FWIW, A Couple Of Updates On Corona Virus -- June 5, 2020

Updates

Later, June 6, 2020: graphic update.

Original Post

 

Fuzzy math: This is very, very interesting. I touched on this a few days ago. I haven't read this article yet, link here, just the headline. I will be interested to see if "Professor Karl Friston" noted the same thing I did: massive testing for the corona virus is revealing very, very strange results. If the virus has pretty much been around for six months, why are so few folks testing positive for it. And why are the results so inconsistent around the world?

• New York:
• number of tests performed: 2,293,730 (and one would think there is a good reason to test those who have been tested)
• number of cases reported: 383,899 (and one knows the number of cases is over-reported)
• ratio of number of cases reported to number of tests performed: 17%
• North Dakota: 3.6%
• USA: 9.8%
• UK: 6%
• Sweden: 15%
• Brazil: 62%
• The article, now that I've read it: very, very short. Not much meat there. Apparently only looking at mortality rates. Says mortality rates similar in both UK and Sweden despite very different approaches.  Mortality rates, deaths per one million population:
• World: 50
• USA: 333
• Italy: 557
• UK: 588
• Germany: 104
• Sweden: 452

Second article: And, more jumping on the bandwagon, now that it's been pointed out: "Has Sweden's Covid-19 strategy backfired?" Link here.

Anders Tegnell, Sweden's chief epidemiologist, has acknowledged that too many people have died in the country due to COVID-19. Tegnell was key in developing Sweden's more relaxed strategy which saw bars, shops, cafes and gyms remain open while the rest of Europe locked down, which he criticised as being unsustainable.

Some restrictions were indeed imposed in Sweden with schools closing for over-16s but, as Statista's Niall McCarthy notes, the public were generally trusted to remain responsible and carry out physical distancing without government enforcement.

His comments come as figures show Sweden's per capita death rate being the highest worldwide in the seven days to June 02.

I'm curious: how many deaths is too many per Anders Tegnell. I know Governor Cuomo of New York said one death was too many.

Note: this is from Johns Hopkins University. If you can't trust Johns Hopkins, who can you trust? 
 

ZeroHedge: one really needs to pick and choose, be very, very wary, but overall, the articles over at ZeroHedge link to some very, very good writing, regardless of whether one "accepts" the premise of many of the articles. I'm not talking about Tyler Durden himself, though he writes incredibly well and is incredibly prolific; I'm talking about many of the articles to which he links. Exhibit A: "Levitate the Pentagon," from Asia Times, from June 19, 2007. I just wish there weren't so many ads and ads disguised as stories.

• the takeaway: this is not a race war, this is a class war 
• the elite are watching this on their huge, 4K televisions sipping malt

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One Bonus Link 

But this one is not about corona virus. It's about the "staggering" "Powell Bubble" in just one amazing chart. Link here.

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Another Bonus Link

I see why Twitter banned ZeroHedge. Like potato chips, one can't read just one article.

It turns out that that its three authors retracted their study on hydroxychloroquine, you know, the article that was used to attack Trump. The article was published in the world's premier medical journal, the Lancet.

The study, published on May 22 in the UK's prestegious Lancet medical journal, relied on bogus data from a company called Surgisphere, which would not transfer the full dataset for an independent review, and "can no longer vouch for the veracity of the primary data sources."

My hunch is there is much more to the story.

This is not the first time the Lancet was duped in a huge, socially-sensitive, issue driven by politics.