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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Wharf Rat who wrote (1219510)4/11/2020 10:39:58 PM
From: RetiredNow5 Recommendations

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  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 1588485
 
I just gave you the facts and then you revert to a known inaccurate way of calculating it. This is silly. It's hard to talk to someone who doesn't understand the problem we're facing with this mass hysteria. You are sorely in need of some perspective. Let me provide it for you. The article is a week old, but it has some good stats in there to compare with COVID.

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Why Are We Destroying the Economy for This?

Arthur Petersen
DON’T LIVE - YOU MAY DIE

(or Why are we destroying the economy for this?)

Note: All figures below are from the CDC, National Health Center and worldometerinfo

As of April 8, 2020, there have been 14,768 deaths associated with the coronavirus in the U.S. out of a population of 331 million. In California, there have been 507 deaths out of a population of 40 million.

In the 2018-2019 flu season in the U.S, there were approximately 35 million cases of influenza, 16 million medical visits and 55,672 deaths from flu and pneumonia. When this happened, we did not close our livelihood, the economy, or put 10 million people (and rising) out of work. In fact, these numbers were not frightening or even news.

Let’s add a more dramatic perspective regarding the ways you may die this year which are infinitely more likely than the coronavirus.

U.S. annual causes of death (rounded to the nearest thousand):

Flu and Pneumonia 2018-2019 - 56,000

Heart disease - 647,000

Cancer - 599,000

Unintentional injuries - 169,000

Lower respiratory disease - 160,000

Stroke - 146,000

Alzheimer’s - 121,000

Diabetes - 84,000

Auto accidents - 40,000

The death rate in California by car, as of now, is 10 times more likely than the coronavirus. Should we stop driving?

Many of the deaths above are associated with smoking, which, according to estimates of the CDC, kills 1,300 people a day.

Let’s add some global facts to this global coronavirus mania. Worldwide, the coronavirus as of this date, is associated with 88,444 deaths out of 7.8 billion people. That is 0.00001% of the world’s population.

Global deaths from other causes from January 1, 2020 to the present (just the last 3 months) are as follows:

Seasonal Flu - 118,980

Mothers during childbirth - 75,645

Suicides - 262,441

Traffic accidents - 330,367

HIV/Aids - 411,415

Alcohol - 612,105

Smoking - 1,223,449

Cancer - 2,009,990

Looking at history, the 1918 Spanish flu infected 500 million globally and killed 50 million while we fought a war.

So, I ask again, “Why are we destroying an economy over the current situation?” To date, we have put over 10 million people out of work and will likely suffer more deaths in the long run from this frustrating and stressful situation from heart disease, depression, suicides, drugs, drinking, debt and financial loss, destruction of families, domestic abuse, lack of exercise, interruption of education, and potential destruction of our currency with unbridled debt and printing of more money. Is it necessary to destroy millions of lives to prevent a temporary and miniscule death increment over the other myriad of reasons we might die when we get out of bed and leave our house? We are all going to die of something someday.

“Increasing dependence on government and passively accepting that some “elite” somewhere knows best about our welfare is much more dangerous that the Wuhan virus. The natural desire to be “safe” often suppresses the need to be free. But abandoning one’s own responsibility to provide for their own safety will result in government tyranny. And you will still die.”

State Rep. John Fuller, R - Kalispell

Albert Einstein once said “There are two things that are infinite: the universe and human stupidity and I am not sure about the universe.”

Or as Ben Franklin said “For those who wish to give up freedom for security, you may soon find you will have neither.”



To: Wharf Rat who wrote (1219510)4/11/2020 10:53:39 PM
From: RetiredNow  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 1588485
 
Here's a true scientific study done in Germany through a randomized test. And what they found was that out of 1,000 random people tested, 15% were infected and there was a 0.37% mortality rate. The evidence is starting to pile up that this is nothing more than a bad flu and we're engaged in mass hysteria and destroying the world economy and the lives of millions of people for no reason. Car accidents kill 10 times as many people as COVID every will. Should we stop driving?

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COVID antibody test in German town shows 15 percent infection rate

Scientists randomly sampled 1,000 people in Gangelt
Ross Clark
This morning we have some data giving a little more insight into the great unknown of the coronavirus pandemic: just how widely among the population has SARS-CoV-2 — the virus which causes COVID-19 — spread among the general population. A team at the University of Bonn has tested a randomized sample of 1,000 residents of the town of Gangelt in the north-west of the country, one of the epicenters of the outbreak in Germany. The study found that two percent of the population currently had the virus and that 14 percent were carrying antibodies suggesting that they had already been infected — whether or not they experienced any symptoms. Eliminating an overlap between the two groups, the team concluded that 15 percent of the town have been infected with the virus.

This number matters hugely because it tells us what we need to know in order to judge how deadly the virus is and also how easily it spreads. It tells us, ultimately, how useful the methods are that we are employing in order to combat the virus. As explained here before, the question of how many people already have the infection is at the heart of a debate between epidemiologists at the Imperial College and Oxford university.

Two weeks ago, the latter published modeling claiming that up to half the UK population might already have been infected with the virus — a level of infection which would mean that lockdown may be the wrong approach, as we would already have achieved a state of herd immunity, preventing the further spread of the disease.

The Gangelt study does not provide support for the idea that half of the population of Britain, or any other country, has been infected with the virus. But for a town to have an infection rate of 15 percent suggests that the virus had spread a lot further than many believed. Neil Ferguson, who leads the Imperial team, told the FT this week that he believes between three and five percent of the UK population has already been infected.

Data from coronavirus deaths in Gangelt suggests an infection mortality rate of 0.37 percent, significantly below the 0.9 percent which Imperial College has estimated, or the 0.66 percent found in a revised study last week.

The 15 percent figure from Gangelt is interesting because it matches two previous studies. Firstly, there was the accidental experiment of the cruise ship the Diamond Princess, which inadvertently became a floating laboratory when a passenger showing symptoms of COVID-19 boarded on January 20 and remained in the ship, spreading the virus, for five days. The ship was eventually quarantined on February 3 and all its 3,711 passengers tested for the virus. It turned out the 634 of them — 17 percent — had been infected, many of them without symptoms. The mortality rate on the vessel was 1.2 percent — although, inevitably being a cruise ship, it was a relatively elderly cohort.

We gained another insight into SARS-CoV-2 from a Chinese study into 391 cases of COVID-19 in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. In this case, scientists tested everyone who shared a household with people who were found to be suffering from the disease. It turned out 15 percent of this group had gone on to be infected with SARS-CoV-2 themselves. Again, many showed no symptoms.

Obviously these are all small-scale studies and none of them are deliberate experiments to see how far SARS-CoV-2 will spread if it is allowed to ‘rip through’ a population. But they do raise the question: is there a ceiling on the number of people who are prone to be infected with the disease? Do many of us have some kind of natural protection against infection? Would it ever spread among more than about one in six of us?

The British government has based its planning and policy for COVID-19 on the assumption that if the virus was allowed to spread unchecked it would eventually infect 80 percent of the population. That is a figure that seems to have been borrowed from planning for a flu pandemic, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it applies to this virus. The sooner we have the results of more studies like that at Gangelt, the better a picture we have and the sooner we will be able to plot a path out of lockdown.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.