Can we get some good news? Every time I open up the Twitter app on my phone, I almost instantly regret it. It is nearly all bad news, hopelessness and hysteria. It’ll make you think we’re all going to be dead soon.
The thing is, though, it’s not as if the people on Twitter are wrong. The situation is pretty bad right now, especially in Italy, where the number of cases just keeps going up. Today, there were over 800 deaths in Italy. Thousands of new cases are being diagnosed every day. Just a few days ago, it seemed like things were under control in Italy. New daily cases seemed to have stabilized and stopped going up, but then they started going up again, and in the past two days, Italy has gained more than 11,000 new cases.
America, Germany and Spain are all adding 2,000+ new cases a day over the past few days, and here in the US total cases are over 24,000 now.
In America, we now have over 24,000 cases, but more than half of those are in New York. And in New York, the overwhelming majority are in New York City. This means that New York City has more cases of coronavirus than the rest of the country combined:
New York City is the epicenter in America. Undeniably. Overwhelmingly. It’s time to quarantine NYC from the rest of us. No flights in or out. Military checkpoints on the highway. Do not let a single soul in or out of New York City. Obviously make sure they’re supplied with food and goods, but we need to isolate NYC.
The scariest part of it all, however, is that Italy has been under nationwide lockdown since March 9 and things have never been worse. It appears the lockdown isn’t working, although perhaps it’s too early to say because the virus has a 14-day incubation period (although it’s possible for symptoms to appear as early as 5 days). So hopefully by Tuesday or Wednesday, Italy starts seeing its new daily cases start declining, because Monday will mark 14 days since the lockdown began.
All this bad news out of Italy begs the question: just to what extent was China lying about its coronavirus numbers? Italy already has more deaths than China claims they had, and China was the origin point for the virus. The worse the Italian numbers get, the less believable the China numbers look.
So just how bad was it really in China? The government’s official figures of 80,000 infected and 3,255 dead are clearly way understated, but by how much?
Well, there is some indirect data we can use to make some inferences about the possible death toll in China, and it is not good.
Yesterday, I saw on Twitter that a 4chan user looked at subscription losses for Chinese mobile phone service companies to try to estimate the number of coronavirus deaths based on how many subscribers Chinese mobile providers lost over the past couple months. The total number of subscribers lost was 14.4 million over a two month span.
This user then drew the obvious conclusion that as many as 14 million people in China may have died from the coronavirus, given that the three main Chinese telecoms lost 14 million subscribers in January & February alone.
He included some images from the three main Chinese telecoms:
The China Mobile numbers are somewhat confusing because it looks like the decrease in subscribers could have been from people switching from 4G to 5G, but focus on the “Total Customers” column. It shows a decrease of nearly 7 million overall.
These are the numbers for China Telecom:
That’s a decrease of 5.17 million subscribers.
Another China telecom also showed over a million in lost subscriptions. It is between these three companies that the 4chan guy got the 14.4 million figure.
Now, I think this is a very high estimate. 14 million dead in China is 1% of the country, and that’s an astronomical death toll. I think it would be very hard for China to cover this up, although if any country could do it, it would be China.
Still, I don’t see many other good explanations for why 14 million people canceled their cell phone service other than: they died. Of all the expenses you’d consider cutting out during a time like this, cell phone service is at or near the bottom of the list.
But another Twitter offers another explanation for why China suddenly lost so many mobile phone subscriptions:
It’s possible people canceled their mobile subscriptions as they fled the country, but even this seems somewhat implausible. If I were to flee the US, I doubt I’d cancel my mobile subscription, but who knows.
In order to make the claim that as many as 14 million people died in China from the coronavirus, you’d have to exhaust all possible non-death alternatives for why people could’ve canceled their subscriptions. For instance, if millions people did flee China and cancel their mobile subscriptions, did they open up new mobile contracts in the country they fled to? I have no idea where they would have fled to and what those other countries’ main telecom companies are, so it would be a lot of work to try and figure out if telecoms in countries outside of China saw corresponding increases of millions of new subscribers, indicating their gain was China’s loss.
