C-VIRUS AND FACTS

JON RAPPOPORT IS AN INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST AND HAS RESEARCHED ALL RECENT PANDEMIC SCARES. I AM POSTING THIS ONE OF HIS MANY ARTICLES WHICH HE IS PUBLISHING ALMOST DAILY IN A SERIES ON COVI-19.  FOR A FULLER PICTURE READERS SHOULD GO TO HIS SITE AND CHECK THEM OUT. A RECENT VIDEO INTERVIEW HE DID ON THE SUBJECT WAS BANNED BY VIMEO, AND THAT INDICATES THAT HIGH TECH PLATFORMS WANT US TO PANIC.

Italy quarantines 16 million people: “the effect proves the cause”

Mar8 by Jon Rappoport

by Jon Rappoport
March 8, 2020
(To join our email list, click here.)
Let’s go to NBC News for the word on what’s happening in Italy. March 8, 2020, “Coronavirus updates live: Million quarantined in Italy, as D.C. reports first case”. (see also this from Wall Street Journal)
This NBC piece, as so many others do, mixes and matches reports. Millions quarantined there, first case here. The tactic is meant to build up details of an overwhelming cascade of “proof”: the threat is real, the storm clouds have opened and the rain is falling.
NBC: “Italy’s government has placed more than 16 million people — a quarter of the population — under lockdown, in a drastic bid to prevent the spread of coronavirus.”
“The Lombardy region, including the city of Milan has been quarantined, as have other cities including Venice, Parma and Modena.”
“Meanwhile in the U.S., the first case has been confirmed in the capital Washington D.C. and hundreds of other cases have been reported around the country.”
At the time of the announced quarantine in Italy, the official death toll in that country was 233.
OK, here are the official “effects of the coronavirus”: around 5800 cases, 233 deaths, 16 million people quarantined. Therefore…
The cause—the virus—must be real and very dangerous.
Wrong.
If Lee Oswald is arrested and charged in the murder of JFK (effect), does that automatically means he committed the crime (cause)?
If a man, crossing the street against a red light, is run down by a car (effect), does that mean a self-proclaimed witch, who stared at the man for three seconds before he stepped off the curb, put a curse on him (cause)?
The effect does not prove the cause. It never did. It never will. Aristotle figured this out 2300 years ago.
“But…but…why would they announce a huge quarantine in Italy, unless the virus were a tremendous threat?”
I’ve published a number of articles explaining reasons for governments acting the way they do. None of those reasons has anything to do with a virus. (archive here)
“But I FEEL like the virus is deadly…”
I feel like the moon is made of cheese, when there is no cheese in the refrigerator. It’s a quirk. I manage to control it.
“I BELIEVE the virus is dangerous.”
On that basis, consider starting a church.
There is a condition called pellagra. In the early 20th century, several million people in the American South suffered from it. That was the effect. Public health officials thought the cause was a germ (or a corn toxin). After all, a disease must have a germ behind it, right? Wrong. About 30 years later, after fighting an uphill battle, a few researchers correctly convinced the medical world that pellagra was the result of a niacin deficiency.
The effect does not prove the cause.
If you were a) demented, and b) the ruler of a nation, and you suddenly decided to lock down 20 million people, would that prove you had a good reason for your action? Your followers might think so. The press might pretend to think so, in order to improve their bottom line. But in truth, you just did what you did. Or you were coerced into it, by more powerful persons.
Finally, exactly how were these 5800 “coronavirus cases” determined in Italy? How many people were labeled “presumptive cases” simply because they were in the proximity of people who had tested positive for the virus—tested by lab procedures which, actually, say nothing about how much virus is actively replicating in the body? The tests, as it turns out, are a piece of theatrical stage magic, and nowhere near as convincing as a man pulling a rabbit out of a hat. If you’re going to say a test reveals actual disease, at the very least you must show that millions of virus are replicating in the body. And the test, called PCR, as I’ve described in past articles, isn’t capable of confirming that.
Of course, proponents of the test claim it CAN confirm how much virus is replicating in the human body. I would ask them, since they’re so certain, to prove it.
I propose a simple trial. From a hundred people, tiny samples of tissue will be removed—the standard first step. Without knowing who these patients are, or whether they are ill, the test professionals will run the samples through their PCR, and then, with the results in hand, they will report a) which viruses they found, and b) how much virus. In those instances where they found a large amount of virus, the patients should be ill. Are they?
Let’s find out.
Let’s find out what “a case of coronavirus” really means or doesn’t mean.
The burden of proving the test is reliable falls on the people who are using it, reporting case numbers based on it, and changing the shape of society as a result of it. They should have performed the experiment I propose decades ago. Ten times. Fifty times. A hundred times.
I see no evidence that they have.
Therefore, the test falls into the realm of SUPERSTITION.
And the quarantining of 16 million people in Italy proves that 16 million people have been quarantined. Nothing else.

JON'S HOME PAGE WITH ALL HIS ARTICLES IS HERE ....
https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/

C-VIRUS AND FACTS

JON RAPPOPORT IS AN INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST AND HAS RESEARCHED ALL RECENT PANDEMIC SCARES. I AM POSTING THIS ONE OF HIS MANY ARTICLES WHICH HE IS PUBLISHING ALMOST DAILY IN A SERIES ON COVI-19.  FOR A FULLER PICTURE READERS SHOULD GO TO HIS SITE AND CHECK THEM OUT. A RECENT VIDEO INTERVIEW HE DID ON THE SUBJECT WAS BANNED BY VIMEO, AND THAT INDICATES THAT HIGH TECH PLATFORMS WANT US TO PANIC.

