A roundup of articles on the status of the Coronavirus and ways we can help….
Meals here can cost $700. Now this restaurant feeds the homeless
Since the novel coronavirus outbreakshut down restaurants across Denmark, Rasmus Munk, chef of the two-star Michelin restaurant, Alchemist, and his team of volunteers have been cooking around 500 meals a day for Copenhagen’s homeless.
Long.
Epidemiology Debunks ‘Distancing’ and a Call for the Return to Sovereignty
By Parisse Deza, Intel Dinar Chronicles, April 13, 2020
https://inteldinarchronicles.blogspot.com/2020/04/epidemiology-debunks-distancing-and.html
Perspectives on the Pandemic Episode 2: In this explosive second edition of Perspectives on the Pandemic, Professor Knut Wittkowski, for twenty years head of The Rockefeller University’s Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design, says that social distancing and lockdown is the absolutely worst way to deal with an airborne respiratory virus. Further, he offers data to show that China and South Korea had already reached their peak number of cases when they instituted their containment measures. In other words, nature had already achieved, or nearly achieved, herd immunity.
Watch episode 1 here: https://youtu.be/d6MZy-2fcBw
And, episode 3, here: https://youtu.be/VK0Wtjh3HVA
KW: Children …are evolutionarily designed to be exposed to all sorts of viruses during their lifetime, and so they should keep going to school and infecting each other, and that contributes to herd immunity, which means after about four weeks at the most the elderly people could start joining their families, because then the virus would then have been extinguished.
Interviewer: You mentioned in the piece that in fact you think containment would prolong the duration of the virus. Can you talk about that?
KW: Yes. With all respiratory diseases the only thing that stops the disease is herd immunity. About 80% of the people have had to have had contact with the virus, and the majority of them won’t even have recognized that they were infected, or would have had very, very mild symptoms, especially if they are children. So it is very important to keep the schools open and kids mingling to spread the virus to get herd immunity as fast as possible.
Interviewer: And so what do you make of this policy that was enacted in the US and most of the world, this policy of containment, of shelter in place. What is your opinion of it?
KW: What people are trying to do is flatten the curve. I don’t really know why. But what happens if you flatten the curve, you also prolong, to widen it, and it takes more time.
Interviewer: And what do you say to people who say, ‘We just didn’t know about the lethality of this virus, and the smartest thing to do is just to do what we did and contain everybody because we didn’t have the data?’
KW: It’s not the first corona virus that comes out and it won’t be the last. For all respiratory diseases we have the same type of an epidemic. If we leave it alone, it comes for two weeks, peaks, and it goes for two weeks and it’s gone.
Interviewer: During the press briefing yesterday [4/2] Fauci, the president and the rest of the people assembled were saying that had they not done the containment strategy that they have done that upwards of two million people would have died in the US. What do you think of that figure?
KW: Well, I’m not paid by the government, so I am entitled to actually do science. If…there had been no intervention, the epidemic would have been over like every other respiratory disease epidemic.
Interviewer: What do you think about their latest figure that they claim that because of social distancing that we saved ourselves from the two million dead, that we are probably looking at 150-200k dead… ?
KW: I don’t know where these numbers are coming from. They’re totally unrealistic; there are no indications that this flu is fundamentally different from every other flu. Maybe it’s a bit worse than other flus. Could be.
KW: For a respiratory disease, a flu ends during springtime. People spend more time outdoors because outdoors the viruses cannot easily spread. That is a form of containment. Spend more time outdoors.
Interviewer: So we’re now spending more time indoors…Doesn’t that help keep the virus going?
KW: It keeps the virus healthy.
Interviewer: So we should be told to go outdoors.
KW. Yep. Going outdoors is what stops every respiratory disease.
Interviewer: They’re saying this is more contagious than the seasonal flu or the H1-N1, and that’s why we have to take it more seriously; it’s much more contagious. Is that just ridiculous?
KW: I don’t know where that opinion comes from. The data that we have speaks against it.
We can see that in China, in Korea, the epidemic went down, and did exactly what every other epidemic did….Nothing is fundamentally different than the flus we have seen before. Every couple of years there is maybe a flu that is a bit worse than the other flus, and it goes away in exactly the way the other flus went away. This one behaves exactly the same way.
In the US we are prolonging the epidemic to flatten the curve…We will see more deaths because of this social distancing.
