COVID-19 is simply not life-threatening
The fading and not very threatening COVID-19 epidemic
in California. Note how masks appear to increase the
disease’s spread. Note also how this doesn’t seem to
change the death toll significantly. Go here for more details.
In the past few days there have been a flurry of new reports proving once again that the panic over the Wuhan virus was completely unnecessary, that the disease was exactly what the initial data suggested, a variation on the flu that would be, like the flu, harmless to the healthy and young while dangerous to the elderly sick.
And like the flu, the Wuhan virus required no extreme measures. All we had to do was protect those elderly sick, and let everyone else continue living their lives normally.
First we have the revelation this weekend, from the CDC no less, that the number of people who died only from COVID-19, with no other health issues, was only about 6% of the total deaths assigned to the disease, or only about 9,700 people total, an infinitesimal percentage of the total population.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website disclosed the shockingly small number of people who died from only the Wuhan coronavirus, with no other cause of death mentioned. Hold on to your hat because here it is: out of the 161,392 deaths in the CDC data, just six percent, about 9,700 deaths, were attributed to the coronavirus alone. According to the CDC, the other 94 percent had an average of 2.6 additional conditions or causes of deaths, such as heart disease, diabetes, and sepsis. [emphasis mine]
Let that sink in. The Wuhan virus killed you only if you had an average of slightly less than three serious chronic health conditions. And generally you had to be elderly, with the average age of death 78 years old. Otherwise, just like the flu you might have been sick for a few days, but you would have recovered and been able to go on with your life as normal. This data once again demonstrates that the masks, the shut downs, and the economic disaster were all unnecessary.
Then on Friday we had another research paper, one of a long continuing string of papers, finding once again that COVID-19 is of no threat to young children at all, that they not only don’t get sick from it they also don’t infect anyone else.
It covers two-thirds of all children’s admissions in the UK due to Covid-19 between January and July and confirms what is already known about the minimal effects of the virus on children.
A “strikingly low” 1% of these 651 children and young people – six in total – had died in hospital with Covid-19 compared with 27% across all other age groups, the study found. Eighteen per cent of the children needed intensive care.
And the six who had died had had “profound” underlying health conditions that had often been complex and themselves life-limiting.
There is no reason not to reopen the schools, in a completely normal manner. None. Why then are our governments and teachers either refusing to do so, or imposing insane mask and social distancing rules that kids will simply not follow, while doing them irreparable harm by making the live under them?
This is not how you teach children to become independent-minded thoughtful free citizens. It teaches them how to become fearful slaves.
Nor is this all. We also had this past weekend new data showing that if you are infected with COVID-19 but have no symptoms, you simply don’t spread the disease to others.
Earlier this month, a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine announced findings that asymptomatic patients were, in both relative and absolute terms, unlikely to infect close contacts.
The researchers, based largely out of Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China, tracked the level of “secondary attack rate” among COVID-19 patients of varying degrees of infection. A secondary attack rate is the level at which a disease is transmitted among close contacts in familiar settings. “Patients with more clinically severe disease were more likely to infect their close contacts than were less severe index cases,” the researchers found; they added that “asymptomatic cases were least likely to infect their close contacts.”
The scientists said they discovered that “the risk for transmission via public transportation or healthcare settings was low,” particularly in comparison to household settings. One explanation they advanced was that “mask wearing to prevent infection was mandatory in public settings but not in households during the study period.”
Their last statement about masks is pure politics and a guess. The simple fact is that, like the flu, this virus does not easily make people sick, even if it spreads relatively easily. Early data told us you needed to be in close proximity with a sick person for an extended length of time to get sick yourself, and the data continues to reinforce that conclusion.
This conclusion was further confirmed by the New York Times, which reported this past weekend that most declared cases of the Wuhan virus involve people with so little of it that they pose no threat.
According to The New York Times, potentially 90 percent of those who have tested positive for COVID-19 have such insignificant amounts of the virus present in their bodies that such individuals do not need to isolate nor are they candidates for contact tracing. Leading public health experts are now concerned that overtesting is responsible for misdiagnosing a huge number of people with harmless amounts of the virus in their systems.
“Most of these people are not likely to be contagious, and identifying them may contribute to bottlenecks that prevent those who are contagious from being found in time,” warns The Times.
