It looks like you shit your pants over this along with the entire establishment (so far). What a strange position to be in, for you.

What is the point of being a contrarian on everything just to fall in line with the conventional wisdom when something important comes up?

I would guess people in California and Miami dade have better vitaminD levels in the late winter then New Yorkers.

How reliable are those antibody tests? I’ve seen claims regarding the Heinsberg study in Germany and, iirc, also the Santa Clara study in California that many of those tests might give false results, because they also might show results for previous infections with other Coronaviruses which merely cause common colds.
0,17 IFR? No way in hell I believe that.

38,000 new infections today. If that’s the best we can do with a total lockdown what is the point? Let’s stipulate that only 80% of the population is strictly adhering to distancing guidelines. Even with that, shouldn’t there be a reduction in the new cases per day after 5 weeks? I get it, there’s more testing, but as far as I know the testing is for people who are symptomatic and not those who are healthy. What we are doing is postponing the enviable while destroying our economy. If the trade off was one for another, it might justified. Instead, we are destroying our way of life for a short postponement.

I doubt very much such a low infection fatality rate. The number of dead is now 200,000. At that fatality rate, there should be over 120 million infected people Worlwide. That is a dozen times more than the reported infection rate.

The preliminary tests that were done in Wuhan by the Chinese government, the most thorough so far, indicate a fatality rate for young healthy people without respiratory ilnesses like asthma and bronchitis of 0.5% and as high as 10% for men over age 80. The overall death rate from infection from this virus appears to be 2-4%. I would say that the overall mortality rate for this virus is definitely lower than 5% but probably higher than 1%

When thinking for yourself is a foreign concept to you, when you base your beliefs either on “I want to agree with [tribe] or “I want to disagree with [tribe],” the behavior of those who do will appear strange and irrational.

Yeah, it’ll come out that we shit holed our economy for an epidemic that is less lethal than either the opiod or annual flu epidemic. I don’t get why SS joined the team on this one. There is a lot of statistical analysis required that is interesting. Maybe there is an opportunity to cash in on this if you can show you are a team player and can do math. Can’t blame him for that.

The point isn’t to be a contrarian, the point is to know the truth and speak it. And to be reasonably prudent. We’ve had a Vietnam’s worth of deaths up to this point with the harsh restrictions. What do you think it would be like without the restrictions? My guesstimate is a Civil War’s worth.

Sometimes the conventional wisdom is correct. Sometimes you share it with Rachel Maddow and Andrew Cuomo. That doesn’t mean you always share it, or don’t keep re-evaluating it… for example, I’m keeping the idea that NYC has a different strain than the rest of the country and that their infection rates won’t transfer to the rest of the country due to lifestyle factors, so Cuomo and Maddow are falsely projecting their experience onto the rest of us.

There are dozens of various antibody tests, each has different levels of accuracy.
In New York they specifically used a test which would would have more false negatives. Dr. Howard A. Zucker, the NY state health commissioner, said the lab had set a high bar for determining positive results.

After weeks of tweaking their own ELISA assay, Columbia researchers say they’ve managed to bring its sensitivity to 85% — higher than the 50% to 60% they achieved with a commercial assay, according to Steven Spitalnik, MD, director of clinical laboratories at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and NewYork-Presbyterian. https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/86084

New York State developed their own antibody test. Is the NY test as accurate as the one used by Columbia University ? Is the antibody test developed by Stanford better ? Which test was used in Florida ? Different tests will have very different results.

In NY their test found 21% of New Yorkers with antibodies , the true number of New Yorkers who have recovered from CV may be closer to 25%, since the test was designed to have a “high bar” for positive results. Thus many with antibodies will be missed and some COVID 19 patients never develop antibodies.

Well an antibody + rate 15x the case rate is exactly what’s been found already in Florida, San Francisco, New York, Delaware… It would seem that working backwards from what is collected evidence to then come up with a number one doesn’t like because it sounds too high is maybe not the best procedure.

Now take this 5-6% number and run it through Sweden’s numbers so far (1500 or so dead) and then say they were either stupid or crazy or inhumanely cruel. It’s hard to see how Miami could have a higher exposure/antibody rate than Sweden where, as of today, people are still eating in restaurants. Could Swedes be that natively more cold and distant than freaked out Floridians?

This herd immunity idea is not yet medically proven. We have no proof immunity lasts and some evidence it doesn’t. One might have assumed medieval people would have developed herd immunity to the plague. As far as I know we never developed herd immunity to polio or much else so how real is the concept?

Deer and other animals have periodic outbreaks of disease so my guess is viruses overcome herd immunity if it exists because they have to to survive.

Clearly, never met a Swede…

There is also the possibility that IFR genuinely varies from place to place e.g. because of the humidity factor that DanHusseinMD (?) has championed around here. Italy and New York (and Sweden) were definitely using indoor heating (and thus had quite low humidity for most people) in February and March (and probably still now).

California, Louisiana and Florida… much less.

Thomas Friedman as well, who thinks the rest of country has wall to wall mass transit and a lot of non-poor people who take the bus to and from work every day just like NYC.

I would say objectively that our host is consumed by this subject.

It is not unexpected. Dostoevsky, when sentenced to death by the Czar and believing his life would soon end, said of his experience: that to have a six inch ledge on the side of a mountain and to have to live eternity on that six inch ledge, would be preferable to death.

In between Sweden and Florida, we have Oxford.

An Oxford University women’s studies professor has lamented that if the college’s scientists produce a successful Covid-19 vaccine, the “white savior” narrative will be unstoppable.

Cousens fears that if the vaccine is developed by “white, male and Oxford-educated” scientists, her country’s stock will rise above female-led countries, such as Germany and New Zealand, whose epidemic responses have been, according to a Forbes op-ed, “most widely praised.”

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/coronavirus-vaccine_uk_5ea067f2c5b6b2e5b83ba372

NB: I don’t click on HP links so no telling what else you’ll find there.

Way to go for the semantic jugular. Steve’s entire schtick is that he is an independent thinker and he don’t take no guff.

Sure, the conventional wisdom is right sometimes This definitely is not one of those times. The conventional wisdom has people wearing masks and cowering in their apartments right now, and it has Steve making posts about optimal seating arrangements in movie theaters.

It was important for us to get it right on this issue. The shutdown has put millions of mostly poor people out of work, and it will cause many shattered dreams and premature deaths all on its own. The more data comes out, the more this looks like a terrible mistake. There have been people expressing skepticism about the narrative on this for sometime, but Sailer isn’t one of them.

Word

It sounds like you know as little about Steve Sailer, the least contrarian writer on this website, as you do about coronavirus.

“You should try thinking for yourself,” says the guy whose opinion matches the consensus of goodthinkers and Model UN types everywhere.

Isn’t it strange how the more data comes out about this, the more wrong that consensus seems to be?

Miami-Dade county is up to 287 deaths in total today

JFC!!!

Tuberculosis claimed 1.5 MILLION lives in 2018.

Steve, are you familiar with the term “self-own”?

By Apoorva Mandavilli

What is that shiny growth on Apoorva’s nose?

We’ve had a Vietnam’s worth of deaths up to this point with the harsh restrictions.

We don’t how many deaths have actually been caused by coronavirus infection.

What do you think it would be like without the restrictions? My guesstimate is a Civil War’s worth.

My guesstimate is………no difference without the restrictions.

HUMIDITY? And yet Albany, Georgia was a hot spot for this virus. hahaha. These people can’t even cover their lies, people. That is the thing about lying, you always have to remember what it is you lied about, whereas when you tell the truth….. Oh well, the MANUFACTURED virus is real, but the only nightmare is the one inside your heads for believing this shit. South Georgia is more humid than Florida.

If one takes 0.17% Infection Fatality Rate and apply to 328 million, half million more sacrifices are needed to please Covid god.

As vhrm noted, I have been hammering on about how low humidity disables the respiratory immune system. Shame on me for not being high-energy enough to push the message through.

In cold, dry air, the respiratory immune system is very disabled, while in the warm, humid air of Miami (and India and Myanmar and Vietnam, etc.) the respiratory immune system works really well.

Yale researchers showed last year, that low ambient humidity hurts the ability of the immune system to fight respiratory viral infection in animal hosts.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6561219/

The Yale group found that at 50% humidity, about half their animal hosts survived a viral respiratory challenge of the flu. At 20% humidity, 100% of the animal hosts died.

The mechanism is that in very dry air (the 20% humidity of hospitals), the mucosal layer in the respiratory system dries out and organelles called cilia which should clear out viruses are immobilized. The above paper and figure 4 of this one explain the mechanism.
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-virology-012420-022445

It has been really depressing to watch as the world utterly loses its mind while ignoring the blindingly obvious (to me, and every intelligent person 75 years ago) fact that humidity **dramatically** reduces the fatality rate of respiratory infections among those who are exposed.

Amid all the sturm und drang about this or that marginally helpful solution, everyone ignores the big, easy and safe answer.

Steve, I really appreciate that you believed me enough to go buy three humidifiers when I first reported the value of humidity a couple of months ago. But I think it is worthwhile to re-up the humidity thing as a blog post again. There really aren’t any controlled studies on the effect of humidity on Covid-19 survival at this time, and there really need to be. Meanwhile there are at least 32 studies going on hydroxychloroquine. The geographic data on warm, humid air being protective against the new coronavirus is stronger than any data I’ve seen on any other remedies.

I noted a little earlier this month, “There are zero nations whose capital is south of 30 north latitude with more than 20 deaths per million people. There are 25 nations whose capital is north of 30 north latitude with more than 20 deaths per million. The United States right now is at 65 deaths per million. South of the equator, zero nations exceed 7 deaths per million. Ten countries exceed 100 deaths from Coronavirus per million and every single one of them has a capital north of 40 latitude.”

Those numbers are a little stale, so I will run those correlations again this weekend, but simple humidity shows more promise than anything I’ve seen, from ventilators to HCQ to any of the fancy antivirals under consideration. Given that cold climes are likely to face this again for a whole long winter season starting in late fall, the value of humidification really needs to become common knowledge by then. People in temperate climes aren’t doing the one thing that could dramatically help them and panicky people in tropical climes are collapsing their economies for no good reason.

Masks are the answer to stop transmission but once someone gets it the virus, humidity will dramatically increase the odds that they will come through okay.

You can take your “Your comment is awaiting moderation” and STUFF IT

https://mobile.twitter.com/AlexBerenson/status/1253790453721444352

Classic TDS: Michigan Democrats to censure Michigan lawmaker who said Trump’s boosting of hydroxychloroquine ‘saved my life’

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/dems-censure-michigan-lawmaker-hydroxychloroquine?utm_source=wnd&utm_medium=wnd&utm_campaign=syndicated

It’s not the business of lawmakers what one of their colleagues takes for medicine. Censure should be saved for crimes, not complaining about someone else’s medical treatments.

I’m keeping the idea that NYC has a different strain than the rest of the country and that their infection rates won’t transfer to the rest of the country due to lifestyle factors, so Cuomo and Maddow are falsely projecting their experience onto the rest of us.

