Search Results for: Corona

Corona: Israeli State Lying With Statistics

You Can’t Trust The Numbers or the Government That Relies on Them

24 Tammuz 5780

The numbers being quoted in the media are completely useless for determining the true scope of the pandemic in Israel.  And yet the politicians are threatening the citizens with all kinds of punitive measures based on the situation as perceived through these skewed statistics.  We’ve already seen people harassed on the streets by the police; whole neighborhoods locked down; people forced to leave home and go to “coronavirus hotels.”  Limits on activities have already been renewed with promises of High Holy Days being a repeat of Pesach and threats of synagogue and yeshivah closures once again.The inmates who have taken charge of the asylum tout “record” numbers of infected and “record” numbers of serious cases, but it is impossible to get a true accounting of the real numbers as the reports are contradictory depending on where you look for them.  (For example today’s count of new cases was either 1200+ or 1500+ depending on where you were looking.)Recently, I quoted Dr. Yoav Yehezkelli who said: “What matters is not the total number of patients, but the number of severe illnesses and intubated patients. As long as these figures are under control, the situation is good.”

The constantly increasing number of overall cases is clearly the result of increased testing [Health Ministry said set to reduce testing as system overwhelmed by outbreak – Asymptomatic people won’t be checked; Israeli HMOs warn they’ll start ‘throwing away’ virus tests due to overload]  but now the reported number of “severe” illnesses has more than doubled since then.  And that is explained here:

Israel’s recent rise in serious COVID-19 cases partly due to change in criteria – Doctors at Israel’s largest hospital amended their approach to categorizing virus patients, impacting national stats; goal is to standardize criteria, they say, not inflate figures.

However, that’s exactly what happened.  Despite the seeming worsening of the pandemic in Israel in a so-called “second wave,” the mortality rate remains relatively low.  But even those numbers can’t be taken at face value as the Israeli media is reporting 375 deaths as a result of COVID-19 as of today’s date, while the WHO makes it 364.

Whom do we believe?  There is no way to know how the dead are being counted as many countries have admitted to decisions and practices which skews those numbers as well.  Either way, the figure remains relatively low.  Even taking the higher figure of 375, that averages out to 2.5 persons per day (since Feb 21 when counts began).

By comparison, in 2016, the most recent date I can find for statistics, there were a total of 35,717 deaths from all causes in the over-65 age group (those determined to be most at risk from COVID-19).That’s an average of 97.8 persons per day.

The reason our perception of this pandemic is so out of touch with reality is because at no other time have the media and the government ever reported on daily deaths from any other cause.  I also have to wonder why the number of ventilated patients is still rising when ventilator-assisted breathing has been determined by many credible medical sources to be a cause of higher mortality.  (See Are Ventilators Making Some COVID-19 Patients Worse? and Why Ventilators May Not Be Working as Well for COVID-19 Patients as Doctors Hoped.)

This was shared today on Facebook.  It is genius.

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From Tomer Devorah, here.

Apply This to Israeli Government ‘Second Wave’ Corona Fearmongering…

Why I’m Not That Worried About Latest Increase in U.S. COVID Cases (At Least Not Yet)

Monday, July 6, 2020

As we have lifted the lockdowns, we move closer and closer to whatever the “new normal” may be. Those have been clamoring for extended lockdowns worry that the lockdowns have been lifted prematurely. The New York Times dismally lamented about a gloomy picture. The Los Angeles Times analogize the spread of COVID-19 to a forest fire. One of the main metrics that lockdown proponents have used to try to justify either returning to lockdowns or prolonging reopening provisions is that of increased confirmed cases. As we see below (figures extracted from Johns Hopkins website on July 5), the number of confirmed cases has reached 52,391. The percent of positive cases has also increased to 7.6% from its 4.4% trough. Dr. Anthony Fauci called last week “a very disturbing week” in terms of this increase. While it might make some intuitive sense to use number of confirmed cases as basis for whether the pandemic is getting worse in the United States (especially relative to other countries), I have some reasons to doubt that assertion.

