New York’s largest hospital system, Northwell, is conducting a sweeping analysis of its use of ventilators while treating coronavirus patients during the peak of the pandemic — over concerns that an over-reliance on the machines may have cost lives, reportsThe New York Post.
The Post goes on:
For so many sick COVID-19 patients, getting attached to a mechanical ventilator was a death sentence. More than two-thirds of the patients in Northwell Health facilities hooked to ventilators died in March and early April and the fatality rate was similar at other hospitals...
“One theory is if you put some patients on a ventilator, you might irritate the lungs more. That’s a theory we’re looking at,” Dr. Thomas McGinn, Northwell’s senior vice president and deputy physician-in-chief, told The Post.
There are a lot of sick and incompetent bastards all around this COVID-19 panic who don't even study reports that are out there--or have other agendas.
I am glad to see the investigations are beginning.
Politicians, government health officials, for starters, should be brought in by Congress and put under oath, let's see what these bastards knew when and what they didn't know that they should have.
Northwell runs Lenox Hill, Long Island Jewish and Staten Island University hospitals, as well as other regional hospitals. They are doing heroic work by conducting the probe.
Here are warnings I published about ventilators as far back as March, when Fauci, Birx and Trump were aggressively promoting the number of ventilators being distributed:
I single Fauci out as the most evil. There is something seriously wrong with the man. He suckered the world with his conman style coprolite that regularly was contradictory and often illogical.
Next, come government officials who still have stringent lockdowns on despite even more evidence that their actions are harmful in many ways, including growing suicides
Doctors at John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek say they have seen more deaths by suicide during this quarantine period than deaths from the COVID-19 virus.
The head of the trauma in the department believes mental health is suffering so much, it is time to end the shelter-in-place order.
"Personally I think it's time," said Dr. Mike deBoisblanc. "I think, originally, this (the shelter-in-place order) was put in place to flatten the curve and to make sure hospitals have the resources to take care of COVID patients.We have the current resources to do that and our other community health is suffering."
The numbers are unprecedented, he said.
"We've never seen numbers like this, in such a short period of time," he said. "I mean we've seen a year's worth of suicide attempts in the last four weeks."
Kacey Hansen has worked as a trauma nurse at John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek for almost 33 years. She is worried because not only are they seeing more suicide attempts, she says they are not able to save as many patients as usual.
"What I have seen recently, I have never seen before," Hansen said. "I have never seen so much intentional injury."
The trauma team is speaking out because they want the community to be aware, for people to reach out and support each other and for those who are suffering to know they can get help.
Let's see how the Bay Area officials who ordered the lockdowns, without any scientific studies to back them up, respond when the post-COVID-19 investigations begin.
Some are even now expanding their orders. The city of San Francisco is now ordering that masks be worn outside in almost all cases. They claim "substantial scientific evidence...that wearing Face Coverings," is one of the "strongest protections.
They, however, did not site even one study or any other pieces of evidence.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s reopening guidelines for schools include recommendations that students and teachers wear face coverings and receive daily temperature checks, according to a summary of the not-yet-released state guidance, reportsPolitico.
And further, the threat of COVID-19 turning into a serious health concern for youth is near zero.
More from Politico:
Newsom is expected to release the guidelines publicly on Friday.
The guidance recommends that individually plated or bagged meals be served in classrooms instead of cafeterias and that students remain with the same small group of classmates and teachers as much as possible.
Cloth face coverings would be used by staff at all times, and would be most essential for students when physical distancing is not possible, according to the guidelines.
Schools would implement screening of all staff and students before they enter campus and monitor signs of illness throughout the day, sending any students with a temperature of 100.4 degrees or higher, a cough or other Covid-19 symptoms home.
Both school staff and parents would need training on how to use masks and increase sanitation, with the possibility of standardized videos and online training to come.
How can this be anything other than indoctrination of children to obey the state and fear everything else?
Here is a bit more on the actions of power freak government officials who have issued draconian orders that are not based on science (The "wear masks" order edition). Jon Miltimore writes:
Millions of people are turning to masks in an effort to protect themselves from COVID-19, but new evidence suggests those efforts could be for naught.
Research published in the Annals of Internal Medicine last month found that both surgical and cloth masks proved ineffective in preventing the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
Conducted by clinical researchers at several universities in Seoul, South Korea, the study involved four patients receiving medical care for COVID-19. (Previous studies researching the efficacy of masks examined transmission of other viruses.)
