though that one facility was a template for all of society.
The local school district (all in the State, I think) will close and not have on-line class. In Washington State every student has to have the same access to what is taught. This is not possible. Other reasons also mentioned. Maybe there will be work arounds.
Issues will now include graduation of this year’s class, and the cascading of the next classes when they restart.
“Every single one of the 12,000-30,000 flu deaths in the US this year has involved a person becoming critically ill before they died. Why didn’t that large number of critically ill flu patients, or the comparable number of automobile accident deaths overwhelm the system?”
First, a lot of those flu deaths occur at home and in nursing homes, in addition to hospitals. Flu deaths occur roughly over winter peaking in January/February. From that standpoint, timing could be worse. Auto accidents are roughly evenly distributed. In any case, an epidemic like this can overwhelm the system, just like a fast food restaurant can get overwhelmed at lunch time if a bus with a sports team shows up. That’s the worry, which I agree is exaggerated. Nevertheless, clusters of cases will stress the system.
It’s possible that the actions being taken will also cause a decline in flu deaths. In any case, our system is not really set up for this, but it should be. If it were up to me, I would put every critical patient in suspended animation, and then treat them just in time to even out the burden on the system.
As with climate change, so with the SARS Cov-2 virus and the accompanying disease COVID19: the information sources chosen are crucial to getting to the truth. Since I’m not an expert in viruses and pandemics I’ve watched videos, read articles and studied data from many sources and worked hard to find trusted information sources and data. Once I’ve found a trusted source, I still keep gathering data and comparing sources against my criteria: 1) What do they gain (i.e. what are their motives) in giving me this information and recommended actions? 2) Does their data hold up to scrutiny from my other trusted sources and my increasing knowledge? 3) Though I’m not an expert I assert that I should be able to confirm the validity of their basic hypotheses. 4) Are their predictions accurate? 5) Is their advice based on sound principles?
I’ve used these criteria in judging the content of Real Climate and I’ve used it in judging my sources for this virus and disease. I’ll make my assertions and leave a list of my sources for those that are interested.
Assertions:
1. The virus is new and no one has immunity, it’s novel.
2. The epidemiology will not be known fully until the pandemic is over and so the reproduction number (R0), mild, serious and lethal percentages, Case Fatality Rate and other parameters are fluid depending on many conditions.
3. Some countries were proactive in protecting their people (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, etc.) others were/are not (Iran, Italy, the rest of Europe, USA, and others).
4. Some countries have very poor health care systems and will likely suffer greatly.
5. People are panicking and making the situation worse.
6. Governments need to recognize that pandemics can last months but don’t seem to have a long-term plan to address both the health of the people and the economy.
7. I can contribute to making the situation better where I’m at, now.
Internet Sources:
The Lancet: https://www.thelancet.com/coronavirus
John Hopkins University: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/
Journel of the American Medical Association: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/pages/coronavirus-alert
YouTube Sources:
Dr. John Campbell, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr0Cqlf5xK4
MedCram, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vZDVbqRhyM
Dr. Mike Hansen, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2hXnt9xrvY&t=10s
Peak Prosperity, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmhsNdW24BM&t=2327s
China in Focus, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQWjnNi5Fv8&t=751s
3Blue1Brown, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kas0tIxDvrg
PBS News Hour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAtgETr4ZMg,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCM92K0RiLk
Sky News, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61-gFtHJOd8
CNBC, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE0uI6StR2Y
Zooming in with Simone Gao, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUwNeqrFfjw&t=311s
Doctor Mike, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CRxyHU9Oxo
10News WTSP, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwuNglv8PLA&t=363s
CBS Evening News, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDelUkpFm60
NTD, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwbsw8BWmhQ&t=24s
+++++ Thanks for the sources!
It’s just as important to be proactive when the wolf is coming to the door as it is to refrain from idiocy when it’s not. COVID starts tearing up your lower respiratory tract before anyone even knows you have it: not the flu.
Whoops, the U.S. COVID-19 death count is now up to 114 (from 108), and my comment isn’t even out of moderation yet.