  • Confirmed cases are not indicative of total amount of infected individuals. One of the best features in favor of confirmed cases as a metric is that it is one of the earlier indicators within the infection timeline. Hospitalizations lag infections, and deaths lag hospitalizations. As nice as it might seem, it does not tell us as much as we would like. As a matter of fact, well-renown statistician Nate Silver wrote a piece in April about how coronavirus tests are actually meaningless. Especially at the beginning of the pandemic, the testing was prioritized for those showing symptoms. While the testing is still skewed in that direction, increased testing capabilities has allowed for more mildly symptomatic or asymptomatic individuals to get tested. Since the testing is not randomized, it suffers from a selection bias that makes COVID-19 look deadlier than it is. Over time, we see that the crude fatality rate (CFR) end up higher than the infection fatality rate (IFR), the latter of which being the apparent death rate.
    • On June 25, the CDC said that for every confirmed case, there are about ten people who had antibodies. At that moment, there were about 2.3 million confirmed cases, which means there were at least an estimated 23 million actual cases.
    • In case you did not have enough evidence that there are a lot more infected than we think, the Pennsylvania State University released an eye-opening paper late last month. This Penn State study examined influenza-like illnesses (ILI) surveillance data. After looking through the ILI data, they concluded that the initial infection rate was much higher. Rather than the initially estimated 100,000 new cases in the last three months, they estimated that there were actually 8.7 million cases, which implies an initial infection rate over 80 times higher than initially estimated. They also found that the number of cases also double twice as quickly as initially estimated (Silverman et al., 2020).
    • As Reason Magazine points out, even if we want to use CFR as a metric (although it is a poor one), the CFR has fallen from more than 6 percent on May 16 to less than 5 percent as of June 28 (see Worldometers data here).
  • Demographic shift in who is getting infected. At the beginning of the pandemic, what we observed in the United States that it was those 60 and older disproportionately contracting COVID-19. Using Florida as an example, the median age dropped from 65 in March to 35 in June. On the whole, 43 percent of COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. took place in long-term care facilities. As the Heritage Foundation reminds us, the age demographics matter a lot when it comes to a serious illness. Younger adults are not immune from contracting a serious case of COVID-19, but the probability of a severe case or death for this demographic is much less likely. What has happened in recent weeks is that younger adults are accounting for a greater share of those infected. With more young adults contracting COVID-19, it is likely that the incident of severe cases and deaths vis-à-vis the IFR will be lower. While there is concern for younger adults infecting the elderly (which means we can have stricter protocols for long-term care facilities instead of another round of lockdowns), this shift is accompanied by other positive trends.
  • Decline in new hospitalizations. According to The Covid Tracking Project, which provides nationwide and state-level COVID data, there has been an increase in overall hospitalizations. At the same time, we have to be mindful of the number of new hospitalizations. Even when accounting for a two-week lag between infection and symptom onset, the CDC still shows an overall decline in new hospitalizations since mid-April. Looking at the CDC’s interpretation of hospitalization forecasting, most of the models show a nationwide plateau of new hospitalizations in the upcoming weeks, although certain states (e.g., Arizona, California) are expected to see an increase.
  • Decrease in COVID-19 Deaths. It is more difficult to draw conclusions from the death data since it can take several weeks between infection and death. At the same time, what CDC data show us is that there has been a decline in all age demographics from the April 18 peak.
  • Our ability to treat COVID-19 has improved. Aside from adequate hospital capacity in most jurisdictions, we preliminarily have two treatments that show at least some promise: remdesivir and dexamethasone. We also have greater knowledge on how to treat COVID-19 in terms of treatment protocol (e.g., how to better use ventilators and their limits, prone positioning). I expect preparedness, palliative care, and treatment to only improve as time passes.

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From Libertarian Jew, here.

Corona Likely Man-Made…

– The most logical explanation is that it comes from a laboratory

The well-known Norwegian virologist Birger Sørensen and his colleagues have examined the corona virus. They believe it has certain properties which would not evolve naturally. These conclusions are politically controversial, but in this interview he shares the findings behind the headlines.

PUBLISERT  SIST OPPDATERT 

“I understand that this is controversial, but the public has a legitimate need to know, and it is important that it is possible to freely discuss alternate hypotheses on how the virus originated” Birger Sørensen starts to explain when Minerva visits him in his office one morning in Oslo.

Despite the explosiveness of his statements and research, Sørensen remains calm and collected.

Sørensen has been a point of controversy ever since former MI6 director Richard Dearlove cited a yet to be published article by Sørensen and his colleagues in an interview with The Daily Telegraph. The article claims that the virus that causes Covid-19 most likely has not emerged naturally.

“It’s a shame that there has already been so much talk about this, because I have yet to publish the article where I put forward my analysis”, Sørensen says in the form of an exasperated sigh.

Together with his colleagues, Angus Dalgleish and Andres Susrud have authored an article that looks into the most plausible explanations regarding the origins of the novel coronavirus. The article builds upon an already published article in the Quarterly Review of Biophysics that describes newly discovered properties in the virus spike protein. The authors are still in dialogue with scientific journals regarding an upcoming publication of the article.

News outlets are thus confronted with a difficult question: Are the findings and arguments Sørensen and his colleagues put forward of a sufficiently high quality to be presented and discussed in the public sphere? Sørensen explains that they in their dialogue with scientific journals are encountering a certain reluctance to publishing the article – without, however, proper scientific objections. Minerva has read a draft of the article, and has after an overall assessment decided that the findings and arguments do deserve public debate, and that this discussion cannot depend entirely on the publication process of scientific journals.

In this interview with Minerva, Sørensen therefore puts forward his hypothesis on why it is highly unlikely that the coronavirus emerged naturally.

On May 18th, WHO decided to conduct an inquiry into the coronavirus epidemic in China. Sørensen believes that it is important that this inquiry looks into new and alternate explanations for how the virus originated, beyond the already well-known suggestion that the virus originated in the Wuhan Seafood Market.

“There are very few who still believe that the epidemic started there, so as of today we have no good answers on how the epidemic started. Then we must also dare to look at more controversial, alternative explanations for the origin,” Sørensen says.

Birger Sørensen and one of his co-authors, Angus Dalgleish, are already known as HIV researchers par excellence.

In 2008, Sørensen’s work came to international attention when he launched a new immunotherapy for HIV. Angus Dalgleish is the professor at St. George’s Medical School in London who became world famous in 1984 after having discovered a novel receptor that the HIV virus uses to enter human cells.

The purpose of the work Sørensen and his colleagues have done on the novel coronavirus, has been to produce a vaccine. And they have taken their experience in trialling HIV vaccines with them to analyse the coronavirus more thoroughly, in order to make a vaccine that can protect against Covid-19 without major side effects.

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From Minerva, here.