Tag Archives: coronavirus

You call that a plague? I’ll show you a plague

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If you want to know what the real thing is like, look at the following by James Hankins from Quillete: Social Distancing During the Black Death.

Every morning bodies of the dead—husbands, wives, children, servants—were pushed out into the street where they were piled on stretchers, later on carts. They were carried to the nearest church for a quick blessing, then trundled to graveyards outside the city for burial. As the death toll rose, traditional burial practices were abandoned. Deep trenches were dug into which bodies were dumped in layers with a thin covering of soil shoveled on top. Boccaccio writes that “no more respect was accorded the dead than would today be shown to dead goats.”

Like COVID-19, the disease spread with bewildering rapidity, but unlike in the modern pandemic, it infected everyone, young and old, rich and poor, not mainly the old and infirm. And again unlike the current virus, the effects of bubonic plague were particularly humiliating. Tumor-like growths as big as apples, called “bubos,” would appear in the groin or armpit. Gangrenous blotches would appear on hands and feet causing the skin to turn black and die. The victims would start coughing up blood, all their bodily fluids stank and their breath became putrid. “The stench of dead bodies, sickness and medicines seemed to fill and pollute the whole atmosphere.” There was no dying with dignity during the Black Death….

Everyone ran in panic from the sick. Neighbors shunned neighbors, relatives relatives. Children abandoned elderly parents and priests their flocks. Incredibly, “even fathers and mothers refused to nurse and assist their own children, as though they did not belong to them.” Some reacted by locking themselves up with a few friends in some comfortable place stocked with food and fine wines. They would entertain themselves with music and refuse to receive any news of the dead. Others, often those without the means to escape, became fatalistic and began looting the houses of the dead, stuffing themselves with food and drink, heedless of the risks of infection.

We really have become an addled civilisation. If we aren’t tougher than this, we will not survive whatever might be the outcome from the Chinese Flu of the moment.

The politics of the left has many ways to kill you

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This is just one. They do not care about you or anyone else at all. All they are interested in is power for themselves.

Personally I think it’s mostly politics but some people think it’s all politics. It’s getting harder to tell all the time.

Let me add this for further context: Time for a second opinion.

We are trying to stave off and arrest a pandemic. Given what is being recommended, we think we need some second or third opinions. This pandemic, now that it has reached America, has taken 3,173 lives here. This, from a tested population of 164,359 cases. That’s a mortality rate of 1.9%. But immediately, questions must be asked. We record every case of death from the coronavirus, but we have no idea how many people have had the coronavirus. Clearly, there are more than 164,359 cases because not everyone has been tested. That would put the mortality rate at less than 1.9%. That rate could be far, far less. As Eran Bendavid and Jay Bhattacharya, professors of medicine at Stanford, have written, based on their model of over 6 million cases they believe exist: “That’s a mortality rate of 0.01%, assuming a two-week lag between infection and death. This is one-tenth of the flu mortality rate of 0.1%.”

The data are American, of course, but could just as well be the death-to-infection rate everywhere.

“You know it is going away”

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“I want to keep the country calm.”

And there is then this, which you don’t hear very much about: Sweden’s Approach To Coronavirus: Do Nothing.

Sweden has taken a slightly different approach to coronavirus than the rest of the world, allowing life to go on as ‘normal’ with a few exceptions.

Unlike neighboring Denmark – which has restricted meetings to 10 people or less, Swedes are still going out to nightclubs, hanging out with friends, and even ‘enjoying ice creams beneath a giant Thor statue in Mariatorget square,’ according to the BBC.

Not only is it going away, for almost all of us it’s hardly been present, as discussed here: Some Much-Needed Coronavirus Perspective. The final paras:

Depending on how deadly the coronavirus actually turns out to be — and at the moment we have no idea — the cure could truly be worse than the disease.

Let’s be clear, we are not suggesting that the coronavirus isn’t a serious threat, requiring extraordinary measures. And we understand that deaths due to a lifetime of bad health habits are different from a death sentence that people can pass on to each other.

But in any situation, context matters. Unfortunately, that’s the one thing missing from the 24/7 coverage of the coronavirus pandemic.

