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by Wombaticus Rex » Thu Apr 02, 2020 7:58 pm
identity » Thu Apr 02, 2020 6:24 pm wrote:I'd be grateful for a more focused rebuttal of the points raised in his paper regarding how the virus is tested for and what the results signify.
by Spook » Thu Apr 02, 2020 8:07 pm
Wombaticus Rex » Fri Apr 03, 2020 10:58 am wrote:identity » Thu Apr 02, 2020 6:24 pm wrote:I'd be grateful for a more focused rebuttal of the points raised in his paper regarding how the virus is tested for and what the results signify.
Life is too short, I'm walking away from this one. Crowe is obviously right about everything and I'm far too much of an intellectual coward to face up to how deluded I've been. Enjoy.
by identity » Thu Apr 02, 2020 8:21 pm
Wombaticus Rex » Thu Apr 02, 2020 3:58 pm wrote:identity » Thu Apr 02, 2020 6:24 pm wrote:I'd be grateful for a more focused rebuttal of the points raised in his paper regarding how the virus is tested for and what the results signify.
Life is too short, I'm walking away from this one. Crowe is obviously right about everything and I'm far too much of an intellectual coward to face up to how deluded I've been. Enjoy.
by chump » Thu Apr 02, 2020 9:10 pm
https://www.globalresearch.ca/all-secto ... ar/5702773
VIDEO: The “Lock Step” Simulation Scenario: “A Coronavirus-like Pandemic that Becomes Trigger for Police State Controls”
(links at original)
By Helen Buyniski
Global Research, February 05, 2020
By now, those following the novel coronavirus epidemic are familiar with Event 201, the pandemic simulation staged by Johns Hopkins University in conjunction with the World Economic Forum, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Johnson & Johnson, and other ruling-class heavy hitters in October. The media establishment has already picked the story clean, set up and eviscerated a straw man (“No, Bill Gates didn’t cause the coronavirus epidemic, silly conspiracy theorists!”), and convinced the group itself to issue a statement denying their exercise was meant to predict the behavior of the actual virus to follow.
But few are aware that the epidemic playing out in China and two dozen other countries, including the US, is unfolding in line with a decade-old simulation titled “Lock Step” devised by the Rockefeller Foundation in conjunction with the Global Business Network. The scenario, one of four included in a publication called “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development” in 2010, describes a coronavirus-like pandemic that becomes the trigger for the imposition of police-state controls on movement, economy, and other areas of society.
The Lock Step scenario describes “a world of tighter top-down government control and more authoritarian leadership, with limited innovation and growing citizen pushback.” In “2012” (i.e. two years after the report’s publication), an “extremely virulent and deadly” strain of influenza originating with wild geese brings the world to its knees, infecting 20 percent of the global population and killing 8 million people in just seven months – “the majority of them healthy young adults.” It devastates global economies and ruptures international trade. But not everyone, the Rockefeller Foundation makes clear, is hit equally.
Countries of Africa, southeast Asia, and central America suffer the worst “in the absence of official containment protocols” – it wouldn’t be the Rockefeller Foundation if someone wasn’t licking their lips at the thought of a mass die-off in the Global South – but western “democracies” also pay the ultimate price. “The United States’ initial policy of ‘strongly discouraging’ citizens from flying proved deadly in its leniency, accelerating the spread of the virus not just within the US but across borders,” the report warns. But remove such obstacles as ‘individual rights’ and you have a recipe for surviving, even thriving in the event of a pandemic, the Foundation gushes:
“A few countries did fare better – China in particular. The Chinese government’s quick imposition and enforcement of mandatory quarantine for all citizens, as well as its instant and near-hermetic sealing-off of all borders, saved millions of lives, stopping the spread of the virus far earlier than in other countries and enabling a swifter post-pandemic recovery.”
The message is clear – police state good, freedom bad. And other governments rapidly get the message, according to the simulation. First and third world nations alike follow suit by “flexing their authority” and imposing quarantines, body-temperature checks, and other “airtight rules and restrictions” – most of which, the report is careful to note, remain in place even as the pandemic recedes into the past. “In order to protect themselves from the spread of increasingly global problems – from pandemics and transnational terrorism to environmental crises and rising poverty – leaders around the world took a firmer grip on power.”
