Nobody knows how many people died as a result of the UK/US Coalition of Death led destruction of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and, by proxy, Syria and Yemen. Nobody even knows how many people western forces themselves killed directly. That is a huge number, but still under 10% of the total. To add to that you have to add those who died in subsequent conflict engendered by the forced dismantling of the state the West disapproved of. Some were killed by western proxies, some by anti-western forces, and some just by those reverting to ancient tribal hostility and battle for resources into which the country had been regressed by bombing.
You then have to add all those who died directly as a result of the destruction of national infrastructure. Iraq lost in the destruction 60% of its potable drinking water, 75% of its medical facilities and 80% of its electricity. This caused millions of deaths, as did displacement. We are only of course talking about deaths, not maiming. This very sober analysis from Salon makes a stab at 2.4 million for Iraqi deaths caused by the war.
The number of Iraqi casualties is not just a historical dispute, because the killing is still going on today. Since several major cities in Iraq and Syria fell to Islamic State in 2014, the U.S. has led the heaviest bombing campaign since the American War in Vietnam, dropping 105,000 bombs and missiles and reducing most of Mosul and other contested Iraqi and Syrian cities to rubble.
An Iraqi Kurdish intelligence report estimated that at least 40,000 civilians were killed in the bombardment of Mosul alone, with many more bodies still buried in the rubble. A recent project to remove rubble and recover bodies in just one neighborhood found 3,353 more bodies, of whom only 20% were identified as ISIS fighters and 80% as civilians. Another 11,000 people in Mosul are still reported missing by their families.
For a vivid illustration, here is a photo of Sirte, Libya, after it was kindly “liberated” by NATO aerial bombardment. NATO carried out 14,000 bombing sorties on Libya.
Sirte, Libya, after NATO bombing
The neo-con drive to dominate the Middle East, in alliance with Saudi Arabia and Israel, has caused an apocalyptic level of death and destruction. It really is very difficult indeed to quantify the number of people killed as a direct result of the policy of “liberal intervention” in these countries. Bombing people into freedom has collateral damage. There are also the vast unintended consequences. The destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria launched a wave of refugee migration which led to politicial instability throughout Europe and contributed to, among many other consequences, Brexit.
For the purposes of argument, I am going to put an extremely conservative figure of 5 million on the number of people who died as a result of Western military intervention, direct or proxy, in the Middle East.
Now compare that to the worldwide death toll from coronavirus: 220,000. Let me say that again.
Western aggressive wars to coronavirus: 5,000,000 : 220,000.
Or put it another way. The total number of deaths from coronavirus in the UK so far is about half the number of civilians killed directly by the US military in the single city of Mosul.
Makes you think, doesn’t it? There are four horsemen of the apocalypse, and while of course I do not blame people for focusing on the one which is riding at them personally, do not forget the others. Coronavirus has not finished killing. But then nor have western wars.
The sight which I cannot stand is the mainstream media which cheered on the horseman of war as they argued for the invasion Iraq on the basis of lies – and still defend it as a “liberation” – who now pretend massive concern for human life. The hypocrites are disgusting.
I was wrong when I initially wrote about the coronavirus.
Before I detail where I was wrong, let me say where I believe I was right. Large general population sampling antibody studies are now just beginning to emerge, and I feel reasonably confident that I was in fact correct that the mortality rate of coronavirus is under 1%, and probably not too different from the 0.5% generally quoted for Hong Kong flu. The term “infection fatality rate” is now being used to describe this true mortality rate. The “infection fatality rate” is the percentage of those who get the disease who die.
These are very early days for whole population sampling antibody studies, and the true picture should become more plain over the next month or two. I must say I have found it alarmingly difficult to explain to people the rather simple concept that you cannot infer a mortality rate among everybody who catches the disease, from the results you get when by definition you have only been offering tests to the most acute cases presenting as needing serious treatment. Of course a fair proportion of the worst cases don’t make it through the disease. But there is a population of millions in the UK (and nobody has a serious idea how many) who have had the disease with no or mild symptoms, and who do not figure in the statistics.
The very large majority of people in the UK who have had coronavirus have never been tested. That is simply true. How many, nobody knows. That is also true.
I do not endorse the extrapolation from New York to the UK, in this Daily Mail piece, to try to calculate how many people may have had coronavirus in the UK. But buried in there is the best collection I can find anywhere of what sampling antibody studies are indicating for the “infection fatality rate” across various US and European locations, and there is a strong clustering under 1%. Now these are preliminary studies, though almost all from reputable institutions. Proper, large scale, antibody testing programmes to produce peer reviewed and authoritatively published studies are on the way, but not here yet. I repeat, though, that I think the infection mortality rate is somewhere below 1%.
Where I was wrong, was in not realising that what is different about this disease from a flu is that it is really very, very contagious. So a far higher percentage of the population get it, all at once. Over two seasons, only about 30% of the UK population got the Hong Kong flu. Unchecked, it seems this coronavirus can spread very much quicker than that. I do not know why, but it appears that it can. So the lockdown policies to prevent health services being overwhelmed are needed and do have my support.
I do not however support the level of alarmism and panic. Of course the disease is really appalling for those who get it badly. It is a painful, protracted and terrifying experience. But a similar level of scrutiny of extreme illnesses of other kinds would bring similar stories. I have had three brushes with death in my own life.
In 2003 I had multiple pulmonary emboli (bloodclots in both lungs), which left me in a coma for days, was incredibly painful and I understand very similar in terms of experience to the end phase of this coronavirus. In 1986 I was actually declared dead in a hospital in Kaduna, Northern Nigeria (salmonella paratyphoid B), and was woken up on a morgue trolley by a cockroach eating my nostril. In 1974 I had emergency surgery for peritonitis, and was in hospital for 5 weeks and then a convalescent home. Retailing the experience or images of any of these illnesses would be as capable or more of generating the terror being created by the detailed coverage of extreme cases of coronavirus.
Yes the coronavirus is horrible if you get it badly. Almost all severe disease is horrible and death very seldom consists of peacefully stopping breathing, despite Hollywood. I wonder if having lived so much in Africa has changed my attitude to death. We do not see death much in the UK. Did you know the British have a 350% higher propensity than the Italians to put their elderly into care homes? That is why the deaths in Italy were so much more visible, even though the truth is that the UK government is doing not significantly better, and quite probably worse, than the Italian government, at containing the virus. It is only now making a start at adding English care home deaths to the official statistics (Scotland has for weeks).
I do support lockdown, I do support every sensible precaution being taken because the virus is so contagious. I utterly deplore the vast quantities being spent on war, the $220 billion being squandered on Trident missiles while the most basic precautions stockpiling against the much more real threat of a pandemic were not undertaken, because Tories begrudged spending a few millions on the NHS. I get all of that and I repeat it. But we must not be panicked into believing that the threat is greater than it is. You have approximately a 99% chance, (still nobody knows for certain) of surviving this disease if you catch it. If you are under 60, your chance of death is almost certainly at worst 1 in 500 if you catch it. If you are older or like me have heart and lung issues, it looks a bit bleak. But we are not immortal, nor would I wish to be.
But remember this. Your odds of survival are massively better than were those of a civilian in a country that your country chose to invade in recent years. Did you, personally, do enough to try to stop that?
Remember, there are other horsemen.
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A reminder for those who keep saying that they do not any one personally who got or died of Covid-19
“I went to a hospital recently where they treat patients with Covid-19 and shook hands with everybody”
https://thebulletin.org/2020/04/a-highlight-reel-of-pandemic-pandering-and-political-hubris/
A few weeks later, a chastised PM humbly begs forgiveness.
His herd immunity pals Cummings and Hancock too. Would have been some of the richest irony in history if the cull men themselves had been dispatched by it.
Who exactly are the “herd immunity pals”?
Could they for example include researchers at the University of Minnesota? These people are projecting that the Coronavirus outbreak will persist for up to 2 years and will not end until about 2/3rds of the global population is immune
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-01/covid-19-pandemic-likely-to-last-two-years-report-says?sref=2WWyrgO6
They’ll be an inquiry into the incompetent way the British government handled this pandemic, though it will take years to compile, and it will be headed up by someone sympathetic to Johnson and the Tories plight.
Some minor pen pusher who has been paid off years before will be shown to be negligent, and the media will concur with whoever is the current PM, that it was just a nasty business that went wrong due to Johnny Foreigner not supplying enough PPE, a few back slaps later and a quick praising off the NHS, if Trump or whoever is the POTUS by then, hasn’t persuaded the government of the day to privatise what’s left of the NHS, and a memorial day commemorating the dead, to make us all feel united will seal the deal.
Job done, off the hook, business as normal.
We are living under the most repressive restrictions in history, participating in the biggest transfer of assets from the many to the few in history, and your biggest complaint is that the Tories didn’t make it happen fast enough? Public reaction is being manipulated, steered into harmless channels. You’re usually on the ball, RoS, but this time you’re being had.
Node
What is your position, what should be done to stop this disease?
Jack.
I think the danger of covid 19 has been sensationally exaggerated. The more data we get the more likely it seems that it is no more dangerous than flu. The official statistics don’t stand up to scrutiny, it is like they are deliberately confused so they can’t be easily analysed.
The measures seem designed to extend the pandemic, to ensure that the virus survives through to next winter, and thus justify extending the crisis.
Let the vulnerable self-isolate a little longer and the rest of us go back to normal.
Well at least you admit that there is a pandemic.
Over a bad winter seasonal ‘flu could be expected to be involved in an extra 10,000 deaths. By the time you read this the number will be three times that and it’s not over yet. There can’t be any doubt that Covid-19 is more dangerous than seasonal ‘flu and that the government’s response has been inadequate.
Kempe
And do you agree that we are living under the most repressive restrictions in history, participating in the biggest transfer of assets from the many to the few in history? If so, would you further agree that we should scrutinise the causes very very carefully?
Node – You are looking at the wrong data.
The data is clear, it is incontrovertible, and it demonstrates that the policy is working as planned
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/the-billionaires-whose-wealth-grew-despite-covid-19-2020-5-1029154677
Existing billionaires increased their aggregate wealth by $282 in just 23 days. But wait there is more – the policy has more to give. Updated figures suggest that billionaire wealth has now risen by a total of $406 billion
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/01/us-billionaires-boost-wealth-by-406-billion-as-markets-rebound.html
In the end it was all so easy to take from the poor and give to the rich – and this time the policy was cheered on by the victims of the greatest larceny ever seen in the world.
To paraphrase an old homily: Isolate in haste. repent at leisure – just don’t expect too much food during your repentance.
Node, read what profi say about flu and covid:
“None of my colleagues – and neither of course I – and none of the nursing staff can remember that the following conditions have prevailed in the past 30 or 40 years, namely:
1. entire clinics are filled with patients who all have the same diagnosis;
2. whole intensive care units are filled with patients who all have the same diagnosis;
3. 25% to 30% of nurses and the medical profession also acquire exactly the disease that those patients who care for them have;
4. too few ventilators were available;
5. patient selection had to be carried out, not for medical reasons, but because the sheer number of patients simply lacked the appropriate material;
6. the seriously ill patients all had the same – a uniform – clinical picture;
7. the mode of death of all those who died in intensive care is the same;
8. Medicines and medical material threaten to run out.
Based on 1-8, it is clear that it is a dangerous virus that underlies this pandemic.
Claims that „influenza“ is equally dangerous and costs the same number of victims every year are wrong.”
—
* I address you to the post with the source links
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/04/backing-the-wrong-horseman/comment-page-5/#comment-939323
Node, read what profi say about flu and covid:
Yes, Tatyana, and on the same page I can direct you to statistics that say you are 85 times more likely to die of covid-19 in Europe and N. America than in the rest of the world, and that a world renowned epidemiologist calculates the mortality rate at 0.1%. Medical opinion is not united on this, and the stakes couldn’t be higher. We are signing over control of the world to a tiny elite on the grounds that, at worst, quite a lot of over-80 year old people might die, and there is reasonable doubt that even that number might not be out of the ordinary.
Loony, you’re talking billions but we already know our government is handing over trillions to Them.
And another unarguable fact : the longer the disruption lasts, the more businesses will fail, and therefore the more the super-elite will gain.
Above, I meant our governments (plural) are handing over trillions.
$5 trillion from the USA alone last thing I heard. Probably more by now.
Node
But are not the superrich the ones that do not want lock-downs just because it allegedly hurts the economy and their wealth?
Node : But are not the superrich the ones that do not want lock-downs just because it allegedly hurts the economy and their wealth?
No, it’s the exact opposite. The super-rich are the only ones who aren’t hurt by the lockdown. Those in control of the money supply always profit from economic upheaval. They create inflation and deflation and make money both ways. Look at the history of the Great Depression. Mortgages default to them, businesses and markets are snapped up cheap by them. When this is all over, the world will still be here but the super-rich will own more of it. They don’t care if an arbitrary monetary value of $100,000 trillion or $1000 trillion is assigned to their assets. It isn’t about money, it’s about control.
