Coronavirus (COVID-19) General News Collection & Resources

[ghost]

Coronavirus: No child known to have passed COVID-19 to adults, global study finds

 

[flash13]

Wuhan shows the world that the end of lockdown is just the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis

 

 

All around the world, people are waiting for the announcement that the coronavirus pandemic is contained and they can return to normal life.

But the Chinese city at the center of the pandemic has shown that normal might still be a long way off.

When Wuhan officials eased outgoing travel restrictions on April 8, effectively ending the city's 76-day lockdown, residents and local businesses soon learned that city's actual reopening

 

would be painfully slow.

Despite the lifting of most strict lockdown laws, many stores are still shut, restaurants are restricted to takeaway and even when citizens go outside they still wear protective equipment

 

and try to avoid each other.

 

Interactive: Wuhan was on lockdown for 76 days. Now life is returning -- slowly

The mood on the ground is very different to the official statements. At a press conference on April 8, Luo Ping, an epidemic control official in Wuhan said that some sectors of the city

 

were already back to 100% resumption rate.

In a meeting of the Wuhan government on April 25, they promised a "double victory" of success of the epidemic and economic growth.

But even government-controlled media has suggested that plans to get the city back to 100% production by the end of April might be "too optimistic."

During a recent trip to the city, business owners told CNN that they were struggling with zero profits and huge rents and experts said that it might take the city's economy months to

 

recover, if not longer.

"In the short term, of course, there's going to be a recovery," said Larry Hu, economist at Macquarie Capital Limited. "Production will recover first and then consumption, because a lot of

 

people are still reluctant to come out ... but from a long term perspective, from a three-year perspective the virus is still going to hurt the long term growth of Wuhan."

 

Struggling to recover

Wuhan is a metropolis with a population of more than a 11 million, larger than most US cities, and yet it is considered a second-tier size city within mainland China.

 

The capital of central China's Hubei Province, Wuhan, is both a manufacturing and transportation hub for the rest of the country.

 

The original outbreak was first detected in Wuhan in mid-December, and as the outbreak worsened, the city sealed its borders from the rest of China on January 23 in an attempt to

 

contain the spread.

 

Virtually overnight, life was halted. In some parts of the city people were confined to their homes for several months straight, unable to leave and relying on delivery services for groceries

 

and other basic needs.

 

With the lockdown now over, the local government is keen to resume normal business as quickly as possible, as Beijing puts pressure on provinces to help boost a flailing economy.

 

But there are signs that despite the hopeful rhetoric, Hubei's economy might take a long time to recover from the severe lockdown.

 

Shaun Roache, Asia Pacific chief economist at S&P Global Ratings, said that the lesson of Wuhan to the rest of the world was that swift, early action on coronavirus was costly to the

 

economy but might lead for a quicker reopening.

"(But) lockdowns have a disproportional effect on small and medium-sized enterprises. These firms have less access to credit to help them 'bridge to the recovery' and can also struggle to

 

meet the requirements for opening up," he said.

When CNN returned to the city on April 21, a drive through a commercial street showed more than half the local businesses remain shuttered.

The province's GDP shrank almost 40% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2020, according to state news agency Xinhua, with retail sales dropping more than 15% in March alone.

The government has announced it will be letting businesses leasing from state-owned enterprises go rent-free for three months, but for those with private landlords, the weight of rent

 

and no profit is pushing them out of business.

"I opened for two days. No costumers come in to eat, as it was forbidden, and I got only two or three orders from the online delivery platform. The cost of opening was much more than I

 

earn each day, so I closed it again," one restaurant owner told the government-controlled Global Times.

 

Fears of a second wave

Some small business owners relayed to CNN their concern that any government assistance will likely arrive too late to save their small shops and restaurants, leading them to shut down

 

for good.

 

Noticeably shuttered still are fitness centers and movie theaters, with no immediate plans to reopen.

 

Most the stores that have reopened have changed their business models. Major chains like Starbucks, McDonald's, Burger King, KFC and Pizza Hut are among the brands preventing

 

customers from entering the physical space. Instead tables are setup at the storefronts and staff brings up the orders to hand off.

 

Roache said while manufacturing could recover reasonably quickly from the virus, it was the service sectors which appeared to be the slowest to return to 100% productivity. "This is

 

important because service industries are the largest employers in most economies," he said.

 

Worst of all, some local citizens and business owners told CNN that they believed it was only a matter of time until a second wave of infections swept through the city, prompting a second

 

lockdown and dealing another blow to the economy.

On Saturday, the day after the CNN team left, the Wuhan health authority reported that they had found 19 new asymptomatic coronavirus cases in the city.

 

There might be a long way to go yet for Wuhan and the rest of the world before we can return to anything resembling normality.

 

Source

Edited June 17, 2020 by flash13

[rasbridge]

Chinese leaders "intentionally concealed the severity" of the pandemic from the world in early January, according to a four-page Department of Homeland Security report dated May 1st and obtained by the Associated Press.

Source: https://www.breitbart.com/news/report-china-hid-coronavirus-severity-to-hoard-supplies/

[rasbridge]

White House Will Release ‘Conclusive’ Evidence Coronavirus Originated In Wuhan Lab, Trump Says

 

President Donald Trump suggested during Sunday night’s Fox News town hall that his administration will soon release “conclusive” evidence showing how the coronavirus originally leaked out of China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.

 

“I don’t think there is any question about it,” Trump responded when asked a question on whether China’s action allowed the pandemic to spread across the globe. He proceeded to tell host Bret Baier that the administration “will be giving a very strong report on what we think happened, and I think it will be very conclusive.”

 

The president has repeatedly claimed to have seen evidence the virus leaked out of a research facility, and his latest comments come the same day that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo maintained the administration has compiled an extensive report on the virus’s lab origins.

 

“We have said from the beginning, this virus originated in Wuhan, China. We took a lot of grief for that from the outset. But I think the whole world can see now,” Pompeo said on ABC Sunday morning. “Remember, China has a history of infecting the world and they have a history of running sub-standard laboratories.”

 

“These aren’t the first times that we have had the world exposed to viruses as a result of failures in a Chinese lab.” Trump clarified Sunday night that he doesn’t view the coronavirus as a malicious action from China.

 

“Personally I think they made a horrible mistake,” he told co-host Martha MacCallum. “They didn’t want to admit it. We wanted to go in but they didn’t want us there. World Health wanted to go in.”

 

“They tried to cover it, they tried to put it out,” he continued. “It’s like trying to put out a fire. They couldn’t put out the fire.”

 

The White House is actively investigating ways to hold China financially accountable for its role in allowing the pandemic to spread across the globe. Officials did not respond when asked by the Daily Caller when the president’s aforementioned report will be publicly released.

 

Source:  https://dailycaller.com/2020/05/03/trump-white-house-release-conclusive-evidence-coronavirus-covid-19-origin-wuhan-lab/

[dufus]

Coronavirus researcher nearing 'very significant findings' dead in apparent murder-suicide

 

A researcher who was reportedly nearing some “very significant findings” in his work on the coronavirus was found killed at his Pittsburgh-area home, a local TV station reported.

 

Bing Liu, 37, was fatally shot in his head, neck and torso over the weekend in Ross Township, Pennsylvania, in what police are calling a murder-suicide, according to CBS Pittsburgh affiliate KDKA.

 

A second man, who police say knew Mr. Liu but did not identify, was found nearby in his car with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Ross Township detectives do not believe there is a suspect loose, KDKA reported.

 

Mr. Liu was a research assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, his department told KDKA on Monday.

 

“Bing was on the verge of making very significant findings toward understanding the cellular mechanisms that underlie SARS-CoV-2 infection and the cellular basis of the following complications. We will make an effort to complete what he started in an effort to pay homage to his scientific excellence,” the department said on its website.

 

It wasn’t immediately clear what projects Mr. Liu was working on.

 

But researchers with the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine published a paper last month in the Lancet-published EBioMedicine, that a potential coronavirus vaccine has proven effective in mice.

 

Researchers said they want to start human trials on the potential vaccine — dubbed “PittCoVacc” — as soon as the federal government gives its approval.

 

source

 

updated info   

 

His wife was not home at the time of the homicide, reported Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The couple do not have children.

 

Dr Bing Liu, 37, was alone at his home in the 200 block of Elm Court in Ross Township on Saturday afternoon when another man - identified as 46-year-old Hao Gu - allegedly entered the residence through an unlocked door and opened fire.

 

Police said Gu then returned to his car parked 100 yards away at Charlemagne Circle and turned the gun on himself.

 

source

Edited May 5, 2020 by dufus

[ghost]

‘Slow to act’: Ousted vaccine director claims White House ignored virus warnings

A vaccine expert has accused US President Donald Trump of allegedly ignoring his early warnings about the coronavirus.

 

 

The vaccine expert who claims he was demoted after sounding the alarm about a drug Donald Trump repeatedly pushed now says the US President ignored his early warnings about the virus.

Rick Bright, who was removed from his job in April, said in a whistleblower complaint filed on Tuesday that he raised concerns about the virus to the Trump administration in January, The US Sun reports

But, Dr Bright said, he was met with “indifference which then developed into hostility” by leaders at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

The scientist claims he was fired from his role in creating a coronavirus vaccine after he advised against the untested hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug that Mr Trump touted.

Dr Bright’s lawyers have argued that the removal from his post was a violation of the Whistleblower Protection Act.

They claim that Dr Bright “has engaged in numerous instances of protected activity.”

US President Donald Trump speaks to media on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, May 5, 2020, before boarding Marine One for a short trip to Andrews Air Force Base, Md., and then on to Phoenix, Ariz. Picture: AP/Patrick Semansky.Source:AP

Dr Bright wrote in the complaint that he wants to be reinstated in his role as director — and has asked for a full investigation.

The former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority said the Trump administration rejected his warnings on COVID-19 for months.

Dr Bright said after the World Health Organization issued a warning in January, he acted quickly to address the spread of the virus.

 

He alleged that leaders of HHS, including Secretary Alex Azar, appeared to intentionally downplay the coronavirus.

NEW: Dr. Rick Bright, the ousted BARDA chief who had

led vaccine development for Covid-19, revealed his

whistleblower complaint today.

He says Trump admin demanded NY and NJ be

"flooded" with hydroxychloroquine as an unproven

"panacea."

Doc: https://t.co/B9GmNH1kkr 

pic.twitter.com/ktovlnMoE3

— Adam Klasfeld (@KlasfeldReports) May 5, 2020

 

Dr Bright claimed in the whistleblower complaint that political appointees at the HHS tried to promote hydroxychloroquine as a cure-all solution.

He said that the political appointees demanded New York and New Jersey -- some of the hardest-hit states impacted by the virus -- be flooded with hydroxychloroquine.

In the complaint, Dr Bright said the drugs were imported from factories in Pakistan and India that had not been inspected by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Dr Bright said he was opposed to widespread use of the drug -- and argued there wasn’t scientific evidence to back it up to be used on coronavirus patients.

Dr Bright said he felt a strong need to warn the public about that, according to his complaint.

The FDA last month warned doctors against using hydroxychloroquine, except for in hospitals and research studies.

Regulators had flagged reports of sometimes fatal heart side effects among virus patients who had taken hydroxychloroquine, or the related drug chloroquine.

Both of the drugs, also prescribed for lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, can cause a number of side effects, including heart rhythm problems, severely low blood pressure and muscle, or nerve damage.

News.com.au

[dufus]

The Models, the Tests and Now the Consequences

 

 

Since late in January the world has undergone staggering changes which in many cases may be irreparable. We have given decisions over every aspect of our lives to the judgment of tests and to the projections of computer models for the coronavirus first claimed to have erupted in Wuhan China, now dubbed SARS-CoV-2. With astonishing lack of transparency or checking, one government after the other has imposed China-model lockdowns on their entire populations. It begins to look as if we are being led like sheep to slaughter for corrupted science.

