2,950 words
If any further proof were needed that our “experts” and “leaders” know nothing, the coronavirus crisis provides an abundance of it. While the media and certain public figures keep ladling on the doom and gloom with a trowel, projecting many more months of death and economic shutdown, all signs indicate that death and hospitalization rates in the US may have peaked and are now declining. As usual, the elites are living in disconnection from reality — and there is reason to think that this disconnection may, in some cases, be conscious and willful.
According to the numbers reported by New York City, there were 1,634 new coronavirus hospitalizations in the city on April 3rd. By April 6th, the number of new hospitalizations had dipped slightly to 1,560. A day later it was 1,280. By April 8th it was 934. So far, only 307 hospitalizations have been reported for April 9th. The city’s COVID-19 “data page” states “due to delays in reporting, recent data are incomplete” — but the numbers are unlikely to tick back up to over a thousand a day. Clearly, there is now a downward trend. [1]
Deaths have followed a similar pattern in America’s largest city. Those numbers peaked on April 7th with 459. The following day the report was 364, then 291 on April 9th. Only 199 deaths were reported on April 10th. Since New York is unquestionably the pandemic’s “epicenter” in the US, this is very good news. And other localities around the country are reporting a similar decline in hospitalizations and deaths.
This isn’t what was “supposed” to happen.
The most widely cited model for how the pandemic was supposed to progress was created by something called the IHME, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, based at the University of Washington. This model has been quoted now for weeks as gospel truth by the media and public health officials. In fact, it has been wrong in virtually all of its projections, as was first exposed by Tucker Carlson, who ranks, in my book, as the most courageous man on television.
To take one example, the IHME projected that by April 4th, New York State could need as many as 65,000 hospital beds for virus victims. The lowball number was 48,000. Governor Andrew Cuomo appeared on television screaming about how the state would need at least 30,000 more ventilators. In fact, by April 4th there were fewer than 16,000 hospitalizations statewide. In other words, just a third of what the model had predicted. As for those ventilators, it turns out New York already has more than it needs — much more. And the IHME got it wrong, very wrong elsewhere in the country. In Virginia, they projected that 3,073 people would die by August; now they have been forced to revise that prediction down to 891.

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Indeed, the IHME seems to have got it wrong everywhere. On March 25th, just eighteen days ago, the organization was projecting that 245,000 people in the US would die from coronavirus. On April 8th, that number was revised down to 60,000 — one-fourth of what was originally predicted. Similar revisions are happening elsewhere in the world. The Imperial College London has revised its prediction of coronavirus deaths from 250,000 to under 20,000, which is about the same number of people who die from the flu each year in the UK.
How could these allegedly unimpeachable sources have got things so spectacularly wrong? The truth is that almost no one in public life, in the US at least, is asking that question. Instead, they are claiming that the numbers of hospitalizations and deaths are lower than projected because shutdowns and “social distancing” have been extremely effective. In other words, closing schools, closing almost all stores and all restaurants, shutting down church services, ordering people not to leave their homes except to buy food, etc., has cut the number of projected deaths, nationally, by three-fourths.
But this is just absurd. Social distancing obviously can reduce the impact, but not by that much. Further, as Tucker has pointed out, the IHME actually took social distancing and a nationwide commercial shutdown into account when arriving at their original figures. In other words, we were told that around 245,000 people were going to die if all of us practiced social distancing, and if the economy were virtually shut down. So, something else has to explain the dramatic overestimation of everything concerned with this virus — infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. The explanation is not going to be flattering to the IHME, or to the pundits and government authorities who tirelessly repeated their wildly wrong numbers.
I feel like I’ve reached a point in my life where it’s, at last, dawned on me that nobody in charge really knows anything, and that half of them (at least) are certifiably insane. It’s like suddenly realizing that nobody on board knows how to fly the plane, least of all the pilots. As a case in point, let’s consider Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has been Trump’s right-hand man in all of this, and has won the trust and affection of the nation. Fauci’s original position on coronavirus, which he made clear in January, was that it didn’t constitute a threat to the US at all. Now he has swung to the opposite extreme and is coming across like he is Trump’s answer to Dr. Strangelove.
Fauci has declared that we may all be in lockdown for the next eighteen months. But it gets better: he has said that things may “never” go back to normal, that we should never shake hands again, and that American citizens may need to carry certificates of immunity to the virus, to present on demand to law enforcement (“papers, please!”). In short, this guy is kind of a nut. Yet the President of the United States won’t make a move without him.
