The controversial Ethiopian politician and Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, claimed in a press conference in early March that the fatality rate for the coronavirus was many multiples that of the fatality rate of the common flu. This egregiously false premise has led to the greatest panic in world history.

The Director General of the WHO spoke on March 3, 2020 and shared this related to the coronavirus:

While many people globally have built up immunity to seasonal flu strains, COVID-19 is a new virus to which no one has immunity. That means more people are susceptible to infection, and some will suffer severe disease.

Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died. By comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1% of those infected.

This statement led to the greatest panic in world history as the media all over the world shared and repeated that the coronavirus was many, many times more deadly than the common flu.

OK, here are my questions. We had a perfect petri-dish coronavirus disease (COVID-19) experiment with the cruise ship "Diamond Princess". That's the cruise ship that ended up in quarantine for a number of weeks after a number of people tested positive for the coronavirus. I got to wondering what the outcome of the experiment was.

So I dug around and found an analysis of the situation, with the catchy title of Estimating the infection and case fatality ratio for COVID-19 using age-adjusted data from the outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship(PDF), so I could see what the outcomes were.

As you might imagine, before they knew it was a problem, the epidemic raged on the ship, with infected crew members cooking and cleaning for the guests, people all eating together, close living quarters, lots of social interaction, and a generally older population. Seems like a perfect situation for an overwhelming majority of the passengers to become infected.

A jaw-dropping example of Ice Age architecture has been unearthed on Russia's forest steppe: a huge, circular structure built with the bones of at least 60 woolly mammoths. But exactly why hunter-gatherers enduring the frigid realities of life 25,000 years ago would construct the 40-foot diameter building is a fascinating question.


"Clearly a lot of time and effort went into building this structure so it was obviously important to the people that made it for some reason," says Alexander Pryor, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter (U.K.). He is the lead author of a new study published this week in the journal Antiquity describing the find at Kostenki, a place where many important Paleolithic sites lie clustered around the Don River.

Scientists in Australia say they have identified how the body's immune system fights the Covid-19 virus.

Their research, published in Nature Medicine journal on Tuesday, shows people are recovering from the new virus like they would from the flu.

Determining which immune cells are appearing should also help with vaccine development, experts say.


Globally, authorities have confirmed more than 160,000 cases of the coronavirus and about 6,500 deaths.

The US is dropping the much-hyped indictment for 'election meddling' against a company supposedly behind the so-called Russian troll farm, closing the opening chapter of special counsel Robert Mueller's Russiagate investigation.

Further pursuing the case against Concord Management & Consulting LLC, "promotes neither the interests of justice nor the nation's security," the Department of Justice wrote to the federal judge overseeing the case on Monday, in a motion to drop the charges.

DOJ lawyers cited "recent events and a change in the balance of the government's proof due to a classification determination," saying only that they submitted further details in a classified addendum.

What is the infamous ID2020? It is an alliance of public-private partners, including UN agencies and civil society. It's an electronic ID program that uses generalized vaccination as a platform for digital identity.

It seems, the more there is written about the causes of the Coronavirus - the more the written analyses are overshadowed by a propaganda and fear-mongering hype. Questions for the truth and arguments for where to look for the origins and how the virus may have spread and how to combat it, are lost in the noise of wanton chaos. But isn't that what the "Black Men" behind this intended pandemic want - chaos, panic, hopelessness, leading to human vulnerability - a people becoming easy prey for manipulation?

Today WHO declared the coronavirus COVID-19 a "pandemic" - when there is not the slightest trace of a pandemic. A pandemic might be the condition, when the death to infection rate reaches more than 12%. In Europe, the death rate is about 0.4%, or less. Except for Italy which is a special case, where the peak of the death rate was 6% (see below for further analysis).

Translated by Sott.net
There are dozens, hundreds even according to the photos, under the sun of this Sunday in March, going out for walks, strolling in the parks, going to the markets. All this would be a beautiful beginning of spring if on Saturday evening, the authorities had not asked everyone not to go out any more because of the coronavirus.

Prime Minister Édouard Philippe's appeal on Saturday evening was clear: in addition to closing down "non-essential" public places, the Prime Minister called on French men and women to assume their responsibilities, and to stop going out without good reason. "We must all together show more discipline in the application of these measures. We must avoid gathering as much as possible, and limit friendly and family gatherings," he explained.