“I think the danger of covid 19 has been sensationally exaggerated. The more data we get the more likely it seems that it is no more dangerous than flu. ”
Node.
I can’t agree with that, its been shown that Covid-19 is far more contagious than the flu for starters, and that people can be asymptomatic, something than I’m under the impression you cannot be with the flu.
There may be other factors about Covid-19 that differ from the flu, we just don’t know enough yet.
Node
especially for you
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/weeklyprovisionalfiguresondeathsregisteredinenglandandwales
please note
“… number of deaths registered in England and Wales in the week ending 17 April 2020 (Week 16) was 22,351; this represents an increase of 3,835 deaths registered compared with the previous week (Week 15) and 11,854 more than the five-year average; this is the highest weekly total recorded since comparable figures begin in 1993.
Of the deaths registered in Week 16, 8,758 mentioned “novel coronavirus (COVID-19)”, which is 39.2% of all deaths; this compares with 6,213 (33.6% of all deaths) in Week 15.”
or, you may like it in picture, England and Wales weekly
https://22century.ru/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/eaw.png
red line for covid deaths, dotted red line for non-covid
Node: “a world renowned epidemiologist calculates the mortality rate at 0.1%”
0.1% of the UK population is 67,000 people. People, Node, who can suffer. And that figure is if everyone who gets ill gets treatment; it’s a best case scenario. Without care, much of it critical care, at least twice as many will die. And if they all get ill at once, as they would without the restrictions, only 5,000 of them can be given critical care.
But they don’t just conveniently drop dead, Node. They struggle for breath for days first. Are you happy to effectively waterboard at least 130,000 people, for a minimum of 5 days each? It would be more humane to shoot them; do you recommend that?
– “We are signing over control of the world to a tiny elite”
Then we’ll just have to take it back, won’t we? I’m up for it; what about you?
Oh, you’d rather suffocate 100,000 old folk. OK, fine. Are those their shrouded bodies on your Gravatar, all laid out in rows?
Node: “a world renowned epidemiologist calculates the mortality rate at 0.1%”
Clark: 0.1% of the UK population is 67,000 people
OK, let me put it another way for you. “A world renowned epidemiologist calculates the mortality rate as the same as flu, a virus that comes around every year without once necessitating bringing about a new world order”
Oh, you’d rather suffocate 100,000 old folk. OK, fine.
Ha ha, run out of rational comment, have we?
“and your biggest complaint is that the Tories didn’t make it happen fast enough? ”
Node.
I’ve no idea what you’re on about, if you re-read my comment you’ll see its about a future whitewash of the inquiry into Tory incompetence, that will let them off the hook.
Make no mistake that will happen, as in the Iraq Dossier cover up.
<iif you re-read my comment you’ll see its about a future whitewash of the inquiry into Tory incompetence
Well, whatever you believe this Tory incompetence consists of, history will assign it the importance of a trivial re-arrangement of deckchairs on the Titanic. This entire ‘crisis’ is being orchestrated to make us believe control measures haven’t been strong enough, to make us demand more rather than less. I bet you every country under lockdown has a variation of the same complaint: “our government is incompetent, it is not protecting us well enough, we demand stronger measures.”
” I bet you every country under lockdown has a variation of the same complaint: “our government is incompetent, it is not protecting us well enough, we demand stronger measures.””
Node.
That may be the case, however you cannot deny that the likes of South Korea and Taiwan, that their governments have handled the pandemic far better than the UK’s.
Even Germany with a larger population than the UK has fewer deaths.
“This entire ‘crisis’ is being orchestrated to make us believe control measures haven’t been strong enough, to make us demand more rather than less.”
Again Node I disagree, as I said above hasn’t it been shown that Covid-19 is more contagious than the flu. Making it far more realistic that a second wave could strike and once again cause many deaths and overstretch our NHS.
The test of removing the Covid-19 bills powers will come once a sense of normality returns. I for one will be the first to decry it, if the Tories continue to infringe upon our right once the threat of the virus has passed.
Node
Ok, I havent seen any CEO from any big company calling for a lockdown. Have you really seen that?
Jack – I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for Node or any other denier answering that one.
No, Trump, right-wing Tories and capitalists generally are all screaming for things to go back to normal, to hell all these wretched “front-line” workers who might get sick and die in the meantime.
Happily for these CEOs, there are brave “truth-tellers” who are desperate to do the work for them free of charge!
Node Ok, I havent seen any CEO from any big company calling for a lockdown. Have you really seen that?
Jack, the people I’m talking about don’t give interviews to the media. They own the media. We’ve come full circle since I started this conversation with “Public reaction is being manipulated.” The elite don’t demand lockdown – they get dupes like Glenn to do it for them.
“A reminder for those who keep saying that they do not any one personally who got or died of Covid-19
“I went to a hospital recently where they treat patients with Covid-19 and shook hands with everybody””
Not that I care very much, but I thought the hospital had denied there were any COVID-19 patients there. I.e. Johnson lied again, and he got it from somewhere else, no doubt less admirable (cheating on Symonds?). A bit like the fake hobby of making buses out of cardboard boxes.
sorry, I messed up
it was
Italy = +474 new deaths
U.K. + +621 new deaths
Here are a couple of graphs depicting deaths from all causes in N.Ireland and England and Wales. Scotland produces it’s own stats and always has as far as I remember.
Monthly deaths in N.Ireland 2006 to 2020:
https://postimg.cc/kDWBGgkF
Monthly deaths in England, Wales and Elsewhere :
https://i.postimg.cc/qqf2BqRQ/Monthly-Deaths-England-Wales-and-Elsewhere-2006-2020-P.jpg
The Elsewhere is explained by this from within the ONS statistic file: This may include records where the place of usual residence is either missing or not yet fully coded. For this reason counts for ”England and Wales” and ”non-residents of England and Wales” may not sum to ”England, Wales and elsewhere”.
The last data point in both graphs I had to extrapolate as the N.Ireland stats go to 24/April 2020 and the ONS stats for England and Wales go to 17 April 2020. I worked out, using weekly figures available from same sources, a daily average for April from those figures and multiplied by 30 to get a figure for the month.
I’d have done the same for Eire but the CSO.ie data for monthly deaths only goes to 2017.
It is clear from both that every winter “excess” deaths occur when compared to the average for the year. It is also clear that in England and Wales there is a very large spike this year in April but not so much in N.Ireland.
“There are also the vast unintended consequences.”
Right. Nobody could have predicted wave upon wave of refugees flooding Europe, because in all of history there were never before any refugees from war.
If you wanted to take revenge on Europe for The Holocaust, don’t you think this is sort of what it would look like?
NeoCon Thinking 101.
The choreography of the horsemen will vary from country to country.
BRITAIN
The British government’s propaganda regarding its probable policy at the end of this month is that
* many of working age who have been laid off from their employment will be allowed back to work so long as there are perspex screens all over the place, but
* social gatherings of more than a few people whether in cinemas, pubs, restaurants or anywhere else will remain banned indefinitely.
Meanwhile as I said they are hinting that they will round up the unemployed and force them to work in the fields to bring in the harvest, which even if it were ALL brought in successfully would account for about 50% of the country’s usual food supply.
BRAZIL
Meanwhile in Brazil most cafes, restaurants, bars and shopping centres have ALREADY reopened and whatever is still closed will reopen on Monday 4 May.
The foreign minister in the government led by Jair Bolsonaro who openly supports eugenics by means of the forced sterilisation of women has published an article in which he rants on about Slavoj Zizek, the guy who for several years has been a candidate for the Most Boring Fake in the World (and whom I long ago awarded an “If This Guy Didn’t Exist, the CIA Would Have Invented Him” award). Araujo asks the intelligent question “Should one take Zizek seriously?” but unfortunately he gives completely the wrong answer, “Very seriously”. The correct answer is “No”. However much Abraham Weintraub the Brazilian “education” minister and other senior figures in the Bolsonaro administration seem to enjoy ranting on about “communists” this that and the other, it remains doubtful that Brazilian capital can position itself in opposition to Chinese capital. Cynics may wonder about a “Manchurian Candidate” scenario and whether Bolsonaro and his mates have Chinese bank accounts :-))
should we take you seriously, then !!??
How can Zizek as a philosopher, maybe subject to discursive critique, be worse than a politician with power but no responsibility?
With at least 1,506,853 infections, including 140,260 deaths, Europe is the hardest-hit continent.
https://www.france24.com/en/20200502-europe-covid-19-confirmed-cases-top-1-5-million
So why would migrants still be making their way to Europe?
Spain-bad, France, bad, Italy-bad, U.K.-bad
Most likely they do not understand how severe the situation is or do not care, but also – EU have not paused the migration.
Jack shows very well why he never understood anything about the EU.
Illegal immigrants information is often long out of date.
– “So why would migrants still be making their way to Europe?”
Why shouldn’t they? It’s going to get just as bad wherever they came from, if it hasn’t already and just not been recorded as thoroughly as in Europe.
As well as everything else, even dieing is free in the unsustainable EU.
There’s a lot of places in the world where dying is free but never painless. The EU is not the only fractured and decaying institution across the globe. Please enlighten me as to where I might go that will improve my life chances and those of millions of others.
What you have here is a virus that causes some people to die. No-one knows how many people are infected. No-one knows how many people will ultimately be infected irrespective of preventative measures. No-one knows how many people die as a percentage of the total number of infected cases.
Based on the understanding above governments around the world have acted to shut down vast swathes of the economy, people prevented people from attending religious services, children are prevented from attending school and a whole range of normal everyday activities have been decreed illegal. Central banks have pumped trillions into various asset markets and further enriched the already obscenely rich.
Given all of the foregoing some may ask where exactly is the limit of government power? Are they able to intern people in the name of public health, are they able to execute people in the name of public health? Where are the limits and how does anyone know what those limits are?
Replying to Loony
When one is not sure with what one is dealing one adopts the ‘precautionary principle’. Otherwise, why on earth would a Tory government shut down the economy – eventually? God knows, I’m not a lover of the Tories and I most certainly would never vote Tory but they’ve done the right thing here (albeit too late).
@John Goss (Assuming I’m not still banned here, MODs permitting)
I’m rather saddened to see you taking the side of the capitalists like this. I know you to be a sincere decent man, and a good socialist.
Look at the meat packers in America. Their industry is ravaged by C-19, a huge proportion of their workers have succumbed to the disease, and it is spreading like wildfire through their communities as a result. This is real, and has caused hotspots of C-19 infection in localised areas. Watch Rachel Maddow (a pretty left-leaning journalist) to see what is actually happening there.
Not BS, not hype – fact.
They are being forced back to work by Trump, despite their very significant misgivings because of C-19. This is not hype, BS, MSM, a hoax or some massive worldwide conspiracy they are afraid of. If they do not comply, they will be considered to be voluntarily unemployed and thus ineligible for any welfare.
Why are you putting yourself on the side of Fox News, Trump apologists, capitalist pigs and the monied classes like this? They are more concerned about the economy, to hell with people’s lives! Get back to work, you SOB’s!
I would urge you to reconsider, and contemplate the forces at play here. The NHS, the WHO, unions, every single credible medical authority on one side – pleading with us to stop spreading the disease. And capitalists and their useful idiots on the other side, telling us to go out and hug each other.
Which side are you on, mate?
If you take a look at the vast complexities of the food supply chain you will realize that if people engaged in the production of food do not work then people will starve.
In the beginning the starvation will be disproportionately focussed on poor people. The US is the worlds largest exporter of food – and a first step to feed its people will be to ban food exports. Other countries have already acted to ban or limit food exports – most notably Russia, the worlds largest exporter of grain.
It is true that a number of “capitalists” want to return to work. This would include small and medium sized business owners. It is also true that the kleptocrat class are instrumental in garnering support for the economic lockdown. The kleptocrat class having further enriched themselves by upwards of $280 billion in the last month alone.
Production of rotting flesh from animal slaughter factories is not necessary to prevent starvation, Loony.
Kindly save your crocodile tears for the poor. Trump is forcing open these slaughterhouses, at the express detriment of the poor undocumented immigrants who largely work there, precisely to please his donors, and you know it.
What would your solution be glenn?
In uk we cover less than 50% of our own food needs
Say we have a crap year for yields like a few years ago…we will require meat to survive. If countries are strugglingbto feed their own there will be no exporting of grain, corn and basic carbs.
Its all very well having unemployed bring in the crop but we’ve lost skill in the growing and have to act quick or will miss growing season. Time for proper testing and getting those that have had mild versions back working. Or making facemasks.
Nick – it takes a lot more growth of plants to produce animal protean, than it does to get the protean directly from plants.
Unless you think we’re all going to survive on subsistence hunting, you’re really barking up the wrong tree mate.
What the heck do you think meat-product animals eat?
Nick, many are relearning the art of growing from good gurus such as Charles Dowding. Charles’ YouTube subscriber base is now over 250,000 and is rising rapidly.