Italy quarantines 16 million people: “the effect proves the cause”

Mar8 by Jon Rappoport

by Jon Rappoport
March 8, 2020
(To join our email list, click here.)
Let’s go to NBC News for the word on what’s happening in Italy. March 8, 2020, “Coronavirus updates live: Million quarantined in Italy, as D.C. reports first case”. (see also this from Wall Street Journal)
This NBC piece, as so many others do, mixes and matches reports. Millions quarantined there, first case here. The tactic is meant to build up details of an overwhelming cascade of “proof”: the threat is real, the storm clouds have opened and the rain is falling.
NBC: “Italy’s government has placed more than 16 million people — a quarter of the population — under lockdown, in a drastic bid to prevent the spread of coronavirus.”
“The Lombardy region, including the city of Milan has been quarantined, as have other cities including Venice, Parma and Modena.”
“Meanwhile in the U.S., the first case has been confirmed in the capital Washington D.C. and hundreds of other cases have been reported around the country.”
At the time of the announced quarantine in Italy, the official death toll in that country was 233.
OK, here are the official “effects of the coronavirus”: around 5800 cases, 233 deaths, 16 million people quarantined. Therefore…
The cause—the virus—must be real and very dangerous.
Wrong.
If Lee Oswald is arrested and charged in the murder of JFK (effect), does that automatically means he committed the crime (cause)?
If a man, crossing the street against a red light, is run down by a car (effect), does that mean a self-proclaimed witch, who stared at the man for three seconds before he stepped off the curb, put a curse on him (cause)?
The effect does not prove the cause. It never did. It never will. Aristotle figured this out 2300 years ago.
“But…but…why would they announce a huge quarantine in Italy, unless the virus were a tremendous threat?”
I’ve published a number of articles explaining reasons for governments acting the way they do. None of those reasons has anything to do with a virus. (archive here)
“But I FEEL like the virus is deadly…”
I feel like the moon is made of cheese, when there is no cheese in the refrigerator. It’s a quirk. I manage to control it.
“I BELIEVE the virus is dangerous.”
On that basis, consider starting a church.
There is a condition called pellagra. In the early 20th century, several million people in the American South suffered from it. That was the effect. Public health officials thought the cause was a germ (or a corn toxin). After all, a disease must have a germ behind it, right? Wrong. About 30 years later, after fighting an uphill battle, a few researchers correctly convinced the medical world that pellagra was the result of a niacin deficiency.
The effect does not prove the cause.
If you were a) demented, and b) the ruler of a nation, and you suddenly decided to lock down 20 million people, would that prove you had a good reason for your action? Your followers might think so. The press might pretend to think so, in order to improve their bottom line. But in truth, you just did what you did. Or you were coerced into it, by more powerful persons.
Finally, exactly how were these 5800 “coronavirus cases” determined in Italy? How many people were labeled “presumptive cases” simply because they were in the proximity of people who had tested positive for the virus—tested by lab procedures which, actually, say nothing about how much virus is actively replicating in the body? The tests, as it turns out, are a piece of theatrical stage magic, and nowhere near as convincing as a man pulling a rabbit out of a hat. If you’re going to say a test reveals actual disease, at the very least you must show that millions of virus are replicating in the body. And the test, called PCR, as I’ve described in past articles, isn’t capable of confirming that.
Of course, proponents of the test claim it CAN confirm how much virus is replicating in the human body. I would ask them, since they’re so certain, to prove it.
I propose a simple trial. From a hundred people, tiny samples of tissue will be removed—the standard first step. Without knowing who these patients are, or whether they are ill, the test professionals will run the samples through their PCR, and then, with the results in hand, they will report a) which viruses they found, and b) how much virus. In those instances where they found a large amount of virus, the patients should be ill. Are they?
Let’s find out.
Let’s find out what “a case of coronavirus” really means or doesn’t mean.
The burden of proving the test is reliable falls on the people who are using it, reporting case numbers based on it, and changing the shape of society as a result of it. They should have performed the experiment I propose decades ago. Ten times. Fifty times. A hundred times.
I see no evidence that they have.
Therefore, the test falls into the realm of SUPERSTITION.
And the quarantining of 16 million people in Italy proves that 16 million people have been quarantined. Nothing else.

JON'S HOME PAGE WITH ALL HIS ARTICLES IS HERE ....
https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/

C-VIRUS IS MAY BE RACIST

IT’S OFFICIAL: Chinese Scientists Find Genetic Explanation for Coronavirus Discriminating By Race

Lance Welton • March 4, 2020

• 1,100 Words • 

Sir Humphrey Appleby, the Machiavellian senior civil servant in the hit 1980s British sitcom Yes, Minister once famously commented that one should “never believe anything until it’s been officially denied.” Which meant we could be fairly confident that racial and ethnic differences in susceptibility to Coronavirus exist, because our race-denying Ruling Class so dogmatical refused to consider the evidence. Now that’s over: a study by a Chinese research group has emerged that offers concrete proof of race differences in susceptibility to Corona virus are very real.

The study—a preprint that has not yet been peer-reviewed—is entitled Single-cell RNA expression profiling of ACE2, the putative receptor of Wuhan 2019-nCov, By Yu Zhao et al., bioRxiv, 2020] and is authored by a group of medical scientists based at Tongji University in Shanghai

The authors explain that “2019-nCov was reported to share the same receptor, Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2)” as the SARS disease, an outbreak of which in 2003 seemed almost exclusively to kill Northeast Asians.

Based on “the public database and the state-of-the-art single-cell RNA-Seq technique” the Chinese scientists “analyzed the ACE2 RNA expression profile in the normal human lungs.” Crucially, they further found (in a comparison of eight individual samples) that the “Asian male one has an extremely large number of ACE2-expressing cells in the lung” in comparison to other races. (The database was based on analysis of eight normal human lung transplant donors of different races.)

As they put it:

We also noticed that the only Asian donor (male) has a much higher ACE2-expressing cell ratio than white and African American donors (2.50% vs. 0.47% of all cells). This might explain the observation that the new Coronavirus pandemic and previous SARS-Cov pandemic are concentrated in the Asian area.

So, there you have it: scientific evidence of how there are, indeed, genetic differences underling the empirical evidence that I have been presenting for weeks that there are racial differences in susceptibility to the Coronavirus (now widely known as COVID-19).

See:

• Do You Know All Coronavirus Victims Appear To Be Chinese? Thought Not!
• STILL No Non-Chinese Deaths From Coronavirus, But The WASHINGTON POST Wants You To Rat Out Your Neighbors Anyway
• STILL No Non-East Asian Deaths From Corona—But CNN’s Sanjay Gupta Won’t Admit It
• Coronavirus STILL Hasn’t Killed Any Whites (Not Counting Iranians). NEW YORK TIMES Ignores, But Concedes Gender Difference. Why?
• Coronavirus Still Discriminating—Reaches Italy, But Italians Also Vulnerable In 1918 Pandemic

And this finding comes as more and more people are beginning notice the racial dimension to Corona virus. According to Woke Wisdom—which declares that “race” is only skin deep—the Corona Virus should be ravaging Africa by now. After all, Africa is poor, poor health compromises the immune system, and access to medical care is, for most Africans, extremely limited. Surely, Africa should be worse affected that any other continent in the world—as should black minorities within white countries. But, consistent with the findings of the Chinese scientists, this is not the case:

Whether it’s a matter of faulty detection, climatic factors or simple fluke, the remarkably low rate of coronavirus infection in African countries, with their fragile health systems, continues to puzzle – and worry – experts.