I think it’s perhaps the same cv strain in a unique environment for spreading. NYC is the worst case scenario while SF is perhaps one of the best. Trump acted with an abundance of caution, perhaps because his gut instinct is that NYC is prototypical, not atypical. However, he let every governor do his own thing when locking down local economies. So really, he has made the best decisions under the circumstances in timeliest possible way given the fake news from China amplified by the W.H.O.

Another point (which is obvious to me, but probably needs to be explicitly stated anyway) — if everyone is going to eventually be exposed then the safest time to be exposed is during the humid summer months.

I will also repeat a comment I made earlier: very low humidity (20% at the University of Maryland Medical Center according to a doctor I know who practices there) is common in hospitals to produce an odorless sensation of sterility, but is debilitating for respiratory immunity. Hospital HVAC systems are very likely increasing the infection fatality rate rather dramatically.

OK we don’t have to rehash everything but our actions in March were a kind of life insurance bought at high cost because we were late in buying it. As we acquire more data we can re evaluate, it’s stupid to stay committed to a flawed action.

It is becoming obvious that we overreacted. Let’s thank our lucky stars and move on. Then shoot everyone at the CDC of course and put severe controls to travel to/from China so this doesn’t happen again.

Bozo Michigan Gov getting in the act, and has been sending nasty texts to lawmaker who had the nerve to get well with quinine. Bozo Gov doesn’t like looking bad after trying to ban quinine.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bronsonstocking/2020/04/24/gov-whitmer-sends-unpleasant-text-messages-to-dem-lawmaker-who-thanked-trump-for-her-coronavirus-recovery-n2567606

She’s looking less likely as a Biden pick. Even Biden knows he doesn’t want a veep who gets into petty fights.

I will also repeat a comment I made earlier: very low humidity (20% at the University of Maryland Medical Center according to a doctor I know who practices there) is common in hospitals to produce an odorless sensation of sterility,

Yep. I have been told that if the AC and humidity levels of most hospitals were raised to more comfortable levels, there would be a stench that would drive all but the most desperate away.

matches the consensus of goodthinkers and Model UN types everywhere

We also agree on this “round Earth” theory.

She hates a potential vaccine because she feels her ego being mutilated through what she perceives as the relative diminishment of one aspect of how she identifies.

I am genuinely impressed by her level of narcissism!

No wonder she has fallen into a polticial worldview which venerates almost completely unreal stereotypes of boundary free victims.

Such a rampant egotist will be irresistibly drawn to anything onto which she can project the suppressed aspects of her personality.

In her case, those being the bits that actually listen to others, and see them as ends in themselves, rather than this absurdly cartoonish example of a viciously solipsistic five year old girl who never actually grew up but instead just learned fancier words.

Or she’s just a very accurate internet satire of a specific archetype, and a happenstance and personally useful reminder of the type of woman that I need to remember to avoid.

Z1. The Covid-19 virus is quite real (viz not a hoax), it is different from the ordinary flu in important ways, and it is very dangerous to certain populations, and not so dangerous to other populations.

2. Had Donald Trump not been president, the publicly-organized and -enforced response to a real but not cataclysmic public health threat would have been rational, orderly, efficient, most likely effective, with a sound feedback loop for adjustment and a sane, gardez-votre-sang-froid mentality as seen in pandemics past.

2a. Examples of rational and orderly responses would have included: early and very strict curtailment of all travel to and from China, and from East Asia generally, with strict quarantines and contact monitoring for returning US citizens; stiff quarantine procedures for the elderly, other at-risk populations, and identifiable “super-spreader” entities; and stern but rational recommendations for everyone else. Life goes on, economy stays normal, a slightly-larger but not catastrophic number of older and infirm people die, Wheel of Life, listen to some Jacques Brel and then move on.

2b. Importantly, a major feature of a rational public-health response would have been a unified, non-politicized, clearly explained stance from the entire government, speaking in a single calm, agreed-upon voice. Not the Speaker of the House tearing up the President’s speech at the State of the UNION address.

3. But Donald Trump is the President, and therefore here we are, stuck in chaos, economic free-fall, mass hysteria and morbid sentimentality instead of clear thinking.

3a. This course of action was deliberately, willfully and maliciously chosen, in virtual unanimity, by our leading classes: government, media, academia, judicial and so on. The clear purpose of this choice was to launch yet another coup attempt against the presidency of Donald Trump. The previous two coup attempts had failed, but this was a ripe poison apple that fell right into their laps.

4. To be clear: the virus itself and the outbreak were real, non-engineered events. But the specific response to the outbreak was malicious and deliberate with respect to the wellbeing of the American people.

5. The Powers That Be hate Donald Trump, and by extension the White, Christian, heritage-American electorate for whom he spoke, with such a deadly fury that they were willing to seize on a recurring, seasonal disease outbreak with known protocols of response, and malignant lay use it to destroy the American economy (Trump’s main selling point) in order to bring down a president when their previous open coup attempts had failed.

Saying Steve Sailer is not a contrarian after you compared him with Israel Shamir or Ron Unz is bizarro-level thinking. Is King Kong also not a monster because he’s not as big as Godzilla?

Maybe I don’t know much about coronavirus, and I admit I’m no genius with numbers. But even I can see that the more data we get, the more the CFR goes down… this has been going on for weeks now. It’s just become totally damning with the recent antibody tests.

I can name a few people on the right, who may even be reading this now, who have shown almost no humility in the face of uncertainty, and in the light of our apparent decision to impoverish and endanger many, many poor people.

Sailer has not been as bad as that, for sure.
But he hasn’t exactly covered himself in glory with posts about pointless hygiene rituals, when the real story is how wrong we are going to turn out to have been, and how bad the economic consequences are.

Here is some relatively scientific discussion of the OP:

[deleted by user]
by inCOVID19

Like I said, numerous times here, once the sun comes out in the Nordic countries and Siberia, flu/bacteria gets killed off by UV rays and warmer weather. Saunas, hot springs, help, year around. Sauna and heat allowed Arctic people to actually, survive. Saunas Save Lives, hahhahahaa I think I need to sell this for Icelandair, SAS, Finnair for this very weird summer season!

Let’s say we do have “a Civil War’s worth” of deaths. Assuming zero overlap between those deaths and the deaths that are already baked-into-the-cake, we would be looking at the annual national death going from it’s usual tic under 1% to 1.2%. And given the fact that throughout the Western World between a quarter and half of the all the deaths are in nursing homes, where the median, um, length of residence is four months in the US, it is safe to assume that there would be quite a bit of overlap between those totals.

To me, numbers like that speak for themselves. Yes, it is a big deal in the sense that the CDC and NIH ought to be dedicating a large bulk of their time and resources toward battling the problem. But it is not a big deal in the sense that the general public should spend much time worrying about it, let alone having our lives indefinitely put-on-hold by it.

Through all this madness, I have never heard anyone put forward any set of standards to justify this unprecedented disruption of life. Should we do this every time a virus coming along that threatens to rise the national death rate from 1% to 1.1%? I would think hope that everyone agrees that is ridiculous, but so where would the hysterics draw-their-line? 2%? 3%. I shutter to think how the public, aided by the contemptible press, will respond if an actually serious virus, something that threatens to kill ten percent of the population comes along. I suppose we’ll all be forced to ride-it-out in induced comas.

The factor of 5 makes NYC area a huge outlier; so we can’t apply NYC to all of U.S. Miami-Dade seems to mimic a typical metro area and hence can be used to replicate probably 75% of the nation. Is there any reason to suspect Miami-Dade is very atypical, besides being filled with mostly Latinos and Spanish speaking? If any, it’s warmer and humid weather may understate the infection (in the rest of the U.S.) somewhat. All, put together, half million seems like a lower bound. And that is so shocking as it seems to mimic losses due to WW2 or Civil War. What seems incontrovertible is Covid is likely going to be a once in a century event, both in terms of human life and economy.

Everybody on UNZ joined the we’re all gonna dieeee. the sky is falling idiots. Endless graph and octuple exponent creative math commenters as well as the writers.

At first, I just followed my simple rule. If it’s on CNN MSNBC NBC NYSLIMES LASLIMES WAPO and the rest of the lying liberal anti White media it’s just not true. And the opposite is true.

After a few weeks I looked at the statistics. What’s the latest? 200,000 in a population of about 7 billion?

I’m often ashamed to be a woman. Too bad she never met up with any of the Muslim migrant rape gangs that throve in Oxford as the academics scorned the proles who objected to being raped by life long benefit Muslims

Why can’t these witches just be glad they have those affirmative action jobs for communist lesbians?

For antibody tests, they control for false positives using frozen blood that was drawn long before the outbreak began. The fatality numbers published in journals from the serological tests are conservative upper limits of the fatality rate. The scientists often make very soft conclusions so as not to shock the media/public/scientific community that we shut down the country over a nothing virus.

Watch the numbers continue to drop to less than 0,1% in the coming weeks to months, especially in regions where they didn’t label virtually every death as suspected COVID-19. Eventually, the IFR will converge to that of the seasonal flu, or perhaps even less than the flu (because flu kills a lot of healthy children every year whereas COVID spares the young and healthy — and we often do not test for flu / put on death certificate because it does not change the management of the patient).

put severe controls to travel to/from China so this doesn’t happen again.

This needs to be repeated over and over.
Until china sorts out their wet-market and virus lab shit, they shouldn’t be allowed in western countries.

Lugash said: We’ve had a Vietnam’s worth of deaths up to this point with the harsh restrictions…

WTF is this. NYC slave chatter?

Real numbers not even close. Get informed.

Can’t believe there are such gullible people on this blog of all blogs. You’d think long time isteve commenters would be fucking hard boiled about government data claims.

50k covid deaths in America? Gov Cuomo has some ventilators he’d like to sell you.

You weren’t paying attention but the CDC initially set relaxed guidelines for coding covid deaths and then relaxed them further to meaninglessness mid April.

Scarf queen Birx admitted the policy at a Trump presser weeks ago.

Hospital reimbursement follies are worse than ever. There is guaranteed $$$ in each coded covid death. So we have two highly motivated parties on each end of the transaction and the result is lots and lots of covid death toe tags.

Wake the hell up. We are months into this sham. No excuses.

Sure, the conventional wisdom is right sometimes This definitely is not one of those times.

There is conventional wisdom this time? The advice given by the various “experts” is all over the map.

Re: Steve’s tweet about firemen not having much to do most of the time, I wonder if setting up something along-those-lines might be actually a good fit for the medical industry. I’m just Trump-style spit-balling here, but it seems like it could be a good idea to require that every medical professional right down to dental hygienists have basic nursing skills, and that every medical doctor of any kind (dentists, optometrists, all of them) be trained in basic tending to virus patients (not that I have a clue what that entails). Would that be feasible? I guess we could say they have to train one weekend-a-month or so like the national guard, so then when the next pandemic hits, maybe we won’t have to shut down the world over it.

A friend of mine mentioned this idea a few weeks back (he explicitly compared it to the fireman model), and it impressed me, but I’m pretty ignorant of these things.

Yeah, they don’t get any cash payment for those. Maybe they can declare them Covids retroactively?