All of these stories, as well as numerous other reports (here, here, here, and here, to cite just a few), demonstrate that this disease is simply not dangerous. You need to be sick and old from other serious illnesses for it to kill you. Otherwise, it is just another flu-like disease, causing an inconvenient short illness that almost everyone recovers from. And like the flu, if you catch it you are almost certainly not going to be harmed by it in any permanent way. There is no reason to cringe in fear from it.
And yet, we remain terrified of this disease, as if it is the plague, which killed 40% of the population at its height. (The death toll from COVID-19 is so far below that number as to be ludicrous, with estimated mortality rates ranging from 0.1% to 0.5%, which is once again comparable to the flu.) Businesses are shuttered. Quarantines are imposed. Religious gatherings are banned. And governments and corporations continue to impose insane rules while requiring masks, even though improper mask use probably increases the chances of getting sick.
Worse, it appears that the public is supportive of these rules, bound by their fear of this generally low-level virus as if it might strike them down dead in the middle of the street should they for one minute forget to put that mask on.
The Scream by Edvard Munch
This is the real problem. People are afraid, and they don’t seem willing to give up that fear. Even when you present them with these facts, they recoil in horror, becoming indignant that anyone would dare, dare, suggest COVID-19 is not dangerous. Corrupt politicians and health officials who for political reasons are very intent on destroying the country in order to defeat Donald Trump in November have successfully convinced far too many people of the dangers of this disease, even though the actual evidence continues to tell us that this virus is not much different than the flu.
Until people defy that fear, and decide to tell politicians and their bosses to stop pushing it on them, we will continue to move inexorably towards tyranny and bankruptcy. You simply can’t have a free and prosperous society when everyone in it lives in terror, afraid to take any risks. More importantly, under such emotional conditions, bad people will quickly take advantage of that fear to impose their will, offering false security and fake protection even as they instead grab power for their own personal benefit.
The final result will be violence, poverty, and oppression. And the end of American freedom and the pursuit of happiness, for all people.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Bob, I was so hoping you would be above joining in on the “6%” bandwagon.
Would you tell Bridget Fonda that her father did not actually die of lung cancer because his death certificate reads:
Cause of Death:
(A) Immediate Cause: Respiratory Failure
(B) Underlying Cause: Lung Cancer
https://img.srgcdn.com/e//eDlUUTZmazFTTHJUaW9wcW1xd3oucG5n.jpg
Ideally, no death certificate should ever list cancer as the immediate cause of death, but should instead list the life ending failure brought about by the cancer, with the cancer itself listed as an underlying cause.
The same holds for COVID-19, and the amazing thing about the “6%” is that so many death certificates failed to list a more appropriate immediate cause. I wonder how many of these are improperly filled out certificates by overworked doctors, medical examiners, and coroners, and how many are from victims who died outside of a hospital setting where the precise immediate cause was not observed, and it was not considered necessary to conduct an autopsy to find out.
Rose: You miss the entire point of my essay, which is that COVID-19 is not the threat it has been sold as. It can contribute to death for sure, but on its own it simply doesn’t do much.
Hundreds of thousands of Germans demonstrated in Berlin this weekend, against the government’s anti-corona policies. This is significant, because Germans do not go out and protest at all as easily as the French do.
There’s a law in Germany that if any member of a family is tested positive for the corona virus, all children of the family must be isolated at home. This means that each child must stay alone in their room. They are not allowed to get in physical contact with their parents or siblings. They are not allowed to eat together with their parents! So there’s madness enough to protest against there. Merkel and many other government leaders in the world have way gone too far this time.
Protesters are said to have ranged from the extreme right to the extreme left and all in between, with some hippies meditating on the street making a funny contribution. Some, belonging to an allegedly growing movement, used the occasion to demand a final peace settlement for the second world war, involving leaving NATO, getting rid of all US troops, and abandoning all kinds of remaining war crime guilt propaganda. Once very broad very large protests like this get going, politics might transform very dramatically very rapidly. Ruling politicians have lost too much legitimacy. East Germany did fell suddenly overnight 30 years ago because of a nightly demonstration at the Berlin wall.
Thanks, I was hoping you’d analyze this Robert. The CDC posted this bombshell on their website without any fanfare, and “6%” immediately exploded across the internet. The oddity of it all made me suspicious of its reliability.
How many never done tests have been charged to the insurance companies or US Government?
Quick untraceable fraud.
Look in any facility that does its own testing.