To date, only three cases of infection have been officially recorded in Africa, one in Egypt, one in Algeria and one in Nigeria, with no deaths.

This is a remarkably small number for a continent with nearly 1.3 billion inhabitants, and barely a drop in the ocean of more than 86,000 cases and nearly 3,000 deaths recorded in some 60 countries worldwide.

[With only three official cases, Africa’s low coronavirus rate puzzles health experts, France 24, March 2^nd, 2020].

Does this low infection rate worry “experts” precisely because it raises the possibility—which I discussed last week—of blacks having a relatively high immunity due to many of them being adapted to a hot and wet ecology which, like the cold and wet ecology of much of Europe, is high in flu and thus selects for flu resistance?

The report then presents a number of hypotheses. Has there been a lack of travel between China and Africa? No. Could it be to do with the climate? France-24 produced a senior medic to reject this one:

“This hypothesis was rejected by Professor Rodney Adam, who heads the infection control task force at the Aga Khan University Hospital in Nairobi, Kenya. ‘There is no current evidence to indicate that climate affects transmission,’” he said.

Professor Adam also used his interview as an opportunity to cast doubt on the race hypothesis:

“While it is true that for certain infections there may be genetic differences in susceptibility…there is no current evidence to that effect for Covid-19.” [Emphasis added, ellipses in original]

It’s not obvious why Professor Adam felt obliged to offer this opinion, since France 24 does not directly raise the race hypothesis.

But note that, significantly, he concedes that “for certain infections there may be genetic differences in susceptibility…” Of course, this is known to everyone in medicine (see: Tay-Sachs Disease; Sickle-Cell Anemia). But for some reason, we’re not allowed to ask about it with COVID-19.

And there is “current evidence.” It has not yet passed “peer-review,” it has not yet been critiqued by other scientists, but there is certainly evidence—beyond the circumstantial—that genetic differences seem to explain race differences in the reaction to the Corona virus.

The African media have noticed the surprising lack of deaths as well. Recently, a series of African news outlets reported that “the African Blood Genes” may permit resistance to Corona. In response, the Nigeria-based Centre for Democracy and Development (a democracy-promoting NGO, not a scientific organization) has asserted on its blog that: “experts have said claims that black people were resistant to the virus were ‘false information.’”

It added:

A UK-based specialist in infectious diseases and epidemics, Paul Hunter, told DW [Africa has been spared so far from coronavirus. Why?, February 14, 2020 ]that the absence of Covid-19 on the continent maybe largely due to luck. There is nothing special about Africa not having seen a case other than pure chance at the moment… “I doubt we will see a big outbreak in Africa, Droplet diseases don’t seem to be as big an issue in Africa,” he said, adding that SARS, a respiratory disease that is also a coronavirus, spread through 26 countries in 2003 but failed to gain a hold in Africa.

From scientific evidence, there is no medical proof that African blood is resistant to the Coronavirus

[Is the African Blood Resistant to Coronavirus? CDD West Africa, February 17, 2020].

Perhaps not. But there is now scientific evidence that Africans (and Whites) are more resistant to it than Asians and that this is for genetic reasons.

Lance Welton [email him] is the pen name of a freelance journalist living in New York.

C-VIRUS IS MAY BE RACIST

IT’S OFFICIAL: Chinese Scientists Find Genetic Explanation for Coronavirus Discriminating By Race

Lance Welton • March 4, 2020

• 1,100 Words • 

Sir Humphrey Appleby, the Machiavellian senior civil servant in the hit 1980s British sitcom Yes, Minister once famously commented that one should “never believe anything until it’s been officially denied.” Which meant we could be fairly confident that racial and ethnic differences in susceptibility to Coronavirus exist, because our race-denying Ruling Class so dogmatical refused to consider the evidence. Now that’s over: a study by a Chinese research group has emerged that offers concrete proof of race differences in susceptibility to Corona virus are very real.

The study—a preprint that has not yet been peer-reviewed—is entitled Single-cell RNA expression profiling of ACE2, the putative receptor of Wuhan 2019-nCov, By Yu Zhao et al., bioRxiv, 2020] and is authored by a group of medical scientists based at Tongji University in Shanghai

The authors explain that “2019-nCov was reported to share the same receptor, Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2)” as the SARS disease, an outbreak of which in 2003 seemed almost exclusively to kill Northeast Asians.

Based on “the public database and the state-of-the-art single-cell RNA-Seq technique” the Chinese scientists “analyzed the ACE2 RNA expression profile in the normal human lungs.” Crucially, they further found (in a comparison of eight individual samples) that the “Asian male one has an extremely large number of ACE2-expressing cells in the lung” in comparison to other races. (The database was based on analysis of eight normal human lung transplant donors of different races.)

As they put it:

We also noticed that the only Asian donor (male) has a much higher ACE2-expressing cell ratio than white and African American donors (2.50% vs. 0.47% of all cells). This might explain the observation that the new Coronavirus pandemic and previous SARS-Cov pandemic are concentrated in the Asian area.

So, there you have it: scientific evidence of how there are, indeed, genetic differences underling the empirical evidence that I have been presenting for weeks that there are racial differences in susceptibility to the Coronavirus (now widely known as COVID-19).

See:

• Do You Know All Coronavirus Victims Appear To Be Chinese? Thought Not!
• STILL No Non-Chinese Deaths From Coronavirus, But The WASHINGTON POST Wants You To Rat Out Your Neighbors Anyway
• STILL No Non-East Asian Deaths From Corona—But CNN’s Sanjay Gupta Won’t Admit It
• Coronavirus STILL Hasn’t Killed Any Whites (Not Counting Iranians). NEW YORK TIMES Ignores, But Concedes Gender Difference. Why?
• Coronavirus Still Discriminating—Reaches Italy, But Italians Also Vulnerable In 1918 Pandemic

And this finding comes as more and more people are beginning notice the racial dimension to Corona virus. According to Woke Wisdom—which declares that “race” is only skin deep—the Corona Virus should be ravaging Africa by now. After all, Africa is poor, poor health compromises the immune system, and access to medical care is, for most Africans, extremely limited. Surely, Africa should be worse affected that any other continent in the world—as should black minorities within white countries. But, consistent with the findings of the Chinese scientists, this is not the case:

Whether it’s a matter of faulty detection, climatic factors or simple fluke, the remarkably low rate of coronavirus infection in African countries, with their fragile health systems, continues to puzzle – and worry – experts.

