The coronavirus pandemic has wreaked havoc around the world, claiming more than 400,000 lives and destroying global economies.

But how does it compare to other mass killers like terrorism or the flu?

About 15 per cent of all human deaths around the world are caused by infectious and parasitic diseases, according to the World Health Organisation.

In recent years, malaria – a parasitic disease spread through mosquito bites – has been one of the deadliest.

In 2018, an estimated 228 million people were infected with the disease, and roughly 405,000 died as a result, World Health Organisation data shows.

Most of those victims were children under five years old (67 per cent) that were living in African countries (94 per cent).

Enter 2020.

What started as a mystery “pneumonia-like” illness in the Chinese city of Wuhan has now infected more than seven million people and killed upward of 419,000.

And in countries like Brazil and Russia, where infection rates are rapidly climbing, the death toll is set to increase further yet.

• Read: Australia has slowed the spread. Elsewhere, deaths are rising fast

To compare how the coronavirus death toll stacks up against other global killers, data visualisation company Flourish has created a bar chart using information from the Global Burden of Disease study, Worldometers populations and Johns Hopkins COVID repository.

Read more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/world/2020/06/11/coronavirus-killers-mal...

And when the Covid19 panic is over and no-one under 65 years of age dies from this virus, the other death causes will continue... On the stats alone, more than 500,000 people will die from malaria, 350,000 would have gone to better pastures by homicide, before the end of the year. Apparently, no one dies from "natural causes" anymore...

Death by age, re Covid19:

Facebook has flagged our article “It’s all bullshit”: 3 links sinking the Covid narrative” as ‘false information’, based on nothing but a single ‘fact check’ website, which does not even claim the information is ‘false’, but merely quibbles over terminologies to justify claiming the information is ‘misleading.’

This is what you see today if you try to access that article on Facebook:

And if you click on the ‘see why’ button you get taken here, to the website of Health Feedback, an “independent fact-checker”.

Of course, they’re not independent – they’re actually funded by Facebook. They are also funded by the “Credibility Coalition”, an NGO focused on “common standards for information credibility”. 

The Credibility Coalition are also funded by Facebook. And twitter. And google. And a whole host of unsavoury sounding NGOs.

So, with the idea that “health feedback” are anywhere close to “independent” firmly debunked, let’s see what they have to say.

Firstly, it’s important to note what is actually being “fact-checked” here. 

It is not that the three documents were leaked. It is not the accuracy of the quotes used. It is not the statistics cited. In fact, not a single factual claim is being called “false”. 

In short, Facebook is well aware that 90% of the article is perfectly provably true.

In fact, it’s not our article they’re allegedly fact-checking, it’s another article in the publication NewsPunch, which relies on one of the same sources we do.

The “fact-check” is entirely devoted to just one of three leaks we describe – the report from German Interior Ministry employee – and even then focuses solely on its provenance rather than its content. In essence, what is being “fact-checked” is not the report itself, but where it came from.

Nowhere in this ‘rebuttal’ does it claim the ‘German Ministry employee’ was lying or making provably false statements. Neither does it challenge the credentials, competence or honesty of the “independent scientists” who co-authored the report.

Instead, it uses diversionary language claiming the document’s main author, Stephan Kohn, was simply sharing his “private opinion” and was not authorised to speak for the government.

The author of the document is Stephan Kohn, a politologist and employee of Germany’s Interior Ministry in the KM 4 department for the Protection of Critical Infrastructures. However, Kohn’s analysis was not requested by the Interior Ministry, as the article claims. On 10 May, Germany’s Interior Ministry issued a press release stating that the employee had disseminated his “private opinion on the corona crisis management” and that the “elaboration was carried out outside the area of responsibility as well as without assignment and authorization”.

This approach should be hauntingly familiar to anyone who has been following the OPCW whistleblower story. Where expert witnesses contradicting the official narrative on Douma were claimed to merely be “disgruntled ex-employees” who were in Syria of their own accord and “never part of the fact-finding mission”. 

All these claims have since been shown to be lies.

In addition to these irrelevant obfuscations, the article uses weasel words to construct a flimsy counter-argument:

According to EuroMOMO, the number of excess deaths coinciding with the COVID-19 pandemic was twice the number that occurred during the unusually deadly flu seasons of 2017, 2018, and 2019 (Figure 1). 

