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Infected 34,887 Deaths 724 Recovered 2,076 John Hopkins CSSE
Assuming that these official statistics from China bear a faint connection to reality (in trend, if not number) this may be a sign that the draconian quarantine is starting to work. If real, it is only a slight slowing in the rate of growth, but it’s a good sign — one I have been looking for. It is a barely visible slowing of the rate of change in the cumulative tally of victims. The exponential curve is slowing. Of course, if this takes off in Africa this would be but a pause…
Graph by Worldometers.info
The virus which had been growing at 50% a day two weeks ago, slowed to 20% last week, and 11% today. One week was such a long time ago in exponential land. Last Friday night the tally was 9,700 infected, and 213 deaths. At that point, no nation had cut off flights or refused visas. UPDATED: Saturday.
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Sadly the brave doctor who tried to warn the world has been taken by the virus. Ominously he was only 34 — presumably with no “underlying disease”. Instead of listening to him, the Communist […]
A fateful decision that led to many deaths
The Samoan Islands, 1896 | Wikimedia
Western Samoa and American Samoa are side by side islands in the Pacific. When the Spanish Flu arrived in 1918, one would instigate a quarantine while the other had a trading community that did not want to stop trade. American Samoa survived the Spanish Flu without a death. Western Samoa kept trading and lost a quarter of the population.
Influenza 1918: the Samoan experience
John Ryan McLane
In 1918 the Samoan archipelago was split between American Samoa (a United States territory) and Western Samoa (previously a German colony but under New Zealand governance from 1914). The 1918 influenza pandemic killed a quarter of Western Samoans, while leaving American Samoa unscathed.
The dangers of ship-borne disease were well known, and exclusion of many diseases, especially plague, had been implemented since the imposition of colonial governance nineteen years before.
On 30 October 1918 the Union Steamship Company’s Talune left Auckland for its run through Polynesia… The new, more lethal influenza variant had arrived in Auckland with the spring, and several crew members were ill.
Western Samoa was a German colony that […]
Ooh. Are these the real figures? Is someone on the inside trying to leak out the truth?
There are claims tonight that a flickering set of figures have appeared that are much higher than the official tolls. These ghostly statistics have appeared three times then switched to the much lower official tally. But each time they grow — almost as if there are two sets of data, one for officials, and one for the public.
Ominously, the flickering death tally was 80 times higher than the official one. The infections were ten times higher. If it’s true the death rate may be far worse than the 2% bandied about.
If they are real, this changes everything. If they are fake, who or what would benefit? A glitch?
From Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge, and the Taiwan Times, h/t David E.
Tencent may have accidentally leaked real data on Wuhan virus deaths
Tencent briefly lists 154,023 infections and 24,589 deaths from Wuhan coronavirus
Taiwan Times
TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — As many experts question the veracity of China’s statistics for the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, Tencent over the weekend seems to have inadvertently released what is potentially the […]
The latest news coming out is mixed. The live map and latest count of 2019-nCoV shows 20,000 confirmed infections, 426 deaths, and most importantly, a spread to 28 countries. It’s slightly encouraging that there are no extra cases in Australia and good to hear 3 of the 12 have been sent home, declared “recovered”. However the incubation period since flights were closed is still only halfway to the average (of 5 – 6 days) so it’s too early to tell.
A South Korean has tested positive after visiting Thailand (not a good sign, but the statement didn’t “rule out China”). Japan has quarantined a whole cruise ship (like Italy did). One passenger came down with the virus in Hong Kong. The whole ship of 3700 is confined to rooms, awaiting test results. It’s reassuring that so many tests can be done. (Yay, Japan). Meanwhile door handles can carry the virus. Soap and hand sanitizer could help a lot.
