rough, incomplete as usual
I don't suppose I ever had to step into the Coronavirus debate, but that hasn't stopped a lot of other armchair experts stepping in aggressively with bad thinking and militant zeal. I don't suppose I can make them stop, judging by the fanatic-like response I get when I've tried (they faith their way past anything I say, then vanish me for trying interrupt their fascinating nightmare). This still annoys me and others, like b at Moon of Alabama, who aptly notes there's no glory in prevention, and people don't get how epidemic modeling works, like a worst-case estimate isn't supposed to come true. But a lot of overly-skeptical people insist on ignoring such details, hypnotized by their own convictions. They see and will keep seeing a massive plot to exaggerate something like a common flu as a way to usher in a terrifying global tyranny.
Resistance update: Australia protesters call for FREE-DOM from lockdown, 10 arrested, including for assaulting police, who they said "do not have authority," because "our law is the ultimate law." That sounds spooky. They wore black, faces covered, and reportedly tied in 5G and vaccine conspiracy theories into their apparent mass delusion. They chanted "no lockdown!" and "arrest Bill Gates!" echoing Alex Jones at a recent protest in Austin, Texas. Alex Jones get it, so it must be true?
https://twitter.com/9NewsAUS/status/1259339892846444545
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A brave US restaurant owner defies orders to host a record-breaking ... Mother's Day massacre? We'll see. Going over some heads to president Trump, the poser owner claimed "We are standing for America, small businesses, the Constitution and against the overreach of our governor in Colorado!!" Some liberal science-governor-police conspiracy the Donald, of all people, could surely shake off.
https://www.wftv.com/news/trending/coronavirus-live-updates-us-cases-reach-13m-deaths-top-78k/A2G6FKFMWZAHTFJMLFMEXHB37Y/
These and some hug-in organizers in London, a new anti-lockdown political party in Germany, etc. join those lovely gun-toting tea-party-militia types in Michigan, standing up to the Nazi Whitmer regime. All these wimpy liberal governors, doctors, nurses, epidemiologists - some scientists and doctors disagreeing, yes, but the others - from China and Iran to everywhere else, the technocrats favored by power are nearly all co-opted, in on the WHO-Gates-whatever plot. In some minds then, the only hope for Humanity is the wrath they face from many their public, from many quarters, including disgruntled business owners with a financial incentive, other folks that are plain stupid all the time, and others that seem to have been hit recently with some fast-spreading idiocy virus.
For those fearful ragers, a glimpse into the dystopian future after you submit to staying home: The first nation to do lockdown was the People's Republic of China. The first state in the US to do it was, I think, Washington. China got the spread licked and got back to a guarded normal quite a while ago. I enjoyed lockdown and a paid staycation, besides not getting COIV19 so far (I consider myself at higher-than-usual risk of dying if I got it). Here in the grim future, I never got signed up for ID2020, never even got hassled for going out to the store or anywhere, and Washington's rate of new cases keeps falling to where even I feel fairly safe going back to work, which happens tomorrow, as the US at large eases controls and businesses resume all over, despite a rising death toll already past 80,000. Critics are right to note Trump's moves to ease lockdown come too early in most places, but here in Washington State, the timing comes out okay - we have it under control, and can keep it that way better than most states.
Or rather … relatively under control. I had noted a sharp early rise clearly slowing. Checking back now (new view scaled onto an old one), it's not that amazing - it never did flatten any further, just held a steady, low-boiling daily increase. Deaths now at 931, +10 in the last 24 hours. I plan to stay extra careful.
Not just to annoy the resistance crowd, I'll keep using the Gates-owned Bing COVID19 tracker using WHO numbers - the same ones others use and misuse. Especially now that it's been improved with fancy comparative graphs and even logarithmic graphs of the kind misused my Andrew Math(hoax)er. This link for Washington should have US, global, all others available on the left, to check or follow up on any numbers I cite below.
