Preparing for COVID-19

[Michi]

Read at least to the part about aliens from other planets and dimensions occupying cloned human bodies.

Wow. Thank you so much for posting that link!

"The second reason is that since the beginning of this century, aliens have begun to invade the human mind and its ideology and culture. The aliens come from other planets. The names that I use for these planets are different . Some are from dimensions that human beings have not yet discovered."

Smart man, that Li Hongzhi, I'm impressed!

I wonder whether he's heard of the Raëlians?

 

[Keith Sinclair]

Mmm interesting thought they were more traditional eastern Religion.

Reminds me of that John Carpenter flic. THEY LIVE . Put on special sunglasses & see the world as it really is.

 

[Luftmensch]

Li Hongzhi, Falun Gong's founder is interesting. Read at least to the part about aliens from other planets and dimensions occupying cloned human bodies.

Wow... it is on wikipedia as well!

I never knew this was part of Falun Gong (not that I knew much about it).... You're right... There is a fascinating overlap between some of these modern movements. Must be something buried in the collective unconscious...

 

[Luftmensch]

Reminds me of that John Carpenter flic. THEY LIVE . Put on special sunglasses & see the world as it really is.

Such an awesome-terrible flick... (or terrible-awesome? Maybe just awesome...)

OBEY!!

 

[Talim]

Shen Yun is also Falun Gong if you didn't know.

 

[Keith Sinclair]

Millions in China practice Chi Gung or Tai Chi

Chi is the same life force energy as Ki in Japan. When I was 20 years old was taking Tai Kwan Do. One of my classmates uncle was into Aikido. The master Koichi Tohei was coming to the dojo in Hawaii. We went to meet him. At one point he asked for volunteer I accepted. He lightly touched outside edge mouth cheek area one finger each side. I went flying back on to the mats. Was first experience of chi energy.

His book Ki In Daily Life helped me. I could feel quite a bit of ki just by following simple steps and letting go.

It even helped me at work would come in and see four or five banquet sheets hanging up. Totally relaxed & calm. With in minutes would know what I needed to order how much work needed to be done in limited time frame would go over what had to be done with my two helpers & we would go to it.

This is old teaching. Attuning oneself to Ki life energy of the universe.

Aliens, ego mind stuff nothing to do with it.

 

[XooMG]

Removed belligerent comment. Stay safe.

 

[Michi]

"In other words, the U.K. is locked down for a NET increase of as little as 6,600 or so deaths. Nobody wants to say it, but even Ferguson admits that the vast majority of those dying from COVID-19 would likely have died within the year anyways. There, we said it."

Awesome! Everything is just fine. Seeing that, as of this moment, worldometer reports 7,097 deaths from coronavirus in the UK. Oh yes, just in case you missed it: when lots of people die from coronavirus, that doesn't mean that other people stop dying from what people normally die from.

One week has passed since I wrote this. In that time, the death toll in the UK has gone from 7,097 to 12,107. That's an additional 5,000 people who have died in one week.

I believe it is accurate to state that the guy who wrote the grassfire article is, at best, incompetent.

 

[Michi]

There also appears to be some amount of under-reporting because the UK does not count people who die in nursing home and private residences, whereas other countries, such as France, do:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/world/europe/britain-coronavirus-death-economic-toll.html

 

[HRC_64]

State Department warned in 2018 that Wuhan lab testing bats for coronavirus had sloppy safety precautions and had the potential to cause a 'new SARS-like pandemic'

Not suprising.

The US National Institute of Health, a government agency, also gave a $3.7million research grant to the WIV to carry out research on bats from caves in Yunnan, more than 1,000 miles away. Scientists have traced the sequencing of the COVID-19 genome to Yunnan...

Not suprising

Furthermore, another lab located in Wuhan, belonging to the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was also conducting research on animal coronaviruses and was located next to the Wuhan Seafood Market. That lab only had a level two biosafety certification meaning its security protocols were more relaxed than the Institute of Virology.

Some experts say that these concerns over whether the virus could have escaped from a Chinese lab should be investigated.

'I don't think it's a conspiracy theory. I think it's a legitimate question that needs to be investigated and answered,' University of California Berkeley researcher Xiao Qiang told the Post.

'To understand exactly how this originated is critical knowledge for preventing this from happening in the future.'

Don't tell KKF

 

[Michi]

It is not inconceivable that the virus escaped from a lab by someone getting infected there. But that's a long way from claiming that the virus was artificially created by splicing bits of other viruses together, or deliberately released.