In the post WWII years two cultural revolutions swept both Asian and western civilisations appearing on the surface to have distinct characteristics, yet each resulting in profound moral cultural decay.

In America and Europe, the rise of modernism in painting, music, philosophy and architecture were imposed upon academia and the arts which modern research has revealed to have been the work of the CIA and the Congress for Cultural Freedom. This paradigm shift in the arts was funded by western intelligence agencies who justified their artistic patronage with the logic that "if the new communist blocs were to be governed by iconoclasm and realism in the arts which put the state above all ideas of personal freedom, then the "democratic aesthetics" must take the polar opposite stance and promote only the unbounded freedom of individual expression devoid of any connection to the whole of society". One consequence of this shift was that the Ancient Greco-Roman aesthetics that defined America's architecture, painting, and general moral sensibilities was brutally amputated [1].

While the backdrop to this reform took the shape of McCarthyism in America, in China a parallel cultural reform occurred in 1949. This cultural movement saw the total rejection of Confucianism as a "relic of past elitism and corruption" which had no place in the Maoist vision for a newly reconstructed China.

Remember when we kicked off 2020 with that little WWIII scare in the Middle East? Oh how quaint all that seems now.

I was going to start off this week with a recap of the craziness that unfolded in recent days as full-on pandemic panic set in in the United States, but leave it to Twitter to come up with the pithiest summary: "What a year this last half hour has been."

That's one way of capturing the shock that many are experiencing right now. But more enlightening still are the responses to that tweet.

"Understatement of the year," one user replied, adding that "Every time you click [refresh], something unbelievable has happened. Literally every second."

Another user responded that "I have a friend who just shut everything off and went out into nature for a day because it was all going to be there when they came back."

Observed yet another: "So much has happened this evening, my mind is literally spinning....I can't keep it straight, and the market opening is 11 hours away..."

So what has got the Twitterati's heads spinning so furiously? A torrent of news about coronavirus that hit the American news media like a tsunami this past week, that's what.

Like the suspension of the NBA, NHL, NCAA Championships and just about every other major sporting event you can think of.

Or the shut down of numerous college campuses (including on-campus housing), which is already leading to riots.

Or the announcement that this or that celebrity has tested positive for the virus.

Or, oh yeah, the worst Wall Street crash since the Black Monday event that led to the creation of the Plunge Protection Team. And the impending shutdown of New York City. And the potential closing off of international borders.

You know, that kind of stuff.

Of course, every crisis has its silver lining: The producers of some of the most risible late night garbage, including Fallon, Colbert and Meyers, have announced they're suspending their shows for the rest of the month!

Yes, it has been a week of non-stop, wall-to-wall, over-the-top news that is enough to make even the sturdiest of information warriors feel queasy. It's not easy to look over the precipice of panic and not feel some vertigo from the view.

It's at times like these that people start worrying about their survival, and not without reason. Even if, as the cooked government numbers seem to indicate, you have nothing to fear from SARS-CoV-2 unless you're an octogenarian with a lung condition, there are still the very real martial law lockdowns and supply shortages and economic collapses to be concerned about.

Whatever your thoughts on what is and isn't really happening here, there no doubt that we're heading into a profound and long-lasting economic crisis, or that we're facing a dramatic change in the way we live our lives. And even the slowest of the slow understand by now that we're about to see a massive power grab by governments the likes of which could scarcely have been imagined at the start of the year.

Universities and schools are being shuttered, sports activities and public gatherings are being cancelled, individuals are hoarding toilet paper and supplies, travel is being severely constrained, the stock market has crashed, and business activity is nose-diving. Major businesses are forcing their employees to work at home.

This blog will try to summarize the coronavirus threat, suggest that some of the panic-driven actions may not be well-founded, and that there may be a far better, more effective approach to deal with the virus.

Before I begin, let me note two things. I am not a medical doctor, epidemiologist, or viral expert. But I am a scientist with some facility with statistics and data, and my specialty, weather prediction, is all about helping people react appropriately to estimates of risk. And I have talked to a number of doctors about this issue. But don't read any more if my background bothers you.