It’s also possible people just used their phones on wifi only after fleeing China, and we will not see any other country with an explosion of new mobile subscribers caused by fleeing Chinese. We haven’t seen any headlines like, to use a country Chinese people could have plausibly fled to, “Taiwanese mobile providers struggle to accommodate millions of new Chinese expat subscribers.” Or really anything about fleeing Chinese pouring into any other countries at all.
In fact, even as early as late January, loads of countries around the world were moving to restrict travel to and from China. This article is from February 3:
“MORE countries have banned travel to China in the wake of the outbreak of the novel coronavirus. As the death toll rose above 300 in China, more countries have issued travel warnings and bans.
Vietnam has barred all flights from and to China. Overall, nearly 10,000 flights have been cancelled since the outbreak. Australia is temporarily denying entry to non-citizens who have recently travelled to the country. Japan also said it would bar foreigners who had recently been in the Chinese province at the centre of the outbreak, or whose passports were issued there.
Previously, the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Hong Kong, France, New Zealand, India, Egypt, Germany and a host of others had issued travel warnings or bans to the Asian country. African airlines have cancelled scheduled flights to China except Ethiopian Airlines. Last week, Nigeria issued a travel warning to China even as Nigerians in China were urged to tread with caution.”
Where could potentially millions of fleeing Chinese have gone? By early February, their options were extremely limited. No other countries wanted to take them in, and rightly.
However, most of these travel bans included provisions to allow expats living in China to return home. For instance, American citizens living in China were allowed to come back to The States. This article from Feb. 1 elaborated on that point:
“Russia will start evacuating its citizens from China next week. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the evacuations would be from regions that had been most affected by the outbreak, Interfax and TASS news agencies reported.”
What I’m trying to say here is that it’s possible that a portion, or even the majority, of the 14 million lost China telecom subscribers were foreign citizens living in China long-term who canceled their subscriptions to Chinese cell service when the virus started spreading and they had to make a quick exit from China.
This, to me, is the best possible alternative explanation to the “14 million Chinese died” theory. If I were an expat living in China long-term, I would most definitely have made a quick exit from China and come back to the states as soon as the virus outbreak began.
More recent headlines indicate Chinese expats are flocking back to China as coronavirus case numbers explode in Europe:
So who knows. Even if we see a major spike in mobile subscribers in China for the month of march as loads of expats living outside of China come back to escape Europe, they might not be the same people who left China in droves in Jan/Feb. There are Chinese people living abroad, but then there are also Americans/Europeans/British/Australians/ Russians/etc. living in China. The latter category likely fled China in Jan/Feb, while the former category is in the process of fleeing Europe to go back to China now.
I don’t know. We’re living in chaotic times. But still, even if just 10% of those lost mobile subscribers in China are people who died, that’s still 1.4 million people.
The bottom line is that we are not getting the full story from China. They have been lying about and covering up the virus since the start. Someone on Twitter posted this on Feb. 8, which showed an unusual amount of sulfur dioxide being emitted from Wuhan, China, indicating mass cremation of dead bodies:
China is so unbelievably guilty for all of this. Government officials forced a Wuhan lab to stop their testing on the virus and destroy the samples so as to destroy proof of it:
This is the Chinese Virus. No honest person at this point can deny that. China passed this on to the rest of the world.
And the worst part of it is, we’re learning that China now basically owns the US Media given how much the media is advocating on China’s behalf. I’m sure you’ve all seen the clips of “reporters” attempting to scold President Trump for saying “Chinese Virus.”
As of February 21, CNN was more concerned with “racism” against Chinese than Americans dying of the virus itself:
It’s almost worse that this article is from a month ago because it clearly shows CNN was not taking the virus seriously at all.
Three days ago, Rolling Stone whined:
Trump bad, China scapegoat.
New York Times:
Screw the “experts.” Why didn’t the experts prevent this from happening? And screw concerns over “xenophobia.” Xenophobia is a made-up term by the globalists to attempt to pathologize the natural human distrust of foreigners. If we were more “xenophobic,” we wouldn’t have to worry about coronavirus. Xenophobia is good.
Washington Post ran almost the same article as NYT:
The media is the enemy inside the gates. The fifth column. The media is actively undermining America from within. Whether it’s because they’re all brainwashed morons, they just do whatever they believe will get them higher ratings, or (more likely) because they’re all bought-out traitors, they are America’s weakness.