Steve, I really appreciate that you believed me enough to go buy three humidifiers when I first reported the value of humidity a couple of months ago. But I think it is worthwhile to re-up the humidity thing as a blog post again.

Can you recommend a make and model?

Hospital HVAC systems are very likely increasing the infection fatality rate rather dramatically.

HVAC “systems” don’t de-humidify the air.

Yes the it is better to let it rip during the summer months than in the winter wisdom seems to have been forgotten. I fear Eastern Europe and the Nordics, except for Sweden, are setting themselves up for disaster next winter.

Should we start considering the young, say everyone under the age of twenty five, plus women up to the age of thirty five, as effectively immune already? This would have a dramatic impact on herd immunity requirements and might well explain why the virus seemingly starts to die out of its own accord.

What do you think it would be like without the restrictions? My guesstimate is a Civil War’s worth.

Your guesstimate based on what?

The best evidence we have is that the ‘restrictions’ were imposed far too late to make a difference, if the start date (globally) is earlier than January 15th 2020 and the initial R[0] is anywhere above 2.0

As I have said from the get-go: everyone discovered the word ‘exponential‘ in February (or re-discovered it, if they did year 9 maths), but fuck-all people [re-]discovered the logistic function.

Logistic functions look a lot like ZOMFG!! EXPERNENSHUL!! functions, until they hit their second ‘knee’ – at which point they flatten (sometimes rather abruptly)… endogenously (including as a result of people making individual decisions in response to perceived risk).

None of this is rocket surgery.

All the logistic curves flattened well before endemicity, and the flattening coincided with increases in average daytime temperatures in the Wrong (Northern) Hemisphere. There was the odd ‘blip’ (e.g., N’Awlins; some funeral in Jaw-ja etc) where some other shit happened.

In other news: irony finally laid its deathly-cold finger on my shoulder.

I have coronavirus.

You’re assuming that the natural end-point is that 100% of people are infected.

That’s happened precisely never in the history of epidemiology, despite their constant braying about the End is Nigh.

Consider just one player – Neil Ferguson. He is a serial offender.

2001 – he claimed that 130,000 people would develop variant Kreutzfeld-Yakob disease (vCJD). Since that time, there have been a total of 128 deaths globally.

2005 – he claimed that H5N1 (avian flu) was going to rival the 1918 flu (in fairness, he wasn’t – and isn’t – alone):

“Around 40 million people died in 1918 Spanish flu outbreak,” said Prof Ferguson. “There are six times more people on the planet now so you could scale it up to around 200 million people probably.”

Actual toll – globally – in the following 15 years: 455

2009 – he claimed that H1N1 (‘swine flu’) could
 • infect a third of the world’s population;
 • had an IFR of 0.4-1.4%;
 • be in line with the 1957 pandemic that killed about 3.5 million people (he caveated that immediately, by claiming that health care was better now).

Actual toll: 18,036

The validity of the test used in Miami is low:

The tests used in the Miami study only have a specificity of 90.63%. https://t.co/df6zEpWLvK https://t.co/XylSpKvmlq

— Vidur Kapur (@vidur_kapur) April 24, 2020

As mentioned in your post, this can be adjusted for, and the article says they do this, but how well this was done is impossible to assess given that we have no details about the adjustment process.

• Intredasting: BenKenobi

If anything, this covid19-related shutdown of the global economy should be seen in the context of the famous (and totally, irretrievably retarded) Trolley Problem.

Faced with a path on which a demographically-small number of very ill, very old people were going to die, the political class veered the trolley and slammed it into the entire global economy – guaranteeing an increase in misery (and suicides) that will have a much higher cost than the alternative… i.e., the death of some very ill septuagenarians.

Does anyone else remember the peace and tranquility of the West Coast beaches?

False positives and negatives only give half the story, what you really need is the F1 score for the test: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/F1_score

“Dr Emily Cousens researches vulnerability and gender and teaches at Oxford and LSE.”

Looks like typical toxic white woman from the byline. I’m sure she will thus leach venom throughout both Oxford and LSE for a long time to come. Lol done, academaniacs!

There is a Swiss study out that explains how Covid-19 can lead to multiple organ failure and sheds more light on the co-morbidity factor.

Varga, Zsuzsanna, Flammer, Andreas J., Steiger, Peter, Haberecker, Martina, Andermatt, Rea, Zinkernagel, Annelies S., Mehra, Mandeep R., Schuepbach, Reto, Ruschitzka, Frank & Moch, Holger (2020). Endothelial Cell Infection and Endotheliitis in COVID-19. Lancet.

(The proponents of heroic ignorance will, of course, not be impressed. Those people can consider themselves lucky to have a president who, though often ignorant himself, is still much better than both the alternative and than they are.)

Singapore, population ~5.7M, has reported just 12 SARS-CoV-2 related deaths. Unfortunately, infection numbers are starting to take off:

“A pivot in Singapore’s strategy could come as it grapples with a surge in cases among low-wage migrant workers living in cramped dormitories, who have long been essential in the city-state’s service and construction sectors.

It reported a fourth straight day of virus cases going above 1,000 on Thursday, and confirmed cases now number more than 11,000.

Almost 900 cases were reported Friday, with Singaporeans or permanent residents making up 13 cases.”

I like that. Never postpone the enviable.

So Ron Desantis was a hero, not an evil creep, for dragging his feet on a lockdown and then supporting re-opening of the beaches. Has anyone on CNN or MSNBC mentioned Miami yet?

And this is the crux of it.

The data are all over the map. Some data show the Coronavirus being as dangerous as the Spanish Flu. Other data show the Coronavirus as being “only” about as dangerous as the Hong Kong Flu (which was by far the nastiest epidemic in my lifetime).

So Steve, instead of cherry-picking his data like a good True Believer, shows all the data and tries to figure out what it all means. That includes the possibility that ALL the data are suspect.

“Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn’t go away.” Philip K. Dick

If I stop believing in the fact that every antibody test indicates a death rate closer to .2%, I don’t think it’s going to go away.

Conversely, if Covid-mongers stop believing in the notion that Covid will kill all but the most vulnerable, it will go away. Just sayin’.

Woke corporate defeats the left with the left’s weapons: Amazon Whole Food docs record that diversity immunizes against unionization

https://archive.fo/1khJw

Store-risk metrics include average store compensation, average total store sales, and a “diversity index” that represents the racial and ethnic diversity of every store. Stores at higher risk of unionizing have lower diversity and lower employee compensation, as well as higher total store sales and higher rates of workers’ compensation claims, according to the documents.

http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=61403

This has been something Steve has been observing for a while.

Which part of New York City is Miami in? That like Jamaica?

I think the only thing Steve did wrong in his thinking was taking New York Statistics as being 100% Truthful.

1) New York is either lying for political purposes
2) Purposefully killing people for political purposes
3) Or, as a previous commentator talked about the hospitals like the Queens Elmwood or whatever are REALLY BAD…not even worth being called ‘hospital’

The reason why Steve took New York stats as truth was because of Northern Italy, London, and a refusal to go ((there)).

London, I put in the same category of New York, too much politics to take anything seriously. Plus, anyone who has lived in London knows you get sick every 3 months with the London Tube Disease. Coronavirus doesn’t even have to exist for people to get sick and die in London…pneumonia is good enough.

I suspect Italy was the media scaremongering because they knew it would take a while for data to be published, and they knew no one could fly to Italy and actually Check.

Especially when one of the scaremongers in Northern Italy was an Israeli Doctor who looked suspiciously like a young Weinstein…and he said that over 60s were being denied ventilators.

Basically….

We got had. But it’s now time to get Un-Had…and Call the liars out.

It’s a ‘I’m not a Basic Bitch’ denier.

It’s the thing girls who are totally Average in Every Respect wear in order to try to be un-average.

She’s average looking, average thinking, average love-life, there’s nothing about her that Stands Out.

It’s better to be a bit Ugly than to be the Ultimate in Average.

Yes, it’s better to be fat, with a fat husband wearing all black outside a chicken shop happily snogging than the be Totally Average.

So she gets the shiny nose pimple booger.

The problem with Covid is that…

No one is comparing it to anything. You are looking at these studies…Covid Causes Multiple Organ Failure…Covid Causes death Via Hypoxia

But…

Don’t all the other nasty little bugs do the exact same thing?

H1N1 would attack the lymphatic system and lower your body temperature so that it could replicate better…that’s why so many people would feel better for a day or two and then get sicker

Flus lead to Cytokine Storms which is your Body Eating Itself Whole

Pneumonia is you drowning in your lungs! (?)

You get the idea…when you look at Covid Studies in a Vacuum it looks Frighteningly Awful

Until you realize…

Oh all the other bugs do the same thing

> Logistic functions look a lot like [exponential] functions, until they hit their second ‘knee’ – at which point they flatten (sometimes rather abruptly)… endogenously (including as a result of people making individual decisions in response to perceived risk).

This.

Every wannabe public intellectual should reflect on the curves that chart the progress of the infection/disease on a semi-log plot. I refer to the ones at 91-DIVOC, but there are plenty of others.

The shapes of the curves for ~95% of jurisdictions are the same. They aren’t linear, or exponential, or logistic. But they’re about the same as each other, irrespective of lockdown status or timing. Per Kratoklastes, this is important.

I’m listening to CBS This Morning as I type, and it’s a bit depressing. The reporters and the people they interview… aren’t deep thinkers.

Well since we know that all viruses are created equal, the superior performance of the New York virus must be due to Magic Dirt.

The only alternative is the Anti-Asian bias of the xenophobic Miami natives refusing to have anything to do with the WuFlu.

The Swedes are Scandinavians whereas the people who live in Miami-Dade are predominantly spanish-speaking Hispanic people so quite a lot of cultural differences. The latitude and climate are quite different too.

When it comes to these statistics so much depends on factors that are not fully understood. For example Florida looked as if it had topped the curve and was going down and then suddenly yesterday there was a massive spike in New Corona virus infections or people testing positive.

Possibly this was due to a huge batch of tests from a prison or something like that being processed on a single day but we simply don’t know all the information about why these numbers have shot up and generally newspaper and TV reporters don’t know either.

I think if they had worked on getting people to do the normal actions you do to avoid the flu, then in general it would have been fine. They did need to lock down the nursing homes. Add it creating a few units of doctors and nurses to head where there were major outbreaks and it would have been about the same number.

Also, we absolutely have no idea of how many people have been infected because the tests, in general, are crap.

Watch the numbers continue to drop to less than 0,1% in the coming weeks to months, especially in regions where they didn’t label virtually every death as suspected COVID-19. Eventually, the IFR will converge to that of the seasonal flu, or perhaps even less than the flu (because flu kills a lot of healthy children every year whereas COVID spares the young and healthy — and we often do not test for flu / put on death certificate because it does not change the management of the patient).

Are you a practicing medical doctor?

The best evidence we have is that the ‘restrictions’ were imposed far too late to make a difference, if the start date (globally) is earlier than January 15th 2020 and the initial R[0] is anywhere above 2.0

How could the massive unprecedented “social distancing” not be making a difference?

