COVID part deux, the Virus Strikes Back

[Tsing Tao]

Daily Cases in the Philippines. But how can this be? They had the most severe lock down and mask mandates ever! Doesn't make sense!!

 

[Tsing Tao]

Spain seeing resurgence in cases. Proposes fines for people who infect other people.

Must be somehow related to what is going on in Florida! DeSantis must be behind it.

 

[gwb-trading]

Has to be Ron DeSantis' fault. No other explanation.

Horowitz: Philippines had the harshest lockdown and most mask wearing. It didn’t work.

Nowhere is the circuitous insanity and national masochism of lockdown policies more evident than in the Philippines. This nation of over 100 million holds the distinction of having undergone the longest and most severe lockdown. They also have the highest rate of mask wearing in the world, according to a recent survey. In other words, they’ve done everything the propagators of corona panic porn every dreamt of. Yet…

Cases are surging because you can’t run or hide from a respiratory virus.

Their answer? A new lockdown – all the while missing the irony that the first series of totalitarian mandates didn’t work. Now they have a weakened and destitute population to face the virus, while countries like Sweden achieved de facto herd immunity from a position of strength.

Just how insane was the lockdown in the Philippines? Beginning as early as March 15, under the direction of President Rodrigo Duterte, anyone under 21 or over 60 was not allowed out of his home, only one family member could go out for food and medicine, and there was an across-the-board curfew from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. President Duterte threatened to have violators shot.

Tens of thousands of people in America likely died as a result of the lockdown – could you imagine how many hundreds of thousands died from lack of food and medical care in a poor country from such a severe policy of house arrest? This country has been suffering from a hunger crisis for years. The cruel irony is that only 2,000 people have died of COVID-19 in the country of 100 million. Like most Asian countries, they probably have a high degree of cross-immunity from coronavirus colds.

Aside from the insane lockdown, the Philippines holds the distinction of having the highest degree of mask compliance. After all, people don’t want to get shot.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1290691016580718597

So, after destroying their country, one would think they at least “got rid” of the virus, right?

Wrong! The virus does what it does and was always bound to come to southern latitude countries later, as we are seeing in places like Israel and Hawaii. The national lockdown was in place until June 1 and many local places still had lockdowns until July. Now, the corrupt and evil government has a brilliant idea: a new lockdown.

Hey, how about they just shoot everyone dead and then they don’t have to worry about the virus? That seems to sum up the strategy they have pursued. It’s like curing a migraine by chopping off someone’s head but still finding some way to not get rid of the pain. Manilla and four surrounding provinces are under full house arrest for two weeks.

A quarantine has been imposed in a compound with confirmed cases of COVID-19 to prevent the further spread of the virus in Quezon City, Philippines. (Lisa Marie David | NurPhoto via Getty Images)

In a cruel irony, the country is now in such a weakened state, they will have an attenuated immune system and a medical system flooded with other ailments to now contend with the virus. How prescient was the warning from D.A. Henderson, the former dean of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, who is widely credited with helping to eradicate smallpox, when he noted how continuing daily lives for most people as normal is the best way to endure through an epidemic.

“Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted,” wrote Henderson in a paper co-authored by other Hopkins researchers in 2006.

On Tuesday, AP wrote an op-ed dressed up as a news story asserting wrongly that “many Americans have resisted wearing masks and social distancing,” which resulted in more viral spread.

“Public health experts say the problem has been compounded by confusing and inconsistent guidance from politicians and a patchwork quilt of approaches to containing the scourge by county, state and federal governments,” added AP.

Well, maybe they ought to take a look at the Philippines. There was no confusion or inconsistency there and certainly no lack of obedience. Just pure tyranny. When will we finally learn that when you trade liberty for security, you achieve neither?