On the plus side, one team in Thailand say they have treated one patient successfully with anti-virals. It’s only one case, but a nice thought. How big are those stockpiles? The other plus, is that summer may slow it down. Best case […]
The WHO could have declared a state of emergency earlier. Instead it delayed the announcement, praised China’s transparency, and recommended countries allow planes potentially carrying a deadly virus continue to fly freely. The WHO waited until the 2019-nCoV virus had spread to 18 nations before declaring an emergency. Wasn’t it an emergency with the first foreign case or the first case of symptomless transmission?
Follow the chain, or rather the Belt and Road
The WHO Director General is Tedros Adhanom of Ethiopia. From 2012 – 2016 he served as Minister of Foreign Affairs in the one party government that rules Ethiopia. This is the same party that borrowed billions from China to build a railway line, then struggles to pay it back. In Africa, Ethiopia is the second largest debtor nation to China — owing $13 billion. As Foreign Minister Adhanom praised China for African loans, looks like he was the man to line them up. We also note that the one-party ruling party of Ethiopia is called the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front which was once a Marxist Lenninist far left group — labels it dropped after the Soviet Union collapsed. (Thanks Maurice for these tips).
Suddenly there might be […]
US and Australia close borders and everyone outside China starts tracking contacts…
The official deaths tally has risen to 259, but for the first time the “total recovered” at 287 now exceeds the total deaths. Evidently it’s quicker to die than to recover.
Australia remains the “leader” of the Western nations with 12 confirmed cases. Thankfully, it and the US have finally got serious and both announced today that they would stop people from China from flying straight in. Citizens can return with a two week isolation or quarantine period, but foreigners cannot. This is very good news (as far as virus control goes). Now all the same nations will be furiously, laboriously tracking and tracing the hundreds of potential contacts. In a few weeks we’ll know how contagious it is, and how deadly. And maybe, with much money and dedication we’ll even stop it.
Though in a few weeks a host of secondary countries may develop their own epidemics and virus-free countries will need to block them too.
What’s really remarkable here is how useless, to the point of negligence, the World Health Organisation is.
US and Australia close borders to Chinese arrivals
BBC News: The […]
Been trying to do a Corona thread for three days, but every time it was half finished everything changed.
The WHO have finally declared a state of emergency, something that seemed inevitable as soon as we knew the virus could be transmitted by people without symptoms. Russia, Mongolia, and North Korea closed their borders Thursday. Hong Kong announced a temporary closure. Singapore has now closed its borders too. Mark Steyn meanwhile, marvels that healthy US citizens are being advised not to go to China, but it’s apparently fine for sick people to travel the other way. Extraordinarily a cruise ship with 6,000 passengers was “stuck” off Italy, waiting for clearance for two Chinese people who had symptoms like a flu. Fortunately they must have just had the flu. The ship was cleared. And so it is around the world with a mosaic pattern of super actions, versus business as usual.
British Airways has suspended all flights to and from China, as have many other airlines, but in a city by city way. The virus is now present in every region of China. It’s not clear why all flights to and from China have not been stopped. On ABC news Australia’s […]
Fifteen years of missing data tells us everything we need to know
Peter Ridd and Jennifer Marohasy are continuing to follow up on the death of the Great Barrier Reef. Strangely, while everyone professes to care, and cry, and Malcolm Turnbull casually tossed half a billion at it, we see the extremely radioactive oddity that no one is worried enough to bother measuring the actual supposed decline of the seventh wonder of the modern world. Fifteen years is a long time to overlook that. Many panicked press releases have gone under the bridge yet apparently AIMS (and all the others) just want to keep quoting the shrinking growth rates, but not keep track of them.
On top of that, Peter Ridd and Jennifer Marohasy have spotted a pretty major flaw in the methodology for that much quoted study that claims growth on the reef has slowed by 15% from 1990 to 2005. If that number is right, the reef will have ground down to a 30% decline by now [in growth rate]. Disaster, disaster. Worthy of a hundred press releases and a thousand grants. So either it just hasn’t occurred to AIMS et al to keep studying the reef they […]
Attenborough turned a natural phenomenon into an advert for the Climate-scare industry. As Benny Pieser at GWPF points out Falling Walruses were turned into the new posterboy of climate change, “It would be a sad legacy if he did not set the record straight.””
