If I'm right, China (too late) became aware of just how infectious this epidemic was. They correctly clamped down totally (in Wuhan & surrounding areas). As they learned that for the vast majority this was a very mild infection, they spread a smaller lockdown across the country (am I right?). Main cities were partly shutdown. Elderly & vulnerable priorities. Result; limited quantity of deaths (mainly in Wuhan).

Italy in particular failed to shutdown soon enough. Result? It spread like wildfire. Ditto Spain. Ditto, probably, UK. But Germany very quickly decided to concentrate on elderly & vulnerable. Fewer deaths.

Ways of reckoning "a death" and how figures (and testing) were done - similarly important. Germany tested everyone; far more revealed as infected; far better treatment of vulnerable.

Shutdowns will limit infections. We shall find a vaccine & better treatment (everyone gets a small portable respirator, mass produced, at home). Panic will fade fast. I suspect by summer, back to "slightly" normal.

The problems are; with over reaction (due to media induced panic; mainly by politicians who know media are their masters - even in China) there will be dreadful economic problems.

And next time (in years; possibly months) a different mutation of a virus will be treated the same way but different problems (circulation instead of respiratory type thing); self isolating won't work.

Just one of many reports on FLU deaths 2017-18... will Covid19 cause as many as 50,000? And why didn't Government order a clampdown then? Why didn't sports events cancel then? ANSWER: Media hype. It's a great story (no matter what the consequences).

JK2006 wrote:
will Covid19 cause as many as 50,000?

And why didn't Government order a clampdown then?


1. Already predicted, in days, by WH0 - c46,000 now

2. Because they quickly realised that the wrong vaccine had been issued

This is definitely not a trivial virus.

To quote the WHO:

COVID-19 causes more severe disease than seasonal influenza.

While many people globally have built up immunity to seasonal flu strains, COVID-19 is a new virus to which no one has immunity. That means more people are susceptible to infection, and some will suffer severe disease.

Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died. By comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1% of those infected.

So there you have it Mr King. It’s 3.4 times more potent than the flu, and it causes very unpleasant deaths.

I agree; this trivial virus is very nasty and sometimes lethal because hospitals and doctors are not equipped to deal with the problems it creates. In due course there will be portable home respirators and a vaccine and even fewer deaths than from flu will happen (in good years). When the next virus comes, stupid governments will not have provided equipment to deal with - say - one that attacks arteries in the heart. More panic. Millions more deaths (if that is a less trivial virus).

Of itself this is a trivial virus, hardly affecting 90% of those that get it. If people have vulnerable health, through age, disease etc, it can provoke serious consequences in some. That doesn't make it less trivial; the effects of pneumonia, strokes etc. are often deadly but the virus remains trivial.

Apart from Peter Hitchens, InfoWars and a handful of neo-Nazi knuckleheads in Alabama, nobody else agrees with you.

FACTS: 1. 3.4% of people who get it will likely die a nasty death
2. There are vaccines for most flus
3. There is no vaccine for COVID-19
4. Being a rational person, you and any other such person of any age, would not want to catch it.
5. Lockdown is the best way to stop it from spreading exponentially
6. For once, the medja is proving itself to be a very useful medium for disseminating information
and advice about the virus.
7. You blame the media for all of society’s ills; stop it!!!

The key point Havana is 3.4% of reported cases have died; and boy have they been reported.

These stats are from the paltry poor few who have gone critical. No one has any clue just how many people have had covid and survived. Not a clue.

Therefore if this stat is offered as indicative of covid's mortal efficacy, it is utterly meaningless.

The news and stats are NOT objective things!

I have noticed that the newsreaders are now saying people have died WITH coronavirus, not from.

Havana - wyot is right; WHO are now predicting that this week there will be 1 million infected and 50,000 deaths. They have no idea how many infected. Testing appalling. One "expert" reckoned half the UK have had it - that's 30 million in UK alone. I think I've had it; my brother's had it (nearly killed him). Dozens of friends feel they've had it. I reckon ten million (a trivial amount worldwide). Which would make 50,000 deaths a trivial percentage.