You’ve got the worst global pandemic in decades spreading like wildfire, and the American media is determined to make the situation worse for us.
So accustomed is our media to disingenuously framing literally every news story as a matter of “racism” that they are unable to resist doing so even in this global crisis.
Never has it been more clear that the media’s obsession with painting America as a viciously racist hellhole where life for minorities is nothing but endless misery and suffering, was simply them inventing problems where there were none. Now that we have a real problem on our hands, notice that nobody but the media is still fretting about racism. It’s almost as if the past five years’ hysteria over racism was complete nonsense and totally fabricated by the media.
And it’s not just racism that has fallen by the the wayside due to coronavirus:
Hopefully, this means that when the dust settles and this coronavirus business blows over, most Americans will realize what a sham the identity politics push since 2015 has been.
But don’t be fooled into believing the media’s behavior has been harmless. The media’s conduct has been so reprehensible during this coronavirus outbreak that it is actively lobbying against finding a cure for the coronavirus. I’m not kidding or exaggerating.
It all started with Trump making a statement on Thursday that a drug called Chloroquine, normally used to cure Malaria, may actually be highly effective against the coronavirus.
This comes from a successful study conducted in France, published March 17:
“A renowned research professor in France has reported successful results from a new treatment for Covid-19, with early tests suggesting it can stop the virus from being contagious in just six days.
Professor Didier Raoult from infection hospital l’Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire (IHU) Méditerranée Infection in Marseille (Bouches-du-Rhône, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur), published a video explaining the trials on Monday March 16.
Professor Raoult is an infectious diseases specialist and head of the IHU Méditerranée Infection, who has been tasked by – and consulted by – the French government to research possible treatments of Covid-19. He said that the first Covid-19 patients he had treated with the drug chloroquine had seen a rapid and effective speeding up of their healing process, and a sharp decrease in the amount of time they remained contagious.
Chloroquine – which is normally used mainly to prevent and treat malaria – was administered via the named drug, Plaquenil. The treatment was offered to 24 patients, who were among the first to become infected in the south east of France, and who had voluntarily admitted themselves to hospital for the process.”
Not only did French researchers come to this conclusion, American researchers did as well a few days prior.
“A new academic study, published on Friday March 13 by US scientific researchers, also said that chloroquine appeared to be an effective treatment, and appears to align with the findings in France.
It said: “Use of chloroquine (tablets) is showing favorable outcomes in humans infected with Coronavirus including faster time to recovery and shorter hospital stay…
“Research shows that chloroquine also has strong potential as a prophylactic (preventative) measure against coronavirus in the lab, while we wait for a vaccine to be developed.
“Chloroquine is an inexpensive, globally available drug that has been in widespread human use since 1945 against malaria, autoimmune and various other conditions…[it] can be prescribed to adults and children of all ages.
“It can also be safely taken by pregnant women and nursing mothers [and] has been widely used to treat human diseases, such as malaria, amoebiosis, HIV, and autoimmune diseases, without significant detrimental side effects.”
Researchers worldwide are continuing to work on developing a vaccine against Covid-19.
So far, no country – nor the World Health Organisation (WHO) – has officially published treatment measures against Covid-19, but in China and South Korea, guidelines already outline the use of chloroquine as an “effective treatment”, the study report said.”
But don’t even bother clicking the link to the US study. It’s a Google Doc, and Google has taken it down due to “violation of terms of service.” Very curious.
For some reason, the media and Google are trying to throw cold water on the buzz around Chloroquine. As is the FDA, as we’ll see shortly.
Why would they be actively working to discourage the use of the Malaria drug for coronavirus? Because the drug is already on the market. As the block quote above shows, it has been widely available since 1945.
But Big Pharma has a strong financial interest in making sure it and it alone has monopoly control over the eventual mass production and distribution of the coronavirus vaccine.
Which is why you see CNN running shameful headlines like this regarding Trump’s touting of Chloroquine:
How dare Trump try to boost our spirits amid such “dark times”!
Let’s have a look at the article, though, because it’ll show just how treacherous CNN is:
“For the past two days, Trump has said he is dispensing “game changer” breakthroughs on treatments and a wartime-style effort to mass produce medical supplies that appear as rays of light amid America’s darkening battle against the coronavirus pandemic.