LocalFluff:
You described very well the important demonstration for freedom that will make history. It feels like 1989. Next time I will attend. Merkel is trying to install an increasingly left-authoritarian regime. Merkel’s SA (Sturmabteilung) is the Antifa.
The Berlin police acted with great brutality against normal citizens (women, old people). So far not known in the Federal Republic of Germany. Here is an example (see link). This woman is not a murderer, no, she did nothing except that she, like other hundreds of thousands of participants, did not want to go home. Great shame on Merkel’s regime and its militarized police. The police even threw a pregnant woman (another example) on the street floor and mistreated her!
Merkel’s government must resign. But that won’t be enough.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7R3SUcloWw
But if Covid got a hold of you and you had three or more co morbidity factors, it might or is likely to kill you.
There is some middle ground logic missing here. On one end if you are healthy and you got the virus you as a general rule were able to shake it off, or you may not even have been aware that you had anything. And I know several people who did have it, mostly younger people and they did for the most part shake it off.
I spoke to one young guy the other day, maybe 35 or so, a Con Ed worker who told me he had it and he was getting nervous when it started to get painful as it migrated into his chest. At which point he was given Azythromiacine and that allowed him to cycle through it and he is back to work. And I know several other people, mostly older with co morbidities who in fact died from the virus. Being healthy is your best bet every day of the week, but not everyone is.
So in pure numbers if you were healthy and got the virus only a relatively small number of people were killed outright and directly by it. BUT.
These statistics and the documented science and accumulated information related to this specific virus are what they are, but there is a middle ground where as group all people must be at least conscious of the potentials that exist to those who are at a higher risk as the virus continues to cycle through the general population of the planet. And there in lies the complication for individuals and for government actors who must find some hopefully middle ground solution to the problem at hand.
And I understand your point about the pure numbers and the science and how they relate to the general public, the virus, masks etc. and not living in a state of fear. But IMO you almost see and argue this event in too much of the way an engineer sees and argues things, in black or white, on or off terms.
Its like your point about masks. I understand, or at least I think I understand your over arching point about the mask and any mandate by any government agency to wear them. If I understand your position on that issue properly, accepted or disputed mask science aside, you see a mandate like that as the government conditioning the people to be compliant (See: 1936 Germany). And I agree with you on that point, a compliant and obedient population is what you have in Communist China and their Social Rating system. The people of China are essentially owned by their Communist overlords and will do as they are told, for now anyway. No thank you. But your position is an absolute “NO” to masks. And that for many becomes an unreasonable position to take. Even though you may be 100 percent correct.
And I do not disagree with you again, but there are times when wearing one is either suggested or required even if they are held to be not ideal or entirely effective. And again, I do not wear one. And I do have some people giving me looks and comments. But if I were to be a carrier without symptoms the CDC would have been knocking on my door long ago because of the amount of people I deal with on a daily / weekly basis. And I generally stay away from others and control my environment. So no harm, no foul. I do not wear a mask as a general rule.
So without being either obedient or compliant to a government agency there are certain practices that I think you would agree with that most everyone should generally practice. Wash your hands, be aware to not touch your face / eyes / nose, be aware of the virus activity in your general area and generally keep clear of other people, especially people who you are not in every day contact with. And you can wear a mask in certain situations, but it certainly is no rock solid prophylactic.
(I get a kick out of seeing people who are strident mask wearers, until they sit outside at the local diner at which point they immediately remove them and are sitting with other people who they do not live with and with others surrounding them at other tables. I guess sitting at the table outside in a chair at a table provides some immunity that does not exist when your walking in the open air? Crazy.)
So this particular virus will cycle through the population of the world where ever it finds itself in its own time as viruses have done for millions of years, and the people will deal with what ever they have to deal with. (What about the next one? What will its characteristics be and what will the learning curve and fear factor be for it?)
Deal with things like living our lives to some reasonable degree with the least amount of government “Help” or interference. A balance between allowing human beings to do what they do and live their lives with the risks that are entailed, and government going way overboard and essentially strong arming and forcing compliance and obedience. Some see these things in too purely black or white terms and that becomes an issue.
At least in America.
