CDC Correctly Predicts Second Wave
CDC director warns second wave of coronavirus this winter is likely to be worse https://t.co/SVbe9O0gMr
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) April 21, 2020
Also: CDC Director: Next Winter’s COVID-19 Season Could Be Even Worse
“There’s a possibility that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through,” CDC Director Robert Redfield said in an interview with The Washington Post. “And when I’ve said this to others, they kind of put their head back, they don’t understand what I mean.”
Assault? As in strategically planned military attack? Ha ha! What a conspiracy theorist Redfield is.
Back in the real world…
“We’re going to have the flu epidemic and the coronavirus epidemic at the same time,” he said.
Having two simultaneous respiratory outbreaks would put unimaginable strain on the health-care system, he said. The first wave of covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, has already killed more than 42,000 people across the country. It has overwhelmed hospitals and revealed gaping shortages in test kits, ventilators and protective equipment for health-care workers.
I wonder if Redfield remembers we had a flu epidemic and coronavirus epidemic at the same time, way back in April of 2020? And that hospitals, in spite of forecasts that said otherwise, did just fine?
That’s ancient history, so we can forgive him for forgetting. Here’s the real meat:
In a wide-ranging interview, Redfield said federal and state officials need to use the coming months to prepare for what lies ahead. As stay-at-home orders are lifted, officials need to stress the continued importance of social distancing, he said. They also need to massively scale up their ability to identify the infected through testing and find everyone they interact with through contact tracing. Doing so prevents new cases from becoming larger outbreaks.
This forecast has no chance of failing. The coronavirus known as COVID-19 will ever be with us. Even the US government cannot eliminate it. It will be here again in the fall. To predict it will kill and kill again is the easiest, safest disease prediction ever made.
So….what then? I’ve asked the question a dozen times, and I have not yet heard from nervous readers, should we lock down each fall for three to four months? If lockdowns work—which is dogma, an unquestionable truth—then you have to justify not locking down this coming fall, and every fall. Can you?
Let us know!
Numbers Juicing
Numbers Juicing
Rate Of Coronavirus Infections In LA Up To 55 Times Higher Than Confirmed Cases
After adjusting for statistical margin of error, that means anywhere from 221,000 to 442,000 local adults in Los Angeles have been infected by the coronavirus. That number is 28 to 55 times higher than the 7,994 confirmed COVID-19 cases in LA at the time the study was conducted earlier this month.
I’d bet it was/is higher still, given the limitations of the study. But that’s neither here nor there. Like I said in the weekly update, the act of testing will and is being used to (passively) juice numbers, to give the impression the virus is spreading. When it’s already here.
Dead Off
Excess mortality data suggests as many as 25,000 uncounted coronavirus deaths
As of Tuesday, nearly 170,000 people had died of the novel coronavirus, at least according to official death counts. But using excess mortality data from around the globe, The New York Times has recorded an estimated 25,000 additional people who have likely died due to the pandemic, whether they actually contracted COVID-19 or it impacted their health in other ways.
To come up with this estimate, the Times looked at recent mortality data of 11 countries. More people had recently died in these countries than in previous years, but official COVID-19 death tolls only made up a small chunk of the increase. Spain saw 7,300 more deaths than usual between March 9 and April 5, while New York City has its typical death rate nearly quadruple in a similar time, mortality numbers show. These excess deaths added up to 25,000 among those 11 countries.
Recall that flu deaths are never counted, but estimated using statistical models to identify “excess deaths”. Recall too that it didn’t seem they were assigning flu deaths as coronavirus deaths, because of the way the flu-death pictures looked, but that they could. Now looks like they want to remove deaths assigned to flu and reassign them to coronavirus. A good way to get them numbers higher to match predictions!
If a man dies and has both flu and coronavirus, what should be his cause of death? Add heart disease. Now what. Add…etc. etc.
Dead Off
Coronavirus Kills More Americans in One Month Than the Flu Kills in One Year
This NRO. It’s also asinine. Flu estimates are somewhere between low 30 thousand to low 90 thousands dead per year. Coronachan will come in somewhere about this range. Flu also kills over a couple of month period. Just like coronavirus.
This whole article is asinine, and makes the same mistakes of the New Atlantis piece.
What A Gas
Can the coronavirus be spread through farts?
I sure do hope so.
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We need a new definition of truth. Here’s one attempt. Truth is that which supports a position previously taken. Other definitions welcome.
To answer your question, *NO* I don’t think we should lockdown in the fall. And if I may make a prediction, we will start to see more clearly the negative consequences of the lockdown.
A word of caution: as far as I know, the LA study has not released a technical report, so it is difficult to judge the accuracy and certainty of their conclusions. As an FYI, two of the authors on the LA study (Eran Bendavid and Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford) are part of the core group at Stanford that conducted the Santa Clara study, which was publicly posted to medrxiv on Friday. As you may or may not know, many serious concerns were raised about their statistical approach that basically boil down to a specificity of the antibody test being low enough that there is a high probability that the number of positive tests we see are all false positives. Thus, without a technical report from the LA study, we don’t have information about their methodology to assess the veracity of the estimate. I think their results will hold up to scrutiny as more calibration data comes in, but it’s not *yet* the slam dunk.
