Coronavirus Pandemic: Apocalypse Now! Or exaggerated scare story?

[Thebull]

Lol check this out

Another one of a seemingly healthy young person getting clobbered hard by this virus.

'Healthy' athlete, 25, in coma after lab lost his positive coronavirus test

A previously healthy 25-year-old man is now fighting for his life after a lab lost a test confirming he had coronavirus. Jack Allard, a two-time All American lacrosse player, was put into a medically-induced coma in Edison, New Jersey after the misplaced test led to a five-day delay in his ...

metro.co.uk

More on young people

Backpacker and her 10 friends get coronavirus at a Bondi beach party

An Argentinian backpacker and her 10 friends have contracted coronavirus after attending a party with hundreds of people in Bondi.

www.dailymail.co.uk

Pushing the young people get it message on the news at 10 on BBC tonight. One young face after another.

Couldn't help but laugh at this scene. Boris had to speak to her majesty on the phone according to the wonderful beeb (BBC)

 

[Goemon_]

So, the french government tells me that I must limit my trips or will get a fine.

Then they give all the recommendations about social distancing.

So, I looked up the definition of 'recommendation' on an french/english dictionary.

The dictionary gives an example of sentence:
The recommendations of the I.L.O are rarely followed through.

I don't say you shouldn't follow the recommendations, it may increase the lock down measures. That's just means that most people are doing more than what the law tells them.

 

[Ruth]

One might wonder how an influenza vaccine increases the risk of getting coronavirus. Did this vaccine contain "dead" coronavirus that is after all not so "dead" hence the increase prevalence of coronavirus among the vaccinated soldiers?

I think vaccination misleads the immune system as part of the problems relating to vaccine efficacy. That's because it's based on bad science and outdated and simplistic notions on how the immune system works.

In the end it's a bit like playing Lotto or Russian roulette - taking a gamble that something will work and not knowing why, when it doesn't. However, I think more and more information is getting out there, though.

 

[loreta]

That opportunity is over now.



Dogs cannot go out from 17 to 05h. That means 12 hours per day they must be locked inside. Our President said that that is enough. It must be true, because he is an expert in everything.

There are a lot of memes about this subject. One of my favorites is this one:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1241345357491113985

And this one:

 

[SummerLite]

The worlds largest manufacturers of Dung are gearing up to dump another load on the American people. You may recall Paul Craig Roberts speculated an economic crash may be implemented before the US election to get Trump out.

Soros Bankrolls Coronavirus Attack Ads Against Trump

The Democratic Party's leading super PAC will begin hitting President Donald Trump over coronavirus in four battleground states using millions from liberal billionaire George Soros.

freebeacon.com

Soros Bankrolls Coronavirus Attack Ads Against Trump
Liberal groups spend millions on anti-Trump ads in Midwest
"Our job is to hold Donald Trump accountable, and we have no plans to let up, particularly with a focus on economic issues as we've done to date," Bradley Beychok, the president of American Bridge, said. "But as this crisis unfolds and the country experiences the consequences of his incompetence, we're not going to give him a pass for bungling the government's response to this pandemic."

American Bridge plans to spend $50 million to "weaken" Trump in the Midwest. "We're now set to leverage our expertise to launch the largest persuasion media effort we've ever undertaken with the goal of making Trump a one-term president," Beychok said last year.

