China Shuts Down All Cinemas, As Scientists Fear Second Coronavirus Wave
China spent most of March attempting to normalize its economy after several months of virus-related shutdowns. There were reports of retail stores opening, people going outside, virus cases declining, factories restarting, and even movie theaters reopening.
The Hollywood Reporter noted that the government gave nearly 600 movie theaters across China the green light for phased reopening in the third week of March. Then by March 27, Beijing’s Film Bureau requested that all theaters go into lockdown.
“This second closure will not be a one or two-week issue,” an executive at a major exhibition company told The Hollywood Reporter. “They are going to be even more cautious when they attempt to reopen again—and this will set us back a long time.”
The Chinese government did not explicitly cite the reason for the latest theater closings. Still, scientists are now warning that a second coronavirus wave could be arriving by the end of April:
“It’s time to relax the lockdown, but we need to be alert for a potential second wave of infections,” says Ben Cowling, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong.
Cowling warned that a second wave of the fast-spreading virus could hit China by the end of April.
China’s large network of 70,000 movie screens were all shuttered in January because of the COVID-19 outbreak that started in December and has since infected 741,000 people globally and killed 35,114.
Many Chinese theaters were closed on the weekend of the Chinese New Year, which is the most significant moviegoing time of the year. Box office sales in the country for the first two months were down $2 billion over the same period last year.
How China deals with the second round of the virus outbreak remains to be seen. If China delays normalcy and extends the quarantines of its citizens, it could damage movie theater chains, Hollywood studios, and the entire global film industry. This also comes as Europe and the US have shut down movie theaters, further amplifying the stress for the industry.
Major movie productions across the world have put filming on hold through spring. Warner Bros. delayed Wonder Woman 1984 from its June debut to mid-August, which suggests US theaters will be dormant through the summer months.
The whole world has gone mad with what I call Covid-19 Derangement Syndrome (CDS).
I define it as an acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in response to the Covid-19 Corona Virus pandemic. The infection is particularly prevalent among the media and the government officials of the world.
Human beings fear what they do not understand and that fear causes them to behave in irrational and destructive ways. The current Covid-19 pandemic is a perfect example of that. I don’t need to describe the paranoia and economic destruction to you because you can see it with your own two eyes everywhere you look. Both the media and the world’s governments are fueling the panic – the media with their hysterical 24/7 coverage and the governments with their draconian police state actions.
I feel like the man in the following cartoon.
I am doomed to helplessly stand by and watch the entire world commit economic suicide for no good reason. At first glance this may seem like a shocking and callous statement but do not mistake this as support for the view that the government should stand back and let the private sector take care of the problem. I have no problem with a strong authoritarian central government response as long as it is reasonable and wise. The current government response is neither.
Do Nothing VS Shut Everything Down
The current debate about what governments should do seems to be limited to two options: Do nothing and let the virus run its course or use authoritarian methods to quarantine and restrict the movement of citizens within and across state and national borders. The former will result in many people unnecessarily dying and the latter will save lives but is already resulting in a catastrophic worldwide economic collapse with repercussions that will last for years. It is very narrow thinking to think that those are the only two options that exist. There is always another way. Wouldn’t it be great if we could find a solution to the COVID-19 virus problem that would save lives and not result in a worldwide economic Armageddon? Such a solution exists and I will lay it out for you in this article.
First let’s define the problem: A highly contagious virus is spreading around the globe and killing people. Governments should be responsible for protecting their citizens so they must take action. But what actions should they take? That is an important question that must be carefully answered, but only after much research and consideration of all options. If we act rashly and arrive at the wrong answer people will die and/or lives will be destroyed by a global economic depression.
Let’s set aside the fear and hysteria and calmly use the Scientific Method to solve our problem. But I must first make a digression about science.
Three Kinds of Science
Did you know there are three kinds of science? Most folks can’t tell the difference between them and are therefore easily misled. The first two are pseudoscience; the third is real science. There is a significant amount of overlap between the first two although they do have enough of the third mixed in to give them the appearance of credibility.
1) Agenda based science – This type is practiced by people with an agenda. They are blinded by their presuppositions and it results in them twisting, distorting, and sometimes outright lying about their studies, experiments, and data. The people that practice this kind of science are not necessarily evil. They just sincerely but blindly believe something that “just ain’t so.” They think they are helping the world but are instead causing it much harm.
2) Bought and paid for corporate science – This type is practiced by scientific mercenaries who shamelessly produce studies that support the goals of whoever is paying them. Many of these folks are downright evil in my opinion. Much of what passes as “science” these days is of this type.
3) Real science – This type of scientist seeks the truth regardless of what it is. If the scientist has a presupposition they will quickly abandon it if their research does not support it. They will tirelessly search for, support and proclaim the truth even if it results in them being ostracized by the scientific community or persecuted by the government.
The Scientific Method
Step One – Purpose – State the Problem
We have already defined our current problem as a virus that is killing people all over the world, but we have not stated our purpose and objectives. Our main purpose and objectives should be to minimize loss of life and damage to the world economy. These objectives are both very important and are not mutually exclusive regardless of what our governments seem to think.
Step Two – Research – Find Out About the Topic
I’m not going to spend much time discussing something you can easily research on the internet. There are plenty of articles in scientific journals and on science websites. Here is one example: How does the new coronavirus compare with the flu? I suggest you conduct your own independent research instead of getting your information from the hysterical media or an armchair doctor.
Although there are some important differences between the seasonal flu and Covid-19, there are enough similarities that I believe we can find a solution to the problem by applying general medical principles relating to viruses. The entire world did not shut down for the many local and worldwide viral outbreaks we have had in the past 20 years such as SARS, Ebola, Zika, MERS, H5N1 (bird) and H1N1 (swine). There was no need to shut it down for this one.
We all know about the infection and death rates that vary widely around the world but you may not know why. Italy is pointed to by the alarmists as justification for the police state shutdown of entire states and countries so let’s take a closer look at it.
The single largest factor that determines the mortality rate is the health of the person at the time they contract the virus. The symptoms are mild for the vast majority of healthy people that become infected. It is well established that the people with the greatest risk of death are those with a weakened or compromised immune system. The death rate increases exponentially with age precisely because of the decrease in immune function that accompanies the aging process. According to an Italian Government Study 99% of their Covid-19 fatalities were already sick and half were diagnosed with 3 or more diseases.
“The median age of the infected is 63 but most of those who die are older. The average age of those who’ve died from the virus in Italy is 79.5. As of March 17, 17 people under 50 had died from the disease. All of Italy’s victims under 40 have been males with serious existing medical conditions.”
“While data released Tuesday point to a slowdown in the increase of cases, with a 12.6% rise, a separate study shows Italy could be underestimating the real number of cases by testing only patients presenting symptoms.”
“According to the GIMBE Foundation, about 100,000 Italians have contracted the virus, daily Il Sole 24 Ore reported. That would bring back the country’s death rate closer to the global average of about 2%.”
A huge factor that affects transmission rates is cultural customs. Getting the locals to alter their cultural customs at funerals is one of the four practices that flattened the Ebola epidemic curve in West Africa in 2013-2016. Italy has an aging population that has a cultural tradition of cheek kissing. Is it a great mystery why their death rate is so high?