It will take a decade to restore sufficient levels of expertise, but the expertise is out there in spades.
aka “we had to destroy the village to save it”, from Trump!
glen-uk
If the monied classes want to buy up everything at a knock down price with new infinite QE money they have awarded themselves then they will have to crash the economy so that everyting they want to buy will be in a bankruptcy sale. This means stopping people from engaging in real economic activity. Its a conspiracy mate.
https://thesaker.is/the-saker-interviews-michael-hudson-about-the-current-economic-crisis
Disaster capitalism isn’t a conspiracy, it’s a political reality. Get off the conspiracy sites and read Marx and Naomi Klein instead; capital runs our world, which is how the same problems persist across generations of time and no matter whom we elect.
We need political understanding to address the crises we face, not supposed secret knowledge that can never be verified.
Is the virus transmitted person to person, or is transmitted through the air?
That’s not an either/or, Dave. It’s transmitted primarily through the air, from one person to another.
The virus is transmitted mostly from infected surfaces, where exhaled infected globules have settled, according to the latest SAGE studies:
https://inews.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus-latest-contaminated-surfaces-covid-19-droplets-air-explained-sage-2680179
Sadly, 44 more deaths in Scotland from coronavirus have been reported.
‘The number of people who have died in after testing positive for coronavirus in Scotland has risen to 1,559. The daily update released by the Scottish government showed a rise of 44 deaths since Friday.
There have been 11,927 positive tests, an increase of 273.
The number of patients in intensive care with confirmed or suspected Covid-19 was 108, a drop of two since Friday. There were 1,674 patients being treated for the virus.’
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-52513145
The article you link to does NOT say that there have been 44 more deaths from coronavirus in Scotland.
Rather it says that 44 people have died after testing positive for coronavirus.
Everyone knows that the BBC is a leading name in fake news – Is there really any reason to make it even more fake than it already is?
Didn’t you spot the inverted commas Loony. I copied the text from the BBC link.
____
And cheers and best wishes to you Brian. Good to hear from you. You and yours ‘Stay safe’.
Hi Mary
We don’t actually have daily Death rates Re CO-19..more a weekly number..you can find accurate data for Scotland here –
https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/covid19stats
Sadly my own area – Inverclyde has a very high % Re our population –
Across Scotland, up to 19 April, there had been 1,616 covid-19-related deaths. Inverclyde’s deaths account for 4.7 per cent of the total in Scotland despite the district having only 1.5 per cent of the Scottish population.
https://www.inverclydenow.com/heart-breaking-inverclyde-coronavirus-death-figures-released/?
P.s I seen your post about Felicity Arbuthnot…Has she passed away, I love her work
Stay Safe.. Hugs from Scotland
The word according to the Scottish government.
https://www.gov.scot/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-daily-data-for-scotland/ (2pm daily announcements)
https://www.gov.scot/publications/trends-in-number-of-people-in-hospital-with-confirmed-or-suspected-covid-19/
https://www.gov.scot/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-data-definitions-and-sources/
@ Mary
The Catch-22 is the virus figures are being inflated to justify the (counter-productive) lockdown, but how can it be lifted if you keep frightening people with inflated figures?
Inflated figures, huh? See here:
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/04/backing-the-wrong-horseman/comment-page-6/#comment-939581
Plenty more like that; local authorities compile figures too. All “in on it”, eh, Dave? How far will you extend your alleged conspiracy? All the universities, all the scientific institutions, all the coroners, all the hospitals, all the doctors, me, SA, Tatyana?
‘Scotland’s NHS will need to change the way it treats emergency patients in the future, a top consultant has warned.
Dr David Chung, vice-president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (Scotland), said that “healthcare is going to look different” after the peak of the pandemic has passed.
A&E staff will have to continue to work in protective equipment for a long time to come, he predicted.
And he said lengthy delays in A&E would need to end.
Dr Chung told the BBC’s Good Morning Scotland that the huge task of ensuring the NHS was not swamped by coronavirus has been a success.’
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-52500252
I assume Dr Chung knows what he is talking about, unlike some on here today.
Dave,
it appears that the lockdown will be lifted only when the population are on their knees, and ready to accept all and any conditions for their release. Bill Gates’ jungle juice all round! Digital certificates implanted as evidence. That sort of thing.
cheers
Dear Craig,
Thank you so much for your work and writings I personally discovered recently. I may add as an excuse I live in Belgium.
I devoured “Murder in Samarkand” and think it should be advised reading for every teenager so they are warned about the workings of the world they’re are supposed to be a part of pretty soon as free-thinking, responsible adults, ideally.
Togo and Sikunder Burnes are already in the pile of books to read.
As much as I respect you and your work, I must however totally disagree with your stance about the “necessity of the lockdown”. This lockdown is a total folly, which already reveals itself in the present daily death figures as more murderous than the virus supposed to be the motivation for it. It should not have been hard for our authorities to foresee such an evolution and avoid such a catastrophic decision. To his credit, Boris Johnson was initially opposed to the measure. I’m no admirer of the man and his policies, but he was in this on the side of good science and common sense, before the media lynched him so he had to “follow the herd”, instead of letting it get naturally immunized, as he intended first.
But even if the pandemic was a real one, I mean by that a very serious one (ebola-like) with many more deaths not attributable only to decades of horrendous social policies or the incestuous relationships and corruption in the political and media world, public health authorities and the pharmaceutical industry, there should be no ground at all for a total lockdown. None.
This opinion is not revolutionary, since it was the position held by the UK government itself not so long ago, before it changed, somehow, for some unknown reason, yet, at the beginning of this year: no lockdown, even in case of pandemic.
The more I learn about this “pandemic”, the more I’m confirmed in my first opinion when I discovered the real figures of the Italian deaths cross-examined by the Italian Health Institute in mid-March: they discovered about 99% of the deaths attributed first to “novel” “corona” were in fact attributable to one, two or three or more comorbidities.
We’re being exposed to an instance of “hybrid warfare” or an immense, worldwide psyop which only benefits the giants of the health industry or the cheerleaders of more authoritarian “security” regimes, more “control” of the populations, and which reveals, as Sting sung in one old song of well before the “virus era”, how fragile we are. I mean how fragile our free societies are. How exposed they are to a media world which now appears only to be the propaganda arm of a handful of huge world interests which own it; and they’re not at all the interests of free, healthy, thriving citizens. Think only of the fact there are huge financial interests that link Monsanto, who developed the sterile seeds they sold to farmers so these should buy each year a new delivery, and Bill Gates, whose declared ambition, on every media of choice for all to hear, as a “philanthropist” now working for twenty years with about every major pharmaceutical company in order to get (us) there, is to vaccinate the 7 billion people of planet earth.
There simply is no room in the media, with the exception of a few really independent, alternative ones, for dissent and the voice of real, independent, world-renowned experts and scientists, immunologists and epidemiologists who totally condemn the global fabricated hysteria (or “media pandemics”) about the virus. And who condemn lockdown and social distancing as exactly the opposite of what should be done in the case of an aerial virus epidemics. These are simply dismissed as “a bunch of conspiracy theorists”, while the public is advised to listen to the “good”, “controlled”, “non-fake-news” corporate and state media.
All the while, many doctors and health workers don’t dare express their dissent for fear of losing their job due to the pressure of their authorities, the media and the public terrified by these .
Journeyman Pictures do a wonderful work at interviewing such scientists:
Perspectives on the Pandemic | Professor Knut Wittkowski Update Interview | Episode 5:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0Q4naYOYDw&t=2s
Perspectives on the Pandemic | Dr. John Ioannidis Update: 4.17.20 | Episode 4:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwPqmLoZA4s
Off-Guardian: WATCH: “Dr Erickson Covid19 Briefing” CENSORED by YouTube:
https://off-guardian.org/2020/04/29/watch-dr-erickson-covid19-briefing-censored-by-youtube/
The UK Column does an incredibly good job as well: UKC News – 1 May 20: End the Covid-19 Lockdown Now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTH96-9vZnI
As for “our” media and government(s), they’re now speaking of lifting the lockdown, … while already announcing and preparing us for the next one, … the lockdown soon to be imposed “for the second wave”! …And “the third” and so on… For “the vaccine” is not ready yet… And the population may still turn doubtful about and rebel (!!) against the whole enterprise, you see. Why bother even explaining the public a vaccine for a corona virus is next to a mission impossible, … when there’s definitely huge money to be made for some in pretending it is feasable, … or at least marketable. Plus all that power, plus all that total control! Everybody “contact-traced”!
No. Enough is enough. It is time for the people to get informed by the good, really scientific sources of information and to defend their liberties, resist and oppose, intelligently, but with utmost vigor, the destruction of their social lives and their basic human rights. Because that is simply were we are!
So, Craig, sorry but no… No lockdown for me. No lockdown for anyone. Except of course for the very old people and other such really vulnerable population whose immunological defenses are diminished and who are the only population at risk, as should have been the rule had not every parameter we knew for common sense in our world been totally reversed recently, … only two months ago!
PS. I contributed to your defense fund, as I’m revolted by what is done to you, and by the course justice takes in the UK, as already sadly egregiously attested by the handling of Julian Assange . And I wish you strength and success in the defense of your cause. The case against you makes of course no sense at all for anyone with an ounce of judgement.
I had the pleasure to find this article by Ben Norton about your present predicament in The Grayzone:
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/04/27/craig-murray-indicted-blog-posts/
Red Corvair,
Welcome to Craig’s blog. I will look out for future posts by you in the hope that they are as perceptive and well written as this one.
Of course you will, Node. You like what RC is saying, so naturally it’s taken as positive reinforcement of your current belief – which you appear to have a great deal invested in – evidence to the contrary be damned.
Ah, but I’m not a man of high principal like yourself, Glenn. Oh, wait a minute, what’s that I see between your legs? ….
Glenn_uk – April 15, 2020 at 8:27 pm – at Squonk’s blog, referring to being banned from Craig’s for having a hissy fit :
“Clark – if someone throws me out of a club, I’m not just going to return the next week with my tail between my legs, hoping they’ll be good enough to let me in again. Being kicked out terminates a relationship IMHO. Or even threatening same, for that matter.”
Node
Could I ask you whether you think that Cummings has the right ideas about managing this crisis? I only mention this because from the start it appears that your views about the gravity of this epidemic seem to be more in concert with those of the originally proposed herd immunity, take it on the chin type of policy.
SA, I was asked a similar question yesterday and I summed up my position thus:
“I think the danger of covid 19 has been sensationally exaggerated. The more data we get the more likely it seems that it is no more dangerous than flu. The official statistics don’t stand up to scrutiny, it is like they are deliberately confused so they can’t be easily analysed.
The measures seem designed to extend the pandemic, to ensure that the virus survives through to next winter, and thus justify extending the crisis.
Let the vulnerable self-isolate a little longer and the rest of us go back to normal.”
And Node
I can use your same argument you use and say: Who exactly is Node to think that the danger of covid-19 is exaggerated?
But I won’t because you are entitled to your views even though they contradict those of the majority of scientists, doctors, virologists, epidemiologist and public health workers who according to you are ‘duped’.
That’s it, Node – why don’t you respond with a _personal_ attack, instead of dealing with the issue at hand?
I can use your same argument you use and say: Who exactly is Node to think that the danger of covid-19 is exaggerated?
No, you totally miss the point. (How often have I said that to you). Unlike you and Clark, I do not claim to be an expert in epidemiology, virology, physics, maths …. (apologies if I’ve omitted any of your specialist subjects). I prefer to find someone who is an acknowledged expert in the relevant field, quote the relevant passage, and explain why I think this particular expert’s judgement should be trusted in this particular instance. Eg Ioannidis.
And Glenn, tuck your tail in, I can still see it.
Red Corvair
We have all seen these links before and they have been analysed and some have been debunked. That a virus kills elderly people with co-morbidities is not a novelty, what we have to address is excess mortality, which none of your links address. Moreiover, a lot of these links are outdated and the situation is changing daily. Here is an assessment of why the study Ioannides participated in is flawed:
“In the past week, though, the Stanford study, and a related effort in Los Angeles, have come under fierce criticism from prominent statisticians and infectious disease experts. Critics have argued that statistical sloppiness, inaccuracies in testing, and a skewed survey method likely warped the results. Some critics have also expressed surprise that Ioannidis was involved in the Santa Clara study at all. (Ioannidis did not respond to multiple attempts, made over several days, to reach him by email and phone.)
https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2020/04/25/is_john_ioannidis_succumbing_to_sloppy_science_on_covid-19_111369.html
The ‘survey’ recruitment was through a Facebook advert? Talk about selective recruitment. It really is not worth its salt.
Anyway we can go on analysing these selective examples when the majority of the scientists in the world agree that covid-19 is a major health problem and cherry picking your ‘experts’ only reinforces what you already believe in.
I wonder whether you both can help me with a bit of research? What are your views on vaccination?
SA.
John Ioannidis is an epidemiologist respected worldwide for his expertise in analysing data. People like Ben Goldacre who make a living from exposing bad science refer to him as “a godlike figure in the field of ‘research about research.’ He is under no illusions that people will try to smear his reputation over his stance on coronavirus, yet he is putting his credibility and career on the line because he believes we are being mislead about the danger.
