In his latest video, Chris Martenson says the World Health Organization (WHO) is “derelict” in its duties. He also challenges reports from China on the number of people infected .
Click on the above image to play the video.
In a comparison to SARS, a coronavirus event in 2003, Chris notes the latest virus spreads before symptoms appear, SARS didn’t. But this the data challenge that caught my ear.
Chris looked at Wuhan as a city district, a city of 11 million people, and noted 49,00 beds. He asks, is it reasonable that 2,000 cases would fill all those beds, with hallways swamped with patients and people dead and sick lying in the hallways?
“This takes my BS meter and puts it into orange. … 2,000 just doesn’t fit right“
Shrugging his shoulder Chris says “I’m thinking 10 times that number.“
“The World Health Organization has really been derelict. My critique is they were pretending to be the World Trade Organization, not the World Health Organization. They are more concerned about the impact on trade than a public health emergency. “
Increasing Ability to Spread
Age Group Risk
China says the risk is changing. But there is only one direction it can be charging towards, and it doesn’t look good.
Hong Kong Strike
Those image clips are all from the video.
Anger Mounts
Please note China’s Premier Tours Virus Epicenter as Anger Bubbles at Crisis Response
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang traveled to the epicenter of the country’s dangerous viral outbreak to meet infected patients and front-line health workers, signaling the Beijing leadership’s concern as public frustration rises over how local officials have handled the crisis.
The central government website published photos on Monday showing Mr. Li wearing a face mask and swaddled in blue protective gear as he toured medical facilities in Wuhan, a sprawling city in central China where the outbreak began. In one image, Mr. Li appeared to be speaking through a walkie-talkie to a patient on a video screen.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping usually reserves the top position on important issues for himself, but in this instance he appointed Mr. Li to head up the Communist Party’s virus-response task force.
Gee, I wonder why he sent someone else.
Stay Where You Are
In an unusual move, the central government said Monday it was extending the annual Lunar New Year holiday, currently under way, by two days to Feb. 2 to delay the infection risk posed by the migration of tens of millions of mostly rural laborers back to their workplaces in the cities. The manufacturing hub of Suzhou went one step further, ordering people not to come back to work until Feb. 9.
Some of the country’s biggest tech companies followed suit. TikTok-owner Bytedance Inc. issued a notice urging employees in mainland China to work from home until a week beyond the extended holiday. Shenzhen-based games and social-media giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. sent out a note telling local staff to do the same.
Global Coronavirus Cases Jump 50% Overnight, 5 Now in US
Earlier today I noted Global Coronavirus Cases Jump 50% Overnight, 5 Now in US
Many of you know Chris Martenson from his economic website, Peak Prosperity.
But even those who do know him, may not be aware that his background includes a PhD in pathology.
If you have not done so already, please do yourself a favor and watch Chris Martenson’s Must See Video on the Coronavirus.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
I agree with@Winn on this. Hospitals not being able to cope is likely NOT an indication that an order of magnitude more people are hospitalized than is being reported. We live in a world of “just in time” inventory management. Hospitals cannot afford to sit around with 50% of their beds empty until an event like this happens. They are mostly full all the time during normal circumstances. Similarly, grocery stores operate with only a few days inventory based upon normal demand.
However, this arrangement does contribute to people being nervous when something unexpected happens. Everyone knows there is not enough slack in system to cope with sudden high demand if this does turn out to be highly contagious and maybe twice as serious as the common Flu. Everyone also knows governments tend to downplay risks in an effort to prevent panic from causing self-inflicted damage, further fomenting distrust.
Except for possibly a few researchers at the center of this storm, the rest of us are stuck with a lack of good information being a “known unknown.” Everything will probably okay in the end despite whatever screw-ups happen along the way. It almost always is.
The number of infected is likely many times higher than official stats say, while the number of deaths is likely much less understated. That means that the death rate is probably much lower than feared.
One positive about the outbreak – it’s given bored internet kibitzers something to talk about. Sort of the electronic version of the gladiator spectacles.
So I wonder how many people those 5 in the have had contact with? Also, i’m getting tired of hearing comparisons to Influenza and other things trying to downplay this into something that doesn’t compare. This is a ridiculous comparison. This is possibly still in its infants stage.