It is probable that the 2-3% global average of the death rate is wildly over inflated due a high false negative rate for the current tests. And what about the many thousands or maybe even millions of people who may have contracted the virus and were not tested because the symptoms were so mild? Several weeks ago a strange virus ran through my family and a number of my co-workers. We felt horrible for a few days but recovered quickly. My daughter got the worst symptoms but tested negative for the flu. How do we know that it was not Covid-19 or another corona virus? Some of the alarmists such as Imperial College London’s Neil Ferguson are now beginning to back off of their doom and gloom predictions. The phrase “Lies, damned lies and statistics” applies here. The infection rate and death percentage numbers are unreliable. The only statistic that is close to accurate is the number of deaths. Let’s focus our efforts on reducing that number.
Sun Tzu, Firefighters, Preppers, and Floridians
Let’s continue to gather information by getting some advice from Sun Tzu, firefighters, preppers, and Floridians. After that I will tie it all together for you so that it will make sense.
Sun Tzu
Sun Tzu famously said in The Art of War “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
The world’s governments are fighting a battle against an “enemy” (the Covid-19 virus) they do not understand. Neither do they understand “themselves,” which in this case I will consider to be the human body. This is a battle they will not win. They rushed into it blindly with little knowledge and preparation and the results so far are not pretty. The current battle should be over in a few months but the enemy will likely be back next year and/or the year after that. Will we know our enemy and know ourselves better before the next battle? I sincerely hope so.
But is treating the Covid-19 virus like an enemy that needs to be destroyed at all costs the right approach?
War on Covid-19
The USA has been at war in one form or another since its inception. There have been countless shooting wars but there has also been The War On Drugs, The War On Cancer, The War On Poverty, The War On Terrorism, The War On Global Warming, etc. Have any of these wars resulted in the eradication of the object on which the war was declared? No. All of these “wars” are foolish and misguided attempts at eradicating something that you cannot eradicate. They will always be with us. We have wasted untold trillions of dollars on these wars and have very little to show for it. The results of the current “War On Covid-19” will not be much different. We need to take a different approach and stop blindly declaring war on something we do not understand.
Trump and other politicians are using the language of war when speaking about their country’s efforts to “fight” Covid-19. That should make us very wary. When the USA declares war on anything we can expect several things to happen:
We will go deeper in debt
Vast amount of money will be wasted and given away to corrupt corporations
The US Constitution will be further trampled and more rights and freedoms will be taken away
The people will suffer
We will lose the war
Firefighters
I am a firefighter/paramedic for a large city in the State of Florida in the USA. Every time something bad happens firefighters are called to mitigate the situation. Heart attacks, Covid-19 patients, car wrecks, and hazardous material leaks/spills are among the situations we respond to, but for this example we will use fire. Firefighters do not treat fire as the enemy. We do not declare war on it and try to stamp out every single flame in our jurisdiction. We understand it to be a naturally occurring phenomenon that can be very destructive and deadly if it is allowed to grow out of control. We do not fear fire because we know it well and we know ourselves well. We do have a healthy respect for it because we frequently see the death and destruction it can cause. When the alarm sounds we calmly but aggressively go about mitigating the fire before it grows out of control and destroys both lives and property. We are well trained and well prepared with the best equipment and Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) money can buy. We have several different methods we can use to put out a fire but the simplest and most effective extinguishing agent is plain old cheap and abundant water. If a sufficient amount of water is applied to the fire in its earliest stages, it will be extinguished with minimal damage to the structure. But if we are called too late and the fire grows out of control before we arrive, the building may be completely destroyed.
Firefighters also educate the public on fire safety. We teach them how to prevent fires and what to do if they occur. I will return to this analogy later but for now the general lesson from firefighters is that the key to mitigating a potentially life and property destroying fire is knowledge, training and equipment. This allows us to apply the right extinguishing agent early enough and in sufficient quantities to put out the fire before the building burns down.
Preppers
I am an amateur prepper, not the “doomsday” type. Maybe it’s because I took the Boy Scout motto “Be Prepared” seriously or maybe it’s because I love the Biblical story of Joseph saving “the world” from starvation due to famine. In any case, this practice of being prepared has served my family well. When the mob of unprepared citizens began cleaning out the stores recently there was not much I had to run out and buy. (Although I was regrettably almost out of toilet paper.) I already had a freezer full of meat and even a box of N95 masks. Preppers spend time thinking about different scenarios that could happen and then prepare for them. Some do it out of fear but most do it because we know these things will happen to some degree at some point and we want to lessen the impact of these events on our family. We do not want to be dependent on the government to save us. We want to be in the position to help other people and not be a burden on them.
Floridians
Floridians are accustomed to preparing for hurricanes. It is an annual occurrence. We don’t panic because we know the enemy well and it is usually not as bad as it could be. We have an advantage over the folks who live in the Tornado Belt because we have plenty of advance notice that the storm is coming. Preparing for the Covid-19 virus to hit looked and felt like it does when we are preparing for a hurricane. We know it is coming but we do not know exactly when and where it will strike or how bad it will be. We all go out at the same time right before the storm and buy the supplies we need to weather the storm and get us through the aftermath. It always results in the store shelves being cleaned out of certain items. Our advice to you is to emulate our calm manner of preparation but do not emulate our practice of waiting until the last moment to obtain the supplies we need. The best approach is to stock up before storm season arrives.
Step 3 – Hypothesis – Predict the Outcome to the Problem
The doomsday outcomes predicted by the hysterical media and our clueless government officials are fatally flawed due to linear thinking. This is particularly prevalent in the West because the Western mind thinks in a linear manner – they act as if the trend in motion will continue on in the same direction indefinitely. The trend always changes. It is the Creator’s way. Cycles are the very foundation on which the universe was built. It is how energy moves. All viral outbreaks peak and then subside. This one will not be any different. Because the primary transmission route appears to be aerosolized droplets suspended in the air due to talking, coughing, and sneezing, the infection rate will drop dramatically as the air becomes warmer and moister. Airborne viruses love cool and dry air. Towards the end of the article I will be offering my predictions and proposed solutions.
Steps 4, 5, and 6
The world is in the midst of a huge quarantine experiment right now that we have rushed into without adequately stating our purpose and researching our options. In the aftermath we will be analyzing the results and coming to conclusions. Like the aftermath to any other crisis such as 911, most of the official government analysis will be propagandized and used to further their political agendas. We will be deluged with pseudoscience, lies, damned lies and statistics. Truth seekers must use real science to sift through the B.S. and find the truth just like we had to do with 911. Let us hope that the people of the world do not fall for the propaganda and “give up essential liberty to purchase a little safety.” One of my favorite quotes is by Mark Twain: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” The government officials of the world know a lot that “just ain’t so.” Unfortunately that “knowledge” is what they base their decisions on.
The World in Turmoil
The world is in fear driven turmoil right now because of the following reasons:
Ignorance: Our leaders are completely ignorant about how the human body works and are relying on guidance from a conventional medical system that is rife with agenda and corporate driven pseudoscience.
Poor or non-existent planning and training: This is self evident and seems to apply to most countries.
Narrow thinking: The response is the same all over the world – mass quarantines, isolation, and shutting down of commerce and travel. No country seems to be taking a different approach.
