Such heartfelt affirmation assures your place among “The Remnant”. Gratitude towards Chris (and the PP team} is warranted given his (their) substantial, unique and even life-saving contributions. Biblically and in other reference, the “Remnant” implies judgement and salvation. Given significant external threats, the lines between a community of “like-minded” folk, a “tribe” and a “cult” may become blurred over time and circumstance. Clarity of thought and emotion are critical to ensure you end-up on the “right” side of the equation. That is always up to the individual to monitor relentlessly and determine.
Hmm, looking more closely, there is a spike in cases. In context (say, with the New York data) it is almost invisible, but if you just look at the Georgia data, it is definitely more visible.
It is unfortunate that all we measure is COVID. If we measured other things, we’d probably be more willing to focus on those things too.
We all know there are “theoretically” costs to shutdown - job losses, poverty, depression, suicide. We could probably come up with a price tag (in alcoholism and drug relapses - I know two personally - as well as homes lost, property repossessed, businesses lost) for each infection pushed forward into the future.
Is society able to make such trade-offs? “Sure, we’ll accept 5 suicide deaths in order to prevent 1 COVID death.” Or “we’ll accept 10 small businesses destroyed to avoid 1 COVID infection.” We can’t even do that, since we don’t have the data - certainly not in real time anyway. Realtime COVID data brings a pressure to decision making. It narrows our focus to just that data.
Infections drop = good. Infections rise = bad.
The realtime nature of the COVID data ends up being the grade given to public policy.
What we measure is what we end up optimizing for. If we don’t measure the rest of life, we won’t end up factoring its destruction into our decision making. Its the GDP trap all over again.
There is unemployment data per region. (I just went and downloaded it from FRED). Georgia Total Nonfarm Employment dropped 475,000 in April. That’s a 10.3% drop. Talk about an experiment! How many deaths will THIS cause? We won’t know until later. If ever. As reference: 1896 COVID deaths during the whole pandemic, with roughly 10M people in the state; roughly 2 in 10,000.
I lost my job once. It was really hard. And I had plenty of financial cushion, since I was pretty frugal, and a fairly well-paid engineer. And it wasn’t just me that got whacked - it was the whole office, they just closed it down. And it was still - really hard.
Once the May employment numbers come in, we’ll be able to see how many jobs came back, and we will be able to get a sense - perhaps - how many lives were saved by this action of the Georgia governor, vs new COVID infections which was the trade off.
My gut feel - 10 years from now, once all the studies are run and the costs are counted, society will decide not to do it this way again. “Many more people died as an indirect effect of the shutdown, than died of the disease itself.”
No data - just my gut feel.
After all, being poor chops about 10 years off your life. And that’s going to happen to a whole lot of people.
“We had to destroy the village to save it.”
When NZ went into Lockdown in march I was not optimistic it would work for a few reasons, including the lack of any for of push for masks, except for health workers around cases.
But here we are today with only one active case left.
He tested positive 29 days ago so one of the longer cases.
Everything feels a lot more normal, but up until today “mass gathering” limit was 10 people. Going up to 100 now.
Still keeping with social distancing in shops etc for a few weeks.
Have not looked hard, but will we be the first country to eliminate it?
But now we have a long therm problem, keeping it out while the rest of the world inches towards herd immunity. Ind a big part of our economy was based on tourism.
Secondary effect job layoffs are beginning to occur. ( Orders for new houses canceled… )
People have been coming in, 1400 non citizens let in for to make movies. Had to do 2 weeks of quarantine, but now do not have the background worry of ‘will I be next?’
Regards Hamish
Also that people weren’t oppressed as much as brainwashed?
Yes 100k+ US coronavirus deaths. but the rapid test kit for coronavirus is still proving beneficial in saving the lives of people. by detecting the symptom quickly. reducing the workload of our real heroes.
Yes, we’re close to zero (known) cases, in New Zealand. As you say, Hamish, it will be difficult keeping it out. In fact, I doubt that is actually possible. Anyone coming into the country provides possible paths for infection, even with a 14 day quarantine. With such a tricky virus, even border lockdown would not keep it out forever. However, we’d never be able to keep those restrictions as tight as the are for ever and when people don’t need to quarantine any more, the risk increases enormously. It will get back in and I just hope our Government is planning for that eventuality (probably by mandating masks along with physical distancing as much as practically possible).
Dear President Trump,
Look at the trouble in Minneapolis over one death. At the same time the whole US has 100,000 deaths from the virus. That’s 312 deaths/million people. Costa Rica has had 2 deaths/million. Let’s do what they are doing: use HCQ. Just issue an order.
