Covid Cases Quotes

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That day was also the first time a case of COVID-19 was diagnosed in South Korea, which promptly began an orderly regime of testing that limited the immediate impact of the virus. In contrast, Trump that night addressed the growing threat with his customary salesman’s patter. “We have it totally under control,” he said. No, they didn’t, and Trump’s feckless indifference in those early days cost thousands of American lives.
Jeffrey Toobin (True Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Investigation of Donald Trump)
Left-wing progressivism” and “managerialism” are synonymous since the solutions of the former always involve the expansion of the latter. To stay with the example of LGBT causes, these may seem remote from something as technical as “managerialism” but consider the armies of HR officer, diversity tsars, equality ministers, and so on that are supported today under the banner of “LGBT” and used to police and control enterprises. The “philanthropic” endeavours of the Ford Foundation in this regard laid the infrastructure and groundwork to setup new power centres for managerialism under the guise of this ostensibly unrelated cause. Similar case studies can be found in issues as diverse as racial equality, gender equality, Islamist terrorism, climate change, mental health, and the management of the COVID-19 pandemic. The LOGIC of managerialism is to create invisible “problems” which can, in effect, never truly be solved, but rather can permanently support managerial jobs that force some arbitrary compliance standard such as “unconscious bias training”, “net zero carbon”, the ratio of men and women on executive boards or whatever else.
Neema Parvini (The Populist Delusion)
We know from subsequent leaks that the president was indeed presented with information about the seriousness of the virus and its pandemic potential beginning at least in early January 2020. And yet, as documented by the Washington Post, he repeatedly stated that “it would go away.” On February 10, when there were 12 known cases, he said that he thought the virus would “go away” by April, “with the heat.” On February 25, when there were 53 known cases, he said, “I think that’s a problem that’s going to go away.” On February 27, when there were 60 cases, he said, famously, “We have done an incredible job. We’re going to continue. It’s going to disappear. One day—it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.” On March 6, when there were 278 cases and 14 deaths, again he said, “It’ll go away.” On March 10, when there were 959 cases and 28 deaths, he said, “We’re prepared, and we’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.” On March 12, with 1,663 cases and 40 deaths recorded, he said, “It’s going to go away.” On March 30, with 161,807 cases and 2,978 deaths, he was still saying, “It will go away. You know it—you know it is going away, and it will go away. And we’re going to have a great victory.” On April 3, with 275,586 cases and 7,087 deaths, he again said, “It is going to go away.” He continued, repeating himself: “It is going away.… I said it’s going away, and it is going away.” In remarks on June 23, when the United States had 126,060 deaths and roughly 2.5 million cases, he said, “We did so well before the plague, and we’re doing so well after the plague. It’s going away.” Such statements continued as both the cases and the deaths kept rising. Neither the virus nor Trump’s statements went away.
Nicholas A. Christakis (Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live)
becomes dangerous and is closely tied to sepsis. A sepsis treatment protocol developed by Dr. Paul Marik, which involves intravenous vitamin C with hydrocortisone and thiamine (vitamin B1), has been shown to dramatically improve chances of survival in sepsis cases. If you suspect that you or a loved one may have sepsis, visit mercola.com and search for the article titled “Vitamin C, B1 and Hydrocortisone Dramatically Reduce Mortality from Sepsis.” It could save your or their life.
Joseph Mercola (The Truth About COVID-19: Exposing The Great Reset, Lockdowns, Vaccine Passports, and the New Normal)
Everything nowadays moves around the planet faster, including viruses. If SARS had conformed to the perverse pattern of presymptomatic infectivity, its 2003 emergence wouldn’t be a case history in good luck and effective outbreak response. It would be a much darker story. The much darker story remains to be told, probably not about this virus but about another. When the Next Big One comes, we can guess, it will likely conform to the same perverse pattern, high infectivity preceding notable symptoms. That will help it to move through cities and airports like an angel of death.
David Quammen (Spillover: the powerful, prescient book that predicted the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.)
In the face of the calamity, the Modi government froze. In the seven months from March to September 2020, Modi made 82 public appearances—physical as well as virtual. In the next four months, he made 111 such appearances. From February to 25 April 2021, he clocked 92 public appearances. From 25 April, after he called off the Kumbh and his Bengal rallies, Modi disappeared. He made no public appearance for 20 days.147 The prime minister of India fled the field when his people needed the government most. Through all of April and much of May, upper class Indians flooded Twitter with calls for help to find hospital beds, oxygen cylinders, drugs like Remdesivir and ventilators.148 The Union did not think to set up a helpline to guide those who needed this help. Into this space strode the youth Congress leader B.V. Srinivas (@srinivasiyc) who, with a team of volunteers, began to help people reaching out for aid on Twitter. He was so effective in the absence of the State and any government presence that even the embassies of New Zealand and the Philippines contacted him for help when staffers fell ill with Covid.149 Focussed on the government’s image, Jaishankar tweeted: ‘This was an unsolicited supply as they had no Covid cases. Clearly for cheap publicity by you know who. Giving away cylinders like this when there are people in desperate need of oxygen is simply appalling.’ The New Zealand embassy staffer who had received oxygen from Srinivas on 2 May died 18 days later.
Aakar Patel (Price of the Modi Years)
IN OCTOBER 2019, just a few months before the novel coronavirus swept the world, Johns Hopkins University released its first Global Heath Security Index, a comprehensive analysis of countries that were best prepared to handle an epidemic or pandemic. The United States ranked first overall, and first in four of the six categories—prevention, early detection and reporting, sufficient and robust health system, and compliance with international norms. That sounded right. America was, after all, the country with most of the world’s best pharmaceutical companies, research universities, laboratories, and health institutes. But by March 2020, these advantages seemed like a cruel joke, as Covid-19 tore across the United States and the federal government mounted a delayed, weak, and erratic response. By July, with less than 5% of the world’s population, the country had over 25% of the world’s cumulative confirmed cases. Per capita daily death rates in the United States were ten times higher than in Europe. Was this the new face of American exceptionalism?