What gives you, a pontificating blog pundit with zero qualifications on the subject, the right to dismiss his study as “It really is not worth its salt.”?
Node
I have an equal right as you to pontificate anything I like on this blog, provided mods agree.
So back to your hero worship. Remember what Clark has said to you before. Science is not about who said what, it is not about hierarchy and it is not about personalities. It is about data and findings. In the case of the webcast by Ioannidis he spends a lot of it explaining what he has done and giving an interpretation of it. Because what he talks about is not yet peer reviewed it is difficult to say more than that this is a personal opinion. Some scientist who analysed the pre-publication, say that he has done exactly what he has accused others of doing, hasty selective data with poor statistical methodology, that is what I reported. You might have to reluctantly admit that recruiting 3000 volunteers through a Facebook add is not exactly a random selection is it? Then there were emails leaked from the wives of one of the co-authors to some school group, urging them to participate in the research because it might help them not self isolate. Someone also commented that if you extrapolate the figures of incidence in St Clara, one of the study areas, and that for mortality in that population, to the situation of new York, you would have to have a population of 12 million in NY, whereas the total pop of NY is only 8 million.
https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2020/04/25/is_john_ioannidis_succumbing_to_sloppy_science_on_covid-19_111369.html
At best Ioannidis is being hasty in publishing the data in this form. Please can you argue logically instead of trying to insinuate that I am an ignoramus as you repeatedly do and that only someone like Ioannidis can answer Ioannidis as he is above reproach.
Take a look at yourself! You dismiss Ioannidis’s study “because what he talks about is not yet peer reviewed.” Then you justify your dismissal with:
“Some scientist who analysed the pre-publication, says …. ”
and
“there were emails leaked from the wives of one of the co-authors …”
and
“Someone also commented that if …”
I look forward to peer reviews of “some scientist”, “someone” and most of all those leaked emails from the wives,
Ioannidis supports restrictions. Stop cherry-picking what he says.
Clark: Ioannidis supports restrictions. Stop cherry-picking what he says.
Hey Clark, I am so pleased to hear you say that. Ioannidis has indeed expressed support for restrictions. He has also said : “Our data suggests that covid-19 has an infection fatality rate that is in the same ballpark as seasonal influenza.” I take it you agree? Surely after your comment above you are not hypocritical enough to cherry-pick his remarks.
Ouch!
Node: You’re deliberately ignoring the fact that C-19 is vastly more infectious.
Your agenda is showing. You will not accept fact, and are willing to be intellectually dishonest in your denialist pursuit.
You were brave enough to admit on Squonk that you were afraid. Are you brave enough to admit this fear extends to denying facts? You would have to admit that to yourself first, of course. It’s a lot easier to lash out.
I think covid-19’s IFR varies significantly depending on circumstances. It seems to be much higher when hospital care is unavailable, and probably among those who encounter high viral load, eg. health workers. “Comparable with seasonal flu” looks like very much a best case scenario to me, but we won’t have good figures for a long time yet.
It makes no odds. Even at seasonal flu levels of IFR, removing restrictions will lead to covid-19 burning through the population in weeks, leading to around 100,000 people requiring hospital care in a very short time. But with only 5000 places available, the vast majority will suffer for weeks without care, breathing assistance and pain relief.
Covid-19 isn’t just about death. Please consider the suffering.
I second Node. This is well written and I hope to read more of you
Amidst the more serious motivations and consequences you have described, you are now under moral pressure to eat more frites! Its a mad situation
Well there’s a company to avoid then; obviously no sense at all.
Anderson Burley, Corporate Advisory and Project Finance in Emerging Markets.
Very ‘subtle’ marketing. There will be many emerging markets in the near future. Talk of disaster capitalism.
“We’re being exposed to an instance of “hybrid warfare” or an immense, worldwide psyop which only benefits the giants of the health industry or the cheerleaders of more authoritarian “security” regimes, more “control” of the populations..”
Who is behind this massive, global operation? It cannot be those controlling the means of production, the employers of labour or the sellers of consumer goods, unless they have got together to sacrifice their economic power for the sake of…what exactly?
It is all very well to talk of a ‘worldwide psyop’ but unless you can begin to explain who is organising this (some supranational body ignorant of the many and variously bloody conflicts between the nation states you seem to believe that it controls) and why there is a sudden need for
“more authoritarian “security” regimes, more “control” of the populations..”- there being precious little sign in, for example the UK or USA, of any resistance to security regimes, which would appear to be rather popular – then all you are doing is presenting an extremely unlikely explanation for what appears to be a very banal mixture of a natural disease, remarkable only for its potency, a rediscovery of the most ancient of responses in the form of a quarantine regime and a cornucopia of political incompetence and administrative failure.
Why we should need to imagine a vast plot being realised-apparently for the fun of it- in a dozen different ways, each shaped by discrete government authorities, in order to convince populations already addicted to doing as they are told by government to follow orders, is unclear.
A pandemic has long been predicted. Neo-liberalism by definition cannot cope with such, unprofitable, events and representative democracy ensures that even the bleak principles of neo-liberalism are muddled and reversed in practise, because, essentially, under neo-liberalism the sole purpose of government is to prevent socialists from coming to power.
Let me add, for the information of yourself and the burgeoning cult of paranoiacs like yourself: posting these opinions on a site like this is not political action of any kind. If you people really believe that we are being herded into a surveillance/mass medication dystopia, why are you doing nothing more than posting stories on the internet? Or is it a secret resistance?
They themselves are engaged in a weakly thought-through psyop on behalf of corporate profit. Preying on simpletons by pretending concern for the poor they would like to see forced back to work on packed tubes and buses. The reality is as you say, no policy in recent history has been more popular than the lockdown. The Tories were (and overwhelmingly still are) resistant to any lockdown that impacts quarterly dividends. Yet we’re told by those in the know that Johnson and Cummings were forced to abandon their plan for a mass cull of the unproductive by some unidentified superior power. An unidentified superior power that considered an 80-seat Tory majority with a prostrate media insufficient to get things done for big capital.
Someone close to the Tory Party probably woke up and remembered that their voter base is concentrated among the oldest, whom covid-19 predominantly kills.
The Tories found another way to capitalise upon the crisis. They suspended parliament and have since ruled by diktat. Never waste a good disaster.
Interestingly the Tories since announcing their ‘Herd Immunity’ plans that met with a huge outcry, did not really abandon the policy but appear to have put the breaks to any action that would slow infection spreading. The so called lockdown, is a walk in the park, compare to that in Spain for example. The deliberate lack of providing PPE for frontline staff, the delays in testing, and diversions on concentrating on plans to get industries to make ventilators, instead of more mundane things like PPE and focus on the logistics of providing provisions for those in ‘lock down’. But having gone underground they still vociferously deny that they ever floated this as a policy.
What I can not understand, is,
we have extra capacity in the health service ( people not wanting to go to hospital or G.P. visits, Nightingale Units and holding of of elective surgeries) yet we do not bring people with suspected covid-19 into the health facilities until they are almost dead.
Why not bring them in at a much earlier stage, so their symptoms can be addressed before they become LIFE or DEATH?
Bevin. Who is behind this massive, global [psyop] operation?
Answer : A secret elite! Yeah, yeah, but hear me out.
In the 18th, 19th and early 20th century, a common subject for debate was who should be allowed to issue currency. It was recognised that whoever controlled the money supply controlled the country.
“Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce. And when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate.” – President James Garfield, 1881.
Do your own research but mine has led me to believe that Britain was first to fall to the bankers due to the debts it incurred in the Napoleonic Wars. The City of London then spearheaded a systematic takeover of the rest of Europe and America.
“The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” – “Coningsby, the New Generation”, Benjamin Disraeli, first Prime Minister of England, 1844
Every country went through its own battle for control of its currency but for circumstantial reasons it was well documented in the USA.
“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks…will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered…. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.” . . . “Paper is poverty. It is the ghost of money and not money itself.”– Thomas Jefferson, 1743-1826
“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war.” – Abraham Lincoln – In a letter written to William Elkin, 1860
Europe watched as the USA struggled longer than most to retain control:
“The division of the United States into federations of equal force was decided long before the Civil War by the high financial powers of Europe. These bankers were afraid that the United States, if they remained in one block and as one nation, would attain economic and financial independence, which would upset their financial domination over the world. The voice of the Rothschilds prevailed… Therefore they sent their emissaries into the field to exploit the question of slavery and to open an abyss between the two sections of the Union.” – Otto von Bismarck, German chancellor, 1865
Eventually the inevitable happened but even the President who signed the papers empowering the Federal Reserve realised what a momentously dreadful thing he had done.
“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the Nation and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the world – no longer a Government of free opinion no longer a Government by conviction and vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men…. Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men’s views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the U.S., in the field of commerce and manufacturing, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.” – The New Freedom, President Woodrow Wilson, 1913 (after signing into passage the Glass Owen Act of 1913 that established the Federal Reserve System)
The International banking system then had the last big piece on the global chessbpoard and continued building it’s power in other ways.
“The Federal Reserve definitely caused the Great Depression by contracting Americas’ money supply by one third between 1929 and 1933.” – Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize winning economist, Stanford University
They know in advance when to create panics to their advantage, and they also know when to stop panic. Inflation and deflation work equally well for them when they control finance.” – Rep. Charles Lindbergh Sr. (R. MN), 1914
“The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is eager to enter into close relationship with the Bank for International Settlements….The conclusion is impossible to escape that the State and Treasury Departments are willing to pool the banking system of Europe and America, setting up a world financial power independent of and above the Government of the United States….The United States under present conditions will be transformed from the most active of manufacturing nations into a consuming and importing nation with a balance of trade against it.”- Rep. Louis McFadden – Chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Currency quoted in the New York Times
Then suddenly the issue of who controls currency became a non-topic, nobody discussed it any more. All that power that had been fought over for centuries suddenly disappeared from sight. Why? Draw your own conclusions. But don’t tell me that financial chaos benefits nobody. Here’s a final quote more recent times before absolutely everybody shut up talking about it.
“The powers of financial capitalism had (a) far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences. The apex of the systems was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland; a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank…sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.”- Tragedy and Hope: A History of The World in Our Time, Professor Carroll Quigley of Georgetown University, 1966 (highly esteemed by his former student, William Jefferson Blythe Clinton) (June 1930)
And don’t anybody give me the predictable guff about veiled antisemitism. Banking, huge corporations, it’s all conglomerated into the hands of a very few and I don’t have a clue who the people are. For what it’s worth, my own private speculation is that the Jewish thing has been used as yet another smokescreen, another layer of the onion to hide behind. It doesn’t matter who these people are or what their origins, there once indisputably existed a huge and powerful, feared by kings, presidents and prime ministers, and now it’s invisible but is surely still there.
Bevin, you say “… unless they have got together to sacrifice their economic power for the sake of … what exactly?” The elite I’ve described doesn’t care about money in itself.They have far more than they can ever use they destroy and create money as required. Money is just a tool. They haven’t sacrificed anything. Money is a tool to control. They still control the money, but now they own/control even more of the world. They’ve been increasing their control for centuries, but never made such a huge single gain as they are doing right now. I keep saying this but it deserves to be the headline:
WE ARE WITNESSING THE BIGGEST TRANSFER OF ASSETS FROM THE MANY TO THE FEW IN HISTORY.
Yep. That’s how we do epidemiology. Not.
You could have saved yourself a lot of typing. Of course the very rich will take any opportunity to make money, they always do. That doesn’t prove anyone’s crackpot theory.
Thanks Node, I’m saving this comment!
Red Corvair – “I discovered the real figures of the Italian deaths cross-examined by the Italian Health Institute in mid-March: they discovered about 99% of the deaths attributed first to “novel” “corona” were in fact attributable to one, two or three or more comorbidities.”
But this cannot be the case. These co-morbidity conditions are always there, yet the overall death rate tripled. And those deaths can’t be caused by the ‘lockdown’ either, because they are now falling. So something else must be causing them, and that is covid-19.
Of course the overall death rate will increase. NHS centres are not working properly. They only accept telephone appointments. At least that is what my local centre does. Operations and important tests have been postponed or cancelled. People are scared to go to A&E so they don’t catch the virus.
My wife had a cancer surgery arranged for April and it was postponed. She is expecting to get a new date by middle of June. I have had tests for pancreatic problems postponed for September and I have been in pain for months now. I tried the A&E a few days ago and there were more security than patients by every entrance. I couldn’t wait to be seen so I will give it another go tomorrow.
Do you honestly think people only die of Covid-19, especially if access to hospitals is so restricted?
So how come the death rate is now falling despite ‘lockdown’ continuing?
Of course it is falling. The flu season is over.
With over 80% of planned operations postponed it might soon start to increase again.
“but he was in this on the side of good science and common sense, before the media lynched him so he had to “follow the herd”, instead of letting it get naturally immunized, as he intended first.”