Meanwhile, Denmark, which suffered an outbreak similar to ours (adjusted for population) is re-opening schools this week. Same thing in Austria, where smaller stores are re-opening on April 15th, larger stores the beginning of May. Sweden has hardly practiced social distancing at all. It has closed high schools and universities, but preschools, grade schools, shops, restaurants, bars, and parks remain open. Sweden has taken the arguably much more sensible approach of isolating only those most vulnerable to infection, which is the elderly and those with certain preexisting conditions. And as of April 7th, there have been only 591 deaths attributed to coronavirus in the entire country. [2] Yet the US must stay shut down for eighteen months. This is surely the nuttiest form “American exceptionalism” has ever taken.
As usual, Trump is all over the place. Addressing Sweden’s approach, he actually claimed that the country “gave it a shot, and they saw things that were really frightening, and they went immediately to shutting down the country.” But this is completely and totally false. Trump wasn’t lying; this is evidently what he was told by the “experts” he consults with. More recently, however, Trump has signaled that he might like to “open up” the US again by May. And the response has been predictable. Trump is insane! He’s putting profits over human lives! He’ll kill us all!
It’s not just Fauci who has floated the eighteen-month figure. Other “experts” have also insisted that the US must remain on lockdown almost indefinitely. Appearing on MSNBC (and very obviously reading a prepared statement from a teleprompter), Dr. Zeke Emanuel, brother of Obama’s White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, also endorsed the eighteen-month figure, stating that “we have no choice.” Indeed, that we must hunker down and prepare for months and months of isolation, compulsory mask-wearing (which “experts” declared less than a month ago to be “ineffective”), joblessness, no gyms, and no haircuts, is the general consensus of the liberal media and establishment elites. Well, folks, as Ayn Rand said years ago, “Don’t bother to examine a folly. Ask yourself only what it accomplishes.”
It’s obvious that the corona crisis is now being manipulated for political ends, and that the agenda may be to sustain public hysteria for as long as possible. Once in a while, Ron Paul gets it right, and last month he wrote: “people should ask themselves whether this coronavirus ‘pandemic’ could be a big hoax, with the actual danger of the disease massively exaggerated by those who seek to profit — financially or politically — from the ensuing panic.” Yes, folks, we really are dealing with people so twisted they would happily see the country plunged into another Great Depression if it meant removing Donald Trump from office. Months ago HBO host Bill Maher stated: “One way you get rid of Trump is by crashing the economy. So please, bring on the recession.” Well, hell, why not go the whole hog and make it a depression?
You know, it’s hard to pick the most loathsome thing the media have done in the five years since Trump announced his candidacy, but here’s my suggestion: it was when they immediately turned against hydroxychloroquine, a potentially life-saving drug, just because Donald Trump suggested it might be worth looking at. The nadir was reached when CNN reported that a man in Arizona had been killed by the drug, but conveniently omitted to mention that this fruitcake had actually consumed an aquarium cleaner containing chloroquine phosphate.
And yet, hard though it may be to believe, there are those among us whose motives are even darker, and who are aiming at much more than winning an election.
While the media reports virtually nothing about possible treatments for the virus (indeed, as I’ve noted, it has actively tried to discredit them), it promotes instead ever more authoritarian government controls as the only solution. Individuals who suggest that things are not as bad as predicted and that we might be able to get back to work in a few weeks are passionately denounced as “irresponsible.” The politically correct position is now that we must put “people over profits” and stay locked down basically until the entire society descends into post-apocalyptic, Mad Maxish savagery. Then the people will beg for “really, really competent and technocratic” leaders, as Andrew Yang has put it.
It was really former British PM Gordon Brown who let the cat out of the bag when he called on world leaders to create a “temporary form of global government” to deal with the pandemic. As my readers know, it is axiomatic that when governments claim new powers for themselves in emergency situations, they seldom relinquish them. Is it plausible that there would be anything “temporary” about Brown’s “global government”?
On April 3rd, the real-life Dr. Strangelove, Henry Kissinger, published an editorial in The Wall Street Journal. It begins with Kissinger reminding us that he survived the Battle of the Bulge. This took place, in case you don’t know, about 350 years ago, which makes Kissinger a very, very old Ferengi at this point — a fact which should be held squarely in mind. He describes the corona crisis in terms that were already dated at the time he was writing: “The coronavirus has struck with unprecedented scale and ferocity. Its spread is exponential: U.S. cases are doubling every fifth day. . . Medical supplies are insufficient to cope with the widening waves of cases. Intensive-care units are on the verge, and beyond, of being overwhelmed.” In fact, as noted, supplies such as ventilators are not in short supply, and makeshift intensive care units meant to handle overflow from hospitals stand largely empty or have been shut down entirely.