Fareed Zakaria (Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World)
We could have dramatically reduced COVID fatalities and hospitalizations using early treatment protocols and repurposed drugs including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and many, many others.” Dr. McCullough has treated some 2,000 COVID patients with these therapies. McCullough points out that hundreds of peer-reviewed studies now show that early treatment could have averted some 80 percent of deaths attributed to COVID. “The strategy from the outset should have been implementing protocols to stop hospitalizations through early treatment of Americans who tested positive for COVID but were still asymptomatic. If we had done that, we could have pushed case fatality rates below those we see with seasonal flu, and ended the bottlenecks in our hospitals. We should have rapidly deployed off-the-shelf medications with proven safety records and subjected them to rigorous risk/benefit decision-making,” McCullough continues. “Using repurposed drugs, we could have ended this pandemic by May 2020 and saved 500,000 American lives, but for Dr. Fauci’s hard-headed, tunnel vision on new vaccines and remdesivir.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
McCullough observes that, “We could have dramatically reduced COVID fatalities and hospitalizations using early treatment protocols and repurposed drugs including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and many, many others.” Dr. McCullough has treated some 2,000 COVID patients with these therapies. McCullough points out that hundreds of peer-reviewed studies now show that early treatment could have averted some 80 percent of deaths attributed to COVID. “The strategy from the outset should have been implementing protocols to stop hospitalizations through early treatment of Americans who tested positive for COVID but were still asymptomatic. If we had done that, we could have pushed case fatality rates below those we see with seasonal flu, and ended the bottlenecks in our hospitals. We should have rapidly deployed off-the-shelf medications with proven safety records and subjected them to rigorous risk/benefit decision-making,” McCullough continues. “Using repurposed drugs, we could have ended this pandemic by May 2020 and saved 500,000 American lives, but for Dr. Fauci’s hard-headed, tunnel vision on new vaccines and remdesivir.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
Peter Navarro never hid his antagonism toward me. He stopped me one day in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where we were tested routinely for COVID, and again blasted my failure to encourage people to take hydroxychloroquine, the lack of which he said was causing people to die. He would not let it go. Perhaps he just had a thing about me. To give him the benefit of the doubt, I arranged with Cliff Lane to have Navarro present via Zoom his case on hydroxychloroquine’s effectiveness to the entire NIH guidelines panel cochaired by Cliff in early August. This group was thirty-five of the top experts in infectious disease, public health, and epidemiology from all over the country. Navarro made his presentation, and uniformly they politely said, “Mr. Navarro, there’s nothing there. These are anecdotes, and all the evidence indicates hydroxychloroquine doesn’t work and can even cause harm.” Navarro’s answer was that he valued his reading of the existing medical literature on hydroxychloroquine as much as or more than theirs. “If I am wrong, no one is harmed. If you are wrong, thousands of people die.” The truth was the exact opposite. By that time, the FDA, which had given hydroxychloroquine emergency approval early in the pandemic, had revoked it on June 15, after it was found to cause heart problems and even death, not to mention proving ineffective against COVID. I had given Navarro one last chance, but he still could not accept reality.
Anthony Fauci (On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service)
The Covid-19 pandemic has made it clear that by several measures, the health status of Black Americans is on par with that of people living in far poorer nations, and that at every stage of life Black Americans have poorer health outcomes than white Americans and even, in most cases, than other ethnic groups. Racial health disparities show up at the beginning of life and cut lives short at the end. Black babies are more than twice as likely as white babies to die at birth or in the first year of life—a racial gap that adds up to thousands of lost lives every year.13 African American adults of all ages have elevated rates of conditions such as diabetes and hypertension that among white people are found more commonly at older ages. In the first half of 2020, owing to the pandemic, the Black-white gap in life expectancy increased to six years, from four in 2019.14 This inequality when it comes to the health of Black people’s bodies is rooted in false ideas about racial differences, developed and spread during slavery, and long challenged by Black medical practitioners and scholars, that still inform the way medical treatment is administered in America.15 To understand the racial divide in the health of our nation that was stripped bare by Covid-19, we must examine the roots of these myths. — In the 1787 manual A Treatise on Tropical Diseases; and on the Climate of the West-Indies, a British doctor, Benjamin Moseley, claimed that Black people could bear surgical operations much more easily than white people, noting that “what would be the cause of insupportable pain to a white man, a Negro would almost disregard.
Nikole Hannah-Jones (The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story)
By March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic had arrived in Tucson. It was well known by this point that it was very infectious and in some cases, fatal. A virus that could cause pneumonia to occur in both lungs that required a lung ventilator to treat it and they were in very short supply.
Steven Magee (Magee’s Disease)
I also couldn’t help noticing how often news reports about some modeler’s latest findings would leave out important nuances and caveats. In March 2020, Neil Ferguson, a highly respected epidemiologist at Imperial College, predicted that there could be more than 500,000 COVID deaths in the U.K. and more than 2 million in the U.S. over the course of the pandemic. That caused quite a stir in the press, but few reporters mentioned a key point that Ferguson had been very clear about: The scenario of his that made all the headlines assumed that people wouldn’t change their behavior—that no one would wear masks or shelter in place, for instance—but of course that wouldn’t be the case in reality. He wanted to show how high the stakes were and demonstrate the value of masks and other interventions, not drive everyone into a panic.
Bill Gates (How to Prevent the Next Pandemic)
In the fall of 2020, as we got closer to flu season, I started to worry. Every year, influenza kills tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of people around the world, nearly all of them elderly. Even more are hospitalized. At a time when COVID was overwhelming or at least sorely testing virtually every health system on the planet, a bad flu season could have been disastrous. But there was not a bad flu season that year. In fact, there was hardly any flu season at all. Between the flu seasons of 2019–20 and 2020–21, cases dropped 99 percent. As of late 2021, one particular type of flu known as B/Yamagata had not been detected anywhere in the world since April 2020. Other respiratory viruses also dropped dramatically. By the time you read this book, of course, things may have changed. Flu strains have a way of disappearing for long periods and then suddenly recurring without explanation. But the huge decline in cases across the board is unmistakable, however long it lasts, and we know why: Nonpharmaceutical interventions made a dramatic difference in reducing flu transmission when combined with the prior immunity and vaccinations that people had.
Bill Gates (How to Prevent the Next Pandemic)
During COVID, one challenge with conventional contact tracing is that it’s not an especially efficient use of resources, because the virus is not transmitted at the same rate by everyone who’s infected. If you get the original COVID strain, the chances are not especially high that you’ll pass it along to someone else. (About 70 percent of those cases may not transmit to anyone else at all.) But if you do pass it along to someone else, you probably pass it along to many people. For reasons we don’t entirely understand, 80 percent of COVID infections with early variants came from just 10 percent of the cases. (These numbers could be different for the Omicron variant—as I write this, we don’t have enough data to know.) So with a virus like COVID, using the conventional approach means you’ll spend a lot of time finding people who wouldn’t have infected anyone else—epidemiologically speaking, you’ll find yourself in a lot of cul-de-sacs. What you really want to do is find the main thoroughfares, the relatively small number of people who are causing the most infections.
Bill Gates (How to Prevent the Next Pandemic)
Droplets, being on the larger side, typically contain more virus than an aerosol, which makes them a better mechanism for transmission. On the other hand, because they’re relatively heavy, they don’t make it more than a few feet from your mouth or nose before falling to the ground. The surface that a droplet lands on becomes what’s called a fomite, and how long the fomite is able to transmit the virus depends on several factors, including the type of pathogen and whether you sneezed or coughed it out (in which case it’s more protected because it’s covered in your mucus). Studies show that even though the COVID virus may be able to survive for a few hours, or even days, it’s quite rare for people to get sick from touching a contaminated surface. In fact, even if someone does happen to touch a fomite, the chances that the person will get infected are less than 1 in 10,000.