This global power-grab is facilitated by a frightened citizenry who “willingly gave up some of their sovereignty – and their privacy – to more paternalistic states in exchange for greater safety and stability…tolerant, and even eager, for top-down direction and oversight.” Everything from tighter biometric identification to stricter industrial regulation is welcomed with open arms. It takes over a decade for people to “grow weary” of the authoritarian controls imposed in the wake of the pandemic, and hints that even the civil unrest that ultimately manifests is focused on the developed world. After all, a popular uprising in the technocratic police state envisioned by the simulation would be all but impossible – as it will be in real life once 5G makes real-time total surveillance of all cities a reality.
Pin the blame on the dragon
It remains unclear what – or who – unleashed the novel coronavirus in Wuhan. The initial claim that it originated in bats from a “wet market,” in which live animals are sold and then butchered in front of the customer, couldn’t have been more perfect from a western point of view – wet markets are reviled in the West, where consumers prefer that the animal cruelty required to put meat on their tables happens behind closed doors. While wet markets would seem to improve food safety by making it impossible to sell “mystery,” mislabeled or expired meat, time and again they are fingered as disease vectors by the disapproving West, every time followed by calls to ban them entirely. However, the Huanan seafood market hadn’t sold bats for years, meaning – if the “wet market” hypothesis is to persist – an “intermediate host” species would be required to get the virus to humans. Snakes were nominated, even though scientists weren’t sure they could be infected by a coronavirus – it was more important that they eat bats and were sold at the market. Three weeks after the Huanan seafood market was shuttered and disinfected, a Lancet study put the last nail in the hypothesis’ coffin, revealing the first several coronavirus cases had no exposure to the market at all. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this has not discouraged the media from continuing to blame it for the epidemic.
Beyond the disintegrating “official story,” rumormongers have pinned the blame on the Chinese government, suggesting that through malice or incompetence Beijing released a virus cooked up in a top-secret bioweapons program operating in the city’s high-security lab. The chief purveyor of this theory is Dany Shoham, an Israeli biosafety analyst, which should raise a forest of red flags in anyone familiar with Israel’s own experiments in gene-targeted biowarfare even before taking into account Shoham’s own history of fraudulently blaming Saddam Hussein’s Iraq for the 2001 anthrax attacks. Other outlets spreading this theory cite American biosafety consultant Tim Trevan, who opined in a 2017 Nature article – published before the Wuhan lab even opened! – that “diversity of viewpoint” and “openness of information” are both critical to the safe functioning of such a high-risk lab and alien to Chinese culture. The persistence of the “lab accident” theory of coronavirus’ creation thus owes more to cultural chauvinism and sinophobia than any fact-based clues.
While many alt-media outlets have fingered Event 201 as the replica “drill” that so often coincides with a false flag event, few are aware that on the day after that simulation, the 2019 Military World Games kicked off in Wuhan, bringing 300 US military personnel to the city. Former Malaysian PM Matthias Chang, however, zeroed in on the games as the likely entry point for what he described as a biological war waged by the US against China. In an interview with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting last month, Chang placed coronavirus on a continuum of American bio-attacks he said included deliberate infection of Guatemalans with syphilis and gonorrhea and Cubans with dengue fever, as well as creating the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone.
As of February 4, there are over 1,000 times more coronavirus cases in China than outside of it, and the foreign cases appear to be ethnically Chinese where reported. This is not a coincidence – a recent scientific paper revealed the enzyme which serves as a receptor for novel coronavirus is produced by a certain type of lung cell found in “extremely large numbers” in Asian men compared to those of other ethnicities. Even more intriguingly, those lung cells are involved in the expression of “many other genes that positively regulating [sic] viral reproduction and transmission.” The paper’s authors stop short of suggesting the virus came out of a lab, instead drily observing that it seems to have “cleverly evolved to hijack this population of [lung] cells for its reproduction and transmission,” but one man’s clever viral evolution is another’s expert bioweapon development.
Certainly, American researchers have been surreptitiously collecting Chinese DNA for decades. A notorious Harvard School of Public Health program in the mid-1990s drafted village medics to administer “free physicals” to locals “with asthmatic symptoms.” These “checkups” were conducted as part of a genetic project that also involved the US National Institutes of Health and Millennium Pharmaceuticals, supposedly aimed at “identify[ing] and characteriz[ing] genes that play a role in causing asthma and other allergic disorders.” It later emerged that the researchers had secured the required consent forms from neither the local experimental ethics board nor the test subjects themselves. A government inquiry was commandeered by an insider and squelched. Over 200,000 DNA samples were thus collected and spirited out of the country.
