Coronavirus lockdown in countries such as South Africa led to suffering for the poor, control through draconian rules without the benefit of a government like Israel’s, that cares for its citizens. What will happen when it ends?
By Steve Apfel, INN
The first day of letting people do what they want and go where they want could be a day of reckoning. On that day people will come face to face with what’s left of their lives. Then who knows – the handlers of the pandemic may be called to answer for the catastrophe. Those who kept their comfy jobs after making the masses go bankrupt could face the fury that confinement damned up.
Those who get a thrill out of controlling the lives of people know that lockdown orders only postpone the evil day; sooner or later the lid must be lifted. Their trepidation as the day approaches is audible. The people know as well as their handlers that the dire predictions of millions dead, of overwhelmed hospitals with not enough equipment did not happen. The models which informed public policy turned out to be imaginatively dark. They were not science, and the model-builders were not gods. Like plumbers or dentists, pandemic experts proved to be ordinary fallible humans. There never was a uniform curve to flatten – still yet a uniform method for deciding who died from Covid-19 and who died with it.
In short the predicted scope of the pandemic failed to happen. The Armageddon scenario failed so badly that the rationale for lockdowns became obsolete. Here’s where the wool was pulled over unsuspecting eyes while our handlers tinkered with the goal post. When the first lockdown orders were imposed we were told that the objective was to buy time, to give the healthcare system time to gear up, to avoid it being overloaded. As things turned out the healthcare system had to cope not with under-capacity but with over-capacity. There were not too many patients but too few, and most hospitals were dead quiet.
So handlers of the pandemic shifted the goalpost while the locked up masses watched movies. Now we are ordered to stay home in order to prevent deaths. Nothing is said about overloaded healthcare systems. It’s about deaths, stupid! To what level deaths must drop before our freedom can be given back we’re not told.
Take the Philippines. It has fewer than 100 virus-related deaths out of a population of 100 million. Yet the army patrols the streets to keep people locked in. South Africa, another poor country with fewer than 100 deaths, locks up 66 million people, including more than a million to whom parks and pavements are home. The decrees are so heavy-handed that they pushed the economy into an abyss leaving an epidemic more dire than the disease.What can be worse than desperate hunger?
Pandemic handlers take comfort in the old adage, ‘better to be safe than sorry’. They’ll be restive when surveying the socio-economic fabric in tatters. Breadlines and displacement, soup kitchens and violent protest, looting and black markets testify to the resentment people feel for being forced to be saved from Covid-19. Our little freedoms are seemingly more precious to us than a little safety. Many get that. Solvency and a full stomach take precedence over a fraction of a percent chance of succumbing to Covid-19.
There are however privileged groups of people who don’t get it. Our power-drunk handlers issuing decrees do not face the choice between a little safety and a lot of austerity. Experts keep their immune jobs no matter what. Governors, cabinet members and civil servants don’t forego their salaries and perks. Shepherding clerics, imams and chief rabbis comforting their flocks with inspiring lessons to take from the lockdown will not face the problem of putting bread on their tables.
Tinny despots, supported by civic leaders, banned everything we hold dear. We can’t cross a state or provincial line. Keeping fit in parks and gyms is forbidden. We’re allowed to buy ‘essentials’ only. We can’t eat out or order in. Buying a pack of smokes or a rotisserie chicken will land you in court. By the decrees of mean-minded despots shops are shuttered and factories are dark. They expect millions of poor people without private access to running water to wash their hands twenty times a day. They order households of five confined to hovels to observe two metres of social distance.
One ‘Stasi’ of the lockdown in impoverished South Africa is a woman who once banned the drug that could have saved the lives of millions infected with AIDS. Emulating Marie Antoinette she advised the dying to eat not cake but beetroot. Today from her sumptuous table she urges the impoverished to comply with lockdown rules. Administering rules in lieu of a cure, party apparatchiks blame Covid-19 for them having to go cap in hand to international bodies for money – even to the Chinese with imperial eyes on Africa. The foreshocks on the eve of lifting stay-at-home orders are ominous. When the tsunami comes, as it must do, governments could topple like tenpins.