Kissinger continues: “The crisis effort, however vast and necessary, must not crowd out the urgent task of launching a parallel enterprise for the transition to the post-coronavirus order.” Translation: Treating the sick and preventing further spread is only part of what needs to be done; we must also shore up the New World Order and make sure it remains intact once the virus is a bitter memory. “Leaders are dealing with the crisis on a largely national basis, but the virus’s society-dissolving effects do not recognize borders.” True, especially when those borders remain porous and unprotected. Henry, you old romantic, haven’t you heard? It was your New World Order that made it so easy for the virus to spread.

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And now here it comes: “No country, not even the U.S., can in a purely national effort overcome the virus. Addressing the necessities of the moment must ultimately be coupled with a global collaborative vision and program.” Yet it was precisely when countries engaged in “purely national efforts” that they began to take control of the situation: when, for example, countries like Hungary closed their borders (Hungary now has about 1000 coronavirus cases total [3]). And the fight against the virus has led to calls for national self-reliance, as opposed to dependence on what Kissinger calls “the world economy,” whose “wounds” he says we must “heal” when this crisis has passed.
But the biggest whoppers are still to come. Kissinger enjoins us to “safeguard the principles of the liberal world order.” And he warns us about the dangerous revival of an old “legend”:
The founding legend of modern government is a walled city protected by powerful rulers, sometimes despotic, other times benevolent, yet always strong enough to protect the people from an external enemy. Enlightenment thinkers reframed this concept, arguing that the purpose of the legitimate state is to provide for the fundamental needs of the people: security, order, economic well-being, and justice. Individuals cannot secure these things on their own. The pandemic has prompted an anachronism, a revival of the walled city in an age when prosperity depends on global trade and movement of people.
One hardly knows where to begin, so I’ll let Pat Buchanan speak for me:
Is the idea of the nation-state, whose principal duty is the defense of the health, safety and security of the unique people who created it, the ‘legend’? Or is the real legend, the myth, the idea of some New World Order of countries traveling and trading happily with one another in a federation of the world?
Amen.
Kissinger imagines he is on the right side of history; indeed, he imagines he stands at history’s End. The truth is that the only thing he stands at the end of is the globalist ideal he and others like him have championed for decades. Following the advice of Kissinger and the globalists, the US and the nations of Europe have abdicated their responsibility to provide for the “fundamental needs” of their own people: their “security, order, economic well-being, and justice.” Is Kissinger blind to this obvious fact? Yes, actually. Kissinger is a very old man with a moribund ideology that, like so many other ideologies of “unity” and “brotherhood,” has proved incredibly destructive.
As an editorialist for RT puts it:
Listening to Kissinger, it must be said, is what got the US into its current situation — believing itself exceptional, distrusting all world powers who do not swear abject fealty to it, repeating the same failed policies to the point of parody. . . The US’s first step, post-pandemic, should be to put out the fires set by Kissinger and those like him who seek to cloak empire in the rhetoric of liberal democracy.
The future is the revival of the “walled city.” One which protects the people from external enemies (including invisible ones) and which provides “for the fundamental needs of the people” precisely by putting its own people first, and becoming self-reliant. In short, the future belongs to nationalism. And how can Kissinger claim with a straight face that that “walled city” was a “legend” when this was the model followed by every nation in the past, until what Greg Johnson calls the “globalvirus” infected the brains of the elite leadership class? Our future, dear friends, is our past. Globalism was already threatened by the rise of national populism in the West, but coronavirus may well have dealt it a deathblow.
At least we hope so. But this is no time to get cocky. No time to posit something like the “historical inevitability” of nationalism. Our enemies are in trouble, and they are worried — hence Kissinger’s essay (if the “federation of the world” really was strong, and really did represent history’s endpoint, why fret?). This is, therefore, a very critical, and very dangerous moment. It’s sometimes said that the most dangerous animal is a wounded one, and so we should expect that our enemies may try almost anything to secure their power — to seize this crisis as an opportunity to push back against national populism in ways that could affect us for decades to come.
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Notes
[1] At the time of publication, all relevant epidemiological metrics — daily new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths — were on a downward trend in New York. The 9th saw 352 hospitalizations, while the 10th saw 117. Daily case numbers have also been declining by the hundreds. From the NYC Department of Health.
[2] At the time of publication, Sweden has had 919 deaths. It has also seen a steady downward trend in daily new cases following what appears to be the “peak” of infection. From the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 Resource Center.
[3] At the time of publication, Hungary has confirmed 1,458 infections. From the Hungarian government’s official COVID-19 information site (in Hungarian). Hungary’s “curve” has also remained relatively “flat,” with one major spike in cases on the 10th. From the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 Resource Center.
