"Facts about COVID-19": Swiss Propaganda Research Article

[pamojja]

On top of this omission they even didn´t make clear if there was any excess at all with the already known covid-19 death, from the words they used I´d say: No (and then we would have so far indeed no really severe problem). This is wishi washi, as it is what Wieler said. In German its called verdummung, dom maken/ houden, making/keeping dump so to say, and indeed, "never critisize me" is the next step.

And doesn't it works? Nobody feels empowered enough to trust the officially published numbers. Here the excess mortality for Germany from 2016 until 14th week of 2020:

And for comparison the Netherlands with the same time-period:

All other European countries monitored for the same time-period in the picture of post https://forums.phoenixrising.me/threads/facts-about-covid-19.79636/post-2268870 above - click to enlarge.

 

[Bergkamp]

Then you have to admit lock-downs are only based on models but not sound science!

Models are science. statistics P-values, confidence intervals, etc. Because that’s what models are based on, and that is all as science as it can be.

The alternative was shown year after year in fromer yearly respiratory infection pandemics to work and well documented by epidemiologists.

Again, this is a novel virus. It has different properties than all the other viruses we had before. So, there is a limit to what you can conclude from previous pandemics.

Your only question the legitimation of me to give a voice to it, but acertain the same right to yourself for what particular stringent reason?

As I said, I’ve got the top epidemiologist in the country, with a whole team, or company even, of epidemiologists behind him, showing me that a lockdown works, with actual, granular data and charts. And it’s not only my country that’s doing a lockdown, it’s basically every major western country, with all the various institutes behind them, except Sweden perhaps.

Even Fauci himself anounced on February 28th already:

I agree with everything he’s saying here. If, yes IF, the amount of infected would be several times higher we would be looking at something comparable to a very bad flu epidemic (however in my country it’s already worse than the worst flu epidemic since we started tracking them). However, in that case you still need to impose restrictive measures because this illness, other than flu, makes people spend up to 3 weeks on the IC, thereby causing capacity problems which could make it far worse.

 

[andyguitar]

In all countries - as it seems - a corona case is everybody who tested positive for corona. A corona death is similarily evaluated.

This is not what happens in the UK. A corona case can be someone who, in the opinion of a Doc has it. No lab test is required. Same with deaths. They "Died with corona virus" not from it.

The epidemiologists are making predictions based on data that lacks a crucial element. How many people have been infected?. This can only be determined by antibody testing. Without this information they are making a guess. How qualified they are is not relevant.

 

[JES]

The epidemiologists are making predictions based on data that lacks a crucial element. How many people have been infected?. This can only be determined by antibody testing. Without this information they are making a guess. How qualified they are is not relevant.

Which is what you would do, you go by the best available evidence at the given time. There are some weird misconceptions about science in this thread, as if science was only about empirical evidence gathered from observations. Most of science, aside from some pure physics perhaps, is about using the best possible models, obviously based on observations, to get an understanding of our world. Medicine is a prime example of this, it's often categorized as an applied science since all diseases are really man-made categorizations. In order to react to an epidemic, it's absolutely necessary to rely on models and predictions, if you wait for the best possible data to emerge you are going to act too late.

 

[pattismith]

Which of course begs the question what went wrong with the 1918 spanish flu? There might be many factors which in retrospect might not be easily verified (lasting worldwar, starvation, terrible immunity..).

Flu virus are different from coronavirus, but still it's interesting to look at it,
from wikipedia:

"The second wave of the 1918 pandemic was much more deadly than the first. The first wave had resembled typical flu epidemics; those most at risk were the sick and elderly, while younger, healthier people recovered easily. By August, when the second wave began in France, Sierra Leone, and the United States,[100] the virus had mutated to a much more deadly form. October 1918 was the month with the highest fatality rate of the whole pandemic"
This flu had a different target than usual:
"The pandemic mostly killed young adults. In 1918–1919, 99% of pandemic influenza deaths in the U.S. occurred in people under 65, and nearly half of deaths were in young adults 20 to 40 years old."

