Coronavirus Lockdown Effectiveness, Other Doubts

One of the few certainties about this novel virus and the pandemic it is spreading is that, being new (or at least new to us, namely newly discovered), we don't know very much about it, and we are constantly learning about it all the time.

But, being human and not liking uncertainty in a similar way in which nature abhors vacuum, we try to jump to conclusions, any conclusion, in fact, just to avoid doubt, chaos and disorder (a very natural feeling). So we grab at many different explanatory theories, whether supported a lot, a little or not at all.

This is The Times of Israel reporting on the theory held by someone the newspaper describes as a top Israeli mathematician:

"I have no explanation but the numbers speak for themselves."

Top Israeli prof claims simple stats show virus plays itself out after 70 days.

Isaac Ben-Israel, who is not a medical expert, says analysis worldwide shows new cases peaking after about 40 days, slams economic closures; leading doctor dismisses his claims.

So, according to Professor Ben-Israel, head of the Security Studies program in Tel Aviv University and the chairman of the National Council for Research and Development, "simple statistical analysis demonstrates that the spread of COVID-19 peaks after about 40 days and declines to almost zero after 70 days — no matter where it strikes, and no matter what measures governments impose to try to thwart it."

What is intriguing is that, minus the mathematical and statistical calculations, a similar view, at least in its practical conclusions, is supported by another person in the news, who has been accused of "anti-Semitism", ie David Icke:

On Wednesday night Icke shared his unsubstantiated views in an edited interview for London Real: COVID-19, and shared baseless claims on coronavirus including that mandatory vaccination for the virus would be 'fascism' and include 'nanotechnology microchips'.

… he appeared to justify attacks on 5G masts around the UK, adding 'human life as we know it is over' if the construction continued.

The 5G theory has been discredited by experts, with Public Health England stating that 'the overall exposure is expected to remain low relative to guidelines and, as such, there should be no consequences for public health.' The new coronavirus is also spreading in places without 5G networks, including in Iran.

Strange bedfellows as they may be, Icke shares with Professor Ben-Israel the hypothesis that the lockdown doesn't help to limit the spread of Covid-19, as shown on this tweet of his with a diagram comparing countries with and without lockdown measures:

Compare this image, though, with the one pictured above this post and you'll see how focusing only on deaths per million and removing cases per million gives a very different picture: this should provide an indication of the complexity of the issue, which doesn't lend itself to over-simplifications, much as we would love to rely on them.

Icke is not the only one to believe in the uselessness of lockdowns, there are many, especially among conservative and Right-oriented people, who are sceptical of their government's policies and think the same.

Now, I am in no position to categorically declare that this idea is right or wrong. As I said at the beginning, we don't have enough information.

I do have some doubts about using pure mathematics to arrive at conclusions like those of Ben-Israel on this. Correlation doesn't mean and doesn't necessarily involve causation. In Latin, this supremely logical and succinct language, it's better: post hoc ergo propter hoc is a fallacy.

For example, is it possible that countries with less contact with the rest of the world and therefore fewer opportunities for contagion (ah, the joys of globalisation! we have finally discovered them in their full glory) have had lower numbers of cases of Covid-19 and therefore had a comparable smaller need for lockdown than those with more international traffic and Coronavirus spread which as a consequence resorted more to lockdown, inverting the cause-effect direction?

Has this been considered as a contributing factor, anyway?

At least we have a glimmer of hope, though: it's the prediction on the progress of the disease in Israel made by Professor Ben-Israel on last 12 April on Facebook, which I have to reproduce in its online translation:

It turns out that the expansion of the expansion [meaning, I presume, the peak] has been behind us for about a week, and apparently it will fade almost completely in about two weeks.

Assuming the translation is accurate, we can wait about two weeks to see if his prediction for Israel materialises and test whether his theory might be correct.

Walkers, Joggers, Cyclists Coronavirus Risks Study

I've noticed that in and around London pedestrians, joggers and cyclists don't always respect the minimum 2 metres' distance of social distancing recommended to limit the spread of Coronavirus.

The Guardian, helpfully, points out another anti-social behaviour in the streets which is more dangerous now: spitting.

But new research has uncovered that the 2 metres' distance deemed sufficient for people standing still, for example when queueing outside a shop, is not enough in times of COVID-19 when someone is exercising.

These are the conclusion of a Belgian-Dutch study.

There is some confusion among the public on this question, in view of the widespread notion, supported by the WHO (World Health Organisation), that the new virus is not spread via the air but by contact with people or surfaces. This is because the aerosols - minuscule particles floating in the air - containing the virus don't remain in the atmosphere long enough to cause a risk.