Note that they only back three years in time, and not all the way to 2000 or 1998, both of which had very similar excess death numbers.

Note also they say “coinciding with”, and not “caused by”. This allows them to cite all the excess deaths in Europe, despite statistics showing that huge numbers the excess deaths were due to other causes – including the lockdown limiting access to healthcare and increasing poverty.

They are using excess deaths caused by the lockdown, to argue against the accuracy of a report warning that the lockdown will cause excess deaths.

It is going full Orwell. And it is utterly disgusting.

This article simply does not offer any justification for dismissing our article reporting Kohn’s words as ‘false information’. The information is NOT demonstrably false, it is merely contentious, in that the data is open to multiple interpretations.

In fact, the article admits that itself – only able to label the claim as “misleading” or “unsupported”. Nowhere do they use the word “disinformation” or “misinformation” or “false information”. Not once.

And yet that is the label facebook has stuck on it.

Facebook is not suppressing this article because it contains false information at all, it is censoring it because it offers an interpretation of facts that does not support the current mainstream dogma.

This is censorship, pure and simple.

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2020/06/17/facebook-factcheck/

Read from top.

Russia has registered more than half a million coronavirus infections, making the country the third most-affected in the world. But the official death toll is under 8,000. Could some figure-fiddling be going on?

In Anna Klochkova's living room there is a photo of her mother, Galina Oleinik. When the latter became ill with COVID-19, Klochkova said she had to plead with doctors to take her mother to hospital. 

Oleinik finally died in hospital in the Yaroslavl region on May 21. She had worked as a receptionist in a health care center in Pereslavl-Zalessky, where she was probably infected by the novel coronavirus. There was no protective clothing provided at her place of work. "I sewed my mother four-layered masks with elastic bands myself," said Klochkova.

Read more: Moscow hotel hosts domestic violence survivors as abuse cases soar

In Russia, a pathologist has to confirm COVID-19 as the cause of death. For this reason, an autopsy of Oleinik's body was ordered. Klochkova told DW the death certificate gives infection by the novel coronavirus as one of the causes of death.

"On the day my mother died, though, there was officially just one coronavirus death, a man. My mother doesn't appear in the statistics," she said.

Read more:

https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-russian-death-toll-statistics-provoke-some-disbelief/a-53887981

Before harping about Russia's statistics, please do the maths:

8000 dead for 500,000 cases... Is this possible? this represents a ratio of 8 deaths per 500 infected people... or 1.6 per cent... Why so low? Well in Australia, the figures are say 100 dead for 8000 infected people... or 1.22 per cent. Thus the Russian stats are not so "extraordinary"... Say that one or even several cases are not counted as "Covid19", due to other morbidity factors, would not change the stats by a great amount. What is possible though is that, despite the health system in some Russian hospitals being said to be below par compared to Western hospitals, the Russians might pay more attention to saving old folks lives. See:

Read from top. 

As well, we know that in the UK, and possibly other Western countries, the DNR policy, which has been defined as Nazi by doctor Vernon Coleman, may have helped in inflating the number of deaths...

by Catte Black

Potentially lethal doses of the therapeutic drug hydroxychloroquine are being administered in ‘clinical trials’, sometimes without patient consent. Nearly a quarter of those participating in one such trial subsequently died.

From the beginning of the SARS-COV-2/COVID19 pandemic rollout there have been disturbing hints, rumours and even overt whistleblower claims of seemingly gross medical malpractice connected with the treatment and handling of allegedly infected people. 

We have heard about mandatory Do Not Resuscitate orders issued forthe elderly, cognitively challenged people, autistic people and even children with fairly minor congenital conditions. 

We have heard of terrifyingly inappropriate usage of invasive ventilation that can only increase the numbers of covid19 deaths’, and of general levels of incompetence and poor practice that must have the same result. 

And now we have evidence of three clinical trials which require patients to be given up to 4 times the normal dosage of hydroxychloroquine, with or without their consent. In one of these studies over 25% of patients died. 

This has been unearthed by Dr. Meryl Nass MD, and is covered in detail over at her site and at the Alliance for Human Research Protection, a site dedicated to exposing unethical practice in the medical community.

The three studies are: 

Solidarity, conducted by the World Health Organization, on 3500 Covid-19 patients at 400 hospitals, across 35 countries. As well as Hydroxychloroqine the trial included Remdesivir, Lopinavir with Ritonavir, Lopinavir with Ritonavir plus Interferon beta-1a.