Neither surgical nor cotton masks effectively filtered SARS–CoV-2 during coughs by infected patients,” researchers concluded. (Note: N95 respirators, which CDC Guidelines advise for medical personnel only, were not part of the test.)
While disappointing, the results are not particularly surprising.
As recently as March, the US Surgeon General was still urging Americans to not buy or wear masks, stating they could actually increase one’s risk of infection. On March 8, NIAID Director and infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci told 60 Minutes much the same.
There is actually an abundance of research that suggests masks are not an effective method of preventing the spread of respiratory viruses, which is no doubt why the World Health Organization and some other countries do not recommend wearing masks.
It was for this reason that I wrote a May 6 article urging an end to the practice of forcing people to wear masks.
This just appeared in a The New England Journal of Medicinearticle (ht Martin Hill):
We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection. Public health authorities define a significant exposure to Covid-19 as face-to-face contact within 6 feet with a patient with symptomatic Covid-19 that is sustained for at least a few minutes (and some say more than 10 minutes or even 30 minutes). The chance of catching Covid-19 from a passing interaction in a public space is therefore minimal. In many cases, the desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic...such reactions may not be strictly logical, we are all subject to fear and anxiety, especially during times of crisis. One might argue that fear and anxiety are better countered with data and education than with a marginally beneficial mask, particularly in light of the worldwide mask shortage, but it is difficult to get clinicians to hear this message in the heat of the current crisis.
On Sunday’s front page of The New York Times, where all the purported COVID-19 deaths were listed, the sixth name listed as dying from COVID-19 was Jordan Driver Haynes, 27, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
It turns out that Haynes was a murder victim.
He was found dead March 12 in a vehicle near U.S. Interstate 380, a victim of what the medical examiner on Wednesday ruled a homicide, according to a press release from the Cedar Rapids Police Department.
“The Iowa Office of the State Medical Examiner conducted an autopsy and ruled the victim’s death a homicide,” said the Wednesday release. “Additional details regarding the homicide will not be released as there is an active, ongoing investigation.”
“Serious question: anyone wonder how far down the list one would have to go to find the first ‘gunshot wound’ or ‘alcohol poisoning’ death?” tweeted former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson. “I’m not going to bother, but unless these names were vetted very carefully (unlikely - the job would be huge), probably not too far.”
Haynes’ name was later omitted from the newspaper’s front-page list of nearly 1,000 names under the banner headline, “U.S. Deaths Near 100,000, An Incalculable Loss.”
Netflix is out with a documentary on Jeffrey Epstein.
Virginia Roberts makes allegations that he was blackmailing his friends. I think your earlier thoughts (How the Big Time Players Really Operate (Jeffrey Epstein Blackmail Edition) on the topic where you stated he likely pulled them aside and befriended them the following day will have more support.
" She said 'when Epstein told me ''people owe me favors and I'll never get caught and I can get away with it'', he meant it' "
A third of Americans are showing signs of clinical anxiety or depression, Census Bureau data shows, the most definitive and alarming sign yet of the psychological toll exacted by the coronavirus pandemic, reportsThe San Francisco Chronicle.
When asked questions normally used to screen patients for mental health problems, 24% showed clinically significant symptoms of major depressive disorder and 30% showed symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder.
The findings suggest a huge jump from before the pandemic. For example, on one question about depressed mood, the percentage reporting such symptoms was double that found in a 2014 national survey, according to The Chronicle.
The troubling statistics were released last week in a tranche of data from the Census Bureau, notes The Chronicle. The agency launched an emergency weekly survey of U.S. households at the end of April to measure the pandemic's effects on employment, housing, finances, education and health. In the most recent data release, 1 million households were contacted between May 7 and 12, and more than 42,000 responded.
More:
Buried within that 20-minute survey, U.S. officials included four questions taken nearly word-for-word from a form used by doctors to screen patients for depression and anxiety. Those answers provide a real-time window into the country's collective mental health after three months of fear, isolation, soaring unemployment and continuing uncertainty.
New York, which had the worst coronavirus outbreak in the country, ranked 12th nationwide in terms of share of adults showing symptoms. Nearly half of Mississippians screened positive for anxiety or depression - a staggering number. By contrast, in Iowa, just over a quarter screened positive.
Some groups have been hit harder than others. Rates of anxiety and depression were far higher among younger adults, women and the poor. The worse scores in young adults were especially notable, given that the virus has been more likely to kill the elderly or leave them critically ill.
