Sydney Morning Herald;

US intelligence agencies are reportedly examining mobile phone data suggesting there could have been an emergency shutdown in October at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
 
According to a report, obtained by NBC News, there was no mobile phone activity in a high-security part of the Chinese laboratory complex from October 7 to 24. Previously, there had been consistent use of mobile phones.
 
The report, carried out by private experts, suggested there may have been a “hazardous event”, specifically at the institute’s National Biosafety Laboratory, between October 6 and 11. Analysis of mobile phone data from around the institute also suggested roadblocks were in place between October 14 and 19.

More: China’s Incestuous Relationship with the WHO Might Be Worse Than We Originally Thought

I don’t think most Americans fully understand the lengths that South Korea has undergone, so I’ll try my best to explain.

H/T Craig: This is an interesting hypothesis that could explain the clotting issue

Boris Johnson’s three step plan to reopening.

The virus is natural, nothing here to see: US and British intelligence agencies are reportedly examining mobile phone data suggesting there could have been an emergency shutdown in October at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Theresa Tam, party animal.

#CCP’s consulate in Los Angeles gets some free decoration.

And finally, this bears repeating: If you don’t like the content here, find a site that wraps you in comfy confirmation bias as it whispers sweet conspiracies in your ear. There’s plenty out there to chose from.

These threads are for information sharing. Keep it that way, please.

Fauci and heads of CDC and FDA in self quarantine, as a growing number of White House associates and staff test positive.

Mask-wearing policy in Canada has resembled Orwell's 1984, where warring nations would be transformed into loyal allies overnight and everyone was expected to forget what they'd been told the day before.

@AlissaStollwerk – A sobering way to look at it. 1 out of 154 NYC adults hospitalized. 1 out of 361 NYC adults dead. Among 75 and older, 1 out of 60 are dead.

Apparently rare, but concerning — Nearly 100 children in the U.S. have been diagnosed with the newly identified syndrome associated with COVID-19.

But still, there are positive developments stateside: Good news as covid testing expands and the positivity rate continues to fall.

More unusable masks from China and Trudeau pledges we “won’t be paying the full price”.

That’ll teach ’em.

Related news/items in the comments.

Do you know who Neil Ferguson is? You should. His data models are a big reason why the UK is currently locked down and arguably assisted the “experts” in Canada and America to encourage the political leaders there to do the same. He is currently infamous for his hypocritical sex exploits but there’s a much bigger scandal afoot.

Looking back, Ferguson’s data models predicted huge deaths in America and the UK:

Give Neil Ferguson a break. Nearly two weeks ago Mr. Ferguson, an epidemiologist with Imperial College London, issued a report on Covid-19. Much of the public attention focused on his worst-case projection that there might as many as 2.2 million American and 510,000 British deaths. Fewer paid attention to the caveat that this was “unlikely,” and based on the assumption that nothing was done to control it.

When these predictions proved to be wrong by orders of magnitude, many suggested that it was because of the lockdowns and shelters-in-place that we averted a disaster. Maybe. But now another strong possibility is coming to light: The software code that Ferguson et al wrote and used to make these predictions is … crap. Absolute garbage spaghetti code that any first year Computer Science student would get an ‘F’ on.

To be clear, Ferguson’s original code is currently unavailable but a derivation of it, “upgraded for over a month by a team from Microsoft and others”, is somewhat of an improvement. Here’s what was said about the original code:

Before the GitHub team started working on the code it was a single 15k line C file that had been worked on for a decade, and some of the functions looked like they were machine translated from Fortran. There are some tropes about academic code that have grains of truth, but \

— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) April 27, 2020

If you know anything about writing software, then you instantly know that a single code file with 15,000 lines is beyond lunacy/incompetence.

If you’re so inclined, get yourself a free copy of VS Code and then clone the git repo. The critical file you’ll want to examine is CovidSim.cpp.

The lock down was supposed to prevent this, not ensure it.

Tens of thousands of medical procedures have been postponed in Ontario, Canada, anticipating a novel coronavirus patient surge that has yet to come, a report from the independent Financial Accountability Office (FAO) found late last month.
 
Delayed heart surgeries, for example, have already resulted in around 35 deaths, a University Health Network (UHN) report states.
 
“A report has been released today by UHN with respect to cardiac deaths and it has been estimated that approximately 35 people may have passed away because their surgeries were not performed,” Health Minister Christine Elliott acknowledged last Tuesday, according to Toronto Star.

The same ridiculous situation is happening across the country, including Saskatchewan – with only 13 COVID cases in hospital, the “plan” to resume thousands of postponed “elective” surgeries is still two weeks away.

Rossana Segreto, University of Innsbruck | Institute of Microbiology

Abstract
 
Based on my experience in genetic manipulation I do not exclude a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2 and I believe that the topic should not be censored. I did a literature review on this subject and I suggest in my manuscript a possible experiment that could have originated SARS-CoV-2, known to be chimeric. Moreover, I do a critical analysis of the paper of Andersen and colleagues recently published in Nature on the Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2. This paper is considered a proof that SARS-CoV-2 has a natural origin, but in my opinion lacks scientific evidence. With my work I do not want to accuse a specific research group, but raise attention of the scientific community on this topic.