Incompletely defining the problem: No government seems to be giving any serious consideration to how they can minimize the economic damage that their solution to the problem is causing. Yes, many governments are throwing vast amounts of money at the problem by creating debt based money but does that ever really work?
Treating the Covid-19 pandemic like a war that needs to be waged instead of a recurring problem that needs to be properly mitigated with the right tools and approaches for the job: The USA’s war on Covid-19 will be about as successful as the USA’s War on Cancer has been.
The Cure For Covid-19
The cure for Covid-19 already exists so there is no need to look to the pharmaceutical industry to save us. It is your body’s own immune system. Instead of destroying the world economy in knee-jerk reactionary style maybe the world’s governments should be finding ways to improve the health of their citizens. We have already established that this virus kills the elderly and the immune compromised and has mild effects on the healthy. We should be focusing on the death rate, not the infection rate. Many people get sick with a virus a few times a year and the world economy doesn’t shut down.
I could write an entire series of articles on ways you can improve your health and immune system to the point that the Covid-19 virus would be only a minor irritation to you but this is not the forum for that. But I will tell you about the closest thing we have to a “magic bullet” and how the Chinese are using it to mitigate the virus.
“Prevention and treatment of cytokine storm: It is recommended to use large doses of vitamin C and unfractionated heparin. Large doses of vitamin C are injected intravenously at a dose of 100 to 200 mg / kg per day. The duration of continuous use is to significantly improve the oxygenation index.”
China must be using it very extensively because in February they shipped 50 tons of it to Hubei Province, the capital city of which is Wuhan. No wonder turned things around so quickly at the epicenter of the outbreak.
Vitamin C: The Magic Bullet for Inflammation
Inflammation is the term we use to describe the body’s immune system response to injury or a foreign invader such as a virus or bad bacteria. It is at the root of all medical problems and diseases. When the immune system is overwhelmed, inflammation rages out of control. In the case of Covid-19 there is an overwhelming amount of inflammation in the lungs that leads to pneumonia, sepsis and death if the inflammatory fires are not quenched. This normally only happens in people with compromised immune systems. An optimally functioning immune system in a healthy person will easily mitigate the virus before it progresses to pneumonia. There are exceptions of course, but they are few.
We now return to my firefighter analogy. We can easily extinguish a fire if we arrive on scene while it is still in its incipient stage. A small booster line or even a 2.5 gallon fire extinguisher is all that is needed. If our response is delayed the fire will grow exponentially to the point that is not safe to enter the building. We then apply very large streams of water from the outside and do not enter the building until after the majority of the flames have been extinguished. The sooner we apply the water the less of it that is required to do the job. If we do not apply large streams of water in the late stages of a fire the building will be lost.
Vitamin C works the same way as water in our firefighter analogy. If enough oral vitamin C is taken at an early enough stage of an illness, the inflammation will be quenched and will never get to the exponential growth phase. The longer you wait to take it the more you will need to quench the inflammatory fire growing inside of you. The key to success is to take it at the first sign of symptoms. One you get to the exponential growth phase intravenous vitamin C is needed and it will be effective in a very large percentage of cases. If it is not applied, the result is death in a large percentage of cases.
Doctors in China and even the USA are using intravenous vitamin C on Covid-19 patients with great success. Doctors and researchers all over the world have known for decades about the incredible power of intravenous vitamin C to quench the raging fires of inflammation.
Sepsis is a condition that can be compared to the pneumonia that is killing the immune compromised elderly Covid-19 patients. They are both acute and massive inflammatory responses due to infection. An observational study published in The Lancet found that 100% of the early Covid-19 patients that died in Wuhan had sepsis. And not surprisingly most were older folks with health problems. Sepsis may be responsible for as many as 20% of deaths worldwide. It is one of the top killers of people that die in hospitals. One doctor in the USA has been using intravenous vitamin C in a treatment protocol that has reduced the death rate from sepsis by almost 5 fold – from 40% to 8.5%.
Is It Really That Simple?
Yes it is. “But Percy, then why aren’t governments around the world endorsing it and using it?” That is an almost irrelevant question. Does the scientific evidence and case studies prove it or not? I can give you a very conclusive answer for the USA. We have a corrupt and powerful pharmaceutical industry that exerts a massive amount of influence on our government. They use that power and influence to squash and suppress any medical treatment that cannot be patented and used to make obscene amounts of profit. Vitamin C cannot be patented so therefore it will not be widely used or studied. If it is not being used in your country then maybe your medical system has been corrupted or misled by the West. China is using it extensively, as well as a few renegade doctors in countries all over the world. If you look for them you will find them.
I do not subscribe to this view because I believe that claims that can be proved or disproved by science all require the same amount of evidence. What is extraordinary to one may be ordinary to another. A good example is 911. I do not consider it to be an extraordinary claim to say that two planes did not bring down three buildings on 9/11/2001, particularly Building 7. The laws of physics prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. But to the vast majority of the American public that is too fantastic of a claim to even warrant checking into. So if you summarily dismiss my claims without serious investigation it will be similar to someone refusing to watch the excellent documentary 911: Explosive Evidence- Experts Speak Out by Architects and Engineers For 911 Truth because it sounds too fantastic to be true. Here are some links to get you started if you would like to conduct your own research. I highly recommend that you do so.
I would be remiss if I did not touch upon the more bizarre aspects of this crisis. I will list a few. This is certainly not an exhaustive list and I have only linked to the things that are facts. No conspiracy theory links here.
Government officials in sunny Florida are closing parks, beaches and restricting other outdoor activities such as boating in spite of the fact that outdoors in the sunshine is the best place to be during a pandemic
Lots of conspiracy theories floating around such as insiders and elites selling stocks and bonds right before the crash, installing 5G cell towers at schools during the shutdown and allegations of bio warfare between the USA and China
I am attempting to apply Occam’s Razor to this crisis but I must admit that the longer this inexplicable and destructive behavior by governments goes on the more difficult it is for me to do so. Are all these things (and more) just amazing coincidences? I will let the reader decide.
Never Let A Good Crisis Go To Waste
When a “crisis” comes along, whether false flag or real, Western leaders always use it as an excuse to pass liberty destroying legislation that would be otherwise politically untenable. In the USA, 911 gave us the Patriot Act, TSA, DHS, etc. I fully expect the Covid-19 pandemic to bring us similar legislation such as the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act. Power grabs are being suggested and attempted all over the world. Here are a few headlines:
I could fill up a page with headlines such as these. It is a very disturbing trend.
Where We Go From Here
I see myself as a realist, not an optimist or a pessimist. My study of history, economics, and politics tells me that the future looks grim. Much of the world is suffering under corrupt and ignorant leaders who cannot possibly successfully lead us out of this mess, particularly in the Western world. The world’s interconnected and dollar dominated financial system is a house of cards that has been waiting on the right flap of a butterfly’s wings to set off a series of events that will cause it to come tumbling down. We are past the point of no return. An economic recession or depression will be ushered in by the response to the Covid-19 virus, not the Covid-19 virus itself. The government response to a crisis always sets up the next crisis. Capital flight to the dollar has already begun en mass. By next year or the year after there will be loan defaults that will set off a worldwide contagion that will make 2008 look like a walk in the park. The Eurozone will implode first. The Covid-19 corona virus will mutate and be back next year and/or the year after that. Lord help us if our leaders shut the world down again next year. China will survive and be the beneficiary of the West’s self destruction. They will suffer, but not nearly as much as the West. The USA dominated Anglo-Zionist Empire will be largely over within 20 years, maybe much sooner. The new financial capital of the world will be China.