Those results reflect a deepening of existing trends: rising depression, stress and suicide among young adults. "It's been a problem many have been studying with no clear answers - whether it's social media or the way this generation was reared or just a greater willingness to talk about their problems," said Maria Oquendo, a professor psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. "What's worrying is the effect this situation is clearly having on young adults."
Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, for starters, need to be called before Congress and investigated. I believe, along with others, they have committed crimes against humanity. It is only there motives we don't know. But they have created a massive amount of anxiety in the country for no reason, amidst other destruction.
And I might add. the anxiety and destruction was further promoted by state and local officials such as California Gov. Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and San Francisco Mayor London Breed. They should all be held accountable for their tyranical, non-scientific orders to lock down their jurisdictions.
America must never forget and never allow this to happen again.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the current "best estimate" for the fatality rate among Americans with COVID-19 symptoms is 0.4 percent. The CDC also estimates that 35 percent of people infected by the COVID-19 virus never develop symptoms. Those numbers imply that the virus kills less than 0.3 percent of people infected by it—far lower than the infection fatality rates (IFRs) assumed by the alarming projections that drove the initial government response to the epidemic, including broad business closure and stay-at-home orders, reportsReason.
The CDC estimates that the case fatality rates (CFR) for COVID-19 falls to 0.05 percent among people younger than 50 and rises to 1.3 percent among people 65 and older. For people in the middle (ages 50–64), the estimated CFR is 0.2 percent.
Reason notes that the projections that the CDC made in March, which predicted that as many as 1.7 million Americans could die from COVID-19 without intervention, assumed an IFR of 0.8 percent. Around the same time, researchers at Imperial College produced a worst-case scenario in which 2.2 million Americans died, based on an IFR of 0.9 percent.
It was not difficult to spot the problems and distortions in those early March projections.
As far as I am concerned Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx should be investigated. They have created crimes against humanity, many have died, economies and lives have been destroyed because of their fearmongering.
David Henderson has dug out some old writing as part of a remembrance of Richard Timberlake who recently passed away:
Dick Timberlake, who has become a personal friend, is a fairly well-known monetary economist and a veteran of World War II. Timberlake’s book They Never Saw Me Then is his account of his time in World War II, first training to be a pilot in the United States and then being a co-pilot of a B-17 on bombing raids over Germany. The book ends with his being wounded in one such raid and then recuperating in hospitals in England and the United States. The title of his book, he explains, comes from the thought that he and his buddies had about their wish for various friends, relatives, and “enemies”: “Boy, if they could see me now.” But because they couldn’t see him then, he writes, his recourse is to tell the story himself. He tells it well.
One thing that is clear throughout the book is that Dick Timberlake had one main goal during the war: to preserve the life of Dick Timberlake. And, he points out, this was the norm. He quotes from Arthur Hoppe, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle: “I suppose there were a few in World War II who were fighting for freedom or democracy, but in my three years in the Navy I never met one of them. … [W]e were fighting to stay alive. And that is the true horror of war.”
It looks as though Las Vegas will be open in about a week, well sort of.
They are going to be social distancing in the city.
The El Cortez Hotel & Casino in downtown Las Vegas, reportsThe New York Times, will have tape on the floor at the craps tables to shows players where to stand to meet social-distancing requirements.
Players will no longer be able to touch the blackjack cards dealt them.
“The days of 16 people standing around the dice table high-fiving one another are over for now,” said Adam Wiesberg, the general manager of the El Cortez.
At least there is one sane voice in the city:
“Nobody comes to Vegas to spend time by themselves,” said Brian Labus, an assistant professor at the School of Public Health at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who is also a member of the medical advisory team for Gov. Steve Sisolak of Nevada. “It’s a place people come to be social with one another.”
You can blame the bizarre social distancing that will be implemented on the mini-tyrants who love to simultaneously run and destroy everything. They are in full operation in Vegas.
The Times reports:
Last week, Governor Sisolak signaled that casinos could reopen as early as June 4.
But guidelines issued this month by the Nevada Gaming Control Board limit capacity to 50 percent and require new cleaning and social-distancing policies. Casinos are now taking out slot machines — which can make up half of the gaming revenue at many establishments — and considering raising minimum bets at card tables. Regulators have capped capacity at three players a table for blackjack and four for poker.
The Nevada Gaming Control Board announced restaurants inside casinos will be allowed to reopen during Phase One of the state’s COVID-19 recovery plan.
A notice to licensed gaming properties released....states that restaurants that meet industry-specific requirements set forth by Gov. Steve Sisolak’s office may reopen but must get confirmation from the board before they can do so.
