Corona Facts and Realities

Keep asking questions and keep looking at the numbers:

One of the many things that has puzzled me somewhat during this crisis is the number of people I had known to be fairly level-headed and rational, who did not buy into things like climate alarmism, but who seem to have fully gotten on board the corona alarmism bandwagon. It is as if their minds have gone a bit soggy and they are now running on fear and feelings.

Panics can do that, I guess. But I will continue to try to present the evidence as best I can ascertain it. I am not minimising the reality of the virus and the dangers it poses, but I also do not want to minimise the reality of how fear, panic and unquestioning subservience to the State can become so very dangerous and fatal as well.

So let me keep running with some actual facts and figures here. If you don’t mind, let me mainly focus on the three places I have lived: America, Europe and Australia. So here then are some numbers and stats that we need to carefully consider in all this. I have taken them all from this site: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

America

Just hours ago new American job figures were released. The figure is just as alarming as any other we might offer: Some 30 million Americans have lost their jobs in the past 6-7 weeks due to draconian lockdown policies. Recall that 40,000 Americans committed suicide during the Great Depression. The cure is getting to be worse than the disease. We should care about all fatalities, not just those directly from the virus.

As I have been saying for months now, the ongoing shutdowns mean economic devastation, depression, suicide, poverty and so on – but too many corona alarmists don’t seem to care about that. They are much too one-dimensional: they insist that there must be no end to the lockdowns until we are all safe – which means we will never be out of lockdown.

Let me speak to this just a bit further. One guy recently sent me a comment saying that if folks want to venture outside and risk COVID-19 they can, but he was going to wait for a vaccine. Oh dear! This is how I replied:

Thanks ****, but it seems that perhaps you have not read this article very carefully, or my other 40+ pieces on this. Had you done so you would have noted the following points:
-There are of course plenty of medical experts who really do NOT think that COVID-19 is anywhere near as harmful or dangerous as some are making it out to be. Their voices deserve to be heard as well, and not just the alarmists.
-Many experts are now very clearly warning that the cure is already far worse than the disease.
-Deaths due to government lockdowns and the economic devastation it is causing are just as bad as corona deaths – and may well end up being far more numerous.
-If you want to “wait” for a vaccine, that is up to you, although many experts are saying that it could easily be two years or more before such a vaccine is found – if ever. If you want to stay locked up in your home all this time that is up to you. And you are very lucky indeed if you are wealthy enough to be able to afford that.
-Most ordinary folks, including myself, can NOT afford to stay locked up indefinitely. We actually have bills to pay, families to feed, mortgages to pay, etc. Again, if you can pull it off, good for you, but the vast majority of mankind will not sit by when they have no incomes, no way to feed themselves, and no way to care for their families. There is no economist worth his salt anywhere who believes an ongoing lockdown is sustainable. Millions will die of starvation, poverty, depression and suicide. I care about those people – we all should care.
-So with all due respect, I am glad you seem to have the luxury to be able to sit around for years on end if need be, for fear of catching something that may well be no more harmful than the common flu. But that is not the luxury most human beings have.
But thanks for sharing your thoughts here.

America and Sweden

It is interesting to compare Sweden with its very relaxed approach to this crisis (basically voluntary social distancing with life going on pretty much as normal) with the draconian lockdown policies in America. While all countries are different with so many variables at play, making comparisons rather tenuous and risky at best, we nonetheless do have some hard numbers to run with:

-America, with its very draconian lockdown policies in place, has 193 deaths per million population.
-Sweden with its very lax policies has 256 deaths per million population.

This is per one million people. Anyone can work out the percentages. But since the alarmists seldom do, as it may appear to undermine their case, let me do it for them: The percentage of people dying from corona in America is .0193 per cent. The percentage of people dying from corona in Sweden is .0256 per cent. There is very little actual difference between the two, yet we have radically differing approaches in terms of lockdown policy.

Sweden and Europe

Next, compare Sweden with some other European nations. All these other nations have also had rather strict lockdown policies in place. Let’s see how they are going in terms of just one important figure:

-Sweden with its very lax policies has 256 deaths per million population.
-The Netherlands has 280 deaths per million
-France has 373 deaths per million
-The UK has 394 deaths per million
-Belgium has 655 deaths per million

Again, in terms of actual percentages, the numbers are not radically different. But the point that I and others keep making is that draconian lockdown policies really seem to make little difference. Yes, we all can seek to run with sensible precautionary practices, such as social distancing, etc.

But we should be greatly concerned that entire nations are being shut down, economies destroyed, and lives lost due to other causes (suicide, etc) – especially given that the massive lockdown policies have basically been based on completely faulty assumptions and modelling.