To date, only three cases of infection have been officially recorded in Africa, one in Egypt, one in Algeria and one in Nigeria, with no deaths.

This is a remarkably small number for a continent with nearly 1.3 billion inhabitants, and barely a drop in the ocean of more than 86,000 cases and nearly 3,000 deaths recorded in some 60 countries worldwide.

[With only three official cases, Africa’s low coronavirus rate puzzles health experts, France 24, March 2^nd, 2020].

Does this low infection rate worry “experts” precisely because it raises the possibility—which I discussed last week—of blacks having a relatively high immunity due to many of them being adapted to a hot and wet ecology which, like the cold and wet ecology of much of Europe, is high in flu and thus selects for flu resistance?

The report then presents a number of hypotheses. Has there been a lack of travel between China and Africa? No. Could it be to do with the climate? France-24 produced a senior medic to reject this one:

“This hypothesis was rejected by Professor Rodney Adam, who heads the infection control task force at the Aga Khan University Hospital in Nairobi, Kenya. ‘There is no current evidence to indicate that climate affects transmission,’” he said.

Professor Adam also used his interview as an opportunity to cast doubt on the race hypothesis:

“While it is true that for certain infections there may be genetic differences in susceptibility…there is no current evidence to that effect for Covid-19.” [Emphasis added, ellipses in original]

It’s not obvious why Professor Adam felt obliged to offer this opinion, since France 24 does not directly raise the race hypothesis.

But note that, significantly, he concedes that “for certain infections there may be genetic differences in susceptibility…” Of course, this is known to everyone in medicine (see: Tay-Sachs Disease; Sickle-Cell Anemia). But for some reason, we’re not allowed to ask about it with COVID-19.

And there is “current evidence.” It has not yet passed “peer-review,” it has not yet been critiqued by other scientists, but there is certainly evidence—beyond the circumstantial—that genetic differences seem to explain race differences in the reaction to the Corona virus.

The African media have noticed the surprising lack of deaths as well. Recently, a series of African news outlets reported that “the African Blood Genes” may permit resistance to Corona. In response, the Nigeria-based Centre for Democracy and Development (a democracy-promoting NGO, not a scientific organization) has asserted on its blog that: “experts have said claims that black people were resistant to the virus were ‘false information.’”

It added:

A UK-based specialist in infectious diseases and epidemics, Paul Hunter, told DW [Africa has been spared so far from coronavirus. Why?, February 14, 2020 ]that the absence of Covid-19 on the continent maybe largely due to luck. There is nothing special about Africa not having seen a case other than pure chance at the moment… “I doubt we will see a big outbreak in Africa, Droplet diseases don’t seem to be as big an issue in Africa,” he said, adding that SARS, a respiratory disease that is also a coronavirus, spread through 26 countries in 2003 but failed to gain a hold in Africa.

From scientific evidence, there is no medical proof that African blood is resistant to the Coronavirus

[Is the African Blood Resistant to Coronavirus? CDD West Africa, February 17, 2020].

Perhaps not. But there is now scientific evidence that Africans (and Whites) are more resistant to it than Asians and that this is for genetic reasons.

Lance Welton [email him] is the pen name of a freelance journalist living in New York.

C-VIRUS BY THE NUMBERS #2

THE SECOND OF TWO POSTS LOOKING AT THE STATISTICS WHICH INDICATE HOW VIRULENT AND HOW SERIOUS THE COVID-19 REALLY IS. [NOTE THAT THERE ARE OTHER POSTS IN THIS SERIES BY Dr. BRIGGS].

Coronavirus Update IV — Take A Deep Breath — If You Still Can

by BriggsPosted on March 10, 2020

Apologies for the duplicate email! I hit the wrong button yesterday and published the incomplete update meant for today.
All the good stuff, caveats, and explanations are linked, some in Update III, and the most important in Update II, so go there first before complaining. Or skip to the bottom for the latest model.
Personal update: I haven’t seen any panic in NYC. Toilet paper still on shelves. On a flight to Florida on the weekend was one passenger wearing surgical gloves, and a mother insisting on wiping down everything her kids would come into contact with.

Condoms are selling out, because why? Because people are putting them on their fingers to avoid coronavirus. And this.
Panicked yet?
“Don’t joke, Briggs. You don’t understand. It’s much worse than they’re saying.”
That so? How do you know?
“Because the numbers they’re reporting are wrong, faked, too low.”
No kidding? How do you know?
“Because it’s much worse than they’re saying.’
That so? How do you know?…
Iterate ad nauseum.

Yes, because anything other than instantly reporting numbers on iffy tests in rambunctious medical circumstances points to a conspiracy. I’ve worked with medical data for twenty years, and the best you can say about it is it’s a mess. Look at our own data. It’s not like the entire world has got together to decide to release 100% accurate counts at 8 PM Eastern Savings Time. Numbers come in from all over, staggered and rough. We must account for this in our minds when wondering whether how much to trust the model.
Last Friday I did some numbers, which unfortunately I cannot update, because my number source stopped carrying totals for individual Chinese cities. A real pain in the kiester. Nevertheless, here’s what I did then. The idea is still sound:

Diamond Princess carried 2,670 and 1,100 crew, and had 696 coronavirus cases [still 696], or 18%. 6 dead [it’s now 7, but I’ll leave this as it is], which is 0.8% among cases, or 0.16% in toto.
This ship makes nice upper estimates: consider the tight quarters and mandatory mingling and isolation.
Then look at Shagnhai (close to Wuhan), which had Monday about 337 cases and 3 deaths—months after the outbreak. Shaghai has 24.24 million souls.
Thus: 0.14% case rate, 1% in-case death rate, 0.00001% death rate in toto.
A nice lower estimate.
A little too low, though. Applying Shanghai to world [7.7 billion] gives ~110,000 total cases, ~1,000 deaths.
We now have ~100,000 cases, ~3,400 deaths. But near the secondary peak.
Princess to world: ~142 million cases, ~12.3 million deaths. With no indication data trending that way.