Sheesh.

The different variants explanation is not unfalsifiable. The genomes of New York and Miami viruses can be sequenced and compared. Indeed, some COVID-19 viruses have already been sequenced. Of course, then you have to see if any differences you find are meaningful.

Watching For Mutations in the Coronavirus

For far too many scientists and commenters, people older than 65 or with a chronic disease or poor health, covid-19 is a personal matter which blind them to the facts. Of course the facts themselves are pretty confusing at this stage.

Personally, I like this sober assessment by a retired Swedish epidemiologist, now a consultant with the Swedish government. Sweden seems to be doing fine without mandatory lockdown. 0% BS guaranteed. Worth listening: there’s a brief summary a the bottom in the description for the lazy or those in a hurry.

Hey Ron,

Are you flying the helicopter and Sailer is on the bullhorn? Or is it the other way around?

Police used a helicopter to catch three people who weren’t socially distancing. Actually came over the megaphone and told them “the building is surrounded” and had them come out with their hands up. This is just insane. I can’t believe this lunacy.

pic.twitter.com/CN2r2erCYX

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) April 22, 2020

“when the real story is how wrong we are going to turn out to have been, and how bad the economic consequences are.”

Because we generally associate a virus to massive spread and deaths. So when that phenomenon does not occur, then the policies and procedures to limit its transmission and keep people safe are called into question. “See, it’s not that bad, let’s go about our normal business”. In the end, it’s not about #DyingForTheDow.

How about total viral load, i.e. multiple exposures over a short period of time? A NYC resident who commutes on the subway could be exposed several times and reach a point where the body cannot clear enough of the virus.

Think of the doctor in Wuhan, the one the broke the news about the extent of the virus. He was a healthy man in his 30s but he died from virus. Did he reach a point where he was exposed too many times and his body could not handle the total viral load?

Perhaps a little exposure, esp. in when ample sun (Vit. D) is available, is a good way to develop antibodies w/o having symptoms.

Gimenez said the UM survey of Miami-Dade reflects a national trend showing African Americans are disproportionately impacted by the novel coronavirus. “African Americans are more than twice as likely to be infected with COVID-19 than other racial groups,” he said.

Of course, that makes sense, doesn’t it?

Blacks are more likely to

–have uncontrolled hypertension.
–be anemic or asthmatic
–have diabetes
–be obese
–do lots of touching and hugging
–be unaware of the nature this disease

That’s why you’re starting to see the theme of Wuhan as another “civil rights issue.” Fauci, being the exemplar of a politically correct deep stater, fell right in line.

As sure as night follows day, the Dimms will use this disease vector as a political one, riling up the black community against Trump because blacks died at a greater rate.

It would be interesting to know something about the mechanisms that cause false positives.

For example, is it just a quality control problem in individual test kits? Or is there some characteristic of certain patients’ blood that is consistently measured incorrectly as an antibody?

If it’s the first problem you could just give multiple tests to people who get a positive result, and measure the consistency of the outcome.

If it’s the second problem, you could figure out what percentage of people have the particular blood characteristic that incorrectly measures as antibody positive. In either case, you could statistically account for the phenomenon.

The other “problem” not discussed is the number of people that were able to fight off the virus without even needing to generate antibodies. I guess you’d have to expose a random sample of healthy people to the virus and measure the response to figure out how often that happens. Are researchers even allowed to do that kind of experiment with volunteers?

Humidity might help.

In Miami you could just turn off the air conditioning. Elsewhere, maybe retrofit humidifiers.

This might play havoc with electronics.

The President of Africa wants debt forgiveness because of corona.

The numbers don’t support this. There is a huge distance between the truth and what was put forward to justify the shutdown.

The current infection rate is at least 10x higher than originally thought. I say at least b/c there is a delay with the studies. Being real about it, it’s likely 20x.

From the beginning of this, worldwide death numbers looked like a bad flu season, not a terrible, world-beating disease. Bad patches from North Italy were cherrypicked as examples to support what has turned out to be the wrong policy.

That policy put a stop on countless people’s life aspirations, and endangered the physical and social welfare of many poor people. Did you forget these people exist? You seem to be the one too focused on the Dow.

> Can you recommend a [humidifier] make and model?

For whole-house humidification of homes with forced-air heating, see this March 16 exchange between me and Jack D.

Although that may not be what you are looking for, since we’re moving into the summer.

Nutball unz is now concerned with methodological rigor and data after writing a bizarre evidence free screed repeating Chinese propganda and blaming the United States military for cornavirus. Contemplate that for a second.

I volunteer to be tested for the coronavirus and to be used as a guinea pig under the conditions that I receive a 100 million dollars COD that I can will off to family and friends in the event that I die during the testing.

Nice. Maybe you will never have to address that every day this goes on has made you look more wrong.

Random thought. Some here have mentioned a Vietnam or Civil War level death toll. I have a more comparable situation.

On February 19th, 1945 US Marines invaded Iwo Jima. By the 26th of March the island had been taken. Some 6000 Marines were killed and almost ALL of the 22,000 Japanese soldiers were dead. Those numbers pretty much match what the death toll has been in New Jersey and New York from the Chinese coronavirus over a comparable period of time.

I think anyone who suggested the battle of Iwo Jima was just a skirmish or not a serious affair in 1945 would probably be looking for some new teeth.

Good points, Mr. Toad. One concept that addresses part of your comment is the distinction between “analytical validity” and “clinical validity.”

Analytical validity is “in narrow terms, did the assay perform the way it was supposed to?”
Clinical validity is “were the assay’s results correct with respect to the condition it is diagnosing?”

Analytical validity is more cut and dried, clinical validity is more subject to “what, exactly, is the question you are asking.” Obviously, clinical validity is what’s most important to… clinicians.

(Written on the fly, I’m sure the usual sources have better descriptions.)

If Trump were not president, HRC would have been. Since she is a quintessential globalist and the Clinton Foundation is the recipient of hundreds of thousands of dollars from Chinese sources, what makes you think she would have ordered the stopping of flights from China any sooner than Trump? Can you name any credible Democratic voices that didn’t criticize Trump for the travel restrictions he imposed?

As to the other measures, the US would be even further behind on testing. The permanent bureaucracy at the CDC and FDA cranked out tainted tests and forbade any other testing sources. It was Trump who cut through the red tape and turned the private sector loose in the development and production of testing.

What about HRC makes you think that her performance in any of the critical decisions would have been superior to Trump’s? Trump wasn’t running against an infinite selection of opponents; he ran and won against HRC.

Guess the leaders of Singapore are learning that reliance on quasi-slave labor has it downsides.

One other factor to consider in these surprising Miami-Dade results is the typical time between infection and death…

Why do you consider them to be surprising?

Analytical validity is “in narrow terms, did the assay perform the way it was supposed to?”
Clinical validity is “were the assay’s results correct with respect to the condition it is diagnosing?”

What does it even mean for an assay’s “results” to be “correct” with respect to a “condition”?

Not a science girl, but genuinely curious to why is it so hard to come up with an accurate test? Is it because this bug has multiple strains? Or does it just test elevate white blood cell count, which could come from something simple like a sinus infection or infected cut? Or could it simply be a crony profiteering problem? I do know this testing issue doesn’t make me have much confidence in any future vaccine.

Either my screen has gunk on it, but it looks like three other data points from earlier weeks and two from later weeks in the year and it looks less than one really high spike in the first or second week. So what were those? Are all viral outbreaks at or below average? We really do live in Lake Wobegon.

But Covid-19 appears to be far more contagious and deadlier than vCJD, H5N1 or H1N1. It has already claimed 200,000 globally with no evidence of slowdown anywhere outside of East Asia; Even there, we don’t know what may happen if they return to any kind of normalcy.

Then there is this: There is currently no evidence that people who have recovered from COVID-19 and have antibodies are protected from a second infection.

https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/immunity-passports-in-the-context-of-covid-19

How do you know that you have “Coronavirus?” Only about 15% of colds are caused by corona viruses. Have you been tested or are you just making a WAG for rhetorical purposes?

“ I might write a riveting, first-person testimony, giving great details of my personal triumph over seemingly-insurmountable odds.”

Make sure you say you were “literally shaking” when you found out! And blame Trump.

WHO : no reason to believe people who had Covid have gained immunity

—-> no reason to believe that there will be a vaccine ever. That’s a it’s not a flue big statement.

Each test was evaluated with the same set of blood samples: from 80 people known to be infected with the coronavirus . . . .

How could this be known before any test is certified as infallible? This seems to beg the question.

No explanation is required for why one area might well have a CFR of .2 and another .7. That variation is expected even if cases and deaths are randomly distributed.

However, the virus has been around earlier than we thought. NYC probably has had it longer and because of density it spread faster. The more generations a highly mutable virus spreads in humans, the less deadly it is likely to become because a less deadly strain will spread more efficiently.

My guesstimate is………no difference without the restrictions.

I think that is a hard argument to justify. A sample plot from
https://www.kinsahealth.co/your-sacrifices-are-saving-lives-social-distancing-is-working/

Whether or not the restrictions (and which particular restrictions!) were/are worth it is a more complicated and nuanced discussion which does not seem possible to have here.

Another point (which is obvious to me, but probably needs to be explicitly stated anyway) — if everyone is going to eventually be exposed then the safest time to be exposed is during the humid summer months.

Yes. It seems sensible to open the restrictions and let the virus progress through the relatively younger and healthier population to build up herd immunity while the infections face the headwind of summer. Our “experts” and politicians seem to be doing their best to set us up for a more severe second wave this fall and winter.

Controlled burns for wildfire prevention make a good analogy here. You do the burns when weather conditions are such that even if something goes wrong the risk is limited.
http://factsheets.okstate.edu/e1010/sections/prescribed-fire-weather/

I will also repeat a comment I made earlier: very low humidity (20% at the University of Maryland Medical Center according to a doctor I know who practices there) is common in hospitals to produce an odorless sensation of sterility, but is debilitating for respiratory immunity. Hospital HVAC systems are very likely increasing the infection fatality rate rather dramatically.

Thank you for following up on that. What a pathetic reason. Again, I will note if that 20% is outside the OR then they are violating the typical recommendation of 40-60% relative humidity for hospitals.

This link has much more about humidity control in hospitals. Including a discussion of dehumidification (for commenters who think that is not part of hospital HVAC equipment). And notice the one exception I see in all of this. They recommend burn units have humidity < 30%.
https://fisair.com/controlling-humidity-in-hospitals/

P.S. A link to our earlier conversation about this.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/infection-fatality-rates-under-different-scenarios/#comment-3849649

Given the horrific situation in Lombardy and now NYC/NJ, I just can’t understand the thinking of the hordes of Flu Hoaxers who hang around here.

Apples and oranges.

Lombardy is full of old people, a huge Chinese ex pat population, the air is bad, and the health care system is atrocious.

In NYC, thousands of Chinese fly into the city on regular basis, poor people are obese, in terrible health, pack themselves into crowded subways two or three times a day, and nursing home personnel who change the bedpans have IQs in the 90s. Northern NJ might as well be NY given it’s population density and demographics.

