Best of the Web:


People

Best of the Web: The effectiveness of social distancing on pandemic viral transmission


Viable Opposition
Wed, 01 Apr 2020 07:16 UTC
social distancing
Social distancing and self-quarantining are two concepts that the vast majority of people were not aware of prior to the current pandemic. As you will see in this posting, apparently these ideas that are new to us are not particularly new to the academic community. A recent early release Policy Review which is found on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website by Min W. Fong et al entitled "Nonpharmaceutical Measures for Pandemic Influenza in Nonhealthcare Settings - Social Distancing Measures" looks at the evidence-based research into the effectiveness of social distancing measures as a non pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) when battling an influenza pandemic. What I found particularly fascinating about this research is that it took place just prior to the current COVID-19 pandemic and yet it is very pertinent to our current global health situation.

Here is the abstract of the Policy Review that appears in the Emerging Infectious Diseases Journal Volume 26, Number 5 - May 2020:

emerging infectious diseases
The authors open with this:
"Experiences from previous influenza pandemics, in particular the 2009-10 pandemic, have demonstrated that we cannot expect to contain geographically the next influenza pandemic in the location it emerges, nor can we expect to prevent international spread of infection for more than a short period. Vaccines are not expected to be available during the early stage of the next pandemic, and stockpiles of antiviral drugs will be limited, mostly reserved for treating more severe illnesses and for patients at higher risk for influenza complications. Therefore, nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), such as social distancing, will be heavily relied on by health authorities to slow influenza transmission in the community..."

Comment: See also:

Read More...
Corona

Best of the Web: COVID-19 lockdown = Auto-genocide? Food shortages likely as US farmers dump MOUNTAINS and LAKES of food

David Yaffe-Bellany & Michael Corkery
New York Times
Sun, 12 Apr 2020 20:34 UTC

Comment: We are so screwed, it's not even funny.


onions food dumped covid-19
© Joseph Haeberle for The New York TimesA field of onions in Idaho waiting to be buried.
In Wisconsin and Ohio, farmers are dumping thousands of gallons of fresh milk into lagoons and manure pits. An Idaho farmer has dug huge ditches to bury 1 million pounds of onions. And in South Florida, a region that supplies much of the Eastern half of the United States with produce, tractors are crisscrossing bean and cabbage fields, plowing perfectly ripe vegetables back into the soil.

After weeks of concern about shortages in grocery stores and mad scrambles to find the last box of pasta or toilet paper roll, many of the nation's largest farms are struggling with another ghastly effect of the pandemic. They are being forced to destroy tens of millions of pounds of fresh food that they can no longer sell.

The closing of restaurants, hotels and schools has left some farmers with no buyers for more than half their crops. And even as retailers see spikes in food sales to Americans who are now eating nearly every meal at home, the increases are not enough to absorb all of the perishable food that was planted weeks ago and intended for schools and businesses.

The amount of waste is staggering. The nation's largest dairy cooperative, Dairy Farmers of America, estimates that farmers are dumping as many as 3.7 million gallons of milk each day. A single chicken processor is smashing 750,000 unhatched eggs every week.

Comment: It's even too expensive to be charitable.

Anyone remember all that liberal bourgeois posturing in the media about 'food waste' and what 'people' ought to do to not be so wasteful and thus 'save the planet'?

Do you realize what those same 'intellectuals' have done? They've broken key supply chains in the real economy. Unless there is a sudden end to this corona-spell - like, NOW - there is no 'coming back from this'. Civilization is hosed.

So how about a slow-clap round of applause for the global managers and reality-creators who thought it would be a good idea to capitalize on a virus that is no more fatal than the flu to 'reset the world' to their liking.

Good job guys; you bet the whole farm, and you lost.

Read More...
Red Pill

Best of the Web: Sweden enacted the world's sanest 'pandemic' response policy and it's paying off

John Fund
National Review
Sun, 12 Apr 2020 16:12 UTC

Comment: Sweden took the red pill. Whodathunkit?!


busy street stockholm coronavirus
© TT News Agency/Fredrik Sandberg via ReutersA street with less pedestrian traffic than usual as a result of the coronavirus outbreak in Stockholm, Sweden, April 1, 2020.
Unlike other countries, it has so far avoided both isolation and economic ruin.

If the COVID-19 pandemic tails off in a few weeks, months before the alarmists claim it will, they will probably pivot immediately and pat themselves on the back for the brilliant social-distancing controls that they imposed on the world. They will claim that their heroic recommendations averted total calamity. Unfortunately, they will be wrong; and Sweden, which has done almost no mandated social distancing, will probably prove them wrong.

Lots of people are rushing to discredit Sweden's approach, which relies more on calibrated precautions and isolating only the most vulnerable than on imposing a full lockdown. While gatherings of more than 50 people are prohibited and high schools and colleges are closed, Sweden has kept its borders open as well as its preschools, grade schools, bars, restaurants, parks, and shops.