Such as. . .? We don’t get any specifics.
[…]
On Thursday, Trump celebrated his own announcement that he had torn down red tape and that several anti-virus therapies used to treat other conditions were now or shortly will deployed in the battle against Covid-19.
Which “anti-virus therapies,” CNN? Why won’t you specify?
“I think it could be a game changer, and maybe not, and maybe not. But, I think it could be, based on what I see, it could be a game changer. Very powerful — they’re very powerful,” Trump said.
But moments later, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn said that the several anti-virals, including one used against malaria, were currently in a regular clinical trial coronavirus and declined to give a timeline when their use might be approved for fighting the disease.” [sic? is the word “for” supposed to be in between “trial” and “coronavirus”?]
You can tell from Trump’s quote that he is referring to something specific (“it”), but CNN’s article is intentionally vague about what, exactly, Trump is talking about. They mention “the several anti-virals, including one used against malaria,” but never Chloroquine by name. This is no accident. They do not want you to be aware of the fact that Chloroquine has been shown to be extremely effective against the coronavirus.
The New York Times at least used the term “Malaria drugs,” but that was about it. They’re still very much against the use of an already-existing drug to combat coronavirus.
“With minimal evidence.” Actually there are multiple studies out. Add New York Times to the list of evil institutions that don’t want coronavirus to be cured.
The FDA is probably in Big Pharma’s pocket as well given the speed with which it attempted to shoot down Trump’s claims.
The media even tried to pretend Chloroquine is DANGEROUS AND WILL KILL YOU BECAUSE TRUMP IS TRYING TO KILL YOU, with MSN posting a scare headline “Drug touted by Trump to possibly treat virus can kill in just 2 grams”. But they neglected to mention the recommended dose size is 500 milligrams:
Wow, if you overdose on Chloroquine, it can kill you. So I guess we shouldn’t use it against coronavirus, even in the prescribed dose amount. In fact, let’s throw out every other drug that can kill you if you take 4x the recommended dose.
This dishonesty from the media is downright evil. Let’s be completely clear here: they literally want to deprive people of a safe, effective cure for Coronavirus because Big Pharma does not have a monopoly on Chloroquine.
We have the cure already. But Big Pharma has mobilized its shills in the media, at Google, and at the FDA to prevent it from ever seeing the light of day.
But Trump remained undeterred, reiterating his interest in using Chloroquine to cure coronavirus earlier this morning:
Big Pharma and their paid shills in the media are determined to make sure the coronavirus does not have a proven and widely available cure, and that America remains entirely dependent on China for medical supplies.
The Daily Beast, for example, is very upset that a Trump administration official is trying to “commandeer” the Coronavirus in order to make the medical-supply chain “more America-centric”:
Outrageous! America MUST remain reliant on China for medical supplies!
Were you aware that even drugs as common as aspirin are no longer produced in the United States because China put our last manufacturer out of business in 2002?
Rosemary Gibson is the author of a 2018 book called “China Rx: Exposing the Risks of America’s Dependence on China for Medicine,” and recently she went before Congress and testified that 90% of the core chemicals required to treat coronavirus patients come from China. She went further:
“There’s talk that we should let the free market fix this. The reality is there is no free market. Generic manufacturing has collapsed in the US. There are only two Western companies left that are making generic drugs, and they announced last year that they’re dropping half their products because they can no longer make them. So now they’re on the FDA shortage list.
And how does this happen? Because of China forming cartels. Which has driven out production of so many of our core medicines–we can’t make penicillin anymore, because of what I wrote about in ‘China RX,’ we can’t make vitamin C, we can’t even make aspirin. And thousands and thousands of other medicines.”
We are completely dependent on China for just about everything, including medical drugs and supplies. This is what Trump adviser Peter Navarro is trying to address, and the media is slamming him for it.
It’s difficult to overstate just how much damage the media is deliberately doing to America.
***
While the coronavirus may be causing chaos around the world (the US stock market is down over 30% as of Friday), and its death toll is rising by the day, we will get through it. It may not seem like there’s any end in sight, but we will get through this.