According to the notice, the gaming property must confirm with the board “whether there is a separate entrance for the restaurant, apart from any entrance to the restaurant off the gaming floor.”
If not, the property has to explain how it will make sure patrons can enter the restaurant without crossing the gaming floor.
The same stipulation goes for restrooms. If there is no restroom inside a restaurant, the property must explain how it will ensure patrons can enter restrooms outside the restaurant without walking the gaming floor.
Don't the Vegas operators have any pull to stop this BS?
Meyer Lansky would know how to fix this.
Who the hell is going to want to go to Las Vegas if it is going to make you feel like you are in kindergarten with a teacher watching over you all day?
What do lies look like in the Virginia media? They swap case rates for death and hospitalization rates. Even though increasing case numbers is a wholly expected outcome of a policy to increase tests, case rates are being used to justify harsher lockdown measures. This same trick is being used across the United States.
Today the Virginia governor is expected to announce mandatory mask wearing in businesses. The justification for this, according to Jonathan Franklin at WUSA9, is that Virginia is still in the upswing of this pandemic, due to increased cases. Which again, is the result of a deliberate policy to increase testing.
In Virginia, death and hospitalization rates from Covid-19 are declining, see the attached screenshot from the Virginia Department of Health. The number of daily confirmed deaths in Virginia peaked on April 30th, at 40. There were less than 40 deaths due to Covid-19 last week total.
This is the same across the United States as the second screenshot shows. Deaths in the USA peaked even earlier at ~April 22nd and have been declining steadily.
Covid-19 deaths are actually clustered in very small regions of the country, of which Virginia is not one of them. As the third screenshot shows, 2/3rds of all Covid-19 deaths in America are in the red and yellow highlighted areas. The rest of America, including Virginia, has seen very little of this outbreak, which is on its way out.
Declining death rates are true nearly everywhere in the Northern Hemisphere. Even in New York (see the 4th screenshot) and in Sweden (5th), where the virus is said to be overrunning the country. By the way, these declines are occurring in spite of a wide range of policies and severity of lockdowns. It's almost as if the response to the virus made very little difference.
Also, of note the virus still remains to be completely non-impacting to children in the transmission or acquisition. This is universally true in every country. Yes, even Sweden. (see the 6th screenshot on deaths in Sweden by age.)
An alternate view of reality could come from, say, the CDC, who recently revised the estimate of all ages iCFR for Covid-19 down to 0.26%, and posted an estimated 99.95% survival rate for symptomatic Americans ages 0-49.
This means that, according to the CDC, healthy Americans under 50 have virtually nothing to be concerned about. Take a moment to juxtapose this against the current level of fear among people under 50 in America. What do you think causes such a dichotomy? See the first paragraph above.
Or from a recent study showing that presymptomatic Covid19 carriers do not pass the disease:
"It is debatable whether asymptomatic COVID-19 virus carriers are contagious. We report here a case of the asymptomatic patient and present clinical characteristics of 455 contacts, which aims to study the infectivity of asymptomatic carriers."
It's not even clear that mask wearing would limit the spread of Covid-19 if it were still in the upswing. According to an often cited study that compared cloth mask use to surgical masks, cloth masks performed horribly and had no clear benefit at all: "Moisture retention, reuse of cloth masks and poor filtration may result in increased risk of infection." - MacIntyre CR, Seale H, Dung TC, et al A cluster randomised trial of cloth masks compared with medical masks in healthcare workers BMJ
We also don't appear to know much, if anything at all, about the science of social distancing. It appears to have been made famous in 2006 in a high school experiment that was championed by the Bush administration, and adopted by the CDC in 2007. But there doesn't appear to be any consideration in the original social distancing computer model about human immunity, complex social interactions, the effects of collapsing economies, the effects of social isolation, or even variable transmission rates among individuals. It even appears that the original model viewed everyone as contagious in an influenza pandemic, which we have learned is not at all the case with Covid-19.
Social distancing may end up going down as one of the craziest hysterias in human history, especially in light of the need for at least 24 feet of space to not be in range of a sneeze.
But it's truly bizarre to impose all of these measures by mandate after the peak. As Professor Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University recently stated:
“Remaining in a state of lockdown is extremely dangerous from the point of view of the vulnerability of the entire population to new pathogens. Effectively we used to live in a state approximating lockdown 100 years ago, and that was what created the conditions for the Spanish Flu to come in and kill 50m people.”
