The big shutdown

Definite le nuove misure nazionali di contenimento dell’emergenza. Nell’articolo 1 della bozza del nuovo decreto del governo compare il divieto di ingresso e di uscita dalla Lombardia e da altre 11 province, e l’estensione delle zone controllate a Piemonte ed Emilia-Romagna. Nel dettaglio, le province diventate “zona rossa” sono le seguenti: Modena, Parma, Piacenza, Reggio Emilia, Rimini, Pesaro e Urbino, Venezia, Padova, Treviso, Asti e Alessandria. Tutte le nuove disposizioni sono valide da oggi marzo fino al 3 aprile.

No travel into or out of Lombardia and a number of other provinces until April third, which is a quarantine of 16 million people. Good thing we’ve got the wine cellar well-stocked through September, at the very least! Seems like a bit of an overreaction to me, but we’ll see. In the meantime, I anticipate most Italians will consider this to be a grand holiday of sorts.

And no, I’m not particularly concerned despite the drastic measures being taken. The country with the largest known test sample, South Korea, is seeing a mortality rate of 0.6 percent, which is only four times more lethal than the average flu. And while the 4 percent death rate based on the official numbers in Italy looks bad, the fact is that most people who have been infected don’t know they have it and have not been counted as an official case.

I strongly suspect something that we simply don’t understand is taking place, and that we’ll eventually be able to put the pieces of the puzzle together. In the meantime, get plenty of sleep, drink plenty of fluids, and take vitamins C and D.

Besides, it’s still not a pandemic, right?

UPDATE: While the government has announced the quarantine of Lombardia as well as parts of the Veneto, Emilia Romagna, and Piemonte, they aren’t shutting down the roads or the airports yet. They haven’t even closed the borders with France or Switzerland at this point.



I could use a week off

An enforced vacation from the gym:

Nella regione Lombardia e in provincia di Piacenza
In tali territori si applica altresì la misura della sospensione delle attività di palestre, centri sportivi, piscine, centri natatori, centri benessere, centri termali (fatta eccezione per l’erogazione delle prestazioni rientranti nei «livelli essenziali di assistenza»), centri culturali, centri sociali, centri ricreativi.

The schools are also closed through 8 March. Keep in mind that something like this is probably going to happen near you, sooner or later, if the situation in Washington is not unique.

The coronavirus has been circulating undetected and has possibly infected scores of people over the past six weeks in Washington state, according to a genetic analysis of virus samples that has sobering implications for the entire country amid heightening anxiety about the likely spread of the disease.

The researchers conducted genetic sequencing of two virus samples. One is from a patient who traveled from China to Snohomish County in mid-January and was the first person diagnosed with the disease in the United States. The other came from a recently diagnosed patient in the same county, a high school student with no travel-related or other known exposure to the coronavirus. The two samples look almost identical genetically, said Trevor Bedford, a computational biologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle who announced the results of the research on Twitter late Saturday night.

“This strongly suggests that there has been cryptic transmission in Washington State for the past 6 weeks,” Bedford wrote. “I believe we’re facing an already substantial outbreak in Washington State that was not detected until now due to narrow case definition requiring direct travel to China.”


Fake news about the fake pope

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.


Just this season’s flu?

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.


He would know, wouldn’t he

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.


When a pandemic isn’t a pandemic

It’s when the globalists are modifying the meaning of a clearly defined term in order to protect their financial interests:

A little known specialized bond created in 2017 by the World Bank may hold the answer as to why U.S. and global health authorities have declined to label the global spread of the novel coronavirus a “pandemic.” Those bonds, now often referred to as “pandemic bonds,” were ostensibly intended to transfer the risk of potential pandemics in low-income nations to financial markets.

Yet, in light of the growing coronavirus outbreak, the investors who purchased those products could lose millions if global health authorities were to use that label in relation to the surge in global coronavirus cases.

On Tuesday, federal health officials at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that they are preparing for a “potential pandemic” of the novel coronavirus that first appeared in China late last year. The World Health Organization (WHO) has stated that an estimated 80,000 worldwide have contracted the disease, most of them in China, while more than 2,700 have died.

However, some have argued that the CDC’s concerns about a likely pandemic have come too late and that action should have been taken much earlier. For instance, in early February, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, had told the New York Times that the novel coronavirus is “very, very transmissible, and it almost certainly is going to be a pandemic,” while former CDC director Dr. Thomas R. Frieden had echoed those concerns at the time, stating that it is “increasingly unlikely that the virus can be contained.”

Despite those warnings, among many others, the CDC waited to announce its concerns that the virus could spread throughout the United States. Their Tuesday announcement riled markets, wiping out $1.7 trillion in stock market value in just two days. The CDC’s warning has reportedly angered President Trump, who accused the agency of needlessly spooking financial markets.

Notably, WHO officials have taken an even more cautious approach than the CDC in their recent comments, stating that it is still “too early” to declare the coronavirus outbreak a “pandemic” while also asserting that “it is time to do everything you would do in preparing for a pandemic.”

The refusal to label the outbreak a pandemic is odd, since it refers to an epidemic or actively spreading disease that affects two or more regions worldwide. This currently describes the geographical spread of the highly contagious novel coronavirus, which has now resulted in significant clusters of cases far from China, namely in Italy and Iran. Countries closer to China, like South Korea, have also recently experienced an explosion in novel coronavirus infections.

Given that the disease is actively spreading in at least FOUR different regions, the term “pandemic” is obviously the correct one. It doesn’t appear to be a particularly lethal pandemic, fortunately, but the term is entirely appropriate at this juncture.


Go for it, god-emperor!

I will be having a News Conference at the White House, on this subject, today at 6:00 P.M. CDC representatives, and others, will be there. Thank you!
– Donald J. Trump

I don’t think the god-emperor will be declaring martial law just yet. But we can hope!


The conspiracy theorists are right again

As usual, the Official Story is admitted to be false, and promptly forgotten:

We found it fascinating that none other than China’s nationalist propaganda mouthpiece, the Global Times, published a report overnight which dramatically changes the narrative, namely that a “New Chinese study indicates novel coronavirus did not originate in Huanan seafood market.”

According to the brand new study by Chinese researchers published on Feb 21,  the novel coronavirus may have begun human-to-human transmission in late November from a place other than the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan. Of course, we already knew that, but what is critical is that until now, Beijing was adamant in sticking to the official narrative that it was the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan where the disease emerged, despite not providing any information on what animal was the vector, or who was patient zero.

However, now that this narrative has been officially questioned and challenged in a media outlet of the communist party, it is safe to say that the theory of the Huanan food market being the source of the pandemic, is officially dead.

I haven’t really been paying attention, but is the Wuhan Institute Of Virology now the official source of the outbreak or is everyone just assuming that it will eventually be accepted as the official source? The most important thing to remember about conspiracy theorists is that they are a) almost always correct about what they believe did NOT happen and b) almost always incorrect about what they believe actually happened instead.

Besides, we already know the real culprit.


Thank you, Corona-chan!

Dear President Trump,

The Emergency Committee of the World Health Organization declared on January 30, 2020 that the Coronavirus outbreak meets the criteria for a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. As this is a global health emergency, it is undeniable that the national security interest of the American people leaves you no choice but to declare martial law in the United States.

Please do so at your earliest convenience.

Sincerely,
The concerned citizens of the United States of America

PS: If martial law helps you Drain the Swamp, Build the Wall, and restore the 1965 demographic balance of the population while you’re at it, so be it.