Once again.... a story (actually a fable) from source so biased that you don't provide the url in clear text. The article is from Conservative Review - https://www.conservativereview.com/...es-harshest-lockdown-mask-wearing-didnt-work/

Folks can go read the bias check here - https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/conservative-review/

The lockdown in the Philippines lasted from March 15 to June 1. The Philippines did have a high degree of mask compliance during the lockdown since it was mandatory. No mask - go to prison. Since the lockdown eased on June 1st the mask compliance dropped.

However the Philippines did not perform Contact Tracing and only minimal testing. The country did not have the resources to effectively implement either before June 1st. As noted many times before 2 of the 5 reasons to have a lockdown is to get proper contact tracing and testing in place before easing the lockdown - the Philippines did not do this in regards to contact tracing -- however since June 1st the COVID testing has improved dramatically in the country. In many ways the Philippines made a wise choice in continuing the lockdown till some semblance of proper testing could be put into place.

The rise in cases in the Philippines since early June is due to more testing, the easing of the lockdowns, and allowing people to move between regions after the lockdown ended. Still the country of 107 million only has 120K COVID-19 cases now that testing is in full gear - compared to over 500K cases in Florida. The country has only 2150 deaths - far less than Florida. Despite having over 5 times the population of Florida.

At a mere 20 deaths per 1M population; the Philippines has one of the lowest COVID death rates in the world. At this point they have tested 15,221 people per 1M in population.

 

[Ricter]

Desantis must be a Randroid, too, because someone has really become quite shrill defending him.

 

[Tsing Tao]

Desantis must be a Randroid, too, because someone has really become quite shrill defending him.

Possibly. Or another explanation is that some folks can't distinguish between what is and is not sarcasm.

 

[Nine_Ender]

Daily Cases in the Philippines. But how can this be? They had the most severe lock down and mask mandates ever! Doesn't make sense!!

View attachment 236834

Current Covid deaths per million people :

Philippines 20, Canada 237, Florida 361, Sweden 571

I don't track Philippines but if their base is 20 the masks and safety rules worked rather well. Canada and Sweden those numbers have barely budged the last 2 months. Florida the number is trending rapidly higher. You keep bringing up second waves but my opinion is those countries and areas that did a good job with the first wave are very likely to do well with the second wave. Not worse as you have suggested several times on this site.

All of Ontario is level 3 open now; less then 100 new cases three days in a row.

 

[Tsing Tao]

Current Covid deaths per million people :

Philippines 20, Canada 237, Florida 361, Sweden 571

I don't track Philippines but if their base is 20 the masks and safety rules worked rather well. Canada and Sweden those numbers have barely budged the last 2 months. Florida the number is trending rapidly higher. You keep bringing up second waves but my opinion is those countries and areas that did a good job with the first wave are very likely to do well with the second wave. Not worse as you have suggested several times on this site.

All of Ontario is level 3 open now; less then 100 new cases three days in a row.

We're talking about cases coming back now. The point of all of this is that a resurgence of the virus is coming - globally. And it doesn't have anything to do with locking down, masks or any other aspects. Not to say that masks don't help. Its just that short of isolating people in their own pods for the next year, people are going to interact and with that interaction comes contagion. That's just life.

We should be fine, as the CFR isn't nearly what it was hyped as in the beginning of this.

Lets see what Ontario looks like in 2-3 months. I honestly and truly hope you are right, and I am wrong.

 

[Buy1Sell2]

Uh oh...more on the success of Europe...I mean, time to double down on that which does not seem to work. Said it a million times: Viruses are contagious. They're going to pass from human to human. Unless we want to cut off all ties to other human beings forever, we're going to have to figure out a way to adapt and still live our lives. The places that have figured this out will be ahead of the game when most of the countries in the world finally realize what fools they have been.

