A 500 foot long rocky asteroid made a fly-by of your planetary home this morning. The next one might pass a lot closer. The object in the image below killed off the dinosaurs. Something like that would be a genuine catastrophe to read about in the morning papers!
Just think, everyone now huddled at home, saturated in fear and self-pity: Imagine if the universe wanted to give you something real to cry about.
via Smithsonian
Originally spotted in 1998 by astronomers and tracked for about 20 years, the monstrous asteroid [1998 OR2] is currently traveling at a rate of 19,461 miles per hour and will pass Earth at a safe distance of 3.9 million miles — or 16 times the distance between the Earth and the moon, reports Space.com. __ Huge Asteroid Flies By
Sweden Continues to Build Herd Immunity Without Killing Its Economy
Sweden is using rational social distancing. And it may have already passed its infection peak without suicidal quasi-fascist lockdowns.
When foreign commentators discuss Sweden’s light-touch response to Covid-19, they tend to adopt an affronted tone. Which is, on the surface, surprising. You’d think everyone would be willing the Nordic country to succeed. After all, if Sweden can come through the epidemic without leaving a smoking crater where its economy used to be, there is hope for the rest of the world. So far, many signs appear encouraging. The disease seems to be following the same basic trajectory in Sweden as elsewhere.
Although we must wait for complete data, modelling by country’s authorities suggests that the infection rate in Stockholm peaked on 8 April. If so, we need to consider the implication, namely that, once basic hygiene and distancing measures are in place, tightening the screw further perhaps makes little difference. __ Source
Sweden opted for social distancing, without all the devastating effects that come from collapsing one’s own economy. While its locked-down Scandinavian neighbors have lower death rates for now, Sweden will be the place they will have to go to get jobs and life-saving supplies, when the Norwegians, Danes, and Finns finally have to let the people out into a crashed economy without herd immunity. But will Sweden let them in?
Three Cheers for Convalescent Plasma: 150 Years of Success
Hospitals and clinics across the country have given plasma from recovered COVID-19 patients to almost 2,600 of those still sick with the disease, and so far no major safety problems have arisen, according to experts who have been tracking the data.
“We have not seen any huge safety signals. The anecdotal evidence is overwhelmingly positive,” said Michael J. Joyner, an anesthesiologist at the Mayo Clinic, who has been monitoring early results as well as setting up a clinical trial of the plasma treatment.
“As doctors, we’re hopeful,” he said. “As scientists, we have to be objective.”
“A lot of smart people are looking at the experiences of those 2,600 patients,” said Arturo Casadevall, chairman of molecular microbiology and immunology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and one of the leaders of a national program to launch clinical trials of survivor plasma. __ Source
More Coronavirus Death Count Inflation in Europe
We first heard from Italy about the tendency to count non-coronavirus deaths as having been caused by coronavirus. The dishonest practice has now moved to other countries, including the US and Belgium.
A source in Belgium’s medical community told me that pathologists massively write COVID19 as the cause of death “if the patient has even been near a COVID19 case”, even if the actual cause is heart attack, stroke,… This appears to be one reason for the anomalously high per-capita COVID19 mortality in Belgium (the highest in the world, and far in excess of next-door Germany which uses much stricter criteria). When all-cause mortalities were compared year over year, an excess mortality was found that is comparable to neighboring countries. __ More Coronavirus Surprises
Lockdowns are Insane
China wants to see the western world on its knees, its economy broken, desperate for (debt slavery) economic assistance from the very country that put them in that position. The western media is helping China to bring western economies down, and now the public health infrastructure seems to be aiding and abetting the crime.
The choice we face is stark. One option is to maintain a general lockdown for an unknown amount of time until herd immunity is reached through a future vaccine or until there is a safe and effective treatment. This must be weighed against the detrimental effects that lockdowns have on other health outcomes. The second option is to minimise the number of deaths until herd immunity is achieved through natural infection. Most places are neither preparing for the former nor considering the latter.