Recovery, conducted in the UK, sponsored by the Wellcome Trust (GlaxoSmithKline) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the UK government. 1,542 patients took part, of whom 396 (25.7%) died

Remap, an ongoing multi-national project that is now trialing hydroxychloroquine as a SARSCOV2 therapy.

Doses employed in all studies were way above normal therapeutic doses and could well have proved fatal, especially to the very frail and compromised people enrolled in the trial, many of whom were already on ventilators or other forms of assisted breathing. In fact to even be considered for the Remap trial a patient had to be “close to death, either on a ventilator or in shock, on pressor medications.” 

Neither was any allowance made in dosage for patients with poor kidney or liver function, who might have increased difficulty in processing the drug. Only actual liver failure was grounds for reducing the dose:

No dose adjustment is necessary for renal dysfunction or concomitant use of renal replacement therapy. Clinicians should consider a dose adjustment in the presence of liver failure, however no dose adjustment is necessary for abnormal liver function tests in the absence of liver failure.

Patient consent was not considered necessary:

For patients who are not competent to consent, either prospective agreement or entry via waiver of consent or some form of deferred consent can be applied, as required by an appropriate ethical review body.”

Ironically, the Solidarity hydroxychloroquine trial was suspended on May 25th following the Surgisphere report in The Lancet that claimed 35% higher death rates in patients receiving Hydroxychloroquine, but which later turned out to be fraudulent, and indeed Nass suggests these medical trials are cynically sacrificing human subjects as part of the ongoing war against hydroxychloroquine, in a bid to prove it does not work or is unsafe:

Why is public health being turned on its head? REMAP-Covid is the third major multicenter clinical trial of hydroxychloroquine to give toxic doses to Covid patients. Who or what is behind this concerted effort to maim or kill patients in order to kill any appearance of benefit from hydroxychloroquine in the treatment of Covid-19?

This is more than possible of course, but I also think we need to set these frankly murderous “trials” within the wider context mentioned above – the distribution of DNRs to healthy or mildly compromised people, the brutal system of almost deliberately induced and needless deaths described by the whistleblower nurses in the US, the deaths by ‘accidental’ neglect in care homes.

These are all beginning to add up to something very dark and very strange going on in the shadows, just beyond public scrutiny. Whether this is deliberate policy or some dreadful perfect storm of institutionalised fear and chronic under-funding is hard to say. But something truly grotesque and potentially evil is going on here, and we can’t afford to ignore it.

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2020/06/24/covid-19-has-turned-public-health-in...

Note: hydroxychloroquine is "safe" in "normal doses"... It's an old drug that still works... at the correct dosage. 

Read from top.

From Kit Knightly

Cash4Covid – How hospitals are making money off the coronavirus

We’ve known for weeks that hospitals get payments for diagnosing Covid19, and even using ventilators. That should worry everyone.

Hospitals in the US are getting money for diagnosing Covid19. They get more money if those patients are then put on ventilators. It’s time we really started thinking about what that means.

Early on in the launch of the Sars-Cov-2/Covid19 “pandemic”, it was revealed by Dr Scott Jensen that hospitals in the US were getting paid bonuses for diagnosing Covid19 in their patients, and then larger bonuses again if those patients were put on ventilators.

We’re not fact-checking that. We don’t need to. It’s already been done.

As soon as his words were aired, the “independent fact checkers” descended upon them in an effort to prove him wrong. They could not. Resorting instead to weasel words and obfuscations.

Snopes found his assertions “plausible”, Politifact called it “half true”, and FactCheck said it was true, writing:

Recent legislation pays hospitals higher Medicare rates for COVID-19 patients and treatment…

Before adding:

…but there is no evidence of fraudulent reporting.”

Which is funny because, to that point, nobody had suggested anything fraudulent. Jensen himself went out of his way to say he didn’t think there was any fraud, but there was an “avenue” for it. 

Obviously the “fact checkers” agreed, because they all felt the need to add very similar qualifications. 

The very fact they rushed to pre-emptively defend the practice illustrates how potentially corrupt it is.

The key fact here, established and unchallenged, is that the CARES act does direct a 20% bonus Medicaid payment to hospitals for every diagnosis of Covid19, and a greater payment again for the use of a ventilator.