JHU now says the number of U.S. deaths has risen to 118, the number of U.S. recoveries has risen to 106, and the number of active cases has risen to 7,769.
Whoops, JHU is reporting that the U.S. COVID-19 death count is now up to 150, and the number of confirmed cases is up to 9,345. They’re also reporting 106 U.S. recoveries.
Be careful out there, people. Nearly half of the people who have the disease feel fine. So the healthy-looking person whose hand you shake might be one of them — or you might be one of them. Don’t take chances.
totally agree, Tony, the response has not weighed costs versus benefits. The harm from locking down the economy is enormous and includes a serious health toll. A mitigation strategy would do far less harm and would be similar to what was done with swine flu. It is time for other voices to be heard. I started a hashtag #thecureisworsethanthedisease and everyone should use that and pass it on
Kevin, you are dead wrong.
The economy will recover, if the people do. If this is not handled very, very aggressively, the consequences will be far worse than if it is.
In South Korea, they had experience dealing with SARS, so their response was rapid, competent & aggressive. But then one 61 year-old women, known as “patient 31,” behaved irresponsibly, and blew the lid off. She is personally responsible for about 2500 other infections, and counting, simply because she went on living her life as normal, even when she didn’t feel well.
Telling people that “the cure is worse than the disease” is wrong, and irresponsible, and potentially deadly.
I asked a similar rhetorical question to friends only today.
‘If this virus hadn’t been ‘branded’ as Covid-19, would we even have known about it’?
Each year winter causes thousands of excess winter deaths in the UK. Likewise excess summer deaths in summer. Numbers vary but 10,000-20,000 above the seasonal ‘average’ aren’t unusual. Nobody bats an eyelid.
Before Christmas I developed a virus, leading to heavy coughing. (It actually gave me a hernia, for which I’m awaiting surgery) Maybe that was C-19 before it’d even been recognised?
The point here is every year thousands develop coughs, colds, viruses and the like. Many thousands die and it’s so normal it barely rates a MSM comment. Hysteria is nowhere to be seen.
‘C-19’ comes along and suddenly all hell breaks loose, with ‘solutions’ that really could be significantly worse than the (supposed) cure. Tony raises a very interesting set of points. How will this play out? I have no idea. Only time will tell.
CheshireRed, you bet we’d have known about it.
Influenza is not nearly as easily transmissible as COVID-19. So it spreads gradually, and doesn’t overwhelm our ability to cope with it.
Absent extraordinary control measures, the number of COVID-19 cases in a population doubles in less than three days, and doubles again in another three, etc., until a large percentage of the population is infected. Do the math: 3 × log2(150,000,000) ≈ 81 days.
If the number infected continues to double every three days — which is what will happen if drastic control measures aren’t implemented — then half of the United States’ population could be infected in less than three months. If 1% of them die, that’s 1.5 million U.S. deaths, most of them in the same month.
Those are the kind of numbers we’d be looking at, in a business-as-usual scenario.
Do you still think we might not have noticed it??
I think your kind of skepticism is one of the hidden costs of the CAGW scam. So-called “experts” have been screaming “wolf” so loud and so long about the fictitious “climate emergency,” that smart people, who’ve learned that manmade climate change is actually modest and benign, have learned to disregard cries of “wolf!”
So when there’s a real catastrophe, and a different set of experts sound the alarm, many people wrongly assume it’s just another false alarm, with deadly consequences.
Friends this is not a false alarm. This is not another batch of scammers ginning up a fake “emergency” to pad their pockets. This one is real.
Nice numbers, potentially scary.
Now show what’s happened in Wuhan.
New cases are virtually stopped.
Has 0.5 % of the entire population died there or across China? Not a bit of it.
Most victims are elderly and with underlying health issues. Not pleasant but brutally put many of those are knocking on heaven’s door already.
(UK’s youngest victim, 45, but with advanced MND and towards the end of his diagnosed life expectancy)
What’s happening here is governments are taking a sledgehammer to entire nations, when simply self-isolating / social distancing the elderly and infirm would’ve been sufficient.