US military literature has been lusting after genetically-targeted weapons for at least 50 years. The infamous Project for a New American Century, whose members have been steering the US ship of state into a series of icebergs since the George W. Bush administration, described gene-specific bioweapons as a “politically-useful tool,” part and parcel of the “new dimensions of combat” in which the future’s wars would unfold. In 1998, the year after PNAC’s formation, reports Israel was working on just such a weapon to target Arabs while leaving Jews untouched flooded the media – part PR campaign, part warning. And it is DARPA and other divisions of the US military, not the Chinese, that has been intensively studying bat-borne coronaviruses for years, even as their own high-security biowarfare labs are being shut down for shoddy safety procedures.
Meanwhile, the likelihood of the Chinese government unleashing a genetically-targeted virus on its own population is vanishingly low. Unlike popular attitudes of “white guilt” in the West born of a hangover from colonialism, the Chinese do not traffic in racial self-loathing – indeed, outsiders have accused the Chinese of an unspoken, unshakeable belief in their own racial superiority, and regardless of whether that belief is problematic, it is unlikely to lead to intentional self-genocide. Even if behavior-correcting false flag was sought by Beijing in Hong Kong, where US-backed pro-“democracy” protests have raged destructively for months, such an event would not have been unleashed hundreds of miles away in Wuhan.
Never let a good crisis go to waste?
The real-life coronavirus is much less virulent than the pandemic described in Lock Step, with an official death toll of “just” 427 and a global infection toll of “only” 20,629 as of February 4, and the dead were mostly over 60 with preexisting medical issues. Economies worldwide are nevertheless in free-fall just like the simulation predicted. This drop is fueled by scare-stories percolating in establishment media and alt-media alike (the name of an actual article in ZeroHedge by a Rabobank analyst: “What if we are on the brink of an exponential increase in coronavirus cases?”) while videos of dubious origin appearing to show horrific scenes from within China keep the virus viral on social media. Adding to the fear is coronavirus’ lengthy incubation period, up to two weeks in which a carrier could be blithely spreading it to everyone they meet, creating a constant threat of a “boom” in cases just around the corner.
China’s economy, of course, is being hit the worst, and the epidemic’s timing could not have been more disastrous from Beijing’s point of view, coming on the eve of the Lunar New Year holiday. At this time, some 400 million Chinese travel around the country to see family, mostly in the high-speed bullet trains that have their hub in – you guessed it – Wuhan. With much of this travel having occurred before the city was quarantined, cases are likely in their incubation phase all over the country, making today’s numbers look like a rounding error.
Correspondingly, the situation couldn’t be better for the American ruling class: a pandemic that targets Asians striking China just when it’s most vulnerable is a powerful blow to the rising superpower. And in case anyone still believes the circumstances of the virus’ ascendance are merely an extended string of coincidences, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross took that plausible deniability and stomped on it last month, unable to stop himself from gushing that coronavirus would “help to accelerate the return of jobs to North America” in an interview with Fox News. Prefacing his victory lap by saying he didn’t “want to talk about a victory lap over a very unfortunate, very malignant disease,” he pointed out that businesses will be forced to take China’s inexplicable susceptibility to deadly viruses into account when reviewing their supply chains. Unmentioned, but adding to the perfect economic storm, was Trump’s signature on the USMCA trade agreement, supposed to bring in an extra 1.2 percentage points in GDP growth.
“On top of all the other things, you had SARS, you had the African Swine virus there, now you have this,” Ross said, hammering home the point by linking coronavirus to other suspect plagues. Just as many scientists concluded SARS was a manmade bioweapon, many – scientists and statesmen as well as alternative media – have raised the alarm about coronavirus. Good luck finding any of their statements on Google, however. Facebook, Youtube and Twitter have been hard at work removing coronavirus “rumors,” and Google has memory-holed hundreds of search results regarding Chinese accusations of biowarfare. Even on platforms that don’t censor on government orders, the baseless claims from Shoham and other disinfo artists about Chinese biowarfare have muscled any comments from Chinese officials out of the way. Even the former Malaysian PM’s comments are obscured behind a Farsi language barrier – his original comments inexplicably missing from English-language media and reprinted only by Iran’s IRIB News Agency (this author can no longer even find the tweet that alerted her to those comments, but would like to thank that person).
