Sweden’s Success is Kryptonite for Lockdown and Mask Advocates
Their long term strategy is working | The Mass Illusion
“The impact of Covid on the people below 50 is smaller than that of flu and the impact on really young people is zero for all practical purposes. Focus on urinating in the correct room which is a task adequate for your intelligence.”
– Luboš Motl (Former Harvard Professor)
“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely
exercised for the good of its victims
may be the most oppressive.”
– C. S. Lewis
***
AS the indolent, Western mainstream media continues to regurgitate its Big government slogan – “we’re all in this together” – in a pathetic and patronising attempt to soften the blow against forced unemployment, stay-at-home Lockdown and mandatory mask-wearing, Sweden has come out the other end with its economy intact and its citizens as free as they were before, global Fauciism.
THE most important takeout of the Swedish ‘experiment’ is one of freedom. The Swedish government put trust, not in Big-government policies, but rather in her people, her voters. The Swedish government refused to muzzle and subjugate its citizenry. Actual, democracy-in-action.
SUCH freedoms allowed to its people highlight a critical moment of distinction for the neo-Marxist, political fashionistas who cite Sweden as a “great example of socialism”. No. Sweden employs ‘socialism’ through various economic levers and social principles. It does-not-forgo the most basic and inalienable right of its citizenry – freedom to be.
THE stark difference between actual democratic freedom and AOC-fashionable-socialism-faux-freedom, cast in brilliant light by the very stance that Sweden has taken in response to the COVID-19 ‘pandemic’.
BELOW are two fantastic reads on Sweden’s commendable and measured response to CV19. The first from a front-line Swedish Doctor. The second, from Swedish blogger, Jordan Schachtel.
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PART 1
via Science Matters :
How bad is covid really? (A Swedish doctor’s POV)
Posted onby Ron Clutz
How bad is covid really? (A Swedish doctor’s POV) | Science Matters
This is a reblog of the post at Sebastian Rushworth M.D. Health and medical information grounded in science. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.
Ok, I want to preface this article by stating that it is entirely anecdotal and based on my experience working as a doctor in the emergency room of one of the big hospitals in Stockholm, Sweden, and of living as a citizen in Sweden. As many people know, Sweden is perhaps the country that has taken the most relaxed attitude of any towards the covid pandemic. Unlike other countries, Sweden never went in to complete lockdown. Non-essential businesses have remained open, people have continued to go to cafés and restaurants, children have remained in school, and very few people have bothered with face masks in public.
Covid hit Stockholm like a storm in mid-March. One day I was seeing people with appendicitis and kidney stones, the usual things you see in the emergency room. The next day all those patients were gone and the only thing coming in to the hospital was covid.Practically everyone who was tested had covid, regardless of what the presenting symptom was. People came in with a nose bleed and they had covid. They came in with stomach pain and they had covid.
Then, after a few months, all the covid patients disappeared. It is now four months since the start of the pandemic, and I haven’t seen a single covid patient in over a month. When I do test someone because they have a cough or a fever, the test invariably comes back negative. At the peak three months back, a hundred people were dying a day of covid in Sweden, a country with a population of ten million. We are now down to around five peopledying per day in the whole country, and that number continues to drop. Since people generally die around three weeks after infection, that means virtually no-one is getting infected any more. If we assume around 0.5 percent of those infected die (which I think is very generous, more on that later), then that means that three weeks back 1,000 people were getting infected per day in the whole country, which works out to a daily risk per person of getting infected of 1 in 10,000, which is miniscule. And remember, the risk of dying is at the very most 1 in 200 if you actually do get infected. And that was three weeks ago.
Basically, covid is in all practical senses over and done with in Sweden. After four months.
In total covid has killed under 6,000 people in a country of ten million. A country with an annual death rate of around 100,000 people. Considering that 70% of those who have died of covid are over 80 years old, quite a few of those 6,000 would have died this year anyway.That makes covid a mere blip in terms of its effect on mortality.
That is why it is nonsensical to compare covid to other major pandemics, like the 1918 pandemic that killed tens of millions of people. Covid will never even come close to those numbers. And yet many countries have shut down their entire economies, stopped children going to school, and made large portions of their population unemployed in order to deal with this disease.