 

The Dubious COVID Models

 

Two major models are being used in the West since the alleged spread of coronavirus to Europe and USA to “predict” and respond to the spread of COVID-19 illness. One was developed at Imperial College of London. The second was developed, with emphasis on USA effects, by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in Seattle, near the home of Microsoft founder Bill Gates. What few know is that both groups owe their existence to generous funding by a tax exempt foundation that stands to make literally billions on purported vaccines and other drugs to treat coronavirus—The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

 

In early March, Prof. Neil Ferguson, head of the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London issued a widely-discussed model that forecast possible COVID-19 deaths in the UK as high as 500,000. Ferguson works closely with the WHO. That report was held responsible for a dramatic u-turn by the UK government from a traditional public health policy of isolating at risk patients while allowing society and the economy to function normally. Days after the UK went on lockdown, Ferguson’s institute sheepishly revised downwards his death estimates, several times and dramatically. His dire warnings have not come to pass and the UK economy, like most others around the world, has gone into deep crisis based on inflated estimates.

 

Ferguson and his Imperial College modelers have a notorious track record for predicting dire consequences of diseases. In 2002 Ferguson predicted that up to 50,000 people in UK would die from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, “mad cow disease”, possibly to 150,000 if the epidemic expanded to include sheep. A total of 178 people were officially registered dead from vCJD. In 2005, Ferguson claimed that up to 200 million (!) people worldwide would be killed by bird-flu or H5N1. By early 2006, the WHO had only linked 78 deaths to the virus. Then in 2009 Ferguson’s group at Imperial College advised the government that swine flu or H1N1 would probably kill 65,000 people in the UK. In the end, swine flu claimed the lives of 457 people. Ferguson and his Imperial College group have a notoriously bad track record for predicting disease consequences.

 

Yet the same Ferguson group at Imperial College, with WHO endorsement, was behind the panic numbers that triggered a UK government lockdown. Ferguson was also the source of the wild “prediction” that 2.2 million Americans would likely die if immediate lockdown of the US economy did not occur. Based on the Ferguson model, Dr Anthony Fauci of NIAID reportedly confronted President Trump and pressured him to declare a national health emergency. Much as in the UK, once the damage to the economy was begun, Ferguson’s model later drastically lowered the US fatality estimates to between 100,000 to 200,000 deaths. In both US and UK cases Neil Ferguson relied on data from the Chinese government, data which has been shown as unreliable.

 

Neil Ferguson and his modelling group at Imperial College, in addition to being backed by WHO, receive millions from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Ferguson heads the Vaccine Impact Modelling Consortium at Imperial College which lists as its funders the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Gates-backed GAVI-the vaccine alliance. From 2006 through 2018 the Gates Foundation has invested an impressive $184,872,226.99 into Ferguson’s Imperial College modeling operations.

Notably, the Gates foundation began pouring millions into Ferguson’s modelling operation well after his catastrophic lack of accuracy was known, leading some to suggest Ferguson is another “science for hire” operation.

 

University of Washington—Gates too…

 

More recently, the forecast models being used to justify the unprecedented lockdown measures across the United States have been developed at the University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in Seattle. Its COVID-19 model forecasts deaths and the use of hospital resources such as hospital beds, ICU beds and ventilators. At the end of March the model from IHME also “predicted” up to 2.2 million American coronavirus deaths unless drastic lockdown measures were followed. By April 7 IHME models revised that down to up to 200,000 deaths. Their last down revision puts deaths at just over 60,000. The claim is that the down revisions are informed by actual data. Yet the wildly inaccurate projections were the ones used to impose catastrophic social and economic restrictions across the USA.

 

Alex Berenson, a former New York Times reporter questioned the IMHE model: “Aside from New York, nationally there’s been no health system crisis. In fact, to be truly correct, there has been a health system crisis, but the crisis is that the hospitals are empty,” he said. “This is true in Florida where the lockdown was late, this is true in southern California where the lockdown was early, it’s true in Oklahoma where there is no statewide lockdown. There doesn’t seem to be any correlation between the lockdown and whether or not the epidemic has spread wide and fast.” IHME claims its revisions are result of the lockdown taking effect even though that would take weeks to show up.

 

Like Neil Ferguson at the Imperial College London, the University of Washington’s IHME is another project of the Gates Foundation. It was created in 2007 with a major grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In May 2015 IHME and the World Health Organization signed a major agreement to collaborate on data used to estimate world health trends. Then in 2017 IHME got an additional $279 million from the Gates Foundation to expand its work over the next decade. That, in addition to another a $210 million gift in 2016 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to fund construction of a new building to house several UW units working in population health, including IHME. In other words, IHME has been a crucial piece of the Gates global health strategy for more than 13 years.

 

They have been turning out highly inflated models for state-by-state emergency room demands. Those inflated projections, from New York to California and beyond have wreaked havoc on the entire health care system. When one IHME model predicted need for 430,000 intensive care beds across the US in March, states went into panic mode from New York to California to Pennsylvania and beyond. By the third week of April the reality was that hospital beds were empty and untold numbers of other operations had been canceled to make room for covid19 patients who never materialized.

 

Faulty Tests

 

The wide variety of different tests that are supposed to tell whether one is infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus have added a crucial element to the perfect dystopian storm that is raging globally. Simply put, the tests are not that reliable.

 

A leading German laboratory reported in early April that, according to WHO recommendations, Covid19 virus tests are now considered positive, even if the specific target sequence of the Covid19 virus is negative and only the more general corona virus target sequence is positive. This can lead to other corona viruses such as cold viruses also triggering a false positive test result. That means you can have a simple cold and you are deemed coronavirus positive. Little wonder that the tally of coronavirus “infected” is exploding over the past weeks. But what does that number really mean? We simply don’t know. Yet our politicians are glibly shutting down entire economies and causing inconceivable social damage based on false model projections and WHO’s dodgy testing guidelines.

 

In Germany the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the government agency leading the COVID19 response, has deliberately refused to list the actual daily number of persons tested despite requests. Prof. Christopher Kuhbander, author of a detailed study states, “The reported figures on new infections very dramatically overestimate the true spread of the corona virus. The observed rapid increase in new infections is almost exclusively due to the fact that the number of tests has increased rapidly over time. So, at least according to the reported figures, there was in reality never an exponential spread of the coronavirus. The reported figures on new infections hide the fact that the number of new infections has been decreasing since about early or mid-March.” Yet the uncritical media presentation of endless statistics from the head of the RKI have fostered unprecedented anxiety and fear in the population of Germany.

 

Californian physician Dr. Dan Erickson described his observations regarding Covid19 in a press briefing. He stated that hospitals and intensive care units in California and other states have remained largely empty so far. Dr. Erickson reports that doctors from several US states have been “pressured“ to issue death certificates mentioning Covid19, even though they themselves did not agree. In Pennsylvania the state was forced to remove some 200 “coronavirus” deaths after doctor autopsy revealed death from pre-existing causes such as heart or lung diseases.

 

The more that actual facts are emerging around this pandemic and its consequences, it is becoming clear were are being told to commit economic and social suicide based on wrong methods and wrong information.

 

source

[ghost]

Coronavirus: White House plans to disband virus task force

US President Donald Trump has confirmed the White House coronavirus task force will be winding down, with Vice-President Mike Pence suggesting it could be disbanded within weeks.

 

"We are bringing our country back," Mr Trump said during a visit to a mask-manufacturing factory in Arizona. 

 

New confirmed infections per day in the US currently top 20,000, and daily deaths exceed 1,000.

 

US health officials warn the virus may spread as businesses begin to reopen.

 

The US currently has 1.2 million confirmed coronavirus infections and more than 70,000 related deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, which is tracking the pandemic.

What did President Trump say?

During a visit to the plant in Phoenix after weeks holed up at the White House, Mr Trump told journalists: "Mike Pence and the task force have done a great job, but we're now looking at a little bit of a different form, and that form is safety and opening. And we'll have a different group probably set up for that."

 

The president - who wore safety goggles but no face mask during his tour of the facility - was asked if it was "mission accomplished", and he said: "No, not at all. The mission accomplished is when it's over."

 

Critics have accused the president of sacrificing Americans' public health in his eagerness to reopen the US economy ahead of his re-election battle in November.

 

Acknowledging a human cost to the plans, Mr Trump told reporters: "I'm not saying anything is perfect, and yes, will some people be affected? Yes.

 

"Will some people be affected badly? Yes. But we have to get our country open and we have to get it open soon."

• Coronavirus: Tracking the global outbreak
• Why is there a US backlash to masks?
• 'I got a life-changing opportunity in lockdown'

The president was also asked if White House task force experts Dr Deborah Birx and Dr Anthony Fauci would still be involved in efforts to address the coronavirus. 

 

"They will be and so will other doctors and so will other experts in the field," the president answered.

 

What did the vice-president say?

Mr Pence earlier on Tuesday told reporters in a briefing that the task force could soon be disbanded.

 

He said the Trump administration was "starting to look at the Memorial Day [late May] window, early June window as a time when we could begin to transition back to having our agencies begin to manage, begin to manage our national response in a more traditional manner".

 

He said it was "a reflection of the tremendous progress we've made as a country".

 

Mr Pence has led the task force, which reports to the president and co-ordinates with medical institutes, political staff and state governors. The group also consulted with medical experts to formulate national guidelines on social distancing.

 

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany later tweeted that the president "will continue his data-driven approach towards safely re-opening".

 

Lives and livelihoods

The White House's shift in focus from the public health aspect of the coronavirus pandemic to its economic impact continues.

 

For more than a month, the task force had been the public face of the administration's response to the crisis, even though President Trump sometimes veered far from the topic at hand during its press briefings.

 

When the president wasn't talking, however, government public health officials led the conversation.

 

Now, it appears, the officials setting the agenda will be ones more concerned with jobs, businesses and the fiscal health of the nation - even though the number of cases of the virus throughout the US continues to increase.

 

There is growing frustration among the president's core supporters, however, with government shelter-in-place orders. Several states, encouraged by the president, have already begun to ease restrictions, even though they have not met White House guidelines for when to do so.

 

Those recommendations were set by the current coronavirus task force, of course. And the "different group" in a "different form" that replaces it, as the president describes, may have other ideas.

• On, off, on again... are Trump daily briefings over?

Does the US have the pandemic under control?

Not yet. Besides New York, which is still the US epicentre despite an ongoing drop in new cases, the level of infection continues to climb across much of the country.

 

Many states that have allowed some business to resume - including Texas, Iowa, Minnesota, Tennessee, Kansas, Nebraska and Indiana - are seeing more new cases reported daily.

 

While some cities such as New York, New Orleans and Detroit have shown improvement, others like Los Angeles, Washington DC and Chicago are seeing the caseload rise everyday.

 

According to a report from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), more than 3,000 people may be killed by the virus each day by next month.

 

The White House has dismissed the report as inaccurate, with Mr Trump saying it describes a scenario in which Americans make no effort to mitigate the spread of the infection.

 

On Sunday, the president increased his forecast for the number of US pandemic deaths to 100,000, after saying two weeks earlier that it would be fewer than 60,000.

 

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, a public forecast model that has been frequently cited by the White House, now estimates that Covid-19 will account for 135,000 American deaths by 4 August. This more than doubles its 17 April forecast.

 

BBC

[dufus]

1,161,386 views•Premiered Apr 29, 2020

 

Dr Judy A Mikovits PHD has a virtual sit-down with Patrick Bet-David and opens up about her fallout with Anthony Fauci that led to her 5 year gag order and whistleblower status.

