41 Replies to ““It is fair to ask about the numbers.””

  1. 400,000 cases of Chinese Flu, 12,000 dead, last count I had, it changes every day. USA

    But the number that concerns me is that only 40,000 have recovered.

    Are 348,000 still sick,
    or walking dead in the future?

    1. Those patients are fine,virtually 100% over the disease, but the medical establishment keeps them in limbo, hoping they’ll die in some fashion that can be attributed to corona.

      When something seems weird, always ask yourself “Cui Bono”. The medical establishment wants more deaths so it can grab more money and power. By medical establishment I mean bureaucrats, not front line doctors, nurses, orderlies etc.

      Yes, I’m cynical and paranoid, but so far, I have never been cynical or paranoid enough.

    2. It takes a long time to get over this disease and stop shedding virus. I think most countries require two negative tests before clearing a patient.

  2. This virus isn’t going away, sadly we should start planning for September as a date to be ready for. When September comes, maybe start planning for December. When December comes, start neighbourhood watch parties.

    Shoulda nuked China when we had the chance back in the 50’s.

    2. The plan by government has always been to MANAGE the infection rate, not prevent it!

      Flatten the curve meant, keeping the rate of infection the same, over a longer period of time, for hospitals to be able “to treat people”, not necessarily to save them.

      Their Hope is to last long enough until there is a vaccine, which same authorities say will take 18-24 months, if one could be made at all……….think about it, they’ve been lying early on when they suggested that it would only take 2 or 3 months to get back to normal life. But, none of them have said ANYTHING lately about duration. Their models show what the forecast is, ongoing infections for many months longer.

      The other Hope is that a valid treatment would be found to battle the disease. Hydrochloroquine appears to be very effective, particularly with Zpac and zinc, which has been independently treated on patients across the globe. But Trump said it too, therefore it must be discarded immediately, and thousands more should die indefinitely, if we take the advice of Dr Mika , Dr CNN, and Dr Le. Mon. These people should be tarred and feathered!

    3. Shoulda nuked China the USSR when we had the chance back in the 50’s 40’s.
      FIFY.

  3. 82, 172, world wide from J H U. as of this am. So far the total since Jan. hasn’t hit the daily death total world wide of 153 thousand plus per day.

    1. I wanna Know …

      Who Questions FAUCI..? and not about the Virus but his almost Maniacal stance on “We must DEVELOP A VACCINE..!! “. Who questions his association with Bill Gates..who’s apparently a big player in the Vaccine Pharmaceutical Industry.

      Seems to me there’s more to this than his serving his Hippocratic oath…a Fk ton more.
      Big Pharma is drooling over this one. ERGO that constant Trashing – Minimizing of Anti malarial – Anti HIV drugs. w/Zinc. By the two RATS noted above.

      1. What’s missing in all of this are the concepts of acceptable risk, probabilities, and tolerances. The insistence that everything has to be 100% safe, which is impossible, is making this situation worse. The universe rarely operates with absolutes, but, instead, uses nominal values with margins of error.

        Then again, that’s what one gets when one puts the scientifically illiterate in charge, giving advice to masses who know even less.

  5. ….50000+ Flu deaths (verified). The world yawns. 2000+ CV deaths (not verified). All hell breaks loose, the US is quarantined 7+ Million unemployed, 70% businesses closed. A 29 Trillion economy in jeopardy.
    The world has gone mad!

    1. TN it is beyond mad. There are insufficient adjectives to describe the lunacy.

      1. Indeed. Wanting to wait months for drug trials, of a well established, SAFE drug to be used to effectively cure patients, is irresponsible beyond words.
        Both Terry Tam and Bonnie Henry, while well meaning, are nothing more than professional resume builders and paper tigers. Yet, they are the ones calling the shots, to run and hide and shut things down.
        All while they get a nice fat pay check every 2 weeks.
        A 19th century response to a 21st century diseases.
        Instead, while preventative measures need to be taken, with PPE for all, shutting the world down is a huge mistake. But that’s been said plenty. The statists, Commies and socialists are now living their wet dream, the great experiment of a Command and Control economy

        1. Dan, when the tax base dries up there will be no paycheques for anyone anywhere.

  6. A few things:

    1. It sounds crass but saving some geriatric patients from an untimely death does not warrant shutting down the nation’s economy. We make many decisions in society that have a sort of life calculus built into them (e.g. speed limits); we could create a perfectly safe society but it wouldn’t be one worth living in. Geriatric patients are vulnerable to lung infections. My mother lived in a small care home in BC (20 beds). Five years ago, five of twenty residents died in one week due to the flu. it was sad but certainly not unprecedented. It happens all the time.