Oh right the herd immunity that’s killed over 27,000 folk in the UK alone, not including deaths in carehomes in England and Wales, of which Johnson surely doesn’t want anyone to know about, no good science there then.
Then of course there’s Johnson himself, going AWOL for weeks, and missing five COBRA meeting, throw in the PPE fiasco, refusing EU help, for two reasons one Johnson loathes Johnny Foreigner and two, taking aid from the EU might lead to an extension on the post Brexit deal.
Then there’s the Panorama programme revealing that Jonnson downgraded the virus, which meant the British government could get away with ordering less PPE, and a fair bit of the PPE that did arrive was cleaning equipment and not the PPE that was desperately needed.
But hey the Tories, callous bastards through and through, knew fine well they’d thin the herd using this policy. Id like to see Johnson and Cumming stand trial in the Hague someday for their blatant mishandling of the pandemic, but they, like Blair are well protected.
Red Corvair.
Three and thirty hearty cheers! Another voice of and for sanity.
Cheers!!
OK, how do you account for the fact that death rates have increased enormously, to the point that undertakers cannot keep up and obituaries run to a dozen pages, when they used to take less than one?
You can give hearty cheers until you’re coughing your last – just because you’re having a nonsense confirmed by another source, it doesn’t make it any more true.
Agree with every word Red. Thanks
Italian informatics clearly indicted that resources needed to be directed towards the elderly yet children and working age people were being locked down despite no risk to them.
The Perspectives on the Pandemic series is a must see. 3 epidemiologists describing the phenomena of epidemics and the appropriate Human response.
Lock down = un-herded and scattered. A Fundamental truth identified helped me see through the fog of contradictions. WE ARE a herd species (tribal) and needed to stay together to protect the vulnerable. All herds do that in times of existential threat. We didn’t! We were un-herded and scattered to our homes. In the herd everyone plays their role. The children spread the virus among themselves without risk building up herd immunity, the working age keep going to work doing usual activities also acquiring vital immunity, while resources are focused on the vulnerable.
Check out historical respiratory illness death stats for a vital perspective never explained on the news or as part of Daily Downing Street Drivel and the picture becomes very very clear.
Thank you, Red Corvair, for this long and very interesting comment!
Have to laugh at Node’s ‘Tory incompetence’, that’s not a very sophisticated argument, beneath him/her if it’s the same Node, no wonder there was tittering at the back, does he/she think the Labour Party of Starmer, Smeeth & Co likely to be any better -there is no ‘lesser evil’, just the same strong poison. Democracy is dead, parties just the entertainment branch of the MIC, music-hall turns in the cyber age. I did check out Off-G for the first time in yonks, but the site is so bloated it laps up the cpu on my old machine, old os and old browser, that it’s a pain to read and scrolls abominably hesitatingly and jerkily, gets worse every visit. Suppose it works great on the kid’s phones.
I was about to have a nice drop of mineral water, from some bottles given me late last year, till I studied the label: “San Pellegrino, bottled at the source, San Pellegrino Terme, Bergamo, Italy.” Centre of the italian outbreak. Contents include: Silica Residue, Nitrate, Strontium, Potassium, Fluoride. Think I’ll pass on that, do well to pour it down the bog instead.
As for scientists in white coats, it’d be better for us all if their sleeves were a good bit longer and could be tied together behind them.
Anti-science, huh? Yeah, ignorance is the way to bliss.
The bloated Off-Guardian should take a leaf out of this site’s book – easy on system resources 😉 None of your java script library payloads, trackers and other assorted crap.
The jerky scrolling is because you have ‘smooth scrolling’ turned off in ‘options’. But turning it on will use up even more system resources though 😉
My mistake think it was RoS the naive, still in the party-box, who introduced ‘Tory incompetence’ pages back. Calculated incompetence just maybe.
– “…if it’s the same Node / Calculated incompetence just maybe”
Yes it’s a massive conspiracy Tony. We’re everywhere. Maybe you’re even one yourself without knowing it; it got programmed into your subconscious by [fill in something sinister-and-sciency-sounding here].
Care home deaths?
How many usually die in care homes in 2 months?
How many have died?
If some one in a care home has shown COVID19 symptoms, why was an ambulance not called to take him/her to hospital?
How many people who died in a care home were even given a PCR test?
COVID19 is well known to have a high mortality rate in the +65 years population. Presumably the population in care homes are +65 years. Yet they died in a care home. Without being treated in hospital.
Am I alone in this thinking? Old Person- care home – cough, temperature, CALL AN AMBULANCE. Whether you know anything about COVID19 or not!
~54,000 people in Scotland tested. Presumably because they had symptoms. 80% were Negative.
1,500 deaths in Scotland? 0.03% of the population? With great respect to those who have lost a loved one, big deal.
Will the SEC ever see a COVID19 patient? Probably not.
Our inalienable democratic rights? Feck them.
Our inalienable rights as a species to bond and interact with members of our family, friends and loved ones? Feck them.
Our government? What a useless parcel of rogues, selling our children’s future down the river for what turned out to be NOT the zombie apocalypse. The only zombies are our officials who relied on a few differential equations in an SEIR mathematical model to sentence the populace to solitary confinement.
Cui Bono?
Well it ain’t me babe. And I don’t see Governments, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Apple, Google, Amazon, Barclays etc. pouring billions into society to help people who really need help.
I live in a town in Scotland that wasn’t doing well before this nonsense started. I have to wonder if the First Minister’s arse is jealous of her mouth given the amount of crap she talks.
The lockdown is one thing and the disease is another and yet it seems we can’t now talk about the disease being a lot more serious than flu (Covid-19 is not flu and not related to flu) without the presumption that implicitly we must also be in support of the lockdown. This strikes me as extremely odd given the sequence of events that led to the lockdown and remembering that S Korea managed to slow and contain the spread and avoided any need for a full lockdown by treating the disease with due seriousness.
By contrast, and in spite of many many weeks of additional advance warning, the UK opted to drop its initial quarantine regime and soon after abandoned testing and contact tracing (in defiance of WHO’s clear recommendations and having seen the success in Korea) in favour a nonsensical and absolutely unscientific herd immunity approach to tackling the spread of a novel pathogen of unknown virulence. After permitting several weeks of unchecked community spread, it abruptly ditched the original decision to sacrifice a few hundred thousand “loved ones”, not because it was callous, but after realising that besides the run on mortuaries, the NHS was also about to be overrun. And that’s when we got the lockdown.
The lockdown was our last ditch effort to lessen an impending catastrophe. It is simply another measure of government failure. For this reason I have never supported the lockdown although I do see it as a temporary fix and a necessary evil. And finally, when this bloody lockdown is ultimately lifted (having caused tremendous damage economically and in other ways), presuming this same incompetent government still hasn’t acquired sufficient testing kits and devised adequate systems for contact tracing, and if it continues to leave the borders wide open, then we will very quickly be back at square one, faced with an exponential second wave that could yet be bigger than the first.
WELL said. Thank you. I’m sick of the right’s useful idiot conspiracy theorists on this site.
“incompetent government …..faced with an exponential second wave that could yet be bigger than the first.”
You’ve obviously read the next part of the script.
One of the epidemiologists in the Perspectives on the Pandemic suggested the possibility that in China had reached herd immunity BEFORE lock down.
When I heard this it was being announced that China was opening up gradually. How could it do so successfully unless herd immunity was in effect? And if that were the case then lock down was never necessary. There will never be any way of knowing but the unknown starting date clearly gives this possibility credence. But may also explain other anomalies.
The idea that human interventions are the reasons for the the different outcomes may also be another lockdown myth. Outcomes are very likely a function of the conditions presented to the virus in terms of health of population, health care system, demography, weather, and so on with minimal effect on outcome of human intervention.
China is now doing contact tracing and quarantine. Everyone has a smartphone app with a QR coded Red, Amber or Green for covid-19. And everyone’s wearing masks.
You can’t talk about individual aspects in isolation because commentator(s) want to polarise the issue. To separate the non-extremists, that’s everyone but them, and then push through ideological policing with them setting the rules and the boundaries of acceptable opinion . Same playbook as anyone who thought more equitable wealth distribution, non-profit public-services, and such small things that made society cohesive and inclusive were labelled Communists, rather than communists, tactics now most evident with climate-change extremists versus anyone who’d rather not return to the stone-age, thanks, being almost everyone. Extremists feigning ignorance that the corporations and actors setting pushing the climate-change hysteria agenda are the self-same players profiting the most from a much wider range of environmentally destructive activities. There must be no opposition but that we control.
We’d all like to – as Neil Young put it – see the earth before it touched mans’ hand. We can try our best, but there’s no going back as some of the damage is forever, it’s irreparable, but it’s not any reason to rush to join some doomsday cult that hates all mankind and thinks eliminating all of us, all but themselves the paid-up cult-members prescribing drastic measures, the answer. The planet dying makes no sound if there’s no-one there to hear it.
Yeah that’s right. All the scientists are controlled (so I can’t imagine where the scientific understanding to make technology comes from when they’re all just parroting what “The Secret Elite” tell them to) and anyone who pushes back and gets arrested for it is just “controlled opposition”. You banging away at your touch-screen imparting your secret knowledge that we’re all too thick to accept will save the world; after all it worked with Kennedy’s assassination, the Moon landings, the USS Liberty, and 9/11, didn’t it?
Who has ever changed the world?
Those who stood up and disobeyed of course! The Russian Revolutionaries, the Suffragettes, the Indian Independence Movement, the US Civil Rights Movement, the Poll Tax Protestors, Julian Assange; the list goes on and on. Those who put their lives and liberty on the line.
All “controlled opposition”, I suppose?
Thank you Clark. Opposition is always infiltrated as it becomes successful, the trick is to build a robust structure within which the moles can do little damage. Remove all the leverage for corruption at the very beginning, and keep that firmly in the organisational DNA. Publish the blueprint and stick to it.
😀
Love and Rage, Jarek.
It spreads quickly because it is a coronavirus, like all other common cold coronaviruses. On average an adult contracts, without mitigation, upwards of three to four rhino or corona viruses each year. The contagiousness of the current strain is no different. It will burn through the population just as quick. If the CFR levels out below 1% heads should roll.
The truth will out when the flu and pneumonia death figures for the year are released. Flu currently kills on average about 17,000 people per year in England, occurring largely in the same quarter of the year as covid-19. If the recorded flu figures are significantly reduced for the year then it’s likely a large number of covid-19 deaths have been misrecorded. Please don’t shout ‘they were tested’ because it’s perfectly possible to die of flu or pneumonia whilst covid-19 tests as being present.
You’re a bit late, the figures are compiled weekly, and there are already 28,000 to 48,000 excess deaths.
Here’s the flu report:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/882403/National_influenza_report_30_April_2020_week_18.pdf
Here are the general mortality figures:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsregisteredweeklyinenglandandwalesprovisional/weekending17april2020
Here is the Continuous Mortality Investigation of Institute and Faculty of Actuaries:
https://www.actuaries.org.uk/system/files/field/document/Mortality%20monitor%20Week%2016%202020%20v01%202020-04-28.pdf
And here is Latest Excess Death Monitoring for Europe Week 15:
https://squonk.tk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/euromomo15.png
The ICL covid-19 model has been updated. The care home deaths which had not been counted were initially all added to a single day, creating a large spike and distorting the model’s output. Those deaths have now been reallocated to earlier dates where they belonged, correcting the distortion:
https://mrc-ide.github.io/covid19estimates/#/details/United_Kingdom
Posterior model estimates of percentage of total population infected as of 2020-05-02:
5.16% [4.00%-6.70%] (mean [95% credible interval]).
The UK’s Rt now looks to be about 0.7 and the UK’s restrictions along with voluntary social restraint seem to be among the more effective in Europe. The more careful we all are, the less infections and deaths there will be and the sooner restrictions can be relaxed and replaced with contact tracing and quarantine.
The UK’s government’s reluctance to act has already caused between 28,000 and 48,000 deaths; deaths will continue to accumulate over the coming months and are very unlikely to be contained below 100,000. But after a late start, and thanks to pressure from the scientific and medical community it seems we’re now on course to having covid-19 under control.
This is no time for complacency! Only around a twentieth of the population has been infected so far, so there is still scope for our epidemic to get twenty tines worse – anything up to a million deaths, and the unthinkable amount of suffering associated.
Rt before restrictions was around 4, so for infections to fall as fast as they rose it would have to be reduced from its current 0.7 to 0.25.
Reducing Rt to 0.25 would require hard lockdown with complete rearrangement of society – no shopping at all, food delivered to doorsteps, essential workers living at their place of work with quarantine and testing before being permitted to leave etc.
Since 0.7 is about 3 times 0.25, infections seem likely to decrease at about a third of the rate they increased. So my very rough guess at this early stage in the decrease is that we should get back to pre-lockdown levels by about late September to early October.
Re the model linked to, I can’t help thinking there’s something dodgy about it.