Australia

And here are the actual numbers for Australia:

-There are 25.5 million Australians
-There are 6766 confirmed cases of corona
-5739 Australians have recovered
-The recovery rate (of closed cases) is 98.42%
-93 Australians have died
-The nation is in lockdown

As I said 4 weeks ago:

When this crisis passes, Australia may – at current rates – have had well under 10,000 cases of the virus, and perhaps 100 deaths. Time will tell. But if this is more or less how things will pan out, there will be at least two views on this:

-The government will say, “See, we told you these draconian lockdown and shutdown measures were needed – it worked!”
-Others will say, “See, it was nowhere near as bad, so all these draconian lockdown and shutdown measures really were not needed.”

The truth may never be fully known, but might lie somewhere between the two. However, as we seek to be wise about proper health and safety measures, we also need to be wise – very wise – about Statism and Big Brother in action.

Australia and Taiwan

As most of you should know, both these countries are island nations with similar-sized populations. Taiwan is of course very close indeed to mainland China (just 130 kilometres or 81 miles away). Consider these figures:

Australia with 25.5 million people and severe lockdown measures in place has had 93 deaths, or 4 deaths per million population.

Taiwan, with 24 million people and very relaxed measures in place has had 6 deaths, or 0.3 deaths per million population.

As I say, one can only go so far with international comparisons like this. But if that is true of me and the corona realists, then it is also true of the corona alarmists. They are happy to make such comparisons when it suits their purposes, so I will continue to offer a different look at the numbers.

These are not the only numbers that matter of course. Many other facts and figures deserve our attention. But since the alarmists and so much of the media are giving us only certain selected figures, I will keep running with some of these other figures – if for no other reason than to bring some much-needed balance to the discussion.

Oh, and one last number for what it is worth: this is my 48th article on corona. I suspect it will not be my last.

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15 Replies to “Corona Facts and Realities”

  1. Many thanks once again Bill. (This article was quick and easy to read compared to the previous day’s which had me looking up internet sites all day which was worth it as I’m behind what is going on sometimes).
    I wonder how Taiwan managed the virus? They are a much smaller country and seemed to know what to do from past experience.

  2. Dear Bill, Thank you again.

    The persistent question I want answered is why has this pandemic been beaten up to the extent it has been? There must be a reason and I don’t trust the MSM to come up with a truthful answer because they are controlled by Satan. If they weren’t why hasn’t there been a call to ask for God’s mercy and help as there was during other plagues and crises throughout history. Winston Churchill called for a day of prayer when England’s army was trapped in Dunkirk but there has not been a peep out of Boris Johnson or any other world leader even though thousands have died.

    Like you I think there was a need for some precautions like social distancing, better hand hygiene and crowd control. These are common sense precautions which should be in place all the time not just during this pandemic. The perspex screens at super market check outs are also long overdue and should have been implemented before now to help contain the rate of contagion in annual flu seasons.

    However, only time will tell how much social unrest there will be caused by the severe lock downs which must have caused so much hardship, poverty, loneliness and anxiety to so many people.

  3. IMHO,
    1. Taiwan has one of the best universal healthcare system in Asia much like Aus Medicare. Their transmission tracing and quarantined are second to none.
    2. The SARs in the early 2000s has taught them superb preparedness.
    3. Many Taiwanese businessmen and manufacturers have been operating in China and never trusted the CCP.
    4. Kuomintang (the party that rule for the main part of the last 50 yrs) has archives of biological warfare waged by the Jap over the Manchurian area during WW2. They don’t take epidemic lightly but took sensible steps and not panic reactions.

  4. Hi Bill, the State Government’s decisions during these times are worthy of debate.
    I assisted in a prison setting some years ago and the hospitality teacher was instructing in the ways of a chili beef and vegies dish. He allowed the said prisoners to add the chili powder after a taste (no double dipping!). Each prisoner added a bit more chili proclaiming that it was a bit mild. After each prisoner had “bettered” the others, the final spice level was off the scale. Inedible comes to mind!
    One wonders whether the states are “saving more lives” than the other states. Oneupmanship may be alive and well. This prison experience comes to mind in these times.

  5. No doubt when this is all over, there will be a world wide post mortem. I suspect, however, that one of the most significant factor will have been how early was the intervention, and the paths of ingress into the country. The later the intervention, and the more paths of entry, the more drastic would be the required intervention. Thus, the fact that the highest rates of infection in the US are on the west coast and the northeast states suggests that that the infection was coming from two different directions. Also, the large population meant that a lot of infected people managed to get in before action was taken. The crowding of New York also contributed.
    Australia was lucky in that movement from China was halted very early, and it was the most immediate source. Europe was a lesser, and later source. Apart from that, it appears that cruise ships were the most important source of infection.