Edited May 6, 2020 by dufus

[rasbridge]

"All disease (mathematical) models are wrong, but scientists are working to fix that"

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-05-disease-wrong-scientists.html

------

"This coronavirus model keeps being wrong.  Why are we still listening to it?"

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/this-coronavirus-model-keeps-being-wrong-why-are-we-still-listening-to-it/ar-BB13w7BK?li=AAggNb9

Edited May 6, 2020 by rasbridge

[Karlston]

We don’t know yet whether a mutation has made SARS-CoV-2 more infectious

A mutation in the virus seems to be getting more common, but we don't know why.

Enlarge / YOGYAKARTA, INDONESIA - MAY 06: An Indonesian health official wearing a protective suit prepares test kits during a mass rapid test for COVID-19 amid the coronavirus pandemic on May 6, 2020 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

Ulet Ifansasti | Getty Images

84 with 51 posters participating, including story author

When SARS-CoV-2 made the jump into humans late last year, it was remarkably well adapted to spread among us. But that doesn't mean things couldn't get worse, as the virus will undoubtedly pick up new mutations as its population expands, some of which might make it more dangerous to humans. In fact, a draft paper recently posted online claimed to have evidence that a more infectious strain of SARS-CoV-2 had already evolved.

 

But the evidence is far from conclusive, and scientists have been taking both the paper and the associated press coverage to task.

The press coverage

The Los Angeles Times had coverage that was typical of the early response to the draft paper, headlining it "Scientists say a now-dominant strain of the coronavirus appears to be more contagious than original." But by Tuesday, the coverage had been roundly criticized by scientists, and awareness of the problems with the paper was gradually increasing. This pushback came from sites dedicated to health news analysis as well as general circulation newspapers. Yet even after these criticisms had been published, new articles were still trumpeting an enhanced infectivity.

 

All of this was set off by a draft article posted on the bioaRxiv—one with a title that seemed to support the fears highlighted in the worst headlines: "Spike mutation pipeline reveals the emergence of a more transmissible form of SARS-CoV-2."

 

The response from scientists has been critical of both the paper's authors (one of whom is in the US and the other in the UK) and of the media coverage the paper has attracted. As far as the media is concerned, the scientists seem to have two main focuses for their criticisms. The response is typified by Columbia University's Angela Rasmussen, who laid out the problems in the early parts of a Twitter thread. Rasmussen and other scientists feel that many reports haven't used caution when evaluating a draft document that hasn't been peer reviewed. As a result, the reporters didn't take the time to understand the data enough to recognize the study's limitations.

 

This has been a recurring challenge during the pandemic, as scientists have rushed to place preliminary data and analysis online in the hope that health authorities can benefit from it. But these drafts can vary widely in quality, and the ones that attract attention aren't necessarily the ones that are going to come through peer review without significant changes.

 

People tend to view peer review as a way of ensuring a paper's data is valid. But it typically performs an equally important function: determining whether a paper's data supports the conclusions its authors reach. In the case of Rasmussen's criticism, and a set of additional issues highlighted by Harvard's Bill Hanage, the draft paper falls short in that regard—leading to press coverage that's overly credulous.

What’s in the draft?

The paper has been enabled by something that simply wasn't possible until very recently: researchers are sequencing SARS-CoV-2 genomes from patients all the time and posting the results online without restrictions, enabling others to analyze the data. Essentially, we can track the evolution of the virus as it spreads globally. Some of these mutations are irrelevant to the virus's behavior but can be useful in tracking how specific versions of the virus spread both within and between populations and could ultimately be useful in tracing sources of infections.

 

But there's the chance that some of these mutations also alter the virus's biology and thus would be subject to evolutionary selection. For their draft paper, the researchers analyzed every viral genome that was available at the point in April where the analysis was performed and used that to look for signs of evolution. Among other things, they looked for indications that a mutation has become increasingly prevalent in a population, which can be a sign that it is boosting the virus's ability to spread.

 

They also looked at things like mutations that will alter the infamous spike protein in a way that could change the immune system's ability to recognize the virus and found that some individuals have likely been infected with two viral strains at once, leading to new combinations of the mutations each strain carries. Oddly, the latter is easiest to detect in Belgium.

 

But the title- and coverage-worthy finding was an indication that a single mutation was becoming far more common over time. Early in March, the mutation was only found in a small percentage of the total genomes available, mostly in Europe and South America. By later in March, it was found in 29 percent of the total genomes available. In individual populations, the mutation typically grew dramatically over time, as shown in the graphs below.

Enlarge / In many locations, an original coronavirus strain (orange) seems to have been partly replaced by a variant form (blue).

In a study of patients in a specific UK city, the mutation wasn't associated with any medical outcomes, suggesting it didn't change the course of infections. Instead, the authors conclude that the mutation could increase the infectivity of the virus, explaining why its frequency went up in many populations. To be clear, the data is consistent with that explanation.

 

The problem is that it's consistent with other explanations as well.

Not so fast

To begin with, the number of genome samples per location is generally quite small, and it's not clear how the sources of the virus were chosen for genome sequencing. Most of the locations were also experiencing complicated trajectories of growth and decline in the number of cases over the course of the study period. All of these factors could potentially make a relatively minor effect look larger than it is, although the large number of locations that show similar patterns makes this less likely.

 

As Hanage pointed out, we also know very little about how the virus has spread between different areas. The lack of details about how often the virus was introduced and how frequently additional sources traveled among locations leaves the possibility that the pattern could be a product of founder effects and frequent reintroductions from certain areas.

 

And as Rasmussen emphasized, sometimes mutations become prevalent for reasons other than providing a large selective advantage. We've apparently been here before, where a mutation was thought to increase the infectivity of Ebola virus, but tests of the mutation in animals showed that it made no difference whatsoever. In other words, evidence consistent with an idea isn't enough to confirm that idea without additional data. Since all the research team did was computer analysis of genome sequences, the paper couldn't possibly produce more conclusive evidence.

 

So the author's conclusion, that there is an "emergence of a more transmissible form of SARS-CoV-2," isn't conclusively supported by the paper's data. And that's an issue that would normally be sorted out by peer review. But for now, a lot of critical information will be reaching the public without the benefit of that essential step.

 

Source: We don’t know yet whether a mutation has made SARS-CoV-2 more infectious (Ars Technica) 

[dufus]

Tony Blair calls for stronger WHO and more global cooperation to fight coronavirus

 

Former United Kingdom Prime Minister Tony Blair has a message for President Donald Trump and other Western leaders as they grapple with the coronavirus pandemic.

 

Speaking at a POLITICO online event on Wednesday, Blair urged governments to resist the pull of nationalism amid the crisis, calling the current debates between “globalizers and non-globalizers” a distraction and urging countries to focus on practical cooperation to defeat Covid-19.

 

But Blair, who along with former U.S. President George W. Bush bucked the United Nations when invading Iraq last decade, acknowledged that few international organizations are up to the task.

 

The United Nations Security Council is “not really representative of the world today,” said Blair, who now leads the nonprofit Institute for Global Change, which he founded in 2016.

 

He acknowledged the World Health Organization (WHO) — which Trump has accused of being complicit with China in covering up the virus — needs to streamline its bureaucracy. But Blair said member countries should agree to give the organization “much greater heft and weight.” Otherwise, it’s “unfair to criticize them” for following the limited mission set out for them by national governments.

 

According to Blair, the G20, an economic forum for 19 nations, the European Union and their central bankers, is ”the only short-term practical way” to achieve global cooperation.

 

That kind of cooperation can’t be achieved without buy-in from China. And Blair said Western governments need to recognize that Beijing’s new “dominant position” in the world means there will be both areas of “genuine confrontation” alongside an unavoidable need for partnership on issues like climate change and public health.

 

He urged the Trump administration to act “strategically” regarding the U.S.-China relationship, criticizing “a series of ad-hoc reactions of a transactional nature.” The days of framing the relationship in terms of individual issues like the coronavirus pandemic or Huawei technology “are over,” Blair said.

 

“We have to understand China from the Chinese point of view,” he continued, describing Chinese people as proud and “by their nature nationalistic.”

 

But he said China also needs to be “a predictable and responsible partner” given the “massive economic interconnections” between China and the rest of the world. And the Chinese government has “serious questions to answer about the origins of this (coronavirus) crisis.”

 

Blair also weighed in on the furious global debate over how best to end the lockdowns many countries have instituted this spring to slow the spread of the virus. While he favors a quick re-opening of the economy, Blair insisted this will only work with a deep “infrastructure of containment,” including mask-wearing, isolating infected people away from their homes, and “defined metrics and thresholds for moving between levels” of lockdown.

 

Blair carefully avoided directly criticizing the Trump Administration’s domestic response to Covid-19, but made his skepticism clear in a new paper from his Institute for Global Change. The United States is not mentioned in the 39-page report, which collects examples of what is working globally and provides a model for multi-level national lockdowns.

source

 

bingo !

[dfortunsan]

I hate corona, and I hope it will end and never come back. It did a lot of damage to my country and I am so upset...

[rasbridge]

"The rise in the suicide rate caused by lockdowns in Australia is predicted to exceed deaths from the Wuhan coronavirus by a factor of ten..."

 Source: https://www.breitbart.com/health/2020/05/07/report-suicide-rise-from-lockdowns-to-kill-more-than-coronavirus-in-australia/

[dufus]

Back in the spotlight: The man behind the UK’s coronavirus app

 

 

LONDON — It's lucky Matthew Gould likes, as he once put it, being "at the center of things."

 

Formerly an ambitious, high-flying diplomat and more recently a spotlight-shunning civil servant, Gould has found himself central to the U.K.’s coronavirus response as chief executive of NHSX, the health service’s tech innovations wing.

 

Founded only last year, the unit is now central to the U.K.'s coronavirus response, not least with its latest assignment: delivering a coronavirus contact-tracing app, billed as a central pillar of the U.K.’s “test, track and trace” strategy that could — in time — help negate the need for continuing the economy-suffocating lockdown. Though Gould knew, according to friends and colleagues, that he had a challenge on his hands when he took the NHSX job, he could never have imagined he’d be commanding a key front in the war against a deadly pandemic.

 

His career up until now — encompassing Iranian hostage negotiations, the embassy in Tel Aviv and Tony Blair’s Downing Street — may have prepared him for the pressures of such a task better than many denizens of Whitehall. A school friend of former Chancellor George Osborne, he was handpicked for the NHSX role by another tech-obsessed Osborne ally, Health Secretary Matt Hancock.

 

With their contact-tracing app due to go live across the U.K. in days, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the British public and the wider world are all waiting to see how “the two Matts” have risen to the challenge.

Iranian diplomacy  

 

Until it was thrust into the front line of the U.K. government’s coronavirus response, few outside the health and tech policy worlds had heard of the hipster-sounding NHSX.

 

Officially launched in July 2019, it was one of Hancock’s big ideas after his transfer from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) — where he built a persona as the U.K. Cabinet’s leading tech-head  — to leading the National Health Service, which has a long record of doomed attempts at top-down tech innovations.

 

Hancock was frustrated at “at the plethora of bodies” within the NHS that had a say over tech policy, said Matthew Honeyman, researcher at the health think tank the King’s Fund. NHSX "was very much a Matt Hancock thing,” said one government official. The "X," Hancock once explained, stands for "user experience."

 

Instead of each individual hospital and provider doing things differently (some still using fax machines and mountains of paper), Hancock wanted an organization at the center to push through health tech reforms that could improve treatments, alter the way patients interacted with services and make life easier for NHS staff, many of whom had ancient computer systems.

 

He also wanted a non-health sector outsider to lead it and give fresh perspective, colleagues said. So he turned to Gould, one of his top officials at DCMS, where the former diplomat had served as director general of digital and media since returning from a five-year stint as the U.K.’s ambassador to Israel.