Conclusion 1 – What Governments Should Do
After we are on the downside of the infection bell curve governments should begin planning for the next round of this. Instead of being reactive they should be proactive. The primary focus should be to educate their citizens on how to be healthy. Healthy people have little to worry about from Covid-19 or most any other virus. Healthy people do not clog the healthcare system; unhealthy people do. They should also educate their citizens on ways they can support their immune systems and encourage them to do so quickly in the incipient stages of an illness. This will drastically reduce the strain of sick people on overburdened healthcare systems. That leaves only the worst cases to deal with. For these they should follow China’s lead and develop a treatment protocol that incorporates intravenous vitamin C to quench the inflammatory fire in the lungs that leads to death.
The mass quarantines of entire cities, states, and countries must stop. It is not stopping the spread and it is destroying the world economy in the process. If they want to quarantine a population it should be the population with the greatest risk of death – the elderly.
None of this will happen of course. When their approach doesn’t work, Western leaders usually double down on it hoping for a different result. Hopefully there will be some renegade local governments that will defy the unconstitutional decrees of their central government – like what many state governments are doing to the federal government in the USA regarding cannabis laws.
Conclusion 2 – What You Can Do
Since I am not under any illusions that this article will be read and considered by any person in power anywhere on the planet, the advice that follows is the reason I wrote this article. There is little chance that any of our overlords will be cured of the Covid-19 Derangement Syndrome that infects them. But, dear reader, if you are living in fear and hiding in your house or apartment and are afraid of contracting the Covid-19 virus there is hope for you. The antidote for fear is knowledge, training and preparation.
I do not fear fire because I understand it and I am well trained and equipped to extinguish a fire at any stage of development. I always strive to extinguish the fire in its incipient stage before it grows out of control.
I do not fear any virus because I understand them and I understand how my body uses its immune system to defend me from them. If I begin to get sick I know many natural methods to ramp up my immune system’s ability to fight off any infection whether viral or bacterial.
If you are not healthy, begin taking steps to correct that now. This virus will be back, and when it does you want your immune system to be functioning at a high level. Take advantage of this “lockdown” time and gain some knowledge. Instead of watching the 24/7 news cycle repeated over and over again (which can rapidly lead to depression and a loss of hope) redeem the time and study how you can change your diet and lifestyle and get in excellent health. After the current madness subsides and the stores are restocked, begin stocking up on the supplies you will need for the next round of this. Become self sufficient and prepared for any emergency. Whatever you do, do not sit back and wait for the government or pharmaceutical industry to save you.
If you do these things you can join me as I watch in stunned amazement the next time the whole world panics due to a pandemic. You will also be in a position to guide and assist your loved ones and neighbors. An economic storm and additional pandemic storms are coming and like minded people around the world need to pull together and help each other when they hit.
* * *
Percy Carlton is a soon to be retired firefighter/paramedic in a large city in the State of Florida in the USA. He has relentlessly studied and pursued truth in the areas of health, economics and geopolitics for the past 10 years.
“Coincidence?” – Japanese Questioning Sudden Surge In Tokyo Infections Following Olympics Delay Decision
As we’ve previously noted, every four decades, something jinxes the Olympics. Japanese officials spent the last several months downplaying the virus outbreak, but as soon as the Games were delayed on March 23, virus cases in Tokyo spiked, with possible lockdowns looming, reported AP News.
Former government officials have raised their eyebrows of just how COVID-19 cases were low before the postponement, to now on an exponential curve, as some have suggested there was a coverup by the government to artificially suppress cases to make it appear that the Games would go on.
“In order to make the impression that the city was taking control of the coronavirus, Tokyo avoided making strict requests and made the number of patients look smaller,” former Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama said in a tweet.
“The coronavirus has spread while they waited. (For Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike) it was Olympics first, not Tokyo’s residents.”
Several weeks ago, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said the Japanese government “would overcome the spread of the infection and host the Olympics without a problem.” Abe’s attitude towards the outbreak dramatically changed over the weekend when he said:
“Once infections overshoot, our strategy … will instantly fall apart,” Abe warned on Saturday. “Under the current situation, we are just barely holding up. A state of emergency is not needed just yet, but that Japan could at any time face a situation as bad as in the United States or Europe.”
Abe had a phone call with International Olympic Committee (IOC), President Thomas Bach, last Tuesday, AP notes. That was the moment when the Games were decided to be postponed until 2021.
Then on Wednesday, one day after the postponement, Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike advised residents to stay home and practice social distancing until mid-April, signaling that possible lockdowns could be ahead to flatten the pandemic curve.
Confirmed cases in the country have surged since the postponement of the Games — with an exponential rise expected through April.
Japan COVID-19 Confirmed cases
“Is this just a coincidence?” Maiko Tajima, an opposition lawmaker from the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, said during a parliamentary session last Wednesday, citing Tokyo’s sudden spike in cases.
Health Minister Katsunobu Kato said there is no correlation between the surge in cases and the Olympic postponement.
Abe has since dismissed that Japan artificially suppressed cases by limiting tests and defined COVID-19 deaths as other pneumonia fatalities to boost the prospects that the Games must go on:
“I’m aware that some people suspect Japan is hiding the numbers, but I believe that’s not true,” he said. “If there is a coverup, it will show up in the number of deaths.”
Abe also said the government had secured enough hospital beds and ventilators to prepare for a worst-case.
“We fear a situation where severe patients start dying when the medical system collapses, and we must prevent that situation,” Kato told NHK on Sunday.
And why would Abe’s government allegedly coverup the virus outbreak to make it appear that containment was almost certain? Well, as we explained on March 11, Japan and some mega-corporations would lose billions of dollars if the Games were delayed or canceled. So, another example of profits over human health?
Crises, like pandemics, don’t break things in and of themselves; they show you what’s already broken.
– Patrick Wyman
Big macro crises in any form are scary, massively disruptive, and in some cases, literally deadly. This is why governments and entrenched institutions always see such events as opportunities to further consolidate wealth and power.
The current global pandemic is no exception, as I detailed in last week’s piece: Power Grab. While it’s necessary to be aware of this reality — and to push back against it wherever possible — it’s equally important to recognize there’s a silver lining to all of this.
The paradigm we live under depends on us not thinking too hard about how power functions. It relies on us being so busy with the basics of survival, or distracted by superficial consumerism and endless entertainment, to contemplate how the system actually works. This method of social control has been wildly successful throughout my lifetime, but what’s interesting about moments of global crises is the mask is forced off for a period. In a desperate scramble to marshal all of the corporate-imperial state’s resources to save the interests of the oligarchy, we’re shown in full color who really matters and who doesn’t.
For every $1000 check that goes out another $1,000,000 check goes out.