The genome analysis indicates the virus is of natural origin. MERS and SARS originated in bats without any bioengineering. There are bits of bat genome in coronavirus. Yes, I know, they didn't sell bats at the Wuhan market. But they sold other animals that may well have been in contact with bats.

Occam's razor says that the simplest explanation is almost always the correct one. When there is a choice between a conspiracy and a stuff-up, it almost always is a stuff-up. Although, we need to keep the possibility in mind that, actually, it's the 5G cell towers wot did it (not!)

Only the Chinese will know for sure whether or not the virus escaped from a lab. If it did, I'm sure they'll be a lot more careful in future. That's little consolation for all the people who are dying, I know

 

[ian]

@HRC_64, you quoted:

“Some experts say that these concerns over whether the virus could have escaped from a Chinese lab should be investigated.

'I don't think it's a conspiracy theory. I think it's a legitimate question that needs to be investigated and answered,' University of California Berkeley researcher Xiao Qiang told the Post.”

This kind of reporting ticks me off. Xiao Qiang is a researcher in internet freedom, and other things digital. They seem to be implying he’s an expert on the Covid outbreak. Red flag, imo, if they can’t find a better ‘expert’ and try to hide his actual specialty.

Maybe it came from a lab, but unless people with relevant expertise start saying it’s likely, I’ll continue to ignore these articles.

 

[MarlSounds]

It's an unprecedented and shocking time for the hospitality and service sector employees and company owners and my heart goes out to everyone working in this space right now. And, unfortunately, when the lockdown/shutdown lifts, it is likely that social distancing will make restaurant visits untenable. Wait staff will still have to wait tables and liaise with the kitchen. The kitchen team still needs to work closely. Customers will miss a busy ambience - the hustle, bustle and banter. So the bounce back is going to be slow and painful.

It's not yet the time to be retrospective, but to get whatever planning and cost reduction action done quickly and orderly, and to hunker down at home. We're all in this together. Please be safe and look after yourself.

 

[HRC_64]

...unless people with relevant expertise start saying it...

LMAO.

“What we thought we knew, we don’t know,” said Dr. Nile Cemalovic, an intensive care physician at Lincoln Medical Center in the Bronx.

 

[rob]

It's an unprecedented and shocking time for the hospitality and service sector employees and company owners and my heart goes out to everyone working in this space right now. And, unfortunately, when the lockdown/shutdown lifts, it is likely that social distancing will make restaurant visits untenable. Wait staff will still have to wait tables and liaise with the kitchen. The kitchen team still needs to work closely. Customers will miss a busy ambience - the hustle, bustle and banter. So the bounce back is going to be slow and painful.

It's not yet the time to be retrospective, but to get whatever planning and cost reduction action done quickly and orderly, and to hunker down at home. We're all in this together. Please be safe and look after yourself.

Unfortunately If and when lockdowns or shutdowns are lifted there will be a spike in cases and more people will die. I truly feel for all the business’s effected( I am retail and have zero income) I firmly believe the best chance of minimizing loss is to have unity. Shut down and stay safe.

 

[Bert2368]

Unfortunately If and when lockdowns or shutdowns are lifted there will be a spike in cases and more people will die. I truly feel for all the business’s effected( I am retail and have zero income) I firmly believe the best chance of minimizing loss is to have unity. Shut down and stay safe.

This:



And this:

https://m.slashdot.org/story/369282

 

[rob]

It's an unprecedented and shocking time for the hospitality and service sector employees and company owners and my heart goes out to everyone working in this space right now. And, unfortunately, when the lockdown/shutdown lifts, it is likely that social distancing will make restaurant visits untenable. Wait staff will still have to wait tables and liaise with the kitchen. The kitchen team still needs to work closely. Customers will miss a busy ambience - the hustle, bustle and banter. So the bounce back is going to be slow and painful.

It's not yet the time to be retrospective, but to get whatever planning and cost reduction action done quickly and orderly, and to hunker down at home. We're all in this together. Please be safe and look after yourself.

PS. if i had a choice of any country in the world to be in now, New Zealand would be it. Jacinta is an amazing leader who has approached this situation with intelligence, compassion and empathy.

 

[HRC_64]

Lets not look to experts, but lets look at what the "experts" actually said....
[source>https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9.pdf]

In theory, it is possible that SARS-CoV-2 acquired RBD mutations (Fig. 1a) during adaptation to passage in cell culture, as has been observed in studies of SARS-CoV11.