President Trump has no use for Sweden's nuanced approach. Last Wednesday, he smeared it in a spectacular fashion by saying he'd heard that Sweden "gave it a shot, and they saw things that were really frightening, and they went immediately to shutting down the country." He and the public-health experts who told him this were wrong on both counts and would do better to question their approach. Johan Giesecke, Sweden's former chief epidemiologist and now adviser to the Swedish Health Agency, says that other nations "have taken political, unconsidered actions" that are not justified by the facts.
Read More...
Corona

Best of the Web: Coronavirus has been going around in California since DECEMBER, says government official

Paige St. John
LA Times
Sat, 11 Apr 2020 21:55 UTC

Comment: Thus the US joins Iran, Israel, the UK, Italy and France to all have had likely clusters of COVID-19 BEFORE Wuhan, China. Which means it is NOT 'the Chinese flu'; it merely means they were first to ID and name it. Which means Western govts only thought to 'lock down' their populations - largely for other internal political and economic reasons - AFTER they watched China's 'awesome' display of state power.

Wakey, wakey, sheeple.


surfer statue
© Reuters / Mike Blake
A man found dead in his house in early March. A woman who fell sick in mid-February and later died.

These early COVID-19 deaths in the San Francisco Bay Area suggest that the novel coronavirus had established itself in the community long before health officials started looking for it. The lag time has had dire consequences, allowing the virus to spread unchecked before social distancing rules went into effect.

"The virus was freewheeling in our community and probably has been here for quite some time," Dr. Jeff Smith, a physician who is the chief executive of Santa Clara County government, told county leaders in a recent briefing.

Comment: God bless Amir and all the other victims of COVID-19.

Some of them might have been saved with timelier intervention, given that it's now known that forcing air into their lungs is actually medical malpractice. Unfortunately, the 'heroes' in hospitals have unnecessarily killed a lot of people, but then they too have been caught in a web of hysteria that is completely out of all proportion to the threat this virus represents.

Read More...
Light Saber

Best of the Web: Meet the former NYT reporter who is challenging the coronavirus narrative

Adam Shaw
Fox News
Fri, 10 Apr 2020 06:31 UTC
Alex Berenson
© Alex BerensonFormer New York Times reporter Alex Berenson has been challenging narratives on the response to the coronavirus crisis.
As daily life across America is upended by the coronavirus crisis -- with mass business closures plunging the economy into freefall -- one former New York Times reporter is sounding the alarm about what he believes are flawed models dictating the aggressive strategy.

Alex Berenson has been analyzing the data on the crisis on a daily basis for weeks and has come to the conclusion that the strategy of shutting down entire sectors of the economy is based on modeling that doesn't line up with the realities of the virus.

"The response we have taken has caused enormous societal devastation, I don't think that's too strong a word," he told Fox News in an interview Thursday.

Berenson is a former reporter who worked for the Times from 1999 to 2010 primarily covering the pharmaceutical industry. He recently came to prominence again with a book, "Tell Your Children The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence," which challenged prevailing narratives on marijuana.

In the face of a broadening consensus on both the left and the libertarian right that sees marijuana as mostly healthy and even a positive in some circumstances, Berenson argued that the evidence instead shows a link between the drug and serious mental illness and an epidemic of violence.

Comment: Good to see more and more people questioning the narrative:

Read More...
Gold Seal

Best of the Web: The flickering flames of freedom - A letter to the future

James Corbett
Corbett Report
Sat, 11 Apr 2020 19:05 UTC
"The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time."

— WWI conspirator Edward Grey
Letter to the Future
© Corbett Report
I do not write these words for my contemporaries. We are the damned. It is our lot now to watch as the lamp of liberty is extinguished, our burden to bear witness to the final flickering of the flame of freedom.

No, I don't write these words for my peers; I write them for those yet to come. The inhabitants of that future dystopia whose birth pangs we are experiencing. The remnant of once-free humanity who might — through some miracle I can't even imagine — come across this electronic message in a bottle.

I know that it's almost hopeless. That the chance of these words surviving the coming internet purge are slim at best. That even if — against all odds — this message does wash up on your digital shores, that the chance of these words being understood by you is even slimmer. Not because you don't understand English, but because you no longer use these words I'm writing: Freedom. Humanity. Individual.

Still, I am here to record the end of an era. So I will press on in the hope against hope that someone, somewhere in that future Digital Dark Age will have eyes to see and ears to hear.

The darkness is descending.

Let there be no mistake: We all know this.
Read More...
Eagle

Best of the Web: Coronavirus the aftermath: A coming mega-depression and calamity upon the world's population

Peter Koenig
Global Research
Thu, 09 Apr 2020 00:00 UTC
covid-19-dollar
What will be next? Is a question on many people's minds. Very likely the world will never be the same again. That might be good, or not so good, depending on how we look at this disastrous, "pandemic" which by all serious accounts does not deserve the term "pandemic", that was unwittingly attributed to the SARS-2-CoV, or 2019-nCoV, renamed by WHO as COVID-19.