However, in a situation in which a person is walking, running or cycling after another, the droplets may still be in the air before they settle down on a surface.

Civil Engineering and Sports Aerodynamics researchers at Belgium's University of Leuven and the Netherlands' University of Eindhoven created simulations to investigate these risks.

Professor Bert Blocken, Study Coordinator of the white paper just published, in an interview to The Brussels Times explained why the measures for people standing still are "ineffective" for those walking, running or cycling:

When people speak, exhale, cough or sneeze they generate droplets, and while the largest droplets tend to fall to the ground first, the smaller ones can remain in the air a bit longer, so it is important that a person who is behind another does not walk into this cloud of droplets.

The Urban Physics, Wind Engineering, Sports Aerodynamics expert has extensively studied the aerodynamic advantages of slipstreaming in cycling, which is the act of a cyclist riding behind a team-mate or rival to save energy and thus gain a benefit: in sport terminology this is usually called "drafting".

But in the Coronavirus pandemic the disadvantages and dangers of this behaviour are remarkable.

The simulations show that the respiratory droplets of someone potentially infected with the virus could come into contact with anyone located behind him by travelling through a slipstream or wake, the area that a person in movement creates behind him.

From Blocken's simulations it appears that social distancing requirement may be smaller for two people running or walking beside each other, as the droplets land behind them. When they are positioned diagonally behind each other the risk to catch the droplets of the lead runner is also smaller. The risk of contamination is the biggest when people are just behind each other, in each other’s slipstream.

The researcher compared slipstreams to a vacuum or drag effect which occurs when the regular airflow is disturbed by someone who is in motion.

Luckily, although slipstreams can even be as long as 10-15 metres, Blocken observed that they remained quite narrow and that respiratory droplets tended to evaporate quite quickly.

Based on this study's results, the scientist advises greater social distances for people on the move:

• those who walk in the same direction in one line should maintain a distance of at least 4–5 metres
• for running and slow cycling the distance should be 10 metres
• for hard, fast cycling it should be at least 20 metres
• for overtaking, cyclists should be in a different lane at a considerable distance, e.g. 20 metres.

I don't wish to unnecessarily worry anyone, but we all should be cautious in these times of pandemic for the sake of others as well as ourselves.


PHOTO CREDIT
Image by Maciej Cieslak from Pixabay

Chinese Communist Regime Caused Coronavirus Pandemic, Says Asian Catholic Church Head

This is, in its bare truth, what communism, in spite of all its edulcorations, wishful-thinking illusions of a better world, lying promises, and deceiving claims of self-alleged philanthropism, really is.

Cardinal Charles Bo, president of the Federation of Asian Bishops' Conferences, said in an official public statement on 1 April:

The Chinese regime led by the all-powerful Xi [Jinping] and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) – not its people – owes us all an apology, and compensation for the destruction it has caused. At a minimum it should write off the debts of other countries, to cover the cost of Covid-19. For the sake of our common humanity, we must not be afraid to hold this regime to account. Christians believe, in the words of the Apostle, Paul, that “the truth will set you free” [in reality it is the Gospel of the Apostle John 8:32]. Truth and freedom are the twin pillars on which all of our nations must build surer and stronger foundations.

Cardinal Bo, the Archbishop of Yangon, in Myanmar, added: "[T}he Chinese people were the first victims of this virus and have long been the primary victims of their repressive regime".

The Cardinal recalled how the Chinese authorities silenced doctors, journalists and intellectuals who raised the alarm as early as December, and waited until 23 January to isolate Wuhan and Hubei:

When the virus first emerged, the authorities in China suppressed the news. Instead of protecting the public and supporting doctors, the CCP silenced the whistleblowers. Worse than that, doctors who tried to raise the alarm – like Dr. Li Wenliang in Wuhan Central Hospital who issued a warning to fellow medics on 30 December – were ordered by the police to “stop making false comments”. Dr. Li, a 34 year-old ophthalmologist, was told he would be investigated for “spreading rumors” and was forced by the police to sign a confession. He later died after contracting coronavirus.

Young citizen journalists who tried to report on the virus then disappeared. Li Zehua, Chen Qiushi and Fang Bin are among those believed to have been arrested simply for telling the truth. Legal scholar Xu Zhiyong has also been detained after publishing an open letter criticizing the Chinese regime’s response.