I still stand by what I have said pretty much from the start of this circus…. It’s impossible to accurately analysis the data without the lens of time…. Here in Stockholm, Sweden they are talking about imposing harder measures as cases are spiking, possibly due to kids going back to school… Yet my kids were never fully excluded from school last term at the hight of the panic.. We have a higher death rate than other Scandinavian countries, yet lower than the UK which implemented total lock down… My anecdotal evidence is I know of only 2 people that have tested positive, one being my 82 year old diabetic father, and both have recovered, I was sick as a dog back in the spring, yet tested negative for antibodies, I have not especially even social distanced, taking a couple of afterwork beers every evening every other week, ( when I don’t share my small apartment with my school age kids) and working in close proximity to my workmates…
I’m inclined to believe it’s bullcrap that’s been blown up to a massive degree.. for reasons unknown, but we need to wait until the final numbers are in.
We don’t know the difference in death rate for “underlying conditions” cases, we don’t know how it will compete against the coming flu season, we don’t know how “lockdown” will finally fare against “open” policy, we don’t know if it will fade away, or hang around, increasing the death toll for years.
While I am very sympathetic with your point Bob… I personally believe all the lockdowns will cause WAY more harm in the long run, the truth is, it’s still to soon th know.
@Cotour, I do believe we almost agree… AGAIN! ;-)
JFK’s nephew (Robert F. Kennedy) also took part in the large Berlin demonstration directed against Merkel’s Corona measures, and gave a remarkable speech there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-u3H3PvebBU
Nicely done graph of the Californian numbers, Mr. Zimmerman. Is it possible to also show the testing numbers on the graph? It would be interesting to see the correlation, if it exists.
Thank you in advance :)
Bob, I like the graph you created but the death rate vs case rate looks like noise and makes for a hard comparison. Would a second Y axis showing the death rates (not compared to the case rate) help the visualization?
The 6% figure is an amazing statistic, but since a large percentage of the population may have at least one comorbidity, it stands to reason that there is a grey area that needs to be explored.
This have been blow so far out of proportion that the truth will be hard to tease out. At least not until factors are met: time enough to have a good look back on the data and if the media will work to actually tell the truth instead of this complete repeat of yellow journalistic practices currently called news.
Bob, you sabotage your essay by basing it on a bogus claim.
The threat of COVID-19 *is* being over exaggerated, but it doesn’t do you argument any favors by relying on a straw man. We desperately need good reporting on the actual roll preexisting comorbidities have on COVID-19 risks, just what those risks are for various age groups, and how those risks compare to other, everyday ordinary risks people are willing to face without panic.
But this whole 6% nonsense offers nothing of interest other than the fact that 6% of COVID-19 death certificates are incomplete. The 94% and its breakdown reported in section 4 of CDC’s weekly “Provisional Counts” report doesn’t distinguish between preexisting comorbidities, comorbidities developed as a consequence of COVID-19, and immediate causes of death. We can guess that obesity is a preexisting comorbidity and respiratory failure is an immediate cause of death, but what about cardiac arrhythmia? It could certainly be a preexisting comorbidity in many patients, but we know COVID-19 is as much a circulatory disease as it is a respiratory one, and in many cases newly developed cardiac arrhythmia is a consequence of COVID-19.
That table is just the low-cost, low-quality result you get from throwing a few queries against a database of death certificates. Anything useful would take a lot more work.
Rose: You miss the entire point of my essay, which is that COVID-19 is not the threat it has been sold as. It can contribute to death for sure, but on its own it simply doesn’t do much.
Thank you for hunting down the sources Mr. Zimmerman, the 6% figure has gotten a lot of coverage on the talk-back radio I listen to, often the other causes of the 94% of death are described as “comorbidities” from the CDC link it is clear that those other causes would be better described as symptoms of Covid -“pneumonia, respirator failure, respiratory distress, respiratory arrest, heart failure, cardiac arrest, sepsis ” etc, the products of Covid attacking the body.
Perhaps we should address this issue as well, to put the Wuhan virus in proper perspective:
Between October 1, 2019 and April 4, 2020, according to the CDC, the flu has resulted in: 39 million to 56 million illnesses. 410,000 to 740,000 hospitalizations. 24,000 to 62,000 total deaths.
Reacting as we are to Covid-19 makes a mockery of every flu death ever.
No, lets be honest: this unreasoning, illogical refusal to accept facts mocks every death ever.
This has happened before, with better and with worse results.
This will happen again, with better and with worse results.
People die. Nothing will change that.
Because I am an “independent-minded thoughtful free citizen” with the ability to parse the facts of the matter and to come to a plan of action that is both appropriate and effective, I choose to live boldly and confidently.
We can quibble about the precision of our measurements, the politicization of our methods and every other factor ad nauseum.