 

Gould took the NHSX role despite being tipped by some to become permanent secretary at DCMS and will, according to another school friend, now be “relishing” his place at the center of events.

 

His entrepreneurialism and ambition was noted by everyone POLITICO spoke to for this article, and one person who knew him during his days as the U.K.’s deputy head of mission in Iran said that the friendship with Osborne was also a kind of friendly rivalry, dating back to their time in the same year at the elite St Paul’s independent school in London.

 

For a time, Gould had by far the more interesting career. His stint in Iran saw him negotiate the release of six Royal Marines and two Royal Navy sailors taken hostage by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and he dealt firsthand with the Islamic Republic’s nuclear negotiating team, led at the time by a high-flying cleric called Hassan Rouhani.

 

“When you get off a plane and into a taxi and turn on the BBC news, and item number one on the worldwide news is the fact that you’ve just got off a plane, you feel very much like you are the center of things and need to deliver,” Gould told Civil Service World in an interview just before the pandemic struck, in reference to the hostage situation.

 

Will the tech work?

Now he's back at the center of things.

 

“NHSX’s time has come,” said one government official, who was of the view that the contact-tracing app — now undergoing trials on the Isle of Wight in the south of England — might not have been finished yet had NHSX not existed as the "natural home" for the project.

 

Under Gould, the organization was already in the middle of “a big recruitment drive” before the pandemic struck, according to Honeyman. It was “deliberately casting the net as wide as possible to include people from outside the health and care world.” Some key roles are yet to be filled, including its first chief information officer who is due to arrive this summer.

 

The app will be available for the Isle of Wight's 140,000 residents to download on Thursday, and then — if all goes well — rolled out nationally by mid-May. Close attention is being paid to the U.K.’s centralized approach to the app, meaning the anonymized data will be uploaded to a central government database. Countries are split between those going for this approach (France is trying something similar) and those like Germany, which eventually decided against it and instead are pursuing a decentralized approach backed by tech giants Apple and Google, which sees data kept on the mobile phones across the network.

 

The centralized approach is intended to allow government, via NHSX, to get a better handle on the national picture of the epidemic, it is hoped, but big questions remain about whether the app will work. Tech experts have expressed concern that the technology, which uses Bluetooth to signal to other phones they have recently been in contact with someone with symptoms, won't work unless someone is actively using the app, something the team building it say they can overcome.

 

Then there are privacy worries and possible problems with international collaboration if and when people start moving between national jurisdictions.

 

Sign-up will also be key. It is estimated that 60 percent of the population, or 80 percent of smartphone users, need to download for it to be optimally effective. The comms effort required to get people to sign up will be, in Gould's own words to a House of Commons committee last week, "enormous." The government has tested messages encouraging people to download the app on focus groups, according to a second official and NHSX has drafted in communications staff from the Department of Health and the Cabinet Office to help. If the app doesn’t take off in a big way, it may not be of as much use.

 

In short, there are all manner of potential bear traps waiting for Hancock and Gould in the weeks and months ahead.

 

“Nobody wants to be in this situation,” a friend of Gould’s who has known him since school days said. “But if I had to guess how he would react … it’s not going to make him crawl under a rock and hide.”

 

Incompetent show jumper

 

If the app works, it won't because of Gould's technical know-how. “He was not a domain expert in technology at all, and doesn’t profess to be one now," said one tech insider. His expertise, say friends and colleagues, is in the strategic leadership required to turn Big Tech ideas into actual policy.

 

Gould’s own amateur's appreciation for all things tech was fostered during his time in Israel. His stint as Britain’s ambassador in Tel Aviv (2010-2015; he was the first Jewish person to take the post) came in the wake of Israel’s startup boom. “He’s quite an unconventional civil servant with quite an entrepreneurial mindset,” said former Digital Minister Ed Vaizey, who knew Gould during his Tel Aviv years. “It makes him ideally suited to pushing the boundaries at NHSX. But he’s also very nice so I imagine he can do so without ruffling too many feathers

 

The person who knew Gould in Tehran recalled him as a well-known party host who enjoyed embassy gossip and horse riding — Gould describes himself on his Twitter profile as an “incompetent show jumper” — but also a diplomat who made a point of touring the country to meet people outside the embassy bubble.

 

When he took the NHSX job, he did something similar, spending June last year, the month before the organization’s official launch, visiting hospitals (sometimes on the night shift), riding with paramedics and meeting care providers across the sprawling national health and care system — people who would soon be facing their biggest-ever challenge.

 

He can't possibly have imagined how big that national challenge would be. Once again, he finds himself at the center — and required to deliver.

 

source

 

quality filth  ....  " When he took the NHSX job, he did something similar, spending June last year, the month before the organization’s official launch "   another coincidence my arse !

 

 

[ultrahub]

What do you call an epidemic that has spread beyond Earth?

[buterfly]

rather, this epidemic would have ended

[dufus]

COVID 19 is a Statistical Nonsense

 

The mortality statistics for COVID 19 have been incessantly hammered into our heads by the mainstream media (MSM). Every day they report these hardest of facts to justify the lockdown (house arrest) and to prove to us that living in abject fear of the COVID 19 syndrome is the only sensible reaction.

 

Apparently, only the most lucrative vaccine ever devised can possibly save us.

 

The COVID 19 mortality statistics are the reason millions will undoubtedly download contact tracing (State surveillance) apps. This will help the vaccinated to secure their very own immunity passports (identity papers) and enable them to prove they are allowed to exist in the post-COVID 19 society, whenever the State demands to see their authorisation.

 

But how reliable are these statistics? What do they really tell us about what is happening outside the confines of our incarceration? Do they reveal the harsh reality of an unprecedented deadly virus sweeping the nation or does the story of how they have been manipulated, inflated, fudged and exploited tell us something else?

 

THE ONCE RELIABLE OFFICE OF NATIONAL STATISTICS

 

In order to register a death in England and Wales, under normal circumstances, a qualified doctor needs to record the cause of death on the Medical Certificate of Cause of Death (MCCD).

 

They must then notify the Medical Examiner for a corroborating opinion. Providing the doctor is clear on the cause of death and no irregularities or suspicions are noted, if the Medical Examiner concurs, there is no need to refer the death to a coroner.

 

The second opinion of the Medical Examiner (another qualified doctor) was introduced in 2016 following a series of high profile systemic abuses. The mass murderer Dr Harold Shipman, and doctors at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust and Southern Health NHS Trust, covered up crimes and widespread malpractice by improperly completing MCCDs.

 

Today, once the Medical Examiner agrees, they then discuss the death with a qualified informant. This is usually someone who knows the deceased. It is an opportunity, more often than not, for a family member or friend to discuss any concerns about the suggested cause of death. If no further issues are raised, the death certificate can be issued to the informant, the Local Registrar notified and the death recorded.

 

Registered deaths have been recorded in England and Wales since 1837. From 1911 onward the cause of death has been coded in accordance with the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). Maintaining registration records was the responsibility of the General Register Office until 1970 when it became a department of the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys (OPCS). In 1996 the OPCS merged with the Central Statistical Office (CSO) to form the Office of National Statistics (ONS).

 

There have been some tweaks and legislative changes to the system over the years.

 

Technology has sped things up a bit, but essentially the simple process of recording registered deaths has changed little over the last century. The ONS have been accurately recording registered deaths in England and Wales for more than 23 years.

 

From a statistical perspective this consistent, verifiable system has allowed meaningful analysis to inform public health practice and policy for decades. The inbuilt safeguards, maintained and improved over the years, means the ONS provide some of the most reliable mortality statistics in the world.

 

They record all registered deaths no matter where they occurred in England and Wales. Whether the deceased died in hospital, a care home or in the community, once registration is complete the ONS add it to their statistics.

 

For weekly statistics the ONS week runs from Saturday to Friday and the statistics are released 11 days after the week ending date. There may be an additional lag for a small number of more complex cases. However, all are eventually resolved and the ONS record the registration of the death in the week it was notified. The ONS also release mortality statistics on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis for comparison.

 

This does not suit a hungry MSM eager to sensationalise reported COVID 19 deaths. Nor does it serve the immediate interests of State officials who want the public to accept their own house arrest.

 

Consequently the MSM have reported COVID 19 mortality statistics from a variety of sources. Some from the NHS, some from the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and eventually the ONS.

 

Now the Care Quality Commission have also been thrown into the mix.

Ultimately, all of these deaths will be registered. The ONS will record them and it will be possible to know how many died, the causes of death and the trends identified.

 

Except in the case of COVID 19.

 

THE VAGUE CASE OF A COVID 19 DEATH

 

The Coronavirus Act 2020 received Royal assent on March 25th. This had significant implications for the registration of deaths and the accuracy of ONS data in relation to COVID 19.

 

Not only did the act indemnify all NHS doctors against any claims of negligence during the lockdown, it also removed the need for a jury led inquest. Effectively, only in the case of death from the notifiable disease of COVID 19. Worrying as these elements of the legislation are, they are just part of a raft of changes singling out registered COVID 19 deaths as unusually imprecise.

The NHS issued guidance to assist doctors to comply with the new legislation. Any doctor can sign the MCCD. There is no need for the scrutiny of a second Medical Examiner. The Medical Examiner, or any other doctor, can sign the MCCD alone. The safeguards introduced in 2016 were removed, but only in the case of COVID 19.

 

Doctors do not necessarily need to have examined the deceased prior to signing the MCCD. If it is considered impractical for the doctor who last saw the deceased to complete the MCCD, providing they report that the deceased probably had COVID 19, any other qualified doctor can sign the death certificate as a COVID 19 death.

 

There is no requirement for any signing doctor to have even seen the deceased prior to issuing the MCCD. A video link consultation within the 4 week period leading up to the patient’s death, is deemed sufficient for them to pronounce death from COVID 19.

 

If that were not tenuous enough, as long as the signing doctor believes the death was from COVID 19, potentially absent any examination at all, perhaps simply by reviewing the patient’s case notes, if a coroner agrees, a COVID 19 death can still be registered.

 

The coroner’s agreement is practically a fait accomplis. On the 26th March the UK State released guidance from the Chief Coroner. This was intended as advice to all coroners in cases of COVID 19 referral.

 

There were some notable changes to normal coronal procedures. Paragraph 5 strongly reminded coroners of their obligation to maintain judicial conduct. It stated:

 

"The Chief Coroner cannot envisage a situation in the current pandemic where a coroner should be engaging in interviews with the media or making any public statements to the press.”

 

This thinly veiled threat to coroners made it clear that speaking out about any concerns would be considered a breech of judicial conduct. A career-ending act it would seem.

 

The NHS guidance advised that if no signing doctor has seen the deceased prior to registration of death, a referral to the coroner must be made. This is a procedural recommendation, not a legal requirement. A legal requirement is only applicable in cases of unknown or suspicious causes of death. In turn, the Chief Coroner’s guidance states:

 

“COVID-19 is a naturally occurring disease and therefore is capable of being a natural cause of death […] the aim of the system should be that every death from COVID-19 which does not in law require referral to the coroner should be dealt with via the MCCD process.”

 

The Coronavirus Act 2020 also meant that a qualified informant, who agrees with the cause of death on the MCCD, no longer needed to be anyone acquainted with the deceased. A hospital official, someone who is ‘in charge of a body’ or a funeral director can perform this vital function. The Chief Coroner advised:

 

“For registration: where next of kin/informant are following self-isolation procedures, the arrangement for relatives (etc) should be for an alternative informant who has not been in contact with the patient to collect the MCCD and deliver to the registrar for registration purposes. The provisions in the Coronavirus Act will enable this to be done electronically as directed by the Registrar General.”

