Corona Conumdrums
Posted by Henry Bauer on 2020/04/12
Something seems wrong about the basis for the current panic over “CoVID-19”.
2019-nCoV, the virus that is said to cause CoVID-19 disease, first appeared in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. Within a few months, it had reached in Britain prime minister Boris Johnson and Prince Charles (but not his wife) , in Russia the health minister, and in Australia Tom Hanks and his wife . According to the interactive online map at the New York Times, this new virus is now present on all continents and on islands large and small, and according to news reports it had also found its way onto cruise ships and warships.
To have spread so rapidly, it must be effectively carried through the air, on the winds, and perhaps through the oceans, as suggested in the Los Angeles Times.
But if this virus has been so widely distributed for several months, why has it caused serious illness in so few places? And why has the continent of Africa been so little affected (see NYT map)?
This seems more like something endemic, that has been around for a long time, like the normal cold or “flu” viruses say, than like a virus that newly jumped from animal to human only last December in Wuhan.
Isn’t there something wrong with the official story?
Moreover, since the virus appeared all over the globe within a few months, how can social distancing prevent it from spreading further?
Skepticism about science and medicine 
Stefan Risch said
It gets even worse. If you look at the information in this video even the WHO treatment guidelines for COVID-19 are helping to up the death-rates:
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Henry Bauer said
Stefan, thanks for this. I had not previously seen anything suggesting that ventilators may be inappropriate treatment; or that supposedly CoVID-19 patients seem different from the usual of people infected by a virus that targets the lungs and tends to bring on pneumonia that is the actual lethal agent.
One of the difficulties I have in understanding what is going on is the lack of believable, authoritative, data-based explanations. The news programs have featured first-hand accounts from nurses, doctors, and recovered former patients telling different things. And we lack trustworthy numbers for what percentage of the population has been exposed, and therefore lack a trustworthy estimate of the mortality rate.
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Stefan Risch said
Prof. Streeck, a German virologist published preliminary results from a representative study done in Heinsberg. He calculated the mortality rate to 0.37% …in the range of the usual influenza wawes (0.1-0.7%)..the final results will be available soon.
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Stefan Risch said
BTW there is a website in Switzerland collecting lots of informations concerning the COVID-19 case: https://swprs.org/
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Henry Bauer said
Stefan:
The information at that link is extremely useful, many thanks indeed
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rosross said
A number of doctors over the period have said that ventilators are not appropriate for treating this disease because the issue is not about people being unable to breathe but about their inability to adequately process oxygen. However, ventilators are yet another techo-toy which the medical industry loves and it limits airborne contagion, even as it kills patients. Protect the staff first and the patients take their chances.
The reality is that modern medicine, allopathic medicine, is so immersed in its tools of scalpel, drug, vaccine that it is lost without some sort of techo-toy. Repressing or removing symptoms is the name of the allopathic game and cure is rare. However, that is what they get paid to do and the pharmaceutical industry makes big bucks in their doing what they do.
Clearly for a minority this is a nasty disease but we need to remember that 99% of those who have died, according to research had co-morbidities, i.e. many things could have killed them. And without knowing whether someone dies OF or WITH Coronavirus, since mostly autopsies are not being done, it remains impossible to assess risk for this disease.
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daldem said
Nice to see you writing again Henry on this current issue.
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Henry Bauer said
daldem:
I haven’t found it easy to understand what’s going on, and there’s much that I remain uncertain about.
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rosross said
Science-medicine in general is also uncertain although that is not the presenting position. This thing has taken on a life of its own from the same dodgy source as climate change, modelling systems, which poll-driven politics devours.
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Corona Conumdrums « Skepticism about science and medicine
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