The media have been proclaiming that only a small percentage of the population have antibodies, and therefore it is impossible that herd immunity has developed. Well, if herd immunity hasn’t developed, where are all the sick people? Why has the rate of infection dropped so precipitously? Considering that most people in Sweden are leading their lives normally now, not socially distancing, not wearing masks, there should still be high rates of infection.
The reason we test for antibodies is because it is easy and cheap. Antibodies are in fact not the body’s main defence against virus infections. T-cells are. But T-cells are harder to measure than antibodies, so we don’t really do it clinically. It is quite possible to have T-cells that are specific for covid and thereby make you immune to the disease, without having any antibodies. Personally, I think this is what has happened. Everybody who works in the emergency room where I work has had the antibody test. Very few actually have antibodies. This is in spite of being exposed to huge numbers of infected people, including at the beginning of the pandemic, before we realized how widespread covid was, when no-one was wearing protective equipment.
I am not denying that covid is awful for the people who do get really sick or for the families of the people who die, just as it is awful for the families of people who die of cancer, or influenza, or an opioid overdose.
But the size of the response in most of the world (not including Sweden) has been totally disproportionate to the size of the threat.
Sweden ripped the metaphorical band-aid off quickly and got the epidemic over and done with in a short amount of time, while the rest of the world has chosen to try to peel the band-aid off slowly. At present that means Sweden has one of the highest total death rates in the world. But covid is over in Sweden. People have gone back to their normal lives and barely anyone is getting infected any more. I am willing to bet that the countries that have shut down completely will see rates spike when they open up. If that is the case, then there won’t have been any point in shutting down in the first place, because all those countries are going to end up with the same number of dead at the end of the day anyway. Shutting down completely in order to decrease the total number of deaths only makes sense if you are willing to stay shut down until a vaccine is available. That could take years. No country is willing to wait that long.
Covid has at present killed less than 6000 in Sweden. It is very unlikely that the number of dead will go above 7,000. An average influenza year in Sweden, 700 people die of influenza. Does that mean covid is ten times worse than influenza? No, because influenza has been around for centuries while covid is completely new. In an average influenza year most people already have some level of immunity because they’ve been infected with a similar strain previously, or because they’re vaccinated. So it is quite possible, in fact likely, that the case fatality rate for covid is the same as for influenza, or only slightly higher, and the entire difference we have seen is due to the complete lack of any immunity in the population at the start of this pandemic.
This conclusion makes sense of the Swedish fatality numbers – if we’ve reached a point where there is hardly any active infection going on any more in Sweden in spite of the fact that there is barely any social distancing happening then that means at least 50% of the population has been infected already and have developed immunity, which is five million people. This number is perfectly reasonable if we assume a reproductive number for the virus of two: If each person infects two new, with a five day period between being infected and infecting others, and you start out with just one infected person in the country, then you will reach a point where several million are infected in just four months.
If only 6000 are dead out of five million infected, that works out to a case fatality rate of 0.12 percent, roughly the same as regular old influenza, which no-one is the least bit frightened of, and for which we don’t shut down our societies.
How bad is covid really? (A Swedish doctor’s POV) | Science Matters
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PART 2
via The Mass Illusion :
Sweden’s Success is Kryptonite for Lockdown and Mask Advocates
Their long term strategy is working.
by Jordan Schachtel
Here in the United States, we have become inundated with tales of COVID-19 doom and gloom. In America, the mainstream narrative is rife with hopelessness. We are told that there is simply no way to stop this virus without repetitive lockdowns, healthy quarantine, even of asymptomatic individuals, and universal mask mandates. And even with all of those extreme policy measures put in place, the politicians and public health officials tell us that we will have to wait for a vaccine for the country to even think about our “new normal” following the COVID-19 pandemic.
There’s one country that they don’t seem to want to talk about – Sweden. And for good reason. Sweden debunks the hysteria. Sweden shows how unnecessary all of the interventions to “fight” the virus are. Sweden shows us that a rational, evidence-based approach to the pandemic is now thriving.
In Sweden, there’s no masks, no lockdown, no vaccine, and most importantly, no problem.
Life has largely returned to normal in Sweden, and it all happened without the economy-destroying non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) demanded by the “public health expert” class, who guaranteed that chaos would come to every country that disobeyed their commands to hit the self-destruct button for their nations.