 

Most relatives, or someone acquainted with the deceased, will be following self-isolation procedures. They will almost certainly be terrified of contracting COVID19 because they have just been told their loved one or friend died from it. Furthermore, the Coronavirus Act has effectively placed them under house arrest.

 

In other words, if the MCCD signing doctor hasn’t seen the patient, while they were alive, no further inquiry is necessary. The qualified informant can be someone who has neither met the deceased nor knows anything about the circumstances surrounding their death.

 

In this situation, but only for COVID19 deaths, it is fine to assume the death was from the disease. If you, the coroner, don’t like the idea, don’t make a fuss. Just sign the damn thing or else.

 

IMPACTING THE COVID19 STATISTICS

 

This quite bizarre death registration process compelled the ONS to issue guidance to doctors signing MCCDs. Not only is there no need for an examination to pronounce death from COVID19, nor is there any necessity for a positive test or even an indicative CT scan.

 

In their guidance the ONS advised doctors on what constitutes an acceptable underlying cause of death. When mortality statistics are used for research it is usually the most relevant factor. The vast majority of COVID19 deaths reported by the State and the MSM also reflect its identification as the underlying cause.

 

 

The World Health Organisation (WHO) define this as:

 

“The disease or injury which initiated the train of morbid events leading directly to death.”

 

For COVID19, this determination can be based upon the clinical judgement of a doctor who has never met the deceased. Quite possibly following nothing more than a video link consultation or a case note review of symptoms.

 

The problem is the symptoms of COVID19 are largely indistinguishable from a range of other respiratory illnesses. A study from the University of Toronto found:

“The symptoms can vary, with some patients remaining asymptomatic, while others present with fever, cough, fatigue, and a host of other symptoms. The symptoms may be similar to patients with influenza or the common cold.”

 

Nor is there any requirement for a post mortem to confirm the presence of COVID19. Guidance from the Royal College of Pathologists states:

 

“If a death is believed to be due to confirmed COVID-19 infection, there is unlikely to be any need for a post-mortem examination to be conducted and the Medical Certificate of Cause of Death should be issued.”

 

Clear causation between the underlying cause and the direct cause is imperative to establish the fact. Just because someone tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 (SC2) virus it doesn’t mean they developed the associated syndrome of COVID19.

 

The Oxford Centre for Evidence Based Medicine found that anything between 5% – 80% of people who tested positive for SC2 did not have any symptoms of COVID19. Asymptomatic people do not have a disease which impacts their health in the short term. Even for those who did test positive for SC2, claims that this was the underlying cause of death are dubious in an unknown number of cases.

 

Following the Coronavirus Act, in keeping with advice from the NHS, the ONS advised doctors:

 

“If before death the patient had symptoms typical of COVID-19 infection, but the test result has not been received, it would be satisfactory to give ‘COVID-19’ as the cause of death….In the circumstances of there being no swab, it is satisfactory to apply clinical judgement.”

 

This isn’t unique to COVID19. Doctors are required to complete MCCDs “to the best of their knowledge and belief” even when test results may not yet be available. The difference in the case of COVID19 is that all the normal requirements for qualified confirmatory opinions and every opportunity to question the cause of death have been removed.

 

In addition, the need to complete Cremation form 5, requiring a second medical opinion, has been suspended for all COVID19 deaths. Given that post mortem confirmation is also extremely unlikely and agreement from a coroner is all but assured, this means possible COVID19 decedents can be cremated without any clear evidence they ever had the disease.

 

In light of all the other registration oddities for determining COVID19 mortality, the direct causation, proving COVID19 was the underlying cause of death, appears extremely doubtful. We just don’t know how many people have died from COVID19. We are told many people have, but we cannot state with any certainty what the numbers are. Neither can the ONS.

 

Obviously concerned about the implications, the Royal College of Pathologists (RCPath) have called for a systemic post outbreak review. The Health Service Journal reports that the RCPath expects a detailed investigation into causes of death due to the degree of uncertainty.

 

STATISTICALLY IT GETS WORSE

 

The overwhelming majority of medical and care staff, coroners, pathologists, ONS statisticians and funeral directors have no desire to mislead anyone. However, in the case of COVID19 deaths, the State has created a registration system so ambiguous it is virtually useless. The statistical product recorded by the ONS, despite their best efforts, is correspondingly vacuous.

 

This hasn’t stopped the State and the MSM from reporting every death as proof of the deadliness of COVID19. Claims of COVID19 as the underlying cause of death should be treated with considerable scepticism.

 

Initially the daily reports were based upon the figures of COVID19 deaths released by the NHS via the DHSC. These were the numbers with positive test results. The ONS also recorded positive test registrations from the NHS, care settings and the community.

 

As discussed, a positive test for SC2 doesn’t necessarily mean you suffered any health impact from COVID19. In addition, the test itself has proved to have a varying degree of reliability.

 

Nonetheless, the ONS figures from all settings, were higher than those reported by the MSM and the State in their daily briefings. However, the reliance upon positive tests changed on March 29th.

 

The State instructed the ONS not only to record all registered COVID19 deaths, where positive tests results were known, but also where COVID19 was merely suspected. In combination with the possibly spurious attribution from hospitals, this ‘mention’ of COVID19, further distanced the statistics from clear, confirmed causes of death.

 

This prompted a significant increase in the COVID19 fatalities reported by the ONS. Not because more people were dying from it, but because the categorisation of COVID19 deaths had changed. Any mention of COVID19 anywhere on the death certificate, regardless of other comorbidities, such as heart failure or cancer, were now recorded as registered COVID19 deaths by the ONS.

 

This addition of claimed COVID19 deaths has punctuated the ONS data throughout the outbreak. While we are told by the MSM that these new figures better reflect the reality of COVID19 mortality, in truth we are moving further away from any meaningful record.

 

The evidence suggests the methodology has been altered at opportune moments to inflate and maintain the mortality statistics. Just after the virus peak of infection and the start of the lockdown, the State instructed the ONS to include suspected “mentions” of COVID19. Again, as the recorded numbers of deaths were dropping, the State started releasing more figures from the care sector. From April 29th they have introduced additional figures provided by the Care Quality Commission (CQC).

 

If the figures from the NHS are at best questionable, the figures from the CQC run the risk of moving us into fantasy land. All the same problems of decedents not being seen, video consultations, lack of corroborative medical opinion and so forth remain. However, in care settings the onus for signing MCCDs shifts from hospital doctors to General Practitioners (GP’s).

 

The CQC is the independent regulator of health and social care in England. During the COVID19 outbreak it has not required care homes or community care providers to notify them of suspected cases. It has also suspended all inspections.

 

From the 29th April the CQC will provide statistics to the ONS where a “care home provider has stated COVID-19 as a suspected or confirmed cause of death.” This notification is made online via the CQC’s Provider Portal. Provisional figures will be included in the ONS daily updates.

 

The CQC is tasked with making sure decedents from care homes who died in hospital are removed from the reports before submitting them to the ONS. Otherwise massive duplication will occur. We can only hope statisticians will be extremely diligent.

 

The ONS has reported what these statistics from the CQC will be based upon. Frankly, it makes jaw dropping reading. The ONS state:

 

“The inclusion of a death in the published figures as being the result of COVID-19 is based on the statement of the care home provider, which may or may not correspond to a medical diagnosis or test result, or be reflected in the death certification.”

 

Most care home providers are not medically trained. Their judgement regarding whether or not the decedent had COVID19 may well be the result of a once weekly phone call with a GP. Guidance to GP’s from NHS England states that Possible COVID19 patients should be identified primarily by weekly check-ins online.

 

This is in keeping with the NHS Key Principles of General Practice, in relation to COVID19, which states:

 

" Remote consultations should be used when possible. Consider the use of video consultations when appropriate.”

 

The ONS add:

 

There is no validation built into the quality of data on collection. Fields may be left blank or may contain information that is contradictory, and this may not be resolved at the point of publication. Most pertinent to this release are place of death and whether the death was as a result of confirmed or suspected coronavirus.

 

This is the system the CQC will use to collect the data for the ONS reports. Once someone, either in a care home or cared for in the community, is assumed to have died of COVID19, based upon the best guess of the care provider following a chat with a local GP, in keeping with the process we have already discussed, their MCCD will be signed off as a COVID19 death.

 

The ONS will add their death to the COVID19 statistics and the State and the MSM will report them to the public as confirmed COVID19 mortality.

 

How anyone can consider the statistics from care providers an accurate and reliable record of COVID19 deaths is difficult to envisage. Nonetheless, that is what we are asked to believe.

 

THE STATE AND MSM COVID19 FUDGE

 

All we are able to identify with any certainty are the total number of of all deaths, called all cause mortality, reported by the ONS. We cannot be confident about what caused those deaths during the COVID19 outbreak.

 

The State has presided over a truly remarkable bastardisation of the ONS data for COVID19. This has not only rendered records of COVID19 deaths a statistical black hole but, during the claimed pandemic, has also made the ONS data for other causes of excess mortality practically unknowable.

 

Especially for the ONS, any chance of accurately separating COVID19 deaths from other causes of mortality has been completely obliterated by State diktat. For the first time in their history the ONS are reporting a relatively large number of highly dubious registered causes of death. However, they remain our best hope of knowing how many people have passed away.

 

In the meantime, while we wait for the ONS data to emerge, the MSM are reporting every COVID19 death from any source they can find. Some are vaguely confirmed and some not. They are also reporting suspected COVID19 deaths from care homes, provisional figures from the NHS , the CQC and then the same figures again from the DHSC and later the ONS.

 

The narrative they are presenting, on the back of this hodgepodge of statistical irrelevance, is designed to convince the public of the severity of the outbreak in the UK. There is clearly high excess mortality at the moment. Thanks to the lockdown, this is happening while the NHS is essentially closed to everyone other than suspected COVID19 patients.

 

Early studies have already predicted a significant health impact from the lack of essential health care caused by the lockdown. People requiring treatment for a range of other potentially fatal conditions aren’t getting it. This was acknowledged by the UK’s Chief Medical Officer Chris Witty in the daily briefing on April 30th:

 

“…You have the direct deaths from coronavirus but also indirect deaths. Part of which is caused by the NHS and public health services not being able to do what they normally can to look after people with other conditions….It is therefore important…..to do the other important things like urgent cancer care, elective surgery and all the other thing like screening….which we need to do to keep people healthy.”

 

How many people have died of other causes, due to the lockdown, only to be registered as COVID19 deaths? We just don’t know and the ONS have no way of finding out.

 

However we do know, thanks to the ONS, the total all cause mortality as a percentage of population in England and Wales over recent decades. This analysis shows us, while excess mortality this year is high, it is by no means unprecedented. In fact, as a percentage of population, it is notably lower to the comparable years of 1995, 1996, 1998 and 1999. Yet none of these years necessitated the shut down of the economy nor the dire health consequences of closing the NHS to all but a few patients.

Between 27th March and 17th April (ONS weeks 14,15 & 16) the ONS registered 25,932 additional deaths above the statistical recent 5 year norm. Of these 11,427 recorded COVID19 as the sole mentioned underlying cause.

 

We have just explored the considerable doubt about this attribution. However, if we accept this figure, it means the remaining 14,505 people died with other registered underlying causes. That means approximately 56% of additional excess mortality is attributable to something else, either in addition to or entirely separate from suggested COVID19.

 

Given this inexplicable Spring mortality, it seems highly likely these are at least some of the indirect deaths the UK’s Chief Medical Officer spoke of. To claim all these excess deaths are the result of COVID19, as the State and MSM persistently do, is without any justification whatsoever.

