A Corona Storm in a Tea Cup? Or a “Corona Cyclone”? By Brian Simpson

     As I usually preface these articles, we are lacking rock solid evidence about the epidemiology of the coronavirus, and this is making it difficult for public health officials, and even Right-wing fringe dwelling conspiracy theorists like me, to get a handle on things. However, one study has presented evidence that the death rates are over-blown:
  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8130815/Death-rates-coronavirus-HALF-initial-estimates-world-health-chiefs.html

“The death rate of coronavirus may be half of what world health chiefs expected it to be, according to a study. International researchers compiled data on coronavirus cases in Wuhan, the Chinese city of 11million people where the deadly disease emerged in December 2019. They found that, overall, the number of people who died after getting sick with the coronavirus was 1.4 per cent. In comparison, estimations by the World Health Organization in early March said 3.4 per cent of diagnosed patients had died. And the true figure is likely to be even lower because so many people are believed to be going undiagnosed. By comparison the death rate of flu is around 0.1 per cent. Coronavirus patients often don't know they're infected – as many as eight out of 10 could have no symptoms in the early stages of an outbreak, according to one study –because they get such mild signs that they don't think anything of it. The study, which has not yet been reviewed by scientists, comes as more than 9,300 people around the world have died and more than 224,000 have been confirmed to be ill. The study, led by Professor Joseph Wu of the University of Hong Kong, was focused on the city of Wuhan, where the first cases of COVID-19 were reported. Professor Wu and colleagues from Harvard University used published data on 425 early confirmed cases and 41 fatalities in Wuhan. But they wanted to get a bigger picture of how many people in the city, which is in the Hubei province, had the disease but showed no symptoms. Hospitals had been overwhelmed in Wuhan and milder cases were unlikely to have been tested. The team used a range of global data sources to estimate the full number of cases within Wuhan by taking into account the location and timing of cases outside of the area to work out how many people could be expected to have had it. By studying real-life patients they found the average time from the start of symptoms – a fever or a cough – to death was 19 days, on average. It ranged between 16 and 24 days.”

  https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30260-9/fulltext

     This is evidence for the position that the coronavirus is not going to be the biomedical threat the MSM and most alternative press (e.g. Mike Adams) are portraying it, but, there will still be frightening economic consequences given the number of businesses that are going to the wall, which I have discussed in other articles. This should not be discounted because the real threat to us all is the threat to freedom, and our standard of living. The elites seem happy to see the world being dismantled, which should make anyone go on red alert, even if we do not know exactly what these monsters are planning. But, it will not be good.

     Stop press: no sooner than I had typed the last sentence when this came through to the cigar-smoke full bullpen office, where the highly stressed League journalists were working late into the night:
  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8133745/Queensland-shut-western-border-Northern-Territory.html?ito=push-notification&ci=10883&si=1326534

“The border between the Northern Territory and Queensland will be restricted to reduce the movement of people and prevent the spread of coronavirus. Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk announced the drastic measure in a press conference this afternoon. 'We will be putting up a border restriction across the west of the state,' she said. Ms Palaszczuk said children in boarding schools will be returned to their families in remote communities wherever possible. She also said plans were in place to seal off remote communities in western Queensland to protect them. Essential personnel such as doctors and food delivery drivers will still be able to move between the states and get to the remote communities. The measure is designed to protect Indigenous Australians who may be more vulnerable to the virus due to underlying health conditions. There are also fears the virus could spread quickly in remote communities which are traditionally very close-knit. Ms Palaszczuk did not say when the restrictions will begin.”

     There are now personal space restrictions as well, which is exactly what we saw in all of those zombie apocalypse dystopia movies, with the 28 Days  (2002)and 28 Weeks (2007) movies,  being a good illustration of what the  system will do when it gets into full anarcho-tyranny mode. Rigid military control, but ferals freely allowed to prey on people just like in the socialist paradise of Venezuela.
  https://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/detect-deter-and-annihilate-how-the-police-state-will-deal-with-a-coronavirus-outbreak_03192020

“Understandably, zombie fiction plays to our fears and paranoia, while allowing us to “envision how we and our own would thrive if everything went to hell and we lost all our societal supports.” Yet as journalist Syreeta McFadden points out, while dystopian stories used to reflect our anxieties, now they reflect our reality, mirroring how we as a nation view the world around us, how we as citizens view each other, and most of all how our government views us. Indeed, the U.S. government has spent a lot of time and energy in recent years using zombies as the models for a variety of crisis scenarios not too dissimilar from what we are currently experiencing.
For instance, back in 2015, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put together a zombie apocalypse preparation kit “that details everything you would need to have on hand in the event the living dead showed up at your front door.” The CDC, in conjunction with the Dept. of Defense, even used zombies to put government agents through their paces in mock military drills. Fear the Walking Dead—AMC’s spinoff of its popular Walking Dead series—drove this point home by dialing back the clock to when the zombie outbreak first appears and setting viewers down in the midst of societal unrest not unlike our own experiences of recent years (“a bunch of weird incidents, police protests, riots, and … rapid social entropy”). Then, as Forbes reports, “the military showed up and we fast-forwarded into an ad hoc police state with no glimpse at what was happening in the world around our main cast of hapless survivors.”