If you go to the menu line, and under countries you choose Germany from the drop down menu, you’ll see on the right the daily number of deaths. The models predictions more or less follows the actual number of deaths reported. How is it that the predicted number of deaths always follows the path of the actual number of deaths. Germany has 5 times less deaths per million than the UK, yet the predicted number of deaths graph for Germany takes more or less the same smoothing over the actual deaths as does the one for the UK. How can a model predict that the UK would respond poorly to a pandemic, whereas Germany would respond adequately? It looks even more bizarre if you choose Greece from the Countries drop down list. Greece’s deaths per million is about 30 time lower than the UKs, yet the predicted graph follows the actual number of deaths.
“Only around a twentieth of the population has been infected so far,”
How do you know this? A recent antibody test in New York had 12.3% of New York state infected, and 21% of New York city.
As best I understand it, the number of deaths is one of the main inputs, so of course it matches. We know the number of deaths much better than we know the number of infections. Rt, the number of infections, and the proportion infected are outputs.
– “How do you know this?”
The proportion infected is one of the model’s outputs.
– “A recent antibody test in New York had 12.3% of New York state infected, and 21% of New York city.”
A problem with such tests is that the sample isn’t random. Those ones may be; I don’t know, I’d have to look them up. But generally people get tested if they show symptoms, so you’re more likely to find positives. One tested all blood donors, but a high proportion of blood donors are medical professionals, and having high exposure to covid-19 a high proportion test positive. One in California advertised for subjects on Facebook, so of course people who suspected they had it applied, so it found lots of positives. And a lot of the antibody tests themselves are pretty unreliable.
But don’t take my word for any of this; go find the academic discussion about it and link to what you find and post comments here. You’ll be helping everyone understand, including me. That’s how science works, by putting our knowledge together, challenging each other’s theories and keeping only that which continues to stand. A load of commenters with anti-lockdown agendas are either trading experts’ sound bites as selected by anti-lockdown websites, or just trashing the science without even bothering to examine it first, and I can only do so much. They insist upon continually reposting disproven claims like the misclassification nonsense, clouding some people’s minds and wasting everyone’s time. A chorus of “that was already disproven” each time they repost it might silence their racket and we could move on to other points, like what might work better than current lockdown rules, eg. this:
– How to reopen society more quickly:
https://www.ft.com/content/5c208540-831c-11ea-b6e9-a94cffd1d9bf
Me, above: – “As best I understand it, the number of deaths is one of the main inputs”
The number of deaths is one of the main variable inputs. The model will also have constants, such as the duration of infection per simulated subject, the duration / period of infectiousness, the likelihood of death, various possible case histories with weightings. Some of these will have been derived from clinical data, and some from epidemiological datasets from countries and regions whose outbreak started earlier than the UK’s. So there will be an ongoing process of refinement as more data is accumulated.
You can download and read the human-readable form of the programme from the link at the top right of the page. It will include lots of comments that explain the actual programming code; you’ll probably find that quite explanatory too.
Hope that helps!
Its contagiousness is not that high as measles, but still is very high. The virus is contagious during the incubation period, during illness time, and yet it can survive on dry surfaces, up to three days on plastics and stainless steel. And another study is underway whether the virus can come back to life if it enters the human body after drying on the surface.
Its genome is 80 percent the same as the genome of SARS. This novel virus has “spikes” (receptor-binding proteins, RBD), but also it has small inserts in the RBD, similar to the most infectious forms of the influenza.
This modified RBD attacks human cells (binds with the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2, ACE2), like SARS does, but with the difference that it forms a very strong bond, thus known antibodies cannot bind to the proteins of the new coronavirus.
Of course, not everyone who receives the virus will become seriously ill. But I would compare current situation with a walk in a forest full of ticks. You can avoid the tick attack, or you can get it. It may get on your protective clothing, or it may get on your skin. You may notice and remove the tick, or it may bite you. In the end, the bite may cause red swelled spot on your skin, or it may cause encephalitis.
Mass testing and effective treatment are not yet available. Calls to disobey quarantine are as stupid as calls to not use seat belts in a car, justifying it by the low risk of death. And the argument that only the vulnerable will be seriously ill can be compared with the refusal to use a child seat in a car.
All the people in the world now have to drive along a new and very dangerous highway. We are asked to get on the road only if absolutely necessary, and please ‘fasten your belts’ and please ‘put your kids into child seats’.
– “Its genome is 80 percent the same as the genome of SARS”
WELL said Tatyana.
The biggest piece of corporate media propaganda was to popularise the term “coronavirus”, encouraging many people to think this was just another common cold. But of course the corporate media wants you back at work and out shopping; is the corporate media not funded by advertising?
If it needs a nickname it should be called SARS-2.
And all the quotes you get from Off-Guardian and UK Column – did they not merely republish nearly all of them from the corporate media? Oh, they selectively quote people with a lot of letters after their names, but count; how many of those quotes are from the scientific literature? My guess is a big fat zero. And you lot fell for it. Who’s the sheeple now, eh?
– “Calls to disobey quarantine are as stupid as calls to not use seat belts in a car, justifying it by the low risk of death. And the argument that only the vulnerable will be seriously ill can be compared with the refusal to use a child seat in a car.”
More excellent good sense; listen UP, conspiracy theorists; our Russian contributor puts you to shame.
It is SARS Covid-2. And chimpanzees and humans have 96% similarity in their genomes. An automobiles with or without seatbelts kill and maim more people than Sars Covid 2.
Dotterel
Yours is a typical false analogy. Automobiles, as you like to call them, have been with us many years and there is solid data as to how many people die with or without seat belts. Covid-19 is an evolving disease and we do not know yet how many people will die from it. Even so it is like saying that since say 10,000 die of a certain cause, we really should not worry about another cause because it is only causing 9000 deaths. Those will be additive.
Common sense tells me that among the people who get into car accidents, there are few housewives taking children to school or going to the supermarket. But there must be many people driving dangerously, exceeding speed, breaking the rules, believing that the road is a stage for self-expression and allowing themselves to drink while driving. All because the risk of getting into a fatal accident is low, they believe.
It’s not even worth mentioning that these dangerous drivers cause death to those innocent who have always fastened their seat belts. And to pedestrians. And even they crash into crowds of people.
Personal experience makes me agree with you Tatyana.
As a young man I did a lot of mountaineering, mostly with a University Club in Glasgow. Drivers of minibuses to weekend ‘meets’ were almost invariably males aged 21 – 25 and after two terms of experiencing their driving, I got myself accredited to at least mean if I killed myself it was solely my fault. The drivers were typical young men: speeding, slamming brakes on before sharp bends, and one rolled a 16 seater bus, piled high with rucsacs, on the first tight bend of the A82 main road from Glasgow to the Western Highlands. None of us were injured, but had a lorry come the other way, we were all mince meat, as the bus rolled onto the roof, on the wrong side of the road, and used friction as a braking device for about 300 yards. The driver had a first class honours degree, was registered for a PhD, so was not mentally subnormal in any way. They were just deficient in social responsibility….
Maybe 21st century young women are the same, but back in the 1980s, they were far safer.
But chimpanzees and humans have far bigger genomes, so their 4% difference is more than SARS 20% difference. And no, traffic doesn’t kill at anything like covid-19’s rate.
– “The total length of the human genome is over 3 billion base pairs”
4% = 120 million base pairs.
– “The final genome of sequenced SARS-CoV-2 consists of a single, positive-stranded RNA that is 29,811 nucleotides long”
20% = under 6000 base pairs.
Learn science! Then you might be able to help hold it to account.
Clark
The vast majority of primate genomes are non-coding.
The most important DNA homology regions are the coding regions (obviously there are some others too), which is much less than 3 billion base pairs.
Clark, thank you. Just one moment… What do you mean by “If it needs a nickname it should be called SARS-2” ?
It already has a nickname, and it is SARS-CoV-2
Maybe this name is inconvenient for articulation, that’s why they don’t use it in audio and video, but it is the most accurate written set of letters to use it as a unique identifier for searching the Internet.
We must understand that “coronavirus” is the name for the group of viruses, like family name. One of them, this one that we are getting in touch today, is SARS-CoV-2, like first name. And it causes in humans a disease called Covid-19, it is like job name.
Pray, folks, for never facing Covid-19 beta, or Covid-21 🙂
Also, we are lucky that coronaviruses are RNA viruses, not DNA viruses, otherwise they would penetrate the nucleus of our cells, like papillomas, herpes, etc. DNA viruses may leave parts of their genom in our DNA
SARS-CoV-2 is the scientific classification name of the virus, the second SARS virus.
CoVID-19 is scientific classification name of the illness it causes, which has been nicknamed “coronavirus” by the corporate media. Let’s take the matter into our own hands and call it what it is, SARS 2, or at least stop calling it “coronavirus”.
– “Just one moment…”
Serendipity. I was just about to go off-line. Bye for now, Love and Rage:
https://rebellion.earth/
Clark
As Tatyana said, let us call it by the approved scientific name SARS-Cov-2
The point of my post is that all the analogies are false! Let’s stick to facts.
SA, fine, but let’s stop using “coronavirus”; it trivialises it. It’s a type of SARS.
Clark, the term ‘coronavirus’ is correct when they talk about the virus.
The term ‘SARS’ is correct when they talk about the illness, it is abbreviation for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.
“Coronavirus” is correct, but it’s very broad, and what coronaviruses are best know for is the common cold. From comments I have read here, I am sure that helps trivialise covid-19, eg:
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/04/backing-the-wrong-horseman/comment-page-5/#comment-939423
– “There is a small number of people with COVID-19. The figures are manipulated to make it seem bigger. So anybody with any strain of coronavirus goes down as COVID-19. Some coronaviruses have been around for more than a decade.”
So counting common colds as covid-19 has supposedly tripled the overall death rate.
Blue Dotterel, I apologise. There’s so much trivialisation converging on this site I’m probably getting too impulsive.
Tatyana, there are very many Coronavirus variants, just as their are dozens of Human Papillomaviruses (quite a few of them are associated with cervical cancer, the two most prevalent being HPVs 16 and 18).
Almost all viral families have several variants, but the press tend to keep things simple.
If I told you that HPV1 will give you a wart, but nothing else, but HPV16 could give you cancer, would you reckon it important to distinguish between the two?
The funniest thing is the plethora of ‘experts’ with letters after their name, PhD, MD, etc, all ‘bought off the shelf’ for a few bucks 😉
Off-Guardian and UK Column have been trawling the corporate media, snipping out the bits they like (cherry picking), and simply reposting. Some of the PhDs and MDs probably got paid for their contributions in the corporate media, and certainly for their stuff that got published by PR companies, but Off-Guardian and UK Column just repost it under the “fair use” copyright exemption.
It is called ‘office politics’.
If the general public knew the difference between cancer research propaganda and cancer research truth, most of you lot would have your hair stand on end…..
The fatality rate in Scotland has been >8% of the UK total for five straight days. Average of 11.1%. We’re catching up. The current level of lockdown will take out a fixed percentage of the population, it’s just a matter of how long. Best to relax the restrictions a bit and let the virus rip. This isn’t callous it’s just recognition of the inevitable.
The optimum position would be relaxation of restrictions to a degree one increment below that where the NHS is strained to cope.
Indefinite continuation of the current level of lockdown will take us into the next flue season without an optimum degree of immunity amongst the vast bulk of the population for whom the virus is survivable.
Viv, some areas around Bergamo did eventually, probably , go into self-limited by herd immunity mode (rumoured village swab testing for nCov-19 tracing coming up with > 61% positive)
Bergamo model isn’t necessarily the ideal, tho’ the other local factors of highest particulate pollution in Europe, age-mixing population, and the ongoing murder investigations into care-homes being used for overwhelmed hospital-discharged elderly might have been equally as relevant.
Is SAGE thinking widely enough yet?, which ‘nudge’ is going to prevail?
Answers are sure to be available in about a year…..I was amazed this morning on Marr when the ONS spokesperson refused to recognise UK as a whole as having suffered worse than anywhere else in wider Europe. After all, hindsight isn’t needed to prepare for such a pandemic when you can see the near-future happening in parallel in numerous other countries(1). They don’t acknowledge this, why?
Dunno, maybe British bluster and inefficiency, blame of foreign hobgoblins, CYA jobsworth Peter principle managerial culture and above-all the ‘austerity’ of the things that were supposed to be sold to Trumpland as part of the exit-uplands….
(1) https://www.ft.com/coronavirusfree graphs like
https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/http%3A%2F%2Fcom.ft.imagepublish.upp-prod-eu.s3.amazonaws.com%2F88648bde-8cbc-11ea-9e12-0d4655dbd44f?fit=scale-down&quality=highest&source=next&width=700
UK is still around ten days behind Italy, but still highest in europe deaths, whilst still including only *tested* numbers, Italy might be over-counting, whilst UK is ‘highly likely’ to be undercounting
What is truly insane is that the government has mobilised huge resources to construct ‘Nightingale Hospitals’ to cope of the effect of a major leak by building large soakaways, instead of dedicating resources to mending the leak by early recognition of all cases and quarantining them. The nightingale hospitals have not so far been needed, but the government is thinking of dismantling them. Why not use them as quarantines for the mild cases, to prevent further spread? It would also give a chance to try and follow mild cases who then develop serious disease, which may be a key to understand why some develop mild disease and others die.
why not to use them for testing of air passengers coming into the country, two days and they are free to go or held in quarantine.