The ubiquitous lockdown has given people a taste of what it must be like to live under tyranny. Our controllers also got a taste, but will relish more of it. Fighting Corona was a fire drill. Climate change is coming. For controlling the public in the name of an existential threat the sky is the limit.
Steve Apfel is an economist and a cost accountant, but most of all a prolific author of non-fiction and fiction, published in many journals and sites. His books include: ‘The Paymaster’ (Fiction); Hadrian’s Echo (Non-fiction); ‘A bias thicker than faith’ (non-fiction, for publication during 2020), and ‘Balaam’s curse’ a WIP biblical novel.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
CS Lewis
Some qualified scientists now agree with my opinion, which I have been stating for some time, that exposure to sunlight reduces the risk of speading coronavirus and may help heal patients:
” If the coronavirus behaves like most other viruses, then as the sun grows stronger day by day as we head towards the March equinox, the stronger sun and increased hours of sunshine will start to take their toll on the virus, particularly as the sun gets stronger in late March, April, and May. Part of the reason the peak in past viruses sometimes has not occurred until as late as April or early May is due to a lag of increasing temperatures of six or more weeks from when the equinox occurs. (See “The Greenhouse Effect” below.) The same could occur here.
If this virus behaves like others and peaks sometime in the next 60 days, that will give us time to work on vaccines and treatment because it will not likely return until next October and November. On the other hand, if this virus is different from all the others and the sunlight, heat and humidity are not its natural enemy, then the threat to the health and welfare of humanity as well as the negative impact on the economy has the potential to be severe. I would estimate that chance to be less than five percent and perhaps minuscule. But until we see how the virus reacts, to sunlight, heat, and humidity increases over the next few months, we will not know for sure. ”
This is from an article in AccuWeather.com by Dr. Joel N. Myers, the founder and CEO of the network.
Wana play Russian roulette? Not me!!!
The paradox is shut down reduces transmission giving the illusion of no danger. Nothing could be further from the truth.
C-19 has already mutated to two or more versions eastward and westward migratory forms. NYC being deadly victims of its westward migration. Eastward to California seems to be less mortality but it might be weather related meaning spittle dries quicker in warm regions thus not transmitting as far but droppingower more quickly not being inhaled.
Natural history is not known yet. All is speculation.
Truth: if it kills you, you’re 100% dead. That’s the only thing that matters. Wana play Russian roulette? Not me! ??????
“The data is in — stop the panic and end the total isolation
Trump: Some governors have gone too far on coronavirus restrictions
The tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be entering the containment phase. Tens of thousands of Americans have died, and Americans are now desperate for sensible policymakers who have the courage to ignore the panic and rely on facts. Leaders must examine accumulated data to see what has actually happened, rather than keep emphasizing hypothetical projections; combine that empirical evidence with fundamental principles of biology established for decades; and then thoughtfully restore the country to function.
Five key facts are being ignored by those calling for continuing the near-total lockdown.
Fact 1: The overwhelming majority of people do not have any significant risk of dying from COVID-19.
The recent Stanford University antibody study now estimates that the fatality rate if infected is likely 0.1 to 0.2 percent, a risk far lower than previous World Health Organization estimates that were 20 to 30 times higher and that motivated isolation policies.
In New York City, an epicenter of the pandemic with more than one-third of all U.S. deaths, the rate of death for people 18 to 45 years old is 0.01 percent, or 11 per 100,000 in the population. On the other hand, people aged 75 and over have a death rate 80 times that. For people under 18 years old, the rate of death is zero per 100,000.
Of all fatal cases in New York state, two-thirds were in patients over 70 years of age; more than 95 percent were over 50 years of age; and about 90 percent of all fatal cases had an underlying illness. Of 6,570 confirmed COVID-19 deaths fully investigated for underlying conditions to date, 6,520, or 99.2 percent, had an underlying illness. If you do not already have an underlying chronic condition, your chances of dying are small, regardless of age. And young adults and children in normal health have almost no risk of any serious illness from COVID-19.” This is from an article by a Dr. Scott W. Atlas on the Politic website, dated April 22. Dr Atlas outlines a realistic program to get people back to work and back to normal activities with minimal risk.
Excellent, on target reporting. A lockdown in the many countries with few COVID-19 cases is criminal insanity. Millions may die as a result of these counterproductive lockdowns in Third World countries.