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Best of the Web: The Covid-19 debate: Economies really are made up of real people

Rob Slane
The Blogmire
Fri, 03 Apr 2020 06:32 UTC
unemployment lines
The headline of this piece is admittedly very, very dumb. It's dumb because everyone knows that real people work in economies. As such, it's on a par with news that paper is made from wood pulp, apples grow on trees and fire is hot.

But the reason it needs to be stated is that the past couple of weeks has convinced me that many people actually don't seem to know this at all. Judging by comments I have seen in numerous articles, and the pushback I and many others have received from questioning the proportionality of the measures put in place to deal with the outbreak of Covid-19, there seem to be many people who think that economies are all about money and commerce and wealth. Well, there is that, but principally they are about people.

It works like this: I or A.N. Other state that we believe shutting down most of the economy for an indefinite period is an astonishingly disproportionate and dangerous way of tackling the threat from Covid-19, and we are immediately assailed with responses that run along the following lines:
  • How can you equate money with people's lives?
  • I can't believe you're bringing the economy into it when we're talking about saving lives.
  • What a callous person you must be to put wealth and profit before people.
For what it's worth, I work for a company that deals with labour market data. On the systems we use, such data looks like a bunch of numbers. Yet we are aware, for example, that when we look at the numbers of jobs in the Restaurant and Pub sectors (approximately 1.6m in the UK), each of the single digits that go to make up that number is actually a person. A real, live person. A person with thoughts and feelings. A person with a heart and soul. A person who works to earn money to put food on the table, to pay the rent, to keep the lights on. Some of them have families, and therefore have dependants to feed, clothe, shelter etc as well as themselves.

Comment: See also:

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Pills

Best of the Web: Hydroxychloroquine rated 'most effective' coronavirus treatment, poll of doctors finds

Natalie O'Neill
NY Post
Thu, 02 Apr 2020 01:13 UTC
medicine
© REUTERS/Lindsey Wasson
An international poll of thousands of doctors rated the Trump-touted anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine as the best treatment for the novel coronavirus.

Of the 6,227 physicians surveyed in 30 countries, 37 percent rated hydroxychloroquine as the "most effective therapy" for combating the potentially deadly illness, according to the results released Thursday.

The survey, conducted by the global health care polling company Sermo, also found that 23 percent of medical professionals had prescribed the drug in the US — far less than other countries.

"Outside the US, hydroxychloroquine was equally used for diagnosed patients with mild to severe symptoms whereas in the US it was most commonly used for high risk diagnosed patients," the survey found.
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Blue Planet

Best of the Web: When Antarctica was a rainforest

Carolyn Gramling
Science News
Wed, 01 Apr 2020 12:00 UTC
antarctica
© J. McKay/Alfred Wegener Institute (CC-BY 4.0)Between 92 million and 83 million years ago, a diverse rainforest (shown in this artist's reconstruction) flourished within about 1,000 kilometers of the South Pole.
Once upon a time, there was a swampy rainforest near the bottom of the world.

Buried sediment extracted from the seafloor off West Antarctica contains ancient pollen, fossilized roots and other chemical evidence of a diverse forest that flourished millions of years ago, less than a thousand kilometers from the South Pole.

The sediment offers the southernmost glimpse yet into just how warm Earth was during the mid-Cretaceous Period, between 92 million and 83 million years ago. By analyzing traces of vegetation in the sediment, researchers reconstructed climate conditions at the site. Average annual temperatures in the forest were about 13° Celsius, with summertime temperatures reaching as high as 20° or 25° C, the team reports in the April 2 Nature.

The mid-Cretaceous is known to have been one of the warmest periods on Earth in the last 140 million years, based on analyses of fossils and sediment collected from the seafloor closer to the equator. Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are thought to have been at least 1,000 parts per million. (Today's atmospheric carbon dioxide levels average around 407 ppm, the highest in the last 800,000 years.)

Comment: As Pierre Lescaudron writes in Of Flash Frozen Mammoths and Cosmic Catastrophes there is strong evidence that our planet's geographic poles have shifted following cometary bombardment. In his article Did Earth 'Steal' Martian Water? we can see why dating in the region may not be particularly reliable.

This is further supported by other recent studies such as: And for more, see: Also check out SOTT radio's: MindMatters: America Before: Comets, Catastrophes, Mounds and Mythology

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Family

Best of the Web: Who's the snowflake now? Still no lockdown in Sweden, where its govt continues protecting population against infection of mass hysteria

Derek Robertson
The Guardian
Mon, 30 Mar 2020 09:50 UTC

Comment: Sweden's stance on this is very interesting. Their holding out may only prove to be temporary (especially as the overall global lockdown is likely to go on for months), but in the meantime, it is upending the core premise of the 'anti-woke' crowd who have spent the last decade ranting about the 'Swedish nanny state'...while their own 'much more free countries' voluntarily embrace the most extreme forms of martial law ever seen on Earth.


sweden cherry blossom covid-19
© Jessica Gow/TT News Agency/AFP/GettySweden hasn't fallen for the CoronyHoax, not yet anyway
The Øresund Bridge - yes, that bridge - is an engineering marvel linking the Swedish city of Malmö and Copenhagen that normally transports 70,000 people daily. It has fallen eerily silent. Denmark is under coronavirus lockdown, and the Danes have imposed strict border controls. On the Swedish side, the Øresund remains open, although, understandably not many are making that journey.

