Yes, it has to do with the Wuhan Flu, and no I don’t think I have it. But what I’m seeing happen is making me feel a bit sick.
I’ve been in the medical field for awhile. Long enough I was in it before AIDS was around.
I remember when H1N1 flu was in going around
The 2009 flu pandemic in the United States was a novel strain of the Influenza A/H1N1 virus, commonly referred to as “swine flu”, that began in the spring of 2009. The virus had spread to the US from an outbreak in Mexico.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that from April 12, 2009 to April 10, 2010, there were 60.8 million cases, 274,000 hospitalizations, and 12,469 deaths (0.02% infection fatality rate/Mortality rate) in the United States due to the virus.
I remember when Ebola was the current threat
Four laboratory-confirmed cases of Ebola virus disease (commonly known as “Ebola) occurred in the United States in 2014. Eleven cases were reported, including these four cases and seven cases medically evacuated from other countries; the first was reported in September 2014. Nine of the people contracted the disease outside the US and traveled into the country, either as regular airline passengers or as medical evacuees; of those nine, two died. Two people contracted Ebola in the United States. Both were nurses who treated an Ebola patient; both recovered.
Then there was the Zika Virus outbreak, if you go to the CDC web site you can get the stats for the multiple years, or there is a wiki article that has them all in one.
I’m sure you get the point, I’ve seen different things come and go. So I’d like to try to put some things into perspective if I can.
If you’re a math wonk, you’ll love this article Basic Math.
When this “pandemic” first started garnering a lot of attention, the news was on The Diamond Princess, a cruise ship that had become infected. Now at the time, no one really knew much about the Wuhan Flu. It’s a cruise ship, people are packed in, breathing the same air from the ventilation system, and in close quarters, and generally older population and no one was practicing social distancing, let alone self-isolation. And yet, they did not all die. Out of 3,700 passengers, 6 died. That’s .00162%.
Since all this has started, the doctor from The Imperial College of London that originally made all the dire predictions has revised his opinion.
Now, lead author Neil Ferguson has testified to a parliamentary committee that the U.K. death toll is unlikely to exceed 20,000 and could be much lower, reported the website New Scientist.
And more than half that number would have died anyway by the end of the year, because of their age and underlying illnesses, he told the panel on Wednesday.
Stanford doctors: Coronavirus fatality rate may be far lower than current models predict
Dr. Eran Bendavid and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya postulate, in The Wall Street Journal, that the high estimated fatality rate of the coronavirus of 2%-4% is “deeply flawed.” They base their argument around the metrics of total individuals infected who die, rather than individuals with identified cases of the virus who have died.
“If the number of actual infections is much larger than the number of cases – orders of magnitude larger – than the true fatality rate is much lower as well,” the doctors write.
And here’s something I think really should be looked at WHEN did coronavirus begin in the US? And why it matters
What led our government and the governments of many other countries into panic was a single Imperial College of U.K. study, funded by global warming activists, that predicted 2.2 million deaths if we didn’t lock down the country. In addition, the reported 8-9% death rate in Italy scared us into thinking there was some other mutation of this virus that they got, which might have come here. Together with the fact that we were finally testing and had the ability to actually report new cases, we thought we were headed for a death spiral. But again, as my colleague Steve Deace pointed out, we can’t flatten a curve if we don’t know when the curve started.
….
You see an insanely dangerous trajectory of cases taking off in March. But what exactly happened in March? The virus was introduced in Wuhan in November. And even without testing, we did detect a handful of cases here, the first known case being on January 21. So why would we suddenly experience the outbreak in March? It’s quite evident that the culprit for the spike in the chart is simply because that is when the testing began because Trump dropped the FDA regulation barring private testing after the government testing didn’t work.
Thus, we know with certainty that people were clearly contracting coronavirus and were likely dying some time before March, but we’re still not sure how long before or how many people. Given the overlap with the general flu and pneumonia season, we really have no way of knowing that the January 21 case of the individual flying from Wuhan to Spokane, Washington, was the first active case – patient zero.
About that testing business, Why the CDC botched its coronavirus testing
The first testing kits from the Centers for Disease Control had a simple fault, and red tape prevented other labs from creating their own.