Bill Gates (How to Prevent the Next Pandemic)
Trump is a man who polarizes opinion: you suspect that if he said ice cream was a pleasant treat on a sunny day, it would lead some Americans to refuse to eat anything but ice cream while others protested loudly outside ice cream parlors. So it was with COVID. The perverse and reckless refusal ever to wear a mask became a badge of pride for many of Trump’s supporters, while his opponents went to the opposite extreme—I noted one prominent tweet by a liberal American journalist explaining that the UK pandemic was “out of control” because people were not wearing masks as they walked in the park. To British eyes, the tweet just seemed bewildering: the evidence suggests that, mask or no mask, the risk of transmitting the virus while out for a stroll is very low. At the time of the tweet, late in January 2021, UK case numbers weren’t out of control either; they were rapidly falling. The tweet could be understood only as a salvo in a politically polarized battle about responsible mask use in which neither tribe was interested in figuring out the truth. Paradoxically, it can be much easier to spot tribalism at a distance. If you belong to the tribe of Republicans or Democrats, you’re too involved in the battle to think clearly. It is easier when—like your bemused British author—you belong to the tribe of puzzled outsiders.
Tim Harford (The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics)
a thorough and all-encompassing decoupling from China would require from companies making such a move an investment of hundreds of billions of dollars in newly located factories, and from governments equivalent amounts to fund new infrastructure, like airports, transportation links and housing, to serve the relocated supply chains. Notwithstanding that the political desire for decoupling may in some cases be stronger than the actual ability to do so, the direction of the trend is nonetheless clear. The Japanese government made this obvious when it set aside 243 billion of its 108 trillion Japanese yen rescue package to help Japanese companies pull their operations out of China. On multiple occasions, the US administration has hinted at similar measures.
Klaus Schwab (COVID-19: The Great Reset)
Later analysis found that of the 675,000 travelers who were subjected to enhanced health screening at airports, fewer than 15 cases of COVID were identified.34 In the end, the number of federal personnel charged with implementing the screening who caught COVID exceeded the number of infected travelers that the efforts would intercept.
Scott Gottlieb (Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic)
furious growth of Covid- 19 cases in those parts of the US where many people regarded masking as an infringement of their individual liberties suggests that it is morbid individualism that turns crises into tragedies.
Amitav Ghosh (The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis)
Across Canada, China, and Singapore, thermal scanners had been used to screen more than 35 million travelers in 2003, detecting nearly 11,000 fevers but uncovering not a single case of SARS-1.31 Still, Canada would record 250 cases of SARS-1, and Singapore 206 cases. During past pandemics, it was reported that people took fever-reducing drugs to defeat the scanners.
Scott Gottlieb (Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic)
inspired by history. (In this case, a particular type of weaponry used in some early Roman battles.) At the moment, we are living under the threat of COVID-19. I hope this bonus novella serves as an escape from all the tension, or at the very least, helps you pass the time! Enjoy! -Tyler Piperbrook April 2020
T.W. Piperbrook (The Ruins Box Set: The Complete Series #1-4)
So, the primary externalities with this virus are the passing on of the disease to third parties, the potential congestion of large numbers of cases in hospitals, or the knocking out of essential industries through a major spike in infections.
Ryan A. Bourne (Economics in One Virus: An Introduction to Economic Reasoning through COVID-19)
Several other studies back this up. One exploited the variation in the timing of local shelter-in-place orders in Texas to show that those counties that adopted orders sooner saw slower case growth.17 Another paper that modeled Sweden as if it had undertaken a lockdown similarly found that the number of deaths would have been a third lower during the lockdown period had Sweden adopted that approach.
Ryan A. Bourne (Economics in One Virus: An Introduction to Economic Reasoning through COVID-19)
Studies showed that about 70 percent of patients infected with SARS-CoV-2 wouldn’t spread the virus any further, but about 5 percent of infected individuals without masks could account for as many as 80 percent of all subsequent cases, mostly the result of superspreading events.
Scott Gottlieb (Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic)
One of the great lessons of the past five centuries in Europe and America is this: acute crises contribute to boosting the power of the state. It’s always been the case and there is no reason why it should be different with the COVID-19 pandemic. Historians point to the fact that the rising fiscal resources of capitalist countries from the 18th century onwards were always closely associated with the need to fight wars, particularly those that took place in distant countries and that required maritime capacities. Such was the case with the Seven Years’ War of 1756-1763, described as the first truly global war that involved all the great powers of Europe at the time. Since then, the responses to major crises have always further consolidated the power of the state, starting with taxation: “an inherent and essential attribute of sovereignty belonging as a matter of right to every independent government”.[66] A few examples illustrating the point strongly suggest that this time, as in the past, taxation will increase. As in the past, the social rationale and political justification underlying the increases will be based upon the narrative of “countries at war” (only this time against an invisible enemy).
Klaus Schwab (COVID-19: The Great Reset)
There is as much truth in the COVID-19 case as there was in the claim of existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. COVID-19 with its antisocial laws is but the traditional coup of power consolidation by the few and the transfer of the valuable goods of the many into their hands. - On the Novel Virus
Lamine Pearlheart (Awakening)
The Lahaina August 2023 disaster occurred after a rise in COVID cases since June.
Steven Magee
In going along with the Panic, it can be argued that they broke the Nuremberg Code and the basic public health laws that are based on that code. The politicians and their advisors could therefore be arraigned as criminals and taken to face an independent court to be tried for their crimes against humanity. Many court cases started by human rights lawyers are now underway in Western countries following exactly this reasoning.299 Criminal convictions for the politicians who violated the Nuremberg Code during the Great Panic would serve as a warning to future politicians who find themselves in similar circumstances, where in the face of overwhelming demands from their populations they could become criminals. It would give them an incentive to more vigorously combat the wave of fear in their populations, and to act within the boundaries of the law.
Paul Frijters (The Great Covid Panic: What Happened, Why, and What To Do Next)
While they almost surely will not be held to account for their actions in court, the politicians of the Great Panic will still suffer some negative consequences. We suspect that their lives will be tough in the coming years as they are dragged from one inquiry to the next, and from one court case by victims to the next. The gradual return of common sense will mean a reevaluation of the actions of politicians during the Great Panic, which will be unpleasant for them.