The Swedish government has provided its advanced metrics on the COVID-19 pandemic to the public, and the data includes the ever-important statistics on actual day of death, and other useful information. I ran the numbers month by month so you can get a very clear picture of Sweden’s downward trend.
In August, Sweden has registered just one death (!) with/from the coronavirus. Yes, you read that correctly. One death so far.
For the month of July, Sweden reported 226 deaths. They’ve accounted for 805 June deaths, 1646 in May, and 2572 in April. The deaths attributed to COVID-19 went from about a 50% reduction to falling off of a cliff.
The story is the same in the hospitals. COVID-19 is hardly registering as a blip on the radar. Sweden has reported just 4 new COVID-19 patients in their ICUs in August. The month of July saw only 52 COVID-19 patients in ICUs.
It doesn’t take a math whiz to come to the conclusion that the epidemic appears to have been wrapped up in Sweden for months. It’s unclear whether this is a result of having achieved the herd immunity threshold, or if the seasonality of the virus is providing indefinite relief. But it’s become absolutely clear that Sweden’s long term pandemic strategy is working.
Sweden did not do everything perfectly. Stockholm, like much of the West, failed to protect its nursing home population. The majority of the COVID-19 deaths in Sweden have come from the senior care population, with the average age of death (82) being the same as the average lifespan in the country. But remember, people in nursing homes are not mobile. They live in their own ecosystems and are not particularly impacted by COVID-19 policies. It was Sweden’s general population that was supposed to be plagued by their open society model to respond to the virus. We were told that the hospitals would be overrun, and that bodies of all ages would be dropping in the streets. This dystopian pandemia projection never came to fruition. Even during the worst months of the pandemic, Sweden’s general population never pressed their healthcare system. The same is true in the United States, but for whatever reason, many U.S. officials and “public health experts” have pushed the idea that everyone is equally impacted, which could not be further from the truth.
For this pandemic, the global public health expert class threw the pandemic playbook out the window, disregarding hundreds of years of proven science on herd immunity, in order to attempt to assert human control over a submicroscopic infectious particle. It hasn’t worked, to say the least. There is no evidence anywhere in the world that lockdowns or masks have *stopped* the spread of the virus. Sweden was one of the few places where cooler heads prevailed, and the scientists realized that attempts to stop the virus would be worse than the disease itself, in the form of economic and social ruin.
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Sweden’s Success is Kryptonite for Lockdown and Mask Advocates – The Mass Illusion
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SWEDEN’s ECONOMY
SWEDEN’s Q2 GDP figures speak for themselves. The best performer in the E.U. and the U.S. :
https://t.co/Jawh3NVO9G https://t.co/toyGpu4NBI
— JWSpry 🇦🇶 (@JWSpry) August 6, 2020
•••
USEFUL Twitter/Sweden links and data :
WATCH…
This is Sweden in the hight of the pandemic. They don’t have wall to wall media scaring the life out of citizens to justify their path! Relaxed & life as normal! pic.twitter.com/KhuRj0O2N6
— Damo Pelham🦈 (@DamoPelham) August 10, 2020
Sweden’s experts settled on a strategy that was realistic, sustainable and science-based. The intention was never to “fight” the virus but to protect the old and vulnerable.
They have NO second wave and herd immunity. This is how Sweden is tracking for deaths per year 🧐 pic.twitter.com/vqnYJPC1GW
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
– H.L. Mencken
“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely
exercised for the good of its victims
may be the most oppressive.”
– C. S. Lewis
***
H/t @Carbongate (Parler)
A few poignant graphics via Ice Age Now exposing a few inconvenient truths about a virus promoted as catastrophic that produces a 99% recovery rate.
This is not about the virus – Ice Age Now
This is not about the virus – Ice Age Now
This is not about the virus – Ice Age Now
This is not about the virus – Ice Age Now
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COVID-1984
IF Obama and not Trump were in power, would a shutdown of the entire global economy even have been uttered? Let alone the coordinated press-driven panic over a virus with a 99% recovery rate. A virus that was known early on to pose the greatest threat to the elderly and infirm.