Coronavirus is not the doomsday epidemic it is being portrayed as by irresponsible media actors. But as the Lock Step scenario makes clear, one does not need massive die-off or victims exploding in geysers of blood in the streets to achieve desired social goals. It’s possible the novel coronavirus epidemic is a “dry run,” a test of both China’s readiness to handle an outbreak and of the international community’s reaction to such a plague. It’s even possible, though unlikely, that the epidemic was a mistake – that the virus escaped from a lab, likely American, by accident.
It’s also possible the plague may suddenly become more virulent. Certainly the media buzz the first week of February is that coronavirus is close to being declared a “pandemic” by the WHO, which will necessitate the type of control measures hinted at in Lock Step and described more exhaustively in Event 201. From “limited internet shutdowns” and “enforcement actions against fake news” to government bailouts of “core” industries, mandatory vaccinations, property seizures, and other police-state provisions laid out in the Model State Emergency Health Powers Acts passed in many US states in the paranoid aftermath of 9/11, the totalitarian nature of these provisions is limited only by the imagination of the regime carrying them out. Once events proceed to that stage, it is extremely difficult to reverse them. We would be wise not to allow this to happen.
*
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Helen Buyniski is a journalist and photographer based in New York City. Her work has appeared on RT, Global Research, Ghion Journal, Progressive Radio Network, and Veterans Today. Helen has a BA in Journalism from New School University and also studied at Columbia University and New York University. Find more of her work at http://helenofdestroy.com and http://medium.com/@helen.buyniski or follow her on Twitter at @velocirapture23. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Currently the world is in the midst of a global health pandemic, or so we are told. We have been covering all of the events which have preceded the coronavirus outbreak that suggest we are not being told the entire story.
This list includes Event 201, the coronavirus pandemic simulation which preceded the first reports of the outbreak by six weeks.
The World Military Games, which held its opening ceremonies in Wuhan China aka ground zero of the outbreak on the same day as Event 201. Nearly 10k military athletes from 110 nations were all in Wuhan, just before the outbreak.
We have also looked at how the CDC shut down Ft. Detrick, the epicenter of the US Biowarfare program just before the outbreak due to violations concerning leaks and contamination. Pus multiple connections to other existing programs related to the United Nations, Bill Gates and many others.
Not to mention our extensive coverage exposing the plan to roll out a new digital financial system out of the ashes of this global emergency which will likely be considered the biggest economic collapse in human history.
In this exclusive interview, Spiro is joined by journalist Helen Buyniski, to break down and discuss the Rockefeller Foundation sanctioned report which appears to be the script for not only Event 201, but everything we are seeing unfold right now concerning the outbreak itself, and the police state response.
[… con’d]
by Wombaticus Rex » Thu Apr 02, 2020 9:13 pm
identity » Thu Apr 02, 2020 7:21 pm wrote:
No problem. However, if "Crowe is obviously right about everything" was meant to imply that I believe that, well, that is far from the case.
by Wombaticus Rex » Thu Apr 02, 2020 11:43 pm
Recently there has been a proliferation of modeling work which has been used to make the point that if we can stay inside, practice extreme social distancing, and generally lock-down nonessential parts of society for several months, then many deaths from COVID-19 can be prevented.
For example, a new study by Christopher J.L. Murray at the University of Washington models hospital and ICU utilization and deaths over a 4 month period of mitigations, and estimates that “Total deaths” can be kept under 100,000.
...
Hiding infections in the future is not the same as avoiding them
A keen figure-reader will notice something peculiar in Kristof’s figure. At the tail end of his “Social distancing for 2 months” scenario, there is an intriguing rise in the number of infections (could it be exponential?), right before the figure ends. That’s because of an inevitable feature of realistic models of epidemics; once transmission rates return to normal, the epidemic will proceed largely as it would have without mitigations, unless a significant fraction of the population is immune (either because they have recovered from the infection or because an effective vaccine has been developed), or the infectious agent has been completely eliminated, without risk of reintroduction. In the case of the model presented in Kristof’s article, assumptions about seasonality of the virus combined with the longer mitigation period simply push the epidemic outside the window they consider.
...