Paul Frijters (The Great Covid Panic: What Happened, Why, and What To Do Next)
Furthermore, some 52 studies—all available on NIH’s website—find that ordinary masking (using less than an N95 respirator) doesn’t reduce viral infection rates, even—surprisingly—in institutional settings like hospitals and surgical theaters.6,7 Moreover, some 25 additional studies attribute to masking a grim retinue of harms, including respiratory and immune system illnesses, as well as dermatological, dental, gastrointestinal, and psychological injuries.8 Fourteen of these studies are randomized, peer-reviewed placebo studies. There is no well-constructed study that persuasively suggests masks have convincing efficacy against COVID-19 that would justify accepting the harms associated with masks. Finally, retrospective studies on Dr. Fauci’s mask mandates confirm that they were bootless. “Regional analysis in the United States does not show that [mask] mandates had any effect on case rates, despite 93 percent compliance. Moreover, according to CDC data, 85 percent of people who contracted COVID-19 reported wearing a mask,”9 according to Gutentag.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
According to an article in Current Trends in Cardiology, “Within eight weeks of the public offering of COVID-19 products to the 12–15-year-old age group, we found 19 times the expected number of myocarditis cases in the vaccination volunteers over background myocarditis rates for this age group.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
I am not a predictor It's not been long since I told some people, "I see no difference in value between any of the world's richest people and a poor child with a round-the-clock danger." Their disagreement / objection were all lying on wealth, advocates, friends, political influence, authorities, what they eat, and the place they settle, and all such worldly desires. But the testimony to my belief is three simple things: same oxygen, same sky, and same ignorance about planet's tomorrow's morning, which are our commonalities. Come on ... this is so raw, poetic, and spiritual view which works only for a literature / art book, not reality, they said. After several months of exposing to covid 19 and its unprecedented death tool everywhere beyond all the human being's differences, they got back to me with somehow regretfully letters saying " I would stand on your side, you're a predictor ". Here is the case: Our differences are embedded in a far much bigger circle, which is our commonalities. Our differences may be easy to be seen but what govern them are our similarities. Simply speaking, the first key helps you walk is not the skill how to walk, nor even how strong your feet are, but having a surface as earth underneath your feet. I am not a predictor then, only familiar with the forecast report of look.
Mostafa Sarabzadeh
While the Chinese government insists the official date for the first Covid-19 case was in December, Dr Wang makes it clear doctors were dealing with the coronavirus from November. For there to have been community transmission in November, Covid-19 likely emerged earlier, in October or potentially September.
Sharri Markson (What Really Happened in Wuhan: The Cover-Ups, the Conspiracies and the Classified Research)
Ultimately, the most powerful way to rebalance the interests of private owners and the common good is by shifting the focus towards taxes on wealth - that is, asking those who have accummulated substantial assets down the years (or with inherited wealth, down the centuries) to make a fairer contribution. The case is indisputable: since 2008, average earnings have hardly risen, while the amount of wealth held by the better-off has sky-rocketed. Clearly paying for shocks such as the 2008 crash or the Covid-19 pandemic should not fall solely on those dependent on their immediate income. A Land Value Tax could also play an important role: a policy that would be difficult to evade, and would tackle the vast windfall profits that come from the development of land. It's an idea that has long enjoyed support from all sides of the political spectrum, including Winston Churchill, as well as from economists as divergent as Milton Friedman, Adam Smith and J.K. Galbraith. Given its elegant simplicity and essential fairness, the fact that it has not been introduced in England is a case-book example of the landowners' ability to block reform.
Caroline Lucas (Another England: How to Reclaim Our National Story)
Detroit’s Henry Ford Health System published a peer-reviewed study showing that hydroxychloroquine significantly cut death rates even in mid-to-late COVID cases, and without any heart-related side effects.106 Fauci leapt to the barricades to rescue his vaccine enterprise. On July 30, he testified before Congress that the Michigan results were “flawed.”107
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
Despite claims of mass poisoning, the media could not find a single case of IVM leading to death or hospitalization. People were not dying from horse ivermectin overdoses. They were certainly not dying from appropriately dosed and prescribed oral ivermectin. But many were dying from untreated COVID-19.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
In early 2021, YouTube did the same thing by censoring the Senate testimony of a doctor who made the medical case for ivermectin, a little-known tropical medicine, to treat severe COVID-19 patients, with no explanation other than to say it violated its misinformation policy.
Vivek Ramaswamy (Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam)
COVID-19 was my most feared enemy that could potentially kill me. I was vaccinated, developed a supplementing protocol for it and survived a COVID-19 infection. I now view it as a mild case of the flu.
Steven Magee
In other cases, the reasons for forgetting are more prosaic, more epidemiological, more related to numbers: the particular pandemic disease was not fatal enough (2009 H1N1 influenza), or it did not afflict enough people because it was not infectious enough (MERS), or it burned out too fast (SARS-1), or it afflicted a confined subgroup of the human population (Ebola), or it was brought low by a vaccine (measles and polio), or by treatment (HIV), or by eradication (smallpox), allowing most people to simply push the disease out of their minds. While the way we have come to live in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic might feel alien and unnatural, it is actually neither of those things. Plagues are a feature of the human experience. What happened in 2020 was not new to our species. It was just new to us.
Nicholas A. Christakis (Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live)
The trio—none of whom ever treated a COVID patient—adopted controversial strategies to confine the nation under house arrest, shut down the global economy, deny the public access to early treatment and lifesaving therapeutics like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, excite persistent public terror through the broadcasts of deliberately exaggerated death and case counts, and repeatedly tell the world that “the only path back to normal is a miraculous vaccine.” With minimal scientific support, they imposed draconian quarantine, mask, and social-distancing mandates, purposefully or accidentally inducing a species of mass psychosis called “Stockholm syndrome” wherein hostages become grateful to their captors convinced that the only path to survival is unquestioning obedience.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
Summary of COVID-24: SARS-CoV-3 is an infectious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 3. Common symptoms include fever, sweating, sneezing, coughing, sporadic nerve pain across the extremities and fatigue. While we are still in the early stages of understanding this virus, most cases identified to date have resulted in mild symptoms that appear to resolve themselves without the need for medical intervention. However, an unknown percentage of people infected have experienced acute respiratory distress syndrome, requiring medical intervention. In China, Italy, Germany, and the United Kingdom, there have been reports of some patients suffering from multiple organ failure, to include septic shock. At this present time, we are unable to determine how contagious the virus is or its incubation period. Until more of this information can be identified, the CDC recommends issuing a level 2 travel advisory for China, Italy, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
James Rosone (Monroe Doctrine: Volume I (Monroe Doctrine, #1))
Watkins’ case is more evidence that society’s fixation on identity politics can miss the ways in which individual circumstances change the game. Watkins, together with her longtime boyfriend, was a bar owner in the tiny rural town of Woodstock, Ohio. This small business, that she’d had such high hopes for, had been struggling due to restrictions imposed by the state government to decrease the spread of Covid-19. She didn’t blame the virus. She blamed Republican Governor Mike DeWine, the man who declared an emergency in March 2020 in an attempt to contain the virus’s spread. DeWine’s order that closed bars and restaurants to indoor customers was lifted in late May 2020. But business still lagged. And during the idle hours imposed by the pandemic, Watkins developed a penchant for watching videos produced by the conspiracy site, InfoWars.
Anita Bartholomew (Siege: An American Tragedy)
We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection. Public health authorities define a significant exposure to COVID-19 as face-to-face contact within 6 feet with a patient with symptomatic COVID-19 that is sustained for at least a few minutes (and some say more than 10 minutes or even 30 minutes). The chance of catching COVID-19 from a passing interaction in a public space is therefore minimal. In many cases, the desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic.” The New England Journal of Medicine, “Universal Masking in Hospitals in the COVID-19 Era,” May 21, 2020. * It is the immemorial tactic of a dictatorial regime to accuse its opponents of what it is doing.