The Media Said Europe "Beat Back" COVID. But Now Lockdowns Loom Again

08/04/2020Ryan McMaken
In recent days governments in Australia, Europe, and the US have moved toward imposing a new wave of forced lockdowns in the name of fighting the spread of COVID-19. Australia has imposed harsh new lockdown measures, including a curfew from 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. CNN reports:

Those restrictions include a curfew in Melbourne for the next six weeks, a ban on wedding gatherings, and schools must go back to online classes….Only one person per household is allowed to leave their homes once a day -- outside of curfew hours -- to pick up essential goods, and they must stay within a 5 kilometer (3.1 miles) radius of their home.

Meanwhile in Europe, Belgium is threatening a "total lockdown" even as it tightens other measures, which now means that "a family or those living together can meet only the same five people from outside their household over the next four weeks." (Belgium has been in a state of lockdown in all but name for months, since even until the most recent restrictions, an individual was allowed to meet in person with only 15 different people per week.)

Other regions of Europe are discussing similar measures. The Guardian reports:

Europe is bracing for a second wave of coronavirus as continuing outbreaks raise the prospect of reimposed restrictions…

[T]he Spanish region of Catalonia may also have to reintroduce lockdown measures if outbreaks are not brought under control within 10 days.

In France, the health minister has called for greater vigilance after a sharp rise in Covid-19 cases in young people, and Germany’s public health advisory body has said it is “deeply concerned” about the rise in cases over the past few weeks.​

Serbia and surrounding countries are announcing new restrictions and regional shutdowns as cases reach new all-time highs.

With these new restrictions will come more economic devastation, more unemployment, more suicide, more drug overdoses, and more cancer death. This cycle is likely to repeat itself, because lockdowns do not make diseases go away. They only—assuming the theory behind the lockdown is actually true—spread out infections into the future.​

Consequently, it increasingly looks like the global public should expect regimes to keep locking down their citizens again and again. The only way this cycle will end is if (a) populations revolt against lockdowns or (b) herd immunity is reached either through widespread transmission or through a vaccine.

The preferred course of action on the part of the experts and politicians is clear: lockdown forever, or until there's a vaccine.

The "Successful" First Round of Lockdowns
Yet just a few weeks ago, though, we were hearing about what success stories lockdowns were in Europe and Australia. A commonly used phrase in the media has been that European regimes have "beat back" the virus.

The actual outcomes were apparently immaterial, so long as lockdowns were imposed. It seemed that by definition a country that employed a lockdown strategy was successful. This is perhaps the only possible explanation for why some experts have ridiculously asserted that Italy—among the worst countries in the world in terms of deaths attributed to Covid—"beat" the disease with lockdowns.

The implication of of all these declarations of "victory" was that if sufficiently harsh lockdowns were adopted, then COVID-19 would be under control.

Some even insisted that lockdowns could make the disease disappear. Australian health bureaucrats, for example, suggested that lockdowns could cause the disease to be eliminated entirely. This Australian report claimed, "it is expected that the virus would die out within Australia" if extreme social distancing mandates are maintained for "months." Another "expert" proclaimed in June, ""Having brought the case numbers right down [in Australia], we may not need lockdowns again."

But if we employ the logic of the advocates of lockdowns themselves, there has never been any reason to presume that lockdowns can "beat back" a disease or eliminate it.

The Logic of Lockdowns, as Stated by Advocates
The claim that forced lockdowns lead to fewer deaths has always been debatable. Some countries with harsh lockdowns, like Spain and the UK, have worse per capita death totals than countries and jurisdictions with no mandatory lockdowns, such as Sweden in Europe and Utah and Iowa in the US.

But for the sake of argument, let's accept that lockdowns do help to slow—i.e., not prevent—the transmission of disease. (We'll ignore, for now, the deaths caused by lockdowns themselves.)

The logic therefore is this: a slowing of transmission prevents hospital resources from being overwhelmed, so it is assumed a certain minimum level of quality can be maintained at medical institutions with the help of lockdowns. Thus, the best that can be hoped for is that some lives will be saved by ensuring hospital beds will continue to be available. But, over time, the total number of infections is the same, because lockdowns do nothing to actually eliminate the disease.