OBAMA’S PANDEMIC
According to the CDC, Obama’s 2009 H1N1 Swine Flu, that killed “151,700-575,400 people worldwide during first year” (COVID19 507,188 to date), didn’t only target the elderly and infirm:
“2009 flu pandemic primarily affected children and young and middle-aged adults…
CDC estimated that 151,700-575,400 people worldwide died from (H1N1)pdm09 virus infection during the first year the virus circulated.** Globally, 80 percent of (H1N1)pdm09 virus-related deaths were estimated to have occurred in people younger than 65 years of age.”
Obama declares national emergency as US swine flu deaths hit 1,000 | World news | The Guardian
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TRUMP’S PLANDEMIC
Case Fatality Rate by age of TRUMP’s CV19 ‘Pandemic’ :
Mortality Risk of COVID-19 – Statistics and Research – Our World in Data
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WHOSE virus, therefore, posed a greater threat to the entire population in order to justify and initiate a global lockdown? Obama’s or Trump’s?
KEEP in mind that the WHO told us, very early on, two crucial points about COVID–19:
INFLUENZA CAN SPREAD FASTER THAN COVID-19 (Mar 6, 2020) : “The serial interval for COVID-19 virus is estimated to be 5-6 days, while for influenza virus, the serial interval is 3 days. This means that influenza can spread faster than COVID- 19.”
NO CLEAR EVIDENCE OF HUMAN-TO-HUMAN TRANSMISSION (Jan 14, 2020) : “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel#coronavirus(2019-nCoV) identified in#Wuhan,#China”
Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China🇨🇳. pic.twitter.com/Fnl5P877VG
— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) January 14, 2020
***
UPDATE – Masks, useless
Via @BeachMilk (Parler)
Via @BeachMilk (Parler)
***
UPDATE – Testing
THE CDC on COVID-19 testing :
What do your results mean?
If you test positive
A positive test result shows you may have antibodies from an infection with the virus that causes COVID-19. However, there is a chance a positive result means that you have antibodies from an infection with a virus from the same family of viruses (called coronaviruses), such as the one that causes the common cold.
Test for Past Infection (Antibody Test) | CDC
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OTHER ‘Coronavirus’ strains in circulation that caused ZERO panic, and ZERO lockdown :
229E(alphacoronavirus)
NL63 (alphacoronavirus)
OC43 (beta coronavirus)
HKU1 (beta coronavirus)
MERS-CoV (the beta coronavirus that causes Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS)
SARS-CoV (the beta coronavirus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS)
SARS-CoV-2 (the novelcoronavirusthat causes#coronavirusdisease 2019)
Coronavirus | Human Coronavirus Types | CDC
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UPDATE – CDC Double counting Covid-19
Via Real Climate Science :
CDC Sabotaging The Economy
Posted onJuly 2, 2020bytonyheller
The CDC is combining antibody and current infection tests, so that anyone who has ever had the virus counts as a positive. Using this methodology they will be able to maintain panic indefinitely, even if very few people are currently infected. https://realclimatescience.com/2020/07/cdc-sabotaging-the-economy/
The CDC and States Are Misreporting COVID-19 Test Data – The Atlantic
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HUGE: MASSIVE CDC FRAUD UNCOVERED – CDC Grossly Overcounting Active China Coronavirus Cases Causing States to Keep Their Economies Closed Indefinitely
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
– H.L. Mencken
RON CLUTZ, of the excellent site Science Matters, examines the historical use of fear employed by our ruling-class-elite as a tool to maintain control and solicit power.
CLUTZ finds that the modern use of fear has been weaponised under a far more sinister premise than in more ‘noble’ times gone by. Whereas in the past, power and authority came from the optimistic visions they offered their people, today’s “societies are now warped by the use of fear for political gain.”
Ironically, the most hated leader is Donald Trump, who broke from the doom and nightmare script, instead offering a promise to “Make America Great Again.” Elected on that hope, Trump was riding high on the theme “The power of Promises Kept.” And then came the pandemic filling the media and stoking public fears.
A salient read that dutifully explains the planned chaotic times we currently inhabit…
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From Terrorism to Climatism to Pandemism
Posted onby Ron Clutz
In 2004 BBC aired a 3-part documentary The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear. The episodes start with this narration (in italics with my bolds):
In the past, politicians promised to create a better world. They had different ways of achieving this, but their power and authority came from the optimistic visions they offered their people. Those dreams failed and today people have lost faith in ideologies. Increasingly, politicians are seen simply as managers of public life, but now they have discovered a new role that restores their power and authority.
Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to protect us: from nightmares. They say that they will rescue us from dreadful dangers that we cannot see and do not understand.
And the greatest danger of all is international terrorism, a powerful and sinister network with sleeper cells in countries across the world, a threat that needs to be fought by a War on Terror. But much of this threat is a fantasy, which has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It’s a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services and the international media. This is a series of films about how and why that fantasy was created, and who it benefits.
At the heart of the story are two groups: the American neo-conservatives and the radical Islamists. Both were idealists who were born out of the failure of the liberal dream to build a better world, and both had a very similar explanation of what caused that failure. These two groups have changed the world, but not in the way that either intended. Together, they created today’s nightmare vision of a secret organized evil that threatens the world, a fantasy that politicians then found restored their power and authority in a disillusioned age.
And those with the darkest fears became the most powerful.
*
I was impressed at the time by the writing, imagery and presentation of the premise: Our societies are now warped by the use of fear for political gain. A lot has happened in the last 16 years, including the demise of Osama Bin Laden, disruption of Al-Queda, the rise and fall of ISIS. With terrorism increasingly on the back burner, politicians turned to climate fears, emphasized at the 2009 Copenhagen COP, ramped up to the Paris Accord in 2015, and further amped to SR1.5 in 2019 to claim a “climate emergency”, leading to schoolchildren protesting rather than learning, and violence from groups like the “valve turners” and Extinction Rebellion.
Greta Thunberg | Science Matters
The Power of Nightmares explained the symbiosis between radical revolutionaries and elected officials. Public fear of damage and destruction cedes power and authority to governing politicians.They invited Greta to speak at Davos for the very same reason: she empowers them. At first the menace was Islamist Terrorists, who did achieve much killing and suffering in places they were able to occupy, or in attacks such as the Twin Towers. Then the media turned to extreme weather events, extinctions, sea level rise, arctic amplification, acid oceans, and fear of everything from Acne to Zika virus. The latter was a prelude to our current obsession with the coronavirus.
Dorian scare | Science Matters
In all cases, the fear has been seized upon for outlays of public monies in massive spending, unheard of in normal times. And from the Patriot Act, NSA surveillance, and FISA courts, on to environmental regulations and obstacles, and now to lockdowns and distancing orders, civil liberties are quashed to gain safety from an invisible enemy.
Ironically, the most hated leader is Donald Trump, who broke from the doom and nightmare script, instead offering a promise to “Make America Great Again.” Elected on that hope, Trump was riding high on the theme “The power of Promises Kept.” And then came the pandemic filling the media and stoking public fears. Most recently, the fear mongers are promoting racism as a reason to undo law and order in favor of passion and violence. They are literally playing with fire threatening the roots of civil society in their pursuit of power.
From Terrorism to Climatism to Pandemism | Science Matters
(Climatism links added)
•••
SEE also :
A brief history of climate panic and crisis… both warming and cooling | Watts Up With That?
COVID-19 #CoronaVirus Infographic Datapack — Information is Beautiful
THESE charts certainly help to put things in context. Perspectives that are needed when hysteria — healthy or otherwise — threatens to eviscerate the global economy, causing far more damage than COVID ever could.
*Immediate disclaimer: saying something is a panic is not denying, minimising, or ignoring it. (Jamie)
Coronavirus: Pandemic May Spark Market Panic, But Try to Resist – Bloomberg
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
– H.L. Mencken
***
WHEN the COVID-19 panic eventually clears, many important questions will be asked. One of them ought to be, “was the cure worse than the disease?”
THE ever-hysterical mainstream media will require tough scrutiny as well. Is there no upper limit anymore to their money-making mantra “if it bleeds, it leads” ?
COMPARE the coverage of Swine Flu (H1N1) (150,000–575,000 fatalities) to COVID-19.
IN April of 2009, H1N1 became a pandemic. It wasn’t until six months later, October, that then-President Obama declared a public health emergency on what was already a pandemic. By that time, the disease had infected millions of Americans and more than 1,000 people had died in the U.S.
Obama declares national emergency as US swine flu deaths hit 1,000 | World news | The Guardian
WILL leave you to judge the reaction of the globalist mainstream media toward Obama’s global pandemic versus Trump’s one, resulting in the literal shut down of the entire global economy.
Ahem, cough, splutter.
