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Feb. 6, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
19:24
The Truth About the Coronavirus - UPDATE!
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Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain.
This is the truth about the coronavirus update.
What is going on?
There has been an enormous amount of information since I did my last update.
My usual caveats.
I am a trained researcher.
I have a graduate degree in history.
I am not a doctor or a specialist in this area, so I simply collate this information for your further perusal.
The links, of course, are all below.
What is going on at the moment?
This is a live update of the coronavirus cases 28,379, of which 3,863 are in critical condition.
Deaths have risen to 566.
The number of recoveries has gone to 1431.
If we look down here, we can see the total cases and the total deaths are going up in an accelerating Fashion.
This is, of course, not what we want to see.
Here's another way of looking at it.
This is a live map here.
We can see the cluster down in China, of course.
There are some in Hong Kong, Japan, of course, and worldwide.
We'll have a look elsewhere.
Confirmed cases and death cases, again, a little bit of a further delineation, a bit of a dropping off in the last day or two, but still...
Very large escalations.
This is a live update by Johns Hopkins.
Total confirmed 28,353.
Total deaths 565.
Recovered 1,382, as I said.
Of course, the vast majority of these are in mainland China, as we can see with these red dots here.
If we look elsewhere around the world, this was last updated this morning.
45 in Japan, 28 in Singapore, 25 in Thailand, 24 in Hong Kong, 23 in South Korea, 16 in Taiwan, and the numbers go down from there.
Down on the bottom right here, we can see mainland China versus other locations, the escalation of confirmed cases.
This number is going, well, exponential it looks, although maybe not quite, but certainly quite close to it.
So, I guess the big story which I wanted to push back on here, I include these things not because I accept them all, but simply because we need to get the information and respond to it.
So Tencent, which was at Taiwan News, may have accidentally leaked real data, according to some people, about the coronavirus outbreak.
The translation, you see the numbers here down below, that confirmed cases in this report were over 154,000 suspected cases Close to 80,000.
Cured only 269 deaths.
Over 24,000.
I have seen what seemed to me fairly convincing pushback against this, that it was photoshopped, that you can actually muck around with the source code and get whatever numbers you want.
So I don't believe that this one is true, although I know it's been pushed by a number of different outlets.
I think that this is fake news, but again, we shall find out over the course of time.
Now, according to Chinese scientists, let me put in a real caveat here, as I generally do, but this is from a website I put below.
They're receiving many new papers on coronavirus 2019 and cough.
A reminder, these are preliminary reports that have not been peer-reviewed.
They should not be regarded as conclusive or guide clinical practice or health-related behavior or be reported in news media as established information.
I put this caveat down, of course.
But according to these Chinese scientists, the coronavirus attaches onto lung receptors that are five times more likely in Asian males.
Whites and blacks may have a stronger resistance because they have a particular inhibitor against the virus.
This is a small... Sample, of course, but here from the report it says we also noticed the only Asian donor who was male has a much higher ACE2 expressing cell ratio than white and African American donors, 2.5% versus 0.47% of all cells.
This might explain the observation that the new coronavirus pandemic and previous SARS-CoV-2 pandemic are concentrated in the Asian area.
And I suppose, given that this is a small sample and it's not peer-reviewed, again, take this with a grain of salt or as highly speculative and preliminary, although the data seems solid as far as I can see, I guess it just serves to remind us that the race, at least to the virus, is not exactly a social construct.
So the 12th case of coronavirus in the U.S. has been confirmed in a man in Wisconsin.
The last 48 hours have seen significant increases in new cases of 2019 NCARF, a jump of about 4,000 each day.
The outbreak continues to be centered in China, which still has 99% of all cases worldwide.
80% of all cases are centered in Wuhan, in the Hubei province.
Worldwide, the number of cases has passed 28,000, the majority of them in China, and the number of deaths is now 565, up from 494 a day ago.
All but one of the deaths have been in China, according to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control.
Last week, the U.S. government said that foreigners who had traveled to China in the past two weeks will be barred from entering the country as the White House declared a national public health emergency over the new coronavirus.
According to the European CDC, the majority of the confirmed cases, more than 28,000, are in China.
Nearly 200 are confirmed outside of China in 25 countries.
These include Thailand, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia, South Korea, United Arab Emirates, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nepal, the Philippines, India, Sri Lanka, Germany, France, Italy, United Kingdom, Russia, Finland, Spain, Sweden, United States, Canada, Australia, Belgium, and Macau.
Japan, Thailand, and Singapore have the most cases outside of China.
The 12 U.S. cases are in Wisconsin, Illinois, Washington, California, Arizona, and Massachusetts.
The CDC in total has 293 persons under investigation for coronavirus from 36 states.
In addition to the seven confirmed, positive 206 have tested negative.