Moreover, he cited a damning study from an English university:

An epidemiological model at the University of Southampton found that had China acted responsibly just one, two or three weeks more quickly, the number affected by virus would have been cut by 66 percent, 86 percent and 95 percent respectively. Its failure has unleased a global contagion killing thousands.

The Chinese Communist Party is a "threat to the world" were the words of the Yangon Archbishop, and Xi’s regime "is responsible, through its criminal negligence and repression, for the pandemic".

And even now, the subterfuge continues:

On top of all this, there is deep concern that the Chinese regime’s official statistics significantly downplay the scale of infection within China.

The British newspaper The Telegraph on 29 March reported the UK's Health Minister accusing China of hiding the true scale of Covid-19 and shockingly exposing China's reopening of the "wet" markets which were identified as the cause of the spread of Coronavirus.

China's communist government oppresses religious freedom, destroys thousands of churches, imprisons Muslims in forced labour camps, practice the removal of organs from prisoners of conscience, suppress the freedoms of lawyers, dissidents, intellectuals.

[All emphases are mine.]


SOURCE and PHOTO CREIDIT
Catholic Archdiocese of Yangon

Media Italiani Hanno Sbagliato il Tiro sul Coronavirus Inglese

Questo post si trova anche nella versione italiana di questo blog:

I Media Italiani Hanno Sbagliato il Tiro sul Coronavirus Inglese

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Capisco che questi tempi di coronavirus rendono proni a sprofondare nel panico, specialmente quando le informazioni, e persino i provvedimenti e decreti, si contraddicono a rotazione.

Quando un nuovo virus e' scoperto, chiaramente anche i dati scientifici non hanno alle spalle una lunga storia di prove ed errori da cui farsi guidare.

Ma non ho potuto fare a meno di riprendere in mano questo blog, dopo due anni di lontananza, quando ho visto quello che e' accaduto in alcuni media italiani riguardo a notizie provenienti dal Regno Unito.

La Repubblica e Il Fatto Quotidiano, per esempio, hanno riportato che emergeva da un documento segreto che in Gran Bretagna l’epidemia di coronavirus sarebbe durata fino alla primavera 2021 con 8 milioni di persone ricoverate.

La loro fonte, purtroppo, e' l'inattendibile, socialista, Guardian, ma parte della responsabilita' va anche al governo inglese, che non e' stato un modello di chiarezza di comunicazione e subito dopo ha fatto retromarcia.

In un primo momento, per l'esattezza giovedi' 12 marzo, il Primo Ministro Boris Johnson aveva annunciato, nel corso di una conferenza stampa, una tattica unica in Europa (un po' come la Brexit) e strabiliante: lasciare che il virus infettasse il 60 per cento della popolazione britannica - mai, comunque, l'80% come hanno scritto Repubblica e Fatto Quotidiano - sulla base della teoria della "immunita' di gregge" che sta dietro le vaccinazioni di massa: quando un alto numero di persone e' portatore di un patogeno, una popolazione e' protetta. Come spiego' a suo tempo l'Express:

Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance warned COVID-19 is likely to become a "seasonal virus" [sic: in realta' COVID-19 e' la malattia, il nome del virus e' Sars-CoV-2] as he said the UK will only benefit from indirect protection, the so-called herd immunity, from the coronavirus if 60 percent of the population becomes infected. Asked how many Britons will need to get coronavirus before herd immunity comes into play, Sir Patrick said: "Probably about 60 percent or so."

Cioe': "Il principale consulente scientifico Sir Patrick Vallance ha avvertito che COVID-19 diventerà probabilmente un "virus stagionale", dicendo che il Regno Unito beneficerà della protezione indiretta, la cosiddetta immunità di gregge, dal coronavirus se il 60% della popolazione viene infettata. Alla domanda su quanti britannici dovranno venire contagiati dal coronavirus prima che subentrasse l'immunità di gregge, Sir Patrick ha dichiarato: 'Probabilmente circa il 60 percento'."

Ma, come dicevamo, il governo britannico ha subito dopo rivisto questa strategia che ha un aspetto eutanasico al suo interno. Basti pensare che, nell'introdurre questo piano, il leader conservatore aveva aggiunto una frase forte: "Molte famiglie perderanno i loro cari".

Johnson sembra che affronti molte questioni, non solo la Brexit, come una schiacciasassi.

Il suo piano, pero', e' stato duramente criticato da medici e ministri della Sanita' passati e presenti, in quanto non teneva conto del fatto che, cosi' facendo, la curva del numero dei casi di contagio sarebbe salita troppo velocemente, oberando il sistema sanitario e mettendo cosi' a rischio di morte persone che, con le cure adeguate, si sarebbero potute salvare.

