Australia’s revelations on Wuhan Flu, real fatality rates and Chloroquine: Links 1, May 26, 2020

1. The CDC’s New ‘Best Estimate’ Implies a COVID-19 Infection Fatality Rate Below 0.3%

(Wow 0.3 percent. That sure seems worth burning down the house to fix)

That rate is much lower than the numbers used in the horrifying projections that shaped the government response to the epidemic.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the current “best estimate” for the fatality rate among Americans with COVID-19 symptoms is 0.4 percent. The CDC also estimates that 35 percent of people infected by the COVID-19 virus never develop symptoms. Those numbers imply that the virus kills less than 0.3 percent of people infected by it—far lower than the infection fatality rates (IFRs) assumed by the alarming projections that drove the initial government response to the epidemic, including broad business closure and stay-at-home orders.

 

The CDC offers the new estimates in its “COVID-19 Pandemic Planning Scenarios,” which are meant to guide hospital administrators in “assessing resource needs” and help policy makers “evaluate the potential effects of different community mitigation strategies.” It says “the planning scenarios are being used by mathematical modelers throughout the Federal government.”

2. The Rebel at the 5th weekly anti-lockdown protest in Toronto. These people really get it.

3. WHO continues its Marxist-Leninist crusade against Hydroxychloroquine, likely just to stop President Trump from looking heroic for saving a lot of lives with it. When you watch this video, please remember this man has no science or medical training, his ‘Dr. is honorary and his real bonafides is being a violent Marxist-leninist revolutionary in the fight to create an independent communist state of Eritrea out of what was Ethiopia.

4. Interesting tweet:

5. Australian news appears to be doing a series on the origins of the CCP WMD. It is scheduled to start this coming Sunday if I understand the host properly. The video embedded in this article is an interview with a top scientist in Australia who discusses the science of the virus and leads the listener to some important conclusions. Not surprising to anyone who follows this site. But it will be to people who live in denial.

A short excerpt is below:

Thank you all who contributed to this post. Johnny U., M., Wrath of Khan, C., and many many more who posted to the comments. New readers of this site should really check out the comments under the Reader’s Links post which appear every day at midnight Eastern.

 

 

About Eeyore

Canadian artist and counter-jihad and freedom of speech activist as well as devout Schrödinger's catholic

8 Replies to “Australia’s revelations on Wuhan Flu, real fatality rates and Chloroquine: Links 1, May 26, 2020”

  1. 5 – I liked the way he kept dodging the gotcha questions about it being designed to attack humans. We know it was but we can’t say that without the usual left wing ridicule towards anyone who thinks for themselves.

  2. I was out today finishing up my flower shopping. Slow-release fertilizer potting soil was unavailable almost everywhere: sales of this item are up 180% this year. I went to many stores looking for this and I found some left at the 5th garden center.

    That said, I can honestly say that 6 out of ten (if not 7) people I saw were wearing face masks. Quite the difference from last week. How to explain it?

    I saw people going back to their cars and once inside, remove their mask, and proceed to asepticise their hands, arms, spreading their germ-free but still wet hands over their clothes, spraying and wiping their steering wheel and everything in the car around them.

    Also, the ‘What you touch, you buy’. I hadn’t seen the signs. So, at one place they were hyper-vigilant and I ended up with some flowers I had decided against. I wanted to contest it but the masks were staring at me. I just wanted to find potting soil and get the hell home.

    This is all going too far for my liking.

  3. SKY NEWS AUSTRALIA Coronavirus may have been a ‘cell-culture experiment’ gone wrong

    ( 16 min )

    The coronavirus that has become a world-wide pandemic may have been created in a “cell-culture experiment” in a laboratory, according to prominent scientists who have conducted ground-breaking research into the origins of the virus.

    Flinders University Professor Nikolai Petrovsky has completed a scientific study, currently undergoing peer review, in conjunction with La Trobe University in Victoria, which found COVID-19 was uniquely adapted for transmission to humans, far more than any other animal, including bats.

    Professor Petrovsky, from the College of Medicine and Public Health at Flinders University who has spent the past 20 years developing vaccines against pandemic influenza, Ebola and animal SARS, said this highly unusual finding left open the possibility that the virus leaked from a laboratory.