https://www.bing.com/covid/local/washington_unitedstates?vert=graph
So … UK Column has published part two of the series "Who controls the British Government response to Covid–19?" by Vanessa Beeley. It seems her/their answer is yes, WHO controls it; a spooky opening quote suggests this is all a plot by the World Health organization to take over the world, maybe exterminate us in some "health camps" or whatever. "To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family tradition, national patriotism, and religious dogmas." — Dr George Brock Chisholm, who served as the first Director-General of the World Health Organisation (WHO) from 1948 to 1953
The article is ambitious and detailed, naming big pharma players who might be behind a big plot if one existed. Rich elites with connections to others, implied agendas, Bill Gates, ID 2020, things of genuine concern, quite possibly launching off this crisis - that does seem worth watching for, but Beeley and other eager spotters try to ignore that these moves are also consistent with simply preventing the virus' spread, which does seem to be a real danger - another thing they try to ignore. They want to prove it's the plot they just know it really is, but they insist on artificially simplified math to prove it. No threat to justify lockdown + lockdown = another motive MUST be at work = don't let them control us with fear, PANIC AND RESIST NOW before it's TOO LATE!!!
Ms. Beeley would consider me one of those robbed of my individualism and ripe for enslavement because I heeded the scientific advice to "stay home, save lives" and so on. I've lost any footing I had as a searcher after truth against power, letting powerful people tell me what to do. We used to be allies, if strained by my annoying devil's-advocacy and second-guessing, etc. and her nasty, hostile reactions to it - she does not like being disagreed with! So I didn't do it often. My only serious gripe I recall is to suggest a more balanced-seeming tone vis-à-vis the "White Helmets" might help a wider audience take it more seriously. That mattered to me because it's valuable work, and I had nothing to add to it aside from such thoughts.
But that was all tolerable, and it was only with this coronavirus issue that … I disagreed and stronger than usual, but only with logic and a question she didn't answer. Instead she who blocked me on Twitter and Facebook, branding me an enemy banished to a planet she's not on, after I pointed out the Syrian and Iranian governments, among others, freely adopted the same kind of tyrannical policies. They took the virus as a real threat, not just a hyped-up flu to justify some Bill Gates-WHO Western elite plot. She didn't want to hear that truth, as she shits on Bashar Assad's efforts along with everyone else's. (Just on this one issue - as far as I know her other work remains excellent on balance, even in my nitpicky opinion).
Anyway, she cast me off, not the other way. That's annoying, but I'd still work alongside her at a distance if she were willing to accept that I strongly disagree on this subject, and yet I'm not part of the evil plot. Stay zealous like that or don't - her call. Maybe in another few months when there was no takeover, just a large but moderated death toll and some inconveniences that will leave a mark, but slowly fade to memory. If she even remembers me by then, maybe she'll see fit to re-friend me.
Actual article analysis - I don't even feel up to anything past the fist few thoughts I had an a graphic I wanted to do. Considering also: part 1 on April 22
https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/who-controls-british-government-response-covid19-part-one
Both of these seem to avoid prior claims of UK peaks past - I had just exposed a leading point in that as a hoax - she or UKC editors may have heeded that, or it was left off in a lucky oversight. Yet the basic approach still insists on simplifying the picture with statements like "death certificates that misrepresent the actual cause of death as Covid–19, regardless of pre-existing medical conditions." That's not simply a "misrepresentation" - it might be, in small or large part. There are cases where the virus was never confirmed before ascribing it, but this is meant to be used where it's reasonable, like another person who dies of pneumonia-like illness right after six others in the same nursing home died of the same, 2 of them and several workers confirmed for COVID19. That would be a fair presumption - not guaranteed to be true, but not a lie to further some conspiracy.
And then even if they had the virus, there's pre-existing conditions - the tired died-of vs. died-with debate. Depending how you define this, it can be said the virus kills no one, just triggers a death that was inevitable due to smoking, pollution, age, illness, genetic disorder, etc.. Taken to the extreme, one could say everyone has the main pre-existing condition (mortality), while only some have the more crucial ones, and the only cause of death ever is death - everything else is just an irrelevant trigger, and there's no point avoiding any kind or scale of death at any time, since we all die anyway.