Here’s the brief synopsis in case you don’t feel like watching walrus horror flicks.
Though this old video that Polar Bear Expert Susan Crockford found is kinda novel — you can see scientists test theories and then throw them out.
Biologists in 1994 noticed walruses falling down a steep incline. They tried to figure it out. They scratch their heads. Admit they don’t know. They saw it happen three years in a row, and as many as 120 walruses met a flattening end.
The first theory was the animals were trying to escape severe storms, but the next year the weather was perfect. Walruses rolled and crashed again. So did that theory.
The second theory, was that perhaps the sights and sounds of humans were putting them out… but no — discussions with locals suggested not.
The third theory was that they were suicidal. But Dr Seagers, quaintly, doesn’t think we should put human thoughts […]
The IPA team interview Peter Ridd. He explains that what’s happening on the Great Barrier Reef with coral bleaching is a normal cycle. He tells his story of being censured at James Cook university, but admits the state of free speech at universities in Australia is non-existent — even after his win. They discuss how we might reform science with audits (universities are almost a lost cause). We’ll probably never know how many scientists think similar thoughts to Peter Ridd. We know that they’ll need a $250,000 legal fund if they say so.
UPDATE: Importantly — Ridd says that the admin are still utterly convinced they are right. They have no remorse, no recognition of why they were wrong. Does this mean admin staff now decide what science is, not Profs? Apparently so. They hold the purse strings, not the Profs. Power follows the money. Indeed, JCU has no commitment to free speech; they’ve now removed the clause that ensured Ridd won. In their minds, their mistake was not in being draconian, but being careless with legal clauses. The Deep State tightens its stranglehold on science.
Peter Ridd: Of all the ecosystems in the world, the reef is one that’s […]
Squid, “surprise” are going to do well with climate change. (If only it was going to happen).
In the new post-CO2 world, corn and soy may become weeds, but squid may take over the oceans:
Squid will survive and may even flourish under even the worst-case ocean acidification scenarios, according to a new study published this week.
Dr Blake Spady, from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (Coral CoE) at James Cook University (JCU), led the study. He said squid live on the edge of their environmental oxygen limitations due to their energy-taxing swimming technique. They were expected to fare badly with more carbon dioxide (CO2) in the water, which makes it more acidic.
No academic could have guessed that squid would have evolved ways to control their own blood pH:
“Their blood is highly sensitive to changes in acidity, so we expected that future ocean acidification would negatively affect their aerobic performance,” said Dr Spady.
Atmospheric CO2 concentrations have increased from 280 parts per million (ppm) before the industrial revolution to more than 400 ppm today. Scientists project atmospheric CO2 — and by extension CO2 in […]
Just another way cheaper electricity saves lives.
Photo by Photo by noodle kimm on Unsplash
It turns out hotter rooms have higher indoor pollution. Levels of formaldehyde are lower in the morning and rise with the temperature. Air conditioning in hot summers, keeps the temperature down and will reduce the amount of formaldehyde and other pollutants from out-gassing from furniture and gypsum walls. Obviously those who can’t afford to run the air conditioner and who live in warmer rooms in summer will be exposed to more pollution.
Though the worst situation was in 1970s homes with radiant heaters installed on gypsum sheets. In that case, people who can’t afford to heat may avoid some fumes.
Opening windows will clear out the indoor pollution, but houses are increasingly being designed to stop draughts to be more energy efficient.
The message: get rich or open windows when it’s nice outside, move those bar heaters off the walls, and buy peace lilies, bamboo palms, and dracaenas.
Researchers uncover indoor pollution hazards
By Tina Hilding, Voiland College of Engineering and Architecture
PULLMAN, Wash – When most people think about air pollution, they think of summertime haze, traffic or smokestack […]
Mysterious CO2 activity in New Zealand shows Phytoplankton at work
Tom Quirk both finds a mystery and solves it.