And Mr. Zimmerman’s point will still be exactly:
You choose to fear.
Or you choose not to.
Has anyone else considered the curious specificity of this virus to killing the old an infirm may in fact have been an engineered attribute pursued by a highly repressive authoritarian regime of 1.3 billion, looking for a quick and efficient and plausibly natural means to cull their population of their weakest and least productive (and thus most costly) citizenry? After all, the initial outbreak was just a few miles from a bioweapons lab too. Perhaps coincidence, but worth considering imho.
WRT the virus in general, while I share the lament to our over-reaction, the risk it represents to the elderly and frail is indisputable, so government action was and is appropriate. But at this point it for sure should let the young and healthy get back to normal and seek to protect primarily those who are truly vulnerable, the only sane path forward unless or until we develop a cure or heard immunity.
The first thing I attempted to establish was whether the virus was engineered or was just a function of nature. My conclusion, as well as anyone can come a conclusion about such things, was that the virus was collected and was being studied in the lab in Wuhan.
The question remains however, was it mistakenly released through poor security practices or was it released for other nefarious reasons. And IMO either are possible given the worlds political atmosphere. The Chinese closed down their internal travel but allowed international travel to continue.
What throws the monkey wrench into the mix is the proximity of the U.S. elections and what we are now seeing, the insistence by the Democrat party for mail in voting because of the virus. A bit too convenient? Maybe, this virus serves many purposes as an equalizer for the Chinese to my thinking. Don’t trust the Democrats, and I certainly do not trust the Chinese.
We may never really know the truth. What do I mean, may.
We will never know the truth.
@Cotour
It’s pretty natural that the Chinese study corona family virus since their natural mutations and spread so often for so long have started in China. It’s the responsible thing to do. It makes no sense to engineer and spread such a common cold virus that is harmless to everyone who is healthy and in working age.
@Questioner
That was a great speech by Mr. Kennedy, thanks!
Local:
Yes, its reasonable that the Chinese study those class of viruses, and it is also reasonable that it escaped through poor security practices. But its so damn convenient. S.O.M. level convenient.
LeeS:
Happy to see you back from your vacation, hope all is well in Sweden.
And yes, we apparently do again agree to some degree. Unbelievable!
The standard Flu numbers from the CDC are changed for about two years after their first statements.
Its because the CDC first gets the flu numbers and then investigates the reasons for death, which takes a year or two.
We will get the “real” estimated numbers next year. And like always they will be lower than first projected.
Not all deaths are given an autopsy and not all autopsies give a definite cause of death.
Just because you died with Covid does not mean you died of covid.
If you died in a car accident and then tested positive for the virus the CDC is just told your dead and had covid.
That 6% number just means that was the amount of doctors willing to positively state someone died because of covid.
James Street wrote: “The CDC posted this bombshell on their website without any fanfare, and “6%” immediately exploded across the internet. The oddity of it all made me suspicious of its reliability.”
This isn’t really a bombshell, since this has been known since April or May. The news media and social media did not make a big deal out of it before, but they are finally doing so only now.
Because we have known this for months, we skeptics were not assuming or making up that we don’t know how many people died of Wuhan flu but only died with it. We have little more than anecdotal evidence that doctors were listing Wuhan on death certificates because of their suspicions or assumptions, as the CDC allows them to do, but we assume that it has happened.
Because articles like the one that Robert quoted used 9,700 as the number of people who died from only the Wuhan coronavirus, many people have been using that as the number who have died of Wuhan flu, but that is not necessarily correct, either. Since the other deaths had co-morbidities, it is unclear how many of those people died due to Wuhan flu rather than due to their co-morbidity. We could make a guess, based upon the 6% figure of those who died without co-morbidities. This hypothesis would add another 9,100 people, 6% of the remaining 94% who died with co-morbidities, making the total around nineteen thousand deaths from Wuhan flu. However, we will never know, because this whole episode has been so badly managed.
What we can be sure about is that, like the news media’s reported number of Wuhan flu deaths (more than 175 thousand), the CDC’s reported deaths (161 thousand) are also inflated. So few people are reported to have died of other flus, far fewer people than in other years, it is likely that many deaths due to those flus have been incorrectly attributed to Wuhan flu, perhaps due to suspicion or assumption rather than actual testing.