Oh, by the way, that might gain you re-election. The Democrats will be against it.
David
P.S. I think you already are thinking this.
Reading all of the comments… well there is some frustration there I think. I think there is a lot of it across the US. I have to say that at least a portion of it is because of “how” the experts have taken and interrogated their data.
An old professor and mentor of mine is collaborating with me on a paper this summer. We were talking last week and the subject of the virus came up. My old friend went off with his quaint South African accent gushing forth from a beard and frame that looks like a long lost ZZ Top member.
“These bastards don’t know anything Willie! One week they tell you this and then next week they will tell you something diametrically opposed to it. And not even explain how the mistake was made. And it keeps happening again and again!”
And so the conversation went.
If you’ll allow me, I’d offer that some supposed scientific branches have less care for the integrity of the data they use and publish than others. (I’m looking at you Economics and Big Pharm) If we can’t agree on the facts then we’ll never agree on the correct course of action. And violating the spirit of sound and unbiased experiment design intentionally is much worse than just making a simple mistake crunching the data. This shows you are allowing bias to guide your work.
It’s happening and it’s getting noticed.
Will
Just watched Chris’ latest video on the Deceptive Lancet Study. Please download “Open letter to MR Mehta, SS Desai…” and distribute this letter. I just sent it to my Dr. and a researcher friend who works at Mayo. This is criminal what is going on. I couldn’t get it to post in an easily accessible link. Can someone please do this. We can each make a difference by forwarding this letter to people we know.
You invariably have data to back up your “gut feelings”. Not this time.
Of course Brad Pitt did say 40k people die for every 1% increase in unemployment. Maybe that is really the excess death numbers?
Those orgs. did not exist when he wrote Brave New World.
He started out satirizing HG Wells who was obviously one of the great scifi writers ever.
There were actually quite a number of writers working on the same subject and Huxley was accused of plagiarism.
Friends:
The relationships between unemployment/recessions/early death are quite “interesting”. Perhaps a useful summary is that losing your job is very bad for the life expectancy of an unemployed individual, particularly for a man, but recessions are good for society at large.
I know, it doesn’t seem to make sense. So read on. 
Here are a few results from my brief Google search, along with the links to the articles and some text from each article.
https://drexel.edu/now/archive/2014/July/Unemployment-Study/
“The increase in the risk of death associated with being unemployed is very strong,” said Tapia, “but it is restricted to unemployed persons, who generally are a small fraction of the population, even in a severe recession. Compared with the increase in the risk of death among the unemployed, the decrease of the mortality risk associated with a weakening economy is small, but the benefit spreads across the entire adult population. The compound result of both effects is that total mortality rises in expansions and falls in recessions.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448606/
Results. Unemployment was associated with an increased risk of suicide and death from undetermined causes. Low education, personality characteristics, use of sleeping pills or tranquilizers, and serious or long-lasting illness tended to strengthen the association between unemployment and early mortality.
Conclusions. An increased risk of death from external causes implies a need for support for those experiencing unemployment, particularly susceptible individuals.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4677456/
Results
Unemployment was associated with a significant all-cause mortality risk relative to employment for men (hazard ratio 1.85 95% CI 1.33-2.55). This effect was robust to controlling for prior health and socio-demographic characteristics. Effects for women were smaller and statistically insignificant (HR 1.51 95% CI 0.68-3.37).
Conclusion
For men, the findings support the notion that the often observed association between unemployment and mortality may contain a significant causal component though for women there is less support for this conclusion. However, female employment status, as recorded in the census, is more complex than for men and may have served to under-estimate any mortality effect of unemployment. Future work should examine this issue further.
At least one possible conclusion is that we really need to work, but that for at least some people, the work itself may be killing them.
[edited: Bruno Latours book was first published in 1987. The year that I read it! I always had 1983 in my mind.]
Hi NordicJack,
Your comment stirred something in me, to be precise, the heartfelt emotion, which I find honest and valuable. So, do not take this as a rebuke or something like it, you just made me think about your post, about the importance of “truth”, and about our society.
What Chris, and Adam do is superb, to me they represent a beacon of enlightenment in a sea of corrupt, ideology driven, pecuniary motivated, and tribal “science” (for persons with a lot of time, try to read Bruno Latours “Science in Action” from 1987, but better yet, this summary (link)). But let not forget, there are, luckily, many “movers and shakers” like Chris and Adam, too many to mention. Think for example of all the people who signed the letter to the Lancet, the doctors posting video’s about their HCQ results, the GP’s, hospitals and countries administering it anyway, the people Chris and Adam interviewed, and think of the many PP forum members also shining their lights on other social media.
