covid question
Despite government and health authority claims to the contrary, the accumulated evidence from the SARS-CoV-2 'outbreak' earlier this year points to it being no more significant than a seasonal 'flu-like virus' in terms of its infection and mortality rate, and that the significant death toll 'from Covid-19' is primarily due to the effects of lockdowns.

Origins

You could be forgiven for thinking that this was a strange seasonal flu-like virus when it appeared 'out of nowhere' in mid to late March in Europe and the USA (note that it was almost non-existent in Australia and New Zealand where the weather was still warm). After all, flu-like viruses propagate best in winter months in the Northern Hemisphere when it is colder (viruses don't like heat).

There is strong evidence however that this virus was already present in Europe and the US at the normal time, as early as last November. French doctors have also confirmed (from blood samples retained from one patient) that the virus was present in France at that time. It has even been suggested by French media that international athletes who gathered at the World Military Games in Wuhan last October may have brought the virus back home with them. French daily Le Parisian, for example, wrote last month that several athletes complained of symptoms upon their return, and that in hindsight, "they may have contracted Covid-19".

Elodie Clouvel, a world champion modern pentathlete, was interviewed on local TV station Television Loire 7 on March 25th:
"I think that we have already had the coronavirus, well the Covid-19. We were in Wuhan for the World Military Games at the end of October. And afterwards, we all fell ill. A lot of athletes at the World Military Games were very ill. We were recently in touch with a military doctor who told us: 'I think you had it because a lot of people from this delegation were ill."
It also appears to have been present in Italy in November:
A "strange pneumonia" was circulating in northern Italy as long ago as November, weeks before doctors were made aware of the novel coronavirus outbreak in China, one of the European country's leading medical experts said this week.

"They [general practitioners] remember having seen very strange pneumonia, very severe, particularly in old people in December and even November," Giuseppe Remuzzi, the director of the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan, said in an interview with the National Public Radio of the United States.

"This means that the virus was circulating, at least in [the northern region of] Lombardy and before we were aware of this outbreak occurring in China."
It was also, very likely, present in the USA around this time:
David Hamer, an infectious diseases specialist at Boston Medical Center and professor of global health and medicine at the Boston University Schools of Public Health and Medicine also told Newsweek it is "plausible" the virus reached Western Europe and the U.S. earlier than January.

Hamer's colleagues at the Boston Medical Center treated patients in mid to late-February with an "unusual pneumonia," with chest scans characteristic of Covid-19, but without a known cause. "We therefore strongly suspect that the virus was circulating in Massachusetts in February," before the surge in cases in early March, he said.
A recent article in the Seattle Times also reported cases from Jan 1st:
"The state Department of Health is investigating whether thousands of deaths in Washington from respiratory illnesses were due to undiagnosed Covid-19, health officials said Thursday. Health officials have identified 3,000 deaths dating back to Jan. 1 that involved symptoms like pneumonia or acute respiratory syndrome, which are commonly associated with Covid-19."
While these stories have featured in mainstream media and been commented on by competent people, I have yet to find one person who has made the obvious connection; that not only was this virus present in the northern hemisphere last year, it was most likely widespread. Viruses do tend to spread among the population, especially coronaviruses, which are well known since the 1960s and cause, among other maladies, the common cold.

The likelihood that the virus was widespread late last year in the countries that, months later, went into lockdown raises an important point that brings the need for lockdowns into serious question: this virus was, apparently, not particularly notable, either for its infection or death rate. After all, if the 'pandemic' that was announced in mid-March was actually occurring since November, why didn't we hear about it? Why wasn't anything done about it? Why weren't hospitals 'inundated' with the sick and dying? Why no 24/7 coverage by the media? Indeed, why no lockdowns then to 'save lives'?

Of course, we all know from where and when the alarm was initially raised. Chinese authorities became aware of this strain of coronavirus sometime in December and notified the WHO in early January. In February 2020, the New York Times reported that a team at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the first to identify, analyze and name the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus, and upload it to public databases for scientists around the world to understand. On 19 February 2020, the lab released a letter on its website describing how they successfully obtained the whole virus genome: "On the evening of December 30, 2019, after receiving the unexplained pneumonia samples sent by Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital, our institute organized the strength overnight and worked for 72 hours to solve the problem. On January 2, 2020, the whole genome sequence of the new coronavirus was determined."

It's clear that the Chinese government was alarmed enough about this new strain to impose limited lockdown measures in different areas of the country as reported cases came in, but with a total of 4,634 deaths among a population of 1.4 billion people, this virus has since proven to be a veritable 'nothing-burger', at least for the Chinese. For context, there are between 84,200 to 92,000 flu-related deaths in China each year.