The reality is that it is impossible to find anyone saying anything on the CV who does not have a personal agenda of their own.

May you live in idiotic times

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You want socialism we’ll give you socialism. This is the front page of The Oz this morning: DEPRESSION BUSTER with the headline all in caps just as you see. We are going to keep handing out money to people for not working and let them stay at home. Maybe this is what people really have always wanted. I wrote my own post last night but didn’t put it up and I, too, used caps, just like this. Here is my take on where we’re off to from last night. It was addressed to the Prime Minister.

WORSE THAN WHITLAM

If I hadn’t just listened to Steve Conroy present the Labor side of things on Andrew Bolt, I would not have known that they are even more absurd than you and your national cabinet. But I don’t really blame you since you are an economic simpleton. I blame those buffoons in Treasury who are giving you and your Treasurer this advice. They are your enemies. They are incompetent. Don’t you know that?

The important part of what first needed to happen was to ensure that no one runs out of purchasing power, which means that no one runs out of MONEY. This was not supposed to be an endless supply of cash unbacked by any productive activities. It was only supposed to be a stop-gap of a week or two and only for those who have been caught short of cash to spend.

If you think this kind of funding of unproductive activity can go on for even a couple of months, never mind six, you will go down in history as WORSE THAN WHITLAM.

I understand that such considerations have gone out of fashion, and are never mentioned in an economics text, but have you ever heard of this thing called the private sector? Do you understand the conception surrounding the notion of value added? If you do not do as much as possible to ensure that incomes are related to productivity, you are guaranteed to run the Australian economy off the rails. You will make the Liberal Party poison for a generation if not longer.

I am perfectly aware that governments skim billions that have been earned through actual value-adding work through taxation and other forms of revenue acquisition. I am just as aware that these tens of billions you gather in are spent on producing assets that never have a positive return on funds invested. The NBN, the train lines in Melbourne or the streetcars in Sydney are a sinkhole of loss that must be covered by actual value-adding projects in the private sector. The ratio of wages paid to value produced in the public sector is a massive negative. You guys have never managed a payroll in your lives which shows in almost every economic decision you make.

But to take these stupidities and extend them even farther is gross negligence. To fund the economy’s wages bill while you have shut down productive activity all across the continent is nuts.

We have eighteen dead from the Corona Virus. People are getting sick, and anyone of us, particularly our older citizens, might end up with this disease and some may die. But to crash and burn an economy because there might eventually be a few thousand of us caught up in this medical firestorm is so bizarrely disproportionate as to defy belief. Have you no sense?

Say you are doing everything you can to overcome this virus, and then do everything you can. There are cures coming, vaccines being developed to prevent its spread, forms of isolation and treatment on the way that will limit how much further the disease continues. Common sense ought to be the prime prerequisite for a Prime Minister. That is why we elected you, to make difficult decisions. People will die from the Corona Virus, that is a certainty. They will also die from incompetent economic decisions.

You must open the economy up as much as possible and do it as soon as possible. Everyone now knows they need to be careful of what they do. Everyone is aware of what they must keep an eye out for. But if you do not let us get back to work, you may ultimately be held responsible for the greatest economic disaster in Australian history.

Anyway, we shall see. We have become the stationary state that John Stuart Mill used to discuss and even looked forward to. All that for a subsequent post.

The coronavirus propaganda war

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If any facts have actually been established they are that the CV originated in Wuhan, China and that the Chinese authorities suppressed all information about its existence and its pandemic potential until eventually it had spread across the world. Another fact I will add is that the Chinese government is a totalitarian state in which all media is controlled. One should also bear in mind China’s social credit system if you are thinking about the way things are done in the People’s Republic. This is from The Age: The war within the war over coronavirus.

Five weeks into the outbreak of coronavirus in Wuhan, the World Health Organisation’s director general paid a visit to Beijing to understand the situation in China.

At the conclusion of Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus’ January 29 meeting with Xi Jinping in the Great Hall of the People, the Chinese government issued a statement.

“Hailing the high speed and massive scale of China’s moves […] rarely seen in the world, Tedros said it showed China’s efficiency and the advantages of China’s system,” the statement said. “The experience of China is worth learning for other countries…”

The endorsement of “China’s system” was incongruous: the Chinese Communist Party initially sought to hide the outbreak in Wuhan and punish the doctors who tried to raise the alarm.

