Posted on 01/30/2020 7:02:42 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Mike Konrad wrote an informative article saying that, even if the Coronavirus is as serious as the media says, we Americans have good medical care, including antibiotics for secondary infections and steroids to control some of the worst symptoms. Now Michael Fumento, debunker extraordinaire, says that, on the available evidence, the newest virus is (a) just another virus and (b) not likely to ravage American shores.
The media is flogging the Coronavirus as if it’s the new Ebola. That’s very fertile soil because we have locked in our memories horrific images out of Africa, showing people lying dead in the streets and, in one particularly disturbing scene on some news show, a three-year-old boy shunned by everyone in his village, including his parents, until he lay down and died, alone, in the dirt.
But this isn’t Ebola. China isn’t Africa. And we, thank goodness, are neither China nor Africa. One of the blessings of life in 21st century America is that we have ways of dealing with diseases that were once deadly.
Michael Fumento blames the media for the hype and proceeds to debunk the scare on the facts. After describing a masked CNN reporter standing in total isolation, something that makes the mask pointless, Fumento explains why someone would do something so silly:
It’s called “drama,” which is badly needed, because there appears to be nothing very special about this outbreak of the 2019-nCoV or Wuhan virus. It should actually be called the DvV, or Déjà vu Virus, because we have been through these hysterias before. Over and over. Heterosexual AIDS, Ebola repeatedly, the H1N1 swine flu that was actually vastly milder than the regular flu and, especially, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003.
[snip]
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Lyme Disease.
He makes a lot of sense, but the very REAL danger with the Coronavirus is the impact on the world economy and stock indexes. I am going to curb my big ticket spending until this thing clears up. I think that this will hurt the Chinese economy much much worse than anywhere else, but there are a lot of US companies that will be impacted.
US companies on foreign soil might consider just bringing their companies back to the USA!
Fatalaties for corona virus, as a percentage of hospitalization, are lower etc. But about 15% of the reported patients in China, end up hospitalized!
RE: But about 15% of the reported patients in China, end up hospitalized!
The key word is “REPORTED”.
So many patients are being turned away by their hospital systems due to lack of resources, that we do not even know how many of those turned away have been infected.
The infection figure could be HIGHER than REPORTED.
RE: China’s air, water and such leave much to be desired..
Something folks like Greta Thunberg and the greenies never emphasize.
There are also people reporting on their own that many people are dying but the cause of death is being listed as pneumonia, etc.
No means of verifying. But the official numbers might be a lie, too.
And the govt. would have as much incentive to lie to minimize, as others to raise a panic.
A friend works for the Army on the public health side of things. He said the same thing. Even New York City doesn’t have nearly the population density of many Chinese cities.
Couple that with meager socialist health care and general ignorance of many aspects of sanitary living you’ve got a greater chance of pandemic.
Dehydration and secondary illnesses probably kills more than the actual virus does
Until they run out of the limited amount of ICU space and ventilators. THAT is the crux.
Plus many of them smoke.
If you smoke and drink now, quit during flu season. Esp. smoking. It may just save your life.
Johns Hopkins has changed that graph so that the axes are different. Looks like it’s levelling off now.
Settle down little sheeple, nothing to worry about.
Say that and start a firestorm:
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/30/wilbur-ross-coronavirus-jobs-109445
The media loves as much print as it possible can, so not surprised.
Again, I really hope I got the trend line wrong.
These shows are sending the South Park adults into a near sexual frenzy and leading the kids to believe their parents will actually murder each other as a result of watching these shows. Kyle informs the kids that there is a phone application that can serve as a parental lock on certain programs and employs a password that only children would know - "How do you tame a horse in Minecraft?"
I think a lot of what I’m seeing on these threads about the Coronavirus might be called “Informative Killer Virus Porn” - a subset of the general category of “Disaster Porn”.
There is a difference between staying informed and aware vs chasing down every single YouTube video and Tweet and blog post and saying “I heard someone somewhere say something like….” Some, if not more than a few of these are dubious if not outright fake content that unfortunately some do not attempt to vet and verify before posting.
Sort of like the post someone made on another thread here, a YouTube video purporting to show the Wuhan bio lab being blown up in order to hide the evidence of the origins of the virus. Except the actual footage was from a series of explosions in the Port of Tianjin in 2015. Someone else posted a video taken from Twitter that purported to show a victim of the Coronavirus that was proved to be a video of a suicide, someone who jumped off a building some years ago – the massive head bleeding resulting from when the poor guy’s head hit the pavement might have been a clue. And yes, the first responders were wearing masks and bio suits because – China - because it is the hot zone of emerging influenza and other viruses, they take precautions that we don’t see here. FWIW, people in Asia have worn surgical masks while out in public long before the Coronavirus, and for some it’s almost like a fashion statement or a fact of life.