    “The two possibilities which I think are both still open is that it was a chance transmission of a virus from an as yet unidentified animal to human. The other possibility is that it was an accidental release of the virus from a laboratory,” he said.

    “Certainly we can’t exclude the possibility that this came from a laboratory experiment rather than from an animal. They are both open possibilities.”

    Professor Petrovsky, who is the Chairman and Research Director of Vaxine Pty Ltd, said COVID-19 has genetic elements similar to bat coronaviruses as well as other coronaviruses.

    The way coronavirus enters human cells is by binding to a protein on the surface of lung-cells called ACE2. The study showed the virus bound more tightly to human-ACE2 than to any of the other animals they tested.

    “It was like it was designed to infect humans,” he said.

    “One of the possibilities is that an animal host was infected by two coronaviruses at the same time and COVID-19 is the progeny of that interaction between the two viruses.

    “The same process can happen in a petri-dish. If you have cells in culture and you have human cells in that culture which the viruses are infecting, then if there are two viruses in that dish, they can swap genetic information and you can accidentally or deliberately create a whole third new virus out of that system.

    “In other words COVID-19 could have been created from that recombination event in an animal host or it could have occurred in a cell-culture experiment.”

    Professor Petrovsky was originally modelling the virus in January to prepare a vaccine candidate. He then turned his attention to “explore what animal species might have been involved in the transmission to humans” to understand the origins of the virus – and had a “surprising” result when none were well-adapted.

    “We found that the COVID-19 virus was particularly well-adapted to bind to human cells and that was far superior to its ability to bind to the cells of any other animal species which is quite unusual because typically when a virus is well-adapted to an animal and then it by chance crosses to a human, typically, you would expect it to have lower-binding to human cells than to the original host animal. We found the opposite so that was a big surprise,” he said.

    Scientists worldwide have, to date, overwhelmingly said the virus was more likely originated in a wet-market and was not created in a laboratory.

    Even the United States Office of National Intelligence ruled out COVID-19 being created in a laboratory.

    Asked why scientists have had this view, Professor Petrovsky said scientists “try not to be political” and do not want their research impacted adversely by tighter laboratory controls.

    “We just try to base our findings on facts rather than taking particular political positions but sometimes obviously the alternatives may have unintended consequences,” he said.

    “For instance, if it was to turn out that this virus may have come about because of an accidental lab release that would have implications for how we do viral research in laboratories all around the world which could make doing research much harder.

    “So I think the inclination of virus researchers would be to presume that it came from an animal until proven otherwise because that would have less ramifications for how we are able to do research in the future. The alternative obviously has quite major implications for science and science on viruses, not just obviously political ramifications which we’re all well aware of.”

    Professor Petrovsky said an inquiry needs to start straight away, not when the pandemic is finished.

    “The idea of putting it off to the pandemic is over, it would be a mistake,” he said.

    “I’m certainly very much in favour of a scientific investigation. It’s only objective should be to get to the bottom of how did this pandemic happen and how do we prevent a future pandemic…. not to have a witch-hunt.”

  4. #1. To be complete, you need to look at the recovery trajectory and whether people regain lung function. There are also asymptomatic coronavirus lung function deficits.

    Just for fun, though, look at the rate of anaphylaxis and for fatal anaphylaxis.
    A possible allergen, say a bee sting– we all know that it could cause a fatal reaction in someone who has a one-off allergic reaction or who has a history of allergic reactions growing in severity. I go to the trouble of keeping an injector because one time I had a moderate reaction. But most people will be more or less “asymptomatic.”

    https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/68/wr/mm6829a5.htm for an annual average of 62 deaths
    https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/bee-stings/symptoms-causes/syc-20353869

    Malaria has dire statistics and an array of factors that define its mortality and morbidity rates: https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/47/2/158/356798

    • Bee stings and penicillin – yep, I carry an injection kit.
      - maybe too much inbreeding?

      Also just for fun: Nicolas Taleb (friend of Yaneer Bar-Yam and Gad Saad) just published a paper, “Tail Risk of Contagious Diseases.”
      https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-020-0921-x

      Just read the ‘Abstract’ if you’re not into systems dynamics. It posits that pandemics don’t fit the policy model used by epidemiologists – CFRs, IFRs, scaled beside everyday risks like auto accidents or seasonal flu. They’re functions of extremes rather than averages, a different model altogether.