China’s numbers have long since slowed, and almost stopped (not of flu, year by year!)—the rate of increase has slowed, I mean. The totals necessarily can only increase. The Wu Flu began in December, and it’s not growing worse at the hot zone, or really anywhere in China.
Hubei province, Google tells me, has 58.5 million people. China (Monday morning, EST) had 80,735 reported cases, which are spread all over the country of one billion souls. Even if all cases were in Hubei, the population case rate is 0.14%. China deaths (also Monday morning) 3,119. This is a 3.8% in-case death rate, or 0.005% death rate for the whole population. Tuesday morning update: 80,754 cases, 3,136 deaths, almost no change.
And the numbers are slowing fast (get it?) in China. Cities nearby Hubei aren’t “going exponential”—the most favored phrase I read—except in the trivial sense that going from 1 to 2 to 4 cases is exponential, but not especially concerning.
Panicked yet?
Here’s another take:

In case you can’t see it, it reads:

American Hospital Association “Best Guess Epidemiology” for #codiv19 over next 2 months:
96,000,000 infections
4,800,000 hospitalizations
1,900,000 ICU admissions
480,000 deaths
vs flu in 2019:
35,500,000 infections
490,600 hospitalizations
49,000 ICU admissions
34,200 deaths

Those stats are for the USA alone, not the world. Though I did see an ackshually guy say it’s not the whole AHA but just one professor. These kind of numbers are not uncommon from all kinds of sources, however.
Here’s another “As the coronavirus spreads, one study predicts that even the best-case scenario is 15 million dead and a $2.4 trillion hit to global GDP“. If you read the story, this is the “best-case scenario”, too.
On the other hand, some caution: Why Novel Coronavirus Fatality is Likely Overestimated.
CDC on the flu, week ending 29 February (these are always 1-2 week delayed):

CDC estimates that so far this season there have been at least 34 million flu illnesses, 350,000 hospitalizations and 20,000 deaths from flu.

USA deaths from coronachan: 22. Germany, incidentally, which had more than twice the number of USA cases had 0 deaths (so far).
A lot of people on our side of the divide are on Trump for on Monday pointing out last year saw 37,000 flu deaths in the USA. As if him saying it making its wrong or unimportant. Everything is political.
Italy and Iran had many more deaths. Iran might be slowly, Italy nearing its peak, probably.
Now you will remember what happened with SARS (see the links above where I keep repeating this). It was bad at the hot zone, and in a couple of other remote places, like Canada, which had very high, double-digit death rates. But it was almost benign in many other remote places. Similar kind of thing is happening with coronavirus. Whether is remains like this is only a guess. These guesses may be way off and this thing escalates like the AHA says. It hasn’t done so by now in China, but hey, we could have bad luck.
What has apparently (or might have) happened with coronavirus is that there are two strains, the worst in China and perhaps Italy and Iran, and the milder most everywhere else. I haven’t seen any confirmation this is so (about who has what), but it would explain the differences.
Incidentally, the tests people are using for diagnosing coronachan, and there are many, are not perfect. With the heightened publicity, i.e. panic, many more are going to be checked and surely some false positives are finding their way into the case numbers. That’s less likely with deaths, but not impossible. That means the true overall death rate might be higher than we think. But it also much less infectious than we think. We won’t know any of this for sure until long after, when it becomes the interest of obscure scholars.
Here’s another hot take. Barbie said, “Math is hard!”
No, wait. This one. This PhD said (click to see the whole thread):

We’re looking at about 1M US cases by the end of April, 2M by ~May 5, 4M by ~May 11, and so on. Exponentials are hard to grasp, but this is how they go. 4/n

I pointed out:

Exponentials sure are hard to grasp. Logistic curves are even harder.
Infections resemble logistic curves and not exponentials, for the excellent reason that exponentials always predict *everyone* will be infected in time. And this never happens. 1/
Look, even CHINA (a billion souls) does NOT have MILLIONS infected, even after 2-3 months of the outbreak. How is it we’re going to beat their numbers so far from the hot zone? 2/

I point this kind of thing out, and some get it. Some, though, are almost angry, as if any good news about this virus is unwelcome.
So many more headlines! Like Ross Douthat’s “My Sunday column: The Coronavirus is Coming For Trump’s Presidency” in which he among other cringey things wrote the eye-rolling “Obviously the White House isn’t to blame for everything that’s gone wrong with the coronavirus response.” Rod Dreher is taking the Fr James Martin role. Never Trumpers in general are trying to score political points.
The WSJ had a headline I’m too lazy to find that ran something like “How deadly plagues will become more common”, which was redolent of global warming concern.
Finally, a word on cancellations. I said it last time, but it bears emphasis. Many companies and politicians are banning travel, forbidding gatherings and the like. Some of this is surely concern and appropriate. But I’d bet much is fear—-fear of the crowd. Just what would happen to MegaCorp Inc. Ltd. if an employee gets coronavirus on an official business trip when all the other companies have stopped flying?
What would happen to the politician who wasn’t seen spending billions on brother-in-law contracts and sees an outbreak in his constituency? To ask is to answer. All this adds to the panic.

Onto the Numbers!

We had the initial peak, then the spread with the expected secondary peak. Will there be third and subsequent peaks? Will the coronavirus be like the flu or the ordinary coronavirus and be with us perennially? Will this really explode like it did in China everywhere? Hey, maybe, maybe not. Nobody knows. Not so likely though, because deadly contagious diseases tend to fade out or only pop up from time to time, like ebola or MERS.
One thing that we cannot do is this, which I see everywhere. Given “I don’t know what’s really going on” we cannot conclude “It’s really bad out there!” This is Talebism. The only thing you can say if you don’t know what’s really going on is that you don’t know what will happen. To say anything else is to take a black swan dive.
Here is the code and the data (see earlier posts for details). All numbers from 8 PM EST, Monday night. You MUST read updates II and III for the code notes if you’re playing along; all the caveats, and there are many, are there.
Here is the naive model applied to the total cases and deaths:

The guess for total cases is ~160,000; total deaths ~6,200. This is higher than last week, but I changed the date of the second peak start to make the totals higher, since it seemed model was catching the top of the secondary peak. That it might be is seen in the next picture.
Here’s the daily cases:

Have we reached the secondary peak? If so, then the model is probably not terrible, though I’d guess it’s an underestimate, as it was during the primary peak. If the same pattern holds, multiply everything by (today) 1.1 to 1.3. That multiplicative adjustments goes to 1 as we approach the secondary peak, naturally.
What if there’s a third peak? Obviously, this naive model can’t see it. But neither can we see it in the data. It’s only a guess one way or another. We have to wait and find out.
Here’s the daily deaths:

Just as we cautioned last week, the daily deaths necessarily had to lag daily cases, for you can’t die until after you get sick. Again, look for the media to tout the deaths and not the cases. But because the deaths haven’t yet reached the secondary peak, the daily forecasts are surely too low. Also, deaths are more than in the primary peak, which is of interest, and suggests there might be a third peak, but smaller.
Looks like we have a couple more weeks of madness ahead of us.
Addendum
The daily data per country is here; see China, for instance. The model can be used on the country data, too, and it would make a great exercise to do so.
I also said this:
People are taking actions to prevent spread of the disease (especially hyper vigilant actions) as absolute evidence of the prevalence of the disease. This is like saying the number of people who buckle up makes a good estimate of number hurt or killed in car crashes.
Many normally sober people with expertise who are making predictions are very scared, it seems, of being on the wrong side. They’re fearful of hearing “You said it wouldn’t be bad, but look how many died!”
But they’re willing to hear “You way over-forecast.”
This is wishcasting and wrong.
The decision people make based on the forecast can be weighted lopsidedly; very willing to suffer false positives, say.
But the best forecast is always the most accurate, regardless of the cost-loss of decisions.
We’re aiming for accuracy here with the most unsophisticated model we can make, taking only into account the “shape” of viral outbreaks (this is also a stats class post). It hasn’t been terrible. It might turn terrible, but then it also might stay un-terrible.
Of course, I have to guard against the opposite, and be careful not to under-forecast because of all the over-forecasts.

C-VIRUS BY THE NUMBERS #2

THE SECOND OF TWO POSTS LOOKING AT THE STATISTICS WHICH INDICATE HOW VIRULENT AND HOW SERIOUS THE COVID-19 REALLY IS. [NOTE THAT THERE ARE OTHER POSTS IN THIS SERIES BY Dr. BRIGGS].

Coronavirus Update IV — Take A Deep Breath — If You Still Can

by BriggsPosted on March 10, 2020

Apologies for the duplicate email! I hit the wrong button yesterday and published the incomplete update meant for today.
All the good stuff, caveats, and explanations are linked, some in Update III, and the most important in Update II, so go there first before complaining. Or skip to the bottom for the latest model.
Personal update: I haven’t seen any panic in NYC. Toilet paper still on shelves. On a flight to Florida on the weekend was one passenger wearing surgical gloves, and a mother insisting on wiping down everything her kids would come into contact with.

Condoms are selling out, because why? Because people are putting them on their fingers to avoid coronavirus. And this.
Panicked yet?
“Don’t joke, Briggs. You don’t understand. It’s much worse than they’re saying.”
That so? How do you know?
“Because the numbers they’re reporting are wrong, faked, too low.”
No kidding? How do you know?
“Because it’s much worse than they’re saying.’
That so? How do you know?…
Iterate ad nauseum.

Yes, because anything other than instantly reporting numbers on iffy tests in rambunctious medical circumstances points to a conspiracy. I’ve worked with medical data for twenty years, and the best you can say about it is it’s a mess. Look at our own data. It’s not like the entire world has got together to decide to release 100% accurate counts at 8 PM Eastern Savings Time. Numbers come in from all over, staggered and rough. We must account for this in our minds when wondering whether how much to trust the model.
Last Friday I did some numbers, which unfortunately I cannot update, because my number source stopped carrying totals for individual Chinese cities. A real pain in the kiester. Nevertheless, here’s what I did then. The idea is still sound:

Diamond Princess carried 2,670 and 1,100 crew, and had 696 coronavirus cases [still 696], or 18%. 6 dead [it’s now 7, but I’ll leave this as it is], which is 0.8% among cases, or 0.16% in toto.
This ship makes nice upper estimates: consider the tight quarters and mandatory mingling and isolation.
Then look at Shagnhai (close to Wuhan), which had Monday about 337 cases and 3 deaths—months after the outbreak. Shaghai has 24.24 million souls.
Thus: 0.14% case rate, 1% in-case death rate, 0.00001% death rate in toto.
A nice lower estimate.
A little too low, though. Applying Shanghai to world [7.7 billion] gives ~110,000 total cases, ~1,000 deaths.
We now have ~100,000 cases, ~3,400 deaths. But near the secondary peak.
Princess to world: ~142 million cases, ~12.3 million deaths. With no indication data trending that way.

China’s numbers have long since slowed, and almost stopped (not of flu, year by year!)—the rate of increase has slowed, I mean. The totals necessarily can only increase. The Wu Flu began in December, and it’s not growing worse at the hot zone, or really anywhere in China.
Hubei province, Google tells me, has 58.5 million people. China (Monday morning, EST) had 80,735 reported cases, which are spread all over the country of one billion souls. Even if all cases were in Hubei, the population case rate is 0.14%. China deaths (also Monday morning) 3,119. This is a 3.8% in-case death rate, or 0.005% death rate for the whole population. Tuesday morning update: 80,754 cases, 3,136 deaths, almost no change.
And the numbers are slowing fast (get it?) in China. Cities nearby Hubei aren’t “going exponential”—the most favored phrase I read—except in the trivial sense that going from 1 to 2 to 4 cases is exponential, but not especially concerning.
Panicked yet?
Here’s another take:

In case you can’t see it, it reads:

American Hospital Association “Best Guess Epidemiology” for #codiv19 over next 2 months:
96,000,000 infections
4,800,000 hospitalizations
1,900,000 ICU admissions
480,000 deaths
vs flu in 2019:
35,500,000 infections
490,600 hospitalizations
49,000 ICU admissions
34,200 deaths

Those stats are for the USA alone, not the world. Though I did see an ackshually guy say it’s not the whole AHA but just one professor. These kind of numbers are not uncommon from all kinds of sources, however.
Here’s another “As the coronavirus spreads, one study predicts that even the best-case scenario is 15 million dead and a $2.4 trillion hit to global GDP“. If you read the story, this is the “best-case scenario”, too.
On the other hand, some caution: Why Novel Coronavirus Fatality is Likely Overestimated.
CDC on the flu, week ending 29 February (these are always 1-2 week delayed):

CDC estimates that so far this season there have been at least 34 million flu illnesses, 350,000 hospitalizations and 20,000 deaths from flu.