    2. Flattening the curve won’t actually save any lives; at best it will spread them out a bit more over time.

    3. The real problem is that our medical system has no margin built into it; this is the result of poor planning by bureaucrats, misplaced allocation of funds by governments and too much unionization in the medical professions. If our medical system was appropriately fund and run by visionaries, we would have the ability to quickly double or guadruple the number of ICU beds and ventilator equipment.

    4. We live in a society that is easy to panic. People have lost their faith foundations and it’s easy to scare the shit out of them. Some broadcaster intones in a deep voice, “Last night we lost four more people to COVID-19” and everyone freaks out. People die every day. Six thousand people die every hour on planet earth.

    5. Our government’s response to COVID-19 is based on computer modelling by a select few epidemiologists and their teams. There are PLENTY of experts with different views of how this should be managed. This diverging opinion is seemingly ignored by our governments.

    6. Our government is seriously contemplating using harvest of mass mobile phone data to track our movements and to ensure compliance with new rules. Does anyone think that such invasion of privacy would ever be lifted? Do we want to live in a country like China with the authorities monitoring our every move and transaction? Please remember that some of the folks who pose as our benefactors are actually enemies of an open and free society such as we have hitherto enjoyed. Lots of technocratically-inclined people, companies and agencies would love to control and monitor in the smallest details of our lives. Please remember the freedom is a precious and exceedingly fragile gift. If we don’t stand watch over our freedom and if we are not prepared to take crap in defending it, we will lose it without a doubt.

    7. I hope that Canadians start rebelling against the bullshit. We need to get people back to work pronto. No amount of government aid can undo the damage. And besides, government aid is just borrowing money from our kids and grandkids who will have to pay for our folly. If we ruin the economy, we’ll also ruin health-care.

    8. COVID-19 isn’t fun. I wouldn’t want to get it. If I did, I’m pretty sure I’d survive, however, I’m sixty, in good health, take care of myself and so I like my chances. However, I’m very confident that when this is all over, we will see that this was just an average season of deaths due to the flu…

    Wake up, people! Governments are almost always incompetent in their response to a crisis. This is no exception. The authorities act like they know what they’re doing but they haven’t got a clue. We need to wake up, speak loudly while we can, and if there is no change, we need to take the law into our own hands. If everybody just goes out to Stanley Park in Vancouver (now closed), what are they going to do? Arrest everyone for enjoying mother nature? We should NOT comply with this crap.

    I could paint a hundred scenarios from my neighborhood of human suffering caused by this: weddings that had to be cancelled, seniors deprived of all socialization and going crazy, charities running dry of cash and having to turn people away because nobody’s donating right now, surgery for stage III cancer cancelled, a restaurant about to start up after months and months of hard work and now it’s all fallen apart, a construction-related salesman who worked long hours to land a contract and now it’s all for naught; a physiotherapy student who won’t be graduating because his needed hand-on labs have been cancelled; his education will be extended for another year and that means more student loans etc. A mother who lost her job in the service sector. And that’s just our neighborhood. We need to tell these stories. And we need to insist on changed policies. The only sane policy is: Protect the vulnerable by isolating THEM, not the whole fricken world and for the rest, let the epidemic run its course. And especially closing the schools: what idiocy – kids are virtually immune to the dangers of this virus.

    1. “we could create a perfectly safe society but it wouldn’t be one worth living in”

      Correct.

      To those who are fixated on safety first may I remind them that the safest place in the US is a Federal Maximum Security prison.

      (Jeffery Epstein could not be reached for comment.)

    2. Please stop talking. You have no idea what you’re saying.

      Flattening the curve absolutely will save lives because it will prevent health systems from getting swamped leading to a mortality spike. One can argue about our current measures but you are talking trash.

      1. Welcome to the Flat Curve Society – it’s the new religion, so you’ll be right at home.

      2. Flattening the curve costs lives as well. We need to consider that. Especially if this lasts any longer. Suicide, lack of hospital care for stage 3 cancer patients, health ramifications of excess stress,etc. All the other side of the balance sheet that no govt official is talking about. H

      4. Well not if the subsequent global financial collapse lead to a Great Depression and a resurgence of Fascism, giving us another World War, I guess.