Joe Schoffstall - March 24, 2020 5:00 AM

The Democratic Party's leading super PAC will begin hitting President Donald Trump over coronavirus in four battleground states, using millions from liberal billionaire George Soros.
Priorities USA Action—the Democratic Party's largest super PAC—will spend $6 million this week on advertisements criticizing Trump for his response to the coronavirus pandemic. The ads will run in Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The PAC received $3 million in contributions from Soros's Democracy PAC on Feb. 21, new filings show. Soros's seven-figure donation accounts for 77 percent of the $3.9 million the PAC reported hauling in last month.
Major Democratic donors have flooded battleground states, especially in the Midwest, with cash for anti-Trump campaigns in hopes of appealing to the president's voter base. CNN first reported Monday on Priorities USA's new ads, which are part of a larger plan by deep-pocketed liberal financiers and activist groups to divert large sums of cash into the region. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in several Midwestern states that she was expected to carry in the 2016 election.
As part of this plan, Priorities USA has said it intends to spend upward of $150 million against Trump in states like Michigan and Wisconsin. The PAC has hauled in $27 million since January 2019. Its largest donor has been billionaire hedge fund manager Donald Sussman, who has given the group $8 million this cycle. Soros is now the group's second-largest donor at $5 million.
The group did not respond to a request for comment.
Priorities is not the only group using the coronavirus pandemic to attack Trump. PACRONYM, a super PAC tied to the nonprofit ACRONYM, which was in charge of the botched Iowa app that caused chaos during the Iowa caucuses, is launching a similar campaign.
PACRONYM announced last Tuesday it will spend $5 million on digital advertising against Trump's response to the pandemic. Tara McGowan, the founder of ACRONYM, said it's imperative that Democratic groups push anti-Trump messaging while Democratic presidential contenders remain positive during the pandemic. Biden, however, slammed Trump on Monday over what he called a "failure of planning and preparation" for the coronavirus.
"This is a public health issue and a national security issue, but it's also a public policy issue and thus a political one," McGowan told the Washington Post.
McGowan's dark money nonprofit, which does not disclose its donors, has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's PAC. It also received funding from failed presidential contender and billionaire donor Tom Steyer's PAC.
PACRONYM received $250,000 from Soros's Democracy PAC and $1 million from Sussman late last year. Hollywood director Steven Spielberg and wife Kate Capshaw added $1 million.
In addition to Priorities and PACRONYM, liberal operative David Brock's American Bridge PAC has assailed Trump's coronavirus response. American Bridge has also been active in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
"Our job is to hold Donald Trump accountable, and we have no plans to let up, particularly with a focus on economic issues as we've done to date," Bradley Beychok, the president of American Bridge, said. "But as this crisis unfolds and the country experiences the consequences of his incompetence, we're not going to give him a pass for bungling the government's response to this pandemic."
American Bridge plans to spend $50 million to "weaken" Trump in the Midwest. "We're now set to leverage our expertise to launch the largest persuasion media effort we've ever undertaken with the goal of making Trump a one-term president," Beychok said last year. "Donald Trump turned his back on the voters who gave him a lifeline in 2016. We plan to cut it."
Brock has close ties to the Democracy Alliance, a secretive club of millionaire and billionaire donors that Soros cofounded. The group's internal documents laid out a $275 million spending plan for the 2020 cycle. Brock and his top employees—including Beychok—have appeared at alliance gatherings in recent years.
Soros has also funded another project, called the Heartland Fund, housed at dark money behemoth Arabella Advisors. The fund targets Midwestern voters. Soros was joined by Scott Wallace, who unsuccessfully ran for Congress in Pennsylvania's First Congressional District in 2018, in helping bankroll the effort.
Other efforts by liberal donors to campaign against Trump in the Midwest include at least $60 million from dark money group Future Majority. The group is led by D.C. strategists Matt Tompkins and Mark Riddle, who launched the super PAC backing Biden's candidacy.

 

[SOTTREADER]

Interesting one here... He basically looks at the bright side of Covid-19 which can be summarised as

• Low fatality rate which as far as pandemics go, we have been dealt a VERY good hand by nature... Next time, we might not be as lucky.
• Due to the low fatality rate, covid has given the world an opportunity to assess its preparedness for when the next one hits.
• Just like after 911, the money that will go into pandemics etc from governments, private institutions and the like will be way greater than before, thus making us more prepared for the next one.
• Talks about kindness and and helper communities that have cropped up to tend to the sick or isolated in most communities Inc even banks giving people mortgage holidays and the like
• Talks about less pollution in places like China in Jan and Feb which may have saved lives!
• Talks about nature getting a respite from the constant grind of the human capitalist economic machine
• Talked about how the economies of the world will have to take the potential of pandemics seriously

 

[Debra]

Apparently there could be a hitch or two with "Over Walked Dogs"!