Emiliania huxleyi coccolithophore | Alison Taylor.
Carbon dioxide is a “well mixed gas” yet CO2 levels over New Zealand start rising there each year in March — a whole month before we see it CO2 start to rise over Tasmania. Air over Cape Grim in Tasmania will be blown by the prevailing wind over to New Zealand about five days later. So these two stations should be showing similar numbers throughout the year. Instead some process in NZ is pushing up CO2 early. Levels also peak earlier in New Zealand, and by September, in early spring, some process around NZ is pulling the CO2 out of the sky. Both NZ and Tasmania share large forested areas, so that wouldn’t explain the difference.
Quirk wondered if it had something do with phytoplankton, so he searched for satellite data that measures chlorophyll in the ocean and shows, voila, that there is major activity right around the Baring Head station at the same time as CO2 levels are falling. Indeed, the station is smack in the middle of a mass phytoplankton bloom.
He […]
Two different models predict two totally different futures. On the left, catastrophic extinction. On the right, happy bats. Click to enlarge
Yesterday a UN supercommittee of 145 scientists from 50 countries declared that one million species are set for extinction. The same day, ten other scientists published a paper pointing out that most modelers forget to allow for genetic variation and thus overestimate the extinction rate. (It’s like they’re modelling the World of Clones – take one small study, pretend they’re all the same — extrapolate globally.) Have a look at the big difference in model outcomes in figure 1 (right).
As I keep saying, 500 million years of brutal climate change means almost every species carries around an industrial tool-kit of handy genetic tricks. Matz et al estimated corals already have the genes to survived another 250 years of projected IPCC catastrophe (in the unlikely event that it happens). Liew et al showed corals even have epigenetic tricks as well as genetics ones. Another group showed when corals are heated something like 74 different genes are activated — often genes that we don’t even know what they’re there for.
My favourite all time Global Adaptability Prize goes to […]
What was Australia’s Environment Minister thinking?
Melissa Price succumbs to pagan witchcraft:
“There’s no doubt that there’s many people who have suffered over this summer. We talk about the Victorian bushfires; (in) my home state of Western Australia we’ve also got fires there,” [Melissa Price] told Sky News this morning. “There’s no doubt that climate change is having an impact on us. There’s no denying that.”
WA
Let’s look at her home state. After 67 years of fire management in the giant, hot, dry state of WA, the trend is clear — the more prescribed area we burn, the less wildfire does. In the graph below the prescribed burns declined for forty years and wildfires increased for thirty. After the Dwellingup Fire in 1961 the state ramped up the preventative burns, and reduced wildfires.
As the BushFireFront team say:
“We can’t control the weather but we can control the fuel loads“
Tough call — what do we do, redesign our energy system, pay billions, change our cars, our houses and our light globes in the hope that bush fires will be nicer, or do we just go back to doing what […]
Where’s the apocalypse: With all the forecasts of doom, is this it?
Global Lament is rising for the small brown rat (Melomys rubicola) lost off a desert island no one heard of til morning tea today. This is a rat that was only recognised as a distinct species in 1995, though even then, it was debated, and the rat’s existence was hanging by a thread. The island is a 5 hectare sand spit with a bit of low scrub and an old rusty scaffold once called a lighthouse. So it’s all of 0.05 square kilometers: it is so small there is no fresh water on the island, just the odd puddle after it rains. It’s all so ephemeral that over a decade or so the island shrank 40% and the vegetation was wiped out by 97% (details below). Life on shifting sands in the Torres Strait is all pathetically desperate. It’s 200km off Queensland but only 50km from Papua New Guinea and the highest point (if you could call it that) is 3m about the high tide mark. In other words, any decent wave could have washed the last one off. It’s sad, but it’s not “climate change”.
Latch […]
Welcome to the DroneAge, where people act like robots and share dumb ideas at light speed! Episode #601: Climate change makes you lonely and fat.