The only preparation this Government excelled at is to build morgues, ready for the bodies they expected. If they dismantle the Nightingale hospital in the Excel centre they can organise and relieve the lock down with an arms fair, marking their territory by providing more death abroad.
“The nightingale hospitals have not so far been needed,
SA.
The London based Nightingale hospital has been used, though not to capacity. In Scotland the Louisa Jordan hospital might not need to be used, as ICU patients are down. I agree it would be foolish to dismantle any of those hospitals now, indeed theyre fully kitted out with pharmacies, and could be used for other medical emergencies if required.
I’m under the impression that those with Covid-19 symptoms are to self-isolate in their own homes, using what could be vital bed space in the field hospitals would be an unwise thing to do.
RoS
Those who ‘self-isolate’ at home are the source of continued infection and will infect their families, this is the constant leak that needs to be suppressed. Maybe they don’t need hospitals, empty hotels will do, but if the hospitals are there and idle why not use them. Some of those mild cases progress to severe cases and this will also mean that the clinical course of the disease can be followed more closely and something learnt about why some progress and others don’t.
“Those who ‘self-isolate’ at home are the source of continued infection and will infect their families, this is the constant leak that needs to be suppressed. ”
SA.
Yes they’ll infect their family at home, that’s why the family has to isolate as well, this common knowledge SA. Its been broadcast umpteen times daily.
Its only the severe cases that follow on to ICU, by the time your plan of isolating the individual to God knows where is implemented its too late, the rest of the family will have already been infected that’s why all need to self isolate together.
RoS
“Its only the severe cases that follow on to ICU”
Did you really write this without thinking? And the severe cases where do they come from, and have you not heard that one person can get it mildly then transmit it to somebody else who dies? If the biggest reservoir of the disease is the mildly symptomatic then you have to stop that leak. Did you not read that Johnson started off being mild then went to hospital after becoming severe?
And yes what you say is a self fulfilling prophecy: if they all stay together they will all get infected ultimately and some of them will die. That’s OK then as long as we can keep our nightingale hospitals free.
Matt Hancock has already said that the Nightingale Units will only be used for their intended purpose and not for any other reason.
It is all about PR. The vast majority of the public are so ignorant that the government can get away with absolute murder.
You only have to look at the reality of getting home deliveries for elderly people from supermarkets to understand in 5 days the difference between truth and media propaganda.
Coronavirus: Half world’s workers may see livelihood destroyed
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52474849
From the UN.
On the planet I live on, this is going to end very, very badly.
Remember, stay at home. And don’t forget to clap on Thursdays.
And the 1%of rich will watch them die slowly of hunger, whilst feasting on very expensive food. Those who have land and seeds will just about make ends meet, but the unprepared, thats our Government, will sacrifice everything just to look good.
A hralth emergency is not a war, it does not cancel election, so we are going to be allowed to vote for the ted Tories next time? Because their leadet is a “safe hand’/wet blanket/unprofessional lawyer….
Of course they do.
When will the chatterati wake up and realise that that was the plan all along?
Starve you all to a position that you have to have a fire sale of assets. Then the vultures swoop and take everything off you.
Let me give you an example Clark. If someone remarks everyone’s hair is getting long, in some cases hilariously so, that many are starting to look like refugees from the seventies. You’d jump on them and say I suppose you want to end the lockdown, open shops and thus kill x billions of people. I’m asking you to ratchet down the attack mode a notch or two, it’s ugly and counter-productive, inhibiting.
The more we are able to make our peace and accept that we could die from this virus, rather than via an accident, debillitating illness or old age, we would have more time to guide our local cllrs. into a more sustainable policy making process by encouraging NVDA and civil disobedience.
Lets face it we are complying, arguing about numbers and models, because we dont trust the system anymore and are scared of dying ourselves.
Eye tests are also an issue, so is dry cleaning of jackets.
There is an argument to ban wearing anything needing dry cleaning because you will end up with disgustingly dirty clothes that you cannot get cleaned.
Some are adapting, some are not. Some fish n chips shops, pubs and restaurants are now becoming home delivery services, others have just shut up shop.
I woke up this morning to a world in which my neighbours could say “oh, but you would say that wouldn’t you, you being a Science type” (I trained at Imperial College so the models of Neil Ferguson, Gemma Nedjati-Giliani and Daniel Laydon hit close to home). COVID-19 CovidSim Model (SARS2) published to github, here:
COVID-19 CovidSim Model
Scientific Method requires full experimental transparency, and estimations of errors. The problem is not Science but rather the abuse of Science for profit. I understand Clark’s fervour on this topic. Science (absent bought “experiments” designed to further corporate agendas) is the best tool that we have when confronted by ideological opinions. Nobody owns the Scientific Method.
If you throw Science under the ideological bus, then welcome to a return to the Middle Ages, it could arise more quickly than you would imagine. You might be surprised at how much policy is already decided by appeal to religious nuts around the world.
I too trained and practiced cancer research for a decade, working in adjacent labs to research groups of several Nobel Prize winners (the latest being Professor Peter Ratcliffe).
I also spent several years doing formal due diligence on the assertions of top medical- and biological research professors and as a result of that I know full well that you do not trust what anyone says without checking it out first. Authority is the very last thing you should rely upon. ‘Show me the evidence’ is your first retort to flight to authority.
Ferguson at ICSM is a seriously flawed individual but for some reason he is on the gravy train. Bill Gates’ funding may have something to do with that. His ‘modelling’ is almost always full of assumptions that turn out to be wrong, simply because no data existed when he made his assertions. It is like parents saying ‘my two year old is going to go to Harvard’. They may do, but the evidence to back that up is seriously lacking.
The ‘assignment’ of ‘Covid19’ as a cause of death is shameless, unprincipled and lacking medical evidence. Anyone and everyone is ‘dying of CoVid19’, simply because the propagandists demand that the numbers be as high and terrifying as possible. Enormous numbers are dying of pre-existing conditions, they just happen to have SARS-CoV2 virus picked up in PCR tests. Any doctor who says that assignment of cause of death is currently rigorous should be warned as to the consequences of Hippocratic oath perjury….
Scientists operate by winning grants, much of which is a political game with pre-determined outcomes (climate science, anyone?) Different arenas of science have sold their souls to greater degrees, the worst being climate and medical modellers. Modelling is an absolutely worthless source of policy making, since almost invariably, the sheer number of assumptions implicit in models means that you cannot rely on them in any way. Anyone who has compared predictions to outcomes over the past 30 years knows that to be true.
The non-scientists amongst readers here should change their mindset to ‘we need to develop the ability to find reliable ways to test the assertions of ‘experts’.’ The best sources are people no longer in the grant-winning game.
He can’t help it as its due to the ancestral madness!
What Dave is saying is that I’m Jewish:
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/forums/topic/engineering-prof-releases-draft-report-on-9-11-collapse-of-wtc-bldg-7-in-nyc/#post-47480
Sorry I read something about hair. Am I missing something?
Tony M – “I’m asking you to ratchet down the attack mode a notch or two”
“I don’t mind people acting like idiots so long as they don’t mind me taking the piss out of them.”
Jake Thackray.
Not been on this site for a while as have had Coronavirus. Got Ill on 11 March and am slowly recovering. Still have the cough and exhaustion. It knocked me for six and affected my kidneys as well as my breathing. I’m anti war but this disease is appalling too and we don’t know the long term effects. After more than 6 weeks, I still feel shit most days, struggling to get up and do anything other than lie on the sofa. I’m 57 and don’t have any diagnosed conditions. I am very thin as lost a lot of weight but was not overweight before I got it. My belief is that this is a man made virus that has mutated and is still mutating and possibly getting more aggressive. I don’t think lockdown will help. It just delays the inevitable and causes other deaths. Take care all.
Not only are the figures inflated by misdiagnosis but by mistreatment too as I understand in New York there is a financial incentive to kill patients on ventilators rather than treat them with oxygen. Also the crisis is designed to fast track a (counter-productive) vaccine, instead of treating the illness with proper diet, exercise and sunshine and the correct medicine, which is being withheld.
What is the correct medicine? I’m interested because I keep relapsing.
Ros Thorpe, I’m sorry you had that dreadful experience. I wish you the best speedy recovery.
You say “I keep relapsing”… just to check if the latest news are true – do you get treatment with interferons? Has your doctor ordered you to take medications to support immune system?
This could explain the relapse, as interferon increases the expression of ACE2, exactly what is the target for the virus.
If only! No treatment at all. When I say relapsing, I don’t get the fever but cough gets worse and feel really tired.
I do not feel entitled to give advice, I am not a doctor. But after illness we restore the health with simple folk remedies – hot tea/hot milk, frequent ventilation of the home and an air humidifier, exercise. Weight loss may require enhanced nutrition and vitamins. Take care.
Ros Thorpe, many get it worse than you; yours is what’s classified as ‘mild’. Those who get it worse need hospital care. The lockdown is to slow down the spread and thereby prevent there being ten times as many as hospitals can treat.
Sorry, I can’t offer medical advice, but I hope it comes back less and less. Relapses as you’ve described are a known attribute of covid-19.
I hope you feel better soon.
I hope you get better soon, too.
I also hope it doesn’t distress you too much that the usual denialists are telling you that it’s a hoax.
Hi,
I would like to add some information published on a German website by an medical expert:
https://multipolar-magazin.de/?locale=en
the article explains, why many more African and Asian people die,
they die from the medicine and not from covid19.
this falsifies the numbers from the us.
In Germany more and more people resist against the lockdown, because constitutional rights are denied.
Kind regards,
Jutta
In Germany there is a constitutional right to assembly and protests naturally must bring people out of widespread isolation. Different states have different rules in place. Speaking of one Germany is a little misleading here. In Berlin methods used to pin protesting pensioners to the floor while processing them raised a swell of opposition as videos escaped the initial MSM lockdown. With a policeman to a limb and several more to keep the crowd at bay the accusations of brutality were unsurprising. There are other perspectives here of course – since the same hold down technique is used in psychiatric institutions and the state seems to have taken the line that opposition is bordering on mental instability. The end result was also that struggling pensioners did not get dropped and hurt, and were prevented from doing themselves harm as they resisted… so these competing viewpoints of the protest are currently much debated in Bavaria. The pensioners were not violent. They were recalcitrant and loud, and to an extent they won: Bavaria has affirmed that the right to assembly for the purpose of protest is absolutely in place, and so it shall remain. It is widely accepted that arrest for holding a cardboard sign while standing far from others was excessive. It is also worthy of note that the constitution of Germany makes it an explicit DUTY of every citizen to oppose injustice.
It is widely accepted that arrest for holding a cardboard sign while standing far from others was excessive.
British lockdown measures make it an arrestable offence for more than 2 people to meet in a public place even if they keep 2 metres apart. This makes effective protest impossible. Perhaps some supporters of lockdown would explain the reasoning behind this measure.
Maybe it’s got something to do with non-essential travel during a pandemic.
No, that can’t explain it. If a couple go out for their permitted daily excercise, they are not allowed to stop and speak to a third person who may also be out for the same reason
Your response makes no sense, no offence intended. If one is allowed to go out for exercise once a day even during a supposed lockdown, late and weak and flimsy as it is, surely going out on an organised protest cannot meet even that weak criteria.
If people keep taking the mickey, so to speak, it makes draconian rules the only alternative.
Go out , and save lives!
Plenty of people are now out exercising being much closer than 2 metres apart. Cyclists out together. Parents running with their children. Folks taking their dogs for a walk.
Getting exercise is a far better prophylactic than social-distancing. Sunlight, healthy exercise and a vitamin-rich diet is what is needed.
As for the over 80s, I am currently on a live experiment with my own parents and I can say with certainty that radical transformations in vigour and alertness can be achieved using dietary triggers.
All the following are tolerated well by the over 85s and work wonders:
1. Fresh fruit smoothies.
2. Oatcakes (energy released over a 2hr period).
3. Egg omelettes.
4. Grated carrot, sliced tomato, sliced cucumber, one lettuce leaf (Little Gem).
5. Freshly prepared vegetable soups (as summer continues using materials from the garden).
6. Tinned fruit with syrup juices.
7. Bananas, healthy yoghurts and soft cheeses.
8. Chocolate fingers (one half way between meals as an energy shot).
Simple practical tests with a variety of food soon gets you a weekly menu of variety which is healthy, edible by the elderly and balances energy, vitamins, minerals and protein.
Jutta Hempel, thank you for the post and the link.
It is one of the best papers on the subject I’ve read. As a South African, I am particularly interested and concerned about the greater incidence of the disease on various different ethnic groups and the potential for disaster if chloroquine is used to treat people with the enzyme deficiency detailed in the article.