Unfortunately, extreme mitigation efforts which end (even gradually) reduce the number of deaths only by 1% or so; as the mitigation efforts let up, we still see a full-scale epidemic, since almost none of the population has developed immunity to the virus.
by Grizzly » Fri Apr 03, 2020 12:37 am
And this isn't even close to the worst thing that's gonna happen in the next ten years months.
by identity » Fri Apr 03, 2020 12:53 am
by identity » Fri Apr 03, 2020 1:09 am
by identity » Fri Apr 03, 2020 1:47 am
by identity » Fri Apr 03, 2020 2:06 am
The inconvenient truth: social distancing and lockdowns will kill people
I’ve heard a lot of people passionately use the argument “every life counts” when debating with someone who doesn’t agree that current lockdown measures are granted.
I am a humanist and value human life way more than money. However, most are forgetting that the side effects of lockdowns will themselves be deadly to some people — and that’s my biggest personal concern at the moment.
What are the consequences of an economic collapse, on the mental health of people, in a country like the US where suicide is the 10th leading cause of death, and considering that suicides are known to spike during these hard times?
If we apply the math found in the study above, and that the rise in suicides is equivalent to the Great Depression, we could expect the economic devastation related to COVID lockdowns to cause an additional 26,400 suicides per year.
But a financial crisis also affects every single citizen who goes through it for a long time, so much that it can reduce their life expectancy. Philip Thomas, Professor of Risk Management from the University of Bristol, warns that the 2008 Financial Crisis caused a 3 month decrease in overall life expectancy.
If we consider that every US citizen (329.45M as of August 2019) cuts 3 months off his life, and that the average lifespan in the US is 78.9 years, then the COVID-19 lockdown measures and its associated financial crisis might already have wasted 82,362,500 years of lifespan, the equivalent of 1,043,844 lives, in the US alone.
I realize this math might look just as speculative and sensationalistic as the one used in the media throughout the COVID-19 crisis, but it does prove a point: We absolutely need to consider the risk/benefit ratio of massive interventions such as the ones that have been taken in the last few months.
Political economist Toby Rogers, PhD, shares the same concerns:
There is a large volume of academic literature on “the social determinants of health” and “deaths of despair” caused by increases in the unemployment rate. The pioneering work in this field was conducted by Harvey Brenner (then at Johns Hopkins University) on behalf of the Joint Economic Committee of the United States Congress in the mid 1970s. Reviewing U.S. historical data over the period 1940 to 1973, Brenner found that:
‘… a 1% increase in the unemployment rate sustained over a period of six years has been associated (during the past three decades) with increases of 36,887 total deaths, including 20,240 cardiovascular deaths, 920 suicides, 648 homicides, 495 deaths from cirrhosis of the liver, 4,227 state mental hospital admissions, and 3,340 state prison admission.’
Based on the Brenner model, Rogers currently predicts that the economic crash following COVID-19-related lockdowns will in itself tragically kill a lot of people:
Lower bound. If the unemployment rate increases by 5 points as a result of the various lockdowns, then 294,170 additional lives will be lost, not from coronavirus, but from deaths of despair.
Mid-range. If the unemployment rate increases by 16.5 points (as predicted by Treasury Secretary Mnuchin), then 970,761 additional lives will be lost to deaths of despair.
Upper bound. And if the unemployment rate increases by 10-fold — which is what we are already seeing in several states — then 1,853,271 lives will be lost to deaths of despair from government orders to lock down, shut down, and shelter in place.
In a country where a record 3.3 million unemployment claims have been filed in the last week alone — up from the previous record of 695,000 in October of 1982 — saying the consequences of current lockdowns seem extremely dismal would be an understatement.