 

It is not possible to identify how many people have died as a direct result of COVID19 either from the registration of deaths or the resultant statistics. This is not the fault of medical practitioners or statisticians. It is caused by a State response to a claimed pandemic which has rendered the most crucial processes, and the data gleaned from them, a statistical nonsense.

 

source

[dufus]

Exclusive: Video shows key UK official in 2016 anticipating “a pandemic that killed a lot of people”

(  video embedded source )

 

On 16 March we reported that the UK had carried out a confidential pandemic training exercise in late 2016, codenamed Cygnus. The story was picked up 12 days later in the Sunday Telegraph and reverberated across the media. The report, as we wrote on 16 March, showed that the UK's pandemic plans had been "tested and failed" and yet "were not rewritten or revised".

 

We now have video from the event in November 2016 when the then UK chief medical officer, Sally Davies – Christopher Whitty's predecessor – reported on the failings of Cygnus. Until the full 57-page report was leaked on Thursday, the findings had not been made public.

 

“We’ve just had in the UK a three-day exercise on flu, on a pandemic that killed a lot of people,” Davies tells Radio 4 presenter Mishal Hussein in the video, who chaired the event at the World Innovation Summit for Health in Doha, “and it became absolutely clear,” continues Davies, that “we could not cope with the excess bodies.”

 

A severe pandemic, Davies goes on, will in future “stretch everyone. It becomes very worrying about the deaths… and then what that will do to society, as you start to get all of those deaths… and then the economic impact.”

 

"As you start to get all those deaths," said Davies. This is not the language of suppression. This was the language of mitigation. It appears that the UK did not intend to suppress a future pandemic, as we have argued before. Exercise Cygnus tested for a pandemic that would lead to between 200,000 and 400,000 UK deaths. That was thought to be a plausible outcome.

 

Government planning rested on the idea that the UK, and other countries would, as one observer put it, "just sit back and let tragedy of that scale unfold. Nowhere in the plan is there recognition that neighbouring countries hit first would react with lockdown." Indeed. For more on that, see this.

 

Whitehall plans rested on a failure of imagination. The UK overturned a years-long strategy – to mitigate the crisis, but not to suppress it – when it locked down on 23 March. (Sally Davies declined to comment when the New Statesman spoke to her on 24 March.)

 

It is now paying the price for failing to act, both after Cygnus in 2016 and earlier this year when the crisis began. The UK now has with the highest number of Covid-19 deaths in Europe. I discussed the implications for No 10 of that statistic in this week's political column. But this crisis has implicated more than just Boris Johnson's government.

 

The failings of Exercise Cygnus took place under Theresa May’s tenure, and the long reign of Jeremy Hunt as secretary of state for health. While the UK’s errant pandemic plans date back to the mid-2000s. No party or recent government foresaw or forestalled this crisis. 

 

source

[zanderthunder]

 

THE highly contagious novel coronavirus has set new standards for personal space, and the etiquette of social distancing has reinforced the notion that hell is other people.

 

Some US politicians seem intent on applying that existential viewpoint at the national level, as they clearly believe that hell is other countries. At least, to be more precise, they are trying to peddle the idea that hell is China.

 

One would think that with the virus killing thousands of people a day in the United States and infecting about ten times as many, without showing any signs that it is being brought under control, the US government would be focusing its attention and concentrating its efforts on the pandemic and be doing its utmost to rein in the infection and mortality rates. Instead, rather than acting to correct their earlier mistakes, they are doubling down on their misreading of the situation by ramping up their China-bashing.

 

Since what they are doing is poles apart from what needs to be done, the US people must swallow the bitter truth that their suffering so far is likely only a prelude of worse to come unless there is a change of approach.

 

An important reason why these politicians seem intent on fabricating an alternate reality in which China is the pathogen that needs to be fought is because they are well aware that they scorned the window of opportunity and shirked the tough decisions that could have prevented some of the deaths, distress and hardship in the country.

 

That the US administration is encouraging people to be “warriors” and go back to work, indicates that the federal government might be thinking of abandoning the conviction that it can contain the contagion in the way it was trying to do.

 

But getting people back to work must be done prudently and should be accompanied by effective control measures, particularly sufficient testing and treatment ability, to ensure that a herd immunity approach does not make transmission a viral stroll in the park.

 

That not a single aircraft carrier strike group of the US Navy has been spared from infection should be a wake-up call to the decision-makers of the country that they are fighting a smokeless war with the wrong enemy. The US’ reimagined gunboat diplomacy will not help it defeat this alien invader.

 

Stopping its blame game, and engaging with China, the most likely partner able to help the US get control of the pandemic, would be the most practical and effective way for the US administration to protect its people and economy from further unnecessary grief and torment.

 

Having invested a lot of time and effort over the years fabricating enemies for others to see to mobilise them to its cause, the US is now confronting a real enemy, one that can’t even be seen. Now is the time when it should rally with others to what is truly a common cause.

 

Source: Washington’s irresponsible blame game only adds to American people’s sufferings (via TheStar Online)

[Karlston]

How Much Is a Human Life Actually Worth?

As the US economy reopens  amid a deadly pandemic, a dire question looms. Let's weigh the risks—and do the math.

 

 

The numbers are staggering. On May 7, 2,231 Americans died of the disease Covid-19, bringing the total number of deaths in the United States to 75,662, and more than 270,000 worldwide.

 

The economic effects have been nothing short of American carnage. At the end of April the US Congressional Budget Office hinted that the second quarter of 2020 would see the first drop in the US Gross Domestic Product in six years, and the worst since 2008. Since March, 33.5 million people have filed for unemployment. Companies large and small are going to disappear, along with millions of jobs. Consumer spending, business investment, manufacturing—everything is in freefall, and it’s not likely to get better until 2021, even if the pandemic eases and doesn’t snap back with a second wave. (Pandemics tend to snap back with second waves—especially when social distancing ends too soon.)

 

Put it that way, and the choice seems stark: Continue strict social distancing and shelter-in-place measures to minimize the spread of Covid-19 and save thousands of lives, or end the lightweight lockdown—open all the shops, restart the factories—and save the economy. Sacrifices must be made for the common good. “We can’t keep our country closed. We have to open our country,” President Trump said while visiting a mask factory in Arizona Tuesday. “Will some people be badly affected? Yes.”

 

But…really? The point of social distancing was to “flatten the curve,” to slow the spread of the virus so that hospitals wouldn’t be overwhelmed and governments could take public health measures—like widespread testing and tracing the contacts of sick people—to keep people safe. All of those things would have rendered the dichotomy false; the lockdown wouldn’t have to be total and the economic costs could be lessened. None of that happened.

 

Sacrifices have to be worth it. The good has to be greater. And there’s devilry in those details. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo made the point in stark terms: “How much is a human life worth? That is the real discussion that no one is admitting, openly or freely—that we should,” Cuomo said in a briefing Tuesday. “To me, I say the cost of a human life, a human life is priceless. Period.”

 

As the Associated Press has reported, the federal government has largely abandoned its own standards for when states should lift their shelter-in-place orders. A researcher at the respected Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security told Congress last week that no state looked epidemiologically ready to go back to normal.

 

And yet 31 states have decided to just go for it. Texas is letting restaurants and movie theaters reopen at 25 percent capacity, with barber shops to follow—while the governor acknowledges privately that Covid-19 cases will certainly increase as a result. Georgia is lifting its stay-at-home order and allowing places from tattoo parlors to bowling alleys to unlock their doors. Even California, which battened down early, is opening some southern beaches.

 

Information about the virus is incomplete and sometimes contradictory. So is information about its impact on the national economy. So is information about what people will contribute to the economy even if states end official restrictions. Given that uncertainty, who is going to get on an airplane next week? Or go to a crowded bar? (A minority, according to polls, but the perception of risk has declined in recent weeks, independent of the spread of disease.)

 

How much is a human life worth? As a society we have historically been willing to incur costs to save lives and improve public welfare. Government forces carmakers to reduce air pollution to help people with asthma, and the price of cars goes up. Laws prevent factories from polluting to save fisheries, and goods cost more. But that kind of tradeoff clearly has limits. Few people suggest deactivating the country’s financial engines to fight opioid addiction deaths or flu or heart disease or traffic accidents. Why do it for this one very bad respiratory virus?

 

Answer: This virus is not like those other things. In less than five months it has killed more Americans that the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan—combined. If trend lines continue, it’ll kill more people every day than died on 9/11. More than that, lots of the preventable public health crises that kill Americans also make a lot of money for someone, like opioid-making pharmaceutical companies, or the petrochemical industry. People have incentives to make it hard to fix those problems. But Covid-19 doesn’t have fans.

 

And so, to save a vast number of lives, we will pay a huge cost. Until that cost seems too high.

 

This calculation is fundamental to the way Americans make policy decisions in normal times. We have a set of tools to draw on—a winding, fascinating body of knowledge that has, since World War II, helped leaders make decisions like this. In asking whether social distancing, school closures, event cancelations and other “non-pharmaceutical interventions” are in any sense “worth it,” the implicit question is simple and profound: What is a human life worth, in dollars?

 

The science of human value began with the preparations for a previous apocalypse. Specifically, military strategists wanted to know how to inflict the most effective nuclear holocaust for the least amount of money.

 

To be fair, The US Air Force didn’t want to know the value of preserving a life, but of ending it. In essence, this was a ghoulish corollary of determining the value of a life: How much does a death cost? Strategists wanted to know how they could wreak the most damage in a first-strike nuclear attack on the Soviet Union—given their limited budget and a limited number of airplanes to drop the bombs. So in 1949 the Air Force tasked the RAND Corporation with the problem. Freshly independent from its origins as an Air Force-funded aerospace think tank, RAND set about applying a new set of tools to the problem: game theory and binary computers. Dr. Strangelove will see you now.

 

After crunching hundreds of equations, optimizing 400,000 different combinations of bombs and planes—modeling as well personnel, airbases, procurement, and logistics—the RANDies were ready to show the Air Force how to stop worrying and love mathematical models. The winning strategy, unveiled in 1950, was to field as many cheap planes as possible, to turn the Soviet sky black with antique propeller planes playing hide-the-ball with A-bombs so the Soviets wouldn’t know whom to shoot down. As the Georgia State economist Spencer Banzhaf writes, the Air Force brass weren’t into it. RAND’s game-theoretic approach might’ve beaten the USSR, but it also maximized the number of US pilots killed and minimized the Air Force’s rationale for buying new jet airplanes.

 

RAND sort of apologized and re-presented their analysis in a way that allowed the Air Force to buy all the deadly new toys it wanted. But the analysts realized they had what they called a “criterion problem.” A bomb or a parachute or a course of training had a dollar value—but what about the person who benefited from all three? They knew how much an airplane was worth, but not its crew. It was really screwing up their theory of the game.

 

The RANDies weren’t the only ones grappling with the moral and economic problem of the value of a human life. By midcentury, economists and lawyers were trying to rationalize and put statistical frames around this basic problem of the human condition: managing risk and figuring out what outcomes are worth a potential death. Courts of law were doing it to compensate people for wrongful deaths, for example.

 

The relatives of someone who got killed on the job, let’s say, might receive as compensation the amount of money that person would likely have earned over a lifetime. Of course, that’s not fair at all—why should the family of a coal miner killed in a cave-in be entitled to less compensation than the family of a guy who works in the mine office? By any morally valid reasoning, the size of a paycheck doesn’t make one life worth less than another.

 

“In some of the early work, it was pointed out that we don’t put a dollar value on an individual life. The example was, if a girl falls down a well, we don’t say, ‘sorry, it’s going to cost $10 million to go down there and get you, and you’re not worth $10 million, so good luck,’” Banzhaf tells me. “We just don’t do that.” As Banzhaf says, economists of the time were trying to distinguish, in terms of benefits and costs, between private consumption choices made by individuals and population-spanning policy choices made by, like, governments.