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12 comments
Yeah, this thought crossed my mind while reading about the small business loans that will be forgiven over the covid 19 shutdown. They are expanding the already unmanageable national debt enormously. Could this all be a pretext to call for the forgiveness or monetization(likely a bit of both) of the US government debt, in an attempt to blame gross fiscal mismanagement of the prior two decades(and long before that) on the covid 19 pandemic? Perhaps also trying to reduce our debt to China by claiming they were the source of the “epidemic.” Of course meanwhile transferring massive public funds to wall street again.
At first I decried the politicization of covid, but lately I’m putting back my customary conspiracy hat, lol.
It’s not to late to octuple down!!
If you’re going to make a claim like this you should really provide a mathematical argument to back it up. Exponential phenomena and common sense are often at odds. I’ll quote at length from <a href="https://www.unz.com/runz/the-government-employee-who-may-have-saved-a-million-american-lives/"≥Ron Unz at the Unz Review here, who has written intelligently about this:
I agree with other points in the article– our “experts” are often very wrong, and there is a lot of cynical political activity exploiting the crisis. I can’t speak to the particular model being criticized in the article. But misguided appeals to common sense on inherently mathematical questions (the effectiveness of social distancing) hurt the credibility of the rest of the article.
Kissinger is 96 and still writing editorials. I see he lived in Germany until 1938.
I see Counter-Currents now has a Entropy but what about a SubscribStar? Radix just started their account and it already has close to 150 subs at a $9 minimum.
Subscribestar will not allow us an account and has not exactly been forthcoming about why. Something all my readers and fans will inevitably bear in mind and hold against them.
Activist theory holds that two of the prerequisites for radical change include a division in the ruling class and a crisis which alienates the working class. With the accession of Donald Trump to the White House we’ve had a division in the ruling class in spades. Trump was not supposed to happen and, regardless of his compromises over the last three years, most of the System is pitted against him: Deep State, Big Media, Conservatism Inc, ad nauseam. And now with the Great COVID National Shutdown we’re seeing the potential for a totally alienated working-middle class.
You’ve got tens of millions of people locked out of their jobs. There are millions more students who are not being indoctrinated on campus. All of them have more time to surf Dissident Right websites, like this one. Maybe, just maybe, more people are starting to think.
Which means that activists who understand the situation and act accordingly can leverage the alienation into a wider National Populist movement.
How about when workers walk back onto the job and students march back onto the classrooms they do so under certain conditions: like no more affirmative action, no more diversity struggle sessions, no more anti-White agitprop, no more gun grabbing, no more being replaced by cheap foreign labor. I mean, what can the System do…send White people home? Just about everyone’s home now, comrades!
As for Trump…if he shows any leadership he can easily sweep the polls in November. For the voters it’s not the economy, it’s the Great Man.
Something to think about in the Continuing COVID Crisis.
the battle of the bulge was in ww2
That’s exactly what the IHME says: 4 days since peak resource use on April 10, 2020.
Data on the IHME site is only available from the end of March, but we can use media reports to reconstruct the timeline. This is a very good article from mid-March. “Projections based on C.D.C. scenarios show a potentially vast toll. But those numbers don’t account for interventions now underway.” Emphasis mine.
“Social distancing” is not a binary, yes/no thing. Models give projections based on various levels of social distancing, from no modification to 25, 50, 75 percent contact reduction. By “contact” they mean situations when the infection can be transmitted – which is subject to debate in the medical community. (Can you catch corona on the subway by standing next to someone for 5 minutes? 10 minutes? In an open air stadium? Etc.) Calculating the actual level of contact reduction is also non-trivial, they use flight and public transport data, polls etc.
Yes, social distancing can reduce the impact that much. A 50 percent reduction means the “curve” is pretty much a flat line drawn right on top of the x-coordinate.
The latest report that I could find for that number is from April 1st, about 2 weeks into the lockdowns:
“If current social distancing trends hold, the White House estimates that 100,000 to 240,000 deaths are possible in the United States. Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease specialist, said the figures are what “we need to anticipate, but that doesn’t mean that that’s what we’re going to accept … Our hope is to get that down as much as we can,” he said.”
There is a delay between measures taken and visible effect in the curve. Around April 1st we had just started to see the first effects of the lockdowns. Because of the nature of exponentiality – minor changes in model input cause dramatic differences in model output – 100,000 to 240,000 is a pretty good first estimate.
Half of Europe’s corona deaths are said to be happening in nursing homes, despite universal social distancing. Over 20 percent of medical professionals get infected despite wearing a space suit at work. The idea that we can let the epidemic rage in society and at the same time successfully isolate at risk groups strikes me as unrealistic.