*
TONY Heller of Real Climate Science pulls no punches when it comes to lifting the lid on the ClimateChange™️ farce. Here are his grim thoughts on the prognosis and prescription for the Wuhan flu …
Creating A Worldwide Depression
Posted onMarch 17, 2020bytonyheller
Millions of Americans are already out of work due to COVID panic shutdowns, and COVID alarmists want that number to increase that number sharply.
There have been 68 COVID-19 deaths in the US, and almost half of them were at one nursing home in Washington.
CDC
Cases in U.S. | CDC
Compare this to the 12,000 to 30,000 flu deaths which had already occurred in the US by February 1.
Flu season is hitting its stride right now in the US. So far, the CDC has estimated (based on weekly influenza surveillance data) that at least 12,000 people have died from influenza between Oct. 1, 2019 through Feb. 1, 2020, and the number of deaths may be as high as 30,000.
This Is How Many People Die From the Flu Each Year, According to the CDC | Health.com
There have been 7,000 COVID-19 deaths globally, compared to far more flu deaths.
Globally, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that the flu kills 290,000 to 650,000 people per year.
This Is How Many People Die From the Flu Each Year, According to the CDC | Health.com
COVID alarmists make these claims :
COVID-19 is much more transmissible than flu
Death rates are much higher than flu
COVID-19 will overwhelm medical services
Most COVID carriers are asymptomatic
The total number of deaths should be proportional to the transmissibility and death rates, yet the total number of global deaths from flu is 40-100X higher. You can’t have higher transmissibility and death rates, and come up with a much lower total number of deaths. The mathematics don’t work.
Every single one of the 12,000-30,000 flu deaths in the US this year has involved a person becoming critically ill before they died. Why didn’t that large number of critically ill flu patients, or the comparable number of automobile accident deaths overwhelm the system?
Crashing the economy would put millions of people on the street with no shelter and no health care. How many people would die from that? How many tens of millions of people would be killed by a worldwide depression?
Something very seriously wrong is going on here.
Real Climate Science | “Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts.” — Richard Feynman
(Climatism bolds)
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UPDATE
MUST WATCH accompanying video (6’02”) version by Tony Heller.
COVID panic has already put millions of people out of work, and threatens to cause a global depression. Panic is a strategy for disaster.
***
CURE WOSRE THAN THE DISEASE?
EXCELLENT piece via Czech theoretical physicist and former assistant professor at Harvard University from 2004 to 2007, Dr Luboš Motl …
The globalist media have brainwashed billions of people into believing that this kind of instinctive yet hysterical behavior is needed, natural, useful, rational, and probably ethical, too. It’s neither.
The economic and otherwise societal losses will be exponentially larger than the damages to the public health.
The enthusiasm with which the West commits suicide is staggering
monday, march 16, 2020 …
About 94,000 people are currently infected with Covid-19, a bit over 7,000 have died plus 78,000 have been cured. The number of deaths per month approximately doubled from the previous one-month period as the disease moved from China to Europe or elsewhere. Asia seems to have tamed the disease completely. China has largely reopened for business despite a dozen of new deaths per day.
Those 7,000 deaths should be compared with approximately 650,000 deaths due to flu in the world in the recent year. Covid-19 clearly continues to be a negligible killer relatively to flu – and the latter hasn’t ever led to any significant hysteria. Covid-19 may be seen to have the potential to surpass flu as a killer (and probably has done so in Italy) but nobody knows whether this potential may be realized in the whole world. Even if Covid-19 becomes the most important killer among respiratory diseases, it will be just a quantitative change in the industry of flu-like diseases.
We’re seeing amazing restrictions on the human movement, contacts, events, economy. I am writing it from the first day (out of 8) of the Italy-style softcore martial law in Czechia. Similar restrictions are imposed almost everywhere. Every hour, a country joins the lockdown; Canada did it minutes ago. Half a billion schoolkids are skipping classes now – Greta Thunberg is no longer too special. Bars and restaurants are closed in about one-half of the world. Carmakers are stopping the production in all of Europe. You can read comments on social networks written by people who were just laid off every second. Also, I think that the real estate prices are likely to drop once the closed hotels and other things are being sold.
The globalist media have brainwashed billions of people into believing that this kind of instinctive yet hysterical behavior is needed, natural, useful, rational, and probably ethical, too. It’s neither.