Science as a platonic ideal is rational, but actual science is not equivalent to seeking the truth, and the scientific praxis is far from rational; it is a human endeavor and as such not different from other activities involving many people, and subject to corruption, lies, manipulation, ego, you name it. Science in action has its own dirty little secrets. Consider for example how “science” treated women (link), rather sexist right? Or how the scientific community reacted to Dr Semmelweiss ideas about causes of diseases in the time that everybody knew that bad air caused diseases (link), not really fact-driven. Or how society embraced the Ancel Keys cholesterol findings (link), what he did borders to fraudulent behavior, or is hiding experimental results that refute your theory a rational scientific activity? Gregor Mendel was completely ignored (link), if you read this nature article (link), it is right on the facts, but the sheer omission of the fact that Mendel was utterly ignored will give readers a very twisted perception of science in action. Ludwig Boltzmann committed suicide because he couldn’t get his atomic theory accepted (link). Albert Einstein had to flee Germany because he was a jew. There are hundreds, if not thousands of historical and current examples about science in action, all proving that science is a rational activity only in theory, but a faulty human endeavor in practice. Btw, forget about the political correct entries in Wikipedia about these and many other scientists and engineers. The entries in Wikipedia fully distorted the facts to accommodate the mainstream narrative that Science is purely rational. Max Planck was right, “science progresses one funeral at a time” (link).
These examples illustrate that there can be a large lag between a introduction of a new theory, and the acceptance on one hand. On the other hand, acceptance of a new theory, even when the facts are really, really fishy, can be lightning speed fast when certain parties have a lot to gain (cough, meat industry, margarine producers, sugar industry, cough), while falsification of the faulty theory can take decades.
To me, this is the reason not to die for a “truth”. For 6 trillion USD you can buy a lot of “soldiers” who are willing to die, not for the “truth”, but for some twisted personal optimization focus, personal believes and biases, and probably also because of some misguided trust in TPTB. Think for example of the WHO, Twitter, Google, Facebook, MSM. Responsible, respectable people work here, yet they execute exactly what they are told to do, maybe, many years from now, they also will claim, maybe even rightfully so, “Ich habe es nicht gewusst”. The stakes are very high for the organizations and people involved, trillions of dollars high to be exact. The wolves will not let go.
Instead of dying, I think it is more important to prepare for what I believe can potentially turn into a “dark age”, ridicule of alternative views, suppression of thoughts, forced vaccination. Maybe the best way to honor Chris and uncountable others, is to become beacons of enlightenment ourselves. Support people, support groups, raise our children to become responsible, warmhearted but critical adults who dare to use higher faculties of their brains. Become writers, journalists, singers, farmers, teachers, cleaners, coaches, grandparents, parents, cops etc, living a truthful and therefor grandiose life. Because after the crisis that I, like many (fourth turning!) expect, the simple truths must be victorious, not the twisted perverted truths that led us into this crisis. The truth was never served by the dead, it is only served the living!
My 2 cents
Cuomo is either baseline stupid, or he knew exactly what he was doing. It was already widely known that nursing homes were Covid hot spots - but even if that were in doubt, a moment’s reflection would surely tell anyone operating on at least 3 cylinders that putting pandemic-level ill or recovering patients into a facility meant to provide support for seriously ill, often declining, elderly persons is not a good idea.
I don’t rule out the possibility he’s just baseline stupid. Potentially suffering, too, from a sociopathic disinterest in the suffering of others. Comments like his, “hey, if they want a job they can apply for a government position” amounts to a modern-day “out of bread? well, then, tell them to eat cake!”
A strangely low prevalence of smoking amongst Chinese Covid-19 inpatients has been reported, prompting questions about a protective effect of smoking against SARS-CoV-2 infection. Before anyone adds smoking to their list of preventive measures, be aware that smoking clearly makes Covid-19 severity worse if you are infected.
What stood out to me about the smoking prevalence in the suspect Lancet study is that African victims have the same prevalence, more or less, as the other regions. The smoking prevalence in all of Africa, among 15 year olds and older, is around half of the world average (13.9% versus 21.9%, https://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.sdg.3-a-viz?lang=en). There’s no way that African Covid-19 patients have a smoking prevalence 3 points below population prevalence (-25%) while the difference is 10 points (-55%) in North America.