Now show what’s happened in Wuhan.
New cases are virtually stopped.
Are you sure? No matter what is really happening, do you genuinely think that China would actually tell us the truth?
Although the Chinese government, well-known for concealing or manipulating information, would obviously prefer the world seeing signs of strength and recovery, that might not be the case. Chinese whistleblowers tell Caixin they’re working to create an appearance that things are back to normal when they’re not:
Beijing has spent much of the outbreak pushing districts to carry on business as usual, with some local governments subsidizing electricity costs and even installing mandatory productivity quotas. Zhejiang, a province east of the epicenter city of Wuhan, claimed as of Feb. 24 it had restored 98.6 percent of its pre-coronavirus work capacity.
But civil servants tell Caixan that businesses are actually faking these numbers. Beijing had started checking Zhejiang businesses’ electricity consumption levels, so district officials ordered the companies to start leaving their lights and machinery on all day to drive the numbers up, one civil servant said. Businesses have reportedly falsified staff attendance logs as well — they “would rather waste a small amount of money on power than irritate local officials,” Caixan writes.
https://www.theblaze.com/news/china-may-be-faking-its-recovery-from-the-coronavirus-outbreak-report
PS. Germany currently has a C-19 mortality rate of just 0.2% of cases. On a national scale that figure would be lost in the noise of normal ‘flu and other winter ailment numbers.
The mortality rate for Germany is currently low because it’s very early in the epidemic, there. Even so, your figure is already out of date. The latest figures for Germany are:
Population: 83 million (25% of U.S. population)
Confirmed: 13,979
Deaths: 42
Recovered: 113
Active: 13,824
42 / 13979 = 0.3% (not 0.2%), so far, but we don’t know how many of the remaining active cases will also die.
If you want to see what happens when extraordinary control measures are implemented too late, look at Italy:
Population 60 million (18% of U.S. population).
35,713 cases confirmed.
2,988 deaths.
4,025 recoveries.
28,710 remaining active confirmed cases.
2988 / 35713 = 8.37%, so far, and we don’t know how many of the remaining active cases will also die, and the numbers are still rapidly worsening:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-51952712
Here are some updated numbers for Germany:
Population: 83 million (25% of U.S. population)
Confirmed:
13,97919,848Deaths:
4268Recovered:
113180Active:
13,82419,60068 / 19,848 =
0.30%0.34%Here are the updated numbers for Italy:
Population 60 million (18% of U.S. population).
35,71347,021 cases confirmed.2,9884,032 deaths.4,0254,440 recoveries.28,71038,549 remaining active confirmed cases.4,032 / 47,021 =
8.37%8.57%, so far12 days after my original comment, and 10½ days after the follow-up, here are the updated figures for Germany:
Population: 83 million (25% of U.S. population)
Confirmed:
13,97919,84868,180Deaths:
4268682Recovered:
11318015,824Active:
13,82419,60051,674682 / 68,180 =
0.30%0.34%1.00%Here are the updated numbers for Italy:
Population 60 million (18% of U.S. population).
35,71347,021105,792 cases confirmed.2,9884,03212,428 deaths.4,0254,44015,729 recoveries.28,71038,54977,635 remaining active confirmed cases./ =
8.37%8.57%, 11.75%Dave, it would be good to distance yourself lest your fear be transmitted to others.
It depends on the meaning of “we”. Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg has this to say:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnlT3rPNUp0
In the coronavirus pandemic, we’re making decisions without reliable data – https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/
Tony you have a typo in this sentence. Double usage of the word “number:” “Millions of Americans are already out of work due to COVID panic shutdowns, and COVID alarmists want that number to increase that number sharply.”
So here is how the flu rolled in this season (from week 40 of ’19 to March 7th)
Extrapolated to 36-51 million cases and killing 22,000 to 55,000 folks.
Thanks for this! Can you provide a link? I’m interested
CDC has pages and pages on influenza – that is where I was reading when I found this chart as well as various statistics.
On 29 February. I went to instacare and got positively diagnosed for influenza A, but my wife and daughter never went to doctor for the same exact symptoms.
