Wednesday, July 1, 2020

Herd Immunity Developing For CV


Herd Immunity For COVID-19 May Be Closer Than It Seems, New Model Shows




We might be closer to herd immunity on COVID-19 than we think, a new model has found.
In herd immunity, enough people become infected with (and cured from) a virus, building antibodies that mean, at least for a while, they cannot catch the virus again. When enough people are included in that herd, the virus has few places to go and often dies off, or at least is greatly reduced.
Now, a new study from Nottingham and Stockholm Universities suggests that such immunity might be closer than many in the mainstream media say.
“According to their new mathematical model, far less people need to be infected with COVID-19 in order to reach herd immunity levels,” StudyFinds.com reported.
“That model, which was specially designed just for this study, categorizes people into different groups based on age and social activity levels. Once those factors are incorporated into herd immunity projections, the percentage of a population that would have to become immune drops from 60% to 43%,” they said.

“By taking this new mathematical approach to estimating the level for herd immunity to be achieved we found it could potentially be reduced to 43% and that this reduction is mainly due to activity level rather than age structure,” professor Frank Bell in a press release. “The more socially active individuals are then the more likely they are to get infected than less socially active ones, and they are also more likely to infect people if they become infected. Consequently, the herd immunity level is lower when immunity is caused by disease spreading than when immunity comes from vaccination.










After months of panic porn and fraudulent projections and statistics about the China coronavirus and horrible unconstitutional mandates from corrupt politicians, it’s long past time to look at the data and manage according to the facts.  

This is what successful business people and leaders do in the real world.


Since the world was first introduced to the China coronavirus the situation became political.  However, some people could see right through it.
We first reported on March 17, 2020, on the controversial Ethiopian politician and Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, and his irresponsible and criminal fear mongering.  Tedros claimed in a press conference in early March that the fatality rate for the coronavirus was 3.4% — many multiples that of the fatality rate of the common flu which is estimated to be around 0.1%.
This egregiously false premise led to the greatest global panic in world history.  We proved that this premise was incorrect then.  Last week the CDC reported that at least 20 million Americans have contacted the coronavirus making the estimated mortality of the coronavirus near that of the common flu.  
Despite data to the contrary, Dr’s Fauci and Birx continued to push shutting down the economy, sending kids home from school, burdening the family with extra work related to the children’s schoolwork, and shutting down companies and industries across the great nation.
These doctors told us that masks didn’t work and then that they did.  Finally, a doctor had the guts to tell us that masks pose serious risks to healthy people and give them headaches.  The long term implications are not yet known.  Time and again the medical profession led Americans astray:


Not only are deaths down but the ratio of deaths to new cases is way down:










COVID Crisis Supercharged The War On Cash


The COVID Crisis Supercharged The War On Cash, Part 1





The corona crisis has already taken a very high toll and caused deep damage in our societies and our economies, the extent of which is yet to become apparent. We have seen its impact on productivity, on unemployment, on social cohesion and on political division. However, there is another very worrying trend that has been accelerated under the veil of fear and confusion that the pandemic has spread. The war on cash, that was already underway for almost a decade, has been drastically intensified over the last few months. 



The “problem”


Over the last years, and as the war on cash escalated, we’ve gotten used to hear certain arguments or “reasons” on why we should all abandon paper money and move en masse to an exclusively digital economy. These talking points have been repeated over and over, in most western economies and by countless institutional figures. “Cash is used by terrorists, money launderers and criminals” is arguably the most oft-repeated one, as it’s been widely employed in most debates about the digital transition. Just a couple of years ago, it was also used by Mario Draghi, to support the decision to scrap the 500 euro note. We didn’t get any specific information or data about how many terrorists were actually using this high-denomination note, but we do know a lot of law-abiding citizens were using it to save, as did small business owners for their operational liquidity needs.

Now, however, the corona crisis has introduced a whole new direction of anti-cash rhetoric and fresh arguments in favor of a digital economy. Even in the early stages of the pandemic, when essentially nothing was concretely known about the virus itself or its transmission, the seeds of new fears were already planted by sensational media reports and fear-mongering political and institutional figures. The insidious idea that “you can catch Covid through cash” might have been prematurely spread, but it did stick in most people’s minds.

Another factor that concretely helped the shift away from physical cash was an entirely practical one. Given the lockdown measures and the new “social distancing” directives that were enforced all over the world, it became difficult to use cash, even if you really wanted to, or had no other means of transaction, as is the case for billions of people. 

For most of us, who have access to online banking, cards or other digital payment services, this introduced no real inconvenience and we probably didn’t even give it a second thought. However, for many of our fellow citizens it was a serious impediment, which in some cases blocked their access to basic goods and essential supplies. 




The “solution”


With cash being presented not just as a danger to society and to national security, but also as a direct health hazard due to the coronavirus, the push towards digital alternatives has been massively reinforced over the last few months. Both international organizations and individual governments have actively participated and encouraged this push, some through public guidance statements and others through the blunt enforcement of direct rules and measures that leave no real room for their citizens to make their own choices.

The CDC in its official guidance to retail workers recommenced that they “encourage customers to use touchless payment options”, while a report by the Word Bank highlighted the need to adopt cashless payments for the sake of “social protection”. 

The UAE Central Bank encouraged the use of online banking and digital payments “as a measure to protect the health and safety of UAE residents”, and the Bank of England has acknowledged that banknotes can hold “bacteria and viruses” and recommended that people wash their hands after handling money. I


A highlight, however, came in May, when the World Economic Forum published an article in its “Global Agenda” strongly supporting the mass adoption of digital payments, for the sake of public health. 








