As Gerald Celente warned from the start of the shutdown trend spreading across the globe, the fear triggered by coronavirus hype may kill more victims than the pandemic.
As noted, globally, some three billion people are in lockdown.
With almost half of the American public forced into self-quarantine and social distancing, the U.S. National Suicide Prevention Hotline has seen a dramatic rise in calls as have many local suicide prevention services.
From Portland to Boston, the national Crisis Text Line saw its volume double last week.
Eric Craine, co-director of the Center for the Study of Suicide at the University of Rochester Medical Center, stated,
“There are ramifications, sometimes fatal, with events like these that are not just related to getting infected or dying from infection or consequences of infection.”
A number of medical and scientific experts are confirming that the shutdown tactics of political leaders around the world are likely to cause more harm than good.
Dr. David Katz, director of the Yale University Prevention Research Center, said,
“I am deeply concerned that the social, economic and public health consequences of this near-total meltdown of normal life – schools and businesses closed, gatherings banned – will be long-lasting and calamitous, possibly graver than the direct toll of the virus itself.”
Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi, a microbiologist and former professor at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, called his government’s anti-COVID-19 strategies “… grotesque, absurd and very dangerous… The horrifying impact on the world economy threatens the existence of countless people.”
Dr. Joel Kettner, professor of Community Health Sciences and Surgery at Manitoba University and a specialist in emergency medicine, said,
“I worry about the message to the public, about the fear of coming into contact with people, being in the same space as people… In the province of Hubei [China], where there has been the most cases and deaths by far, the actual number of cases reported is 1 per 1,000 people and the actual rate of deaths reported is 1 per 20,000. So maybe that would help to put things into perspective.”
Commenting on the coronavirus situation in Italy, subject of dramatic and frightening headlines for weeks, Dr. Pietro Vernazza, a Swiss physician specializing in infectious diseases, comments,
“Each individual case is tragic, but often – similar to the flu season – it affects people who are at the end of their lives. If we close the schools, we will prevent the children from quickly becoming immune. We should better integrate the scientific facts into the political decisions.”
And Michael T. Osterholm, Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, stated,
“Consider the effect of shutting down offices, schools, transportation systems, restaurants, hotels, stores, theaters, concert halls, sporting events and other venues indefinitely and leaving all of their workers unemployed and on the public dole. The likely result would be not just a depression but a complete economic breakdown, with countless permanently lost jobs, long before a vaccine is ready or natural immunity takes hold.”
TREND FORECAST: We maintain our forecast that the consequences of politicians locking down entire nations will kill more people than the virus… destroying millions of business and seriously negatively affecting hundreds of millions of people financially, mentally, physically, morally and spiritually.
As Gerald Celente has noted, just as politicians start wars with no exit strategies (as clearly evidenced by the ongoing wars started decades ago), and condemn those who ask for them, so, too, will they with the COVID-19 War.
There is no exit strategy.
Indeed, the drastic socioeconomic implications of their COVID-19 War are just now being discussed by the mainstream media… that we identified as the primary dealer for championing the virus crisis and which politicians seized on to exert their power.
Dr. Sunetra Gupta leads an Oxford-based research group that put together an epidemiological model for coronavirus based on hard data. In the introduction to the recent study, Dr. Gupta writes,
“Importantly, the results we present here suggest the ongoing epidemics in the UK and Italy started at least a month before the first reported death and have already led to the accumulation of significant levels of herd immunity in both countries. There is an inverse relationship between the proportion currently immune and the fraction of the population vulnerable to severe disease.”
According to research by Dr. Lisa Maragakis, Senior Director of Infection Prevention at Johns Hopkins Health System, as of 27 March, there have been 24,361 deaths reported worldwide from COVID-19. Each year, seasonal flu kills 291,000 to 646,000 people worldwide.
While a number of health professionals are stating COVID-19 is “deadlier” than the seasonal flu, the data so far shows seasonal flu kills far more people than COVID-19. And, with both viruses, the vast majority of those who die are elderly people who had significant pre-existing health conditions.
Dr. John Ioannidis, professor of Medicine and Health Research and Policy at Stanford University School of Medicine asserts:
“If we had not known about a new virus out there, and had not checked individuals with PCR tests, the number of total deaths due to ‘influenza-like illness’ would not seem unusual this year. At most, we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average.”