You do not matter. The imperial state doesn’t care about you. Oligarchs don’t care about you. Mega corporations don’t care about you. This truth is cleverly hidden from much of the public during “normal” times when the machine is humming along as intended, but it’s far more in your face during a crisis period. It’s much harder to hide the truth when the world gets turned upside down.
Aside from the grotesque spectacle of the U.S. government funneling all of its resources toward propping up Wall Street and large corporations, this crisis has exposed the the rot and dysfunction in another meaningful way. Our health experts, ostensibly there to help the public navigate exactly this sort of event, have failed us in spectacular fashion.
Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!
They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk! https://t.co/UxZRwxxKL9
My government:
– Pretended it wasn’t real.
– Made tests that didn’t work.
– Didn’t allow local labs to make their own tests.
– Told the public masks don’t work.
– Gave trillions to Wall Street and an assortment of other predatory oligarchs.
This is what political actors masquerading as experts do in a crisis. They either give bad advice, or intentionally mislead the public to hide the fact the U.S. simply doesn’t have adequate mask supply and sent its manufacturing capacity overseas. Which brings up an important topic worthy of further discussion: the crucial distinction between experts and expertise.
An “expert” in our society is someone with expertise in a particular field who’s been propped up by either the media, government or both as an authoritative source to listen to on a particular topic. This individual’s elevated stature is artificially created by an external source that’s selected this particular person as someone you should listen to. It tends to be a political appointment. This person has been chosen, not only because he or she has expertise (many others also do), but due to other attributes that appeal to those who’ve decided to prop them up. Anyone who’s worked in corporate America knows full well that many of those promoted to middle management, or higher, often end up there not because they’re particularly skilled, but because they’re good at playing politics and know the right ass to kiss. The same is true in all large organizations, and government is no exception.
In the days before the internet and social media, the public might know that government/media experts were behaving dishonestly, but didn’t have realtime access to competitive nonpolitical voices with equal or superior expertise to the government experts. What many of us discovered during this pandemic is people with expertise engaging publicly on Twitter provided far better and more timely advice than the government/media experts. This makes perfect sense because these people tend to not be political actors, but rather humans attempting to share information in an honest and selfless manner. If we’ve learned anything in the 21st century, it’s that actual track records don’t matter when it comes to media and government positions. In fact, the more catastrophically wrong you are in the interests of oligarchy, the more likely you are to be promoted and elevated.
Fortunately, I entered this crisis with a well established distrust of mass media and government, and therefore knew better than to look toward their experts for any useful guidance. Rather, I sought out the opinions of various nonpolitical individuals with relevant expertise who helped me see things for how they were very early on. Others have not been as lucky, but will no doubt emerge from this crisis with a deep distrust of established institutions and individuals, and with very good reason.
We’ve just witnessed a catastrophic failure of the centralized state in America, and the blowback will resonate within the larger culture for years if not decades. Similar to how many people were shaken to their core during the financial crisis a decade ago, I think this pandemic event will lead to an even larger wave of people awakening to how completely rotten, pernicious and corrupt the whole system is. Once you see that reality in all its glory, you can’t unsee it.
Of course, recognizing how broken things are isn’t enough. We need to have a thoughtful conversation about what we have too much of versus what we need. If we’re going to change the world, we need a vision. I have some thoughts on the matter.
What we need more of:
– Small businesses
– Empowered individuals
– Decentraliation/localism
– Look inward, bottom up change.
What we need less of:
– Monopoly, dominant oligarchs
– A mass of indebted cubicle slaves
– Centralization/empire
– Searching for saviors, politicians
Nothing is set in stone. The world as it is today is not some divine eternal paradigm beyond reproach. Humans shape the world through their choices, actions and mentality.
For additional thoughts on that and much more, check out my recent interview with Tales From the Crypt.
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How To Turn $454 Billion Into $4.5 Trillion: Visualizing The Fed’s “Multi-trillion Dollar Helicopter Credit Drop”
Last Friday, to bipartisan cheers – and one sole, rational dissenter who was promptly silenced after asking “if $6 trillion is fine, why note $350 trillion” – Trump signed into law a $2.2 trillion corporate bailout fiscal spending package, which quickly defined the main topic of the current new cycle. What was far less discussed, purposefully so due to the complexity of the underlying math, is that in parallel to the Treasury’s 2 trillion package, the Fed received a green light to lend up to $4.5 trillion in new credit (which is where Kudlow’s misconstrued “$6 trillion stimulus” comment came from).
And as usually happens with matters Fed related, the fact that the Fed received permission from the Treasury to “stimulate” by more than twice the full amount of the CARES act, flew right over America’s head. Which, if to be expected, is lamentable, because by giving the Fed a green light to inject money at will, the US government officially launched helicopter money.
Or rather, “helicopter credit” as Wrightson ICAP chief economist Lou Crandall put it.
So how do we get to $4.5 trillion? Here’s what it happened.
The roles of the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve are different in a recovery. The Treasury Department is part of the Executive Branch. It receives its funding from taxpayers. It is accountable to Congress and to the President. It just received $454 billion in the CARES Act. The Federal Reserve, in contrast, is a private, bank-owned agency which pretends to operate on behalf of the people but in reality makes sure the financial system and the commercial banks that dominate are viable and profitable (if they aren’t they are bailed out).
As a result, the Fed’s members and private owners are banking institutions who keep massive reserves on deposit at the Fed. The Federal Reserve has many roles in the economy, but none of them is to take on credit risk. So how do you get the Fed to establish a “loan” facility, as contemplated in the CARES Act, if it will not take on credit risk? And not just any loan but $4.5 trillion in loans?
This tsunami of credit (the helicopter comes next… and last) is made possible by the $454 billion set aside in the aid package for Treasury to backstop lending by the Fed. The Treasury’s contribution, as Tom Barrack explained recently, you can think of as “equity” — that is, Treasury will stand in a “first loss” position on every loan made to corporate America.
The Fed will contribute the “leverage” — the money that will help make loans using the Treasury’s equity and be levered 10-to-1. Such leverage assumes no more than 10% capital losses (on “AAA-rated” paper), as the Fed is not allowed to be impaired. Of course, in a real crash the losses will be far greater but we’ll cross that particular bailout of the bailout when we get to it. The loan fund, now levered up ten-fold thanks to the Fed’s own $4.1 trillion, will then make loans to businesses.
“Effectively one dollar of loss absorption of backstop from Treasury is enough to support $10 worth of loans.” Fed Chair Powell said in in a rare nationally-televised interview last Thursday morning. “When it comes to this lending we’re not going to run out of ammunition” and he is right – the Fed can apply any leverage it wants; after all the value of the collateral it lends against is whatever the Fed decides!
Visually, the magic of the Fed’s 10x leverage looks as follows:
The overall size of the Fed-Treasury loan fund depends on how much Fed money will be supplied for every dollar of “equity” the Treasury contributes. In theory, the answer is a function of what is called the “credit box.” If the loan program makes loans only to investment grade companies (those rated BBB or higher), the Fed will contribute more capital than if the loan program makes loans to companies with lower credit ratings or no ratings at all. In other existing Fed loan programs, the Fed supplies about $9 for every $1 of Treasury capital, but in those programs the loans are secured by extremely high-quality collateral (often AAA).