How is comparing something to influenza, downplaying it?
As Mish pointed out, the Spanish flu killed between 50 and 100 million people in 1918.
Regular flu kills more than a half a million people in the world every year.
In 2003 we prepared for SARS. I never saw a case.
In 2005 we prepared for H5N1. I never saw a case.
In 2014 we prepared for Ebola. I never saw a case.
In 2016 we prepared for Zika. I never saw a case.
We also prepared for MERS. I never saw a case.
Meanwhile I lose patients to influenza every year.
So much for downplaying. Why are you not scared of regular influenza?
Anyway, I think we should take this seriously, as I said. It may also be true that the WHO and CDC have been slow to respond. I’m telling you though, developed nations go nuts about this stuff when they get going.
Mish said astutely that unlikely is not impossible. I agree, yet it remains unlikely that we will see this go out of control in the USA. Taking this seriously in a logical way makes sense. Panic does not.
Spanish flu isn’t a relevant comparison. It happened at the end of WWI amid devastation, chaos and weakened populations.
I actually agree.
We don’t have figures for comparison, however I see the reverse to your argument in that it means the 1 to 2% mortality of Spanish flu would have been less and R0 would have been less. With mCoV R0 is possibly higher than Spanish flu and mortality also, that is all you need to know in basic terms.
After that it is a question of what true R0 and mortality figures are for nCoV, which are the figures we need for comparison. The R0 figure will vary, say unmanaged outbreak vs. martial law, and everything in between. The mortality rate will vary, depending on proper registration of cases and amenities available for care.
As stands we are guessing. Spanish flu is a fair example of what a virus with R0 and mortality similar to it means. We don’t know how capable our societies are at reducing those numbers, what would be a background pandemic that could not be contained. Add in a time factor where for example the virus infects a lower quantity yearly but over a long period, and if mortality is high it still will not register off the scale until you add up by say the decade.
I’m not optimistic that nCoV will be handled well. As thankyoudata says, we tend to just tolerate the effects of more common flu, and that approach might be a mistake for nCoV.
My bet is that the mortality rate of this will be much lower than currently estimated.
I hope so, and I don’t like the confusion that is going on – for sure by now there must be some realistic data in the hands of authorities. That clearer figures aren’t released can be read in different ways, so I’m just staying cautious.
There is very little available data in the West so far. The sample is very small.
Only China knows more, and I wouldn’t trust their info. We need more time.
The Chinese have WHO and other contributors working with them, so by now even with a sample of say only a thousand patients being tested and say one hundred infected with nCoV, after a week from presentation you have a quite clear idea of how many are severe and how many are mild. After maybe two or three weeks you might have an approximate figure for survival ratio of the total.
Meaning :
We should have a minimum R0 figure available based on obvious lines of contagion.
We should have a minimum figure for severe infections based on that R0 sample.
We should have a minimum but incomplete mortality ratio based on that R0 sample.
R-not of the typical flu season is between 1 and 2 usually with about 60,000 deaths in the United States per year. R-not of nCoV is supposedly 2.8 now and it is much more virulent. I suspect we will see around 120k deaths in the US alone as a low estimate.
I’ll take the under. I would be surprised if we got within a factor of 100 of that estimate. I’ll come back and swallow my pride publicly if I’m wrong.
…..Hong Kong infectious disease experts are urging the government to take “draconian” measures against the spread of the deadly new coronavirus from the mainland Chinese city of Wuhan, citing research estimating that 44,000 patients could be infected there – far higher than official figures. University of Hong Kong academics on Monday estimated that the number of patients in Wuhan had reached 43,590 by Saturday, including those in the incubation stage of the virus, which causes pneumonia….Leung said his team’s research showed self-sustaining human-to-human transmission was already happening in all major mainland cities and warned that a pandemic might be close. “We have to be prepared, that this particular epidemic may be about to become a global epidemic,” he said…..
Speaking as a lung specialist physician: Certainly this is a serious global health risk that should be taken seriously. (And it would not be surprising in the least if China were lowballing the estimates, by an order of magnitude even.)