In addition, some say that a lot of positive tests are effectively false positives, because we have been testing all wrong. If this is true, then this year’s Great Oppression has been even more tragic than we have believed, because it was so unnecessary to harm so many people worldwide.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testing.html
One would think that this were the very first time that we’d had a virus outbreak. Competence on the part of the world’s medical community has been greatly overestimated. But then, they only got serious about medicine a century ago, after WWI, and the respectable sciences have been serious for four centuries.
Our politicians relied too heavily on medical scientists and their narrow viewpoint rather than taking the whole picture into account, which would explain why we had the lockdown, shutdown, smackdown, Great Oppression in which so many sacrificed so much in order to save so few. Or maybe the Great Oppression was yet another plot to get rid of the literal Hitler, Trump.
After all, Trump’s book “The Art Of The Deal” reads just like Hitler’s “MeinKampf,” advocating capitalism rather than national socialism. Hitler started WWII by sending troops into his neighboring country, Poland, and Trump sent troops into his neighboring country, Portland (according to Oregon’s governor, Democrat Kate Brown). Hitler rounded up Jews into concentration Camps, and Trump rounded up Japs into concentration camps. Oh, wait, that was the Democrat Roosevelt, but what the heck, Trump or Roosevelt, they are practically the same literal Hitler. Hitler saved Germany from a terrible economy, and both Trump and Roosevelt saved the U.S. from terrible economies. Several plots against Hitler’s life failed to remove him from office, and several political coups failed to remove Trump from office (including an impeachment that was “bereft of evidence”). Hitler was foreign born and had a native born girlfriend, and Trump is native born and has a foreign born wife. Hitler wore a military uniform, and Trump wears a business suit. Hitler had a small mustache, and Trump has orange hair. There are just too many similarities for this to be coincidence; Trump is Hitler incarnate.
What Cotour, Lee, Rose, and others said pretty much sum up what I was going to say (got here from an excerpt and link from Ace of Spades). But I would also add this…Something has pushed the weekly death count to exceptionally high levels. If you look at the raw death numbers, total deaths per week from all causes, there has been a significant spike. The increase actually starts back in November or so. Looking into March, April, May things really spike to over 70,000 deaths per week (typical flu season death rates are around 55,000, maybe 60,000). By my count there have been in the neighborhood of 170,000-200,000 “excess” deaths this year. And those deaths have tapered off pretty much in parallel to the pandemic. My suspicion is that there is more than just Covid going around. I do think Covid deaths and Covid case numbers are exaggerated mostly due to inadequate test quality. But the ephemeral data have become so corrupted there’s no way we can trust most of it. The best we can do now is look at antibodies tests.
A lot of us knew that March 15th.
LocalFluff:
It’s strange, these American guys here don’t seem to care what happened in Berlin and what Kennedy said. These people here probably live in their own world.
@Questioner
Nothing has been reported in regime media, and Youtube has removed the videos showing the masses of demonstrators. So they don’t know. I stumbled upon it on a Swedish alternative media that has only about 2,000 followers.
When the Soviet Union collapsed and great demonstrations in the Baltic states demanded independence, Sweden’s secretary of state explained in the government’s own TV channel (which had monopoly back then) that:
“- Oh no, they don’t want independence from the Soviet Union! They are just expressing their cultural traditions, dancing and singing and such.”
Bagdad Bob style.
@pzatchok “That 6% number just means that was the amount of doctors willing to positively state someone died because of covid.”
Not even. It is the amount identified as dying of covid for which an immediate cause of death was omitted. Ideally no death certificate should ever list only COVID-19, but should first list an Immediate Cause of Death such as respiratory arrest or cardiac arrest, with COVID-19 listed as an Underlying Cause.
Andrew W, please comment on this video: https://youtu.be/LFLhHN17J3w
From what I can gather from the audio this woman must have posted something related to Covid or the government and the lock down and she is being arrested for it and the police are executing a search warrant.
A pregnant woman with 2 other kids.
I will assume that New Zealand is right behind enforcing these kinds of measures.
Take note America.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8688793/Pregnant-mum-arrested-Facebook-post-inciting-coronavirus-protest.html
Her “offense” is shown at the link.
Seems that she was organizing a protest. Maybe a smaller scale of what was seen in Berlin.
The AU government apparently does not want such a demonstration to be seen, and acted swiftly to crush dissent.
They went further and issued a threat and a fine for anyone who shows up.