 

[Jasophoria]

How old is your mother and does she have any existing health problems?

My mom is 66 with onder control hight blood pressure.
She manly eats vegetables and also takes food supplements for almost her entire life.
She's had a drugstore and a lot of knowledge about those things.

 

[stellar]

In terms of food and supplies, there was enough in the local supermarket as of yesterday so, I doubt there would be any drastic food shortages during the lockdown. Plenty of cows in Australia and they don't suffer from Covid-19, lol :) We have filled up the freezer with plenty of grass-fed beef, lots of bacon and eggs in the fridge and there is 15 KG Ghee in the pantry so, we should be fine for some time.

We did drive out to the mountains last week for an outing and it felt great. Plenty of elder people had come out for a walk in the mountains, the country cafe was bustling with people squished and dining together, even the local council had waived parking fees to attract more people - go figure lol. I just hope they don't close the regional public parks as my wife and I are planning to head out again for a day out and get some fresh air.

Finally found some t/paper :)) and most things are slowly being replenished.
Unemployment office queues huge but orderly and efficient in my area; go figure. I am on sickness benefits for past couple years so have to report fortnightly regardless. Arrived 30 min early before opening & found about 50 people before me. Everyone kept their 1.5m distance but were all in good spirits, chatty and basically just going with the flow to keep sane. Not many appeared to take this nonsense as serious other than for those with compromising health conditions.
Most had some good jokes to tell while we were waiting.

We had a houseboat booked for end of April for a few days and that is still a go. The owners called to confirm that all is good if we still want to come as long as we don't sail past the border. They also suggested that we send a shopping list for food and supplies which they can have waiting for us onboard.
I accepted their offer as I think it would be helpful for the local country business and less for us to carry. He said they had some panicked cancellations to whom they refunded costs but was relieved that we were not in that state of mind; not so much for the income but that we were sane, I think. Anyhow, looking forward to it.

 

[SOTTREADER]

Hmmm... This one is meshing in with the latest session. Basically it's sounding like the virus was engineered at Fort Detrick (where have we heard that? )

 

[dantem]

Italy, third week of lockdown here, today the News network announces that 'the conspiracy-theorists have been proved wrong by an article on Nature Medicine' published a week ago, saying that: 'Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.'

That news rang a bell, did a check up and yes, it was the very online Review that published the March 18 article on 'Hydroxychloroquine, a less toxic derivative of chloroquine, is effective in inhibiting SARS-CoV-2 infection in vitro'.
But Hydroxychloroquine is no good for the MSM, and there are several local news online smearing the Hydroxychloroquine drug, citing a man dying from it in Phoenix, USA, and raising eyebrow on the French doctor Didier Raoult, calling him a global-warming denier and a braggart.

 

[SlipNet]

I've just seen footage of people licking and spitting on products in supermarkets and elevator buttons, absolutely disgusting! I have a video of it, but it's part of a 1hr30m vid, and no-one's got time for that so I won't add it to this post. I couldn't believe what I was seeing, some people were even licking toilet bowls! The polarisation of humanity is unfolding before us folks, stay safe, stay vigilant, stay clean.

 

[Niall]

While Italy's case and death figures are, like everywhere else, all-but-impossible to distinguish from background 'average' rates of winter influenza-like illnesses, something serious does seem to be going on in the region of Lombardy - and more specifically, in the province of Bergamo.

The Russian govt recently sent a lot of military personnel and equipment to that city:

The convoy, composed of 22 trucks and other vehicles, set off for the northern Italian city of Bergamo early on Wednesday. [...] One hundred Russian military medics and disease specialists were airlifted to Italy over the weekend [...] The team, deployed to help Italy in its fight against coronavirus, brought mobile laboratories, disinfection vehicles, coronavirus test kits, and other equipment to battle the disease.