David Mamet (Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch)
IHME’s data also suggests that a country’s success against COVID correlates roughly with how much people there trust the government. This makes intuitive sense, since if you have confidence in your government, you’re more likely to follow its guidelines for preventing COVID. On the other hand, trust in government is measured by polls, and if you live under an especially repressive regime, you’re probably not going to tell a random pollster what you really think about the government. And in any case, this finding doesn’t easily translate into practical advice that can be implemented quickly. Building trust between people and their government takes years of painstaking, purposeful work.
Bill Gates (How to Prevent the Next Pandemic)
Zoonotics seem to be in the hews for one or another reason of late. From coronavirus (covid-19), bird flu (H5N1) and now monkeypox. Scientists say that there are no connections between them, yet bird flu turned up in coronavirus hotspots around the globe. Monkeypox attacks the same areas as covid. Coincidence? I don't think so. It's time that we looked more closely at how these zoonotics work and why they share a penchant for the same human body areas. There may be no connection, but what if there is. It's like yesterday and tomorrow. They are both separate, but they are connected by a thing called, today. We should look at what is their food source. That is, the proteins in our bodies that they feed off. We should also map out the areas to see where they overlap. With monkeypox we should also look at what vaccines were administered just in case there is a connection there as well. I know that there is a connection there somewhere. All we have to do is look at what may be possible.
Anthony T. Hincks
Economists describe the precise endogeneity problem outlined here as simultaneity. Lockdowns affect potential deaths, but potential deaths can also impact the adoption of lockdowns. There’s a two-way causation. In this particular case, then, the endogeneity problem might be a source of bias that leads to an underestimation of the effectiveness of lockdowns in reducing deaths, at least in the near-term after lockdowns are implemented.
Ryan A. Bourne (Economics in One Virus: An Introduction to Economic Reasoning through COVID-19)
In the case of facemasks, the latest best evidence now suggests that authorities’ fears were overblown and that their reluctance to provide guidance for people to wear surgical facemasks when indoors in public cost lives. It was a potentially low-cost recommendation, in other words, that could have had large benefits if it had been implemented as guidance earlier. One economic study in Germany examined the variation in timing of towns and cities adopting mask-wearing mandates in shops and on public transport. It estimated that these policies reduced the growth of daily new cases by as much as 40 percent.
Ryan A. Bourne (Economics in One Virus: An Introduction to Economic Reasoning through COVID-19)
But assessing correlations between a policy and some outcome may lead to faulty policy conclusions if they are interpreted as a causal relationship without thinking hard about the mechanisms or other variables that might drive the results. In the case of COVID-19, assessing lockdowns’ effectiveness by looking at crude death numbers might be misleading if lockdowns were introduced because death numbers were expected to rise, or if we ignore major changes in behavior.
Ryan A. Bourne (Economics in One Virus: An Introduction to Economic Reasoning through COVID-19)
Price controls like this, in fact, have very negative short-, medium-, and long-term consequences. In the near term they encourage buyers to overpurchase and hoard. Those fortunate enough to be in the store when shelves are replenished buy more than they would have if prices reflected the reality of the situation. Meanwhile, these just-in-case purchases worsen shortages for others, who see their demands unmet, given the gap between the amount of the product available and the amount they want to consume at the regulated price.
Ryan A. Bourne (Economics in One Virus: An Introduction to Economic Reasoning through COVID-19)
labs that enrolled in the FluNet Global Influenza Surveillance System—a network of reference labs that sample for flu as a way to track its global spread—recorded 4,623 cases of flu in 2019 but just 53 in 2020. In Chile, there were 5,000 cases in 2019 and 12 in 2020; and in South Africa, the network’s labs detected 1,094 cases in 2019 and just 6 in 2020.53 In New Zealand there was a “near extinction” of influenza.54 With so little flu virus migrating, a similar scenario played out in the US during our fall and winter. By the end of January 2021, the CDC had recorded only 1,316 positive flu cases in its surveillance network, compared to 129,997 they had recorded over the same time frame in 2019.55 The mitigation we put into place was designed to deal with a pandemic flu, not COVID, and it worked much better against its intended viral target.
Scott Gottlieb (Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic)
In the next two days, as cases grew (reaching one hundred civilian cases and another nine hundred at a local barracks), Starkloff asked the city’s mayor and other leaders for legal authority to issue public health edicts. His request was granted. Starkloff’s actions were swift and forceful. Starting on October 8, theaters, pool halls, and other public amusement venues were ordered shut. All public gatherings were banned. Churches were also shut. Schools were ordered closed the next day.25 The difference in the response times between Philadelphia and St. Louis amounted to fourteen days when measured from the first reported cases—but those two weeks represented about three to five doubling times for a flu epidemic.
Scott Gottlieb (Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic)
In Israel, a teacher strike began in the last week of December 1999, causing elementary schools to close nationwide. The strike came right in the middle of a furious flu epidemic. Flu cases fell sharply when the strike forced the schools to close. And when the strike ended and kids returned to classes, flu cases rebounded sharply.
Scott Gottlieb (Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic)
Modeling suggested that timing matters: the interventions had their greatest impact if schools were closed before 1 percent of a local population was infected.41 More systematic studies had found that in the setting of flu epidemics, closing schools for long stretches of time reduced the total number of community cases.42 These steps could also reduce peak attack rates by up to 45 percent among a community, according to the research (and by as much as about 50 percent among children).43 Real-world studies, including surveys done after the 2009 pandemic that analyzed the influence of school closure on transmission, supported these conclusions.
Scott Gottlieb (Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic)
Despite claims of mass poisoning, the media could not find a single case of IVM leading to death or hospitalization. People were not dying from horse ivermectin overdoses. They were certainly not dying from appropriately dosed and prescribed oral ivermectin. But many were dying from untreated COVID-19. Bill
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
George Washington’s troops scraped off the scabs of the smallpox dead to inoculate themselves, but we cower in our homes in fear and obedience for a virus that is 99.6% non-fatal and is fatal mostly for people who lived four years longer than the average life span.27 Friends of mine who caught the virus and developed immunities are still treated like lepers even though there is not one single verified case of reinfection from Covid-19 in the world.
Jeffrey Tucker (Liberty or Lockdown)
Cases continued to surge. And yet many civic leaders would argue that the Spanish flu was driven by misguided fears and wasn’t that dangerous. In 1918, one of the most prominent of these individuals was Krusen, who would declare that the end of the pandemic was near and that the cases had reached a “crest.” Dr. John W. Croskey, president of the West Philadelphia Medical Association, similarly said that “the public should be educated to the fact that the disease is not as deadly as many believe it to be.” However, Croskey had grossly underestimated the severity of the flu, putting the case fatality rate—the percentage of people who developed symptoms of flu and would die from the disease—at about 0.5 percent, which was far less than its real fatality rate.
Scott Gottlieb (Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic)
At the peak of the winter surge, we were losing as many as seven thousand patients a week in nursing homes to COVID. About thirty thousand long-term care facilities were impacted by COVID with outbreaks. Less than 1 percent of America’s population lives in long-term care facilities, but by the end of 2020, this population accounted for about 40 percent of all COVID deaths—nearly 175,000 in total.55 During the worst week of infections, the week of December 17, there were 72,586 COVID cases diagnosed in nursing homes.