My point is that data collection for influenza has an inherent risk of error for people that aren’t reported.
This whole coronavirus data reporting seems odd to me. There is a high range of death rates across nations. Secondarily, it seems exponential growth rate predictions are very difficult to predict if exponential rate and initial conditions are in error. Nevertheless, the daily reports are fascinating to study.
I prefer my data from family in Italy + Anecdotes for friends and family here in Au… I am having trouble with official sources.
My cousin says nobody in his family or friendship circles have reported a corona fatality or even a possible positive corona diagnosis. Even friends of friends that he knows there. None.
My cousin says that there is incredible corruption in italy and it has a very unpoular government. Italy has been in a crushing economic depression for decades now and it continues to unfold.
He has tried for years to come back to Australia, but cannot sell his home or find buyers. Sounds like Greece to me.
Not a single murmur of a positive case of corona in my circles of friends and relatives here in Au Nothing in local papers, not a single fatality or even a corona case recorded in my region according to the local papers.
“My point is that data collection for influenza has an inherent risk of error for people that aren’t reported.“
Hence the huge ranges on estimates.
Some features of COVID, not shared by the flu, are
~ 1in 6 hospitalization rate
~1 in 20 require intensive care
aerosol contagion, in addition to usual droplet
longevity on hard surfaces for the better part of a day
asymptomatic onset and contagion, between half and 2 weeks before indications
COVID-19 is a SARS virus: sudden acute respiratory syndrome
COVID-19 worldwide case growth is running at about an order of magnitude per fortnight. That means you can add 2 digits to the end of present numbers and you’ll have the rough figures for about a month from now. Unless restrictive measures intervene.
But there’s cause for optimism. Check out the successful hydrochloroquinone /azithromycin treatment that was recently reported by Didier Raoult et al. in Marseilles, which supports the reports of China and South Korea that quinine-like chinchoa alkaloids are at least somewhat efficacious. Greg Rigano of Stanford has been publicizing these results (I first found Eschenbach’s post of it on WUWT). Rigano has written both technical papers and made MSM TV appearances. He’s mounting a clinical trial at https://www.covidtrial.io/ (many good links there.)
These quinine-like treatments are cheap and seem to be efficacious. I hope their use doesn’t become politicized, nor suppressed in favor of more profitably exotic pharmaceuticals. Offhand, they look like an easy fix.
See Chris Martensen’s daily videos at Peak Prosperity, starting from the end of January. He has covered both epidemiology and economic impact. (He reminds me a bit of Tony.) As he says, if the facts alarm you, the problem isn’t with the facts.
I think many of you are deluded.
Yes flu kills about 30k per year. And yes *so far* Wuflu has only killed 0.2k (200). But it has been increasing exponentially, continuously and with no other action will likely infect ~50% of the US. With 1% fatality rate (US rate so far 1.3%, Italy 7%) this means 1.5 million dead. OK say 3x more people have only mild cases so denominator 3x bigger that is 500k dead Americans.
US *known* cases now 13k . . . . a couple of weeks ago a few hundred. By mid April maybe a million . . . . and still increasing geometrically.
What if you are not old? Then fatality rate “only” 0.1%. That sounds like the flu, but not really, as flu fatality rate is mostly old people, much lower rate for young people. Do you really want to play Russian roulette with a 1000-chamber gun? If 100 million non-old people get it that is 100,000 non-old people dead. Also a similar number of people would have permanent organ damage (lungs, kidneys – who needs ’em?).
Now three days later the USA has ~42,000 cases and over 500 deaths. So 2.5x the deaths in 3 days so if the exponential growth continues for another three days we’ll be at ~1250.
Unfortunately the exponential growth continued and the 1,250 deaths mark was passed on March 26, now we’re over 2,200. Total cases about 125,000.
https://youtu.be/-LjHam9NtzA
Seems like Italy has always had a high death-rate from the flu (see the pre-COVID-19 study): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971219303285
(More than 68,000 deaths attributable to flu epidemics were estimated in the 4-season study period).