Consequently, the number of lives saved is only the number of lives that would have been lost due to a lack of adequate hospital resources.

In the United States, this has, so far, been accomplished. No health system has yet been overwhelmed, and no hospital system has run out of ventilators. Any lives that might have been lost due to a lack of hospital beds have been preserved, whether through luck, lockdowns, or unknown circumstances.

But how many lives exactly have been saved, and exactly how many hospital systems would have been overwhelmed without mandated lockdowns? This is unknown and cannot be known, because any number proffered for total "lives saved" requires counterfactuals. The idea that "millions of lives" have been saved by lockdowns in the US and Europe is pure theater. Moreover, any benefit that can be gained from lockdowns must be compared against increases of "deaths of despair," increased child abuse, and deaths due to neglected medical conditions as a result of lockdown policies. And then, of course, there is the fact that lockdowns constitute human rights violations against the basic right to seek employment and income.

From "Flatten the Curve" to "Lockdowns Until Vaccine"
That lockdowns bring economic, social, and psychological devastation has long been obvious to more astute observers. This is why the lockdown strategy was at first sold to the public as a strictly temporary and limited option.

During the early days of the COVID-19 panic, politicians and technocrats justified the lockdowns on the rationale "15 days to slow the spread." But then the rationale changed. We saw this shift begin to take shape in early April when, for example, US health bureaucrat Anthony Fauci claimed it would be impossible to even "relax" mandatory social distancing until there were "essentially no new cases, no deaths for a period of time" Former presidential advisor Ezekiel Emanuel insisted "The truth is we have no choice" but to remain locked down for "for the next 18 months or more."

[RELATED: "When Governments Switched Their Story from "Flatten the Curve" to "Lockdown until Vaccine" by Ryan McMaken ]

Since then, it has become increasingly clear that the preferred policy of the health technocracy is one of permanent lockdown. Both inside the US and outside, we have repeatedly heard that, worldwide, "normalcy may not be possible before a vaccine is widely available."

What If There's No Vaccine Coming?
But what if there's no vaccine right around the corner?

Earlier this week, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a press conference from the agency’s Geneva headquarters, "However, there is no silver bullet at the moment and there might never be." British PM Boris Johnson has admitted that a vaccine is "by no means guaranteed." Given the history of failed attempts at creating vaccines for coronaviruses, there's no reason to assume this coronavirus will have a vaccine in 2020, or 2021, or even beyond.

One thing we can assume, though, is that politicians and health bureaucrats will seek to continue to keep the world in lockdown indefinitely. They want "immunity passports." They want a police apparatus capable of enforcing mask mandates, forced house arrest, and any other form of "lockdown" they deem necessary.

They want to maintain the fiction that the only two options available are: world-ending plague and endless lockdown.

Unfortunately for the experts, we've already seen the likely scenario that results from a policy of no mandatory lockdown: The case of Sweden. Sweden's total per capita death toll is by no means presently among the lowest. But Sweden has always maintained that over the long term, the total per capital death toll of COVID-19 will be similar across countries regardless of their lockdown policies. Even now, Sweden's death toll is better than that of the UK, Belgium, Spain, and Italy, all of which have enacted draconian lockdowns. In fact, the Swedish model looks increasingly prescient as time goes on. While the rest of Europe is talking about surges in cases and new lockdowns, the number of Swedish case continues to decline, while total ICU hospitalizations have plummeted. Meanwhile, Sweden was "the only major economy to grow in the first quarter of the year" while most of Europe was slipping into economic disaster.1

Looks like they are further delaying the success that Sweden has had.

 

[Buy1Sell2]

Current Covid deaths per million people :

Philippines 20, Canada 237, Florida 361, Sweden 571

NYC 2250 per million.

 

[Buy1Sell2]

When you lockdown, you have to do it completely and not come out at all until vaccine. Sweden's approach is much better-----work on herd immunity and don't destroy the economy and people's lives in the meantime.