Scott Gottlieb (Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic)
A highly respected pair of researchers put the odds that such an effort (in this case involving a hypothetical strain of a novel influenza) could create a dangerous pathogen that would accidentally escape from a lab and trigger a pandemic at 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 100,000 per lab year.64 This was a meaningful risk. The US government imposed a moratorium on gain-of-function studies in 2014. No such restrictions were imposed in China. The US moratorium was later lifted by the NIH in 2017 and gain of function experiments continued including one widely cited study that was done by US researchers in collaboration with the WIV.65
Scott Gottlieb (Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic)
A pandemic is a complex adaptive system comprising many different components or pieces of information (as diverse as biology or psychology), whose behaviour is influenced by such variables as the role of companies, economic policies, government intervention, healthcare politics or national governance. For this reason, it can and should be viewed as a “living network” that adapts to changing conditions – not something set in stone, but a system of interactions that is both complex and adaptive. It is complex because it represents a “cat’s cradle” of interdependence and interconnections from which it stems, and adaptive in the sense that its “behaviour” is driven by interactions between nodes (the organizations, the people – us!) that can become confused and “unruly” in times of stress (Will we adjust to the norms of confinement? Will a majority of us – or not – abide by the rules? etc.). The management (the containment, in this particular case) of a complex adaptive system requires continuous real-time but ever-changing collaboration between a vast array of disciplines, and between different fields within these disciplines.
Klaus Schwab (COVID-19: The Great Reset)
He mentioned five elements that really set the deck apart from the rest. Here’s what you need, according to Andy: Name a big, relevant change in the world. This should be an “indisputable truth.” “E-commerce will accelerate post-COVID19-pandemic” is a good example. Show there will be winners and losers. The point here is to give anxiety to the customers that may fall on the losing side. At Videoplaza, we cited the transition from analog to digital in video streaming and monetization with Netflix and Amazon as the winners thus far. Tease the promised land. Instead of introducing your product immediately, talk instead about the future state, about your founding insights to give the prospect a glimpse into the future. Introduce features as magic gifts for overcoming obstacles to the promised land. This is where your product comes in with its ability to get the customer to the other side. Present evidence that you can make the story come true. Case studies, customer testimonials, analyst quotes, product demos—all of these are appropriate in telling this part of the narrative.
Rags Gupta (One to Ten: Finding Your Way from Startup to Scaleup)
The winter was even worse for the country, when the epidemic widened. Yet at the same time, on many days, the nations of China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, New Zealand, and Australia were collectively registering fewer daily COVID cases than the city of Los Angeles.27 Some of these nations, especially China, had employed draconian tactics that would have been firmly rejected in the US.
Scott Gottlieb (Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic)
The totalitarian regimes of the 20th century give us the starkest examples of such insanity. Stalin persecuted genetics researchers in the 1930s and ostentatiously praised the scientist Trofim Lysenko when he claimed that genetics was a “bourgeois perversion” and geneticists were “saboteurs”. The resulting crop failures killed millions. For an encore, Stalin ordered the killing of the statistician in charge of the 1937 census, Olimpiy Kvitkin. Kvitkin’s crime was that his census revealed a fall in population as a result of that famine. Telling that truth could not be forgiven. In May, the great crop scientist Yuan Longping died at the age of 90. He led the research effort to develop the hybrid rice crops that now feed billions of people. Yet in 1966, he too came very close to being killed as a counter-revolutionary during China’s cultural revolution. In western democracies we do things differently. Governments do not execute scientists; they sideline them. Late last year, Undark magazine interviewed eight former US government scientists who had left their posts in frustration or protest at the obstacles placed in their way under the presidency of Donald Trump. Then there are the random acts of hostility on the street and the death threats on social media. I have seen Twitter posts demanding that certain statisticians be silenced or hunted down and destroyed, sometimes for doing no more than publishing graphs of Covid-19 cases and hospitalisations. Even when this remains at the level of ugly intimidation, it is horrible to hear about and must be far worse to experience. It is not something we should expect a civil servant, a vaccine researcher or a journalist to have to endure. And it would be complacent to believe that the threats are always empty.
Tim Harford
Israel’s response to Covid-19 was unprecedented in the Western world. It used its internal security service, the Shin Bet, to track and monitor potential Covid cases (though it had been secretly collecting all mobile phone metadata since at least 200262) and follow social media posts for any evidence of social gatherings. There was an outcry among the Israeli media class and some politicians, angered that a system designed to oppress Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem could be turned on Israeli Jews. Not that any of them said this outright, but the implication was clear: do what you want to monitor Palestinians with the Shin Bet and make their lives hell but do not use it on us.63 There was also silence about Israel’s export of surveillance tools to regimes around the world, with many Israeli critics unable or unwilling to make the connection with the nation’s Covid-19 response and the companies tasked to do it having had years of experience selling these tools to dictatorships and democracies
Antony Loewenstein (The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World)
That left one last task before they could tell the world about their deal. Manchin, who now had his own case of COVID, needed Biden’s formal endorsement of their agreement. All along, Manchin was convinced that the White House was going to hate provisions in the deal expanding oil and gas leases. But many in the White House, like Brian Deese, were perfectly comfortable with what Manchin wanted. Given the conflict in Ukraine and the spike in energy prices, they were happy to expand domestic production of energy. It was politically expedient, at the very least—and might help lower prices in the middle of a crisis. When Biden came on the line and greeted Manchin, he purred, “Joe-Joe!” After nine months of emotionally exhausting back-and-forth, they were done.
Franklin Foer (The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future)
The virus leaves behind tiny pieces of itself after the body breaks it down. These pieces, similar to fragments of the virus’s outer shell, can clump together into structures that trick the body into thinking there’s a bigger threat. This triggers an intense immune response, like sounding a massive alarm over a few leftover virus bits, which can contribute to severe inflammation and symptoms seen in serious COVID-19 cases. It's like the virus has a ghostly afterlife, continuing to affect the body even after the majority of it has been destroyed. In the battle against the virus, our body initiates a defense mechanism that, while protective, also causes inflammation in critical areas, particularly where our stem cells are nurtured including the bone marrow, gut, and brain. For instance, the mitochondria in our blood cells—often referred to as the cellular powerhouses responsible for energy production — are compromised. Their functionality is impaired; they either push themselves too hard or don’t work as efficiently as they should, leading to a notable decrease in the body's energy levels. This energy deficit is more than just feeling tired; it's a systemic issue affecting the body's ability to fight off the virus effectively. The T cells, which are supposed to eliminate any remaining virus, find themselves restrained rendering their arsenal less effective and their capacity to multiply weakened. Despite these limitations, they release copious amounts of interferon-gamma (IFN-γ), a signaling molecule that rallies the body's defenses to fight vigorously. This intense response may play a role in the virus's stubborn persistence and ongoing immune response. Meanwhile, the B cells are on overdrive, producing an excessive amount of antibodies in this heightened state of alert. This heightened immune response complicates the path to recovery, posing challenges for individuals striving to reclaim their sense of health and wellness.