Forbes found Fear’s quick shift into a police state to be far-fetched, but anyone who has been paying attention in recent years knows that the groundwork was laid long ago for the government—i.e., the military—to intervene and lock down the nation in the event of a national disaster. We’re seeing this play out now as the coronavirus contagion spreads. What we have yet to experience (although it may only be a matter of time) is that the government through the imposition of martial law could pose a greater threat to our safety (and our freedoms) than any virus. As the Atlantic noted about Fear the Walking Dead: “The villains aren’t the zombies, who rarely appear, but the U.S. military, who sweep into an L.A. suburb to quarantine the survivors. Zombies are, after all, a recognizable threat—but Fear plumbs drama and horror from the betrayal by institutions designed to keep people safe.”

Indeed, zombie fiction perfectly embodies the government’s paranoia about the citizenry as potential threats that need to be monitored, tracked, surveilled, sequestered, deterred, vanquished and rendered impotent.
Why else would the government feel the need to monitor our communications, track our movements, criminalize our every action, treat us like suspects, and strip us of any means of defense while equipping its own personnel with an amazing arsenal of weapons? For years now, the government has been carrying out military training drills with zombies as the enemy. In 2011, the DOD created a 31-page instruction manual for how to protect America from a terrorist attack carried out by zombie forces. In 2012, the CDC released a guide for surviving a zombie plague. That was followed by training drills for members of the military, police officers and first responders. As journalist Andrea Peyser reports: Coinciding with Halloween 2012, a five-day national conference was put on by the HALO Corp. in San Diego for more than 1,000 first responders, military personnel and law enforcement types. It included workshops produced by a Hollywood-affiliated firm in…overcoming a zombie invasion. Actors were made up to look like flesh-chomping monsters. The Department of Homeland Security even paid the $1,000 entry fees for an unknown number of participants… “Zombie disaster” drills were held in October 2012 and ’13 at California’s Sutter Roseville Medical Center. The exercises allowed medical center staff “to test response to a deadly infectious disease, a mass-casualty event, terrorism event and security procedures”… [In October 2014], REI outdoor-gear stores in Soho and around the country are to hold free classes in zombie preparedness, which the stores have been providing for about three years. The zombie exercises appeared to be kitschy and fun—government agents running around trying to put down a zombie rebellion—but what if the zombies in the exercises were us, the citizenry, viewed by those in power as mindless, voracious, zombie hordes?

Consider this: the government started playing around with the idea of using zombies as stand-ins for enemy combatants in its training drills right around the time the Army War College issued its 2008 report, warning that an economic crisis in the U.S. could lead to massive civil unrest that would require the military to intervene and restore order. That same year, it was revealed that the government had amassed more than 8 million names of Americans considered a threat to national security, to be used “by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law.” The program’s name, Main Core, refers to the fact that it contains “copies of the ‘main core’ or essence of each item of intelligence information on Americans produced by the FBI and the other agencies of the U.S. intelligence community.” Also in 2008, the Pentagon launched the Minerva Initiative, a $75 million military-driven research project focused on studying social behavior in order to determine how best to cope with mass civil disobedience or uprisings. The Minerva Initiative has funded projects such as “Who Does Not Become a Terrorist, and Why?” which “conflates peaceful activists with ‘supporters of political violence’ who are different from terrorists only in that they do not embark on ‘armed militancy’ themselves.”

In 2009, the Dept. of Homeland Security issued its reports on Rightwing and Leftwing Extremism, in which the terms “extremist” and “terrorist” were used interchangeably to describe citizens they perceived to be disgruntled or anti-government. Meanwhile, a government campaign was underway to spy on Americans’ mail, email and cell phone communications. News reports indicate that the U.S. Postal Service has handled more than 150,000 requests by federal and state law enforcement agencies to monitor Americans’ mail, in addition to photographing every piece of mail sent through the postal system. Fast forward a few years more and local police were being transformed into extensions of the military, taught to view members of their community as suspects, trained to shoot first and ask questions later, and equipped with all of the technology and weaponry of a soldier on a battlefield. The Obama administration then hired a domestic terrorism czar whose job is to focus on anti-government American “extremists” who have been designated a greater threat to America than ISIS or al Qaeda. As part of the government’s so-called war on right-wing extremism, the Obama administration agreed to partner with the United Nations to take part in its Strong Cities Network program, which is training local police agencies across America in how to identify, fight and prevent extremism.”

     The worst-case scenario is that this pandemic, however biomedically real it is, will be exploited to the full by governments, acting under the instructions of capitalist superclass, to further the New World Order agenda, and reduce humans to flesh robots, until they can be replaced by real robots, and then probably eliminated by some real global pandemic.