This is one of the passage "supposed to debunk" the WIV origin theory, saying in essence, its possible but not likely it was a lab contruct because the alternative "provides a much stronger and more parsimonious explanation".

Herel's the alternative hypothesis:

The finding of SARS-CoV- like coronaviruses from pangolins with nearly identical RBDs, however, provides a much stronger and more parsimonious explanation of how SARS-CoV-2 acquired these via recombination or mutation19.

This however, is not a statement of fact, or evidence of any kind.

This is the second passage in the original article:

The genomic features described here may explain in part the infectiousness and transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 in humans. Although the evidence shows that SARS- CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory- based scenario is plausible.

Again, this last sentence is purely speculative.

 

[Michi]

This:

I agree with the gist of the video. I have to quote myself here:

World-wide, even after most countries have brought their outbreaks under control, we are looking at a long period of whack-a-mole. I cannot see any real relaxation in the social distancing rules without paying the price in more deaths. When more than 99% of the population still have no immunity, any relaxation will instantly send those numbers skyrocketing again.

The video presents an argument that is too simplistic though, because it ignores herd immunity. No virus can infect 100% of the population. Once infections get to about 70%, herd immunity kicks in and slows the spread of the virus.

However, unfortunately, this does not change the core message of the video. Herd immunity or not, if we just "let it rip", we are looking at probably more than 100 million deaths world-wide. And, with it, utter and complete destruction of any semblance to normality.

Realistically, we are stuck with social distancing until after we have a vaccine and have managed to immunise enough people to make it safe for the ones that are not (yet) immunised.

 

[Michi]

Again, this last sentence is purely speculative.

What truly puzzles me in all this is why some people want to so desperately believe that there was a conspiracy, or that the virus was manufactured, or that it was deliberately released. What's to be gained by believing that?

The virus is here, it's real, and we need to stop it, no matter how it got into the world. Relaxing social distancing will most definitely not stop it.

I'll be watching with keen interest as to how things go when countries relax the rules. Italy, Spain, and Austria are taking the first very cautious steps toward that right now. I sincerely hope that this will not turn out to be a move they'll regret. The risk of ending up right back where they came from is very real.

I think what we'll see is flare-ups of infections once the rules are relaxed, followed by clamp-downs, followed by relaxation and flare-ups and clamp-downs again, etc. After a few cycles of this, people might be more prepared to accept the reality of the situation. A vaccine is the way out. Pretty much nothing else is.

 

[HRC_64]

Just to continue...since nobody will believe their own judgement, here are some "footnote" comments with a bit of context.

Lets not look to experts, but lets look at what the "experts" actually said....

The "pangolin theory" was undermined if not completely debunked ... >

[D]espite their spike proteins, pangolin coronaviruses bear many differences to SARS-CoV-2 that make pangolins unlikely to be the source of infection, The New York Times reported.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/science/pangolin-coronavirus.html

But all the pangolin viruses lack a certain furin-like feature (another protein), a key identifying feature of the new coronavirus, which it uses to jump to humans and latch on. It is likely that there was yet another intermediate animal that mutated the virus before it jumped to humans;

>https://www.livescience.com/did-coronavirus-evolve-in-dogs-after-bats.html

https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/doi/10.1093/molbev/msaa094/5819559

The "implausibility of accident" theory is so weak it doesn't need to be "debunked"

The simplest evidence-backed argument is that the chinese were (commonly) observed studying BSL-3 grade pathogens at BSL-2 (or sub-standard bio-security arrangements)...Meaning an outbreak would be entirely plausible.

https://thebulletin.org/2020/03/exp...er-it-could-have-leaked-from-a-research-lab/#

More intuitively, when SARS jumped from bats to humans via Civets, the first outbreaks were dound in rural areas, near the bats. SARS-2 was first found in urban environment....a city of 11 million people 500 miles away from where the bats/civets lived...

This means/implies that the intermediate host was never in touch with humans (?) except for this one animal (?) that (By luck) ended up on somebody's dinner plate or shopping cart at Wuhan wet market.

So we should remain sceptical of easy explanations no matter from what side teh come from.

 

[HRC_64]

What truly puzzles me in all this is why some people want to so desperately believe that there was a conspiracy...

You seem rather desperate to use the word "conspiracy"
... but eveytime you say this ...
you're analysis turns out to be incorrect.

 

[Luftmensch]

There is a stinky hubris to all this....