To give you an idea of how concentrated Italy’s ‘COVID-19 problem’ is in the northern region of Lombardy, these Italian figures reported last week had ’25,500 cases of confirmed COVID-19 cases’ in Lombardy, while the next worst-affected region in all of Italy is Emilia-Romagna, south of Lombardy, with just a over fifth of that number – 6,700 cases.

So this outbreak in Italy is centered on Lombardy, and Bergamo province specifically. Although the ‘original Lombardy cluster’ was previously believed via case-tracking to have originated in Codogno in the south of Lombardy, which is about 60km due south from Bergamo city, the highest concentration of cases/infections/deaths are in Bergamo province itself:

The media has since reported that it's unknown exactly how and where the first cluster began in Lombardy because the ‘China connection’ turned out to be a false lead:

Mattia [Italy's 'Patient 1'] first went to the hospital in Codogno on Feb. 18 complaining of flu-like symptoms. He was sent home but came back the next day after his condition worsened dramatically. He was only tested for coronavirus after doctors learned that in early February he had met with a man who had been to China.

By then, however, he had infected his wife and several doctors, nurses and patients at the Codogno hospital, creating what was thought initially to have been Italy’s main cluster. Since his China contact turned out to be negative, though, experts now believe that the virus had been circulating widely and quietly in northern Italy since at least the second half of January.

Bergamo then is Italy’s ‘Wuhan’, and Lombardy is its ‘Hubei Province’, by far the worst-hit region in the whole country:

Which takes me to something ‘else’ that took place in this very region of Italy earlier in the winter…

Bergamo meningitis outbreak January 2020

From late December to late January, Italian media was reporting about a meningitis outbreak in Bergamo that had killed 5 people. The resulting panic spurred Lombardy health authorities to vaccinate some 45,000 people in early-to-mid January with the Meningococcal C vaccine, apparently all of them in one area to the east of Bergamo, between the city itself and Lago d’Iseo.

(Incidentally, this was in addition to the 185,000 doses of free flu vaccines administered to Bergamo residents this winter. I don't now how this coverage compares with populations of comparable size, but northern Italy, as widely noted, has a lot of elderly citizens.)

The authorities there reported satisfaction at having vaccinated 65% of their target population with this MenC vaccine, providing them, they assumed, with 'herd immunity' and thereby 'preventing an epidemic'.

I found almost nothing on this in English, but here are a few reports, all automatic translations from Italian news reports, so perhaps Italian-speakers can clarify any significant mistakes:

Meningitis scare: Queue and crowds at Sarnico ATS for vaccinations
Il Giorno Bergamo, 4 January 2020

Queues and crowds this morning at the ATS of Sarnico, a municipality in the province of Bergamo overlooking Lake Iseo, to get vaccinated against Meningococcus C, after the four cases of meningitis, with two deaths, in the last month in the Basso Sebino.

The population was literally panicked. The influx, which began at dawn, led the mayor, Giorgio Bertazzoli, to set up a municipal civil protection garrison tomorrow and Monday starting at 6am.

In addition to those in Villongo and Sarnico, extraordinary clinics will be open from next week to vaccinate citizens up to 60 years of age free of charge also in the municipalities of Predore, Credaro and Paratico.

They apparently vaccinated all schoolchildren in the target area of Bergamo:

Meningitis in the Basso Sebino: "We will vaccinate all schoolchildren students"
Giornale di Brescia, 5 January 2020

Despite the race to vaccinate people in the Sebino area - following the five cases of meningitis, two of which have been fatalities in the last month - there is no shortage of vaccines and the action to contain the outbreak is taking place promptly and widely.