USA deaths from coronachan: 22. Germany, incidentally, which had more than twice the number of USA cases had 0 deaths (so far).
A lot of people on our side of the divide are on Trump for on Monday pointing out last year saw 37,000 flu deaths in the USA. As if him saying it making its wrong or unimportant. Everything is political.
Italy and Iran had many more deaths. Iran might be slowly, Italy nearing its peak, probably.
Now you will remember what happened with SARS (see the links above where I keep repeating this). It was bad at the hot zone, and in a couple of other remote places, like Canada, which had very high, double-digit death rates. But it was almost benign in many other remote places. Similar kind of thing is happening with coronavirus. Whether is remains like this is only a guess. These guesses may be way off and this thing escalates like the AHA says. It hasn’t done so by now in China, but hey, we could have bad luck.
What has apparently (or might have) happened with coronavirus is that there are two strains, the worst in China and perhaps Italy and Iran, and the milder most everywhere else. I haven’t seen any confirmation this is so (about who has what), but it would explain the differences.
Incidentally, the tests people are using for diagnosing coronachan, and there are many, are not perfect. With the heightened publicity, i.e. panic, many more are going to be checked and surely some false positives are finding their way into the case numbers. That’s less likely with deaths, but not impossible. That means the true overall death rate might be higher than we think. But it also much less infectious than we think. We won’t know any of this for sure until long after, when it becomes the interest of obscure scholars.
Here’s another hot take. Barbie said, “Math is hard!”
No, wait. This one. This PhD said (click to see the whole thread):

We’re looking at about 1M US cases by the end of April, 2M by ~May 5, 4M by ~May 11, and so on. Exponentials are hard to grasp, but this is how they go. 4/n

I pointed out:

Exponentials sure are hard to grasp. Logistic curves are even harder.
Infections resemble logistic curves and not exponentials, for the excellent reason that exponentials always predict *everyone* will be infected in time. And this never happens. 1/
Look, even CHINA (a billion souls) does NOT have MILLIONS infected, even after 2-3 months of the outbreak. How is it we’re going to beat their numbers so far from the hot zone? 2/

I point this kind of thing out, and some get it. Some, though, are almost angry, as if any good news about this virus is unwelcome.
So many more headlines! Like Ross Douthat’s “My Sunday column: The Coronavirus is Coming For Trump’s Presidency” in which he among other cringey things wrote the eye-rolling “Obviously the White House isn’t to blame for everything that’s gone wrong with the coronavirus response.” Rod Dreher is taking the Fr James Martin role. Never Trumpers in general are trying to score political points.
The WSJ had a headline I’m too lazy to find that ran something like “How deadly plagues will become more common”, which was redolent of global warming concern.
Finally, a word on cancellations. I said it last time, but it bears emphasis. Many companies and politicians are banning travel, forbidding gatherings and the like. Some of this is surely concern and appropriate. But I’d bet much is fear—-fear of the crowd. Just what would happen to MegaCorp Inc. Ltd. if an employee gets coronavirus on an official business trip when all the other companies have stopped flying?
What would happen to the politician who wasn’t seen spending billions on brother-in-law contracts and sees an outbreak in his constituency? To ask is to answer. All this adds to the panic.

Onto the Numbers!

We had the initial peak, then the spread with the expected secondary peak. Will there be third and subsequent peaks? Will the coronavirus be like the flu or the ordinary coronavirus and be with us perennially? Will this really explode like it did in China everywhere? Hey, maybe, maybe not. Nobody knows. Not so likely though, because deadly contagious diseases tend to fade out or only pop up from time to time, like ebola or MERS.
One thing that we cannot do is this, which I see everywhere. Given “I don’t know what’s really going on” we cannot conclude “It’s really bad out there!” This is Talebism. The only thing you can say if you don’t know what’s really going on is that you don’t know what will happen. To say anything else is to take a black swan dive.
Here is the code and the data (see earlier posts for details). All numbers from 8 PM EST, Monday night. You MUST read updates II and III for the code notes if you’re playing along; all the caveats, and there are many, are there.
Here is the naive model applied to the total cases and deaths:

The guess for total cases is ~160,000; total deaths ~6,200. This is higher than last week, but I changed the date of the second peak start to make the totals higher, since it seemed model was catching the top of the secondary peak. That it might be is seen in the next picture.
Here’s the daily cases:

Have we reached the secondary peak? If so, then the model is probably not terrible, though I’d guess it’s an underestimate, as it was during the primary peak. If the same pattern holds, multiply everything by (today) 1.1 to 1.3. That multiplicative adjustments goes to 1 as we approach the secondary peak, naturally.
What if there’s a third peak? Obviously, this naive model can’t see it. But neither can we see it in the data. It’s only a guess one way or another. We have to wait and find out.
Here’s the daily deaths:

Just as we cautioned last week, the daily deaths necessarily had to lag daily cases, for you can’t die until after you get sick. Again, look for the media to tout the deaths and not the cases. But because the deaths haven’t yet reached the secondary peak, the daily forecasts are surely too low. Also, deaths are more than in the primary peak, which is of interest, and suggests there might be a third peak, but smaller.
Looks like we have a couple more weeks of madness ahead of us.
Addendum
The daily data per country is here; see China, for instance. The model can be used on the country data, too, and it would make a great exercise to do so.
I also said this:
People are taking actions to prevent spread of the disease (especially hyper vigilant actions) as absolute evidence of the prevalence of the disease. This is like saying the number of people who buckle up makes a good estimate of number hurt or killed in car crashes.
Many normally sober people with expertise who are making predictions are very scared, it seems, of being on the wrong side. They’re fearful of hearing “You said it wouldn’t be bad, but look how many died!”
But they’re willing to hear “You way over-forecast.”
This is wishcasting and wrong.
The decision people make based on the forecast can be weighted lopsidedly; very willing to suffer false positives, say.
But the best forecast is always the most accurate, regardless of the cost-loss of decisions.
We’re aiming for accuracy here with the most unsophisticated model we can make, taking only into account the “shape” of viral outbreaks (this is also a stats class post). It hasn’t been terrible. It might turn terrible, but then it also might stay un-terrible.
Of course, I have to guard against the opposite, and be careful not to under-forecast because of all the over-forecasts.