Hmmm
Reviewed the rights to freedom of expression in AU.
https://www.ag.gov.au/rights-and-protections/human-rights-and-anti-discrimination/human-rights-scrutiny/public-sector-guidance-sheets/right-freedom-opinion-and-expression#can-the-right-to-freedom-of-opinion-and-expression-be-limited
The right to limit based on public health has never been tested.
The planned protest guidelines stated they will use social distancing/masks to be in compliance.
This smacks of smothering dissent.
I think this explains the Aussie hard line tactics:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8489039/Oxford-professor-Sunetra-Gupta-says-Australia-embrace-herd-immunity.html
And like New Zealand they are now in an eternal battle for controlling their populations because they have isolated themselves instead of allowing the virus to be cycled through their population in a controlled manner.
State sponsored authoritarian control justified for everyone’s benefit. Its a paradox in a free society.
Where does this now go? The government can not allow any potential for people to come together in fear of someone being infected. This policy is counter to nature, the intellectualization of nature to be precise. And that can only be sustained for just so long, and then nature prevails in the long term.
And that is the way the universe operates.
I suppose they are waiting for a vaccine, and then they will mandate that everyone take it. And if you don’t you are checked out of society. This is where this goes. The Aussies and the Kiwis are basically owned and managed by their government over lords.
R Reagan.
Reagan- America Is The Last Stand On Earth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPvuYxUxEto
0:49
Wow, I’d expect the video of that arrest to generate larger protests than the one they were trying to quash.
A bit of an aside, but didn’t there use to be a time (how many decades ago?) that being arrested did not automatically mean being handcuffed, but it was done at the discretion of the arresting officer based on their perception of risk? Did that just change gradually over time?
Back to the power of the state, a lot of people didn’t realize just how much power public health officials have. Yesterday’s news, “Trump administration announces nationwide eviction moratorium through end of the year” makes it sound like an order from the president, but it isn’t, because the president doesn’t have that power. It is instead a directive from the president to the director of the CDC to issue such an order, because that is where the power resides.
Aside from the question of whether couples currently making a combined $197,000 annually really need to be protected from eviction; and aside from the impact this will have on small-scale landlords who have invested in a couple of houses they have divided into apartments and rely on the rent both for their own income and to pay maintenance and utilities; is it even constitutional to vest such a power in the CDC?
Cotour, yes, horrible place is Australia. Don’t go there.
The Aussies and the Kiwis are basically owned and managed by their government over lords.
Surely you mean “Aussies and Yanks”?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-stringency-index?tab=chart&year=latest&country=AUS~NZL~USA
WHAT DO YOU GET WITH “POLITICAL CORRECTNESS”, MULTICULTURALISM AND THE “PROGRESSIVE” AGENDA?
https://youtu.be/P0WyTkLuC28 3:37
I like this guy from Sweden, an every day guy just seeing what he sees and sharing his observations. This is the Leftist agenda, we save you from your country, and then you tell us we should leave. Is this Australia and New Zealand’s future? All our futures? Is this what the world of the future will look like?
“Swedes should leave sweden
You raise an interesting point, many Maori Do leave New Zealand, they go to Australia. Think of it as missionary work.
To all:
The most important conclusion that must be drawn from the entire corona madness that applies to all countries is: disempowerment of the state (and of politics / politicians as such), empowerment of the citizen (including his ability to defend himself against state violence)!
WTP
wrote: “My suspicion is that there is more than just Covid going around.”
This is correct. There is collateral damage due to the lockdown, shutdown, and scare. People have been afraid to go to the hospital and were forbidden from having elective surgeries. Other factors come from the isolation of lockdown, swum as alcoholism, domestic violence (divorces seem to be on the rise), and drug use, including overdoses of each, resulting in injuries and deaths. The whole thing has been a huge cluster bleep.
Questioner,
You wrote: “It’s strange, these American guys here don’t seem to care what happened in Berlin and what Kennedy said. These people here probably live in their own world.”
What do you mean don’t care? Did you expect us to be upset by the speech? Did you expect us to disagree and argue? What reaction did you expect from us after watching your linked video?
Edward:
This is correct. There is collateral damage due to the lockdown, shutdown, and scare.
While I agree on that, I was speaking of something else. The numbers for what you speak of will be spread out over the next several years and will be very hard to identify. No, I think something started in early November, possibly even September. If you look at the weekly CDC death counts, the total number of deaths regardless of cause, they started going up early/mid fall of last year. I suspect we have some other disease going around in concert with Covid-19 or there’s another strain of a Covid-19 like illness or that Covid-19 got here (and thus left China) much earlier than advertised.