Then there is the repeated claim that this virus can be transmitted through the eyes. Well if you have the virus on your hands and you touch your eyes, yes, but that is no different than one of the ways influenza or the common cold or even measles is transmitted. The Coronavirus is not shooting out of people’s eyes and infecting other people’s eyes over any distance or from across the room as some have implied. You are not going to catch the Coronavirus because someone with it made eye contact with you from across a room. And as far as we know so far, the Coronavirus is not sitting around on surfaces, days, weeks or months later just waiting to jump off and infect someone. The modes of transmission so far seem to be the same as for other Coronaviruses that cause anything from a mild common cold to SARS or MERS and similar to how influenza is transmitted. This is not some sort of super bug with magical transmission properties.
Speaking of influenza, if you want to read and learn about likely the deadliest pandemic ever to hit humanity, yes even more deadly than the Black Death of the middle ages, learn about the 1918 Influenza pandemic or the so called “Spanish Flu”.
In the United States, it was first identified in military personnel in Kansas in the spring 1918. It is estimated that about 500 million people or one-third of the world’s population became infected with this virus. The number of deaths was estimated to be at least 50 million worldwide with about 675,000 occurring in the United States. And it spread to remote parts of the world, small pacific islands and remote Inuit villages in Alaska. And it was not a biologically engineered weapon unless you consider birds as engaging in biological warfare against us humans or as the quote from the “rather” well done movie Contagion said:
Government official: "Is there any way that someone could weaponize the bird flu? Is that what we're looking at?"
Dr. Ellis Cheever: "Someone doesn't have to weaponize the bird flu. The birds are doing that."
That’s not to say I am downplaying this. We should be concerned because it is a novel virus in humans and we don’t know everything about it yet- too soon to know just how contagious it is or what the actual mortality rate vs the actual infection rate is, how many people are infected but only have mild symptoms and require no treatment and recover, how many who have died or require extensive medical care are in the same group as would with influenza (the very old and or with underlying health conditions), and so on. And no, I don’t completely trust the Chinese government to be completely forthcoming and neither should anyone. So, yes, we should be concerned.
But you know what? Just look back to the Spanish flu in the US and how the Sedition Act of 1918 suppressed all press reporting on anything that might be detrimental to the morale and support of the WWI war effort including growing reports of this strange and very bad flu. The very reason the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic got the name Spanish Flu was because Spain was neutral in the war and thus didn’t place any restrictions on their press about reporting on the influenza unlike the nations combating each other in the “Great War”.
In the fall of 1918 in Philadelphia, doctors and a few public health officials were becoming aware of the influenza outbreak and begged the city officials to postpone or cancel the Liberty Loan Parade, fearing that this large public gathering could spread the disease. But the parade when on because the war effort was deemed more important. Within three days of the event, 635 new civilian cases of influenza signaled the beginning of the single deadliest period of pestilence ever recorded in the city’s history. People were literally dying in the streets and there were not enough coffins or volunteers to bury the dead. US government censorship and suppression of influenza news under the Sedition Act of 1918 was in part to blame. So while this was 100 years ago, it does show that China is not alone in such matters.
And I’m not completely discounting that it was a laboratory released virus, although if it was, it was surely accidental because to purposely release a virus with no known vaccine or well understood virulence or death rate on one’s own population and a near shut down of their economy would be more suicidal than strategic, so at this point it is more likely to be a naturally mutating virus jumping the species barrier much like the “Spanish Flu” did.
But come on people, this is not the “The Andromeda Strain” or “World War Z” or “The Stand” or “The Omega Man” or even “Contagion”.
Sure the spread has been rapid and the death rate concerning, and certainly something that China and the rest of the world want to see contained, but consider that in the US alone - influenza - 8,200 people have died and 140,000 people have been hospitalized so far during the 2019-2020 flu season and 54 children have died.
Before posting some of these dire predictions and unsourced/unconfirmed rumors, perhaps we need to first ask ourselves - "How do you tame a horse in Minecraft?"
I agree with all your sentiments.’,
Don’t do either.
I’ve got a touch of asthma and sometimes chest colds tend to become bronchitis, but that’s been a couple years.
It is also important to keep in mind that the media is very determined to turn this into a “Katrina moment” for Pres Trump. To do that will require 24/7 Armageddon coverage. They are also doing everything they can to tank the economy before November. Panic disrupts supply lines. It’s already happening.
I’m not down playing the potential seriousness here, but I am saying that there are a lot of variables that should be factored in as we watch this unfold.
We know the Chinese government lies like a rug on virtually everything. We also know the the vast majority of the MSM in the US lies just as much. We also know that social media is a hotbed of kooks and commies. This may be pretty bad, maybe even awful. But it must not be forgotten that virtually no information from these sources can be taken at face value.
Tell that to Mao, Stalin, and Pol Pot.
Mao killed maybe 60 million.
Stalin, 10 or 20.
And Pol Pot about 1/7 of the population.
That is, knowingly, intentionally, and with malice aforethought, setting out to do so, using other people as the killers.
How much easier then to have an oopsie with an engineered virus?
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