In practice, the Fed – which can “print” an infinite amount of dollars in exchange for any collateral including baseball cards, turds or oxygen – can lever up 20x, 50x, even 100x or more with zero regard for the underlying collateral.
And the real kicker is that what and how the Fed decides on what leverage to apply, how to value the collateral, and which companies to bailout (and which to let fail), is now a secret. That’s because the Senate-approved stimulus bill repeals the sunshine law for the Fed’s meetings until the President says the coronavirus threat is over or the end of the year (spoiler alert: the coronavirus threat will never be over). That could make any FOIA lawsuits to disclose details of what’s is taking place in Fed meeting a non-starter since it has been codified in a federal law, to wit:
SEC. 4009. TEMPORARY GOVERNMENT IN THE SUNSHINE ACT RELIEF. (a) IN GENERAL.—Except as provided in subsection 8 (b), notwithstanding any other provision of law, if the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System determines, in writing, that unusual and exigent circumstances exist, the Board may conduct meetings without regard to the requirements of section 552b of title 5, United States Code, during the period beginning on the date of enactment of this Act and ending on the earlier of— (1) the date on which the national emergency concerning the novel coronavirus disease (COVID–19) outbreak declared by the President on March 13, 2020 under the National Emergencies Act (50 20 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.) terminates; or (2) December 31, 2020.
So what does all this mean? Three things:
the US population will go in debt to the tune of at least $454 to pre-fund the Treasury’s “first-loss” equity tranche which will be then handed over to the Fed as seed capital
the Fed will then apply 10x – or much more – leverage to make any collateral it makes loans against money good, bailing out any and all asset holders, while triggering the endgame of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency, because without even a veiled pretense of scarcity, the dollar literally becomes less valuable than toilet paper.
As JPM’s chief economist Michael Feroli put it, “The Fed has effectively shifted from lender of last resort for banks to a commercial banker of last resort for the broader economy,”
And the punchline: this mechanism which is now codified by law and which grants the Fed literally unlimited power to bailout anything and anyone, and which marks the beginning of the end for the US dollar, was delivered by America’s politicians with pride:
“Very quickly we hope to stand up a very broad based lending facility that could be leveraged up to $2 or $3 trillion,” Senator Pat Toomey told reporters Wednesday. “We’re hoping it’s a mechanism to keep businesses alive for a few weeks or months until our economy can resume.”
And if it can’t resume in a “few weeks or months”, the mechanism will keep running until the Fed can – and will – nationalize everything.
So congratulations America, you were just bought by a group of anonymous bankers with your own elected politicians making it possible. The price? $1,200 per person per month for a month or two…
The unprecedented response to the COVID-19 pandemic has prioritized keeping people apart to slow the spread of the virus. While measures such as business closures and travel restrictions are effective at fighting a pandemic, they also have a dramatic impact on the economy.
To help right the ship, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act — also known as the CARES Act — was passed by U.S. lawmakers last week with little fanfare. The act became the largest economic stimulus bill in modern history, more than doubling the stimulus act passed in 2009 during the Financial Crisis.
Today’s Sankey diagram is a visual representation of where the $2 trillion will be spent.
Broadly speaking, there are five components to the COVID-19 stimulus bill:
Although the COVID-19 stimulus bill is incredibly complex, here are some of the most important parts to be aware of.
Funds for Individuals
Amount: $603.7 billion – 30% of total CARES Act
In order to stimulate the sputtering economy quickly, the U.S. government will deploy “helicopter money” — direct cash payments to individuals and families.
The centerpiece of this plan is a $1,200 direct payment for those earning up to $75,000 per year. For higher earners, payment amounts will phase out, ending altogether at the $99,000 income level. Families will also receive $500 per child.
There are three other key things to know about this portion of the stimulus funds:
There will be a temporary suspension for any student loan held by the federal government. This means no payments required and no interest accrued until the end of September, 2020.
Borrowers with federally backed loans can request forbearance on mortgage payments for up to six months.
There will be an expansion of unemployment benefits, including a four-month enhancement of benefits. This plan includes freelancers, workers in the gig economy, and furloughed employees.
Big Business
Amount: $500.0 billion – 25% of total CARES Act
This component of the package is aimed at stabilizing big businesses in hard-hit sectors.
The most obvious industry to receive support will be the airlines. About $58 billion has been earmarked for commercial and cargo airlines, as well as airline contractors. Perhaps in response to recent criticism of the industry, companies receiving stimulus money will be barred from engaging in stock buybacks for the term of the loan plus one year.
One interesting pathway highlighted by today’s Sankey diagram is the $17 billion allocated to “maintaining national security”. While this provision doesn’t mention any specific company by name, the primary recipient is believed to be Boeing.
The bill also indicates that an inspector general will oversee the recovery process, along with a special committee.
Small Business
Amount: $377.0 billion – 19% of total CARES Act
To ease the strain on businesses around the country, the Small Business Administration (SBA) will be given $350 billion to provide loans of up to $10 million to qualifying organizations. These funds can be used for mission critical activities, such as paying rent or keeping employees on the payroll during COVID-19 closures.
As well, the bill sets aside $10 billion in grants for small businesses that need help covering short-term operating costs.
State and Local Governments
Amount: $340.0 billion – 17% of total CARES Act
The biggest portion of funds going to local and state governments is the $274 billion allocated towards direct COVID-19 response. The rest of the funds in this component will go to schools and child care services.
Public and Health Services
Amount: $179.5 billion – 9% of total CARES Act
The biggest slice of this pie goes to healthcare providers, who will receive $100 billion in grants to help fight COVID-19. This was a major ask from groups representing the healthcare industry, as they look to make up the lost revenue caused by focusing on the outbreak — as opposed to performing elective surgeries and other procedures. There will also be a 20% increase in Medicare payments for treating patients with the virus.
Money is also set aside for initiatives such as increasing the availability of ventilators and masks for the Strategic National Stockpile, as well as providing additional funding for the Center for Disease Control and expanding the reach of virtual doctors.
Finally, beyond the healthcare-related funding, the CARES Act also addresses food security programs and a long list of educational and arts initiatives.
Execs Scramble To Buy Spyware To Keep Tabs On ‘Locked-Down’ Employees
Tens of millions of Americans have transitioned from their corporate desks to living room sofas in the last month as “shelter in place” government health orders have forced many to work at home amid the COVID-19 outbreak. Corporate executives, who once had unlimited control over employees, have lost much of it, and that is why they’re now panic buying spy software to monitor employees who work from home, reported Bloomberg.
Axos Financial Inc. told employees who are working from home that they’re monitoring every keystroke, logging every website, and taking screenshots of their desktops, in a bid to keep tabs on how productive they’re. In an internal email to employees, the company wrote that “disciplinary action” or “termination” is possible if slacking was seen.
“We have seen individuals taking unfair advantage of flexible work arrangements,” Axos Financial CEO wrote in an internal email reviewed by Bloomberg. If daily tasks aren’t completed, workers “will be subject to disciplinary action, up to and including termination.”
It’s not just corporations that are ushering in digital surveillance tools to monitor employees, but also we’ve noted that governments are utilizing mass surveillance to monitor social distancing and the health care system.
“Of course, digital surveillance has been used for years on office desktops, yet it seems a violation of privacy to a lot of workers when they’re required to have software on their computers that tracks their every move in their own homes.