Russian Forces Encroaching On U.S. In Syria In Attempts To Push U.S. From Region






Russian forces are encroaching on U.S. troop-controlled territory in eastern Syria — part of what officials say is a deliberate campaign to squeeze the U.S. military out of the region, according to two current U.S. officials and one former U.S. official. 
The growing friction between U.S. and Russian troops in Syria comes against a backdrop of deepening mistrust between the national security community and President Donald Trump’s White House over dealings with Moscow. The tension burst into the open last week with revelations that Russia’s secretive military intelligence service offered bounties to the Taliban for killing U.S. and coalition troops in Afghanistan. Lawmakers demanded answers this week amid bipartisan anger that the Trump administration has known about the bounties for months but has not yet authorized a response to Russia.

The disclosure of the bounty program has highlighted emerging frictions between the U.S. and Russia in other areas, including in Syria.
Clashes between Russian and U.S. forces in Syria have rarely turned violent, with one notable exception. In a bloody four-hour battle in 2018, American commandos killed 200-300 pro-Syrian government forces, including Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group. 
Recently, however, American military leaders in Syria are facing increasingly frequent brushes with Russian troops, according to two U.S. officials and one former U.S. official. Russia is deploying its forces closer and closer to U.S. positions in the Deir Ezzor region of eastern Syria, and the two militaries interact multiple times a week, if not daily, compared to roughly monthly last year, the people said.







Unemployment Rate: Almost 1/2 Of Working Age Adults In US Unemployed


Close To Half Of All Working Age Adults In The US Do Not Have A Job Right Now



There is a lot of talk about the “unemployment rate” these days, but the way that it is calculated has become so convoluted that it is not really that meaningful anymore.  Even during the so-called “good times”, more than 100 million U.S. adults were not working, but we were told that the unemployment rate was the lowest that it had been in decades.  Of course now everything has changed. 
Since this pandemic began, more than 47 million Americans have filed new claims for unemployment benefits, and the mainstream media is going to make sure that fear of COVID-19 continues to paralyze our society for the foreseeable future.
In this article, I would like to discuss the employment-population ratio.  According to Wikipedia, the employment-population ratio is “a statistical ratio that measures the proportion of the country’s working age population that is employed”.  I believe that it is a far more accurate measurement than the “unemployment rate” is, and we have seen this ratio move quite dramatically over the past couple of months.  According to CNBC, the employment-population ratio hit 52.8 percent in May, and that means that 47.2 percent of all working age Americans did not have a job…

Nearly half of the population is still out of a job showing just how far the U.S. labor market has to heal in the wake of the coronavirus.
The employment-population ratio — the number of employed people as a percentage of the U.S. adult population — plunged to 52.8% in May, meaning 47.2% of Americans are jobless, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics. As the coronavirus-induced shutdowns tore through the labor market, the share of population employed dropped sharply from a recent high of 61.2% in January, farther away from a post-war record of 64.7% in 2000.
As you can see on this chart, we are definitely in uncharted territory.
We have never seen a collapse of this magnitude in all of U.S. history, and it has been truly horrifying to watch so many people lose their jobs.





Fauci Warns Of Another Potential Pandemic:

Fauci Says US ‘Needs to Keep Eye’ on New Swine Flu in China to Avoid COVID-19 Pandemic Scenario




On Monday, a new study published in the Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences revealed that a new strain of swine flu, dubbed G4 EA H1N1, has been identified in China. The new influenza virus is said to have genetically descended from A/H1N1, which caused the 2009 swine flu pandemic.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned on Tuesday that the country should pay more attention to a new strain of swine flu spreading in China, to avoid repeating the scenario of how Washington has handled the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

Fauci, the US government’s top infectious-disease expert, said that the new influenza virus, known as G4 EA H1N1, has the potential to become a pandemic.

Speaking in a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on Tuesday, Fauci noted that there is no evidence of human-to-human transmission of the virus yet, but the virus is exhibiting “reassortment capabilities”. The health expert explained that when there is a new virus that has the potential to trigger a pandemic, it’s usually either due to mutations and/or a reassortment, or exchange, of genes.
“And they’re seeing a virus in swine [...] now that have characteristics of the 2009 H1N1, of the original 1918 [influenza] – which many of our flu viruses have remnants of that in it – as well as segments from other hosts like swine,” Fauci said, cited by Fox News.
The expert explained that when all the factors are combined, along with some of the elements that could make it susceptible to being transmitted to humans, the possibility of a new pandemic similar to the 2009 swine flu, would be high.
“It’s something that’s still in the stage of examination, it’s not so-called an immediate threat where you’re seeing infections, but it’s something we need to keep our eye on just the way we did in 2009 with the emergence of the swine flu,” Fauci said.
In a study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers said that pigs have been increasingly infected with the virus G4 EA H1N1 in China, beginning in 2016.
“G4 viruses have all the essential hallmarks of a candidate pandemic virus,” the study authors stated.
During the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, the United States saw around 60.8 million infection cases, over 274,000 hospitalizations and 12,469 fatalities, according to US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates.
On Monday, Fauci also warned that the US could see a surge in COVID-19 infections, up to 100,000 new cases per day, if the nation does not slow the ongoing virus outbreak. He called for the government to take action “very quickly”.

“We’re going in the wrong direction if you look at the curves of the new cases,” Fauci told the Senate Health Committee. “We need to do something about that and we need to do it very quickly”.
The current average of the daily coronavirus cases in the US is at least 40,000, the highest number yet recorded since the outbreak of the pandemic.
As of Tuesday, the US has registered over 2,620,000 novel coronavirus cases, including 127,272 virus-related deaths.