A Chinese study showed that the country’s PCR swab test is so inaccurate it gave a false positive 80% of the time for those who were diagnosed based on contact only. Nevertheless, authorities can use these tests to claim a pandemic and shut down society. Last week, Professor Anthony Costello, of University College London’s Institute for Global Health, made essentially the same prediction, apparently based on the same computer models. UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock says the government will soon release a contact-tracing app to track everyone’s movements and show the identity of everyone they come near. According to he BBC, cell-phone users will be required to answer an on-screen questionnaire. If judged to be ‘at risk’ of infection, alerts will be sent to everyone they have been near, ordering them to immediately go into self-isolation. A similar app was used in China during the initial phases of the pandemic. Citizens who refused to install it were banned from entering public spaces and from using public transport. -GEG
To stop coronavirus we will need to radically change almost everything we do: how we work, exercise, socialize, shop, manage our health, educate our kids, take care of family members.
We all want things to go back to normal quickly. But what most of us have probably not yet realized—yet will soon—is that things won’t go back to normal after a few weeks, or even a few months. Some things never will.
It’s now widely agreed (even by Britain, finally) that every country needs to “flatten the curve”: impose social distancing to slow the spread of the virus so that the number of people sick at once doesn’t cause the health-care system to collapse, as it is threatening to do in Italy right now. That means the pandemic needs to last, at a low level, until either enough people have had Covid-19 to leave most immune (assuming immunity lasts for years, which we don’t know) or there’s a vaccine.
How long would that take, and how draconian do social restrictions need to be? Yesterday President Donald Trump, announcing new guidelines such as a 10-person limit on gatherings, said that “with several weeks of focused action, we can turn the corner and turn it quickly.” In China, six weeks of lockdown are beginning to ease now that new cases have fallen to a trickle.
But it won’t end there. As long as someone in the world has the virus, breakouts can and will keep recurring without stringent controls to contain them. In a report yesterday (pdf), researchers at Imperial College London proposed a way of doing this: impose more extreme social distancing measures every time admissions to intensive care units (ICUs) start to spike, and relax them each time admissions fall. Here’s how that looks in a graph.
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Offline is a documentary on the inevitability of the Earth being slammed by a mega solar flare – not the common type that interrupts communications and creates a light show in the Northern skies – but the big brothers thousands of times more powerful. These monsters deliver enough energy to blow apart the master transformers that supply the planet’s energy grids. When that happens, the lights go out for longer than anyone wants to think about. These X-Class solar storms hit the Earth every 150 years, on average. The last one arrived 156 years ago. We are overdue (
I WILL NOT SUBMIT!
China didn’t mandate any such application. What they do is calling people who bought medicine for cold, cough, fever and headache and if they are sick they will take them to a nearby hospital for testing for the COVID. All these drugs are registered.
Western media keep pouring out propaganda to smear China.
This sounds like the Fort Detrick and microBill’s Mary-go-6rounds. Bill Gates is practicing medicine without a doctor’s license in Africa by injecting children with his vaccine.
What a load of crap MIT like Harvard are as trustworthy as the cabal bankers which by the way are all connected.Seems there were millions in that crap CARE ACT bill to the Federal Reserve and institutions like Harvard ..oh my.. Welcome to The 4th Reich..