By the time China’s government admitted the outbreak was happening, it had gone global. Now governments worldwide are on a “war” footing to contain the pandemic that has infected half a million people worldwide, killed more than 23,000 and threatens to destroy economies from the inside.

That is exactly how I understand what happened. The rest of the article is about how China and the US have engaged in a battle to determine who is at fault. As noted in the article:

Beijing has dialled up the volume and variety of messaging on coronavirus through diplomatic channels, state media and social media for weeks, to deflect blame for the outbreak and to try to position itself in the world’s eyes as the competent, generous problem-solver.

A quite interesting article from end to end with this as the conclusion:

Should China succeed in the global propaganda war around coronavirus, as it appears to be attempting, the CCP will have achieved a revision of history in real-time on the screens of social media users everywhere.

But this would be ironic, because as Bandurski says: “we cannot, or should not, forget the fact that the Chinese Communist Party’s obsession with perception over truth was actually how the saga of this global pandemic began.”

An obsession with the perception of truth is the farthest thing in the world from an obsession with actually knowing the truth. News media that present the Chinese side and slag Donald Trump’s efforts in America are no friends of our democratic and open way of life.

Attention Greg Hunt, you should listen to this

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Because we are all self-isolating we have been discussing things online, and then suddenly there was this in relation to a post on the Corona Virus by Phil Ruthven. A quite sensible post I might add, but that is, in this case, neither here nor there. In the midst of our online conversation among others was this.

Sue: I told Greg Hunt not to put Covid clinics at hospitals and guess what? Our first two deaths in Victoria were at the Alfred Hospital where they have a Covid-19 unit and they were cancer patients. Three staff so far have tested positive to the virus and 60 are now in self isolation………How can we function with 60 staff away from a hospital???

Always knew staying at home, ringing the Hotline and not going to either the hospital or to a GP was the solution …… We would come to you.

Me: That is an incredible story. I’m afraid I may not understand why you were in a position to tell Greg Hunt anything. How sensible you were. But why were you advising him?

Sue: Sadly I do not advise Greg Hunt but I just email and ring and generally annoy him and his staff constantly. It started nearly 5 weeks ago and it continues.

He is going to get another call on Monday to close down the Covid Clinics (which I also told him to do) because he cannot guarantee the safety of all other patients or the Alfred as I explained previously.

None of this is rocket science just common sense. I know of one girl who went to the Alfred suspecting she had Covid-19 and went through 5 people before she had a swab taken. That is way too much exposure to the staff. So I will be suggesting if you think you have Covid-19 you ring the Hotline, you do not go to your GP or to the hospital (unless you are very very unwell). We will come to you or set up a drive by and you can go there. We need to be smart because with increased exposure the staff can get into serious trouble themselves. (This is well documented internationally)

We also know of a RN from the Alfred who is not at work because she has had too much exposure – she is not happy. We also have a vested interest as we have a daughter who is a Doctor who because she does General Medicine is on the Front Line and we are very mindful of this. Same goes for all the Front Line nurses and anyone who cares for these patients.

All this sounds ultra-sensible. Why is this not being done in exactly the way Sue suggests?

A sampler of the politics of The Atlantic

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If you are interested in the politics of The Atlantic, let me present you with the final paras of this long and astonishingly inane article which I have just received: How the Pandemic Will End.

One could easily conceive of a world in which most of the nation believes that America defeated COVID-19. Despite his many lapses, Trump’s approval rating has surged. Imagine that he succeeds in diverting blame for the crisis to China, casting it as the villain and America as the resilient hero. During the second term of his presidency, the U.S. turns further inward and pulls out of NATO and other international alliances, builds actual and figurative walls, and disinvests in other nations. As Gen C grows up, foreign plagues replace communists and terrorists as the new generational threat.