        I never understood how the way to fight a serious and challenging illness was to collapse global GDP by 25%, rendering most healthcare systems (and many farms) functionally bankrupt, and converting places like Spain and Italy into Venezuela, risking the associated rise in xenophobia and civil strife.

        Well, the operation was a success but the patient was too weak to handle it, and so sadly has passed.

        But then I am clearly not a wise, gender studies postdoc such as yourself, who is also an expert in global health, political economy and finance, so what do I know?

      5. Really, as an expert myself in modeling and analytics (I have done this stuff for a living for over 25 years) you place WAY too much faith in modeling, when you have ZERO FUCKING CLUE how to either build a model, manage a model, or validate and vet one.

        Shouldn’t have been a gender studies postdoc. You would have been better served becoming a mathematician, a statistician, or a data scientist. I have reviewed and validated several of the Covid19 models. All models are wrong. Some are useful.

        Now shut up about modeling. Tucker is bang on in asking these questions of models, model vetting and validation, and model management.

        If banks built Basel II models to the standards of the Covid 19 models, their CROs would be fired at best, and in some jurisdictions they’d be in prison.

        Tucker has performed a valuable public service, and I’d like to see predictive models designed for high-impact decision-making, subject to the SAME LEVEL OF RIGOUR AND VETTING as new drugs are, or bank capital models for regulatory reporting, credit loas models for international accounting standards.

        Where can I read a model audit report on these forecasting models?

        Because right now, the banks are WAY ahead of where climate science and epidemiology need to be.

        I believe NONE of the models used to forecast these outbreaks has been properly quantified for model risk.

  7. Fucker Carlson is tied with Scott Adams as ‘least qualified to comment on anything’. Just because a model is revised as new data comes in does not mean you just get to throw out experts. Listen to the experts.

    1. What experts, UnMe? There are many experts out there and they are saying different things. There is no reason to think that the government “experts” are any wiser than the rest. In fact, the government experts are not free to express an opinion that might embarrass their masters.

      1. They are saying different things. They are not saying that this virus is no big deal cuz flu.

        1. We are not saying that either. No one is saying that, but the current strategy of shutting everything down is destroying our society and wuite probably preventing us from developing herd immunity.

        2. Actually, many of the models are saying EXACTLY THAT. That IS the issue – flu by the way is no joke. It killed 80,000 Americans in the 17/18 season.

          And you are unfamiliar with the excess mortality statistics, aren’t you? So the question everyone would like answered before we blow the entire world economy up, and usher in a resurgence of race-based fascism all up and down the globe, … BY HOW MUCH is this thing “worse” than the flu?

          And the answer is “no one knows”.

          All I know is, this thing better end up killing at the rate of the Black Death. Because otherwise the reckoning for those that panicked and shut down the whole global economy is going to be very, very severe.

      1. Joey, it turns out that there are models that have backtested against the outcomes quite well. The problem with all models in situations like this is once you have the history, the model loses its predictive usefulness. Because now you know what happened.

        Good models need to be challenged, vetted, and correctly calibrated (calibration of models is a problem deep enough to keep hundreds of PhDs busy for the next decade).

        As an example, the more “spectacular” of these models essentially use a derivative of Brownian Motion to jostle pingpong balls around in a box, and then need to calibrate an “infection probability” which is dependent on an infection radius in some way. The problem is, the probability of transmission is not constant, is not actually knowable, and the effect of radius around each ball (social distancing) is completely unknown and also unknowable.

        The whole “social distancing” arose out of model radii around pingpong balls in a box. The fact is no one on planet earth knows what the optimal radius is. And the model is HIGHLY sensitive to on numbers like these. Also, the “jitteriness” of the balls (how much the move around) also has a big impact . In the model that is.

        So now you have “lockdown” to try to decrease the circulation of the balls.

        All models are wrong. Some are useful. Some of the time. And generally the more complex a model, the better its results, but over a very narrow range of outcomes (called “overfitting”). So finding the right mix between complexity and accuracy is no easy task. I mean at some level, you coudl also use undergrad regression, or Chi Squared to fudge something together. Who knows what these health folks are relying on, because I assure you, they have probably never even heard of model audit, and even if they had, who would they hire to do it for them? Maybe one the Big Four?