Some suggest that lockdown/social measures played a role in the pandemic evolution:

 

[Bergkamp]

Already 1 week later the daily deaths plateaued. If there was an effect by the strict lock-down it only could have shown 3 weeks later. The average time from infection to death by covid (if not remaining asymptomatic). The outlying later peak was sufficiently explained by you.

Thank you for this post. You couldn’t have proven my point in a more efficient way.

The fact is, we have on several occasions throughout March imposed stricter measures. On 12 March everyone was advised to work from home, group events were forbidden, and to stay home in any case if you had a cold. A week before that these measures were imposed on Noord-Brabant, the most heavily impacted region. On 15 March all bars and restaurants were closed. Some days later we closed schools.

All these different measures, that’s were the plateau comes from. However, with these measures the ICUs were still overcrowding so we imposed more stringent measures on the 23rd. Again, these issues, the several measures and how that would result, to what extent and in what number at what time, depends on a wide set of variables that you or I probably won’t be able to understand.

Of course, because that until now was the only way to outlife such pandemics. I'm in agreement.

He actually had to painfully come back from this, saying herd immunity is not the goal, just a by-effect of current policy - as I’ve stated before, staying within ICU capacity but simultaneously letting the virus spread within limits. Source is
here but in Dutch

 

[pamojja]

Thanks @pattismith for this historic perspective from the US I wasn't aware of (only that this coronavirus doesn't show much different from the 100 respiratory infections that came inbetween).

Which raises the question to those who know US history well: what was the distinct difference for cities then being hardest hit?

..as if science was only about empirical evidence gathered from observations.

Its rather a very complex pyramid:

The base has to be there, but where knowledge has advanced to repeatedly made observation, the pyramid can't be turned up-side down. Or one is risking one's credibilty in the scientific world.

 

[Hip]

Ok, one more deep breath..

At timecode 13:40 of Professor Knut Wittkowski's video, he talks about China and South Korea's figures. China I am not sure I would rely on, as the CIA have said Chinese figures are highly manipulated.

As for South Korea, his says self quarantine was ordered on 21 Feb, and national social distancing ordered 29 Feb, and the peak in daily new cases occurred around 1 April.

Then he says "social distancing started only long after the number of infections had already started to decline".


Well, what he fails to consider is the effect of wearing masks. Mask wearing in times of epidemics is a normal and natural response in Asia. Thus when the pandemic started to take hold in Korea, the populace would have all naturally started to wear masks, without being told to do so.

South Korea also implemented widespread testing as a means to stop the virus. He fails to mention this.

These measures were very effective, because South Korea has not gone into lockdown, and life continues as normal, with the deaths so far in South Korea being just 208 to date.



So this retired professor appears to have missed out the most important factors in the control of the South Korea pandemic. Which shows he does not really know what he is talking about.

Note also that no other scientists are mentioned as authors on Professor Knut Wittkowski's paper. Often papers have half a dozen or more researchers listed as authors, but I expect no scientist who values their reputation would want to collaborate with this man.

It's not uncommon for retired academics to go off the rails.

 

[Rufous McKinney]

This is the most concerning aspect in all this. The residents are sitting ducks. It's horrible.

here in my local area, the hospice workers aren't allowed to visit the patients in hospice. Very concerning.

 

[pattismith]

Thanks @pattismith for this historic perspective from the US I wasn't aware of (only that this coronavirus doesn't show much different from the 100 respiratory infections that came inbetween).

Which raises the question to those who know US history well: what was the distinct difference for cities then being hardest hit?

.

In the article from which I quoted the graph on the spanish flu pandemic city by city, they explain the difference of curve (flattening of the curve for example) was the result of lockdown measures (they explain what kind of measures were taken). Philadelphia waited too long before taking the measures and so had a sharper deaths pike than other cities. Some cities didn't stand with the measures long enough and got a rebound, etc

 

[Bergkamp]

Same thing, but this time with an empirical background: Yesterday in Dutch news (NOS) they said that there is a higher mortality observed in the last month, presumably coming from corona deaths "which havn´t been diagnosed and died at home". So, same thought, but I would have thought that they give the percentage, so that the viewer can know how much people have died more than usually within a month ( ... or within a three month time, or within a half year).