The question is not whether to aim for herd immunity as a strategy, because we will all eventually get there. The question is how to minimise casualties until we get there. Since Covid-19 mortality varies greatly by age, this can only be accomplished through age-specific countermeasures. We need to shield older people and other high-risk groups until they are protected by herd immunity. __ Spiked
China is directly responsible for every Wuhan CoV-19 death. At the same time, we must all learn to deal with the mess that Beijing (intentionally or not) made.
If you subtract all the New York City area deaths from the US total, the already low deaths per million rate for the country would be nearly halved. The city of New York refused to let transit employees wear masks, and packed riders into subway cars like sardines in a can — due to an intentionally reduced ride schedule. It was almost as if the city was trying to expand the outbreak.
SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, has killed 56,749 Americans as of Tuesday.
That’s not good. But it’s not as bad as the 2017-2018 flu season, when 80,000 -plus perished. And it’s a long cry from what all the experts were warning about just a few weeks ago: First, they predicted 1.7 million Americans dead; then they redid the models (this time apparently entering a few more “facts”) and said 100,000-240,000 dead. __ Media, Politicians, and Academics Driving Panic
So if you subtract all the NYC-area deaths from the US total, closer to 30,000 would have died so far. That would still be sad. But it would take some of the wind out of the panic-mongering media’s sails, all the same.
Remember:
- go to work
- stay away from crowds
- maintain a 2 meter distance
- wash your hands
- wear a mask in public
- don’t touch your face
- don’t shake hands
- keep public surfaces clean/disinfected
- wear cotton gloves in public, change and wash often
In the grocery store:
Rational social distancing and personal protection just makes sense, as we have been saying. Total lockdowns do not make sense. The Gestapo must be destroyed.
More:
Compare society’s reaction to the 1968 global Hong Kong flu pandemic, with the gestapo lockdown reaction to the Wuhan CoV-19 pandemic. More deaths from the flu in ’68, but no hysteria in 1968.
Hundreds of thousands were hospitalized in the U.S. as the disease hit all 50 states by Christmas 1968. Like COVID-19, It was fatal primarily to people older than 65 with preexisting conditions. The Centers for Disease Control reports that it killed more than 1 million people worldwide, more than 100,000 of them in the U.S. Luckily, a vaccine was developed early — in August 1969. But the Hong Kong flu is still with us as a seasonal malady.
During the Hong Kong flu, Americans rode buses less often, washed their hands, and practiced social distancing. But they went to work.
Marilyn Brown worked at the Los Angeles Department of Social Services during the Hong Kong flu. “Other than my coworkers bringing their own alcohol to wipe down their desks and wipe down pencils and not use pencils that clients had used, we didn’t do anything,” she recently told Travel Weekly.
Philip Snashall, a now retired professor of medicine, wrote in the British Medical Journal that his two-year-old daughter contracted the first known case of the Hong Kong flu to hit Europe. “How things change,” he noted. “The stock market did not plummet, we were not besieged by the press, men in breathing apparatus did not invade my daughter’s play group.”
The global response to COVID-19 couldn’t stand in starker contrast. Leaders have made the decision to do everything possible, including bringing entire economies to a crashing halt, to limit the loss of life. They’ve swept aside considerations of the negative health effects of locking people inside with a virus that spreads most virulently indoors. People who’ve been denied nonemergency surgeries are expected to comply and shut up about their pain, even though some will undoubtedly die from their conditions.
Joel Hay, a professor of pharmaceutical economics and policy at the University of Southern California, told me that the role of science has also changed. Medical technology has vastly improved from a time when people still did computations on slide rules. But the data it produces has seduced some into thinking that we know more than we actually do and that we can produce useful models to predict the course of this novel coronavirus disease. “We’re being bombarded with data, but we often act like the guy who looks for his keys under the lamppost because the light is better there,” he told me. “We aren’t asking more fundamental questions, like ‘Does this $20 trillion experiment in lockdowns actually work?’” __ Source
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