Despite the current scientific consensus that SARS-CoV-2 was not man-made, the idea that it is - a claim that has been made by several epidemiologists who have studied the virus' sequence (it is almost perfectly adapted to humans, a strange thing for a virus that is supposedly newly migrated from animals) - remains the only truly plausible explanation for why the Chinese government, and later the WHO and other governments, initially responded to it in the way they did.

Prior Knowledge

Among the dozens of seasonal flu-like viruses that circle the globe each year, not one of them has ever provoked the hysterical reactions that this novel coronavirus has, at least, not since the 1918 'Spanish flu', and even then there were no global lockdowns, despite the fact that it contributed to the deaths of up to 50 million people. This includes previous outbreaks of SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV in 2002 and 2012, both of which are very similar to SARS-CoV-2.

In the case of SARS-CoV-2 however, a "public health emergency" was declared almost simultaneously by the US and European governments, in mid-March, complete with dire warnings of half a million deaths in the UK and over 2 million in the USA. This was at a time when it was already well known as a result of China's experience that this virus was life-threatening almost exclusively to the elderly with serious underlying health conditions, a tiny percentage of any population. A BBC article on February 18th reported:
Health officials in China have published the first details of more than 44,000 cases of Covid-19, in the biggest study since the outbreak began. Data from the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CCDC) finds that more than 80% of the cases have been mild, with the sick and elderly most at risk.
On March 17th, three weeks after Italy began to lockdown, and one week before the UK lockdown, the Italian health authority knew that at least 99.2% of those who had died 'from' this virus had serious comorbidities. At least 50% of those had at least three. So why did the governments of the UK, France, Spain, Germany, the US etc. (I'm not even going to mention the idiotic Australian and NZ governments - just look at their statistics) decide, against all reason, to impose a punitive lockdown on their entire populations, in the process causing untold suffering and death (as we shall see) to so many?

The Deadly Lockdowns

While these governments (along with the ever-helpful mainstream media) have spent the last 3 months repeatedly hammering into the minds of their populations that tens of thousands of people have "died from Covid," this claim is not supported by the facts. The facts strongly suggest that the lockdowns were the primary source of these deaths.

Below is a graph produced with data from the UK's Office of National Statistics which show that deaths "from Covid" in England peaked around April 7th. The average delay from infection to time of death is 18.5 days.

UK peak deaths
This means that infections had peaked in the UK several days before lockdown was imposed. This means that lockdown had NO effect on the spread of the virus, because it had already spread widely in the population, had 'killed' all those it was ever going to kill, and was in the process of becoming extinct.

This conclusion has been validated by Bristol University's Professor Simon Wood, who used separate modelling to show the inferred daily infection rate and peak infection (graph below):

Peak infection Professor Simon Wood
Here's Spain's peak 'Covid' deaths on March 31st, 15 days after lockdown was imposed, meaning that peak infections had been reached at least 3 days before lockdown:

Spain covid peak deaths
Here's Italy's peak 'Covid' deaths on March 27th, 16 days after lockdown was imposed, meaning peak infections had been reached more than 2 days before lockdown:

Italy Peak Deaths
Here's New York City's peak 'Covid' deaths on April 7th, 16 days after lockdown ('stay at home' order) was imposed, meaning peak infections had been reached more than 2 days before lockdown:

NYC peak deaths
If the only negative aspect of lockdowns was that it did nothing to halt the spread of the virus, we might find some way to accept it as merely a bad policy decision and move on. But there is, at this point, overwhelming evidence that the lockdowns not only caused massive suffering among those confined to their houses for months, but that they were responsible for a significant number of the excess deaths. Evidence from deaths in UK care homes bears this out (see below) and may support the idea that the bulk of all excess deaths can be similarly attributed to the lockdown, not Covid. In addition to that, it is possible that some excess deaths attributed to Covid were also the result of the lockdown, not the virus.

Now, you might say that it's normal that deaths would peak about 18 days after peak infections, and that Covid was the cause, and you would be correct, if it were not for the fact some portion of the deaths represented in the above graphs are actually not directly related to Covid-19. At this point it is hard to say what portion exactly, but the evidence from death certificates and care homes dealt with below should give us cause for serious concern.

'With' Covid, Not 'From'

For the duration of this alleged pandemic, governments and media have been reporting deaths 'from Covid' as if those deaths were directly caused by the virus. But as statistics from multiple countries show, the vast majority of people who died 'from Covid' actually died from their serious underlying health conditions and, if present, Covid may have merely 'contributed' to these deaths, or not.