The economic and otherwise societal losses will be exponentially larger than the damages to the public health. I would even argue that that the economic damages that have already taken place are larger than even the worst case scenario damages to health and lives that could materialize in a hypothetical future. These economic damages are already crippling lots of lives and they will destroy many of them in the future.
A rarely non-hysterical alert just informed me that the first volunteer is being injected with an experimental Moderna vaccine.
In recent years, if you forgot, we were bombarded with the insane culture and feminist, transsexual, multicultural and pro-Islamist, climate alarmist, and several other insanities by the extreme left. These things seem almost completely forgotten now. It is clear that the global CO2 emissions in 2020 will be significantly lower than those in 2019. And so will be the GDP. The drop may continue for years.
Lots of people don’t seem to care about the deepening shutdown of the global economy. People like pensioners, employees, and entomologists who seem certain that they will be safe. Really? When the society stops producing cars and probably many other products, and when it stops an even greater percentage of services, do you really believe it will be capable of giving you a pension that is comparable to the present one, in real terms? When businesses such as restaurants – but even much more industrial ones – are being brutally punished and robbed during this shutdown, do you really believe that they will continue to be able to pay employees? Will the society be willing to pay entomologists? Teachers who don’t really teach because it’s obvious that the home or online schooling will be a farce for a great majority of children?
I am amazed by the huge number of people who seem to enthusiastically welcome this new “regime”. Some totally unhinged leftists – like Democrats in a New Hampshire survey who preferred the extinction of humans by ETs over a Trump reelection – have been known to wish this kind of economical destruction. The green leftists are naturally known to have wet dreams about a global economic misery combined with the “martial law” economy, as correctly pointed out by Marc Morano who was interviewed by Ezra Levant.
But I see a vastly greater number of people who not only don’t seem to be worried about this a new, almost totally man-made Great Depression; but who seem absolutely enthusiastic about it. I am just flabbergasted. Were millions of people similarly enthusiastic about the decline of the Roman Empire? Are these people powered by jealousy? Where does the sentiment come from? Is there a majority that actively wants our civilization to be flushed down the toilet?
An even more shocking finding is the tiny number of people who stand firmly on the opposite side, like myself: people who really think that we must stop the acts that will make a huge Great Depression unavoidable. Yes, even the desire “not to have a new Great Depression” has turned into a “fringe” political opinion, according to the number of prominent advocates (although most Americans probably agree with me – but they have no power today). Freedom Fighter has composed a nice list of conservative pundits who are clearly against the viral hysteria:
“Action must be powerful and wide-ranging. After all, the climate crisis is not just about the environment. It is a crisis of human rights, of justice, and of political will. Colonial, racist, and patriarchal systems of oppression have created and fueled it. We need to dismantle them all.”
–– GretaThunberg™️
WHAT an Orwellian world we inhabit, in this the 21st Century. The age of social media and the twenty four hour news cycle where the race to the top is defined by who is the most outraged, the most aggrieved. Where personal gain is measured by entitlement. Where online ‘likes’ outweigh offline friendships, and where Western politicians take their scientific advice from a 17-year-old child-activist diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, obsessive–compulsive disorder, and selective mutism.
THIS is the age of morality, where it’s more important to signal virtue than sense and reason.
PERHAPS the greatest and most dangerous example of virtue-signalling in recent years has been the frenzied push by eco-activists and their mainstream media acolytes for “Net Zero CO₂ Emissions By 2050” in direct response to GretaThunberg™️‘s “Climate Crisis” palaver.
BUT, what’s the cost? The most vocal will not tell you, perhaps because they don’t even know or simply haven’t weighed up the social and economic consequences of the other side of their zero-emissions utopia.
CFACT contributor Ronald Stein expertly lays out the not-so-pretty side of a #NetZero2050 future with the Coronavirus parallel giving pause for zero emissions zealots to take stock of aNet-Zero future and evaluate what their lives may look like outside of virtue-signalling and panic.
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Social Changes With COVID-19 Are A Prelude To Life With Less Fossil Fuels
Posted on Thu 03/12/2020 by PA Pundits – International
By Ronald Stein~
While the world is feverishly trying to reduce emissions from fossil fuel usage, we get hit with the horrific contagious Coronavirus COVID-19. We’ve seen extensive self-imposed social adjustments to transportation that are very similar to what will be required to live with less fossil fuels in the future.
