FROM “An Epidemic of Irrationality,” by C. Griffin Trotter MD, PhD :

Today (March 27, 2020) is kind of a landmark day. The front-page headline in the Seattle Times screams “U.S. has most virus cases: With 1,000-plus deaths, more grim milestones ahead.” But the real milestone is that the stark irrationality of our public response to COVID-19 has become manifest as never before. Today the Times has three front-page articles featuring three radically incompatible claims.

The first article makes the same old claim that has been featured on the front page every day for the last month. It is the claim that Coronavirus is a nearly unprecedented medical catastrophe, destined for “grim milestones” of almost unthinkable proportion.

The second article correctly claims that it is very difficult for patients to get tested for Coronavirus. The policy in Washington state is still to test only sick patients. In fact, even sick patients are still often turned away if they are not sick enough, as several examples cited in this article document.

The third article reports that the death toll from Coronavirus, according to a model from University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, could reach 1,430 by July (at which time the model estimates the seasonal epidemic will be over).

Do these three articles hold together logically? Not even close. Washington’s population of 7.5 million persons makes up about 2.5% of the population of the United States. Even in the extremely unlikely event that every other state eventually gets hit as hard as Washington, the death rate referenced in the third article would translate to 57,000 deaths nationwide. That is substantially less than the death toll from influenza in 2017-18, which the media almost entirely ignored. So if the third article is correct, then the first article is radically incorrect. If the third article is correct, then this is not an unprecedented catastrophe, and in fact it will not even be as bad, mortality wise, as a bad flu season. (more…)

  IF one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.2 "Covid-19 — Navigating the Uncharted" List of authors.Anthony S. Fauci, M.D.,  H. Clifford Lane, M.D., and Robert R. Redfield, M.D. MARCH 26, 2020 New England Journal of Medicine And yet in no previous flu season was the economy deliberately wrecked with millions of people thrown into joblessness. Dr. Fauci, you deserve nothing less than a jail sentence.

FROM Br. Alexis Bugnolo at From Rome (March 21, 2020): In recent days the international press has run stories about this Italian City as ground zero for the Wuhan Virus pandemic. They want desperately that all panic and accept their narrative about the apocalyptic plague which is decimating this city. First, we cannot dismiss or diminish the death of any person let alone of large numbers of them. But, second, we ought not manipulate statistics to make a flu seem like a plague. Bergamo is a city of around 120,000 souls. It is also the chief city in the province of Brescia, which has 1.2 million souls. There are many hospitals in the province, but Bergamo has the principal ones. Not all who are patients at Bergamo are citizens from the city. As being reported, the Mayor of Bergamo says the total deaths of citizens of the city since the outbreak of the Corona Virus is 108 more than normal. He is using 2019, in which the deaths were 56 in the same period, as the basis. But he admits that only 30 some, of all the dead were known victims of the Wuhan virus. However, the press wants you to think that everyone is dying in the city, and that everyone is dying of coronavirus. The Ecco of Bergamo is sounding this kind of alarm. Here is a photo of coffins from a migrant shipwreck in 2013. It has also been used…

IN A real pandemic, police would be busy helping people get medical treatment, clearing bodies away, and quarantining the sick. When a virus that overwhelmingly affects the very old and those with compromised immunities is turned into a fake pandemic, they imprison the healthy in their homes, close down playgrounds and enforce draconian "social distancing," an unproven measure for controlling contagion among those with no signs of sickness. America is a prison without bars. (And without bars.) Prisoners in maximum security facilities get to play basketball, but not the inmates of New York: In New York City, they’ve started dismantling basketball hoops to prevent people from gathering in parks and playing. In Lakewood, New Jersey, police broke up a wedding being held in violation of a ban on large gatherings. And in Austin, Texas, officers are encouraging people to call a hotline to snitch on violators of the city’s orders for people to stay home. Police departments are taking a lead role in enforcing social distancing guidelines that health officials say are critical to containing COVID-19. Along with park rangers, fire inspectors and other public servants, officers more accustomed to chasing suspects and solving crimes are spending these troubled days cajoling people to stay at least 6 feet apart. Things are especially bad it seems in New York City, an example for propaganda purposes to the rest of the nation. The city is not an epicenter of disease at this moment;…

  FROM The Guardian: Gordon Brown has urged world leaders to create a temporary form of global government to tackle the twin medical and economic crises caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The former Labour prime minister, who was at the centre of the international efforts to tackle the impact of the near-meltdown of the banks in 2008, said there was a need for a taskforce involving world leaders, health experts and the heads of the international organisations that would have executive powers to coordinate the response. A virtual meeting of the G20 group of developed and developing countries, chaired by Saudi Arabia, will be held on Thursday, but Brown said it would have been preferable to have also included the UN security council.  

  IT'S SHOCKING that bioweapons labs exist, but they do -- in the United States, China, Israel, and Soviet Russia.** The fact that Taiwan has had two deaths from the coronavirus, South Korea less than 150, Japan just 45, Israel only five, while Italy has had more than 7,000, Spain more than 4,000, and Iran more than 2,000, lends support to theories of a biological weapon. That evidence is more significant when combined with what appears to be a highly coordinated campaign to shut down the economies of these countries and create social unrest. South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore (two deaths) have not engaged in generalized shutdowns. They have quarantined those who are sick. Taiwan, only 81 miles off the coast of mainland China and densely urban, has had a staggeringly low total of only 252  cases of the illness. (See figures here.) Perhaps weather is a factor, as Taipei is warmer than northern Italy, but the temperature in Tokyo now (54° F) is close to recent conditions in Lombardy, Italy. And about 2,000 people have been diagnosed in Florida, which has temperatures close to those in Taiwan. There are many mysteries here. Interestingly, in 1998, Israel was accused of developing an "ethnic bio-weapon," designed to target a specific ethnic group. Whether coronavirus is a biological weapon is secondary to the issue of how the virus is being used to implement social and financial engineering. ** Of these three, Russia and…

FROM “Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say?” By Eran Bendavid and Jay Bhattacharya , professors of medicine at Stanford University, in The Wall Street Journal, March 24, 2020:

If it’s true that the novel coronavirus would kill millions without shelter-in-place orders and quarantines, then the extraordinary measures being carried out in cities and states around the country are surely justified. But there’s little evidence to confirm that premise—and projections of the death toll could plausibly be orders of magnitude too high.

Fear of Covid-19 is based on its high estimated case fatality rate—2% to 4% of people with confirmed Covid-19 have died, according to the World Health Organization and others. So if 100 million Americans ultimately get the disease, two million to four million could die. We believe that estimate is deeply flawed. The true fatality rate is the portion of those infected who die, not the deaths from identified positive cases.

The latter rate is misleading because of selection bias in testing. The degree of bias is uncertain because available data are limited. But it could make the difference between an epidemic that kills 20,000 and one that kills two million. If the number of actual infections is much larger than the number of cases—orders of magnitude larger—then the true fatality rate is much lower as well. That’s not only plausible but likely based on what we know so far.

Population samples from China, Italy, Iceland and the U.S. provide relevant evidence. (more…)