However, I still believe the true number of infections is much higher than the official count, and there are many studies elsewhere with not-so-easy-to-dismiss results. MGH ran a study in Chelsea, a neighborhood near Boston, which had the highest per capita number of reported cases (2% of its population). They found that 64/200 of people randomly asked on the street had positive antibody tests, with roughly half having had symptoms in the last month. There’s also the study in Germany and the NYC pregnant woman study that estimated 15%; Sweden’s study showed 11%; Switzerland showed 5.5%; among many other studies out there. The universal conclusion from all of them is that there are many more who were infected than are counted in the official total. Thus, even if we assume that all “presumed COVID deaths” are true deaths, the infection fatality rate (IFR) is much lower than originally predicted, closely approaching flu levels of danger.
Also, I found this interesting tool that attempts to construct an approximate Bayesian prediction interval using MC bootstrapping for prevalence using calibration data from the antibody used: https://larremorelab.github.io/covid-calculator2. Using even this relatively crude tool with the validation data available suggests that, for all of the above studies, the actual prevalence is many times more than reported cases. Maybe as few as 3-5x, but as high as several 50-80x times or more.
Sources:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/antibody-surveys-suggesting-vast-undercount-coronavirus-infections-may-be-unreliable
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01095-0
NY pregnant women study: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2009316
Switzerland study: https://www.hug-ge.ch/medias/communique-presse/seroprevalence-covid-19-premiere-estimation
“In a wide-ranging interview, Redfield said federal and state officials need to use the coming months to prepare for what lies ahead.”
Translation: CDC is going to need more money. A lot more.
The CDC—true psychics. If your first prediction fails, repeat it for the future and keep on trying. No science here, just gypsy wagon stuff. Admittedly, idiots believe this garbage and there are plenty of idiots out there. I suggest starting a rumor that the world will be hit by an meteor in August, so not to worry about Covid. Maybe we could promise ebola at the same time and really scare the daylights out of the brainless crowds.
The CDC has 4 to 5 months to prepare. They are obviously admitting incompetence and it should be labelled and called out as such. Oh, and take the second C off CDC since all they can do is hand-wring like an frightened little girl. There’s no control whatsoever. In fact, fire them all and give the money to the real workers that treated Covid patients and kept food stores open.
Personally, I think everyone should be locked down including the “essential” people. Give it six months, the food runs out, war breaks out and everyone is dead soon thereafter. Death is safe and we all want to be safe, right? Plus, you never have to worry about another pandemic or shutdown.
Making up data is the new procedure in what is jokingly called science. Why use data when you can just fabricate any lie you want? No wonder people are beginning to hate experts—they are all liars and con artists that should be dumped on an island to tough it out for the rest of their miserable, lying lives, making up numbers and stories.
There is NO SUCH THING as excessive mortality. Period. It’s a unicorn, leprechaun, a troll. Completely fictitious. However many people die, die. Mortality is the number of dead, not the imaginary dead.
There is an amazing number of regular people who are speculating about the “second wave” of the virus… which they seem to hope will either mean we will be on lockdown over the summer into the fall, or have a new lockdown in the fall. Altho when the temps are hovering in the 40s it is easier to feel “cozy” but when it is 85 and your tee shirt is sticking to your back, being home-bound is not so much fun. There are others who think we will be on continuous lockdown from now until next Feb or Mar… at which time they can joyfully submit themselves to the new vaccine. The people who are looking forward to lockdowns being part of the “new normal” have the expectation of continued gainful employment in “high-paying jobs.” If their personal job outlook changes, they might have to revise their view/hope/estimate.
Anon–
When the Democrats take over ‘lock-down’ include full pay, double pay for those required to work, student loans forgiven and sorts of other wonderful things. What’s not to like?
Real numbers:
The Ohio State Pen at Marion is a perfect Petri dish for the Kung Flu. Every single prisoner and staff member has been tested with accurate, fast-result kits. (Notably, not the ones provided by the CDC that are wildly inaccurate and require a week to get results.)
Prisoner population of 2564, 1828 infected (71%), 2 deaths.
Staff population unlisted, 109 infected, one death.
Total infected: 1937
Total deaths: 3
Case Fatality Rate (CFR): 0.155%
There are only 21 people hospitalized for the Kung Flu in the county. Anecdotal reporting says that only a few dozen prisoners appeared to be ill.
Fall Lockdown or not, Essential job or not, you can be sure some number of people who need to work will. And that includes if/when they are ill, including knowingly ill with Covid-19. Why no online discussions of this? That is already happening, and will compound as Econ need dominates individual motivation.
Seems a highly contagious virus that is contagious before the human host is aware of being infected (and many remain unaware) must have and be spreading at far greater rates and resides in/resided in far more people than the tested numbers indicate.
Maybe the question is, “how long to achieve herd immunity for that kind of contagion when social distancing is used?”