We’ve seen a serious reduction in the usage of the transportation infrastructures of airlines, cruise ships, as well as automobiles, trucks and their impact on the leisure and entertainment industries, all to avoid crowds.
Fossil Fuel Derivatives (Climatism insert)
Before fossil fuels and the thousands of products made from petroleum derivatives, and electricity that followed, the world was a zero-sum snake pit. One that was at war against one another scrounging for food, water, and shelter. In the 1800’s most people never traveled 100-200 miles from where they were born. Life expectancy throughout Europe hovered between 20 and 30 years of age.
The social lifestyles before 1900 had no such transportation choices, as they had no autos, planes, or cruise ships for transportation. The inventions of the automobile, airplane, and the use of petroleum in the early 1900’s led us into the Industrial Revolution. Crude oil, natural gas, and coal changed – for the better – the lifestyles of every person living in developed countries such as, the U.S., Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Australia.
We would not be able to “make products and move things” if not for the thousands of products from petroleum derivatives that get manufactured from crude oil that wind turbines and solar panels cannot manufacture.
Economies around the world, and all the infrastructures are increasing their demand and usage each year of those energy sources from deep earth minerals/fuels to make thousands of products, inclusive of but not limited to:
Medications and medical equipment for cures for most diseases
Electronics for worldwide communications
Fertilizers to help agriculture feed the world
Asphalt for all the roads
Tires for all vehicles
Steel for every building in the world
Wire for the worldwide electrical grid
Today, the airlines that did not exist before 1900, transported more than 4.1 billion passengers in 2017 around the world and projections are 7.8 billion airline passengers by 2036. Cruise ships which also did not exist before 1900 move 25 million passengers around the world every year.
Along with those transportation options available for society, we also have billions of vehicle trips to and from airports, hotels, ports, and amusement parks that are increasing each year. COVID-19 has shown us that society changes can reduce the demand of those growing numbers.
Yes, we may be using fossil fuels too extensively for leisure and entertainment but the developed world is where it is today, healthier and wealthier, because of all those products we get from those oil derivatives.
To meet those low emission targets, we’ll need to continue to reduce the transportation demands of society and COVID-19 may be showing us how we’ll need to retract from our extravagant usage of the various transportation systems that did not exist before fossil fuels.
Our future existence may be less vacations and less business conferences. Reductions in the usage of the entertainment and hospitality industries, neither of which existed before fossil fuels, may also be necessitated.
As we wean ourselves from oil, we’ll need to lower our demands for transportation infrastructures that COVID-19 has shown us the way.
As we wean ourselves away from fossil fuels, we’ll need to accept that developing countries like many in China, India, and Africa are still stuck in the pre-1900’s era. They have yet to join the industrial revolution and the opportunity to enjoy the thousands of products in our daily lifestyles. Of which may never do so as the fuels that support the demands of the various transportation infrastructures will be diminishing.
The same politicians that are thrashing on the oil and gas industry, and seeking its demise, are the same ones reaping the benefits of the medications, medical equipment, communication networks, and the thousands of other products. This from industries that have contributed to their lifestyles and their ability to live beyond 80 years of age. Those vocal about emissions need to join the conservation movement.
Yes the world has changed from the societies that existed in primeval times, without airlines, trains, vehicles, merchant ships, medications, fertilizers, cosmetics, and military equipment like aircraft carriers, battleships, planes, tanks and armor, trucks, troop carriers, and weaponry, and electricity that did not exist before 1900, but now may be the time to start showing our conservation cards.
At a rapid pace more and more countries and governments are moving their energy policies toward ridding the world of fossil fuels to electrify societies using only intermittent electricity from wind turbines and solar panels. Electricity alone may support a simplified lifestyle but cannot support the huge energy needs of the transportation infrastructures, nor provide the thousands of products that societies demand from those petroleum derivatives.
Ron Stein contributes Posts at the CFACT site. He is an engineer who, drawing upon 25 years of project management and business development experience, launched Principal Technical Services (PTS) in 1995. He writes frequently on issues of energy and economics.
Read more excellent articles at CFACT http://www.cfact.org/
Social Changes With COVID-19 Are A Prelude To Life With Less Fossil Fuels | PA Pundits – International
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