Vox Popoli

This would be almost Biblical if it were true:

The Vatican has confirmed in a statement that Pope Francis and two of his aides have tested positive for the novel Coronavirus. The three new cases add up to the over 400 cases confirmed in Italy under a week. Pope Francis missed a planned Mass with clergy in Rome yesterday after showing Coronavirus-like symptoms.

However, I haven’t seen any mention of this in the Italian media or from the Vatican press office site, so I’m highly dubious.

As large quantities of deaths fail to appear in Italy or anywhere else outside of China, there is some reason to at least begin to suspect that the potential danger from Corona-chan has been significantly exaggerated:

An editorial published Friday in the New England Journal of Medicine speculated that the coronavirus currently causing panic in world markets could turn out no worse than “a severe seasonal influenza” in terms of mortality.

Citing an analysis of the available data from the outbreak in China, the authors note that there have been zero cases among children younger than 15; and that the fatality rate is 2{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} at most, and could be “considerably less than 1{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3}.”

Those who have died have been elderly or were already suffering from another illness — as with ordinary flu. The underlying data suggest that the symptoms varies, and fewer than one in six of the cases reported were “severe.”

The authors note that coronavirus looks to be much less severe than other recent outbreaks of respiratory illnesses:

[T]he overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3}) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} and 36{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3}, respectively.

The vast majority of patients recover, and among those who are hospitalized, the median stay thus far is 12 days.

Alternatively, the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine may be heavily invested in the equity markets and are looking for a dead cat bounce to shed the remainder of their stocks. At this point, virtually no one outside of China actually knows anything.

Bill Gates is still trying to make people think that he’s trying to STOP infectious disease rather than spread it:

Billionaire and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said the coronavirus that has killed at least 2,859 people and infected more than 83,700 globally may be the “once-in-a-century pathogen we’ve been worried about.”

“I hope it’s not that bad, but we should assume it will be until we know otherwise,” Gates wrote in an article published Friday in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Gates and his wife, Melinda, founded The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000 to help improve world health and combat extreme poverty. The foundation announced Feb. 5 that it would donate $100 million to help find treatments and expand testing for the virus, particularly for poorer populations.

According to Gates, COVID-19 poses a serious threat to the world because it’s far more deadly and contagious than many other deadly viruses.

“First, it can kill healthy adults in addition to elderly people with existing health problems,” he wrote. “Second, Covid-19 is transmitted quite efficiently. The average infected person spreads the disease to two or three others — an exponential rate of increase.”

Let’s not forget, we’re talking about a ruthless billionaire who advocates radical depopulation and just two weeks before news of the coronavirus news broke, ran a simulation of a deadly pandemic originating in China.