On Thursday, a man in Illinois became the first case of person-to-person transmission of the virus in the U.S., the CDC said.
He is the husband of a Chicago woman diagnosed with the virus after returning from Wuhan.
He is hospitalized in isolation and is stable.
His wife, who is in her 60s, is also in isolation and in good condition.
The Chicago Department of Public Health reported that she had visited China in December and returned to Chicago earlier this month.
Anthony Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the strict precautions are warranted because of the issue now with this is that there are a lot of unknowns.
He pointed out that the number of cases, quote, has steeply inclined each and every day, end quote.
We now know for certain that a person without symptoms can transmit the disease, Fauci said.
On January 31st, the CDC issued federal quarantine orders for all 195 U.S. citizens at the time who recently returned to the U.S. after living in China.
The quarantine will last 14 days from the date the plane left Wuhan.
To me, that's got to get a little fine.
But again, I am not a doctor.
The CDC's move follows a quarantine issued by Riverside County, California, after one of the passengers tried to leave March Air Reserve Base Wednesday morning without being cleared by health officials.
Health officials also clarified the distinction between isolation and quarantine.
Isolation is used to keep a person who is already sick from infecting others.
Quarantine, of course, confines or restricts the movement of a person who has been exposed but is not yet sick.
From my Hong Kong contact...
The sources, of course, to all of this are below.
Hong Kong University microbiology professor defends his estimate that 1.4 million people will become infected by NCOF. By the coronavirus 2019 edition.
If we look at the flu, it is still very common, he says, despite years of asking people to wash their hands carefully and wear a mask when sick.
If the virus did in fact come from animals, a restriction on the sale of exotic meats within China has revealed that there's a woman in charge of a particular market wherein there are leopards and other kinds of crazy animals that are not generally consumed by humans.
China attempts to patent all uses of Gilead's antiviral drug against NCOF. Gilead attempted to get a global patent, but their filing got stuck in China.
And Hong Kong protesters are, of course, angry about the CCP, Chinese Communist Party, attempting to monetize its use.
The CCP will try everything it can get away with.
So there is a virus that seems to have some promise, and that's what he's talking about.
The government, he says, the police specifically are buying up and hoarding the available supplies for personal protective equipment, alcohol for hand sanitizers and other necessities.
Surgical masks made by prisoners have mysteriously disappeared, only to float up again in the black market, being sold for high prices.
It is said they were allocated to the police and their families.
And Dr. Wang Liang Li, who was the first to report the epidemic in Wuhan, died of viral pneumonia Thursday, which was the sixth local time.
He was only 34 years old, leaving his wife and five-year-old child.
Really quite tragic what has occurred for this man.
This is the doctor who tried to warn everyone about the coronavirus, and he spent his time, of course, fighting it like crazy.
And sources at the Wuhan hospital where he works have told the BBC he has died of the infection.
Chinese state media widely reported this but have since said that he was still alive but, quote, critically ill.
Dr. Wang Liang, who's 34, tried to send a message to fellow medics about the outbreak at the end of December.
Three days later, police paid him a visit and told him to stop.
He returned to work and caught the virus from a patient.
He had been in hospital for at least three weeks.
He posted his story from his hospital bed last month on social media site Weibo.
And just terrible.
It's absolutely appalling how...
China sat on this information for quite some time.
And, of course, he's a young man, and they keep saying, well, it only affects the old, or it mostly affects the old.
He had, of course, a lot of exposure, I assume, but a relatively young man and a healthy man, and this is what occurred.
A really, really heroic fellow.
So, regarding transmission, another case, a fine transmission case.
A man in China was infected with the coronavirus after spending only 50 seconds with a confirmed patient at a hospital.
Both of them were not wearing masks.
That is how jumpy the virus is.
This comes from China's national English-language newspaper under the People's Daily.
Survival. This is an older study, again links are all below, on virus survival.
This is called effects of air temperature and relative humidity on coronavirus survival on surfaces.
So non-porous surfaces seems to be the key.
The longest that they can find this virus surviving at about 40 degrees Fahrenheit or 4 degrees Celsius and 20% relative humidity that the virus can last alive for up to 28 days.
28 days.
The mask shortage is causing people to create these ad hoc masks out of bottles.
You can see this mother and child here in a virtual tent, people wearing plastic bottles and people entirely encased in plastic at an airport.
This is the reality.
This again, I mean, it's tempting to laugh a little, but this is a genuine concern and fear.
Would you be willing to look ridiculous?
In order to stay alive, this is two people in a lineup at an airport looking like caterpillars in their shroud and this of course is a person walking along a train station I think and entirely shrouded.
This is where things are.
Now, a Wuhan doctor's conversation has been leaked, and he said, emergency ward becomes mortuary.