C-VIRUS BY THE NUMBERS #1

STATISTICS PLAY A VITAL PART IN DETERMINING HOW DANGEROUS AND HOW VIRULENT COVID-19 ACTUALLY IS.

THIS IS THE FIRST OF TWO POSTS LOOKING AT THE NUMBERS TO DATE.

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March 9, 2020

Coronavirus Codswallop -- By the Numbers

By Brian C. Joondeph

"Codswallop" is one of those interesting words that might have been used by Supreme Court justice Anton Scalia in a dissenting opinion, or by conservative intellectual William F. Buckley in describing some liberal policy.
It's a British expression that refers to words or ideas that are foolish or untrue — in other words, nonsense.
While codswallop is a good description of the entire Democrat agenda, today I will restrict its use to the hysteria surrounding the coronavirus outbreak, media fear-mongering, and resulting public panic.
Big media are all about ratings, view, and clicks, hence their axiom, "If it bleeds, it leads."  A viral outbreak is the perfect story, on par with a missing Malaysian airliner or a celebrity football player named OJ on trial for murder.
The added bonus is that any negative news can be laid at the feet of a president loathed by the media, who just so happens to be running for re-election.  The media are in full campaign mode, trying desperately to drag the carcass of one of their corpselike candidates across the presidential finish line.
Stoking fear over quarantines and supply chain disruptions has sent the stock market on a downward roller coaster ride.  One of President Trump's major achievements is the roaring economy.  Taking the stock market down 25% or more may help the Democrats.  But by the numbers, the economy is still roaring, bolstered by the February jobs report of 273,000 added jobs, more than expected, and record-low 3.5% unemployment.
Despite the hair-on-fire reporting of coronavirus news, let's look at some actual numbers, rather than the codswallop from CNN or MSNBC.  Statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Dashboard are illustrative.
At the time of this writing, there are 107,352 cases worldwide, 3,646 deaths, and 60,558 recoveries.  Fifteen of those deaths occurred in the U.S.  The odds of recovering are far higher than the odds of dying.
Cases in mainland China have peaked, with few added cases over the past week.  Cases elsewhere are on the rise, following the same pattern as China in early February.  Recoveries are rising at an even faster rate.
Granted that China may be better equipped to institute mandatory quarantines and travel restrictions under their command and control government, the pattern is similar to the disease course for other viral epidemics.
Anthony Fauci, M.D., of the National Institutes of Health and a member of the Trump administration's task force, gave some perspective in a New England Journal of Medicine editorial:

The median age of the patients was 59 years, with higher morbidity and mortality among the elderly and among those with coexisting conditions (similar to the situation with influenza).
The overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza.

In other words, the coronavirus may be a nastier version of the seasonal flu, potentially fatal for the elderly and infirm.  How many Americans die from the flu each day?  Let's ask the CDC.
Influenza and pneumonia caused 55,672 deaths in the U.S. in 2017, or 153 persons per day.  As a reminder, only 15 have died from the coronavirus to date, the number dying in any four-hour period from the flu.
Over the past decade, influenza has affected between 9.3 and 45 million persons each year, depending on the flu severity.  Hospitalizations for the flu have ranged from 140,000 to 800,000 persons per year, and deaths varied between 12,000 and 61,000 each year.
These numbers, in America only, far eclipse the number of coronavirus fatalities worldwide, about 3,600 thus far.  This could and will likely change, but are the numbers worthy of the hair-on-fire reaction from cable news anchors and Democrat politicians?
Remember the coronavirus mortality rate of 3.4% pushed by the World Health Organization, the global Deep State's health mouthpiece?  President Trump said that number was too high and was excoriated by the liberal media, eagerly willing to trade a bunch of dead Americans for a Trump defeat in November.
It turns out the president was correct.  Health and Human Services assistant secretary Admiral Brett Giroir declared, "The best estimates now of the overall mortality rate for COVID-19 is somewhere between 0.1% and 1%."
For comparison, the fatality rate for the seasonal flu is 0.1%.  The coronavirus fatality rate is likely similar to the 0.1–1% figure based on confirmed cases.  How many individuals have a normal cold, when in reality they have the coronavirus, and recover after a week?  That would mean that far more are infected but are unreported, as their infection is a nonevent, making the fatality rate lower than reported.
Look also at past viral illnesses, far more lethal than the coronavirus.  The fatality rate for MERS and SARS was 34.4 and 9.5% respectively.  Neither illness generated as much media hysteria as coronavirus.
Swine flu, also known as H1N1, happened on Obama's watch.  With over 60 million cases in the U.S., and over 12,000 deaths, where was the vitriol hurled at Obama, compared to what we are seeing directed toward Trump?
Another number ignored by the media is the number of cases of coronavirus per capita.  The U.S. rate is obviously far lower than China, South Korea, and Japan, but also lower than Italy, France, Germany, and Spain.
President Trump's decisive actions, again contrary to media reporting, are responsible for keeping U.S. numbers down due to his travel ban.
For additional perspective, heart disease kills 1,774 persons a day, cancer 1,641, accidents 466, and strokes 401 per day.  A recent tornado in Tennessee claimed 24 lives, almost twice the number of Americans who died from the coronavirus thus far.
Some other numbers offer perspective. Americans die each year from unusual causes. One hundred sixty die each year from autoerotic asphyxiation, 67 are victims of serial killers, 986 are killed by police, 75 from lawnmowers, 31 struck by lightning, and one American dies each year being trampled on Black Friday.
I haven't heard any media angst over lawnmowers or auto-erotica.  Medical errors are also far more dangerous than any viral epidemic.  From 250,000 to 400,000 Americans die each year from medical errors, the third most common cause of death in the U.S.  What would happen if Bernie Sanders got his wish and government were in charge of all of health care?
Numbers are inconvenient to the media — particularly the math-challenged like MSNBC's Brian Williams and NY Times editor Mara Gay discussing Bloomberg's campaign spending, being off by a factor of a million.  How can we trust these people reporting on coronavirus numbers?
President Franklin D. Roosevelt once said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."  If you watch the evening news or read the daily newspaper, you will be inundated with fear.  Take the constant barrage of coronavirus codswallop with a grain of salt, and keep things in perspective.
Brian C Joondeph, M.D. is a Denver-based physician and freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in American Thinker, Daily Caller, Rasmussen Reports, and other publications.