On top of this omission they even didn´t make clear if there was any excess at all with the already known covid-19 deaths, having died in hospitals. From the words they used I´d say: No (and then we would have so far indeed no really severe problem).

I have some data here that could probably clear that up.

Weekly deaths vs other years

Another figure

These charts cannot make it more clear I would think. In the article where the second chart is from, coming from the RIVM, the national health institute in the Netherlands, they say that the excess death in the week from 26 March to 1 April was 1700-2000. The reported number of COVID-19 deaths was 936. Hence, there are about 2x more deaths than reported, perfectly in line with what I mentioned before about underreporting of deaths.

 

[pamojja]

Thank you for this post. You couldn’t have proven my point in a more efficient way.

If you want to learn from history don't make the mistake of Ancel Keys, who 'proved' with the 7-country study that cholesterol is bad for health. Only to be disproved by reviewers, who showed that his result was only derived by selecting 7 countries out of many more to prove his point. Which with the same method could just as well be disproven. Nevermind, the appointed experts of the field are only decades later backpedalling.

So this retired professor appears to have missed out the most important factors in the control of the South Korea pandemic.

He tried to analyse the already available early data. Where I agree that China's numbers are too unrelyable, and South Korea's previous experience with such pandemics put it in a very different place. South Korea alledgedly even offered the US to assist with their experience. Which the US sadly declined.

To disprove or prove we are very soon in the position when many more countries have advanced in their epidemic. However, for that, and I agree with Bergkamp, the meassures taken have to be carefully differentiated.

The fact is, we have on several occasions throughout March imposed stricter measures. On 12 March everyone was advised to work from home, group events were forbidden, and to stay home in any case if you had a cold. A week before that these measures were imposed on Noord-Brabant, the most heavily impacted region. On 15 March all bars and restaurants were closed. Some days later we closed schools.

All these different measures, that’s were the plateau comes from. However, with these measures the ICUs were still overcrowding so we imposed more stringent measures on the 23rd. Again, these issues, the several measures and how that would result, to what extent and in what number at what time, depends on a wide set of variables that you or I probably won’t be able to understand.

Where it might become clearly evident that some of the close-down meassures were more effective than others. Like in this case, where the strictest lock-down added less returns.

1 or 2 or 3 country in this worldwide epidemic doesn't prove anything one way or other. But looking at all of them will.

 

[pamojja]

These charts cannot make it more clear I would think.

Not much different from the chart I posted for the Netherlands. Only that the first goes many more years back in time. But it should be also clearly obvious, that Netherlands doesn't reflect the situation of most European countries, nor of this world. And we have to differentiate if we want to learn anything from this for the future.

 

[pamojja]

here in my local area, the hospice workers aren't allowed to visit the patients in hospice. Very concerning.

Here all nursing homes visits are banned too, but of course in hospices its most devastating.

Poor old! Now you're all alone!

In 2018 a total of 954,874 people died in Germany. The day with the highest death rate was 3 March 2018, on this day 3,863 people died in Germany. In the period between February and mid-April, the daily death rate was well over 3,000, for the rest of the year, with one exception in August, it was between 2,300 and 3,000. 2,302 people in the age group of 80 years and older died in Germany on 03.03.2018. (Source: Federal Statistical Office)

The topic of care is often politically abused - now for the scare tactics!

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

..use deepl.com for better translation from german

 

[pamojja]

For anyone in the US who would like to advance the knowledge about covid with antibody testing, just found this trial in the US is looking for participants on an other forum:

NIH study’s focus on antibodies used to measure the extent of undetected transmission
The National Institutes of Health announced that it will look at antibodies to help understand just how far the coronavirus has subtly spread through the population.

In a “serosurvey” analyzing the blood samples of up to 10,000 volunteers, NIH said the presence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies serve as a sign that the body had encountered the disease and developed a response to it.