Honey wrote:
I have noticed that the newsreaders are now saying people have died WITH coronavirus, not from.

That's interesting Honey. Sounds like the start of preparing for the rewind much sooner than people have been - deliberately - prepared for. I have largely stopped reading the news because of this.

While a lover of fiction, I prefer it between the covers of a book rather than a news channel...

The easy thing is always to say how we SHOULD have behaved. The difficult thing is to say how we need to behave. Present tense. Imagine several top scientific advisors come in and give you conflictng advice. You have no expertise with which to assess each position. So you pretty much have to make an uninformed judgement as to which extremely well-qualified scientist is going to be proven correct, or the least incorrect. And you know that, if you get it wrong, loads of your fellow non-specialists, sitting on their arse at home, will then start writing 'What you SHOULD have done' pieces. The Guardian is brilliant at this.

I agree that the media is guilty of exaggeration and hyperbole sometimes. The Daily Express without fail predicts a coming snowmageddon from October to January every year. However this is different. If 50,000 die of the flu that is not trivial; and the numbers we’re getting from this aren’t trivial either. Did Ken’s brother think it was trivial when he got? If you only look at percentages as guide, then are Alzheimer’s and lung cancer trivial too?

No Havana; I'll say this very slowly so you can understand me. Anyone's death or sickness is terrible for them and their loved ones. Even, in some cases, for strangers, outside observers. Deaths and sickness are never trivial. But this trivial virus, affecting far, far fewer than many others (I bet, when it is over, far fewer will have died than died, for example, with Spanish flu) is far less serious than many others. Even simply considered as something which affects people in different ways - I would say smoking, for example, is far from trivial. The media has inflated this trivial virus into a plague for one reason only - it's a great story. So they cover ordinary details - like statistics on deaths for example - in biased ways to create drama, panic, sales, circulation, ratings, profits. Gullible lemmings see 500 people died in the UK today - horror! But media makes sure it does not reveal that 2000 people a day die in normal times. Gullible lemmings say "this is a plague; a pandemic; dreadfully serious". It isn't. It's a trivial virus with some very nasty consequences for a few (including death). It could and should be dealt with far better, far more economically, far wiser, far safer. If people stopped falling for media hype, looked at the facts, balanced their opinions. Over reaction is a DEADLY virus.

So, if it were the for the media hype, would there be no global lockdown?

I'm already going stir crazy ( Like I wasn't before )

I can't drive I don't want to risk a fine, friend of mine was. Only so much YouTube and music I can take. Garden don't need doing until a month or so away.

Supermarkets are still an asylum.

W.H.O have really fucked up and so have China.

I don't like Paul Joseph Watson, but he is right here.

youtu.be/WslBRY9B-n4

That's what I keep going on about Havana. Without the media hype there would, indeed, not be this total lockdown; far better, more appropriate and less disruptive action would have been taken.

Do you have any empirical evidence to support your hypothesis that the media tail is wagging the medical experts’ dog? All I can say is the Chinese authorities certainly didn’t treat it as a trivial virus long before the media hurricane in the West, and it’s not exactly a country known for having an open hyperbolic media. The answer of course is NO! You hate the media with a passion and blame them for everything. Get over it.

This trivial virus can have very nasty consequences and the Chinese clampdown was appropriate when they realised they did not have the equipment or medication to stop them killing a lot of people; so they needed to stop it spreading. Not a perfect response but a decent one which seems to have worked. Global media leaped onto it and inflated it to make a better story. Simples.

The coronavirus stories contain all the elements of classic ‘yellow journalism’.

contentinsights.com/how-yellow-journalis...about-its-influence/

You keep using the word - trivial - meaning, of little importance.

Well, most - in the real world - would consider 1 million infections and 50,000 dead, to be rather more than that!


Particularly as it's all happened in only 3 months.

And is spreading rapidly, without a vaccine to stop it - or any prospect of one, for over a year (WHO).