It feels surreal in Sweden just now. Working from my local cafe, I terror-scroll through Twitter seeing clips of deserted cities, or army trucks transporting the dead in Italy, surrounded by the usual groups of chatty teenagers, mothers with babies and the occasional freelancer.

Outdoors, couples stroll arm in arm in the spring sunshine; Malmö's cafe terraces do a brisk trade. On the beach and surrounding parkland at Sibbarp there were picnics and barbecues this weekend; the adjoining skate park and playground were rammed. No one was wearing a mask.

Comment: The former!

What's really difficult to reconcile is the 'alt-image' of Sweden as a communist-feminist-marxist nanny state of the worst kind... with its - comparative to what's going on in the rest of the West - ultra-libertarian and healthy stance on this COVID-19 madness.

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Gold Seal

Best of the Web: Covid-19's meant to be a new Black Death, but in Britain no more people are dying than NORMAL. What does this say about the virus?

Peter Andrews
RT
Tue, 31 Mar 2020 21:24 UTC
hospital
© REUTERS/Hannah McKay
Many people are waking up to the fact that the Covid-19 "pandemic" is not turning out as billed. When we finally emerge from it, the big question will be how many people have died from the virus. Here's the most likely outcome.

You can bet that the institutions of international government, and the "experts" advising them, will try to massage and cherry-pick statistics to present the version of events that most closely matches their worst-case scenarios. The fact is, according to their early predictions, we are already long overdue millions of Covid-19 deaths that have failed to materialise.

But even when Covid-19 deaths are recorded, we have seen how it could be that people are dying with coronavirus rather than dying of it. This concept is easy enough to understand, and it encourages one to take a closer look at the breakdown of deaths across an entire society. The more you follow this rabbit hole down, the more interesting the numbers become. It may be somewhat morbid, but it is nonetheless very important.
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Black Magic

Best of the Web: Memento mori, or love in the age of corona

Michael Prescott
michaelprescott.typepad.com
Tue, 24 Mar 2020 18:33 UTC
memento mori
In recent weeks, I've learned not to post anything on Facebook, because people decide I'm a hater if I so much as suggest that there might be another metric worth considering besides the coronavirus mortality rate. So I won't open that can of worms here, except to say that risk management entails looking at a variety of factors, not exclusively public health. The strength of the economy, the stability of society, the prevalence of psychological illness, and the death tolls of other diseases - all these are relevant factors to take into account. A purely epidemiological approach is necessarily narrow-minded. It doesn't do us much good to save, say, one thousand lives from COVID-19 if we've condemned our nation to a decade or more of grinding poverty. Chronic unemployment, bankruptcy and foreclosure, the loss of businesses and the lifetime of effort they represent ... these are not trivial outcomes. And they do have public health consequences. Look at the epidemic of opioid addiction among the chronically unemployed in the Rust Belt.

This too shall pass, though it may leave a Great Depression in its wake. (And those who believe that economic numbers are "only statistics," as I've been told very heatedly online, will soon learn how real these statistics can be.)

What interests me, in the context of this blog, is that vast numbers of people in the Western world seem absolutely flabbergasted to discover that they are, in fact, mortal. The reality of their own demise evidently had never been quite clear real to them before, and now fills them with existential dread.
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Chart Pie

Best of the Web: How to understand - and report - figures for 'Covid deaths'

Dr. John Lee
The Spectator
Sun, 29 Mar 2020 18:03 UTC
coronavirus world map
Every day, now, we are seeing figures for 'Covid deaths'. These numbers are often expressed on graphs showing an exponential rise. But care must be taken when reading (and reporting) these figures. Given the extraordinary response to the emergence of this virus, it's vital to have a clear-eyed view of its progress and what the figures mean. The world of disease reporting has its own dynamics, ones that are worth understanding. How accurate, or comparable, are these figures comparing Covid-19 deaths in various countries?

We often see a ratio expressed: deaths, as a proportion of cases. The figure is taken as a sign of how lethal Covid-19 is, but the ratios vary wildly. In the US, 1.8 per cent (2,191 deaths in 124,686 confirmed cases), Italy 10.8 per cent, Spain 8.2 per cent, Germany 0.8 per cent, France 6.1 per cent, UK 6.0 per cent. A fifteen-fold difference in death rate for the same disease seems odd amongst such similar countries: all developed, all with good healthcare systems. All tackling the same disease.