Furthermore, ending the lockdown is critical for the well being of our children. If we wish to talk about scientific consensus, there is a very clear one on the negative effects of stress on child development. Here is just one example of many:
"The biologcial effects of stress undermine[children's] ability to concentrate, remember things, and control and focus their own thinking."
And yet the plan in Virginia remains to social distance children in masks, with teachers in masks and gloves, and pretend that learning will happen.
In closing, I fully expect that Governor Northam will take credit for the decline in Covid-19 deaths that started nearly a full month ago for a policy he implements today. I look forward to his response to the next pandemic that he made more likely. And as the science for social distancing, lockdowns, and mask wearing are all clearly evolving, I'd like to thank Northam and all those who are imposing these restrictions on society for forcing us to be participants in your science experiment. Even though such methods are usually considered unethical.
David Burns is a cyber security engineer living in Virginia Beach with his wife and two daughters, ages four and two. He can be reached at dvdburns@gmail.com.
Although criticism of the mainstream media has been the central theme of my American Pravda series, I always spend at least a couple of hours every morning carefully reading our leading newspapers, which I regard as unmatched sources of important information so long as their articles are treated with proper caution and rigor. Consider that most of the crucial evidence suggesting an American biowarfare attack was hidden in plain sight in such eminently respectable news sources as the NYT, the WSJ, and ABC News.
As our global confrontation with China has grown hotter, my morning New York Times has continued to provide invaluable information for anyone willing to read it carefully.
For example, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo probably ranks as the most prominent Deep State Neocon in the Trump Administration, and is a leading architect of our confrontation with China. Last week he broke quarantine to take a trip to Israel and hold important talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as reported in a 1,600 word NYT article. Although the majority of their discussion concerned American support for the proposed annexation of the Palestinian West Bank, a serious disagreement arose concerning Israel’s growing economic ties with China, with the piece noting that the Jewish State had “antagonized” Washington by allowing Chinese companies to make major infrastructure investments, some of them in sensitive locations. According to the three Times journalists, Netanyahu firmly stood his ground, determined to “push back” against Pompeo’s repeated warnings and refused to reconsider his government’s China policy.
But just a couple of days later, the Times then reported that Du Wei, the Chinese ambassador to Israel, age 57, had been found dead at his home, having suddenly fallen victim to “unspecified health problems.” The piece emphasized that he had become a leading public critic of America’s current policies toward China, and the juxtaposition of these two consecutive NYT articles raised all sorts of obvious questions in my mind.
According to standard mortality tables, an American male age 57 has less than a 1% chance of dying in a particular year, and given the similarity in overall life expectancy, the same must surely true of Chinese males. Recently appointed Chinese ambassadors are likely to be in reasonably good health rather than suffering the last stages of terminal cancer, but such causes together with obvious, visible injuries account for more than half of all fatalities at around that age. Thus, the likelihood that the 57-year-old Chinese diplomat died naturally within that two day window was probably far less than 1 in 50,000. Lightning does sometimes strike under the most unlikely of circumstances, but not very often; and I think that the unexplained deaths of ambassadors during international confrontations probably fall into the same category.
Thus, it seems exceptionally unlikely that the sudden demise of Ambassador Du was not somehow directly connected with the heated dispute between Pompeo and Netanyahu over Israel’s China ties that had occurred just two days earlier. The exact details and circumstances are entirely obscure, and we can merely speculate. But since speculation has not yet been outlawed by government edict, an interesting possibility comes to mind.
In sharp contrast to the elected leaders of America’s vassal-states throughout Europe and Asia, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu hardly regards himself as beholden to the American government. He is a powerful, arrogant individual who remembers the endless standing ovations that he enjoyed when he addressed our own House and Senate, receiving the sort of bipartisan public adulation that would be unimaginable for a Donald Trump, who remains deeply unpopular with half our Congress and nation. So faced with demands by a Trump envoy that he sacrifice his own nation’s interests by cancelling important Chinese economic projects, he apparently disregarded Pompeo’s warnings and told him to get lost.
The classic 1972 film The Godfather ranks #2 in the IMDb Movie Database, and one of its most famous scenes concerns a conflict between a powerful and arrogant Hollywood film mogul and a visiting representative of the Corleone family. When the polite requests of the latter are casually disregarded, the movie tycoon awakens to discover the bloody head of his prized race-horse in his own bed, thereby demonstrating the serious nature of the warning he had received and indicating that it should not be disregarded. Pompeo had recently served as CIA Director, and I suspect he called in a few favors with elements of the Israeli Mossad and had them take lethal steps to convince Netanyahu that our demands that he reassess his ties with China were of a serious nature, not to be treated lightly. I strongly suspect that the controversial Chinese-Israeli economic ventures will soon be curtailed or abandoned.
