The Coronavirus Hoax

Ron Paul Institute ^ | Mar 16 2020 | Dr Ron Paul

[rintintin]

Governments love crises because when the people are fearful they are more willing to give up freedoms for promises that the government will take care of them. After 9/11, for example, Americans accepted the near-total destruction of their civil liberties in the PATRIOT Act’s hollow promises of security.

It is ironic to see the same Democrats who tried to impeach President Trump last month for abuse of power demanding that the Administration grab more power and authority in the name of fighting a virus that thus far has killed less than 100 Americans.

Declaring a pandemic emergency on Friday, President Trump now claims the power to quarantine individuals suspected of being infected by the virus and, as Politico writes, “stop and seize any plane, train or automobile to stymie the spread of contagious disease.” He can even call out the military to cordon off a US city or state.

State and local authoritarians love panic as well. The mayor of Champaign, Illinois, signed an executive order declaring the power to ban the sale of guns and alcohol and cut off gas, water, or electricity to any citizen. The governor of Ohio just essentially closed his entire state.

The chief fearmonger of the Trump Administration is without a doubt Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health. Fauci is all over the media, serving up outright falsehoods to stir up even more panic. He testified to Congress that the death rate for the coronavirus is ten times that of the seasonal flu, a claim without any scientific basis.

[cambyses]

How do they know that the death is due to exclusively coronavirus infection? We do not have such data! Most of the death cases are due the underline conditions(pulmonary fibrosis, bacterial pneumonia, fungus pneumonia, diabetes, immunosuppressed persons due to HIV infections, organ transplant, aged peoples, Georgy syndrome in children etc. etc. which happened to be infected with coronavirus. Coronavirus infection may be highly contagious(spread very fast) but is not highly pathogenic( induced death is very low).

[Rashputin]

I wasn’t intentionally insulting you in any way. I’m not sure what you mean.

[Let_It_Be_So]

“Globally the death rate now appears to be about a thousand a day. Doubling every four days do the math.”

I don’t see a doubling every four days. Mind sharing where you are getting those kinds of numbers? I’m not saying you are wrong, just would appreciate a look at your source data.

Thanks.

[MV=PY]

"The influenza typically has a case fatality rate of about 0.1%. The coronavirus is approaching 4% fatality. That is a LOT higher than the flu. This, along with the easy transmissibility, makes Covid-19 very concerning."

Ok, let's keep it real. They can't know the fatality rate without testing EVERYONE. They are now only testing people showing symptoms that complain about them enough to go get tested. On top of that, there is a scarcity of tests.

There is hard evidence that there are carriers who present minor or no symptoms who will never be tested. All of these people would go into the denominator of the fatality rate.

No one should quote such fatality statistics as "facts." The fact is, we simply don't know what the fatality rate is, but it is definitely lower than what we can measure at the moment.

[Rashputin]

So someone doesn't like you, shoots you in the hip, and you fall in front of a tractor trailer doing 75mph.

Accidental death due to pedestrian walking into the path of an oncoming vehicle.

[wastoute]

The virus itself is doubling every four days. The death rate lags because of the “not dead yet” column. The deaths lag behind the # of seriously ill by the number of days it takes to die.

[jurroppi1]

I work with some PHDs that are, simply put, dolts! They are so convinced they are right all the time about everything (the PHD gives them a penchant for confirmation bias).

That said, there are some that are amazing.

I’d like to see raw data and an intelligent discussion of the stats that includes topics of uncertainty (confidence interval), testing rate, potential for false positives and false negatives when testing, skewness, kurtosis, sample size, population from which the sample is taken, etc...

Right now the stats on this are just simple numbers based on oversimplified principles and this is much more complex than simple division.

[wastoute]

That’s why I keep saying watch the number of deaths. There can still be an error in “cause of death” but about the death itself there is no argument.

[SisterK]

Ron Paul
I loved you then (2008)
And I love you now

[CodeToad]

Since we haven’t taught logic and reasoning in schools, meaning people no longer know how to discern fact from fiction, it is extremely easy to gaslight the feeble minded into believing anything.

[MV=PY]

"That’s why I keep saying watch the number of deaths. There can still be an error in “cause of death” but about the death itself there is no argument."

Agreed.

Still, to get an accurate death rate you need to know the total number of people infected (the denominator).

[CodeToad]

“you don’t believe me that the death rate is approaching 4%?”

No, I don’t. As a PhD, I know how to discern fact from fiction, and I damned well know when numbers are thrown around without any source of reference or stipulation as to their veracity. What did you get your doctorate in, liberal arts??

[wastoute]

Let’s try to go over it. There are three sets of numbers we can access in increasing order of error. The # of dead is pretty firm. The # of seriously ill a little squishy. The number of infected is an estimate. But we have rough estimates on their proportion to each other. IIRC the number of seriously ill is over an order of magnitude greater than the number of dead and the number of asymptomatic at least twice that. Roughly from the figures I have seen. The number of seriously ill is about a week in front of the # of dead. The number of seriously ill is doubling about every 4 days last time I looked so in a week we can expect the number of dead to be about appropriate to that proportionality.

So if we look at the number of deaths right now we have probably a better number of “seriously ill” than the actual # we believe to be seriously ill at the moment. So somebody said the number of dead right now is 70. We can expect that number to be twice that in 4 days. I used 100 in my initial guess. Using 70 in 4 days expect 140 dead and so on. Watch the numbers of death in the next two weeks because that’s what the people who make decisions are doing. If the number of deaths over the next week or so stops doubling every 4 days what we are doing is working. 70 now, 140 in 4 days, 280 in 12 days, 560 in 16 days, 1120 in 18. Somewhere in there it goes exponential and starts going up even faster. If we have 1,000 dead in two weeks expect 20-100,000 by the end of the year.