That being said, let us not forget that in the 2018-19 season, the CDC estimates that 61,200 people died in the USA of influenza, and estimates of the worldwide annual death toll range from five to ten times that, around 300-600K.
(As a digression, tuberculosis, diarrheal diseases and road injury kill, annually, more than a million people, each, worldwide. The most common seven diseases of the elderly together kill 25-30M annually, worldwide.)
Lower respiratory infections kill almost three million people worldwide every year, so only 10-20% of that is attributable to influenza.
Novel 2019 coronavirus is scary because it is new and a relative unknown. That makes it easy to fear a global pandemic. Every time a new pathogen comes out, everyone is inclined to do so.
While you are worrying about that, though, try to put it in context. This is likely to fall somewhere in the continuum from SARS / MERS (while acknowledging the tragedy of those it kills, ultimately not a big deal globally) to influenza (the global pandemic we already have, a huge killer annually that nobody is breathlessly reporting on, because we’re used to it). More likely the former, given those first two are also coronaviruses.
Why does the US have such a high comparative mortality rate from influenza?
The US doesn’t have 9% of the worlds population, it is more like 4%. That should mean that the rest of the world has 20 – 25 times the deaths that the US experiences. Is it because the US has an older population and its population is far less susceptible to other morbidities?
It all has to do with the investigation, collection and reporting of data. If deaths are not investigated, and if statistics aren’t generated, and if statistics aren’t reported, it’s “not a problem”.
“Why does the US have such a high comparative mortality rate from influenza?”
Because it has a lower death rate from other causes.
Only time will tell. If this turns out to be as infectious as say, the common cold, even if the mortality rate is only 3%, it could result in tens of millions of fatalities every year until our immune system figures it out or it mutates into something harmless.
if something were to curb population growth for the first time in recent history, would that necessarily be disastrous ? Well, definitely so for the unsustainable, eternal economic growth based, debt ridden/ driven social economic paradigm we ve been ‘enjoying for more than half a century now……A blessing for the planet though…at long last !
Population growth for the developed world is a non issue. Almost all the population growth nowadays is in sub-saharan Africa. Instead of a coronovirus in China, what you want is a deadly ebola outbreak in say the Congo.
Once the MSM finds a way to blame Trump. It will be all over the news. You’ll hear about his cuts to the CDC leading to this, etc…
Please be careful to contain your suicidal pathogens to yourself, however, because, I don’t share your Earth worship. Liking life, a lot, I choose to exploit the Earth to stay alive. To each his or her or their or its own. Seriously, I do not wish you to be infected by any disease, and hope you do not wish that for yourself.
….a tantrum reaction to merely some philosophical(yet realistic) musing of mine …..People like you will get what they deserve … I hope …. whether good or bad …
Hospitals are almost always full all the time. Daily discharged and admitted patients are about the same. The hospitals can’t cope with sudden influx of patients even though they have to discharge as much as they can. And these patients can’t be admitted to ordinary hospitals as all the patients will be infected. These patients have to go to communicable disease hospitals. So you can see that kind of scene. There might be about one or two in Wuhan.
“Chris looked at Wuhan as a city district, a city of 11 million people, and noted 49,00 beds. He asks, is it reasonable that 2,000 cases would fill all those beds, with hallways swamped with patients and people dead and sick lying in the hallways?”
Seems entirely reasonable to me. I would guess that the number of beds in a city that size has been adjusted over time to cope with the normal capacity of medical need. This virus will act at the margin on the demand for beds. A well honed system can be thrown out of kilter by a sudden change at the margin.
They probably wanted to isolate the infected people from other parts of the hospital for more routine medical needs as well.
No, leicestersq, he asked if it was reasonable that 200 serious cases would swamp the hospitals – not 2,000.
It is reasonable that 200 serious cases should not overwhelm a city with 49,000 hospital beds available.
The worst of it is about 1M people left Wuhan while potentially carrying the virus. It seems like it can be communicable even when people are asymptomatic. Multiple research outlets reporting treatment is the same as that of SARS but this is an evolution of SARS virus. Maybe someone who survives it can produce the antibodies to save a lot of people.