On March 11, Dr. Tedros, WHO's Director General called it a pandemic. This decision was already taken by the WEF (World Economic Forum) in Davos, from 20 -24 January 2020, when the total COVID19 cases outside of China were recorded by WHO as 150. On January 30, theWHO Director General determines that the outbreak outside of Mainland China constituted a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). This was a first indication that there was something not quite right, that there is another agenda behind the "outbreak" of the COVID-19 disease.

On March 26, in a peer-reviewed article in the highly reputed New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, one of the 27 institutes and centers that make up the US National Institutes of Health - NIH), likened COVID19 to a stronger than usual common flu:
If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.nejm.org
This scientific assessment in the New England Journal of Medicine has not prevented Dr. Fauci from saying exactly the opposite, when interviewed by the mainstream media: see below.

headlile covid19
Read More...
Magnify

Best of the Web: Covid-19 had us all fooled, but now we might have finally found its secret

libertymavenstock
Medium
Sun, 05 Apr 2020 18:54 UTC
coronavirus
In the last 3-5 days, a mountain of anecdotal evidence has come out of NYC, Italy, Spain, etc. about COVID-19 and characteristics of patients who get seriously ill. It's not only piling up but now leading to a general field-level consensus backed up by a few previously little-known studies that we've had it all wrong the whole time. Well, a few had some things eerily correct (cough Trump cough), especially with Hydroxychloroquine with Azithromicin, but we'll get to that in a minute.

There is no 'pneumonia' nor ARDS. At least not the ARDS with established treatment protocols and procedures we're familiar with. Ventilators are not only the wrong solution, but high pressure intubation can actually wind up causing more damage than without, not to mention complications from tracheal scarring and ulcers given the duration of intubation often required... They may still have a use in the immediate future for patients too far to bring back with this newfound knowledge, but moving forward a new treatment protocol needs to be established so we stop treating patients for the wrong disease.
Read More...
2 + 2 = 4

Best of the Web: Nobody knows anything: West doesn't trust China's Covid-19 data, but how meaningful are its own numbers?

Peter Andrews
RT
Fri, 10 Apr 2020 06:56 UTC
Wuhan China April 2020
© REUTERS/Aly SongWuhan, Hubei, China April 8, 2020
Whatever the eventual impact of the coronavirus, one thing has become apparent: when governments are the gatekeepers of data-gathering, there is no reliable source of information on the scale of the pandemic.

It did not take long for a war of information to break out over the true extent of Covid-19. Every morning, we wake up to the freshest figures for our own country. Another few hundred or thousand new cases, depending on where you live, and a fraction as many deaths. Every day, the colour-coded curves corresponding to the cases in various countries creep one day further into the future, like breakers approaching a beach.

But there is no way of comparing different countries' statistics, based as they are on processes so riddled with holes and flaws that they may as well be guesswork. Obviously, comparing Italy and Belarus is comparing apples with oranges - the populations and the timelines of the pandemics in these countries are wildly different, so inferring results from their response plans is pointless.

Comment: While each country uses different methods of testing and reporting, another more insidious issue is the concerted effort to inflate the number of infections and mortality rates in order to convince the masses that the police state measures being enforced are necessary.

Read More...
Health

Best of the Web: 'Patients need oxygen, not pressure!' New York city physician finds 'Covid-19 patients' is akin to high-altitude sickness, NOT pneumonia

John Whyte, MD, MPH; Cameron Kyle-Sidell, MD
Medscape
Mon, 06 Apr 2020 00:00 UTC
ventilator procedures Covid-19

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

John Whyte, MD, MPH: Hello. I'm Dr John Whyte, chief medical officer at WebMD. Welcome to "Coronavirus in Context." Today we're going to talk about whether we're managing coronavirus correctly; do we need to think about a change in our treatment regiments? My guest is Dr Cameron Kyle-Sidell. He's a physician trained in emergency medicine and critical care, and he practices at Maimonides in Brooklyn, New York. Welcome, Dr Sidell.

Cameron Kyle-Sidell, MD: Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me.

Whyte: You've been talking a lot about the number of patients, the percentage of patients dying on ventilators. When did you first notice this trend?

Kyle-Sidell: In preparation of opening what became a full COVID-positive intensive care unit, we scoured the data just to see what was out there — those who have experienced it before us, primarily the Chinese and the Italians; it was hard to find exactly, like the rate of what we call successful extubation — meaning, someone was put on a ventilator and taken off. And that data are still hard to find. I imagine there are a lot of people still on ventilators. But from the data we have available, it appears to be somewhere between 50% and 90%. Most published data puts it around 70%. So, that's a very, very high percentage in general, when one thinks of a medical disease.

Whyte: You've been talking on social media; you say you've seen things that you've never seen before. What are some of those things that you're seeing?

Comment: Watch Dr. Kyle-Sidell's video below - he thinks that the ventilators may be causing lung damage because of pressure:

See also:

Read More...