 

A former USAF pilot turned PhD candidate named Jack Carlson found the beginnings of a way out. In his dissertation, he tried to put a cost not on a life, but on saving lives—or not saving them. The USAF, Carlson wrote, trained pilots in when to eject from a damaged plane versus trying to land it. Ejecting would save the pilot, and landing might save the (expensive) plane.

 

Carlson ran the numbers on bail-out versus landing and found that the tipping point implicitly valued the saving of the pilot’s life at $270,000. In another case, Carlson noted that designing, building, and maintaining ejection pods for the crew of the B-58 bomber would cost $80 million and save between one and three lives a year. Making the implicit explicit: Doing the math, the US Air Force pegged the “money valuation of pilots’ lives” at between $1.17 million and $9 million.

 

Carlson’s thesis adviser, a former RAND economist named Thomas Schelling, built his student’s ideas into the framework that’s still in use today. In 2005 Schelling would win the Nobel Prize for his work on the game theory of conflict, especially nuclear war, but back in 1968, when he was a professor at Harvard, he wrote a chapter in the scintillatingly titled book Problems in Public Expenditure Analysis called “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.”

 

It’s a weirdly philosophical work, somehow both whimsical and elegiac. “This is a treacherous topic, and I must choose a nondescriptive title to avoid initial misunderstanding,” Schelling begins. “It is not the worth of human life that I shall discuss, but of ‘life-saving,’ of preventing death.” Schelling was trying to get out from under the moral weight of putting a monetary value on life, and after 35 pages of squirming he identifies the lever that’ll shift the mass. You can’t value a life, he says, but you can find out how much money people are willing to accept to risk their own.

 

Take a program to save lives in a large, well-known population with a risk that’s well-understood but small, and then ask, OK, what’s that worth? You can figure that out through surveys or consumer behavior— “revealed preference,” as economists call it. Take what people will spend individually to avoid a teensy risk, and multiply it by the odds of that risk coming to pass and the total number of people it might affect. That’s it.

 

Schelling called it the Value of a Statistical Life.

 

This approach has the advantage of dodging the morally questionable admission that death is part of the cost of doing business. Like insurance, Schelling’s idea spreads out a known risk among a large population, smearing out the question of specific responsibility or guilt so everyone has a share.

 

A decade later, amid the doldrums of the 1970s, politicians were starting to worry about the financial implications of government regulations. Sure, it was fine to save bald eagles or keep rivers from catching fire, but was it worth making taxpayers or businesses (and therefore consumers) pay their hard-earned dollars for that? President Jimmy Carter ordered agencies in the executive branch to take a new approach, analyzing the costs and benefits of every new rule. When Ronald Reagan took office, his deregulatory mania went further. All executive agencies had to prove, to the Office of Management and Budget, that the economic benefits of any major regulation outweighed the costs of implementing it.

 

In 1981, an economist named Kip Viscusi suggested using VSL to make these decisions. As he later wrote, the math was pretty simple. The odds said that about 1 in 10,000 Americans died on the job every year—a risk of 1/10,000. And in return, people got paid an extra $300 a year for incurring that risk. So OK: 10,000 workers get $3 million in total to risk one of them dying. The VSL was $3 million, or about $8.9 million adjusted for inflation. Today, estimates for VSL hover between $9 million and $11 million.

 

“We spend some money to smooth out a curve on a highway and predict it’ll lessen the chance of dying of each person who goes around that curve,” Banzhaf says. “If there are million people driving that curve, and each one has a reduced risk of dying on that curve of one in a million, then by fixing the curve, we saved one life.” If you believe in the VSL, it’s worth spending $10 million to regrade the road.

 

It was a controversial approach, for some of the same reasons that social distancing is controversial today. Not everyone agreed that risk—or risk-aversion—was the right way to evaluate policies. Maybe outcomes like cleaner rivers and non-dead birds were their own valid metrics, their own reward. Katherine Hood, a sociology doctoral student at UC Berkeley who has written on the history of VSL, points out that the CEO of General Electric gave a speech in 1978 called “The Vain Search for a Risk-Free Society;” industrialists at the time worried (or said they were worried) about risk aversion threatening the American way of life, a position that tech industrialists like Elon Musk still stake out today.

 

Meanwhile the left side of the political spectrum worried about the same thing but from the opposite direction. In congressional hearings, familiar politicians like Al Gore and Ralph Nader testified that health and safety regulations simply weren’t amenable to cost-benefit analyses, because while the costs were fixed, the benefits were unpredictable. “Requiring factories to not pollute, a lot of the time that regulation ends up spurring innovation and leading to a healthier and more productive workforce,” Hood says. “There’s a real political battle going on here. It’s not just an argument about how to do the math.”

 

All of which leads to the basic math to calculate whether it’s worth keeping people home and businesses closed to fight the spread of Covid-19 despite the economic consequences—to answer the question all those politicians have been asking on TV. All you need to know is how the GDP will change, and how many lives you save.

 

So, the math, in broad strokes: First, assume that Gross Domestic Product was going to grow at 1.75 percent a year without the pandemic, but that instead social distancing will shrink GDP by 6.2 percent. That’s the cost.

 

Then also assume that all the mitigation measures reduce the Covid-19 fatality rate from 1.5 percent when hospitals are overwhelmed to just 0.5 percent. That saves 1.24 million lives, with a VSL of $10 million each.

 

A group of economists at the University of Wyoming have already done the arithmetic, in a paper in press at the Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis. (Yes, that’s a thing.)

 

GDP would have been $13.7 trillion, but now it’ll drop to $6.5 trillion.

 

Cost: $7.2 trillion.

 

Social distancing will save 1.2 million lives at a VSL of $10 million a pop.

 

Benefit: $12.4 trillion.

 

Analysis: Social distancing to fight the spread of Covid-19 saves $5.2 trillion.

 

That seems good.

 

I feel OK about that calculation because I asked Kip Viscusi, now an economist at Vanderbilt University. He graciously agreed to metaphorically scribble on the back of an envelope. “Ask an infectious disease expert how many lives will be saved, and the numbers they were coming up with will be at least a million lives. Once you’ve got that number, you can run with it. A million lives at $10 million each is about $10 trillion, which is half the GDP,” Viscusi says. “Unless you have a really catastrophic outcome, the health benefits of social distancing swamp the costs.”

 

Stop there, and the problem does indeed seem simple. But of course it’s not.

 

Epidemiologists are reasonably secure in the idea that social distancing instituted sooner rather than later lowers overall deaths. And history bears out that it’s worth it. One analysis—again, an un-peer-reviewed preprint—says that the economies in cities that instituted social distancing measures stricter and earlier in response to the 1918 influenza pandemic bounced back faster and higher. A city that put those non-pharmaceutical interventions into effect 10 days earlier saw manufacturing employment go up 5 percent higher than a city that did it later. Keeping those measures in place for 50 days longer increased that employment by 6.5 percent.

 

But that said, it’s not obvious whether policymakers and public health experts are thinking in terms of VSL or any other analysis deeper than who will vote, and how. “VSL calculations are rampant among economists and outside analysts who are thinking about this, but I don’t know if anybody in the government is doing these kinds of calculations,” Viscusi says. “They’ll say, ‘the economy has to reopen,’ which is the message targeted to people who favor reopening, and then they’ll say, ‘we have to do it safely,’ which is targeted to people worried about the risk. They’re trying to appeal to both sides.”

 

Even if they were using VSL, that might be the wrong move. It’s too blunt an instrument. The question of who, exactly, incurs these costs and who, exactly, accrues these benefits acquires all sorts of subtleties. The arithmetic isn’t the problem; it’s the rhetoric.

Photograph: Paloma Rincón

 

Remember the criteria for VSL—small, predictable risk spread out over a population that can say how much it’ll spend to mitigate that risk. “Most of the Value of Statistical Life calculations you have are for one life, or a small number,” says Andrew Atkeson, an economist at UCLA working on VSL and the pandemic. But they’re harder to apply, he says, when the risk is high and the exposed population is huge—potentially everyone, in fact.

 

And the cost side isn’t some thin slice of a paycheck, or a tiny bit of extra annual salary. “It’s not just, ‘oh, I’ll have to postpone buying a new car for a year,’ or ‘I can’t get a fancy meal out on my anniversary,’” Banzhaf says. “We’re talking about whole ways of life and livelihoods potentially being ruined and not coming back.”

 

VSL might be one thing to take into account in making globe-spanning, high-stakes decisions, but it can’t be the only thing. “After 9/11, all that response, was it about saving lives, period? Or was it about not letting the terrorists get us, a sort of pride? If it was only about lives, clearly we could have saved more lives by spending that money in other ways,” Banzhaf says. “I have been such a lifelong advocate of benefit-cost and quantitative analysis, but I just don’t know what number you would use right now.” With so much still unknown about Covid-19, nobody even really knows the overall mortality risk, much less the chances that death will happen to any one person.

 

Also, VSL is different for different demographic groups, though it’s slightly suicidal, career-wise, to admit it. A massive debate over whether to value older people with a smaller number—figuring that they might not pay as much because they had less time left to live, lower the value of their statistical lives overall—got turned into a scandal over the government calculating a “senior death discount.” Richer people are willing to assume less risk than poorer people. Some economists even think that globally, poorer people in the developing world may well value their risk lower because they simply have less to spend, and more to lose. Even if it’s true, acknowledging it puts you on a slip-n-slide to racism and eugenics.

 

People in the US might be willing to assume more risk for less money during the pandemic because the emergency social safety net doesn’t pay 75 to 90 percent of their income when they stay home, as it does in, say, Denmark. The willingness to assume risk changes with context, and every one of those contexts implies a different cost-benefit analysis.

 

All that assumes people understand their actual risk—which they can’t, because scientists only just met SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, less than five months ago. Neither economic nor epidemiological models have enough data to account for known unknowns like how likely it is that someone might get sick after walking behind an asymptomatic jogger who isn’t wearing a mask.

 

If the risk that VSL tries to account for is unknown, that’s called “Knightian uncertainty,” and it makes it hard to understand how people value that risk and how they’ll act in response. “How do people behave when they don’t know the right model, and they don’t know the right parameters even if they do?” says Martin Eichenbaum, an economist at Northwestern University. “Does that bias them to inaction? Does that bias them to pessimism?”

No one knows.

 

Just as it’s tough to measure the benefits, it’s also hard to accurately measure the costs. Much of the early work in determining the economic effects of social distancing and business closures uses Gross Domestic Product as a metric, and it’s a bad one. “GDP is a lousy measure of economic welfare,” says Alan Krupnick, an economist at Resources for the Future, a nonprofit think tank in Washington DC. “Economists tend to look at aggregate economic indicators like unemployment rates and GDP, as opposed to getting into the distributional issues—who’s being affected, who’s losing income, where is this GDP growth actually coming from, does it increase the equity in society? Our profession is not as good at doing that.”

 

GDP might go up if people felt they had no choice but to return to work regardless of the risk of infection. If essential workers are also most likely to be exposed, and they return to work, the economy could improve as social inequality increased. A person who has no income if they don’t go to work is running a very different cost-benefit analysis—the risk of getting sick and perhaps dying versus the “benefit” of being able to afford food and not getting evicted. They incur all the risk to merely not starve, while the more nebulous and conceptual “economy” benefits greatly (and presumably so do private-equity hedge funds and billionaires).

 

The cost-benefit analysis approach to Covid-19 shutdowns clearly needs some honing. A hodgepodge of closure and reopening policies among populations with wildly different risks of infection and death does not lend itself to balancing a cost in dollars against a cost in blood. What researchers would like to know is which specific interventions are most successful stopping the virus and have the least impact on people’s economic lives. Figuring that out could lead to a new phase in the fight.