And what could be a clearer message of sanity than from Dr. Karin Molling, noted German virologist and former director of the Institute of Medical Virology at the University of Zurich:
“The 2018 influenza epidemic, with 25,000 deaths, never disconcerted the press. The clinics had to deal with an additional 60,000 patients, which was no problem in the clinics either! That is the main fear: the disease is presented as a terrible disease. The disease per se is like the flu in a normal winter.”
From Dr. Richard Schabas, former Chief Medical Officer of Ontario, Canada:
“Quarantine belongs back in the Middle Ages. Save your masks for robbing banks. Stay calm and carry on. Let’s not make our attempted cures worse than the disease.”
Helping to fan the anxiety and fear over coronavirus, the mainstream media pushes the highest projections of potential deaths with little regard for balance with more sober estimates.
One clear example of the wild swings in expert projection of the potential danger of coronavirus is the testimony of Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London.
Professor Ferguson, who has been appearing in an inquiry by the UK Parliament House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, originally gave a projection that COVID-19 would kill some 500,000 in the UK. He now has revised that projection down to 20,000… and stated the number could be much lower.
There are those in the UK who remember the Swine Flu hysteria back in 2009-2010. At the time, Professor Sir Liam Donaldson, Chief Medical Officer for England, proclaimed a worst-case scenario was some 19 million people infected with about 65,000 deaths. The actual result: around 500 deaths.
You’re Gonna Die
On 13 March, The New York Times published an estimate from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) as to the worst-case scenario for coronavirus:
“Between 160 million and 214 million people in the United States could be infected over the course of the epidemic, according to a projection that encompasses the range of the four scenarios. That could last months or even over a year, with infections concentrated in shorter periods, staggered across time in different communities, experts said. As many as 200,000 to 1.7 million people could die.”
Yet, just three days later, the magazine Science published a report headed by Dr. Jeffrey Shaman, professor of Environmental Health Science at Columbia University, which included significantly lower estimates:
“The chance of someone with symptomatic COVID-19 dying varied by age, confirming other studies. For those aged 15 to 44, the fatality rate was 0.5%, though it might have been as low as 0.1% or as high as 1.3%. For people 45 to 64, the fatality rate was also 0.5%, with a possible low of 0.2% and a possible high of 1.1%. For those over 64, it was 2.7%, with a low and high estimate of 1.5% and 4.7%. The chance of serious illness from coronavirus infection in younger people was so low, the scientists estimate a fatality rate of zero.”
Dr. John Lee, recently retired Professor of Pathology and consultant pathologist to the UK National Health System writes,
“The simplest way to judge whether we have an exceptionally lethal disease is to look at the death rates. Are more people dying than we would expect to die anyway in a given week or month? Statistically, we would expect about 51,000 to die in Britain this month. At the time of writing, 422 deaths are linked to Covid-19 — so 0.8 per cent of that expected total. On a global basis, we’d expect 14 million to die over the first three months of the year. The world’s 18,944 coronavirus deaths represent 0.14 per cent of that total. These figures might shoot up but they are, right now, lower than other infectious diseases that we live with (such as flu). Not figures that would, in and of themselves, cause drastic global reactions.”
TRENDPOST: Just as the mainstream media promoted the Iraq War based on lies, excluding those who challenged the George W. Bush administration’s lies, so, too, have they banned those providing scientific data contradicting the media Presstitutes promoting coronavirus mass hysteria.
To illustrate how deceptive and agenda-driven the mainstream media are, this is from the June 2008 Trends Journal, which detailed how the mainstream media sold the Iraq war:
“According to FIR, the two weeks following Secretary of State Colin Powell’s error-filled speech to the UN in which he made bogus claims for war, U.S. TV networks banished contrary perspectives.
Of the 393 on-camera sources appearing on ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS newscasts, only 1 percent were anti-war and just 6 percent were skeptical sources, according to their study.”
Now, 17 years after the Iraq War, which has killed millions, bombed the nation into rubble, and cost trillions, how the war was started and why is long forgotten.
Just as the nation bought and paid for the George W. Bush and his Gang of Liars wars with their money and their lives, so, too, is the nation buying – and selling – the COVID-19 War based on media hysteria and political bravado… repeating the sound bites and dismissive of scientific data and quantitative analysis.