        You are right to be skeptical of model output. Models give insights. Ina lot of cases, the primary benefit of model building is the enhanced organisational appreciation of the extent and drivers of the problem, much more than any results.

        But reporting their predictions, and using them to run public policy against non-audited results is borderline criminally irresponsible. There MUST be a review and a criminal investigation into the use of unvetted models to shut down the global economy.

  8. I urge all of you who panicked in response to the projections and moreso because the disease was a Chinese plot (and if you reflect on it you will know who you are) to recall that feeling and ask yourselves if your irrational response to the projections in any way resembles the responses of the frightened masses to the climate crisis projections.

    What can we learn from that?

  9. Speaking of numbers, Tucker likes to score partisan points as much as any other journalist so I was surprised he let Cuomo’s math gaff go unmentioned.

    Cuomo stated that they needed 30,000 ventilators but were only offered 400. He then went on to say who is going to pick the 26,000 to die. What is it with liberals and math?

    2. Liberals are inherently (on average) lazier and less productive than conservatives. Almost every program they want to see is designed to facilitate their lazy and voluptuous lifestyles.

      Have you ever met a communist who was successful in life? Every socialist I know is a bum and chronic underachiever. Oh but they will assure you they have the secret sauce to manage the supply and demand curves for all production. Ask yourself what kind of bonehead falls for the socialist scam?

  10. Boris– a very thoughtful comment. I agree with everything you have said. Notably:
    “Flattening the curve won’t actually save any lives; at best it will spread them out a bit more over time.” One epidemiologist I encountered claims we are extending the longevity of the virus. Moreover, by keeping kids out of school, we are preventing the development of herd immunity, and THAT is how viruses die. Increasingly this looks like a philosophical problem. People have become so arrogant and misguided that we think we can control nature in all of its manifestations. We turn to government for security, rather than acknowledge the reality of there being things we cannot control. It is ironic that despite all of our sophisticated technology we are forced to acknowledge that we are quite helpless. In our relentless quest for safe spaces and our desire to believe that someone is in charge, we have relinquished our freedom and human confidence. It is fitting and also painful that in our quest and hope that someone is in charge who can protect us, Canada has chosen to select the man-child for its leader. It all makes me very sad.

  11. Boris.
    Well said.
    The clueless and useless are well dug in, into positions of authority.
    The current crop of “leaders” are a perfect example.
    We will have to cull,if we have any hope of reestablishing an economy.
    That said the current economic shutdown,is perfect for Canada’s Politicians.
    As it provides cover for their hopeless incompetence and covers over the damage done by those ridiculous “rail blockade”and the political support for Gang Green.
    A plausible excuse for the collapsing Canadian economy, Oh yeah.
    Stampeding the herd,a fools strategy, but our progressive comrades keep insisting it will work…this time.
    This modelling of doom,by pandemic this time,is a repeat of the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming models.
    Except in this case people are effected immediately and the modelled projections have already fallen apart.
    As Kate says, “We need a Famine”.
    For real problems and disasters do focus the attention.
    Will Canadians focus?

    For in my opinion,the emerging crisis is not the Wuhan Flu, but the authoritarian response.

    A true pandemic,famine,flood or war will cause us to remember,we are all going to die,only the time and method is unknown.
    Enjoy yourself,in the time and friends you now have..for life leads to death as life cycles on.

    Politicians and Presstitutes pronouncing Doom,Doom,Doom for personal power and prestige are as old as human memory,it is what they do.
    Only a soft pampering people will voluntarily become quivering masses at the threat of death, no matter how foul.

    Those of us remembering the nuclear bomb terror,as taught in school, should recall the last line,never officially spoken.
    As if huddling under your desk,with your head between your legs was going to do anything useful.
    So huddle under desk.
    Put head between legs.
    Unspoken;”Kiss ass good bye”.

    1. “For in my opinion,the emerging crisis is not the Wuhan Flu, but the authoritarian response.”
      Yes. I think we are completely destroying the human spirit. I agree that there is some similarity with the global warming issue, particularly with respect to the believe that we can control everything in nature. We cannot control the climate and we cannot control viruses. Viruses will run their course, until we develop herd immunity by exposing enough people.

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