We need to understand each place AS IT IS.

That’s not to say Corona-Chan isn’t bad — it is.

What we shouldn’t do is take perfectly healthy people under 60 with no co-morbidities — really, most of the population in most places that aren’t Lombardy or NYC — and put them under effective house arrest in the mistaken belief that such actions will somehow save all the 80 year olds with COPD.

Of course, the lockdown has super-duper benefits for mediocrities like Whitmer, Cuomo, Murphy, and Pritzker. It gives them an unending hard on — yes, for Whitmer too — since they can let their authoritarian freak flag fly, while destroying their economies for which they can blame Donald Trump because he didn’t shut down the country on February 1st.

You need to get straight about who the really dangerous hoaxers are.

I doubt very much such a low infection fatality rate. The number of dead is now 200,000. At that fatality rate, there should be over 120 million infected people Worlwide. That is a dozen times more than the reported infection rate.

It is absurd to think there are only 10 million infections worldwide.

“She hates a potential vaccine because she feels her ego being mutilated through what she perceives as the relative diminishment of one aspect of how she identifies.”

She ought to spend her energies hating something else, something that might actually exist one day, because there will never be a kungfluey vaccine.

Though HIV is planet Earth’s most sanctified and holy coronavirus, there is no vaccine after nearly four decades of research.

I fume every time I hear science illiterates blithely refer to a kungflu vaccine – no such animal, unobtainium.

That data not especially meaningful without further context.

How do they define “flu-like illness”? Based on what? Self diagnosis? A doctor’s diagnosis? Testing? Sure a lot of people with flu symptoms now stay home. And people who do show up at a hospital are instantly suspected of having CoV.

Bear in mind that this is from a company that has a vested interest in the panic.

Put a gold box round this comment and a gold star beside Germ Theory’s alias. A perfect comment.

The conventional wisdom has people wearing masks and cowering in their apartments right now . . . .

No one is cowering in an apartment anywhere. Where do you come up with this stuff?

No, but it might look like a sudden spike in mortality from a lot of old people dying in their own homes from neglect, people dying from heart-attacks at home, people dying of DVT because they’ve been sitting in their homes drinking for the last four weeks, people dying because they were put on a ventillator for something that would have been better treated elsewise, and people dying from COVID-19 because we decided to quarantine everyone instead of quaranting specifically those who are at risk.

I’m sure Elizabeth Holmes would have had an at-home finger-stick Covid test by now, if The Man hadn’t held her back.

“The point isn’t to be a contrarian, the point is to know the truth and speak it.”

You’re wasting bandwidth trying to talk sense into Lowe. Back a while ago I observed that the commentator RichardTaylor can’t seem to shut up about how everyone else is getting coronavirus wrong even though he was previously telling us that even 5,000 dead was a ridiculously high death toll, as in “nothing like that is likely to happen.”

I think we were already at 10,000 dead by that point (i.e., just a few weeks later), but even so, Lowe decided it was smart to pipe up and tell us that RichardTaylor’s comments didn’t ” seem that unreasonable”.

They don’t care about facts and numbers and being correct. Ideological purity is far more important than trivial matters like what 2+2 really amounts to. Like Wittkowski (who predicted 10,000 would die from this, by the way), they just keep doubling down, and then claim “see, I was right all along” any time and any cherry-picked point at which the predictions fall under the median, which they invariably do. I.e., the stopped watch approach to telling the time.

I’ve never denied that coronavirus might, in the final tally, prove to be a lot less lethal than initially feared, but if that proves to be the case, a big reason for why the panic took hold is that the truther crowd were such feckless lying idiots, displaying nothing more than basic TV weather-forecaster logic. Bury all the failed predictions, and trumpet the good ones.

And don’t try to tell me that 5,000 or 10,000 dead was a “reasonable” prediction. At least have the honesty and integrity to shut up about that. Likewise, don’t tell me that any country containing NY will ever regard Sweden’s approach as the better road not taken. The economist Richard Epstein made a stupid prediction (he initially predicted 500 dead, but after correcting a math error, he upped it to 5,000) but hey, few of us haven’t made a stupid mistake now and then. At least he had the good grace to stop digging.

“Around 40 million people died in 1918 Spanish flu outbreak,” said Prof Ferguson. “There are six times more people on the planet now so you could scale it up to around 200 million people probably.”

It’s hard to take seriously the predictions of anyone who is so ignorant of present or past facts. If the world’s population was 1.8 billion in 1918, he must have thought it was 12.6 billion in 2005.

Here we go…My suspicions are slowly being confirmed…

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8256469/Brooklyn-nursing-home-ravaged-coronavirus-tried-send-sick-patients-USNS-Comfort.html

Basically New York Officials were TRYING to get the death rate as high as possible in order to scream ‘Orange Man Bad’

I bet the death rate at the top hospitals in NYC is under .1…because those are the people in charge and who matter….everyone else is more valuable as a death statistic than alive

Actually, now that you mention it, that red curve is not out of line with some of the data displayed for December/January.

Oh the irony of calling others ignorant, when you are clearly full of hatred towards your fellow man for having a slightly different viewpoint. That is what used to be considered ignorant. Now, anyone who doesn’t goose step along with the WHO’s edicts is considered ignorant. This is the path that demonic atheistic science worship is leading us down.

1. The Miami-Dade population is, on average, healthier than NYC population.
2. Miami-Dade population has a smaller portion of morbidly obese people.
3. Miami-Dade population has a smaller portion of malfunctional people who ignore all rules.
4. The same factors, density, subways, etc., that increase the infected portion of NYC population also increase the average initial viral load of infected New Yorkers, initial viral load being one of the major determinants of your prospects for surviving.

4. means, generally, there is probably going to be a correlation between the infected portion of population and the IFR for that population.

It is even more absurd to assume that there are 150 million infected people Worldwide, considering that the entire World went on lockdown less than a week after people started dropping dead. With an incubation period of only 5 days(on average) there is no way the virus could have infected over 120 million people in that short space of time. Remember that exponental progression numbers only start to pick up speed after a !0 x doubling. Starting with 1 infected people at an RO of 2.0, it takes a chain ot ten consecutive infections for the number to reach even 1,000 infected people. It is obvious that the mortality rate of this virus is over 1%, although it is certainly lower than 5%, which is what the death rate of officially infected people show.

Cuisinart? Calphalon?

Seriously, a large pot of water kept on low boil in northern climes is the main thing people need to save their life.

We have this in our bedroom, which is where our baby sleeps:

The best place is the room where one sleeps.

Climate is the biggest variable.

China has a new outbreak and lo and behold it is in Harbin, the northernmost major city in China, capital of China’s northernmost province and far north of North Korea.

Humidity indoors in Harbin right now is still very low.

This virus is boomer remover, and Sailer is a boomer. Like Nero, he can’t imagine that the world can get along without him.

it will cause many shattered dreams and premature deaths all on its own.

First world poverty does not cause premature deaths. Anyway, thanks to our moron government, many of the unemployed will be getting MORE money:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/23/business/economy/unemployment-benefits-stimulus-coronavirus.html

They are certainly cowering on Unz Review.

Isn’t it strange how the more data comes out about this, the more wrong that consensus seems to be?

to elaborate: …the more data comes out, the more wrong that consensus seems to you. this is not at all strange if you apply Odin’s Law:

“No matter how much data comes out, everyone on all sides remains convinced he has been right all along.”

This seems to hold for all issues over all time periods. Although it must have been said before, I don’t know who to credit.

The point isn’t to be a contrarian, the point is to know the truth and speak it. And to be reasonably prudent. We’ve had a Vietnam’s worth of deaths up to this point with the harsh restrictions. What do you think it would be like without the restrictions? My guesstimate is a Civil War’s worth.

Lugash, i’m with you on trying “to know the truth and speak it”. But i find your war comparisons deeply misleading and a bit hysteric.

I think there’s (at least) three different issues.

1) Actual death rate.
Here’s the “it’s just the flu, bro” guys are just wrong (in some cases “nuts”). They are showing themselves to be data averse and unable to build simple models.

In these towns in northern Italy which have been hard hit and show high infection rates, they’ve racked up well over a typical year’s deaths in a couple of months. Even if you assume that they’ll be no more deaths and assume that everyone has been infected, you end up with an IFR several times 0.1%–an upper bound on anything from “the flu”. Excess deaths already locked in are 0.3-0.7% an order of magnitude about “just the flu”–and that’s the floor.

For the Diamond Princess we’ve got 14 deaths out of 712 infected–2%. Age adjust this super-aggressively at say 4x–you’re at 0.5%. (And note cruising oldsters are healthier than normal population for their age, not the folks confined in a care home because they’re on death’s door.) But even if you take the entire ship of 3700 (mostly uninfected) and that 14 deaths–you’re at .4%. And age adjust the heck out of it, you’ll still be above 0.1%–worse than any flu in my life–as an absolute (and really ridiculous) floor.

This “just a bad flu year” stuff is not data driven. It’s a religion. Not an evil genocidal one like minoritarian globalism–“nation of immigrants” or “our diversity is our greatest strength”. But likewise data averse and silly.

2) Who is dying.
From the beginning–not right at the start with poor data from China, but quickly–it’s been clear that this thing is skewing heavily to killing the old and weak. Skewed even more dramatically than a typical flu. You have the odd cases here and there, but the average “years lost” of the deaths is going to be <10 years. Probably around five.

When i figured this out … i felt deeply relieved. My dad (90s, already lived his life) gets it, good chance he's dead. Me (60s, done with productive labor and child raising) small chance of death. My kids (20s; the future of my family and the nation) close to zero chance of dying. A car accident is more likely to kill them this year. In other words … the natural order. I sent my kids email–"you're going to be fine".

Lugash, this is why the war deaths thing is hysteric and offensive. The Civil War killed off something like 700,000 young men–maybe a 1/6 or 1/7 of a generation–who should have gone on to lead productive lives, knock up their future wives and raise families to populate America's future. It was a true epic–epically stupid–tragedy for our nation. In contrast to that, the China-virus is literally nothing–*nothing*–a speed bump.

3) The reaction.
Finally there’s the reaction–the hysteria, the flat out lying (ex. masks), the tyrannical power grabbing by politicians and the overall question of cost-benefit. Some of the reaction–closing up activities like golf and hiking–where people are naturally apart–and just shutting rather than sensible regulation of parks and beaches–just reek of stupid tyrannical bullying.

People will be all over the map on questions of cost-benefit. But all the hysteria, lying and bullying deserve all the mocking, abuse and denunciation they get.

Apparently, the Jews could survive six million dead, but American can’t survive 2.5 million.

“How many will die?” is an important question to ask, predict, and adjust, but it’s just as important to ask,

“WHO is in fact dying?”

The jury is still out on question #1.

Question #2 is pretty much answered. Old people. People who are already sick. People who have conditions that make them vulnerable.

What if it turns out that 20% of the final death toll is from nursing homes?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/1-5-coronavirus-deaths-could-have-been-prevented-daniel-greenfield/#disqus_thread

Take away the co-morbid and nursing home patients, and what is the IFR now? It ain’t Spanish flu level, that’s for sure.

