Coughs and sneezes spread diseases

Welcome to the world

There are just under eight billion people living in the world. Apart from the few who have had the coronavirus and are now immune, those eight billion have no immunity to the new disease.

The disease is easily transmitted both by aerosols and contact, in this respect it is similar to influenza. We can expect that in a relatively short period of time those eight billion will be infected.

We have to ask: what is the worldwide panic with forced isolations supposed to achieve? The virus is in the wild and it is going to spread – probably sooner rather than later – to every human that comes in contact with other humans.

How ever many people with a slightly raised temperature are put into forced isolation for a fortnight and thus condemned to being infected even if they were not infected before, the disease will spread. And it will continue to spread until the majority of humans have acquired immunity – that is, have had the disease.

How long have I got?

Probably quite some time. In effect, a dose of COVID-19, as we must now call it, will produce much the same symptoms as the familiar influenza. It seems to have about the same lethality of about 40 per 1,000 cases, although this figure is relatively meaningless: whether it kills you or not depends on the state of your health and the quality of medical care available to you.

The most recent epidemics of similar diseases, SARS and MERS, had a higher lethality of around 10%, but they were largely confined to poor populations. COVID-19 has also kicked off in a poor population and it is for this reason that we must not make too much of the early mortality figures.

The World Health Organization's preliminary figures tell us that of the 44,000 cases of the disease in Hubei province, 80% had a mild form of the disease, the symptoms barely worth mentioning. In 14% of cases, the COVID-19 infection triggered something nastier such as pneumonia. Around 5% had an unpleasant time before they got better and 2% died (some rounding errors in there, of course). Most of the dead were ill before infection. It is fair to say that if COVID-19 hadn't finished them off, something else would have done so in short order. Swish! goes the Grim Reaper's scythe.

The average, global mortality figures are misleading because the well-fed and pampered rich will be able to survive an infection relatively easily. They will have easy access to medical services should they need them. When a vaccine has been developed, they will be the ones who receive it.

In contrast, those with weak health and the malnourished and undernourished poor will be scythed down by the Grim Reaper in much greater numbers. The ill should take whatever precautions they can and hope that this is not the bullet that has their name on it. The poor, stamped out of clay, will return to it, many of them so socially insignificant that their exit, like their lives, will go unrecorded.

Something will get you

In other words, business as usual. There is nothing unusual about the COVID-19 epidemic. Each year, according to the WHO, 650,000 people around the world die of influenza. Traditionally, a whole group of diseases such as influenza, COVID-19 and pneumonia are the Reaper's little helpers, who come along and put the already dying out of their misery with a brief coup de grâce.

The negative economic effects of the COVID-19 epidemic will be caused not by absence from work or the inability of sufferers to go shopping for a week or two, but the disruption and panic caused by the idiotic, futile prancing around of the international and national agencies who manage our lives for our own good, whether we want it or not.

Update 26.02.2020

We've heard it for years from climate alarmists, the term 'worst case [scenario]'. In this context it means the 'business as usual scenario', which is calculated in the climate models by turning up all the heating parameters to MAX and all the cooling parameters to MIN.

Away from the press releases, cameras and microphones, those in the know admit that the likelihood of this eventuality is close to zero. Nevertheless, they've worked it out and given it a name: RCP8.5.

Those behind the websites or in front of the cameras and microphones take RCP8.5 as a verified forecast (SCIENCE!) and spin their doomsday tales accordingly. The oceans will rise – within only a few years Hans Gruber will fall from the thirtieth floor of the Nakatomi Plaza building with a slight plop into the pleasantly warm seawater just a few feet below him.

Now, in the context of the impending COVID-19 'pandemic' apocalypse, the term 'worst-case', like the virus itself, is now in the wild and spreading rapidly.

Accordingly we can expect (SCIENCE!) that corpses will litter the pavements, that around the world men in flatbed trucks will drive slowly down the streets shouting 'BRING OUT YOUR DEAD!', that almost every door will have a large 'X' daubed on it and that poor Hans Gruber, still a picture of health on that windowsill, will be dead of COVID-19 before he hits the water. Die hard, indeed.

In contrast, as far as the climate is concerned, the scientific expectation is that the world may experience a further slight rise in its temperature – or perhaps not, who knows? The extra carbon dioxide will continue to green the earth and have hardly any perceptible effect on weather, which will continue to have its fickle way with us humans.

As far as COVID-19 is concerned, most people in the world will get it and most of them will barely notice the fact. A few will have a tough time and the weak will be swept away by the disease unless something else has got to them first. More harm – economic, psychological and social – will be caused by the deranged 'responses' of the media and the global powers-that-be (a.k.a. 'them'), which will do more damage than Hans Gruber ever could.

Ditto for that climate emergency thingy.