The world we will inhabit on the other side, however, will not be the same as the one we inhabited as recently as January. The Great Coronavirus Epidemic of 2020 will have long-term consequences all around the world.
Such as what?
First and foremost, the China Problem will take center stage. For too long we have ignored the fact that we have slowly but surely become entirely dependent on China. It all started with Richard Nixon “opening” China for business in 1971, and was cemented in 2001 when the Bush finally administration allowed China to join the World Trade Organization and obtain “most favored nation” status with the U.S.
This has been an utter disaster for America, and it’s not just in medical supplies. It’s in rare earth minerals, it’s in clothing, it’s in electronics–just about everything. I remember when I was working for a US Congressman I accompanied him on a tour of a semiconductor plant in our district. At the end of the tour we sat down with the owners and asked them how we could help their business out, and their #1 concern, overwhelmingly, was China. China was undercutting their prices and they would soon be out of business because they couldn’t compete. China has been waging economic warfare on America for decades, and we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking it’s all good because at least we get cheaper goods.
We can no longer view China as a developing country that needs our help to modernize. China is now our foremost rival in the world. I’d even go as far as to say they’re our number-one enemy in the world.
Our trade deficit with China has ballooned to head-spinning levels:
And that’s on top of the fact that the US Trade Representative estimates that the US loses out on between $225-600 billion per year in Chinese intellectual property theft. The Chinese are bleeding us dry.
Growing wariness of China should not be a partisan issue, either. It’s an American issue. The only way one could oppose America ending its dependence on China is if they’ve been paid off by China. Our reliance on China benefits no one except the multinational corporations that have outsourced to China for cheap production, and the American universities that collectively accept hundreds of thousands–probably by this point millions–of Chinese students.
The rest of us are paying the price.
China is our enemy. That much has become crystal clear for Americans over the course of the past couple months. Not only have they bled our economy dry, they’ve now inflicted a deadly virus upon the whole world. No matter how much the media tries to muddy the waters by calling Trump a racist, this is a Chinese virus that has now become the whole world’s problem. We must lay the blame on China and hold them accountable for not only the medical suffering they’ve inflicted, but the trillions of dollars of economic carnage as well.
China wrecked the world economy. China did this.
And if you’re wondering why Italy has been hit so hard by the coronavirus, it’s because Italy has the highest population of Chinese expats in all of Europe. According to Wikipedia, there are 320,000 Chinese citizens living in Italy, and most of them arrived over the past decade. There is nothing coincidental about Italy being the worst-hit nation by coronavirus after China.
China has been investing in (read: buying out) Italy for the past decade, Milan specifically. And wouldn’t you know that Milan has borne the brunt of the virus outbreak in Italy.
There’s a medium-sized Tuscan town just north of Florence called Prato, and it has been completely taken over by the Chinese:
“I spoke to Marco, a 38 year old construction worker, about the changes he’s seen here over the last 30 years.
‘Prato has evolved and grown in terms of population, but the majority… how can I say it… the majority it’s all Chinese. That ‘something’ that there was before isn’t there anymore, Prato’s traditions, the feasts… on the 15th of August we used to go to Feast of Santa Maria, we’d eat watermelons, you’d go there and see all the people from Prato… now what you see, it’s mostly managed by [the Chinese]….’
So when did Via Pistoiese swap cantuccinis for noodles and dumplings? Where do all these hand waving cats come from, and who buys them? Why do some areas of Prato, in short, look so Chinese?
[…]
Until the 60s, the extra workers Prato needed came from the countryside and around Tuscany. In the 70s and 80s, these jobs were taken up by migrants from the south of Italy, and in the 90s by workers from China.
Chinese immigrants quickly began buying and opening small firms, merging those firms, and replacing the older firms owned by Italian families. They focused on fast production of ready-to-wear fashion clothing and employed mostly other Chinese people, who were much cheaper than Italians. Failing Italian firms began cutting costs by closing down and renting their warehouses to Chinese companies instead.
Today, Tuscany has the largest percentage of firms owned by Chinese citizens in Italy, and Prato has the largest share in Tuscany. More firms in Prato are owned by foreigners than Italian, and over 70% of those owned by a foreign national are owned by the Chinese.