But no, we have to close every greasy spoon and nail salon in the nation in a frenzied panic, have normal healthy people wear more or less useless masks amongst other healthy people while they are all scrambling for toilet paper, and just generally destroy our economy, rather than calmly tell old and sick people to stay inside, and have the authorities descend upon nursing homes and make sure their shit is order.

When all this is said and done, we will rue the day we acted so stupidly.

Maybe you should start with New York City first.

The problem you’ve got on (1) is the uneven impact geographically combined with the one-size-fits-all lockdown.

When your hospitals are empty you’re not inclined to be much impressed with people making fun of you for some skepticism about the whole kit and kaboodle no matter how many hockey sticks the usual suspects are running out again.

All y’all need to check your epistemology and stop swinging your dick around and beclowning yourselves repeatedly. Once again our illustrious host sets a great example. We’d do well to follow.

I lucked out and had a mouth full of humble pie* when this thing hit so was on self-imposed sabbatical. My sense is that we’ve dodged a bullet due to an outstanding, mostly decentralized, response and a decent amount of luck. But pretty much still too early to tell.

* – proclaiming Biden toast less than a week before he wrapped up the nomination by uniting the two wings of the Democratic Party, black women and white women.

You have it exactly right. The conventional wisdom is true.

I at first was skeptical. But then my information changed, and so I altered my conclusions.

What do you do, sir?

Here is England & Wales all-cause mortality displayed back to 1993:

Source: http://inproportion2.talkigy.com/

Note that it only goes out to April 10th, the latest date available when the data was reported on April 21, so that right-most spike will have some additional width to it.

Does COVID-19 look like a disease with Flu-type fatality rates?

It does to me, yes.

Whether or not the restrictions (and which particular restrictions!) were/are worth it

An important point.

The text at the top of the graph says “unprecedented”.

That graph shows the current tally in a bold red line, and I presume, the tally from previous years as faint blue dots.

It shows a spike in the bold red line, and the spike is shown for a duration of 2 weeks.

The text also says it’s for “death registrations”.

If you connected all the blue dots with a bold red line, would the red spike in that graph continue to stand out, apart from being a bit late in the year for a spike? There are 3 blue dots on that graph above the highest part of the red peak ( weeks 50 and 1, rather than 15 or so), and about 6-8 in the range of that 2 week spike (weeks 1, 2, 8, and 49-52).

If the spike hangs in the air like that for 10 weeks, that would be extremely unprecedented in the last 50 years and unlike anything previously observed.

But in a 2 week duration, if it were to go down for a 3rd week, it looks like the graph shows at least a few precedents in the past 50 years but shows them in a different color. It certainly doesn’t make it look like nothing, it looks like it’s competing with the 2 or 3 worst spikes in death registrations in the last 50 years.

I have no idea what was causing those previous spikes. I notice they do all occur in what I would think of as flu season and not in the middle of summer. They may not be diseases, perhaps terrorist IRA bombings or train derailments or something? It presents itself as death registrations. The period of the graph does not cover the London Blitz or the Spanish Flu.

I think part of the problem with the flu debate is most people don’t define what they mean by ‘flu’. You did. 0.1%.

I think we could possibly benefit from defining it like we define floods. Yearly flus, decadal flus, semi-centennial flus, centennial flus, etc. I would guess 0.1% would be a yearly flu. I might agree to call it decadal but no more than that.

That spike looks nothing like a yearly flu, easily worse than a decadal flu. It doesn’t necessarily seem out of the ballpark for a bi-decadal or semi-centennial flu, and is still quite easily imaginable for a centennial flu. Just as a ’cause of death’ generically, that graph covering 50 years makes it look like a bi-decadal to semi-centennial cause of death.

It is absurd to think there are only 10 million infections worldwide.

China, the epicenter, has very low numbers.

“… then the safest time to be exposed is during the humid summer months…” – Do we really know that the outcome for the very vulnerable depends on humidity once they get infected? I do not think so.

” it could be that there’s a New York City variant that is more lethal than the variant prevalent in Miami.”

I have no expertise but I thought they could sequence the RNA and determine if the NYC and FLA versions are similar.

I forgot about the good old Trolley car morality metaphor!

But it’s true. Once the political default was “do something,” it meant that any casualties would be blamed on any politician who allowed people to keep their freedom. He’d be accused of “having blood on his hands.”

Remember, it was the Chinese who were getting so much praise for their super-aggressive lock down of Wuhan before it started hitting the west. They helped set the tone what was to follow.

“…there could be different strains in different places.”

I have been suspecting as such for a while. How to explain to which the data varies from place to place.

This little bastard, at least in it’s current, or”novel”, state, has really only been known to exist for the last several months. We are still on a learning curve. I mean, the TONNAGE of what the “experts” don’t know yet would sink the entire US Navy fleet ten times over.

“When all this is said and done, we will rue the day we acted so stupidly.”

Who’s this “we” you refer to? To be sure, armchair back-forecasters applying their keen 20/20 hindsight to cherry-picked outcomes and then claiming they were right all along will always be among us. And innumeracy is currently far more widespread in our world than coronavirus. That means mathematical illiterates who pretend that they know more than the experts and could have done all this better will never be in short supply. (And when the models are especially difficult, they’ll frequently be right, sadly.)

However, I repeat: no sane person who believes that New York City is a real location — as opposed to a troupe of crisis actors — will ever believe that even Sweden’s approach was the “right” one (and even theirs is a far cry from the “let ‘er rip” attitude that many here are still advocating, because, if 200,000 in a world of 7 billion means nothing, then why do anything about a million or two million dead? What answer can anyone provide for such people except to breathe a sign of relief that they’re kooks?)

I get it — you want to ignore what doesn’t suit your worldview and pretend it was only the let’s-do-something crowd that acted stupidly. I’m telling you, if you’re really interested in being honest, there was — as far as I can tell — as much or more stupidity from the let’s-do-nothing contingent. If you want to claim otherwise, then I will tell you it’s not just the CDC that should be suspected of retconning the history and fudging the numbers.

Even as someone who suspects the final numbers may be closer to your prediction than some of theirs, I hope I can at least be honest enough to also admit that.

Dan:

Would climate increase both the portion of the population infected and the average initial viral load of those infected, and thus IFR?

Henry

Amidst all the turmoil, The Narrative remains alive and well.

The Miami study looks to have somewhat decent methodology, though from what I can tell, it still requires the randomly-chosen individuals to consent – meaning that the people who are least likely to get infected – that is, the people who refuse all or most social contact – are not included in the sample.

Other studies have been much worse about this. For instance, one of them tested supermarket shoppers. Even a moment’s thought about this methodology should tell you that it’s probably biased upward, and it’s impossible to estimate by how much. That puts it squarely in the category of “hmm, interesting I guess” and that’s about it.

I think it’s very good that they’re doing these studies. However, they are still working out some methodological problems (as well as test problems) which is why they are coming up with these unrealistic IFR figures. People want to believe what they want to believe, so they look at these very early non-replicating studies that are all over the map, and assume that the truth must be the average of all of them, or the upper or lower bound. But the studies may have high variance and bias, we just don’t know at this point.

It’s quaint how these topics have resulted in a flood of trolls who never had anything to say before but are now suddenly smart and informed enough to tell Steve how to write his blog. Imagine that friend everyone has who just took up a new hobby two weeks ago – let’s say wine tasting – and now won’t shut up about it and talks as if he’s an expert with 10 years of experience. That’s what I’m seeing with so many “dissident right” people on Corona. It’s really highlighted the stark difference between people who pursue topics like HBD and evopsych out of a desire for knowledge and truth, and those who are simply in service to yet another lame tribe based on political ideology.

I’m transitioning from social distancing for physical health to social distancing for mental health. Turns out that many of the people I was hanging out with were just as stupid and obnoxious as the progs and pinkos, it just didn’t come out until they encountered unknown territory.

utu wrote:

“Do we really know that the outcome for the very vulnerable depends on humidity once they get infected? I do not think so.”

utu — I find no argument here. You haven’t said anything at all. You have presented no science one way other the other.

Here are a bunch of data points. You don’t happen to work for the World Health Organization do you, because you seem be dismissive of all useful knowledge on this.

(1) The fatality rates in hot, humid countries are coming in very, very low. By contrast, the fatality rates in cold, dry climates are coming in orders of magnitude higher.

(2)

In 2019, a research team at Yale University Medical School published a groundbreaking study (Kudo et al., National Academy of Sciences, 2019) which showed how low ambient humidity hurts the ability of the immune system to fight respiratory viral infection in animal hosts. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6561219/ .

It is unfortunate that no controlled studies have been done on humidity as it relates to COVID-19 yet.

(3)

Respiratory immunity is very dependent on humidity.

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-virology-012420-022445

Read through the 130 citations in the above document, as I have, and then get back to me. Please do some work before dismissing things out of hand.

(4) Humidifiers have been sold to improve respiratory health in winter throughout America and the world for at least the last 100 years.

(5) More citations on how higher humidity improves immunity against respiratory viruses. Admittedly much of this is for flu, but respiratory immunity clearly functions far better in higher humidity.

1. Kudo et al. Low ambient humidity impairs barrier function and innate resistance against influenza infection. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2019.

2. Makinen et al. Cold temperature and low humidity are associated with increased occurrence of respiratory tract infections. Respiratory Medicine, Volume 103, Issue 3, March 2009, Pages 456-462

3. Eccles R (2002) An explanation for the seasonality of acute upper respiratory tract viral infections. Acta Otolaryngol 122:183–191.

4. Iwasaki A, Pillai PS (2014) Innate immunity to influenza virus infection. Nat Rev Immunol 14:315–328.

5. Chen X, et al. (2018) Host immune response to influenza a virus infection. Front Immunol 9:320.

6. Taubenberger JK, Morens DM (2008) The pathology of influenza virus infections. Annu Rev Pathol 3:499–522.

7. Bustamante-Marin XM, Ostrowski LE (2017) Cilia and mucociliary clearance. Cold Spring Harb Perspect Biol 9:a028241.

8. Oozawa H, et al. (2012) Effect of prehydration on nasal mucociliary clearance in low relative humidity. Auris Nasus Larynx 39:48–52.

9. Kudo E, et al. (2019) Low ambient humidity impairs barrier function, innate resistance against influenza infection. NCBI BioProject. Available at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ bioproject/PRJNA528197. Deposited March 20, 2019.

As Deckin notes, and unless Deckin and I are reading this chart of weekly UK death registrations incorrectly, it appears that the number of death registrations in a given week in the UK has exceeded the 2020 level on at least three occasions since 1970.

The chart doesn’t indicate which years those were or what the causes were, but if one assumes that the spikes were caused by some kind of flu, because they are all concentrated in peak flu-season weeks, then COVID-19 does indeed look like just a bad flu, perhaps the fourth worst since 1970. (Note: it’s also possible that the other weeks when flu deaths exceeded COVID-19 deaths all occurred in one year, so it’s possible that COVID-19 is the second or third worst flu since 1970, in terms of weekly death registrations, at least in the UK.)