Interviewer: We keep seeing more now about this second wave that will come in the fall. …It seems from what you’re telling us that we’ll have a second wave because of social distancing.
KW: If we had herd immunity now, there couldn’t be a second wave in autumn… However, if we prevent herd immunity from developing it is almost guaranteed that we will have a second wave as soon as either we stop social distancing or that climate changes with winter coming or something like that.
Interviewer: So should we tolerate this? Should we stand for staying sheltered in house arrest…or should we perhaps be resistant?
KW: We should be resisting and we should at least hold our politicians responsible….One thing we should do and that would be safe and effective is opening schools. Let children spread the virus among themselves, which is a necessity to get herd immunity. That was probably one of the most destructive actions the government has done.
Interviewer: What would you like people to know?
KW: I think people in the US and maybe in other countries as well are more docile than they should be. People should talk with their politicians. Question them. Ask them to explain. Because if people don’t stand up to their rights, their rights will be forgotten.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau addresses Canadians on the COVID-19 pandemic from Rideau Cottage in Ottawa on April 15, 2020.
Also long.
CERB Eligibility Loosened To Cover More Hard-Hit [Canadian] Workers Amid Pandemic
Canadian Press, April 15, 2020
Seasonal workers without a job, Canadians who’ve seen hours severely cut will qualify, PM says.
OTTAWA — The federal government is making changes to its COVID-19 programs to send emergency aid to seasonal workers without jobs and those whose hours have been drastically cut but who still have some income.
The changes will also allow people who are making up to $1,000 a month to qualify for the Canada Emergency Response Benefit, as well as those whose employment insurance benefits have run out since the start of the calendar year.
The changes begin to address key concerns about who qualifies for the $2,000-a-month benefit, which was quickly put in place earlier this month to deal with the pandemic’s economic fallout.
In the last month, the national economy has contracted sharply as businesses have been ordered closed and Canadians told to stay home.
Watch: Trudeau says restrictions to fight COVID-19 still tightening
Preliminary data from Statistics Canada on Wednesday showed economic activity collapsed in March, suggesting the drop could be a record nine per cent.
Some six million people have applied for the help since the middle of March when businesses were ordered closed and workers to stay at home as a public health precaution.
Employment Minister Carla Qualtrough said it was too early to say how many people will apply for the help, or how much it will add to the cost of the $24-billion program.
She said much will rest on how many companies use an upcoming $73 billion wage subsidy program, which will cover up to 75 per cent of employee salaries. The government is expecting companies to take advantage of the program to keep workers tied to an employer, meaning fewer of them would be in receipt of the CERB.
For those doing jobs deemed essential and making less than $2,500 a month, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the federal government will top up their pay to encourage them to keep going into work during the health and economic crisis.
He says the government is still weeks away from seriously considering loosening public health restrictions to reopen the domestic economy, something that will be done in phases with some regions and industries starting sooner than others.
The Bank of Canada is warning that the downturn tied to COVID-19 will be the worst on record and that the economic recovery will depend on the effectiveness of current measures to bring the pandemic under control.
The bank announced that it is keeping its key interest rate target on hold at 0.25 per cent, saying that it is effectively as low as it can go to combat the economic impacts of COVID-19.
If conditions improve quickly, the economic shock is likely to be “abrupt and deep, but relatively short-lived” and followed by a strong rebound for most, but not all, sectors of the economy.
A more severe scenario would likely see a “significant number” of businesses closing for good and longer spells of unemployment as workers look for new jobs.
Bank of Canada warns of impact of downturn
A longer downturn would also mean households, businesses and governments could have higher debt by the time the recovery takes hold.
No matter the scenario, all the possibilities suggest “the near-term downturn will be the sharpest on record,” the report reads.
“The outlook is highly conditional on how long the containment measures remain in place, and how households and firms adapt,” governor Stephen Poloz said in his opening remarks during a morning teleconference.
He added that “substantial monetary stimulus needed to be in place to lay the foundation for the post-containment economic recovery.”
The monetary policy report is the last one Poloz is to be a part of, with his tenure at the head of the central bank scheduled to come to a close on June 2.
He was involved in the first monetary policy report published 25 years ago. Poloz said that he wished the circumstances for his last were “more favourable.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 15, 2020.