“should we lock down each fall for three to four months? ”
Hell, no. A regular, periodic lock-down for whatever raison du jour our Civil Masters In Charge and their media lackeys have decided to whip public panic into a froth over most recently is nothing more than a reliable recipe for the entree “Police State on Demand”, whenever it suits those same Civil Masters to serve it up. My suspicion is that there is currently a concerted covert effort to recast the Republic into an autocracy much in the mold of Communist China, or the old Soviet Union. Although the Soviet Union was ultimately a miserable failure, and China is probably destined for the same fate, the oligarchs of each nation successfully sucked everyone else dry and lived lives of luxury until that happened. Like Keynes, their philosophy was, and probably still is, “in the long run we are all dead”; the wreckage they leave for the future holds no fascination for them at all.
I saw a headline this morning indicating that the State of Virginia has begun to review death records going back to April 5th to determine if they can reclassify any of those as COVD-19 fatalities. All in the interests of accuracy, of course…
Social Distancing
– When you can smell their farts, your too close –
you’re
too early in the morning…
I want to know why the hell the Sundance Kid, a blond bubbleheaded Hollywood actor, is now the CDC Director!? Criminy, world’s goin’ to hell in a basket of viral farts.
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I wonder how much automation this whole thing will drive going forward? If you have to shut your facility when one worker is sick, what if you just had 3-4 workers doing shifts and only needed one to operate the plant? (Yeah, extreme, but still…)
The death toll from the wuwuflu lunacy will dwarf anything the virus
could do on it’s own. This is already happening in the populations
of chronic and acutely ill that are being denied inpatient hospital
care, ‘to flatten the curve’. Was there ever a more moronic term coined?
Yes that’s right we rank 76th out of 80 developed countries in hospital
bed space. The same geniuses that ensured there were no PPE’s on hand
are responsible for this woeful inadequacy as well. Someone thinks
they deserve a raise and they’ll get it too. They will be literally showered
with money and hailed as heroes for their utter incompetence and
malfeasance. It truly is a brave new world where up is down and right
is left and black is white etc. Welcome to this new model government
they say explains everything.
Michael Dowd
April 23, 2020 at 7:30 am
“We need a new definition of truth. Here’s one attempt. Truth is that which supports a position previously taken. Other definitions welcome.”
What a perfect definition of the MO of these CoVid threads.
A truly workable solution: lockdown the farms and ranches to save the food producers from the virus. Skip this year’s growing season.
The resulting mass starvation will weed out the weak and stupid, the non-cannibals, and the children. What a boon for Democrats and climate change warriors!
You must agree that saving one farmer’s life from the Wuflu justifies this plan.
There’s nothing like famine to break the will of a defiant population.
Famine inevitably leads to pestilence, disease, and unconditional
surrender. Americans have never felt the lash of famine applied in
in progressively liberal doses. (pun intended)
Hate speech:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. “
‘Here comes your ox cart Mike right back to earth:’ FST
EXCLUSIVE: Dr. Rashid Buttar BLASTS Gates, Fauci, EXPOSES Fake Pandemic Numbers As Economy Collapses
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=WGbYHJcMbz8&feature=emb_logo
Lockdown should be over!
And “my” governor Whitless is hinting it will continue well into May.
What a Karen.
The devastating downstream economic fallout from the current exercise will be of such a dire nature that attempts to do a lockout repeat will fail. We’ll all be working overtime just to pay taxes which will be doubled from present values.
I ran across this article today – WOW
“Most Americans support extending coronavirus stay-at-home orders, poll finds”
See here https://www.foxnews.com/us/americans-support-extending-coronavirus-stay-at-home-orders
I heard once that due to all the excess contraceptives (hormones estrogen and progesterone) being flushed down the toilet – and into our drinking water – men were becoming less manly – well – here would be a good proof text for that – Dr. Strangelove indeed
Jeff,
The studies have shown that Testosterone has plummeted among men (and females) which could be to a large degree a result of the Estro hormones in water and other sources (Red #40 for example) which could result in the rise of femanized soi-bois.
“Truth is that which remains unchanged regardless of arguments for or against.”
C-Marie
P.S. No more lockdowns. Be adults ….. we will probably get sick sometimes ….. ask God for healing ….. no one can die without God allowing it ….. the whys in many cases of deaths, we have no knowledge ….. live in Christ to the glory of God ….. so you can be in His eternal Life forever.
God bless, C-Marie
Sorry I posted that video by Dr. Rashid Buttar what he’s reporting
is factual but then he goes off the deep end classic Alex Jones style.
It’s a technique perfected by Mr. Jones to discredit information by
interjecting crazy sounding rants along with factual reporting.
Even though you know the information is factual you’re hearing
it from a madman and there is an almost autonomic subconscious
rejection. Buttar even mentions Jones in the video and clearly this is
what he’s doing. I had only watched about half the video when I posted it.
I heard an excellent analogy, via a friend, from a Russian virologist: “Lockdown against the Coronavirus is like building a chickenwire fence round the mosquito swamp”.
How do we come together as non-experts yet informed citizens to prevent a lockdown of this catastrophic nature from happening again, let’s say, in the fall? How do we reverse or stymie this toxic, uncritical groupthink that has taken hold of so many throughout this pandemic?