Giulio, an 80 year old man who used to own a textile factory, said: “The young people from Prato all left to go work in France, Germany… if you look around, you can’t see a young person, it’s only the Chinese. It’s just like 50 years ago, when there were no jobs and Italians went abroad, to America… it’s like back then. The firms are all closing down, especially in Prato. The only ones that survived are the ones that buy already made stuff from China to sell. There’s no more manufacturing here.”
[…]
In the end, Marco points out, “People from Prato used to drive big expensive cars and Chinese people used to drive the Ape [a cheap and small three-wheeled truck]. Now people from Prato drive the Ape, and Chinese people drive the big cars.”
When white Europeans did stuff like this in Africa during the 19th century, it was condemned as “imperialism.” When the Chinese do it, it’s all just part of the glorious process of “globalization.”
The developed West needs to ween off of China. It’s time to start making things again and stop allowing China to leech off of us.
In fact, when this is all over, China needs to answer for this virus that destroyed so much. We’re talking post-WWI style reparations like Germany was forced to pay at Versailles. Massive, punitive, crippling reparations.
Second, people in America are going to learn the art of saving money again. At least they should. 78% of the country lives paycheck to paycheck. 69% of Americans have less than $1000 in savings.
People are going to learn to save money again. No longer should people take their incomes for granted.
Third, people in America are going to question urban living. Densely-populated urban areas are, unsurprisingly, being hit the hardest by the coronavirus. Again, New York City has more than half of America’s cases. It’s also the most “international” city in the U.S., where thousands of foreigners flock daily for business, tourism and even to start whole new lives in the land of opportunity.
Not only are you far more likely to catch a deadly virus in a big city, urbanites are also the ones encountering emptied-out supermarkets. City dwellers are far more reliant on the supermarkets than rural Americans.
While it won’t be mass exodus from the cities, I think you’ll see some people move away from the cities and head for, if not rural areas, then at least suburban locales.
I’ve been saying it for a while and now it’s never been more crucial: get out of cities, move to the countryside and become self-reliant. Buy land, raise goats and chickens, get in touch with nature and God.
Fourth, I can’t even begin to fathom the economic impact the coronavirus will have on this country and the world. Hopefully, people who are out of work (that’s most of us) will either get unemployment insurance, or those Trump Bucks (preferably both). But if this goes on any longer, the number of businesses that will shut down will dwarf anything we saw in 2008. There’s a big difference in a business experiencing slowed demand and a business that cannot operate at all. We need to get the economy back up and running as soon as humanly possible or else things are going to get really bad.
Fifth, open borders is a liability. Not only is it turning America into racially-fragmented, third-world-esque banana republic, and eroding its historical culture and traditions, it’s made us vulnerable to viruses like this. The reason this virus became our problem and not just China’s is because of open borders and globalization. This will inevitably lead many more Americans to begin questioning if open borders is such a good idea–and since a lot of people have already started questioning it over the past several years, this could be a major turning point in public opinion. We can only hope.
***
Finally, at the beginning I said we need some good news around here because everything seems so apocalyptic at the moment.
Well, the good news is, the coronavirus may well in fact be “just the flu.”
I’m not talking about the symptoms of the virus, but rather in terms of numbers.
Here are the CDC’s stats on the current flu season, still ongoing:
- 38 million – 54 million total flu illnesses
- 17 million – 25 million medical visits
- 390k – 710k flu hospitalizations
- 23k – 59k flu deaths
In America, we’ve only seen 24,000 total cases of coronavirus and 288 deaths.
Now, these numbers are of course still going up (and rapidly) but there’s no way we’ll see 38 million cases of coronavirus, and I seriously doubt we’ll see 23,000 deaths.
The death rate for coronavirus is certainly higher than the flu. That’s a fact. But it’s also true that we don’t have an accurate number on just how many people have the coronavirus. We don’t have anywhere near the testing capability for the coronavirus as we do the flu. It’s likely there are many more people who have the virus than we currently know of. Many people will get it and recover without ever going to a hospital or a doctor.
I’m not trying to say you should be out in crowded areas and being careless, but I am saying the virus is not nearly as scary as it seems.
Placing the virus in the context of the flu makes it less scary. At least it did for me.