@hollyanndoan – Prime Minister office sued over media ‘blacklisting’ at #COVID19Canada briefings.

Coronavirus lessons on density, mass transit, bureaucracy and censorship

One reason vaccine development takes so long: There is a condition in humans called antibody dependent enhancement (ADE). It turns out if you have no antibodies you get the disease and if you have a lot you are protected. If you have this in between level (of antibodies) and you get the disease it actually enhances the disease and the immune response is really destructive.

Saputo confirms COVID-19 case at Wakooma Street dairy facility in Saskatoon

Excess mortality data of April 11th:

NEW: we’ve updated our excess mortality tracker, the gold-standard measure for Covid deaths, allowing like-for-like comparisons btwn countries

UK had 43,000 more deaths than usual in March & April vs 22,000 reported Covid deaths at the time

Free to read: https://t.co/pSx03b2kdL pic.twitter.com/loM7I78yqc

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) May 6, 2020

Related tips in the comments. Keep chatter to a minimum, please.

COVID-19 has cracked open the vulnerabilities in Canada’s beef supply chains, exposing some disturbing realities about the challenges faced by this workforce so important to the success of Canada’s beef sector.

Related.

Yet currently, deaths in the US are dropping: Scott Gottlieb MD: New projections from CDC in documents obtained by New York Times shows steady rise in number of cases and deaths from #covid19 over next several weeks, reaching about 3,000 daily deaths on June 1st and about 200,000 new cases each day by end of the month. (pdf)

Update: The study above “obtained by the New York Times”? The researcher who developed a model predicting a steep surge in the country’s coronavirus cases and deaths has said that he was not aware that his work, which “was not in any way intended to be a forecast,” had been drafted into a government report. OH.

Click to enlarge.

Just leaving the ER.

For the first time in nearly two months, the number of non-COVID19 patients outnumbered the number of #COVIDー19 patients I saw today.

Certainly better.

But definitely not over.

— Craig Spencer MD MPH (@Craig_A_Spencer) May 4, 2020

Meanwhile, in a Texas seniors home: Armstrong doesn’t call the Hydroxychloroquine a cure and is aware of all the recent reports that say the drug shouldn’t be used to treat COVID-19. But he points out only one of the nursing homes COVID-19 patients has died…

Thread is open for related links.

1/ 2147 close contacts of 157 #COVID19 cases were followed up: Overall infection rate was 6%, higher infection rate among friends (22%) and household (18%), and main risk factors include contact in household (13%), transport (11%), dining (7%). https://t.co/QBSZVSjylU (4/3/20) pic.twitter.com/sh6hH0WjTw

— Dr Muge Cevik (@mugecevik) May 4, 2020

Finally, some solid data on transmission risks. It’s mostly good news, meaning that mitigation can be more accurately targeted. It largely explains the infection clusters — high density populations, nursing homes, plant workers living in close quarters. Read the full thread.

On reopening — “Everybody has a plan until you get punched in the mouth.”

h/t Ron

For May 4th, 101 days since Canada’s first diagnosed case and we record the biggest yet one day jump (+2,760) in new cases.

@DrZoeHyde (add her to your follows)

Latest #COVID19 forecast from team at Imperial. Epidemic likely declining in 4 countries (inc. France, Italy, & Spain), stabilising or growing slowly in 23 (inc. Germany, Netherlands, UK, & USA), and growing in 9 (inc. Brazil, Canada, India, & Russia).

Dr Matt Strauss : The underground doctors’ movement questioning the use of ventilators

With our modern insistence on evidence-based medicine, we would never significantly invest in medical infrastructure that has not been proven beneficial by a randomised control trial. Except of course we have, and we continue to do so. No area of medicine is immune to these lapses. But it is my own specialty of life-support medicine where this has recently been thrown into the sharpest relief.

 

As I previously reported in the Spectator, there has never been a randomised control trial to show that sedating people with severe pneumonia in order to put a breathing tube down their throat (the process known as intubation), in order to hook them up to a mechanical ventilator is lifesaving at any particular point in their illness. Neither has there been such a trial in chimps, dogs, sheep or rats. Yet it is a firmly entrenched belief that intubation and ventilation are necessary once a patient requires a high level of supplemental oxygen. Or it was.

THE US SECRETARY OF STATE IS ALWAYS THE LAST TO KNOW: ‘Enormous evidence’ connects coronavirus outbreak to Wuhan lab

University of Texas under investigation for possible ties to Wuhan biolab: Suspicions arose that UT neglected to report all gifts and exchanges between itself and the Chinese state-owned institutions. 

Belgium is a hot zone for COVID-19 and nobody knows why.

Your related news and morning developments can be shared in the comments.

Update: Related