Un conto e' la vaccinazione, dove l'immunità di massa ha un senso, perche' l'agente patogeno e' somministrato in dosi minime e controllate.

"Non si fa affidamento sull'agente infettivo in dosi altamente letali per creare una popolazione immunitaria", afferma Akiko Iwasaki, un virologo della Yale School of Medicine.

"Vallance e altri hanno dato l'impressione che il governo stesse deliberatamente mirando a far ammalare il 60% della popolazione", sostiene l'Atlantic. Ma cosi' non e'.

E' vero che La Repubblica ha pubblicato il dietrofront di Johnson, ma ho la sensazione che sia sfuggito a qualcuno.


FONTI:
La Repubblica
Il Fatto Quotidiano
Daily Express
The Atlantic
PHOTO CREDIT
Vox

The Antichrist Looks a Lot Like Something We've Seen

Rings a bell?

The Antichrist:

1) will come disguised as the Great Humanitarian; he will talk peace, prosperity, and plenty, not as means to lead us to God, but as ends in themselves. 

2) He will write books on the new idea of God to suit the way people live.

3) He will induce faith in astrology so as to make not the will but the stars responsible for our sins.

4) He will explain guilt away psychologically as repressed sex, make men shrink in shame if their fellowmen say they are not broadminded and liberal.

5) He will identify tolerance with indifference to right and wrong.

6) He will foster more divorces under the disguise that another partner is “vital.”

7) He will increase love for love and decrease love for persons.

8) He will invoke religion to destroy religion.

9) He will even speak of Christ and say that he was the greatest man who ever lived.

10) His mission, he will say, will be to liberate men from the servitudes of superstition and Fascism, which he will never define.

11) In the midst of all his seeming love for humanity and his glib talk of freedom and equality, he will have one great secret which he will tell to no one; he will not believe in God. And because his religion will be brotherhood without the fatherhood of God, he will deceive even the elect.

12) He will set up a counter-Church, which will be the ape of the Church because, he the devil, is the ape of God. It will be the mystical body of the anti-Christ that will in all externals resemble the Church as the mystical body of Christ. In desperate need for God, he will induce modern man, in his loneliness and frustration, to hunger more and more for membership in his community that will give man enlargement of purpose, without any need of personal amendment and without the admission of personal guilt. These are days in which the devil has been given a particularly long rope.

Thanks to https://churchpop.com/2018/05/21/the-12-tricks-of-the-anti-christ-to-steal-souls-according-to-the-ven-archbishop-fulton-sheen/

Men Cannot Predict Consequences

How many times have we stubbornly and ardently wanted something, and maybe got out of our way and moved heaven and earth to make it happen, only to realise in the end not only and not so much that it was not worth it, but above all that it was not for our benefit at all, and that it would even have been better if the opposite had occurred?

It is sufficient to think, furthermore, of the heterogony of ends, or the unintended consequences of intentional actions, of which the most macroscopic examples are the side effects of drugs and the laws of the state.

All this is telling us that often we are not able to foresee, understand and evaluate the medium- and long-term consequences of actions or events, in a nutshell we can't see beyond the end of our nose.

This is not the only but one of the fundamental reasons why any consequentialist ethical system, namely a system for which every choice of a moral agent must be guided by the evaluation of the consequences that will derive from each alternative choice, can only fail.

We have many examples of great historical significance of this disastrous, catastrophic failure to foresee the consequences until the total reversal of intent.

An example is offered - unintentionally, of course - exactly by a philosopher who is the representative of a consequentialist school of thought, utilitarianism, which we will discuss below: the contemporary Australian philosopher Peter Singer.

In his book One World published in 2002, Singer vigorously defends mass immigration from Third World countries to those of the First, arguing on a utilitarian basis that, while the possible inconveniences, if ever there are, for the peoples of the latter are mild, they are nothing compared to the good that immigration into rich nations brings to the poor of the world (Singer, an ethnic Jew, would perfectly agree with Pope Francis).

The Princeton professor arrives (or arrived, in 2002) to the point of saying that the European countries and North America should greatly increase the number of immigrants they welcome.