  6. The Taiwanese have shown themselves to be exemplary and apparently for three very good reasons. One, they don’t trust the mainland communist regime. Two, they didn’t listen to the W.H.O and three, they have very good border control.

    For all these these reasons the Taiwanese were doing health checks on those coming into their nation from the 26th January and were aware of the potential problem from the 31st of December. They clearly reacted vastly better to the problem than every other nation.

    Australia is also an island like Taiwan (and mainland Britain) but we have demonstrated that our border control is lax and that our government agencies, whom we pay to monitor these things, are complacent and faulty. If we had closer ties with Taiwan over matter such as these and proper border controls, we could have been exemplary as well.

  7. If our clever highly-paid bureaucrats in Health, Quarantine and Border Control had been “on the ball” those virus-infested cruise ships would not have been allowed to land their passengers in Australia without testing and quarantine. That would have made Australia’s numbers very similar to Taiwan’s. Virtually every infected case I’ve heard of has been traced to one of those ships including the recent Tasmanian hotspot. There might have been a few off planes, but not many. As stated elsewhere, the Taiwanese stopped all incoming planes and ships immediately they heard of the Wuhan Flu because they know the Chinese Communist Party only too well.

  8. HongKong, also an island though much smaller than TaiWan let alone Australia, is very exemplary as well, why hasn’t this native city of mine been made mention of?

    I concur with Bill Purcell, Jeremy Wong, and Michael Weeks on the reasons they’ve listed for TaiWan’s success in tackling the inroads of this WuHan Virus pandemic. First of all, it’s the total distrust in the Chinese communists these two cities have displayed. Then it’s the disdain they’ve shown for that sycophantic [towards the BeiJing autocracy] W.H.O. Lastly and most importantly, it has to do with the spontaneity and vigilantness of the people of these two cities. The only thing that the HongKongers differ from their TaiWanese counterpart is that border closure has never been completely implemented (to date) in HongKong, which isn’t like TaiWan that’s shielded from mainland China by a 180-km strait, due to the servile [to the totalitarian regime up north] H.K. government who have kept several doors to the territory open for hundreds of thousands of WuHan denizens (many of them infected) who’re fleeing their country and have thus scattered to the whole world within less than two months.

    As janitor of the freest access to the outside world from China, there’s very little the HongKongers could do to curb this pernicious exodus [which has led to our current global plague] although they had fought extremely hard against their repressive, thickheaded potentate in an attempt to stem the spread of this pathogen, sadly all their efforts have been crushed. Let the world not be oblivious of this. May we also not forget the unflinching courage with which the resilient HongKongers have been at the forefront resisting the Great Red Dragon in the Orient on behalf of the free world since June 2019.

    We don’t need to become alarmist and throw our weight behind draconian lockdown measures, but on the other hand we should avoid being too complacent and lax towards this pandemic. This virus is unlike anything doctors and scientists have ever seen before. The other day I came across an article from ”Intelligencer” http://www.nymag.com that “we still don’t know how the coronavirus is killing us”. “The disease has proved just as mercurial at the clinical level, with doctors revising their understanding of CoVID-19’s basic pattern and weaponry. The clinical shape of the disease, long presumed to be a relatively predictable respiratory infection, is getting less clear by the week. Lately, it seems, by the day.”

    I’m a believer in the ‘conspiracy theory’ which claims that this ferocious coronavirus originated from the P-4 Lab of Virology in WuHan, not a naturally-existing one. At least, It might have been an experiment gone wrong if not a China’s scheme to develop its own bioweapon. Suggested sources for supporting this view include http://www.dcclothesline.com , http://www.pop.org , http://www.politico.com , http://www.gordonchang.com , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s56zAchvk3w . The global death toll from the coronavirus has now passed 243,000 with 3.4 million cases of infection. In the end, communist China must be made to pay its reckoning for covering up the outbreak and deceiving the world.

  9. This is exactly what it says it is!!!
    Mindblowing – A Must Watch!!!!!! 13 minutes for Today
    Important – This video of Harry Vox originally aired in New York City on October 21st 2014. This is an important detail that should not be overlooked, it shows that this plan has been in operation since that time.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xe9MNQnSY6I
    Mirror:
    https://www.bitchute.com/video/xe9MNQnSY6I/

    He refers to this document from 2010!!!! See Page 18!!!!
    https://www.nommeraadio.ee/meedia/pdf/RRS/Rockefeller%20Foundation.pdf

    THE 3 VIDEOS FROM 2016 THAT YOUTUBE TERMINATED VICTURUS LIBERTAS FOR BULLYING AND HARASSMENT
    https://www.bitchute.com/video/Fgz3i06e3g4U/

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