Jon Douglas (In It for the Long Haul)
Maria. “Nobody could have predicted” a pandemic that his own Department of Health and Human Services was running simulations for just a few months before COVID-19 struck in Washington state. Why does he do this? Fear. Donald didn’t drag his feet in December 2019, in January, in February, in March because of his narcissism; he did it because of his fear of appearing weak or failing to project the message that everything was “great,” “beautiful,” and “perfect.” The irony is that his failure to face the truth has inevitably led to massive failure anyway. In this case, the lives of potentially hundreds of thousands of people will be lost and the economy of the richest country in history may well be destroyed. Donald will acknowledge none of this, moving the goalposts to hide the evidence and convincing himself in the process that he’s done a better job than anybody else could have if only a few hundred thousand die instead of 2 million. “Get even with people who have screwed you,” Donald has said, but often the person he’s getting revenge on is somebody he screwed over first—such as the contractors he’s refused to pay or the niece and nephew he refused to protect. Even when he manages to hit his target, his aim is so bad that he causes collateral damage.
Mary L. Trump (Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man)
I am prepared for death, just in case the science is wrong!
Steven Magee
knows that who studies this. So this was a catastrophe waiting to happen. Unfortunately, it happened. The Chinese government under Xi and his comrades there have been covering this up from the get-go. The first reported case was December 1 [later research determined about mid-November], so they’d been sitting on this until they couldn’t anymore. And everything they’re telling you is a lie. It’s propaganda.
Francis Boyle (Resisting Medical Tyranny: Why the COVID-19 Mandates Are Criminal)
Western countries have been talking about pandemic preparedness since bird flu rang alarms in the early 2000s. This was especially true in the US, which was widely expected to be the country best prepared for something like this. But when Covid-19 hit the US, the plan was largely abandoned, while unexpected complications set in everywhere. Health workers didn’t have enough protective gear and ended up sick or in quarantine. Insurance rules meant people initially couldn’t afford to get tested. For weeks, they couldn’t get tests in any case because of problems with one test at the US CDC in Atlanta. Employees with no paid vacation came in to work, hoping it was just flu. The virus spread earlier and farther than surveillance systems could detect, partly due to years of cuts to public health.
Debora MacKenzie (Stopping the Next Pandemic: How Covid-19 Can Help Us Save Humanity)
What stands out now is the speed and efficiency with which, in retrospect, the world acted. The virus didn’t get opportunities to establish itself in countries outside China that delayed taking action to contain it, as happened with Covid-19. As the virus arrived, there was no disputing the need for containment or talk of relying on herd immunity. Because of this swift action, SARS never circulated widely enough to be called a pandemic. Maybe the virus’s high death rate scared everyone into line. Maybe its inability to spread before symptoms started, and absence of many mild cases, just made it easier and less disruptive to follow the epidemiologists’ advice. And there was more public trust in experts 17 years ago.
Debora MacKenzie (Stopping the Next Pandemic: How Covid-19 Can Help Us Save Humanity)
In any case, what I discovered by asking what might happen if another Black Death hit us turns out to be very relevant to what we are already going through with Covid-19, even though it has been much less lethal. The link, as with many apparently intractable problems, is complexity.
Debora MacKenzie (Stopping the Next Pandemic: How Covid-19 Can Help Us Save Humanity)
We today know that only too well: someone may carry, and transmit, the Covid-19 virus without knowing they have it. So the natural inclination of a Jesus-follower, to obey Jesus’ call to go and help at the place of danger, even at the risk of one’s own life, looks rather different when that apparently heroic action might easily make matters worse. The generous one-dimensional desire to be a hero, to ‘do the right thing’, needs to be rounded out with the equally generous willingness to restrain apparent heroism when it might itself bring disaster. Yet this cannot become an excuse for doing nothing. Out of lament must come fresh action. At the very least, clergy (properly trained, authorized and protectively clothed) must be allowed to attend the sick and dying. If, as sometimes seems to be the case, secular doctors suppose that such ministry is superfluous, this must be challenged at every level. As we thank God that in the last two or three centuries the long-term calling of the Church to bring healing and hope has been shared in the wider secular world, we must work with the medical profession, not least to ensure a fully rounded, fully human approach. This applies particularly when people are near the point of death; the hospice movement of the last fifty years has been largely a Christian innovation, privately funded, witnessing to a hope that secular medicine has sometimes ignored. The call to Jesus’ followers, then, as they confront their own doubts and those of the world through tears and from behind locked doors, is to be sign-producers for God’s kingdom. We are to set up signposts–actions, symbols, not just words–which speak, like Jesus’ signs, of new creation: of healing for the sick, of food for the hungry, and so on. This means things like running food banks, working in homeless shelters, volunteering to help those visiting relatives in prisons, and so on. These can be rewarding tasks but they, and all similar things, are also demanding. For them we will need, as Mary, Thomas and the disciples in the upper room needed, the living presence of Jesus, and the powerful breath of his Spirit. That is what we are promised.
N.T. Wright (God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and Its Aftermath)
But a “case” of coronavirus refers only to a positive test result showing someone has been infected. It does not mean that a person will become sick – much less that he or she will be hospitalized, need intensive care, or die.
Alex Berenson (Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns: Part 1: Introduction and Death Counts and Estimates)
In 1918, the Spanish flu killed about 2.7 percent of the world's population. [60] The risk of an outbreak of influenza against which we do not have a vaccine remains a threat constant, which we should take extremely seriously. During the first months of 2009, thousands of people died from swine flu. For two weeks, it was a recurring topic on the news. However, unlike Ebola in 2014, the number of cases was not doubling, not even increasing in a linear fashion. Some researchers concluded that the flu was not as aggressive as the first warning signs had indicated. However, journalists continued to stoke fear for several weeks.
Hans Rosling (Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think)
During COVID-19, you should keep a list of your medications and supplements with the dosages and times taken next to your bed in case you fall ill.
Steven Magee
Incremental and anecdotal infection cases are irrelevant. Total numbers are irrelevant. Most of these are not even “cases” but just positive test results. Most will experience no symptoms or mild to moderate symptoms and recover quickly. Many international studies show that countries that use HCQ as an early treatment for COVID patients have an exponentially lower mortality rate. You’ll never hear that in the United States.
Simone Gold (I Do Not Consent: My Fight Against Medical Cancel Culture)
In the United States, as of March 20, 2020, our lovely citizens were told, “Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not recommend that people who are well wear a face mask (including respirators) to protect themselves from respiratory diseases, including COVID-19. US Surgeon General urged people on Twitter to stop buying face masks.
Judy A. Mikovits (The Case Against Masks: Ten Reasons Why Mask Use Should be Limited)
A classical Game Theory case. People are not taking vaccines in the hope that everyone else would be vaccinated and they would be safe.