One could also envisage a future in which America learns a different lesson. A communal spirit, ironically born through social distancing, causes people to turn outward, to neighbors both foreign and domestic. The election of November 2020 becomes a repudiation of “America first” politics. The nation pivots, as it did after World War II, from isolationism to international cooperation. Buoyed by steady investments and an influx of the brightest minds, the health-care workforce surges. Gen C kids write school essays about growing up to be epidemiologists. Public health becomes the centerpiece of foreign policy. The U.S. leads a new global partnership focused on solving challenges like pandemics and climate change.

In 2030, SARS-CoV-3 emerges from nowhere, and is brought to heel within a month.

It’s all politics on the left. Saving lives is the last thing on their minds.

A test of common sense, civility and courage

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The harm to our economies and our way of life because of the over-reaction to the Corona Virus is discussed today by Henry Ergas in The Australian: Coronavirus: It will be unhealthy to ignore the cost of all this.

While the response of federal and state governments to the spread of COVID-19 is understandable, there must be a danger of going too far.

To say that is certainly not to recommend an attitude of benign neglect. Nor is it to ignore the fact these are decisions being taken in the depths of uncertainty, where risks are hard to measure and errors could lead to disaster.

But it is no less a fact that some 430 people die in this country every day, so that since the beginning of the year there have been almost 37,000 deaths, of which 12 are due to the coronavirus.

And it is also a fact that, every day, decision-makers around Australia take decisions that balance life and death: not merely by determining how much we should spend on public health but also by assessing whether to spend taxpayers’ funds on making roads safer, reducing the risk of fires or strengthening the emergency services.

Inevitably, those decisions involve trade-offs: they require us to assess how much we are willing to give up so as to prevent a person dying sooner than they otherwise would.

He puts his finger right on the problem, that every life matters and if we can save but one life, etc etc etc.

It is undoubtedly true that decisions that involve balancing lives and costs are far easier to take when the life at issue is not likely to be your own. It is one thing to think in terms of trade-offs when those who will be affected are anonymous draws from a large population and quite another when it is a matter of family and friends.

But that is precisely why we so often delegate these decisions to others, from the physicians who assess whether it is worth undertaking a procedure on a grievously ill patient to the institutions that select, out of the many who desperately need them, the few who will receive donated organs.

These are tragic choices, and we know that they will be better taken at a distance, dispassionately weighing the consequences.

He finishes with this:

This crisis is … a test of common sense, civility and courage: the common sense to avoid taking decisions that we may regret for decades to come; the civility, in the term’s old meaning of “civil righteousness”, to be mindful of what we owe each other and prudent before inflicting costs on people who will struggle to bear them; and most of all, the courage to calmly confront, and ultimately defeat, an enemy who, as the Treasurer put it, flies no flag and has no face.

That enemy is deadly enough. It would be a disgrace if we made the harm it wreaks even greater than it needs to be.

Whenever this panic comes to an end and we return to something like normal, this will be remembered as a very odd episode in our history, along the lines, I believe, with the Salem Witch Trials from the supposed Dark Ages of our past.

Not the end but is it the beginning of the end?

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Did Nancy blink? Pelosi delays her coronavirus bill, says will try to pass Senate’s without most members present .

Is this why? Gallup: Trump Up to 49% Approval; 60% Approve of His Handling of the Chinese Flu

Is the Great Corona Virus miasma coming to an end? Dow Posts Record 2,100-Point Gain as Trump Sets Tentative Deadline to Reopen America

Are things coming right because of the President? Trump: Coronavirus crisis vindicates my policy arguments on immigration, trade and China policies

Would this have anything to do with it? Reflections on a Century of Junk Science

During the last few weeks, I had made a point of not watching or following the news. I trusted none of it. A TV at the pizza place, however, was tuned to CNN. It showed the Coronavirus death toll: 12,000-plus worldwide and 285 in the United States.

The numbers stunned me. Not following the news closely, I presumed, based on the hysteria in the air, that the numbers had to be at least ten times that high both nationally and internationally.

285? According to the Centers for Disease Control 185 Americans died of drug overdoses every day in 2018. According to the CDC, 315 people died of the flu every day during the six-month 2018-2019 flu season….

In my 2009 book, Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture, I documented a century’s worth of scientific misinformation, disinformation, half-truths, and lies disseminated almost inevitably to advance a progressive agenda.

The book, btw, is an antidote to quite alot of what’s been going around and not just of late.