The weather’s damp and cold, the TV programming is dire and we have an epidemic so locked in, locked down etc. *
Get me outta here to somewhere warm and sunny, where there are no worries and where others are kind and thoughtful. Utopia?
Fortunately, though, I’m not locked up like Julian. I wonder how he is and whether he has had any visitors. Trust Ms Baraitser and co are all OK in their salubrious dwellings.
Earlier I commented that the Tory party U-turn away from letting covid-19 burn through the population to imposing restrictions was because they realised it would kill more of their voters than the opposition’s among younger people.
But maybe they were warned that deliberately letting it kill would lay them open to lawsuits from families of the deceased.
What you mean Clark is that the Tories have went from being insidious to incompetent, either way they surely must be held to account with regards to their handling of this pandemic.
But like I said on a previous page, a years late and over budget inquiry on the matter will see no significant conclusions on who’s to blame.
Still we’ve now witnessed first hand just how far the nefarious Tories will go, weeding and cutting will be on their agenda for decades to come.
Would it be a stretch of the imagination to say that Corbyn would’ve handled this pandemic any better? In my opinion it wouldn’t, but that ships sunk, holed by Labours neoliberals, the media, and those obsessed with leaving the EU.
If it’s true to say that Corbyn could not have done a worse job than Johnson with regards to this pandemic, would it also be true, that more lives could’ve been saved if he were PM now?
Clark says: “Why has the death rate tripled, John? In multiple countries. Is it even possible that misclassification can triple the death rate? Those are scientific questions, because the answers help illuminate what we’re dealing with.”
Clark has been boasting about the importance of science so I thought I would check out the government figures, which is what researchers do in the absence of scientists to help them.
The mortality statistics for January to March 20, 2019 are given as 134,337. There is an explanatory note that this is five thousand fewer than the five year average 2014-2018 for this quarter. So it was an anomalous year.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/quarterlymortalityreports/januarytomarch2019
Mortality statistics are generally presented quarterly. There is however (including the COVID-19 spike) a large increase this year over the 5 year average.
“Looking at the year-to-date (using the most up-to-date data we have available), the number of deaths is currently higher than the five-year average. The current number of deaths is 207,301, which is 22,085 more than the five-year average. Of the deaths registered by 17 April 2020, 19,112 mentioned the coronavirus (COVID-19) on the death certificate; this is 9.2% of all deaths.”
If the epidemic has plateaued, as most countries are seeing now, the average for the next quarter should fall.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsregisteredweeklyinenglandandwalesprovisional/weekending17april2020
Getting a grasp of statistics might help prevent the propaganda of “scientific questions” like “Why has the death rate tripled?” when it clearly hasn’t.
Give one another a hug. And not one of those virtual hugs. Let’s get back to normal before normality becomes something totally different from what’s normal.
The pandemic has only plateaued ‘cos everywhere has imposed social and travel restrictions.
That would be everywhere except Sweden.
Or everywhere except Sweden, Iceland, Taiwan, Belarus, Japan and South Korea
“Or everywhere except Sweden, Iceland, Taiwan, Belarus, Japan and South Korea”
Loony.
Taiwan and South Korea have had very strict testing policies in place from early on in the outbreak.
Theyve had downloadable apps on the contagion for a wee while as well, updating them on areas and apartment blocks that have residents with the virus, and telling them not to go there. They’ve tested folk at airports and people entering the workplace from a very early stage, unlike the UK.
Though you are correct about Japan, and Sweden the latter now seeing a rise in Covid-19 cases.
You are mistaken, Loony. Sweden is not immune.
Since I never said that Sweden was immune I find it difficult to understand in what way I am mistaken.
What I in fact said was that Sweden has issued no stay at home orders.
They have made social distancing measures, but as you say no lockdown. Perhaps that is why it has a higher death rate than all the other Nordic countries put together.
Are you doubting this pandemic is real, Loony? Perhaps you think it’s a hoax like your messiah Trump used to, or that it will all magically vanish by itself?
– “Sweden has issued no stay at home orders”
Yet the vast majority are staying home nonetheless. This is because they have more trust in their government, which has merely asked them to stay at home. Sweden also has closed high schools, universities and cinemas etc. and has banned mass gatherings. Nevertheless, infections continue to rise in Sweden.
Iceland:
As of 18 March, the whole world is defined as a high risk area. All travel abroad is discouraged and residents in Iceland who are currently abroad are encouraged to return home as soon as possible. Residents in Iceland who arrive from abroad will now go into quarantine.
On 21 March, a stricter ban on public assemblies was put in place in Vestmannaeyjar. Assemblies there with more than 10 persons would now be prohibited. A still stricter ban was announced for the Húnaþing vestra district, where all inhabitants have been ordered to stay at home except to buy necessities.
From 00:00 on 24 March, a nation-wide ban on public assemblies over 20 took effect. All swimming pools, museums, libraries and bars closed, as did any businesses requiring a proximity of less than 2 m (hairdressers, tattoo artists, etc.)
And so on…
Evidence?
Do some research, find out what measures have been taken in the various countries.
I didn’t make the unqualified statement. I’ve already been pushed into research because of previous unqualified statements. Why don’t you do some research? 🙂 I would try not to make a statement about the reason Coronavirus-19 figures have plateaued (if they have) unless I had concrete evidence.
Since the plateau has taken place about three weeks after lockdown in each country that introduced it, wouldn’t you say the two might be related?
See here for each European country, starting with for example Germany:
https://mrc-ide.github.io/covid19estimates/#/details/Germany
John Goss – “I would try not to make a statement about the reason Coronavirus-19 figures have plateaued (if they have) unless I had concrete evidence.”
Yet you’ll encourage spreading the disease on no evidence at all.
John – as I wrote to you above, I simply cannot believe you are doing the dirty work for the likes of Trump, Bolsenaro, the “alt-right” fascists and acting as a stooge for the monied classes.
They _want_ you to believe there’s not a problem, they _want_ you to spread the message that it’s OK to run down to the shops and get back to work. They’re losing money! Do you think anyone in the airline industry, retail, live entertainment or the fossil fuel industry is happy about what’s going on? Do you think the government is happy to prop up the economy on credit, while tax returns plummet?
How can you think all the health workers are lying on behalf of the rich, whereas you can see through it all.
Perhaps you think the government of Cuba is “in on it” too?
http://en.granma.cu/
They seem to be taking Covid-19 seriously. Perhaps you should too.
John gives the following murderously stupid advice: “Give one another a hug.”
Why don’t you go down to your nearest major hospital, ask for the Covid-19 ward, and go in and do just that.
Only have the guts to do so, before you pass on such irresponsible nonsense to anyone else. What you’re engaged in is public endangerment. If you think you’re so right, then you’ll visit the hospital first like I suggested, just to make sure. Otherwise, you’re gambling with other people’s lives.
Totally unfair. I’ve said from the start that any advice to socially integrate excludes hospitals, care homes, old people’s homes and elderly and sick in the community. And your second sentence is a stupid suggestion. It is not the likes of Trump that is manipulating us but the likes of Bill Gates.
This virus spreads from social contact. I can’t believe it’s necessary to tell you this, but people contracted C-19 _before_ they went to hospital in the most part. That means they got it from going about their usual business.
If people followed your advice and went around hugging, then the disease becomes vastly more widespread. Foolhardy advice like that ensures lifting a lockdown will not work, because there are people like you who disregard social distancing.
Bill Gates? Give me a break! Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet, as Churchill himself said!
All viruses spread from social contact. This is a new strain, probably man-made, which it appears has been introduced to reduce the population by targeting the elderly and infirmed. Next year it will not be a new strain.
If people want to wear masks or other protective clothing, fine by me. There has never been anything like MSM wall-to-wall coverage of COVID-19 almost to the exclusion of all other news. They have certainly brainwashed some. But I’m not one of them. The purpose I am sure is to get people used to not assembling in groups. That way the tiny minority of globalists diminish people power. Wake up glenn-uk and everyone else. Don’t buy into this lie.
You need to wake up yourself, John – or at least wise up. What you are suggesting makes zero sense.
Some mysterious powers-that-be, you think, have cooked up this supposed hoax just to stop people protesting because they can no longer assemble.
Hmm. Well the ability to assemble never really caused the PTB much of a problem before, did it?
Regardless, the PTB managed to persuade every government in the world of every persuasion to wreck their own economies and go into huge debt, did they? Never mind you have no evidence at all for this. Never mind the WHO, the NHS, CDC and every health organisation in every country is – supposedly! – playing along.
Never mind the fact that huge, profitable industries are near collapse and the stock market has taken a huge plunge.
No – that’s all by the by. We cannot protest right now, and that’s the story – right?
Dear John,
Half an hour ago, I was waiting for the elevator, in my mask and gloves. And a neighbour came up, she was also masked. She asked me if she can use elevator together with me. I didn’t mind, but I was curious why the question at all. The neighbour told me there is a ‘contact’ person in our block, and she already contacted them. Potentially contagious, thanks for warning.
If I followed your hugging advice, I could get infected. Then, what about my son? What about my parents? Especially, my father whom I’m going to take from the hospital after a surgery?
See my response to glenn-uk
So dear Tatyana let’s get back to normal. It has made little difference whether there is lockdown or not. And South Korea is a prime example of a none lockdown country with a low death rate. It’s bad enough having to listen to all this BS from MSM, which never presents opinion from the learned experts who offer a different viewpoint, but it seems we have to listen to it all a second time from those who have been indoctrinated.
I don’t know what’s happening in Russia except that its infection started late. I have been very surprised that RT is playing along with it and wonder who has the clout over them. Epidemics have to run their course. Previous epidemics have run their course and sadly people have died. But they did not kill off everyone.
You will not see reason, John. Everything is based on your unshakable premise that it’s a massive conspiracy, and you fit in the pieces after that – even when there is zero evidence.
I showed you earlier how Cuba is working to battle C-19. You really think they’re in it too?
Of course, no evidence is needed that they are participating in a supposed hoax. You _know_ they must be, because you _know_ it’s a hoax. Probably the entire lack of evidence is proof itself on how effectively they’ve covered it up!
“John gives the following murderously stupid advice: “Give one another a hug.””
Surely not, I thought John was a pretty clued up guy. Doesn’t he realise that the buffoon Johnson almost died by shaking the hands of patients with Covid-19, the media adding that a Stalin type announcement of his demise was set to be drawn up.
Of course hugging someone who doesn’t appear to have symptoms won’t necessarily stop you contracting the virus, as some people can be asymptomatic.
No hugging just yet John, unless of course you stay in the same household, then it won’t really matter.
I’m surprised at him too, RoS.
Whenever I see something by John Goss I am always reminded that key CIA operative who helped set up JFK as a commie killling was Porter Goss ultimately to become its director.
I remember having a dispute with John.probebly over the Palme assassination. Probably about the Lockerbie disaster, likely being that a Palme associate was on the plane, and the target of the mass killing. a convenient agency false lead.
If you can’t remember what it was how can it be discussed. Lockerbie leaves a lot of unanswered questions. Bernt Carlsson appears to have been the target. Abdel Basset al Megrahi did not plant the bomb. Somebody did. And shamefully western governments let Abdel Basset al Megrahi rot in prison till cancer released him from prison and later from life. But I suppose the all-wise Trowbridge knows who did it.
Gosses underestimate me at their peril.
The Lockerbie disaster was caused bt Syrian arms dealer Monzor Al-Kassar, the guy who had the PLO hijack the Achille Lauro during which Leon Klinghoffer was deliberately murdered
No it was caused by a faulty cargo door opening at high altitude resulting in the immediate (3 seconds) destruction of the plane, as evidenced by absence of distress call from Captain, the cockpit detaching and knocking off engine 3 on cargo door side, and the fact Thatcher refused to hold a public enquiry at behest of US and to avoid lying never mentioned Lockerbie in her memoirs. See independent aircraft investigator John Barry Smith.
Never heard of investigator Smith, and obviously you have never read my article about it which the survivor of one of the victims posted on the web, or another article of mine on Veterans Today about how Thatcher’s obsession with secrecy was ultimately the primary cause of .her downfall
Up to 20 March there were 194 Covid deaths. Did you expect that number to have impact?
Well I suppose the family and friends of the 194 feel impacted.
John – There’s an interesting note in the second link you gave, viz:-
“A death can be registered with both COVID-19 and Influenza and Pneumonia mentioned on the death certificate. Because pneumonia may be a consequence of COVID-19, deaths where both were mentioned have been counted only in the COVID-19 category.”
Does that mean that if a death is registered with Covid 19 and Influenza, then the death is counted in both the Covid 19 total and the Influenza total? If it’s Covid 19 and Pneumonia, it’s counted as Covid 19 only.
I noticed that Franz B. Also if anybody dies of any virus suspected of being COVID-19 they have to put that on the death certificate. That does not apply to ‘flu’.
OT.
Hate to mention it, but since no here added it, I shall.
I predicted Bozo Johnson’s near death at St. Thomas’s on squonk’s closed down blog when the media was seeing it as just a precautionary measure.
The web is generally just a collection of fake news.