Employers justify going full Orwell by saying that monitoring curbs security breaches, which can be expensive and helps keep the wheels of commerce turning.
With so many people working remotely because of the coronavirus, surveillance software is flying off the virtual shelves.” – Bloomberg.
Brad Miller, CEO of surveillance-software maker InterGuard, said businesses are “scrambling” to purchase software that monitors the productivity of employees who are working from home.
Axos spokesman Gregory Frost released a statement to Bloomberg that said, “the enhanced monitoring of at-home employees we implemented will ensure that those members of our workforce who work from home will continue” to be productive during these challenging times.
Along with InterGuard, software makers include Time Doctor, Teramind, VeriClock, innerActiv, ActivTrak, and Hubstaf have developed monitoring tools for corporations.
Stacy Hawkins, a professor at Rutgers Law School, said some employers are going to far in their attempt to track workers.
Some workers who have been subjected to extreme surveillance while working at home have vented their frustration on forums such as CodeAhoy.
“I’ve heard from multiple people whose employers have asked them to stay logged into a video call all day while they work,” said Alison Green, founder of the workplace-advice website Ask a Manager. “In some cases, they’re told it’s so they can all talk throughout the day if questions come up, but in others, there’s no pretense that it’s for anything other than monitoring people to ensure they’re working.”
The virus has been the perfect cover for corporate America to rollout massive spy surveillance technology to monitor employees. Simultaneously, the government is ushering in the surveillance state.
China is waging a propaganda war against the coronavirus on several fronts. In addition to its well-documented efforts to deflect attention from its early suppression of information about the disease and to claim that it has among all nations now halted the scourge, it is also pushing an alternative explanation of its origins—namely that it didn’t start in Wuhan after all, but was a creation of a military biochemical lab in the United States and was brought to China by an American team that competed in the Military World Games in Wuhan last October.
While that conspiracy theory was quickly noted and dismissed in much of the West, it is continuing and broadening all over social media in China – a country that strictly monitors what appears on its online platforms, regularly scrubbing it of what the authorities call “rumors.” But a lot of it, put on platforms that are banned in China, seems aimed outward, part of a concerted effort to convince the world that China, once the villain of the coronavirus story, is actually its hero, and that the real villain is America.
Its effectiveness may provide a new illustration of how fake news, if repeated loudly and often enough, uses social media as a carrier to spread misinformation around the globe.
Recently, for example, Global Times, an English-language mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, called on the American government to release the medical records of all the members of the American team that competed in Wuhan, so as “to end the conjecture about U.S. military personnel bringing Covid-19 to China.” In asking the United States to be “transparent,” the paper was giving credence to a claim at the heart of the conspiracy theory, that a 50-year-old bicycle racer named Maatje Benassi, a member of the American delegation, was “patient zero,” the first victim of the disease, which would mean that the virus was brought to China by the United States. This claim has been amplified across Twitter.
Among the ironies in this is that the demand for transparency is coming from China, one of the most secretive and opaque regimes in history. Another is that the idea that Benassi is “patient zero” stems from an American conspiracy theorist named George Webb. In a Youtube video earlier this month, Webb advanced that notion, along with the theory that the virus was created, not in China, but at Fort Detrick in Maryland.
It’s not the first time that China has given quasi-official sanction to the rewriting of the recent coronavirus past. The theory that the American army created the coronavirus has been propagated on Twitter, for example, by Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry. What’s become clearer over time is the possible goal of China’s effort: to win respectful treatment for its evidence-free claim, to present the question of the virus’s origins as undecided, something urgently requiring further research and disclosure.
Chinese websites are carrying numerous videos detailing what one of those sites, dubbed Sharp Arrow Military News, calls “America’s ugly truth.” Slickly produced and professionally narrated, the videos list various supposedly incriminating facts about American behavior and spin them into a tale of a dark anti-China plot — for example, that as late as February President Trump seemed unconcerned about the spread of the virus to the United States.
One video making the rounds recently provides one of the more elaborate presentations of the theory to date. It’s not entirely clear who created it, or how broadly it is circulating in China or how great its influence is. A brief, unscientific survey of people inside China, mostly well-educated middle-class city dwellers, turned up nobody who actually believed its claims.
But the video is professionally done, with a Chinese-language narrator speaking with very much the style and intonation of official Chinese news broadcasts. It has the look and format of other videos that have been put out by a Chinese army propaganda unit in Wuhan, though it could not be confirmed whether this new video was produced in this way or not.
“We have to find patient zero, the first coronavirus case,” the narrator says at the beginning of what appears to be a piece of investigative journalism, a supposedly sincere and objective effort at sifting through the facts to arrive at “the truth” of the virus’s origins. “At the beginning, everybody thought it came from a seafood market in Wuhan, but now it appears maybe not,” the narrator says, going on to advance the theory that the video will explore: “Maybe it’s related to the Wuhan military competition.”
In support of that notion, the narrator – according to RealClearInvestigations’ translation – reminds viewers that the 2019 World Military Games were held in Wuhan in October last year, with participation by some 10,000 athletes from more than 100 countries, including the American team with nearly 300 athletes and staff. The U.S., which, the narrator says, “has very strong abilities,” did poorly in the competition, and indeed, the American team won just eight medals, none of them gold, compared to China’s 239.
Isn’t this a strange thing? the narrator goes on to say, putting the poor American performance into a sinister light and using it to support the theory that the coronavirus must have originated in the U.S., not in China.
“Do you think the Americans came to Wuhan to buy soy sauce?” the narrator asks sarcastically. “They didn’t come to compete; they came because they had a job to do,” and while he doesn’t say so explicitly, the implication is clear: the “job” was to plant the new virus in Wuhan, thereby framing China as the creator of the new disease.
And from there, the video moves to other suspicious “facts” about the epidemic, among them: that some Japanese who had never been to China came down with the virus after vacationing in Hawaii; that more strains of the virus have been detected in the U.S. than in China; that Fort Detrick was mysteriously closed by the Centers for Disease Control last July.
The narrator also repeats some by now discredited claims, notably that Robert Redfield, the head of the CDC, admitted at a press conference that some Americans believed to have died of the flu last fall actually died of Covid-19. Redfield admitted this “very firmly,” the narrator says, thereby, he contends, providing irrefutable confirmation of the theory that the virus was in the U.S. before it was in China.
What Redfield actually said during congressional testimony in March, well after the virus had begun to spread in the U.S., was that it is possible that some people whose deaths were believed to have been caused by the flu might actually have been victims of the coronavirus but weren’t tested for it. He did not say that people died of Covid-19 last fall, before the disease appeared in China.
The Chinese video then goes on to answer its question regarding the identity of patient zero: It was Maatje Benassi, the army bicycle racer.
“The circle is complete,” the narrator says, and then addresses President Trump: “What is your response?”
The outward circulation of the Chinese claims on platforms like Twitter and YouTube (whcih are banned in China), could be in part a simple matter of national pride, a concern for the country’s international image, and a response to President Trump’s use of the term “Chinese virus” to refer to the disease, which has infuriated many Chinese. But some commentators point out that China’s withholding of information was a breach of international law that could make it legally liable.