Vineet Raj Kapoor
Is faith just a human conception coming out of fear? As a matter of fact, the faithful people have lived in the most primitive civilizations as well as in the most recent times. Despite racism, bias, discrimination, genocide and even decimation of their native lands in some cases, the Muslims and Christian population alone would exceed 60% of the global population by 2050 as per Pew Research Centre. In UK alone, about 5,200 people convert to Islam every year. So, it is inappropriate to undermine conscious faithfulness by people who adopt faith even when it could result in bias, discrimination and racism.
Salman Ahmed Shaikh (Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World)
The human mind wants absolute justice, but it is not possible for natural reasons like an army general cannot be given equivalent punishment for committing genocide and in cases where the oppressed are in a weak position legally, diplomatically, politically and militarily. Raymond Davis killed two human beings in Pakistan, but went free from Pakistan without any punishment. Later on, he was charged in the USA for a minor traffic violation. Chilcot report in UK is most critical about the loss of 150 British soldiers in Iraq war while more than a million Iraqi civilians also died in the unjust Iraq war.
Salman Ahmed Shaikh (Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World)
The sufferings which some people go through in this world are in some cases a result of morally indifferent behaviour. Lack of social justice, unequal opportunities, extractive socio-economic institutions, socio-political injustice and outright wars have resulted in loss of millions of lives in the modern scientific age. Religion compels pro-social behaviour to avoid sufferings as far as possible and even if the sufferings do occur without human interventions, then religion urges moral action to help the needy and exemplify self-less spirit in dealing with catastrophes. If we leave the faith altogether, then science alone cannot provide any solace and meaning to the people who live their lives in unfair circumstances and who die in vain unjustly.
Salman Ahmed Shaikh (Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World)
Clearly, if one can’t prove that the coronavirus even exists and that the testing for this imaginary virus is bogus, then the world has been led wildly astray. If the test for the coronavirus is inaccurate and misleading, as is the case, then there are no grounds for believing the reports about the number of Covid-19 cases, the number of Covid-19 deaths, or any other statistics coming from the orthodox medical institutions. If the testing is bogus, then the coronavirus emperor has no clothes.
Thomas S. Cowan (The Truth About Contagion: Exploring Theories of How Disease Spreads)
But a “case” of coronavirus refers only to a positive test result showing someone has been infected. It does not mean that a person will become sick – much less that he or she will be hospitalized, need intensive care, or die. Thus discussing the age distribution of infections, while technically not untruthful, is extremely misleading.
Alex Berenson (Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns: Part 1: Introduction and Death Counts and Estimates)
We are experiencing one of the most significant pandemics in recent history. Corona Virus can transmit from one person to another person. To avoid exponential growth in the spread of Corona Virus cases, social distancing is suggested. Father of Monetarist School of Economics, Milton Friedman said that one thing which a person can always be sure of is that everyone would put his or her self-interest before others. Apparently, it is realized by governments that this is perhaps not the right thing to expect and put faith in at the moment. Private choices in pursuit of self-interest and invisible hand were deemed to be less reliable in current situation. Lockdown was considered necessary by governments in everyone’s individual and collective interest. Things do not work out randomly. They have to be worked out.
Salman Ahmed Shaikh (Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World)
The explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement didn’t take place in a vacuum. It materialized in the midst of the greatest health crisis of the century—the COVID-19 pandemic. And in the United States, the pandemic was being handled with all the proficiency that one might expect to find in a corrupt and dysfunctional regime led by a superstitious, science-defying authoritarian leader of a banana republic who had decided to let the people fend for themselves—and die accordingly. Notices about COVID-19 had appeared in the president’s daily briefings (PDB) as early as January 2020, but, as was usually the case with PDBs, Trump didn’t bother to read them.
Craig Unger (American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery)
The news is filled with uplifting stories of patients who have survived Covid-19 — including my own — but rarely do these narratives cover the long and jagged road to recovery that follows. The World Health Organization has stated that people with “mild” cases can expect recovery to take two weeks, while those with “severe” cases may take up to six weeks to recover, but the distinction between “mild” and “severe” cases is confusing, and many of us are experiencing symptoms for longer.
Fiona Lowenstein
I PALE HORSE 1 THE VIRUS NOW known as Hendra wasn’t the first of the scary new bugs. It wasn’t the worst. Compared to some others, it seems relatively minor. Its mortal impact, in numerical terms, was small at the start and has remained small; its geographical scope was narrowly local and later episodes haven’t carried it much more widely. It made its debut near Brisbane, Australia, in 1994. Initially there were two cases, only one of them fatal. No, wait, correction: There were two human cases, one human fatality. Other victims suffered and died too, more than a dozen—equine victims—and their story is part of this story. The subject of animal disease and the subject of human disease are, as we’ll see, strands of one braided cord. The original emergence of Hendra virus didn’t seem very dire or newsworthy unless you happened to live in eastern Australia. It couldn’t match an earthquake, a war, a schoolboy gun massacre, a tsunami. But it was peculiar. It was spooky. Slightly better known now, at least among disease scientists and Australians, and therefore slightly less spooky, Hendra virus still seems peculiar. It’s a paradoxical thing: marginal, sporadic, but in some larger sense representative. For exactly that reason, it marks a good point from which to begin toward understanding the emergence of certain virulent new realities on this planet—realities that include the death of more than 30 million people since 1981. Those realities involve a phenomenon called zoonosis. A zoonosis is an animal infection transmissible to humans. There are more such diseases than you might expect. AIDS is one. Influenza is a whole category of others. Pondering them as a group tends to reaffirm the old Darwinian truth (the darkest of his truths, well known and persistently forgotten) that humanity is a kind of animal, inextricably connected with other animals: in origin and in descent, in sickness and in health. Pondering them individually—for starters, this relatively obscure case from Australia—provides a salubrious reminder that everything, including pestilence, comes from somewhere.
David Quammen (Spillover: the powerful, prescient book that predicted the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.)
Doctors also think that many patients may have long-term consequences of infection with SARS-2 in many organ systems, in what is called “post-COVID syndrome.” Such patients may have permanently scarred or injured lungs or kidneys or hearts, for example, or even, in rare cases, neurological deficits.
Nicholas A. Christakis (Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live)
Report published : #Globalization of #disease has led the world to be only as resilient as the least resilient country and person , especially for highly contagious COVID-19 which has spread with scale and severity not seen since #Spanishflu . The variants of the virus (such as B.1.617.2 Delta , #DeltaPlus, Epsilon, #Gamma ) continue to threaten even those vaccinated. Secondary diseases such as black fungus are targeting #COVID patients and killing almost one in two persons in such cases. Human life is more precious and important than all economic principles or systems in totality because all these concepts are legitimate only because of their utility value which is to fundamentally make human life better. At least until this ongoing crisis ends, all economic policies (related to money, banking, fixing prices of commodities, etc.) need to be revised to make sure no human being suffers from hunger or the absence of required medical care. For this purpose KAILASA has presented a detailed report on effective solution for
Nithyananda
According to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, there have been 7,537 cases of myocarditis and pericarditis reported following COVID vaccines,85 with 5,602 cases attributed to Pfizer.86 Some 476 of these reports occurred in children from 12 to 17 years old.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)