Besides, young people who don’t end up in mortality statistics can have a pretty rough 2-3 weeks before they recover. Chances are that in a couple of years corona will be just one of the “flu” pack of diseases. But we’re not there yet.
Hungarian guestworkers in the Swedish health care system say the numbers are completely bogus. Sweden only tests those who have severe symptoms, and they let a large number of their elderly die without treatment. If anyone has a comorbidity, they don’t register the death as a corona case. For example, if a 75-year-old with a well-managed hypertension, who still has a decade in him, dies of corona-induced pneumonia, he is listed as a cardiovascular casualty. In most countries the above 70 crowd make up most of the dead. In Sweden, the above 70 make up a smaller portion of the dead than the 40 to 70 population. The least that we can say is that we don’t know what’s going on. To build the corona strategy of a country on Swedish data is simply irresponsible.
The Hungarian case numbers are bogus. We hardly test at all. We closed the border in mid-March, around the same time as other European countries. The first serological tests, conducted by a medical university, suggest 2-5 percent of the population has already been infected. The number of deaths, on the other hand, is probably close to the truth. If anything, the Hungarian medical profession tends to overreport.
Hungary: population 10 million, 122 deaths. (Sweden: population 10 million, 919 deaths.)
There are various theories about the low death count. A popular one is that BCG or some other vaccine has a useful side effect. We live under a vaccination fascist regime, anti-vaxxers are prosecuted ruthlessly.
Really? They are very good at hopping on whatever waves are thrown up by the Kali Yuga.* I think they’ll be fine in the post-corona world.
Example: Orbán used the national emergency to try to put (opposition) municipal governments under government control. The legislation was submitted to Parliament at midnight, March 31. By next morning, there was an all-out attack on the Hun currency. By lunchtime the legislation was withdrawn.
* Last year, in the months leading up to the epidemic, strange things were going on in the world. The enemy are either fantastically lucky, or not just passive surfers. But needless to say, the only way to hack them is to pretend we take the system at face value. Everybody, run for office!
Ever since the lock down started every grocery store in my city has been a madhouse, all the gun shops & GNC stores had lines going out the door with dozens of people stacked on top of each other. It was only until very recently that this was happening, now the stores limit the amount of people inside & actually enforce the 6ft spacing rule on lines. There were also record numbers of gun sales in February, many of which were undoubtedly at gun shows before the lock down where, when things are normal, several hundred people are in close proximity to each other throughout the event. Given all the news coverage of this going on across the entire country for the last month I doubt what happened in my city was exceptional. The virus has been in the US since at least January and has had plenty of opportunities to spread both before & after the lock down yet its only just eclipsed flu deaths since the season began last year, with cases of similar illnesses nosediving during the same time. I’ve been hearing that millions will die across the world in two weeks, every two weeks since this began last year. Any minute now all those projections will be vindicated, I’m sure, till then I’ll be setting my clock to never.
HungarianFashionista:
“In Sweden, the above 70 make up a smaller portion of the dead than the 40 to 70 population.”
Please note that the statistics in your link deal with coronavirus infections, not deaths. While middle aged people are more likely to be infected, old people are more likely to die from it.
One reason behind Sweden’s relatively high fatality rates, compared to Hungary, is obviously its African and Middle Eastern immigrant communities.
The most affected ethnic group is the Somalis. They make up about 1% of Sweden’s population, but 40% of its coronavirus victims last month:
https://voiceofeurope.com/2020/03/sweden-coronavirus-spreading-rapidly-in-somali-community/
Other heavily overrepresented groups are Syrians and Iraqis.
So unfortunately it doesn’t seem like diversity is a strength in this case.
@Breidablik
Indeed, it’s cases not deaths. I mixed up my tabs, this is the actual death chart, and in itself it doesn’t prove that the numbers are cooked.
Thanks for the correction.
By the way, seeing reports from Sweden my impression is that their non-lockdown isn’t much different from the Hungarian lockdown. Twitter is saturated with images of Swedes sitting in cafés. But other than that, they seem to have reduced their social contacts voluntarily to a very significant extent.
Both Sweden and Hungary are highly individualistic countries. And there is always something to offset individualism – otherwise we can’t have functioning societies. Swedes have a tendency to conform to social norms. Hungarians are impressed by authority, so we have a militarized crisis team and press spokesmen in uniforms. It would make sense that different countries have different responses, based on their habits and cultural preferences.
I also find it entirely believable that immigrants and Newswedes are heavily overrepresented in the Swedish data. We either taylor our measures to the most problematic social group, or that social group will be hit disproportionately.
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