Mainly, I just like to make graphs, maps, timelines, etc. and to educate, make my case - all at the same time if possible. Beeley/UKC provoked me with a misleading graphic. As described: "The following graph was produced by UK Column and demonstrates the lack of correlation between lockdown and "saving lives""
My updated version, re-colored, re-ordered - UKC bar sizes are darker shaded, additions since lighter
… note that Sweden has doubled it death rate in the intervening 18 days. The US and UK have done about the same, with their lockdowns (meaning it would have more than doubled, from a higher start, if there had been no such measures). Italy, Spain, France, and Germany have had had better luck at keeping the fatality rates from increasing dramatically. Belgium must be trying, but it remains out of hand, increasing about 50% since April 22.
It didn't look like a simple flu to China's leadership, so they instituted a stronger version of what we call lockdown. Logically, it worked. The crisis in Hubei with delayed lockdown = 4,512 dead in 58.5m = 77 deaths per million. This could have gotten worse but was stopped. It had some bleed-over to other parts of China, but these were limited, then stopped. Most importantly for death tolls, the vulnerable were protected everywhere (to the extent vulnerability was known). The nationwide average looks middling-low, better than almost anything else on the chart (4,633 out of 1,438m = 3.2 per million - that's current, and barely different from April 22). That's all the more impressive as this isn't New Zealand that could act smart before any cases appear; they did this after averaging-in the most rapid surprise attack in the world in Wuhan and Hubei. In fact I'd say the urgency that instilled is why the Hubei death rate was cut by 99.884% everywhere else in China. And now comparing cumulative death tolls, we can see the creeping version of COVID19 and herd immunity policies are what really kills.
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I just saw that Mexico may be underreporting its cases and fatalities. I suspect Belarus has been doing so - the president has declared no deaths will officially be attributed to COVID19, and somehow the number dead remains disproportionately low for the rising (but surely incomplete) number of cases - around 1,000 new cases each day (about 30,000 total), just 5 or so deaths/day (131 total).
May 13: Another chart that doesn't start from UKC's choices but my own more relevant ones to how adherence to the Gates-WHO plot or Imperial College modeling somehow spans most political lines that exist. It almost seems like whoever care enough tries to contain it, with or without lockdown, and whoever does it well (and has good starting luck) winds up with tiny death tolls compared the few being ushered to a utopia of "herd immunity."
Brazil - 156,061 confirmed cases puts Brazil at 7th place in the world for confirmed cases, and probably lower-than-average confirmation - that's good, as the dead-to-confirmed ratio isn't good: 6.8% (10,656 deaths). Out of 209 million, that's 51/million. A couple weeks ago, it was only at 14/million. At the moment, the government refuses to put brakes on the spread, and flu season will be on them soon (not that season is nearly as relevant as some think). Peak deaths remains to be seen - the last several days are the highest yet, around 700 dead/day. Pres. Bolsonaro had to fire his health minister, and now (following on unrelated corruption charges) he and his supporters are calling for a return to military rule, suspending Brazil's congress and supreme court.
UK peak deaths: it's often repeated that fatalities peaked on April 8 and have been falling since. I see that as almost right and not very telling; peak on April 10 - 980 dead - two other 900+ days close by and non since makes that a peak, but the downhill part is not vey - it stayed abound 800/day on average for some two weeks, then dropping to a current average around 650.
The Bing graphs I've been following were just changed to a new and much more detailed format. Somehow, the dates are all shifted now, so that peak is on the 9th, not the 10th (or the 8th). Here I just took the whole date line and shifted it right to reflect that.
US peak deaths, color-coded (higher = redder, so it adds nothing but looks): like Brazil, still getting there. We get over the mark of 2,600/day a few times, each time a bit easier. As lockdown measures ease across the country, expect this to become highs of 3,000/day and above, with a time to peak that's impossible to know, dependent on how we behave.
On May 3, a huge batch of 8,000+ deaths was added, then removed, remains floating - that's probably care home tallies or some such, not belonging to any one day. The tallies for that and the next couple of day kept shifting, with some really low totals, but highs just higher than past ones. The last couple of days are low again, maybe to be followed by a higher spike, but the numbers come in slow at the weekend. Only late Monday or Tuesday will answer that. I may update any of these last 3 graphics in a few more days. It's been interesting, but I should hope it'll get boring eventually.
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