by Belligerent Savant » Fri Apr 03, 2020 2:42 am
identity » Thu Apr 02, 2020 11:53 pm wrote:Navigating Through The “Coronavirus-Panic”: 8 Inconvenient Facts To Consider
https://theemfguy.com/blog/coronavirus/ ("EMF Guy Blog" from Québec)
Fact #1: We’re Locking Down Entire Countries To Stop the Coronavirus… And The Consequences Are (And Will Be) Disastrous
Fact #2: “Confirmed” Cases Of COVID-19 Are… Well… Not-So-Confirmed
Fact #3: “Confirmed” Deaths From COVID-19 Are Not-So-Confirmed Either
Fact #4: The WHO’s Panic-Inducing Death Rates Are Akin To Comparing Apples To Oranges
Fact #5: Overall Mortality Rates From Respiratory Infections Have Still Not Increased Significantly
Fact #6: A Slew Of International Experts Warn That The Danger Of COVID-19 Has Been Dangerously Overblown
Fact #7: The Data Confirms That Lockdowns Are Possibly Useless & Surely Damaging
Fact #8: Things Are Getting Better, And Better, And Better
by identity » Fri Apr 03, 2020 2:46 am
April 2, 2020 (II)
Already in 2018, the Guardian wrote that „Pollution and flu bring steep rise in lung-related illnesses„: Shortage of specialists adds to worries that surge in respiratory diseases is putting pressure on A&Es.
Professor Martin Haditsch, specialist in microbiology, virology and infection epidemiology, sharply criticises the Covid19 measures. These are „completely unfounded“ and would „trample on sound judgment and ethical principles“.
Even representatives of German nursing homes are now complaining about the restrictive measures and inappropriate media coverage of Covid19.
Figures from the northern Italian city of Treviso (near Venice) show that, despite 108 test-positive deaths by the end of March, overall mortality in municipal hospitals remained roughly the same as in previous years. This is a further indication that the temporarily increased mortality in some places is more likely to be due to external factors such as panic and collapse than due to the coronavirus alone.
Professor John Oxford of Queen Mary University London, one of the world’s leading virologists and influenza specialists, comes to the following conclusion regarding Covid19: „Personally, I would say the best advice is to spend less time watching TV news which is sensational and not very good. Personally, I view this Covid outbreak as akin to a bad winter influenza epidemic. In this case we have had 8000 deaths this last year in the ‘at risk’ groups viz over 65% people with heart disease etc. I do not feel this current Covid will exceed this number. We are suffering from a media epidemic!“
by identity » Fri Apr 03, 2020 3:44 am
The former Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption, QC, has denounced the police response to the coronavirus, saying the country is suffering 'collective hysteria'. This is an edited transcript of his interview with BBC Radio 4's World at One programme earlier today.
BBC interviewer Jonny Dymond 'A hysterical slide into a police state. A shameful police force intruding with scant regard to common sense or tradition. An irrational overreaction driven by fear.' These are not the accusations of wild-eyed campaigners, they come from the lips of one our most eminent jurists Lord Sumption, former Justice of the Supreme Court. I spoke to him just before we came on air.
Lord Sumption The real problem is that when human societies lose their freedom, it's not usually because tyrants have taken it away. It's usually because people willingly surrender their freedom in return for protection against some external threat. And the threat is usually a real threat but usually exaggerated. That's what I fear we are seeing now. The pressure on politicians has come from the public. They want action. They don't pause to ask whether the action will work. They don't ask themselves whether the cost will be worth paying. They want action anyway. And anyone who has studied history will recognise here the classic symptoms of collective hysteria. Hysteria is infectious. We are working ourselves up into a lather in which we exaggerate the threat and stop asking ourselves whether the cure may be worse than the disease.
Dymond At a time like this, as you acknowledge, citizens do look to the state for protection, for assistance, we shouldn't be surprised then if the state takes on new powers if it responds. That is what it has been asked to do, almost demanded of it.
Sumption Yes that is absolutely true. We should not be surprised. But we have to recognise that this is how societies become despotisms. And we also have to recognise this is a process which leads naturally to exaggeration. The symptoms of coronavirus are clearly serious for those with other significant medical conditions, especially if they're old. There are exceptional cases in which young people have been struck down, which have had a lot of publicity, but the numbers are pretty small. The Italian evidence, for instance, suggests that only in 12 per cent of deaths is it possible to say coronavirus was the main cause of death. So yes this is serious and yes it's understandable that people cry out to the government. But the real question is: is this serious enough to warrant putting most of our population into house imprisonment, wrecking our economy for an indefinite period, destroying businesses that honest and hardworking people have taken years to build up, saddling future generations with debt, depression, stress, heart attacks, suicides and unbelievable distress inflicted on millions of people who are not especially vulnerable and will suffer only mild symptoms or none at all, like the Health Secretary and the Prime Minister.