“An antibody test is looking back into the immune system’s history with a rearview mirror,” Dr. Matthew J. Memoli, the principal investigator of the study, said in a news release. “By analyzing an individual’s blood, we can determine if that person has encountered SARS-CoV-2 previously.”

NIH said the molecular tests that are commonly done by inserting a cotton swab into someone’s nose can identify a current infection, but they can’t tell whether a person was previously infected with COVID-19 and recovered.

A positive test for the SARS-CoV-2 antibodies confirms that they already had the disease.

“This study will give us a clearer picture of the true magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States by telling us how many people in different communities have been infected without knowing it, because they had a very mild, undocumented illness or did not access testing while they were sick,” according to Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “These crucial data will help us measure the impact of our public health efforts and guide our COVID-19 response moving forward.”

Healthy volunteers over the age of 18 from anywhere in the U.S. can participate, and will be asked to consent to enrollment over phone.

People with a confirmed history of coronavirus or current symptoms consistent with COVID-19 are not eligible to participate.

People interested in joining this study should contact clinicalstudiesunit@nih.gov. For more information, visit ClinicalTrials.gov using identifier NCT04334954.

 

[percyval577]

These charts cannot make it more clear I would think. In the article where the second chart is from, coming from the RIVM, the national health institute in the Netherlands, they say that the excess death in the week from 26 March to 1 April was 1700-2000.

The reported number of COVID-19 deaths was 936. Hence, there are about 2x more deaths than reported, perfectly in line with what I mentioned before about underreporting of deaths.

Somehow strange when comparing with the following report:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/coronavirus-is-only-part-of-the-excess-fatality-mystery.html

from the article

And Italy isn’t alone. In Spain, El País obtained a study that showed mortality rates in some regions had almost doubled, with only a fraction of the increase officially attributed to COVID-19. So what accounts for all those other deaths?​

...​

Reliable data establishing which deaths were directly caused by COVID-19, which were indirectly caused by COVID-19 because of failed health-care systems, and how many people would have died anyway may not be available for months or years.​

 

[andyguitar]

In order to react to an epidemic, it's absolutely necessary to rely on models and predictions, if you wait for the best possible data to emerge you are going to act too late.

There is more than one model. The one chosen by the UK Gov was the most alarmist. When a decision is made that will result in millions becoming unemployed, thousands of busineses being destroyed, trillions being spent, the removal of the basic human rights as to who you associate with, what you do in your own time and where you go then that decision has to be based on accurate scientific information. As I say those who did the modelling are making a guess based on incomplete data. That is not very scientific. It's more to do with faith. May as well just toss a coin.

 

[pamojja]

Somehow strange.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/coronavirus-is-only-part-of-the-excess-fatality-mystery.html

Sadly I'm not surprised. From the first page I linked to experts who basically all posit 'the cure could be much worse than the disease' - of course unheard of from most party-line medias.

“The number of deaths that are being predicted from the pandemic are huge and will actually end up becoming the second or third leading cause of death this year,” said Dr. Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University. “But for the back of the envelope, all you need to do is think out a scenario where mortality rates from the leading causes of death, like heart disease, cancer, and so forth, increase by 10 percent and you’re suddenly dealing with very big numbers.”

A 2016 study in The Lancet connected at least 250,000 cancer deaths to the 2009 recession, and the stress of the pandemic and the economic crisis it has ignited will likely precipitate increased smoking, alcohol consumption, and drug use, as well. “The opioid epidemic was in the headlines until this came along, and it really hasn’t gone away,” said Woolf. “Now my colleagues in addiction medicine are reporting an increase in opioid overdoses during this pandemic.”

And since I've been traveling many years of my life, one deathly certain effect of a shut-down in developing African and South-Asian countries is simply thirst, hunger and disease. To an extent nobody here even started to fathom.

 

[Rufous McKinney]

For anyone in the US who would like to advance the knowledge about covid with antibody testing, just found this trial in the US is looking for participants on an other forum

Lets hope they intend to do random sampling......(?)

 

[percyval577]

I have some data here that could probably clear that up.
...
These charts cannot make it more clear I would think. .

Thanks a lot, very good to have.

We will see in the next week what it is going on, I think.