As has been said before... there was SARS-CoV-1, MERS-CoV and Ebola. The fact that they didnt happen in white-prosperous nations meant a large chunk of the OECD could pretend it was a far away problem. Epidemiologists have been screaming about the risks of pandemics for a long while now.

At home we have seen small scale events of Hendra virus and lyssavirus. These are deadly infections that were not created in a lab and did not arise because people were tearing the heads off bats. This is the nature of zoonotic disease...

Rather than finger pointing, which has an undercurrent of racism, the international community should be working collaboratively to minimise zoonotic hot-spots such as wet markets and aspects of intensive farming. This is sensitive as it requires challenging the hygiene of cultural practices - being accusatory is unlikely to yield cooperation.

 

[Michi]

So we should remain sceptical of easy explanations no matter from what side teh come from.

Sure. As I said:

It is not inconceivable that the virus escaped from a lab by someone getting infected there.

Chances are that we'll never know for certain. And, to me, it doesn't matter because, at this point, it is irrelevant.

What's relevant is beating the virus.

 

[HRC_64]

Rather than finger pointing, which has an undercurrent of racism, the international community should be working collaboratively ....

Please take your racist ******** somewhere else......if this thing came out of russia and russia was hiding the patient zero etc....you have the same problem and people would be similarly critical. The international community needs to understand the origin of the virus to fight it. You need patient zero, and you need to know the natural history of the pathogen (intermediate hosts, etc) to fighht re-emergence.

 

[HRC_64]

And, to me, it doesn't matter because, at this point, it is irrelevant.

Again, you're simply wrong. The origins of the viruse have scientific/practical value to fight the pandemic.

 

[Michi]

The origins of the viruse have scientific/practical value to fight the pandemic.

I honestly don't see why that would be so. There are more cases in several countries now than there are in China (USA, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, and UK), and China has had fewer deaths than most of those countries.

Given the current situation, where the virus is pretty much everywhere, why does it matter where patient zero was? We know it started in Wuhan. That narrows it down to a few square kilometres. Isn't that accurate enough?

Can you explain why we need to have a more precise origin of the virus than that in order to fight the pandemic more effectively?

 

[Luftmensch]

Please take your racist ******** somewhere else......if this thing came out of russia and russia was hiding the patient zero etc....you have the same problem and people would be similarly critical.

Apologies if that is offensive to you. I am not calling you a racist. I have no idea if you are racist or not... I doubt you are... and I certainly hope you are not.

But arguments that assign intention/fault to this disease (a synthetic disease that was deliberately or accidentally released by the Chinese) do strike me as having racist undertones. They are not widely supported and appeal to suspicion. At the very least it is a bad faith attitude that prevents collaborative spirit during a global event that requires international collaboration.

The "plausibility" argument is a slippery slope. Why defend "plausible" explanations over "likely" explanations. Sure: it is plausible this a weaponised disease that was accidentally leaked. That doesn't at all make it likely.

 

[HRC_64]

The "plausibility" argument is a slippery slope. Why defend "plausible" explanations over "likely" explanations. Sure: it is plausible this a weaponised disease that was accidentally leaked. That doesn't at all make it likely.

You have this completely backwards. The PUBLISHED AUTHORS earlier cited "plausibiliiy" to support to pangolin theory ("likely") over the lab accident theory ("implausible"). A proper analysis has shown this is wrong: pangolin theory seems unlkely, and the lab accident theory remains VERY plausible (and seems equally if not more likely).

 

[HRC_64]

But arguments that assign intention/fault to this disease...

Wanted to address this "intent" comment separately. You don't need any intent to develop WMD. A classic case study is VX nerve agent. This was derived from a PESTICIDE that was found to work on MAMMALS. By accident basically.

In 1954, ICI put one of them on the market under the trade name Amiton. It was subsequently withdrawn, as it was too toxic for safe use. The toxicity did not go unnoticed, and samples of it were sent to the British Armed Forces research facility at Porton Down for evaluation. After the evaluation was complete, several members of this class of compounds became a new group of nerve agents, the V agents. The best-known of these is probably VX...

Notice the title slide of this presentation (discussing the history of VX) and its allusion to "public heath":

'Public Health in Reverse’: History, Innovation and the Dual- Use Problem of Biological and Chemical Warfare

>https://www.who.int/global_health_histories/seminars/Brian_Balmer_presentation.pdf

Its not hard at all to imagine similar parallel could happen with a biological pathogen in "non-intentional" industrial research. Likewise any release of this pathogen would have "public health" consequences (accident or otherwise).

There is sufficient basis for the concerns people have here to take them seriously.