If the UK has had three weeks since 1970 when weekly flu deaths exceeded weekly COVID-19 deaths, then I don’t think it’s unreasonable to equate COVID-19 with a bad flu. And I don’t recall the UK’s economy (or any other economy) being shut down in any other year since 1970 to deal a bad flu.

“It ain’t Spanish flu level, that’s for sure.”

At current population levels in the US (+/- 330 million), that level would be close to 2 million. We’re only about 3 months into this thing and between 40 and 50 thousand have died so far. We’re still in round one, with round two possibly scheduled for latter 2020 through early 2021. Though the likelihood of this even approaching the Spanish flu is remote–not impossible, only remote–still, we’re talking about a lot of people who’ll be checking out over the next 9-12 months.

Hmmm … I thought it was part of Lon Guyland.

“Would climate increase both the portion of the population infected and the average initial viral load of those infected, and thus IFR?”

I don’t know the answer, but it is an interesting question. Certainly if the respiratory cilia are immobilized by dry conditions, they will dispose of fewer virus particles, and so more the particles that you are exposed to can multiply.

Viruses live much longer in cold, dry air **AND** dry air is bad for respiratory immunity once you are exposed.

What’s below is mostly about virus survival in the air for influenza, but your basic virions (virus particles) have a lot in common no matter the type.

1. Noti et al. (2013) High Humidity Leads to Loss of Infectious Influenza Virus from Simulated Coughs. PLoS One. 2013; 8(2): e57485.

2. Tamerius JD, et al. (2013) Environmental predictors of seasonal influenza epidemics across temperate and tropical climates. PLoS Pathog 9:e1003194, and erratum 2013 Nov;9(11).

3. Shaman J, Pitzer VE, Viboud C, Grenfell BT, Lipsitch M (2010) Absolute humidity and the seasonal onset of influenza in the continental United States. PLoS Biol 8(2): e1000316.

4. Shaman J, Goldstein E, Lipsitch M (2011) Absolute humidity and pandemic versus epidemic influenza. Am J Epidemiol 173: 127–135

5. Lowen AC, Mubareka S, Steel J, Palese P (2007) Influenza virus transmission is dependent on relative humidity and temperature. PLoS Pathog 3(10): 1470–1476.

6. Schaffer FL, Soergel ME, Straube DC (1976) Survival of airborne influenza virus: effects of propagating host, relative humidity, and composition of spray fluids, Arch Virol. 51: 263–273.

7. Hanley BP, Borup B (2010) Aerosol influenza transmission risk contours: A study of humid tropics versus winter temperate zone. Virol J 7: 98.

8. Yang W, Marr LC (2011) Dynamics of airborne influenza A viruses indoors and dependence on humidity. PloS One 6(6): e21481.

9. Shaman and Kohn (2009) Absolute humidity modulates influenza survival, transmission, and seasonality. PNAS March 3, 2009 106 (9) 3243-3248

Perhaps a little exposure, esp. in when ample sun (Vit. D) is available, is a good way to develop antibodies w/o having symptoms.

The WHO has just announced that there is no proven immunity from having antibodies in your blood. The plot thickens. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I’d say this is a perfect tool to thin the herd from the old and already sick. The rest will just have to live with the virus, pretty much how most people live with the incurable herpes-1 virus. Unfortunately, I am neither young nor particularly healthy, so I am not too happy with this conspiracy.

BTW It’s Oxford Brookes University (former polytechnic) not the ancient one.

Unprecedented isn’t when you have 5 other datapoints on the chart at the same level or higher.

Unprecedented is this:

https://mashable.com/video/unemployment-graph-coronavirus-gamecube/

The red line spike is defined by two points: Week 14 and Week 15 if I am reading it correctly. They are about 5,500 and 7,500 above the red baseline, respectively. Weekly CoV deaths for UK can be obtained from the worldometers.info data by summing up the daily deaths:

Week 14 ending April 5: 3,708
Week 15 ending April 12: 5,678
Week 16 ending April 19: 5,448

The CoV weekly deaths are 2,000 lower weekly totals than excess mortality totals from Financial Times graph. So either CoV deaths (Week 14+15) are undercounted by 40% (13/9.2-1) or there is a second killer in UK that kills at 60% lower rate than CoV.

That data not especially meaningful without further context.

There is a reason I include so many links in my comments. Feel free to follow the link in that one (and more from there if you like) then come back and have a real conversation about this.

How do they define “flu-like illness”? Based on what? Self diagnosis? A doctor’s diagnosis? Testing? Sure a lot of people with flu symptoms now stay home. And people who do show up at a hospital are instantly suspected of having CoV.

The TLDR version of following the links is they have a model which fits the historical temperature data from their smart thermometers to the CDC flu reports. Then they use their current data to estimate the “flu-like illness” for each area.

Bear in mind that this is from a company that has a vested interest in the panic.

That’s a point worth remembering. One thing I find really interesting is that the Kinsa data is currently showing almost no illness in the entire country. And they have not made a blog post since 4/9 after having 10 from 3/23 to 4/9.

How do we reconcile that (also see PS) with continuing new cases of COVID-19? I would expect deaths to keep coming given the lag involved, but where are the new cases coming from?

P.S. For anyone interested, CDC flu surveillance:
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/fluactivitysurv.htm

A. Everyone posting here (and elsewhere) knows much more about the Wuhan flu than they did in early January, if they knew anything back then at all.

B. This flu is far more contagious than recent flues have been. At least an order of magnitude.

C. The dormancy or asymptomatic periods of someone having it and transmitting it are highly unusual and lengthy. That explains much of B.

E. While some (younger, healthier) here scoff at concern, salivating about how older, fragile others will die (not them!) this is far from reassuring even to these people. Large numbers of younger and even very young people, otherwise healthy, have died. Some recovered sick have long term effects.

F. Fear of the unknown, and early “knowns” like ease of transmission have driven the government mandates. Fear is a great driver for authoritarian behavior and acceptance. In a democracy more or less, panic drives quick and hard. As we now know, most of these measures may be unneeded. This isn’t any reason for bragging about “defying conventional wisdom” since boasts of personal bravery are worthless at best. No “hoaxer” I’ve ever read talks about volunteering to help the sick. Zero.

G. Even basic scientific facts about COVID-19 are slow to emerge, verified and uncontested.

H. Yes, time for panic is over. Time for normalcy to return is sooner rather than later.

I. A basic human trait about risk is that when it is seen as controllable (driving a car) versus uncontrollable (flying in a plane) the risk tolerances are much higher. Hence dangerous car travel is preferred to safe flying by most. Likewise, low pandemic risk is perceived as riskier than normal seasonal flu death (vaccines). Now that risk perceptions are changing, mandates and dictates no longer have much popular appeal. House arrest and depression economics are both bad.

J. Steve Sailor here and Ron Unz do a tremendous service for providing a forum to all. Don’t abuse them just because you disagree. That’s why we cherish them, because they allow open dissent.

This seems to hold for all issues over all time periods. Although it must have been said before, I don’t know who to credit.

“Odin’s Law” works since the observation goes back to mythological times. Plus, you would not want to name it after the actual discoverer. That would mean you violated Stigler’s law of eponymy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy

She is mainly employed by Oxford Brookes. That’s not Oxford. The rest of what she does is to teach grievance studies. If she could just focus on bleating harmlessly, that would be fine. But obsessing about what sex or race will save us is nuts. The contrarian in me hopes that a drunken Russian scientist in far off Siberia will come up first with a vaccine. That will drive the progressive nut jobs crazy, it will take them ages to formulate their collective groupthink responses, and in between, there will be much comedy and merriment. Of course, a old, white male Christian from Nebraska would provide just as much comedy. The talking heads with TSD on cable would explode.

We’ve had a Vietnam’s worth of deaths up to this point

This is irrational thinking. The exact same could be said of any flu virus.

What do you think it would be like without the restrictions?

Sweden has now decisively and totally proved this theory wrong.

Sweden’s coronavirus-positive deaths peaked April 5 to 16, at over 80/day (on three days within that range reaching over 100/day), and have been steadily downhill since then. As of April 21, the final/total new-deaths figure are all looking like <50 day based on preliminary figures. Their hospitals have plenty of spare capacity, and the recent studies suggest a very large % of the population has had contact with the virus, meaning the epidemic is already all-but-over in Sweden and Sweden’s approach is vindicated completely.

The Imperial College paper was so laughably far off as to either have been prepared by a team of dunces whose normal judgment was further impaired by various substances in their systems, or a hoax meant deliberately to incite panic and empower the “Corona Coup d’Etat” faction.

The paper predicts hundreds of deaths per day by early May, and is set to be completely wrong; they wildly overhyped this virus, as the anti-Panic side has been trying to warn all along. If Sweden is not seeing a thousand deaths a day in the first two weeks of May, that is the final nail in the coffin for the Imperial College paper and its extremist advocates.

(From Against the Corona Panic, Pt. III: “Just the Flu” Vindicated by the Data; Or, Why to End the Shutdowns Now, April 19; updated for Sweden April 24.)

Thank you for your posts, Lowe, you are 100% right. This was a sad, and shocking, case of mass-hysteria and even mass-delusion.

As someone may have once said, “There is a thin line between civilization and madness.”

OT: About a week and a half ago, Kim Jong-Un did some more missile launches. Does anyone think the timing of this has anything to do with the fact that he’s supposedly in the hospital brain-dead right now?

It looks suspiciously like someone got tired of Fatboy’s antics in the middle of the Covid-19 crisis and assassinated him for his termerity in trying to make trouble right now. His death in the middle of a pandemic would be convenient. It’s a case, however, in which there are too many suspects.

Another piece of evidence

Woman forced to rescue 82 year old father from Queens Nursing Home

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8256699/Woman-rescue-dad-82-Queens-nursing-home-dead-night-ProPublica.html

Does COVID-19 look like a disease with Flu-type fatality rates?

Yes.

And we’ve known it since late March, at the latest, with good indications of it by early March or earlier. The CoronaPanic and CoronaParanoia became self-driving forces.

Corona defined: [fluff] + [hype] + [self-fulfilling prophecies] + [unremarkable flu virus].

_______________

Here is another surprising feature of the UK data:

A comparison of the 2017-18 flu season with 2019-20. The exact same period, the exact same number of days, the same weeks of the year, constituting the entirety of the usual flu season for both periods.

Don’t look necessarily at the eye-catching “spikes,” though they may be some interest. Look at time-span periods.Here are the exact numbers of interest:

[2017 Week 44, thru 2018 Week 15]
(UK Deaths occurring 12:01am Oct. 28, 2017 to 11:59pm April 13, 2018)
282,486 total deaths, all causes

[2019 Week 44, thru 2020 Week 15]
(UK Deaths occurring 12:01am Oct. 26, 2019 to 11:59pm April 10, 2020)
279,330 total deaths, all causes

As you can see, 2017-18 had more deaths (3,150) than 2019-20 so far, despite the alleged major catastrophe of coronavirus ongoing in 2020 for weeks.