You might think it would be easy to calculate death rates. Death is a stark and easy-to-measure end point. In my working life (I'm a retired pathology professor) I usually come across studies that express it comparably and as a ratio: the number of deaths in a given period of time in an area, divided by that area's population. For example, 10 deaths per 1,000 population per year. So just three numbers:
  1. The population who have contracted the disease
  2. The number dying of disease
  3. The relevant time period
The trouble is that in the Covid-19 crisis each one of these numbers is unclear.

Comment: Two other clear-headed reports by Dr. John Lee can be read here:

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Take 2

Best of the Web: FAKE NEWS: Media fear-mongering reaches new low as CBS uses footage from ITALIAN hospital to describe conditions in New York City

Jim Hoft
The Gateway Pundit
Sun, 29 Mar 2020 00:04 UTC
cbs footage italy hospital
Emergency Room Footage on CBS Matches Footage from Italian Hospital!

This is footage from SKY News on March 22 from Italy.
italy hospital
And here is footage from CBS News during their New York City report on March 25.
italy hospital
CBS News painted a dire picture from New York City this week in their coronavirus coverage.

On Wednesday morning CBS aired this footage from a New York hospital.


The footage matches SKY News video from inside an Italian hospital from Sunday March 22.


UPDATE: ALX posted the video comparison from the two news outlets.
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Fireball

Best of the Web: Massive explosion leaves giant crater in Akure, Nigeria, dozens of buildings damaged - UPDATE: Expert suspects METEOR IMPACT


SouthFront
Sat, 28 Mar 2020 20:24 UTC
crater nigeria explosion akure
The crater caused by the Ondo explosion in Nigeria
On March 28 morning, a massive explosion rocked a suburb of the city of Akure, the capital of the southern Nigerian State of Ondo.

According to Nigerian sources, the explosion split Akure-Owo road and inflicted serious damage on dozens of houses, 50 to 100, as well as a school and churches.

Ondo State Governor, Rotimi Akeredolu, revealed that the explosion was a an accident. According to the governor, a fire broke out in a vehicle within a convoy transporting explosives to a storage facility in a neighboring state, which caused the explosion.

Comment: There are conflicting reports. According to some reports, the crater was caused by a meteor impact!
The explosion that rocked Akure, Ondo state capital, on Saturday, was caused by a giant rock from space known as meteors, a team of experts have concluded.

A meteor is what happens when a meteoroid - a small piece of an asteroid - burns up upon entering earth's atmosphere, creating a streak of light in the sky.

The experts led by Adepelumi Adekunle, a professor of geophysics and earthquake engineering at Obafemi Awolowo University, said the meteors impacted the location from "an angle of 43 degrees".
[...]

Rotimi Akeredolu, governor of the state, had told journalists the blast occurred after a truck conveying explosives to a quarry exploded.

"I have been briefed by the security chiefs that in the early hours of Saturday March 28th, a vehicle in a convoy transporting explosives to a storage facility in a neighbouring state developed a fault while in transit along the Akure Owo Road about 2km from the Akure Airport," the governor had said.

But Adekunle said findings by his team suggest the explosion was caused by a natural phenomena, thereby contradicting the governor.

He added there was no evidence of a buried vehicle, buried ordinance or explosives from the site, and that "foreign rocks and strange metallic objects" were found within the crater crated.

His report read: "My Research group carried out a detailed analysis of the impact site. A circular impact crater with 21m diameter and 7.8m depth was found which suggest a natural phenomenal.

"Water was found oozing out from the edges of the crater. A preliminary in situ vibration, noise, seismicity, water analysis, radioactivity studies, rock and soil investigation were carried out.

"Our findings suggest that the impact of the blasting covers 1km radius of the surroundings of the crater. No evidence of fire or Burning of anything was found within the vicinity.

"No evidence of radioactivity radiation was found within the crater and immediate vicinity. The field evidence point to a conclusion that a meteoric from an asteroid belt that travels at a great speed from space impacted the location at an angle of 43 degrees created an ejecta at South-Western part."


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Bullseye

Best of the Web: "This is what a police state is like": UK's ex-supreme court judge lambasts policing, 'collective hysteria' and the lockdown

Lisa O'Carroll
The Guardian
Mon, 30 Mar 2020 15:33 UTC
Lord Sumption
© Supreme Court/PALord Sumption said Derbyshire police had 'shamed our policing traditions' and had turned themselves into 'glorified school prefects'.
A former supreme court justice has heavily criticised Derbyshire police for stopping people exercising in the Peak District saying that such behaviour risks plunging Britain into a "police state".

Lord Sumption warned that police had no legal power to enforce "ministers' wishes" and that the public should not be "resigning their liberty" to over-zealous citizens in uniform.

"The behaviour of the Derbyshire police in trying to shame people in using their undoubted right to take exercise in the country and wrecking beauty spots in the fells so people don't want to go there is frankly disgraceful," he said.

Comment: And here is a warning police have been leaving on the cars of those who were enjoying their countryside walk, possibly while being tracked and filmed on one of the police's drones:

why are you here
See also:

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