This is essentially what I’m saying…
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/09/the_covid19_pandemic_is_ending_comments.html
WTP,
You wrote: “If you look at the weekly CDC death counts, the total number of deaths regardless of cause, they started going up early/mid fall of last year.”
What you describe is an annual phenomenon. Please examine the last graph in this essay, as it shows this occurred each year for the past decade.
https://wmbriggs.com/post/32316/
The cause is generally attributed to illnesses that tend to occur during the colder times of year. This includes the regular flu, which has surprisingly fewer reported deaths, this year.
Please examine the graphs just before the last one in the essay (the penultimate graph), as it shows a dashed line that represents all deaths minus the official reported Wuhan flu deaths (CDC’s numbers, not the press’s numbers, which always seem to exceed the CDC’s reported deaths). Although it is impossible to determine cause, the sharp peak in the dashed line, under the solid line, could possibly be due to the hospitals turning away cases that were not Wuhan flu cases or due to people being frightened away from going to the hospital during the first weeks of the lockdown shutdown. It could also be due to regular flu cases, but probably not due to auto accidents or other outdoor activities.
Other than the peak that I noted, the dashed line looks similar to the regular lines of previous years, although it may droop sooner than in previous years. This early droop, if it exists, could be due to early deaths that were caused by the greater number of Wuhan flu deaths in the population of unhealthy elder people. Many may have passed away a few months earlier than they otherwise would have. This is part of the tragedy of seven states sending Wuhan ailing patients into nursing homes, because even though they would have died anyway, they lost a portion of their lives that they were paying the nursing homes good money to make sure they would enjoy. Another part of the tragedy is that those patients would have been better off at home with their children, where even if they died early, at least they would have been with family instead of prevented from family visits.
The government is supposed to protect us from all enemies, foreign and domestic, but when they send ill patients into nursing homes and cause premature deaths, that government becomes the very domestic enemy that we need protection from. And for this we pay taxes — to that enemy.
I am completely unable to express my anger and disgust at how horrific this entire cluster bleep has been and continues to be. The attempt to save lives has failed in every way, and it has had adverse affects in every aspect of life.
What you describe is an annual phenomenon.
Yes, I get that. What I should have been clearer on is that they are higher than normal relative to previous years. It’s not easy to see with the graphs but if you look at 2019-2020 you can see a slightly higher early onset of deaths. There is the normal peak around first week of January, then the Covid peak later. But the lead up to January, starting in early October, if you look at the raw numbers, you will see an unusual number of weeks, relative to previous four years or so, where deaths crossed the 55,500 threshold. Now this could be a function of population growth, especially immigrants from even previous years that were more vulnerable. But even that is a point of interest.
Though I do agree with you in general on your other points.
This includes the regular flu, which has surprisingly fewer reported deaths, this year.
Given that there have been enormous efforts put into strategies like social distancing and lock-downs to reduce the spread of a contagious virus that is transferred from person to person via exhaled droplets, it’s anything but surprising that there’s been a reduction of the spread of contagious viruses that are transferred from person to person via exhaled droplets.
According to the Alberta health expert, Covid-19 is less contagious than the measles.
Covid-19 has been totally blown out of proportion.
Nancy Polosi knows this to be true and hence her use of a salon.
Further, a certain pathologist of my acquaintance, indicates reputable research indicates that the mildly (or asymptomatic) are poor conductors of the spread.
An interesting analysis: LOCKDOWN and government manipulation V Covid.
https://youtu.be/CsSYqzrtOGE 9:57 min.
All the country’s and states that mandate behavior related to Covid are doing the worst and actually killing more people per million in their population and not less.
GOVERNMENT, PLEASE, STOP HELPING.
According to the Alberta health expert, Covid-19 is less contagious than the measles.
Measles is very contagious, good thing most vaccinate against it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Samoa_measles_outbreak
WTP,
You wrote: “if you look at the raw numbers, you will see an unusual number of weeks, relative to previous four years or so, where deaths crossed the 55,500 threshold. Now this could be a function of population growth, especially immigrants from even previous years that were more vulnerable. But even that is a point of interest.”
There is a general upward trend in the data that seems much greater than population growth. My suspicion is that this is due to the aging baby boom generation that is increasingly attending the funerals of their friends. Even the summertime deaths are increasing with each passing year.