And when they were given out, they were then recalled. When new ones came out, the CDC only gave them to state run labs claiming they wanted to be sure of accurate results. The result? A backup in time to get the results. Complicated by the “worried well”. People that wanted to be tested to make sure they didn’t have Wuhan Flu. Since you have to meet criteria to even be tested, this has lead to people being tested by a doctor that was a friend according to an interview I heard on a talk show tonight. One person I heard of claimed they had been “exposed”. Well, no. They worked in a store so they felt they might have come in contact. Now that private labs are allowed to run the tests, results will hopefully come back quicker. And with more results, does that mean more people have it? No, it means more tests have been run. To be fair the the CDC, it’s hard to come up with accurate test kits when you really want to focus on “the epidemic of gun violence”, right?
And more companies are getting involved in improving the process US company announces a major breakthrough in coronavirus testing: This is a ‘GAME CHANGER’
The Food and Drug Administration has issued an Emergency Use Authorization to medical device giant Abbott Labs on Friday for a five-minute coronavirus test that could be arriving to the nation’s urgent care clinics as early as next week.
COVID-19 Deaths: Italy, 1 in 5,789 People; United States, 1 in 157,499
But numbers of confirmed cases are a function of testing. As testing in the U.S. has ramped up, it was only a matter of time before that testing would detect sizeable numbers of cases moving through the American population.
Some of the world’s most populous nations, Pakistan and Indonesia among them – have carried out very little testing for countries with populations of 233 million and 267 million, respectively. India (pop. 1.3 billion) and Nigeria (pop. 214 million) are even further behind.
In the United States (pop. 332 million) more than 850,000 tests had been carried out as of early Monday (more than 710,000 of them negative), according to the COVID Tracking Project.
There are other differences in the US and Italy. Italy has the world’s second oldest population, Japan has the first. Italy already has “Medicare for All”, this is how it works out in real life. Socialized Medicine In Action: Italian Doctors Now Telling Patients Over 60 To Pound Sand
This whole article is worth every minute it takes to read it. Why Flattening the Curve is Overrated
and not just for this fabulous chart that I stole, borrowed, am sharing from them.
Then there is the concern about PPE Personal Protective Equipment, or rather the lack thereof.
U.S. government has 1.5 million expired N95 masks sitting in an Indiana warehouse
Obama Admin Allegedly Depleted Federal Stockpile Of N95 Masks, Never Replaced, Reports Say
Oh. However, help is on the way. Liberals Attack CEO Who Converted His Factories to Make 50,000 N95 Masks Per Day He talked about G-d, that’s like garlic and sunshine to a vampire.
Treatment options are also appearing. Hydroxychloroquine and Chloroquine, Zinc, Azithromycin, good names to know.
Information for Clinicians on Therapeutic Options for COVID-19 Patients
3 Countries Prove Chloroquine with Azithromycin Shows 100% Success Rate in Treating Coronavirus
Should I mention the Israeli pharmaceutical company Teva Donating More Than 10 Million Doses of Hydroxychloroquine as Potential COVID-19 Treatment I do hope anyone supporting BDS, will be morally honest enough to refuse treatment.
As to prevention, Dr. David Price is a critical care pulmonologist caring for COVID-19 patients all day in NYC at Weill Cornell Hospital tells you how to 99% prevent catching it. Weill Cornell is a 1,200 bed hospital.
So, he’s not afraid. Our country has faced other communicable diseases and we’ve never shut the country down before, and it appears that some of the models that caused us to do so may have been flawed. Wuhan flu will not be wiped out, and what do we do next time there is a flu? Shut the country down again? And what kind of country will we still have when we emerge from our self-isolation?
So what does scare me?
Nancy Pelosi Proposes 1,400-Page Coronavirus Bill Stuffed with Special Interest Goodies
Increased fuel emission standards for airlines receiving funds and carbon offsets
Payment for up to $10,000 in student loans
Same-day voter registration, early voting, voting by mail, ballot harvesting
Preserving collective bargaining powers for unions
The expansion of wind and solar tax credits<< Side note on this one. I used to know a gal that worked for one of those obama wind power companies. The company catered lunch in for the employees every day. For awhile another perk was head, neck and shoulder massages. Yes indeedy folks, you can’t afford to go out to eat because your tax money supports this.