China’s failure to provide timely information about the virus and its level of contagion to the World Health Organization, for example, “is more than a moral breakdown,” James Kraska, a professor of international maritime law at the Naval War College, wrote recently. “It is also a breach of a legal duty that China owed to other states under international law, and for which injured states – now numbering some 150 – may seek a legal remedy.”
To be sure, conspiracy theories are legion around the world, whether it’s the claim that the 9/11 attacks were a CIA plot to give President Bush an excuse to invade Iraq, or whether it’s the notion, reiterated by Tom Cotton, the Republican senator from Arkansas, that the virus originated in a high-tech biochemical lab in Wuhan itself.
The difference with China is that misinformation there has been used as an element of state policy, sometimes officially, sometimes more informally, but in either case without any possibility that a free press or an independent judicial machinery will challenge the official “truth.”
Perhaps the most blatant and well-known example of this in China was the country’s denial that its military massacred civilian demonstrators when it brought an end to the massive pro-democracy protests in Beijing in 1989. Almost immediately after the army moved in to crush the protest movement, killing hundreds of people in full view of thousands of eyewitnesses, Chinese television was saying that the only people killed that night were brave army soldiers attacked by “hooligans.”
The disinformation effort on the coronavirus hasn’t reached that point; it isn’t a massive propaganda campaign inundating the media. Indeed, some efforts to propagate the idea of American responsibility for the virus have fallen flat. Earlier this month, for example, a blogger in China’s Guizhou Province posted a video of a Caucasian man slyly putting spittle on a subway pole. “This is a solid proof showing that Americans were spreading the virus during the Military World Games,” the blogger wrote, asserting that the man in the video was a member of the U.S. Army team and was riding the subway in Wuhan.
In fact, the video showed a man riding a subway, not in Wuhan at all, but in Brussels, Belgium, where he was arrested and the subway car disinfected. When other social media users in China pointed that out, the blogger retracted his claim, though not before his original post had been viewed by an undetermined number of people.
But the idea that Maatje Benassi was patient zero and that there is now a “debate” between China and the United States over the origins of the virus has spread around the world, as a Google search of Benassi’s name shows. China’s demand for the U.S. to be “transparent” by releasing the military team’s medical records has appeared on everything from websites about international cycling to 24-hour news sites across the globe.
Meanwhile, there has been no retraction of the lengthy video “investigation” of the coronavirus’s origins with its claim that it was insinuated into China by the American military. While some Chinese officials are giving credence to that claim, the government has not officially endorsed it. It seems content to put it out there, to spread an idea that might shift discussion about the virus from China’s responsibility to the question: Did it actually originate in America?
Correction March 30, 2020, 10:45 AM Eastern
An earlier version of this article misstated the location of Fort Detrick. It is in Maryland, not South Carolina.
As we wait for scientists and healthcare professionals to develop a vaccine for COVID-19, there is another, more readily available tool at our disposal.
Social distancing, defined as measures taken to reduce physical contact, is the first line of defense for containing an infectious disease like COVID-19. That’s because these infections spread when people cough, sneeze, or touch surfaces on which the virus resides.
To help us grasp the impact these measures can actually have, Visual Capitalists’ Marcus Lu illustrates how a reduction in social exposure can theoretically contain the spread of infection in the following infographic.
Theoretical Potential
The calculations used to create today’s infographic come from Signer Laboratory, a stem cell research lab located in the Moores Cancer Center at the University of California San Diego.
Using a summation formula makes it possible to estimate the number of new infections over a 30 day period, across three scenarios.
To arrive at the figures reported above, Robert A.J. Signer, Ph.D., and his team made a number of key assumptions.
First, they estimated the basic reproduction number (R0) of COVID-19 to be 2.5, a figure supported by recent research. This means that, on average, an infected individual will spread the disease to 2.5 other people.
Next, they assumed that an infected individual will unknowingly spread COVID-19 over the median five day incubation period. After this period, the individual will begin to develop symptoms, immediately self quarantine, and no longer pose a threat.
Finally, they assumed a direct linear correlation between social interactions and R0. This means that when an infected person reduces their physical contact with others by 50%, they also spread the disease by an amount 50% less.
Timing is Everything
While the figures above are the results of mathematical estimations, researchers have actually studied social distancing from a variety of angles.
One study used simulations to determine the magnitude and timing of social distancing measures required to prevent a pandemic. The distancing measures simulated were:
The results, for a community of 30,000 people and an epidemic with R=2.5, are charted below. We can define the final illness attack rate as the share of people from an at risk population who ultimately catch the disease.
Results showed that when no action was taken, 65% of the population contracted the disease. However, if a combination of all four distancing measures were implemented instead, the attack rates were:
45% (distancing begins after a 4 week delay)
21% (distancing begins after a 3 week delay)
7% (distancing begins after a 2 week delay)
What’s clear is that social distancing was significantly more effective when implemented with minimal delay—the final illness attack rate rose quickest beyond the third week. These findings draw a parallel to the visualizations in today’s infographic, which showed us just how quickly a disease can spread.
Social distancing interventions are important as they represent the only … measure guaranteed to be available against a novel strain of influenza in the early phases of a pandemic.
– Kelso, J.K., Milne, G.J. & Kelly, H., BMC Public Health 9, 117 (2009)
We arrive at a similar conclusion when it comes to the types of distancing measures implemented. In the simulations, none of the four measures taken on their own were able to have a similar effect as when they were combined.
With the global number of COVID-19 cases still rising, many governments have issued quarantine orders and travel bans.
The math supports these decisions—reducing our physical contact with others, even when we aren’t experiencing any symptoms, is crucial. Studies like the one summarized above also prove that taking action sooner, rather than later, can go a long way in reducing the spread of infection.
The key takeaway from all of this? Social distancing is a powerful disease control tool, but only if we all participate.
Hydroxychloroquine Demand Triples Overnight Following FDA Approval
The Food and Drug Administration gave emergency-use authorization to hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the coronavirus pandemic on Sunday. But demand for the drug backed by President Donald Trump that is typically used to treat malaria soared prior to the move, according to data from Symphony Health.
Weekly prescriptions soared from 100k to 300k over the past week, since President Trump first mentioned the drug as one of two commons drugs that produced potentially wondrous results if administered together (the other drug, azythromycin, better known as a Z-pak) to COVID-19 patients.
Given the market’s desperation for anything that might cure a disease that is killing 1 in 10 people it infects in certain areas, it would seem that concerns of those who took these medications regularly before the crisis might be struggling to source their medication for the first time.
The FDA gave emergency approval to a Trump administration plan to distribute millions of doses of anti-malarial drugs to hospitals across the country on Monday, saying it is worth the risk of trying unproven treatments to try and slow the progression of the disease.
There have been only a handful of anecdotal studies detailing a possible benefit of the drugs, hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, to relieve the acute respiratory symptoms of COVID-19 and clear the virus from infected patients. If these effects could be widely replicated, it would be nothing short of miraculous. And the evidence certainly offers reason to hope, at least for some.
Interestingly, prescriptions for the drug surged during the week ended March 20, asnearly 300,000 prescriptions were written in the US that week, roughly triple the 113,000 weekly average in 2019.
We suspect these numbers will only continue to climb.