Dymond The executive, the government, is all of a sudden really rather powerful and really rather unscrutinised. Parliament is in recess, it's due to come back in late April, we're not quite sure whether it will or not, the Prime Minister is closeted away, communicating via his phone, there is not a lot in the way of scrutiny is there?
Sumption No. Certainly, there's not a lot in the way of institutional scrutiny. The press has engaged in a fair amount of scrutiny, there has been some good and challenging journalism. But mostly the press has, I think, echoed and indeed amplified the general panic.
Dymond The restrictions in movement have also changed the relationship between the police and those whose, in name, they serve. The police are naming and shaming citizens for travelling at what they see as the wrong time or driving to the wrong place. Does that set alarm bells ringing for you, as a former senior member of the judiciary?
Sumption Well, I have to say, it does. I mean, the tradition of policing in this country is that policemen are citizens in uniform. They are not members of a disciplined hierarchy operating just at the government's command. Yet in some parts of the country, the police have been trying to stop people from doing things like travelling to take exercise in the open country, which are not contrary to the regulations, simply because ministers have said that they would prefer us not to. The police have no power to enforce ministers' preferences, but only legal regulations - which don't go anything like as far as the government's guidance. I have to say that the behaviour of the Derbyshire police in trying to shame people into using their undoubted right to take exercise in the country and wrecking beauty spots in the Fells so that people don't want to go there, is frankly disgraceful.
This is what a police state is like. It's a state in which the government can issue orders or express preferences with no legal authority and the police will enforce ministers' wishes. I have to say that most police forces have behaved in a thoroughly sensible and moderate fashion. Derbyshire police have shamed our policing traditions. There is a natural tendency of course, and a strong temptation for the police to lose sight of their real functions and turn themselves from citizens in uniform into glorified school prefects. I think it's really sad that the Derbyshire police have failed to resist that.
Dymond There will be people listening who admire your legal wisdom but will also say 'well, he's not an epidemiologist, he doesn't know how disease spreads, he doesn't understand the risks to the health service if this thing gets out of control'. What do you say to them?
Sumption What I say to them is I am not a scientist but it is the right and duty of every citizen to look and see what the scientists have said and to analyse it for themselves and to draw common sense conclusions. We are all perfectly capable of doing that and there's no particular reason why the scientific nature of the problem should mean we have to resign our liberty into the hands of scientists. We all have critical faculties and it's rather important, in a moment of national panic, that we should maintain them.
Dymond Lord Sumption, former Justice of the Supreme Court, speaking to me earlier. We put his criticism of Derbyshire police to the force and they sent us this statement: 'Our advice to the public was in line with national government instruction and echoed what people in our communities were saying following thousands of people that travelled to the Peak District National Park the previous weekend. The weekend just gone saw much smaller numbers and we thank the public for their response.'
by Sounder » Fri Apr 03, 2020 5:47 am
Transmission 3–Illinois CoupleA paper in Lancet made a big deal about the presumed first case of person-to-person contact in the USA, from a woman who had visited Wuhan in December 2019, to her husband, who had stayed in the United States. She got sickafter returning, and later both her and her husband, who had not travelled to Wuhan, tested positive for the coronavirus [31]. Whether he had symptoms or not was impossible to tellbecause he had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, sohada cough and difficulty breathing all the time. What is more interesting is that authorities identified 372 contacts of this couple, and “were able to assess exposure risk and actively monitor symptoms for 347”. Not one of these people had an emergencyroom visit with respiratory symptoms within 14 days of contact with the couple. 43 did have some symptoms that could have been COVID-19, and became “Persons Under Investigation” (PUIs). 26 had had exposures to the coupleclassified as “medium risk or greater”. But despite the presence of symptoms, contact with the couple, and close monitoring, not one tested positive for the new coronavirus.
Transmission 4 –Diamond Princess [33]The Diamond Princess cruise ship was a perfect laboratory for watching a highly infectious pathogen in action. The first person who tested positive had symptoms before boarding the ship on January 20th. It was not until February 1stthat they tested positive, and February 3rdwhen passengers were confined to their quarters, in some cases with someone who tested positive. Passengers had interactions with the crew, e.g. to obtain meals. Despite this, the rate of transmission was only 16.7%, meaning that 83.3% remained negative. Since almost half those who tested positive had no symptoms it was not possible to avoid contact with positive persons based on observing symptoms, and it meant that 92% emerged from quarantine without having experienced symptoms due to the coronavirus.
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