So, yes, “it’s just another (additional) flu season”. In the next few weeks. If you really think this is a hoax volunteer to work in a hospital for the next two weeks.

[wastoute]

You are never going to know that. There is no way to know that. If you test millions of people even with a low false positive on the test you are going to have thousands of false positives.

[MV=PY]

"You are never going to know that. There is no way to know that. If you test millions of people even with a low false positive on the test you are going to have thousands of false positives."

Agreed. But as I tried to state in my original post, the error in the fatality rate of the Coronavirus is overstated because there isn't enough testing going on to detect all the actual cases that should be in the denominator, much less generate a bunch of false positives.

[Magnatron]

If you ignore Dr. Paul’s spinning crazy eyes for a moment, you’ll realize on this he’s right.

[CitizenUSA]

The fatality rate is known cases versus deaths, and as you noted, S. Korea is probably one of the better reporting countries. We may very well know the number of reported cases as well as the number of deaths in S. Korea. What we don’t know is the number of unreported cases or the percentage of infected people who seek medical treatment. It might be very low or high and may not be the same as other viruses.

[jetson]

The coordination of this whole fight against the virus is truely amazing. Could not have been done without internet communication. Trump is doing an amazing job.

[1Old Pro]

Trump is doing an amazing job.

I nominate him for "Man of the Year"

[daniel1212]

See http://peacebyjesus.witnesstoday.org/COVID-19%20_Percent_Population.html , by the grace of God.

COVID-19 cases as of 3-16-20 compared with 2018 death rates for the Flu.

While COVID-19 has hardly competed its run, yet for comparison with the Flu, although I cannot find the stats for the number of cases of flu per state for this season, yet I did find the morality rate for the flu per state in 2018, which I have added to the table below, as well as the latest morality count for COVID-19. Additional stats on the 2019-2020 Flu season are provided below the the table.

During the 2017-2018 season, the percentage of deaths attributed to pneumonia and influenza (P&I) was at or above the epidemic threshold for 16 consecutive weeks. Nationally, mortality attributed to P&I exceeded 10.0% for four consecutive weeks, peaking at 10.8% during the week ending January 20, 2018.

And for 2017-2018 season, according to a later report by the CDC, 80,000 people died of the flu in U.S, the highest death toll in 40 years.

Meanwhile, the NYT (3-13) sounded this alarm: “Between 160 million and 214 million people in the U.S. could be infected over the course of the epidemic, according to one projection. That could last months or even over a year, with infections concentrated in shorter periods, staggered across time in different communities, experts said. As many as 200,000 to 1.7 million people could die.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/us/coronavirus-deaths-estimate.html)

Below is a list of states per currently reported COVID-19 infections (by CNN, of 3-12-20) in comparison with population size (note that variations in reported cases are partly be due to how comprehensive testing can and has been done). Use an online calculator here, (see second row under “Percentage Calculator in Common Phrases,” and remove commas in population figure) for cases as a percent of population.

In any case, I pray that this crisis, both real and inflated, works to bring souls to realize the need for help from above, for repentance and mercy from God through faith in the risen Lord Jesus.

State	Population	COVID-19 cases	Percent of infections by capita	Deaths from COVID-19 (as of 3-12-20)	Deaths from Flu in 2017-2018 (last available data from CDC) Over 80k total. Deaths were at or above epidemic threshold for 16 consecutive weeks
Washington (19 tied to one nursing home )	7,614,893	904		48	930
New York	19,453,561	967		10	4,749
California	39,512,223	557		7	6,917
Massachusetts	6,949,503	197			1,441
Colorado	5,758,736	160		1	568
Georgia	10,617,423	121		1	1,530
Florida	21,477,737	155		5	3.091
Illinois	12,671,821	105			2,564
New Jersey	8,882,190	178		2	1,465
Texas	28,995,881	85			3,516
Oregon	4,217,737	39			530
Pennsylvania	12,801,989	77			2,887
Iowa	3,155,070	23			697
Louisiana	4,648,794	136		3	824
Maryland	6,045,680	41			973
North Carolina	10,488,084	38			2,064
District of Columbia	705,749	22			N/A
Indiana	6,732,219	25			1,118
Nebraska	1,934,408	18			394
South Carolina	5,148,714	33		1	882
Wisconsin	5,822,434	47			1,075
Arizona	7,278,717	18			1,116
Virginia	8,535,519	49		1	1.283
Kentucky	4,467,673	21			969
South Dakota	884,659	10		1	245
Nevada	3,080,156	45		1	527
Tennessee	6,833,174	52			1,646
Minnesota	5,639,632	54			698
New Hampshire	1,359,711	17			265
Rhode Island	1,059,361	21			192
New Mexico	2,096,829	17			365
Ohio	11,689,100	50			2,395
Connecticut	3,565,287	30			757
Utah	3,205,958	39			353
Hawaii	1,415,872	7			542
Michigan	9,986,857	53			1,869
Oklahoma	3,956,971	10			809
Vermont	623,989	12			87
Arkansas	3,017,825	22			670
Delaware	973,764	8			167
Kansas	2,913,314	11			630
Mississippi	2,976,149	13			910
Missouri	6,137,428	6			1,477
North Dakota	762,062	1			152
Wyoming	578,759	3			128
Alabama	4,903,185	29			1,268
Idaho	1,792,065	5			235
West Virginia	1,787,147	0			539
Maine	1,344,212	17			312
Montana	1,068,778	7			152
Alaska	731,545	1			68
Total (3-16)		4,556		85	Over 80k. Above totals may be less.