Requirements for federal and corporate gender and racial diversity data Post Office Bailout
Automatic extension of nonimmigrant visas.
Restricting colleges from providing information about citizenship status
Money for Planned Parenthood
Dems Can’t Get Enough from the Pork Barrel
$37M for the U.S. Forest Service (nothing viral in our forests)
$75M to the National Foundation on the Arts & Humanities
$78K to the Institute of American Indian and Alaska Native Culture and Arts Development (see line item comment on the National Foundation on the Arts)
$500K to a Utah water project
$25M for the Kennedy Center
And then, Kennedy Center abruptly lays off entire orchestra hours after receiving $25 million taxpayer bailout
How the heck do we pay for this? Then the government is going to send everyone money. How? The government doesn’t create anything it can sell to raise the money, no, it gets the money from us, and now they are going to send some of it to us, which we will send back in taxes.
In the meantime, how many small businesses, how many Mom and Pop restaurants, the nail salons, beauty shops, craft stores, and the like are going to go out of business. Those people that invested their life savings, and maybe a big chunk of their lives into building that business are going to watch it go down the drain not because of anything they did wrong, but because the government shut them down due to a a flawed model and a knee jerk reaction. And those businesses have employees, and supply trucks, and they buy things to run those businesses. Or they did.
This scares me. As Leftists Demand America Stay Closed for Months, Suicide Calls Skyrocket
This scares me. Economic Consequences of the Pandemic
This scares me. Dreaded financial redline approaches: U.S. debt could exceed GDP within 2 years
Those are the financial issues that will face us, what about our freedom? What kind of world will we be walking back into when we emerge?
Restricting Gun Rights During a Crisis…
Are Gun Stores ‘Essential’ Businesses? It’s John Lott, so you know it’s good.
A DuckDuck search on gun shop closings due to Wuhan Flu Several states that must consider liquor stores “essential businesses” do not consider your ability to defend yourself or your family “essential”. Remember who they are during elections. But it shouldn’t be any surprise that some politicians consider themselves your “betters”. They and their families are worth defending, you and yours not so much. Like failed Demoncratic presidential candidate and soda czar mini-me Mikie Bloomberg. Voter asks Mike Bloomberg how he can ‘justify’ his gun control agenda while having armed security for himself Typical elitist attitude.
Then to top it off,
Open Borders Coalition Demands All Illegal Immigrants Freed from Custody Over Coronavirus
Missouri AG Right To Be Concerned Over Released Inmates Apparently the person involved in the release was Kim Garner. If that name is familiar it’s possibly from my column on “So Whatever Happened To”
But this isn’t unique to America, in Israel the terrorist groups are calling for terrorists jailed in Israel to be released due to, you guessed it, Wuhan Flu. Free to go out and kill again.
NYC Mayor Wants To Release “High Risk” Inmates From City Jails Remember, NY already runs a “catch and release” program. No bail needed.
But what about our rights? As normal everyday Americans? What good are constitutional rights if they are violated when Americans get sick?
This is all uncharted territory, I’ve never seen our country and other countries around the world shut down. I have heard stories of the great depression. I’m not saying this is not a serious thing, I’m not saying don’t observe sensible precautions like those outlined by Dr. Price. But I’m afraid shutting down the country is going to be a cure worse than the disease.
But we are not called to be a fearful people. In case you don’t know Pesach (Passover) starts next week. Irony huh? Plagues, locust, which by the way, Africa is seeing locusts now. G-d gave us miracles then, he can give us miracles now. I heard a radio show hostess, Tamar Yonah talk about how she doesn’t want life to go back to “normal” with all the depravity, immorality, corruption and self-centered behavior. She wants us to come out better on the other side. I think that is a worthy goal. I think G-d has a message in all this for us. If we don’t try to find it, I think it will be a mistake. Everything comes from G-d, that we can not see good in it is a failing of our human eyes I think. But one of the important things, is we do not fear.