Feeling friendless, floppy and like a loser? It’s not your fault. Blame a coal plant. Blame Exxon. Blame anyone but yourself. It’s your bad luck to be born into the most bountiful, benevolent era in human history. Damn!
Lonely, unfit and hooked on air-conditioning – is this the summer of the future?
Nicole Hasham, Sydney Morning Herald, uses new unorthodox indicators of “climate change”. Wait for it… test cricket attendance? It’s a smorgasbord of nonsense:
In Perth, cricket fans avoided an historic Test fixture amid predictions of 38-degree days. Sun melted a coastal highway filled with holidaymakers in northern NSW. Victoria’s coal generators shut down. Tasmania burned. And rotting fish corpses lining the Darling River at Menindee forced anglers to seriously rethink their plans.
Are we kidding? Thirty-eight degrees is just a summer’s day in Perth. It’s something that happens 19 years out of 20. As for coal generators shutting down: we’ve spent 20 years trying to drive them out of business to stop climate change, and now, if they don’t work, that […]
Image Erin Silversmith
Three amazing things in this story. One that solar cycles might influence the oceans to such an extent that jellyfish plagues are cycling in tune with the sun. Second is that the sun might control food for jellyfish on Earth somehow but have no effect on clouds, temperature or our climate (join the dots that expert climate models don’t). Third is that (briefly) there was actual scientific debate published on the ABC (even if only a few Australians were exposed to it). No one called anyone names, and both sides got to speak (albeit on different channels). Put it in your diary.
A couple of weeks ago on the ABC jellyfish were booming and it was because of climate change:
Jellyfish are causing mayhem as pollution, climate change see numbers boom
RN By Hong Jiang and Sasha Fegan for Late Night Live
…the brainless, spineless, eyeless, bloodless creatures are booming in numbers — and causing mayhem around the world.
Some scientists think jellyfish numbers are increasing as the climate changes — the creatures reproduce well in warmer waters.
Last year, Nick Kilvert of the ABC saw it as a […]
…
Look out, another knot of tortured researchers just went past. All this time we’ve been pouring money into planting trees and stealing land from farmers because we were sure that trees would cool the world. (Just like solar panels do, yeah?) But life is so complicated — for years now some researchers have been quietly wondering if more trees were actually going to warm the planet instead, but they didn’t want to say much. It turns out that while trees absorb the sacred CO2 (that’s cooling!) they also emit methane (that’s warming!), and terpenes (cooling) and isoprene (warming and cooling!) If that’s not complicated enough, then there is the albedo effect. Trees are dark, they absorb more sunlight than bare ground and snow. So depending on where they are planted, that makes for “warming”. Then some VOCs or volatile organic compounds also seed clouds.
So what’s the net effect? Who knows, it’s not like there are whole industries dependent on it…
Now they ask?
How much can forests fight climate change? Trees are supposed to slow global warming, but growing evidence suggests they might not always be climate saviours. Gabrielle Popkin, Nature
As usual, the debate is based […]
Of all the homo subtypes only humans survived. We began to colonize the entire planet sometime between 300,000 and 60,000 years ago.
Scientists Have a Bold New Hypothesis For Why We’re The Only Humans Left on Earth
Depending on who you ask, we’ve shared the Homo genus with six other species across the millennia. And those are just the ones we know about. One by one they’ve all vanished. Around 30,000 years ago, the last of the Neanderthals disappeared…– Science Alert
Homo erectus spread from Spain to Indonesia, but stuck to forest and grassland. Neanderthals specialized in cold northern realms and survived hundreds of thousands of years of ghastly ice ages. They coped better than we do with cold but we are the ones still living in Siberia. Tell the world: we’re adaptable!
Maybe it’s time to stop trying to adapt the planet to us, and get back to adapting us to the planet instead?
Some of the ecological challenges faced by Pleistocene H. sapiens. a. The Thar Desert of northwest India at the site of Katoati. Credit: James Blinkhorn. b. The highlands of Lesotho at the site of Sehonghong. Credit: Brian A. Stewart. c. […]
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