Great attention will be paid to high school students of the Basso Sebino (which includes 12 municipalities: Parzanica, Vigolo, Tavernola bergamasca, Predore, Adrara San Rocco, Adrara San Martino, Viadanica, Sarnico, Villongo, Vigolo, Gandosso, Credaro, Foresto Sparso) which will be reached, municipality by municipality, in the various schools, to undergo vaccination (as well as teachers and school staff). Therefore, schools are not closed.

"We are working extensively. There are no vaccine problems and we have decided to intervene in the weakest group, the students: we will go to schools to vaccinate the children directly. We are in close contact with the Ministry of Health and with the Istituto Superiore della Sanità who thanked us for the work we are doing."

Apparently there are 30-40 cases of meningitis in Lombardy every year:

Meningitis epidemic averted thanks to blanket vaccinations
Radio Lombardia, 5 January 2020

In the fifth case of meningococcal sepsis in the Bergamo area, a 16-year-old boy from Castelli Calepio was hospitalized at Pope John XXIII hospital in Bergamo in serious condition. [...] Meanwhile in Sarnico, Bergamo, the population of the area is being vaccinated. [...]

Schools will not close. 93% of nursery children have already been vaccinated and herd immunity has also been achieved thanks to great proactive action by the region administration since the Meningococcus C vaccine is not a mandatory vaccination for attending kindergarten. As far as high school students are concerned, today it has been decided that operators will go to the schools attended by the boys who live in the areas of Basso Sebino and Grumello to vaccinate all the boys and the staff.

"Today I received the phone call from the (national) Minister of Health, Roberto Speranza, whom I warmly thank," explained the Minister for Welfare of the Lombardy Region, Giulio Gallera. "[Speranza] confirmed the total availability of the government and its ministry to intervene where necessary. I thank our operators who, despite the holidays, with great professionalism, immediately made themselves available. On December 23, we had evidence of an anomalous situation. I recall that, every year in Lombardy, there are between 30 and 40 people who fall ill with meningitis."

Gallera then read a note in which the director of the Infectious Diseases Department of the Higher Institute of Health (ISS), Gianni Rezza, invited people to avoid alarmism after the 5 cases of meningococcal sepsis that all occurred in the same area of Bergamo in span of a month, underlining that "if one intervenes as one is doing, putting in place a mass vaccination, the outbreak can be limited" and that "the risk of a large-scale epidemic is very low, because we are taking action quickly and massively."

"It is normal that a little apprehension has arisen," concluded Gallera, "but we are not facing an epidemic."

Famous last words?

At the end of January, Gallera was reporting:

"We vaccinated 45,000 people in the lower Sebino and Grumello area in just over a month - equal to 65% of the expected target population up to 60 years of age. Scientific and epidemiological data attest that the greatest risks on Meningococcal C infections mainly involve this band. This is also confirmed by Lombardy data: in the last twenty years, people affected beyond this age limit have been only 93 out of a thousand more cases recorded. The new episode, fortunately not particularly serious, however, it leads us to extend coverage to all citizens, without any age limit."

Did they, by rolling out a mass vaccination program in Bergamo to 'contain' a not-particularly-serious 'outbreak' of meningitis, somehow compound ongoing - and, up until that point, undetected - COVID-19 cases? Did they perhaps trigger a far more dangerous outbreak altogether?

 

[SOTTREADER]

Right, that's me done... All fingers are pointing to this thing coming out of China and being in circulation in other places before it could have been 'officially'.

Twilight zone stuff here but can't see how they'll keep this locked up and under wraps when the whole world is investigating.

You'd assume, China, Russia, Iran and all major powers KNOW the truth already.

 

[latulipenoire]

An update from Russia. So far, we have 658 confirmed cases of coronavirus which is 163 more than yesterday.

Yesterday President Putin visited the Moscow clinic treating these patients. Following that he had a long discussion with the Russian government and today he has delivered his second address to the nation. The address is truly remarkable, here is the transcript translated via Deepl (the bolding is mine):

Siberia, thank you for sharing the translation. Could you send a link directly to his speech? I am asking because I'd like to share with some friends. Thank you in advance.