Nobody handles the bodies.
Crematorium too busy.
Many coronavirus patients pushed away without being tested or diagnosed.
So here we will look and listen.
Some of these images might be a little bit disturbing, but this is...
I mean, to me, it's just incredible.
Outside of the horror and tragedy of all of these images...
It is just amazing that we can get these images based upon this new technology, this modern technology.
This, of course, is a Wuhan crematorium at full capacity.
And somebody, of course, quite upset about this, as we can understand, could be a relative there.
This is a wild video of...
You can see this in various places.
I think this is in Wuhan.
That the people are running down with these massive...
I don't know what they are. Nobody's been able to identify it, of course, at a distance, but they're trying to disinfect the entire street with some sort of chemical, some sort of antiseptic, some sort of disinfectant.
Lysol apparently works with coronavirus, so maybe that's what they're sprinting down and trying to get done.
Now, this, of course...
is striking. If you really want to look at how dangerous a flu can be, you would look at the Spanish flu that occurred after the First World War.
Oh, by the way, for those of you who pointed out that the replication rates that I talked about in the last video should be R0 rather than R0. I appreciate that.
Thank you. Zero is just the North American word for nought, which is the British word for zero.
But R0, sorry about that.
So this is Fort Riley, Kansas in 1918, where, I mean, millions upon millions of people ended up dying from this Spanish flu in the past.
And if we look at it here...
These are the beds for the victims currently in China all being set up.
I've seen pictures of entire sports stadiums that have been converted to this kind of use.
The quarantines can become extraordinarily harsh in China.
Here's an example of a quarantine where they simply dumped a massive amount of gravel mixed with concrete, it looks like, in front of somebody's door.
And man, you are just inside for the duration.
That is what's going on.
And of course, as I pointed out on Twitter, Back in the day, gosh, way back, seven, eight hundred years ago, when the first of the many waves of the Black Death, the bubonic plague, rolled through Europe, killing a third or more of the population in certain regions.
When people heard somebody coughing inside a house, they would simply nail up the house from the outside and not let anyone out.
So here is, again, a rather chilling video.
I will speak its contents for those who are just listening, although this is definitely a show well worth it.
You see they're all wearing biochemical protective gowns.
They're here to disinfect the place.
Now, you know how deadly this virus is.
And you can see, of course, all the people dressed in their protective clothing in the street.
Yes.
And you can see that the guy is using a welding machine to seal that gate.
They are sealing the middle one now.
So, yeah, this is what is going on.
People are being in there. You can see pictures online, of course, of people trying to open their doors and they've had these massive locks and bolts put on the outside.
Here's an example of how to deal with these kinds of fears.
This is toothpicks, it looks like, stuck into some polystyrene in an elevator.
And here you can see what you do is you take the toothpick, you push the button that you want, and then you put it in the cup so that nobody will use it again.
And on the lighter side, because, you know, it's funny, these kinds of disasters do often bring out some great things in people.
Nobody wants these disasters, but the best that we can get out of it is a renewed sense of the purpose and meaning of life, a renewed sense of commitment to virtue and connection, and the reminder, of course, when death's shadow passes in front of your door, even if there's not that bony-fingered knock and forced entry, it can remind you to drink deep of the cup of life.
Before it is taken from us often against our will, here are some people in China simply playing badminton in their backyard.
There, of course, have been lots of reports of people being incredibly bored.
Cabin fever has kicked in.
People are fighting randomly with each other.
People are getting mad. They've run out of video games.
They've run out of books to read.
They've run out of movies to watch.
And that is where things are.
So let's have a quick summary.
I'll look forward to your comments below.
So first of all, of course, I have covered a number of these breakouts and supposedly imminent pandemics in the past, and I've always been enormously skeptical of their capacity to reach any kind of worldwide contagion.
I don't believe that to be the case with this particular virus.
The incubation period is too long.
The time, of course, at which transmission can occur is too broad.
And the movement of people is simply now so much greater, even than it was before.
One of the things that really, I guess you could say, helped spread the Spanish flu after the First World War was the number of soldiers returning home, a displaced population, and of course, a population in Europe that had been weakened by war.
Once a virus gets into places like China, then of course it is very easy to spread.
Once viruses get into a place like India, it is easy to spread.
Now, whether there is a particular susceptibility for East Asians, the Chinese, the Koreans, the Japanese, and so on, To get and to spread and be affected by this illness is important.
The fact that they may be disproportionately affected by the illness doesn't mean that other people can't transmit the illness.
So once again, please, I urge you to do everything in your power to stay away from this virus, to work from home if you can.
I hear that the Chinese internet and the Hong Kong internet are creaking and groaning at the borders because of the number of people working from home.
Wash your hands And try and stay safe.
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