With the benefit of hindsight, which is 20/20, I do not know if Peter has changed his mind. I know however that the events that followed have completely refuted him, even from within his own viewpoint. That's because the type of immigration from poor regions to rich regions that he advocated has had - and is continuing to have on an ever-increasing scale - the consequence of spreading Islam in the Western world, once Christian and still preserving some traces of the virtues and attitudes arising from Christianity, including doing unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Once the ethnic, cultural and religious replacement of Christianity with Islam will to a good extent be accomplished - not only for the purely demographic reasons of the different degree of reproduction between Muslims and native Westerners but even more so because a society, especially as complex as ours, cannot exist without religion, and it would be destined to collapse (but this is a subject for another article) -, what will happen to us is what is happening in the rich Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which erect walls and close their borders to their Muslim "brothers" of Syria.

This is how Singer's pro-immigration recommendation, which would have the self-declared intention to help the world's poor, will result in the rich countries' changed nature - changed exactly thanks to the application of the precepts and prescriptions of this utilitarian philosopher -, which in turn will have the direct consequence of making them much more reluctant to help the poor.

Another clamorous example of miscalculation is that of another Jewish and atheist philosopher, Karl Marx.

All or almost all the predictions that Marx derived from his diabolical theory have been refuted by that giant laboratory that is history, proving that his theory is indeed scientific, as he called it, but at the same time false.

In particular, Marx thought that the only relationships that matter, the only dynamic relationships, were those between man and man, social.

The other relational aspect of the economy, that is the relationship between man and nature, this communist man par excellence saw as active only on the part of man, and purely passive on the part of nature.

Unlike for others of his ideas, Marx cannot be blamed for having had this idea.

In the nineteenth century it would have been very difficult, indeed impossible, to foresee ecological disasters, to think that the environment could, so to speak, "rebel". Certain phenomena needed to take place, events to occur, ideas to be developed and understood before we could make similar predictions.

But this is yet another demonstration of human incapacity for far-sightedness.

Finally, I mention only briefly - with the intention of developing it more fully another time - the so-called "sexual liberation", that orgy of promiscuity and libertinage that has engulfed and enveloped the West at least starting from the notorious sixties on.

It's only love, said Oscar Wilde. Make love not war, the hippies echoed. Who could think that something bad could come from "love"? That chaos could derive from "love"?

Well, there was someone who understood it. And he understood it precisely because he was going against the current, and his foresight came from far away, from very far away, from another world.

I'm talking about Paul VI and his encyclical Humane Vitae, in which, perhaps enlightened by the Holy Spirit and certainly on the basis of a true doctrine - predictive ability is the test of truth -, he was able to foresee, already in the now distant 1968 (so much water has passed under the bridge), those many and serious evils that we later saw.

Yet again evidence that are not men alone, without supernatural help, who are able to see far away.

Utilitarianism, founded by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) (also influenced by the Italian Cesare Beccaria and his treatise Dei delitti e delle pene), is a consequentialist moral theory of the kind described at the beginning of this article.

For it the right moral action in all circumstances is that which is expected to result in maximum utility, understood as the greatest pleasure and happiness for the largest number of moral patients - that is, all those who will suffer the consequences of such action - and the least pain and unhappiness for the least number of them.

What one feels, the feeling, both physical, as sensation, and psychic, as emotion, reigns supreme.

In fact what else can be the foundation of an ethical system that has been deprived of God, what other rational basis can it find? It is the triumph of the purest materialism.

There are other ethical systems without God besides utilitarianism, but the latter is perhaps the one that best represents the atheistic position.

Once the feelings of pleasure at the pillar of the whole moral system have been erected, and provided with a somewhat rational basis (the so-called "utilitarian" calculation), it has infiltrated European culture and, by extension, Western spasmodic research, not to say obsessive, of pleasure itself, by any means: "natural" - sex -, artificial - chemically, with drugs, alcohol, sweets, excess and excessive consumption of food -, possession of wealth, power, material goods, obsession with shopping, and so on.

This article is also in Italian, here.

There Is No Such Thing As Humane Slaughter

I'm not reproducing here the horrendous pictures of animals tortured in an abattoir by bored staff, filmed earlier this year by an animal protection group in (ironically named) Vigan, France.

You can see them by clicking on this link to an article in The Daily Express.

And don't think that these things don't happen in Britain. They do, as it's been repeatedly exposed in undercover reports by worthy organisations like Animal Aid.

The Animal Aid exposes have been covered by mainstream media, for example here in The Telegraph.

Make no mistake: both ritual (halal for Muslims and kosher for Jews) and nonritual slaughterhouses are horrifically cruel, although the former a bit more than the latter.

If you find even watching these graphic images hard to bear, think of the animals who must endure these ordeals on their own flesh and skin.

And, especially, think of that when you buy or eat meat.