This scenario plays out every year with influenza and other seasonal flu-like viruses. The US Centers for Disease Control and the WHO estimates that up to 650,000 people died world wide from the flu last year. Why do they only 'estimate'? Because the flu is not categorized as a disease, and therefore cannot be recorded as the underlying cause of death on death certificates, and there is no widespread testing program for the flu. The reason for this is that the flu rarely, if ever, actually kills anyone. At most it is a 'complicating factor' and in no way the direct cause of anyone's death. No one 'dies from the flu', and doctors have known that for a long time.

The same is (or would) be true for SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19, if it were not for the fact that in early March, the WHO and the health authorities of major nations decided to 'upgrade' Covid-19 to a notifiable disease, thereby making it reportable on death certificates as the underlying cause of death. In addition, memos were sent by the respective health authorities to all attending physicians with new guidelines on how to fill in death certificates 'in a time of Covid'. The instructions were very clear that physicians were to write 'Covid-19' as the underlying cause of death if a patient had symptoms that matched that clinical diagnosis, regardless of whether or not the patient had been tested for Covid-19. Even in the cases where the symptoms were not consistent with Covid-19, (cancer or heart disease for example), if a patient tested positive, physicians were instructed to include Covid-19 as one of the circumstances leading to death.

This appears to have been a cynical move designed specifically to create the 'death rates' that have been shoved in our faces over the past 3 months, unnecessarily terrifying hundreds of millions of people and 'justifying' the lockdowns. Despite this, several medical experts and health officials have openly admitted that the death rates 'from Covid-19' are likely massively inflated. In a UK Telegraph article of March 23rd, Professor Walter Ricciardi, scientific adviser to Italy's minister of health, stated:
"The way in which we code deaths in our country is very generous in the sense that all the people who die in hospitals with the coronavirus are deemed to be dying of the coronavirus. On re-evaluation by the National Institute of Health, only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88 per cent of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity - many had two or three."
The truth about actual Covid-19 deaths in Italy is also true of the UK.

Speaking to the UK Telegraph recently, Professor Karol Sikora, a senior British oncologist, said doctors were sometimes too eager to put Covid-19 on death certificates. Prof Sikora said the virus would be mentioned on death certificates when there was "any hint" that it could have been the cause, without proof, as well as retrospectively over the phone.

Recently, the British National Health Service released data on deaths 'from Covid' in hospitals in England that appears to confirm this hypothesis. Rather than merely reporting total 'Covid deaths', the data is separated into 'Covid deaths' in patients with and without underlying health conditions, the latter being the true number of deaths from Covid-19 alone. Check it out below - and remember, the UK government is officially reporting a total of 40,000+ deaths 'from Covid-19'...

Covid-only deaths England hospitals
Care Home Slaughter

Despite the fact that it was known, or strongly suspected, that at least 80% of the population was essentially immune to this virus, and that it posed a serious risk to only a tiny percentage of the remaining 20% (vulnerable elderly), governments pushed ahead with lockdown policies that resulted in hundreds of millions of healthy and immune men, women and children being confined to their homes for months, with many suffering extreme anxiety and fear provoking a 'tsunami of mental illness'. In addition, serious damage had been done to the economies of many countries with the real effects still to manifest. But this is by no means the worst aspect of the draconian lockdowns.

Part of this reckless strategy involved radical measures to prepare hospitals, against all evidence, for a presumed 'influx of Covid patients of all ages'. Since younger people are deemed a more important human resource than the elderly, on government orders, the elderly in countries across Europe and several US states were discharged from hospitals where they were receiving treatment and placed back into care homes or private residences. There, in many cases, they were denied primary health care and, essentially, left to rot for more than two months, many with almost no human contact. The same was true for thousands of vulnerable elderly who were 'cocooned' in their own homes, too terrified by government propaganda to go to hospital when they needed to.

At the same time, given that this virus was already widespread in the population, and hospitals tend to be the primary source of infections, many residents were sent back to care homes having contracted the virus in hospital. Locked in these buildings, prevented from even opening windows, they much more effectively spread the virus to other residents who were in relatively good health. The fact that what little staff remained took few if any precautions (masks, gloves) simply ensured the virus spread more effectively among the vulnerable.
Care home scandal
The result has been a large spike in excess deaths in care homes and private residences beginning about a week after lockdown was imposed and continuing throughout April and May. Below are two graphs showing deaths with and without Covid mentioned on the death certificate in care homes and private residences in England and Wales during lockdown:

Deaths in care homes covid
Note that deaths in care homes where Covid is NOT mentioned significantly surpass those where Covid is mentioned. It should also be remembered that where Covid is mentioned, this does not necessarily mean Covid was the cause of death. Source: ONS data
Deaths at home covid
Note that deaths at home where Covid is NOT mentioned FAR surpass those where Covid is mentioned. Source: ONS data
The final death toll from the lockdown is still unknown, but we know that at least 50% of deaths 'from Covid' occurred in care homes in several countries (that number will likely increase) with the rest in hospitals (where infection was rife) and private residences. As of a few weeks ago, official data shows that 42% of all Covid-19 deaths have taken place in care facilities that house 0.62% of the U.S. population. In Pennsylvania, a shocking 70% of all 'Covid' deaths were in care homes. Almost all of the deaths are among the vulnerable elderly, the very people that the rest of the population was encouraged to 'save' by locking ourselves in our homes. The newly-formed 'Spanish Association for Victims and Those Affected by Covid-19' has recently filed a case with the International Criminal Court in the Hague against the Spanish Prime Minister for 'the genocide of 50,000 people' as a result of Spain's lockdown policy.

Health Care Denied - True 'Second Wave' To Come

What do you think would happen if the health care systems of major countries were suddenly shut down for several months? If the answer wasn't already obvious, it should be now, because that is precisely what happened beginning around the middle of March this year. As I've said, against all evidence and reason, governments were 'advised' that they should expect an influx of desperate 'Covid' patients of all ages, and needed to retool their health care systems in preparation. Apart from removing the (apparently expendable) elderly from hospitals, a majority of staff at many hospitals, clinics and GP offices were simply told to go home (for their own protection of course), elective surgeries were cancelled and many hospitals became virtual ghost towns in anticipation of an 'influx' that never came.

The combined effect of the incessant broadcasting of 'Covid terror' into people's homes and the furloughing of staff and cancelling of elective surgeries meant that many people with serious health issues were, like the residents of care homes, left to their own devices. And the result? Again, you might have to think hard about this one, but I'll help you out with some recent graphic statistics. First, attendances at Accidents & Emergencies departments in England:
Accident and Emergency attendances England Covid
A&E attendances dropped off a cliff right around the time that the 'Covid fear factor' began to be broadcast.
Next up is cancer surgeries in England. Note that this is representative of most countries that imposed harsh lockdowns.

Cancer surgeries cancelled covid.
Something weird happened around April...ah yes, that'll be the lockdown when we were all 'saving lives'.
Here's what happened to the waiting list for all surgeries in the UK. It's pretty clear that the lockdown is going to be killing people for several years to come...
Waitlist UK surgeries lockdown
And here's the global picture:
global surgeries cancelled lockdown
In a shocking indictment of the lockdown policy, Australia has seen a precipitous drop in cancer testing over the last few months, and this in a country of 20 million people that had a grand total of 102 'Covid deaths' over the past three months. And remember, like other nations, lockdown did nothing to stop the spread of this virus in the country. Would anyone like to hazard a guess at how many extra people are likely to die from undiagnosed and untreated cancer over the next few months in Oz, given that there were 144,000 new cancer cases last year and 50,000 deaths? Still worse is Oz's little brother, NZ, which had 1,500 cases and a whopping 22 'Covid deaths' over a 3-month period. Yet for some reason, 30,000 surgeries were called off to "prepare for a possible wave of Covid-19 cases - and to minimise contact"... for a virus that posed no threat to life to about 99.99% of the population.

Conclusion and the $64,000 Question

I'm aware that readers who may now be willing to question the official narrative about this viral episode will have more questions, and in particular the question of 'why?' If we can reasonably conclude that governments knew that this virus was no real threat and, indeed, little different to a seasonal flu in terms of infection and mortality rates and therefore no significant threat to anyone and not likely to 'inundate the health service', why did they pursue the policy of lockdowns with all of the disastrous and pernicious effects they would foreseeably cause?

It was clear from the beginning of this episode that the overt governments of this world were not in charge of Covid policy decisions, and these were being handed down to them by scientists and 'experts' under the aegis of the WHO. So to the question of 'why?' we must add 'who?' (no pun intended) and look further 'up' the hierarchy for the culprits. The problem with that is that, beyond the overt governments of this world there are merely faceless 'advisors' of different stripes and with different (and often competing) interests, so I have little hope of any real calling to account over this public health scandal.

That said, one thing I'm fairly sure of is that someone, somewhere, really wanted to stop the spread of this virus among the wider population to the greatest extent possible. The other thing I am very sure of is that their reason for doing so had nothing to do with the welfare of the ordinary people of this world.