We will know Week 16 2020’s total deaths in a few days when the data for deaths through April 17 is released. We know 2018 Week 16 had 11,223 total deaths. Going on the current trajectory, UK Week 16 2020 will probably have 13,000 to 16,000 total deaths, which means the UK finally “caught up” in total deaths with 2017-18 by the third week of April 2020. And this includes the many thousands of corona-negative excess deaths in March and April 2020, few-to-none of which would have occurred if we had ignored the virus or taken the Swedish approach.

Given the level of coronavirus coverage and so on, the CoronaPanic, this is an incredible fact that deserves wider attention, but of course no one pays attention to it. The coronavirus epidemic in the UK in 2020 shows no signs of being much worse than even the 2017-18 flu epidemic, which was unnamed and triggered no hysteria, no recession, no coup d’etat.

I invite anyone who wants to confirm these UK total-mortality numbers to do so. They are not hidden.

We have simply not been smart about this, and we are continuing to be stupid.

As if we didn’t know BEFORE about who was going to suffer most, we do know now.

We have to stop this draconian bullshit RIGHT NOW, today, this minute, except in certain places.

Millions die every single year if diseases that are much easier to prevent than this. Your weekly Starbucks could save multiple lives in poor countries, yet you choose your overpriced coffee. This is the harsh reality of your own choices, and everyone else’s too.

You can pretend that you’re all about saving lives and therefore give huge inflated context-free numbers, but I very much doubt that any of your actions, in areas that don’t allow you to play the satisfying role of internet scold, actually show that you do.

Talk is cheap. Ordering other people to have their lives ruined is cheap. I simply don’t believe you and your stated motivations. Your actions belie your words.

I didn’t finish reading your comment and don’t mind the rest of it. The next time I find myself in conversation with anyone, the first thing I’ll say is that it’s important to keep a gardez-votre-sang-froid mentality.

the Clinton Foundation is the recipient of hundreds of thousands of dollars from Chinese sources,

Try hundreds of millions received from Chinese sources in various forms. In return, the Chinese received U.S. rocket technology, wholesale transfer of industrial capacity to China, and no doubt countless other little favors that we haven’t even heard about yet.

Only a small proportion of China’s total bribe would have been paid officially to the Clinton Slush Foundation by China and its cutouts. Remember Charlie Trie? Malaysian Chinese billionaire Lapseng Ng?

A sovereign nation of China’s size, history and sophistication has countless discreet methods for rewarding people who may benefit China or favored interests within or outside China, or just be a thorn in the side of China’s adversaries.

Non-cash incentive methods including sexual services, sexual blackmail, elimination of rivals etc. will also be well developed and readily available as they are to all major (and not so major) powers.

Sweden’s coronavirus-positive deaths peaked April 5 to 16, at over 80/day (on three days within that range reaching over 100/day), and have been steadily downhill since then.

Not really. Not really at all.

Clearly lower and upper envelopes over the data points keep increasing at least as fast as linear meaning that the totals increase at least as fast as a quadratic function. That we do not see an exponential growth in data anymore is because Sweden despite of their official pronouncements to the outer world in fact practices social distancing (see Steve Sailer movie theatre attendance graph as an example). Deaths are lagging infections by 3-4 weeks so one may expect that the growth will continue as daily infections in Sweden official data keep growing. In last four days daily growth of new infections was 10% per day.

The strong periodic (7 day period) signal in data suggests that data are being managed, that death certificates are processed in clusters and possibly a strict filtering is applied between “with virus” and “from virus” death categories. Sweden’s reputation and that of their chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell are on the line so the pressure on them to “cook the data” might be irresistible.

Anders Tegnell promised that he will push the death rate to lower than seasonal flu. He said that he will cut the number of death by four fifths (meaning a factor of five). How was he planning to do it? With a miracle drug nobody else had? Certainly not with isolation and special social countermeasures. The only thing he could do is to keep counting deaths sums by adjusting the line dividing “death of virus” and “death with virus” categories.

Except you have absolutely no evidence your measures did anything beyond destroying small business. This is serious superstitious native thinking along with failed prediction behavior. “Oh my prediction failed? That’s not because its a bad prediction, it because we made the Gods happy with our virgin sacrifice”. Grow up and live with the cognitive dissonance rather than acting like ufo or end of the world cult.

And anyone that thinks destroying people’s economic livelihood and the food supply chain is just an amusement to fight the system and Dow Jones, never worked a day in their lives.

I am not sure anyone here advocated doing absolutely nothing. Advising hand washing,advising avoiding big groups, etc would always have made sense and will probably turn out to have been enough. But it is very likely that doing nothing, policy wise, would have been preferable to where we are now. Even with no government intervention people would have increased social distancing and hand washing.
For me, suppression made no sense as soon I understood that there was no plausible, reasonably quick, exit strategy especially for a western country. That is what attracted me to Swedish approach which is modified let er rip approach. It actually had an exit strategy. They conceived this approach very early on with the same data as everyone else’s experts. For us non experts, it is naturally a bit of monday morning quarterbacking. But the fact the most countries experts, who have been studying pandemics for years and years, could not have at least offered the Swedish approach as an option is quite disappointing. This will be a historically bad policy failure – and yes, this should have been foreseen.

From Harvards Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience that recommend 30 million tests per day and associated army of contact tracers.

“COVID-19 IS A PROFOUND THREAT TO OUR DEMOCRACY, COMPARABLE TO THE GREAT DEPRESSION AND WORLD WAR II. As ever, the greatest bulwark of democracy is us. What we do together—for one another and, even more, with one another—to fight this terrible disease, protect human life, secure our institutions, and prevent the destruction of our economy will determine whether free societies will prove resilient in the face of existential emergency.”

Wow, our best of the best people still thinking Covid is an “existential emergency”.

“It’s hard to see how Miami could have a higher exposure/antibody rate than Sweden where, as of today, people are still eating in restaurants. Could Swedes be that natively more cold and distant than freaked out Floridians?”

Sweden’s SARS-CoV-2 linked deaths at last count is 2192. Roughly similar per capita infection/death rates as those of San Francisco.

“Apr 25: Sweden’s Deputy Prime Minister Isabella Lövin.

Q: What is the biggest misconception you have seen about the Swedish strategy? I’m speaking in general, because there have been a lot of articles written about Sweden in foreign media lately.

Deputy Prime Minister: The biggest myth and misconception is that life goes on as normal in Sweden. It absolutely does not. We have seen Easter travel decrease by 90 percent, we have businesses going bankrupt, a record number of temporary layoffs, and a lot of unemployed people.

That’s because people follow those recommendations we issue. The tourism industry has been hit incredibly hard. A lot of small businesses are on their knees because production is down or has decreased a lot. It is not business as usual in Sweden but the opposite, things are very, very tough.

No, we have not had a complete lockdown in Sweden, but if you look at people’s behaviour it is a very big difference compared to a normal situation: a lot of people are working from home, a lot of people have called in sick with minor symptoms to limit the spread. You don’t see your elderly relatives, you don’t travel any more, and that comes as a result of people obeying the recommendations our government agencies have issued. Even if the majority follow recommendations, there are some who don’t.

Prime Minister Stefan Löfven’s tone was noticeably sharper at the latest government press conference this week. It felt rather like the final warning before tougher rules are imposed. Are there ongoing discussions within the government about introducing stricter measures and what form would they then take?

We are constantly prepared to take stronger measures if it is necessary to curb the spread of infection, and if the situation deteriorates we will look at further measures. Exactly what kind of measures depend on where we see that there may be big problems ahead. We are now issuing very strong calls not to travel, not to have parties at Walpurgis and definitely not demonstrations on May 1st.”

One thing I find really interesting is that the Kinsa data is currently showing almost no illness in the entire country. And they have not made a blog post since 4/9 after having 10 from 3/23 to 4/9.

How common are Kinsa thermometers in the general population?
For example, how many elderly black people in Detroit or parts of Georgia have one?
Ditto how many Native Americans have one? Or working class whites in Mississippi?
These questions should be obvious just by eyeballing the data, because Kinsa is far from universal as a home health device.

This is a data subset and has its own peculiarities. If their data can be partitioned down to the county level, or better still the zip code level, I wager that some parts of Maryland or Michigan would show a lot of users, other parts would show few or no users.

How do we reconcile that (also see PS) with continuing new cases of COVID-19? I would expect deaths to keep coming given the lag involved, but where are the new cases coming from?

New cases mostly among people who don’t own a Kinsa device? Just a guess.
Data subsets that are non-random can have problems.

Ron Unz: One other factor to consider in these surprising Miami-Dade results is the typical time between infection and death…

Why do you consider them to be surprising?

Good question.

How could the massive unprecedented “social distancing” not be making a difference?

Sheesh.

“social distancing” is an umbrella term for many specific interventions.

It’s not clear how much impact each of them has but the principle of diminishing returns is likely at play.

A specific point of argument is that the most onerous and costly interventions: shelter-in-place and closing businesses and stores were unnecessary because the curve of the pandemic had already been bent by the time they were put in place.

(there are also some arguments that some measures were downright counterproductive e.g. sending college kids home probably sent Corona home with some of them. )

“Respiratory immunity is very dependent on humidity.” – Yes, for TB high humidity is bad.

Here we go…My suspicions are slowly being confirmed…

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8256469/Brooklyn-nursing-home-ravaged-coronavirus-tried-send-sick-patients-USNS-Comfort.html

Basically New York Officials were TRYING to get the death rate as high as possible in order to scream ‘Orange Man Bad’

I bet the death rate at the top hospitals in NYC is under .1…because those are the people in charge and who matter….everyone else is more valuable as a death statistic than alive

Absolutely evil, if true. Which it probably is.

Even the superspreader events…like the funeral story in Chicago…are meaningless if you don’t also look at superspreader events during H1N1 or the seasonal flu

It sounds bad when you look at it in a vaccuum…but then when you stop and think…doesn’t the same thing happen with the flu?

We just got back from some shell hunting on the beach at Cupsogue State Park in Westhampton Dunes, NY. That’s correct, right here in the “epicenter” where everyone is cowering troglodyte-style indoors. Well, not everyone. I won’t say that the beach was crowded, but it was way busier than I ever would have managed. Many families out enjoying the reasonably warm weather. On the road leading to the beach, lined with $1M+ vacation houses, there were almost too many bicyclists and runners to count and traffic on all the main roads getting to the area was not light by any stretch of the imagination.
Reality was not at all like the stories one hears. The government wants everyone to hide indoors, the people have other plans.

Blacks are more likely to

–live in cities controlled by Democrats who want the economy to tank to hurt Trump’s reelection, and need inflated death figures to drive support for more lockdown duration.

The best evidence we have is that the ‘restrictions’ were imposed far too late to make a difference, if the start date (globally) is earlier than January 15th 2020 and the initial R[0] is anywhere above 2.0

How could the massive unprecedented “social distancing” not be making a difference?

Simple, really.

If the pathogen had a starting R[0] above 2 and had been running unchecked in a population for 3 months – assuming that the first cohort[1] of infected arrived in the the US in December [2]- then it’s actually very likely that the (logistic) process was already past its second knee and the reproductive rate was already declining.