Photograph: Paloma Rincón

The approach that epidemiologists use to map how diseases spread was developed in the 1920s and 1930s, primarily by WO Kermack and AG McKendrick. They divided a given population into three kinds of people, now called “compartments:” Susceptible, Infected, and Recovered (or Removed, which is dead). That’s the basis for an SIR model, but you can add in more categories. (SEIR adds people Exposed but not yet Infectious; SEIRS is for when Recovereds don’t remain immune and circle back around to Susceptible status.)

 

Those populations grow and shrink according to variables like the rate of infection—how many Susceptibles a given Infected can infect (that’s called the reproductive number), and over how much time. Modelers also hope to know how long it takes for an Infected to start showing symptoms, or what proportion of Infecteds get Removed and how long that takes.

 

To a certain extent, social distancing measures get wrapped into the Reproductive Number. The strictest kind of quarantine reduces it effectively to zero, because Infecteds can no longer come into contact with Susceptibles. But in even the most sophisticated models, that’s a gross oversimplification because of those same demographic and geographic differences that plague (sorry) the VSL.

 

The problem gets even worse, though, and the explanation is a clue to why epidemiological models have been so controversial and so all-over-the-place in predicting what’ll happen with Covid-19. They tend to overestimate the number of dead or sick people, because they don’t account for behavioral changes like social distancing or new patterns of consumption like wearing masks, or only getting takeout.

 

Adding new compartments can help, with different populations showing different levels of adherence to lockdown policies, but you still have to be able to “parameterize” those models—“You need to be able to estimate what the impact of those would be, such as how much would that reduce transmission and then how would that reduction change with differing adherence. And to know those estimates for sure is hard,” says Helen Jenkins, a biostatistician at Boston University. “We are very early on in this pandemic, so we don’t have good estimates. You’re basically using poor data in your model, so it’s questionable how useful that is.”

 

From a public health and political standpoint, one of the worst things that can happen to a model is that it works. If a model inspires a government to institute social distancing, it becomes a reverse Toynbee Convector, precluding the future it predicts through the act of predicting it. That’s the source of the public phenomenon known as the paradox of prevention—if it works, people assume the thing it was trying to fix must not have been that bad.

 

“All these SIR models always overestimate the eventual cumulative burden of disease, and usually it’s because they have fixed parameters. They don’t take into account that people are going to change behavior, rationally or not, and disease will slow down more than would be predicted by the model,” Atkeson says. The opposite could also happen—models that build social distancing into the numbers, with an artificially depressed reproductive number, end up lowballing the impacts when social distancing gets lifted before the disease is suppressed.

 

It’s probably an oversimplification to say epidemiological models can’t take into account change. One subclass, called dynamic transmission models, can reduce contact rates over time, for example, by incorporating mobility data like what you might get from a cell phone. “Though just because it’s possible to include does not mean that models have indeed taken this into account yet,” says Brooke Nichols, a health economist and infectious disease modeler at BU.

 

A more subtle and useful approach might be to unify the two philosophies here. Nichols says the fields are siloed off from each other, even though an interdisciplinary approach would help with not only Covid-19 but figuring out the true value of any public health intervention that averts deaths.

 

An economist like Eichenbaum would say that epidemiologists are good at looking at the things people do and coming up with infection rates, but not as good as economists at talking about how infection rates might change behaviors like going to arena concerts and buying at retail. “That’s just not what they do. That’s our job,” Eichenbaum says. (And indeed, he’s co-author of a working paper that came out this April called, simply, “The Macroeconomics of Epidemics.”) “Epidemiological models are basically nonlinear difference equations, and economists are used to that stuff. We know how to solve those. The challenge, mathematically, is to understand that the coefficients in those nonlinear difference equations depend on what people do, and what people do changes those coefficients.”

 

Economists and epidemiologists might still have some work to do in the quest to integrate the two worlds. “I would venture that the epi models can be slow to adjust, whereas the econometric models are too flexible,” says Jeffrey Shaman, an infectious disease modeler and director of the Climate and Health Program at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.

 

Modelers from any tradition might agree, though, that their work is most helpful in conjunction with experimental data—something sorely missing in the dynamics of Covid-19. The geographically heterogenous lifting of social distancing requirements across the US will put an ugly, tragic end to that lack of data. “There’s all these uncertainties about how people behave and how the disease will react,” says Atkeson (who, to be clear, is not advocating this move). “Since we’ve never done this before, or not in 100 years, it has to be empirical. You impose the measures and see what happens.” Some epidemiologic curves will flatten, others will flex, and more people will die.

 

That’s…a choice. It’s not one the vast majority of Americans want, and it seems supported mostly by anti-vaxxers and the kind of people who bring guns and tactical vests to nominally nonviolent protests. But it’s one President Trump has been pushing for, even when states haven’t met the most basic conditions of his own policy for “re-opening” the economy. (States were supposed to first report 14 days of falling new cases, not to mention an infrastructure for testing and contact tracing; no state meets both criteria.)

 

That’s going to be terrible if you don’t want people to die needlessly. But it might open the door for a different, clearer kind of decision making—one that doesn’t depend on necessarily opaque mathematical models and instead drags economics, a dismal science even in the Before Time, into the now. It might provide useful knowledge, maybe for the next pandemic, but it’ll also push the most vulnerable people—the sick, the old, the poor, people of color—toward sickness and death, no matter what their individual appetite for risk is.

 

The truth is, the question of how to respond to Covid-19 has never really been one of lives versus dollars. At least, it didn’t have to be. The dichotomy was false because of the degree of control a government could always exert on both sides of risk—the risk of infection, flattened by social distance, and the risk of personal financial ruin and societal economic collapse mitigated by aid programs. The federal government is pushing to end the restrictions that flattened the curve, and the aid programs have been grievously inadequate.

 

And now here we are, forcing (or at least urging) scared people to go back into the world because nobody could be bothered to develop a nationwide program to test people for infection and trace their contacts if they were positive, or to adequately support a pause of economic activity. Consumption behavior has a context. “It’s not, either we can choose to go about life as normal and some people will die, and that’s life, people die, or we can all shut down and give up our productive American way of life,” Hood says. “That’s only a choice people are making because we don’t have a social safety net.”

 

Absent that kind of response, the invisible hand of the market seems to be giving people the finger. Instead of trading between lives saved and economic stability, we will have neither. We’ll attempt to restart the economy, more people will die, and the economy will auger in. The number of deaths in the United States from Covid-19 is staying at a steady, high rate, with many projections indicating growth to come. Every economic indicator says the losses are continuing. The decisions of leadership reveal a preference: The lives of Americans must now, somehow, be worth less.

 

 

Source: How Much Is a Human Life Actually Worth? (Wired)

[Reefa]

MUST WATCH: Debunking the Narrative (With Prof. Dolores Cahill)

[dufus]

The UK Government's Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance explains that many people who died with Covid-19 on their death certificates have not been tested for the virus

 

video

[Karlston]

COVID-19 resurges in reopened countries; Wuhan sees first cluster in a month

China ordered all Wuhan residents get tested for COVID-19—that’s ~11 million people.

Enlarge / WUHAN, CHINA - MAY 11: Residents wears face masks while riding their bicycles and scooters. The government has begun lifting outbound travel restrictions after almost 11 weeks of lockdown to stem the spread of COVID-19.

Getty | Stringer

266 with 116 posters participating

The World Health Organization on Monday called for continued vigilance as several areas that have eased lockdown restriction began to see a resurgence in COVID-19 cases—and the United States begins unbuttoning as well.

 

The Chinese city of Wuhan—where the pandemic began last December—saw its first cluster of cases in at least a month. The city began reopening in early April.

 

The cluster was just six cases: an 89-year-old symptomatic man and five asymptomatic cases. All of the infected lived in the same residential community. However, it was enough to spook government officials.

 

NPR’s Emily Feng reported from Beijing that “The rise of such hard-to-detect asymptomatic cases has alarmed public health authorities in China, who have ramped up contact tracing and testing efforts.”

 

China state media announced Tuesday that it has ordered all residents of Wuhan—roughly 11 million persons—to be tested within the next 10 days.

 

Likewise, the mayor of Seoul shut down bars and restaurants over the weekend—just days after South Korea had eased restrictions and allowed businesses to reopen—due to a spike of 86 new COVID-19 cases. Authorities identified a 29-year-old who visited five nightclubs and a bar while infected with the virus, sparking an outbreak of at least 54 cases, according to NPR. The uptick also led South Korean officials to delay the reopening of schools.

 

Germany, too, saw increases in cases after restrictions eased last week.

 

“Releasing lockdowns is both complex and difficult,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who goes by Dr. Tedros, said Monday. What’s happening in these places are “signs of the challenges that may lie ahead.”

 

“Fortunately, all three countries have systems in place to detect and respond to a resurgence in cases,” he added.

 

Though many areas of the US are beginning to reopen, it is unclear if the country has those systems in place to handle resurgence. In a Senate hearing earlier Tuesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease expert and director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Congress that resurgence “absolutely will occur” after we reopen.

 

“If you do not do an adequate response, we will have the deleterious consequence of more infections and more deaths,” he said.

 

 

Source: COVID-19 resurges in reopened countries; Wuhan sees first cluster in a month (Ars Technica)  

[dufus]

THE ANTI-VAXXERS ARE WINNING THE BATTLE ON FACEBOOK

 

Anti-vaccination Facebook Pages are currently better at attracting undecided users to their cause than pro-science counterparts, researchers have found.

 

As social media sites struggle to purge misinformation and conspiracy theories from their platforms, including campaigns relating to COVID-19, a study has now shown how differing stances on vaccination have evolved and competed over time. The project, led by Neil Johnson, professor of physics at George Washington University, analyzed Facebook communities containing close to 100 million individuals, grouping them into "clusters" to map how members interact, shift and share links.

 

The clusters were color coded, mapped and analyzed. And the results were surprising, Johnson told Newsweek, describing the current situation as a "perfect storm" that could see legitimate information drowned out by fringe, fake, science.

 

"We expected to find a network where establishment medical science/government public health advice ('Blue') forms a very large strong core, surrounded by a small number of fairly disorganized communities expressing a fringe view, like opposing vaccines ('Red'). We found the complete opposite," Johnson said. "Instead, there's a complex, three sided online war over trust in establishment medical science and health guidance—and Red is now in the driving seat.

 

"Instead of it being a two-sided war of Red vs Blue, anti-vaccination has pulled in the huge population of people who ordinarily don't talk a lot online about such issues; communities on Facebook of pet lovers or parents with a particular interest. These users are akin to a civilian population in an insurgency. We call them 'Green.' Blue is fighting in the wrong place, off to one side."

 

The team's findings suggested anti-vax Facebook Pages are smaller but more nimble than pro-vaccination communities, appearing to become "heavily entangled" with the much larger groups of users who are yet to fully form their own opinions.

 

Under present conditions, one predictive model used by the scientists found that anti-vaccination support could reach dominance in approximately 10 years.

 

"This is now a war over hearts and minds," Johnson said. "The growing success of Red lies in the fact that Red now offers lots of attractive 'flavors' of health-related narrative, such as questioning role of big pharma, government, civil liberties, freedom of choice for their kids etc. By contrast, Blue is like vanilla, one flavor of message."

 

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Facebook has stepped up its efforts to combat fake news and misinformation on its platforms—to mixed results.

 

That is, in part, due to the sheer scale of the problem.

 

Last week a video packed full of virus conspiracy theories from an anti-vax activist went viral and managed to attract millions of views before being addressed by the website's moderation staff. In March alone, Facebook said it had to display warnings on roughly 40 million posts that were related to bogus or unreliable COVID-19 information.

source

 

sleeping giant awakes  !