I had never heard of the unfortunate Chinese ambassador prior to his sudden demise, and under normal circumstances any such notions of American foul play might be dismissed as absurd. But consider that just a few months earlier, we had publicly assassinated a top Iranian leader after he was lured to Baghdad for peace negotiations, an act vastly more weighty than the plausible deniability of a middle-aged diplomat being found dead in his own home of unknown causes.
There were no signs of violence, leading investigators to believe that Wei died from a heart attack, Army Radio reported. Other sources close to the investigation claim he died of cardiac arrest...
Wei’s death comes one week after US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Israel in what seemed to be an attempt to convince the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to limit Chinese investments in Israel.
Here is more on the absurd and very curious order from the CDC to count any death of a COVID-19 infected person who has died as a "COVID-19 death."
Democrat Washington governor Jay Inslee, whose daughter-in-law works for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, oversees a state government that has now admitted to counting gunshot deaths as Coronavirus deaths in official numbers pertaining to the virus, which sparked a draconian lockdown in Inslee’s state, reports the National File.
Freedom Foundation reports: “Today, officials at the Washington State Department of Health (DOH) confirmed that, as the Freedom Foundation reported on Monday, the state is counting in its COVID-19 death total the deaths of persons who tested positive for the virus but died from other causes. In remarks made during a telephonic press briefing, DOH officials even acknowledged knowingly including multiple deaths caused by gunshot wounds in the state’s COVID-19 fatality count.
Spiked recently interviewed Yoram Lass, former director of Israel’s Health Ministry.
Here are key snippets:
Mortality due to coronavirus is a fake number. Most people are not dying from coronavirus. Those recording deaths simply change the label. If patients died from leukaemia, from metastatic cancer, from cardiovascular disease or from dementia, they put coronavirus. Also, the number of infected people is fake, because it depends on the number of tests. The more tests you do the more infected people you get.
The only real number is the total number of deaths – all causes of death, not just coronavirus. If you look at those numbers, you will see that every winter we get what is called an excess death rate. That is, during the winter more people die compared to the average, due to regular, seasonal flu epidemics, which nobody cares about. If you look at the coronavirus wave on a graph, you will see that it looks like a spike. Coronavirus comes very fast, but it also goes away very fast. The influenza wave is shallow as it takes three months to pass, but coronavirus takes one month. If you count the number of people who die in terms of excess mortality – which is the area under the curve – you will see that during the coronavirus season, we have had an excess mortality which is about 15 per cent larger than the epidemic of regular flu in 2017.
Compared to that rise, the draconian measures are of biblical proportions. Hundreds of millions of people are suffering. In developing countries many will die from starvation. In developed countries many will die from unemployment. Unemployment is mortality. More people will die from the measures than from the virus. And the people who die from the measures are the breadwinners.
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[P]eople are afraid. People are brainwashed. They do not listen to the data.
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Any reasonable expert – that is, anyone but Professor Ferguson from Imperial College who would have locked down everybody when we had swine flu – will tell you that lockdown cannot change the final number of infected people. It can only change the rate of infection. And people argue that by changing the rate of infection and ‘flattening the curve’, we prevented the collapse of hospitals. I have shown you the costs of lockdown, but this was the argument in favour of it. But look at Sweden. No lockdown and no collapse of hospitals. The argument for the lockdown collapses.
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If you look at the 1950s, we had the Asian flu. In the 1960s, there was the Hong Kong flu. These were worse than this pandemic. Also, look at the story of swine flu in 2009, which began exactly the same as coronavirus. A new virus originated in Mexico. There was no vaccine so it was very frightening. It spread all over the world. It infected one billion people. A quarter of a million people died. But there was no lockdown, no Ferguson, nothing – people were far more interested in the economic crisis that hit a year before in 2008. They did not have time to give attention to this nonsense.
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The virus, like the influenza virus, is saying farewell to western Europe for sure. The same in the Middle East. In the United States, we do not know yet, so we should talk in a month from now. But nothing can justify this destruction of people’s lives. It is unbelievable.
Lass is an Israeli physician, researcher and scientist. He served as Director-General of the Ministry of Health and was a member of the Knesset for the Labor Party between 1992 and 1996. He earned a doctorate in medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
He is professor emeritus at the Sackler School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University.
