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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Perhaps this was what I was remembering (and it does have a tangential bearing on our subject)
One year deserves special mention – 2015, when life expectancy fell across virtually all of Europe. In England there were 495,000 deaths in 2015, about 31,000 more than the preceding five-year average; deaths associated with flu were estimated at about 28,000. Life expectancy fell by 0.2 years over the preceding year in both males and females – unprecedented for decades. As in Europe, most 'excess' deaths occurred early in the year and among older people, with deaths from respiratory disease (including flu and pneumonia) being a key contributor to the largest annual rise in deaths since the 1960s. |
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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But what killed the 40,000 in Wuhan? After all, it was these deaths that supposedly prompted the models that predicted millions dead in the USA.
Obviously, what we know as Covid 19 did not kill those people.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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Treatment? Putting folks on a ventilator?
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N R Scott
In: Middlesbrough
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Ishmael wrote: | my friend had two of her childhood friends die during the outbreak. Buth girls were under 30 years old. The odds of two young women from one tiny village in China dying in a city of millions in which only 2,563 people died is statistically zero. |
This sounds similar to this story, though one of the 29 year old women survived.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/13/world/asia/coronavirus-death-life.html
I'll keep my thoughts on it to myself. Though saying that with it being China I'm probably allowed to say it's fake.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Sorry, but this kind of evidence is not so much worthless as dangerous. AE even has a name for it: "the tyranny of large numbers". Various numbers are bandied around and the largest gets selected because it makes for the best story. Thereafter the number can go up but it cannot go down without charges of unfeelingness, making light of a tragedy, falling for counter-propaganda and so forth. Since nobody knows the true number, such accusations are hard to resist. It has a variant, "the tyranny of small numbers".
In this case, there is one party that does know the true number: the Chinese Communist Party. Their figure can be accepted or rejected but other numbers (higher or lower) should not be 'bandied around'. Evidence can be put forward. I myself instanced the stockpiling of body bags in the very early stages when the Chinese were not so much minimising deaths as denying them. But Ishmael's, for instance, is a classic urban myth-style number. This does not make it untrue, just not very 'robust', as we have learned to call such figures.
Treatment? Putting folks on a ventilator? |
This is quite important in the Chinese context because they tend to be 'robust' in the old-fashioned sense. It would not, I think, explain 40,000 Wuhan deaths but sort of kind of getting up that way. Certainly the Chinese government would regard such a figure as an insignificant price to pay in the achieving of some wider goal.
But, generally speaking, as I have said before, I haven't found the Chinese government has acted better or worse than any government finding itself in such an unprecedented situation. That may turn out to be wrong but I'm not prepared to throw them under the bus just because they're a bunch of creepy power-mad bastards.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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Mick Harper wrote: | Sorry, but this kind of evidence is not so much worthless as dangerous. AE even has a name for it: "the tyranny of large numbers". Various numbers are bandied around and the largest gets selected because it makes for the best story. Thereafter the number can go up but it cannot go down without charges of unfeelingness, making light of a tragedy, falling for counter-propaganda and so forth. Since nobody knows the true number, such accusations are hard to resist. It has a variant, "the tyranny of small numbers". |
I completely agree. I would be saying this myself were it not for my next-to-direct experience.
You may recall that I said at the start of this discussion that, while I could know that tens of thousands died in Wuhan City, you could not. I could "know" because I am directly connected to my friend and know her experience personally. You cannot know what I know because, for you, this will never be more than anecdotal evidence. And should not be taken as anything more.
That is why I requested you accept the proposition for the purpose of discussion.
Is there a way we could resolve the paradox, if we assume tens of thousands initially died, supposedly of a cause we now know to be ineffectual?
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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Wile E. Coyote wrote: | Treatment? Putting folks on a ventilator? |
That is one of my two options. The trouble is, to kill 40,000 people with ventilators, you need 40,000 ventilators. Chinese hospitals may be effective industrial death factories but they lack the necessary equipment to operate at scale.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Is there a way we could resolve the paradox, if we assume tens of thousands initially died, supposedly of a cause we now know to be ineffectual? |
I always have and am happy to re-iterate it. It is not the friend-of-the friend aspect I objected to, it was the nature of the evidence itself, as reported by you. This is like the Trump position, you jump to the answer while the rest of are left slightly open-mouthed. And then you get impatient with us. Now maybe we are slow coaches for our own ideological reasons but it sure as hell feels like we are just being properly sceptical from where we sit. And I speak for the entire membership thanks to some new telepathy software I've had installed.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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I'm asking only to play a game.
Assume the 40,000 figure is correct.
I happen to believe it is correct based upon my next-to-direct evidence. That's what forced me to try to resolve this paradox. But no one needs to believe it to play the game.
How can we have a disease that kills 40,000 in one city in China, kills no one anywhere else (to any appreciable degree), spreads all over the world to cause a panic everywhere it goes---only to prove itself utterly ineffectual. I think it's a fun puzzle to try to solve.
Perhaps the most probable solution is that the Chinese panicked too, then killed everyone with their treatment. That was my original theory. It feels unsatisfying, considering the video evidence that was being leaked out of Wuhan. And it doesn't explain why the Chinese panicked, if they did.
So I've come up with something else.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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Ask yourself this question; what kind of event would you assume had happened in a city if 40,000 people dropped dead there in the span of a month of so, and it wasn't attributed to a disease.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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An emergency trial vaccine?
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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When I was looking at the Fire of London I concluded that the so called fire and plague occurred because parts of the city were being cleared and rebuilt.
I reckon this is something similar, they have cleared certain areas of the city and corrupt local officials are now using the plague as an excuse to destroy the records of thousands of former inhabitants that have been illegally displaced, in order to cover their tracks.
I can do conspiracy, Scotty.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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Mick Harper wrote: | An emergency trial vaccine? |
That's a good suggestion.
China has a poor history with vaccines. A few years ago, a vaccine company, in league with the government, killed thousands of babies nationwide when its vaccine turned out to contain deadly poisons. It was a massive scandal that became a major crisis for the CCP.
It's one of many examples of Chinese companies doing shoddy work or cutting corners in pursuit of money at the cost of lives.
To my knowledge, there was no trial vaccine deployed in Wuhan City.
Let me ask another question then. Have we ever seen another city where tens of thousands reportedly died suddenly (outside of wartime)? What was the cause death on that occasion?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Yes, clearly this is not Covid-19, leastways not in the form it reached us. It would appear to be atmospheric -- radiation? nerve agent? -- except now we run into "too few died"! So we are back to an infectious disease of a particularly virulent form but one for which many (most?) already have some form of immunity.
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