As I said, we’re not fact-checking that. And we can’t fact-check whether or not there is “fraudulent reporting”, but there’s no denying that these payouts potentially incentivise artificially inflating case numbers. 

How big an incentive are we talking about?

The CARES act channelled $175bn dollars into the “fight” against coronavirus, including $15 billion purely for treating COVID patients without insurance.

15 BILLION dollars. That’s a lot of extra money.

You couldn’t blame a doctor for gaming the system to get a little for his struggling, under-funded clinic. For labelling some unknown respiratory illness “Covid19”, or re-ordering a test known to create false-positives until he gets the result which may pay a nurse’s salary, or re-stock a pharmacy. 

If a few thousand doctors do that a few hundred times each, you’ve created a “pandemic” out of nowhere, with a comparatively small outlay and 99% of those involved believing they’re doing the right thing.

The American medical system is broken, of course. Has been for decades, and Dr Jensen’s revelations received a comparatively large amount of coverage which people in the UK and Europe largely filed away as “just American healthcare doing American healthcare things”.

What received markedly less coverage is the fact the UK’s NHS has its own Covid money problem. 

We don’t know if they operate a similar “money for diagnosis” system, and when we contacted the NHS to clarify this we were passed around various NHS offices before eventually being totally ignored. We received no answer to the question at all.

We do know that the NHS has received over £14 billion in extra fundssince the crisis erupted. Which doesn’t include all the money saved from running the NHS at well under capacity for over three months.

On March 17th Sir Simon Stevens, Chief Executive of the NHS, sent out this letter to the chairs of every NHS trust, as well as GP surgeries and other NHS providers that explains how that money will be spent. Including:

Nationally we are now in the process of block-buying capacity in independent hospitals.

Which means paying private hospitals to keep beds empty.

And:

Additional funding to cover your extra costs of responding to the coronavirus emergency […] financial constraints must not and will not stand in the way of taking immediate and necessary action

Which means that the more a hospital “responds” to the “emergency” – ie. the more tests they run, the more non-Covid patients they discharge to make room for the “surge”, and the more operations they cancel – the more money they get.

Though couched throughout in the subtly deceptive language of the British bureaucrat, there’s no denying the implications of some of the content.
There’s more than enough hints here suggesting huge potential for transferring public money into private hands.

But that’s not the worst of it.

Wasting millions of pounds “bulk buying” bed space in private hospitals and contracting emergency “Nightingale” hospitals to do nothing but stand empty – as well as a host of “estimated expenditures” and other “reimbursements” – well, that starts to reak of corruption, perhaps even embezzling. Obviously morally bankrupt, but corruption is expected in a capitalist system. Breakage. The cost of doing business.

What’s worse – where this gets really shady – is around the questions of ventilators.

The Stevens letter says this on the subject of mechanical ventilation:

National procurement for assisted respiratory support capacity, particularly mechanical ventilation, is also well under way in conjunction with the Department of Health and Social Care. In addition, the Government is working with the manufacturing sector to bring new manufacturers online.

Invasive mechanical ventilators are not a first-choice treatment for patients with respiratory viruses, so channelling fund to manufacturers is, at best, wasted money. However, I can’t find any direct evidence that NHS hospitals have a financial incentive to use ventilators. 

But there is absolutely no denying that American hospitals do.

Ventilators are known to likely make respiratory conditions much worse by damaging the lungs. A lot of times putting someone on a ventilator is a death sentence. We’ve been told that by several whistleblowers, not to mention medical experts.

Put those two bits of information together.

Hospitals in the US – and perhaps other countries – are therefore employing treatments they know may kill their patients, in order to secure money.

There is a hard reality here we’ve all been slowly becoming aware of for a while now. It’s time we looked it square in the face. 

Look at this in context. Look at the tests which cause false positives, and the coroner guidelines being changed. Consider the nursing home deaths, the enforced illegal use of DNRs and how at odds all of that is with the actual threat of the virus. It’s all coming together to form a very disturbing picture.

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2020/06/25/cash4covid-how-hospitals-are-making-...

Read from top.

London: Coronavirus may have lain dormant across the world and emerged when environmental conditions were right for it to thrive - rather than starting in China, an Oxford University expert believes.

Dr Tom Jefferson, senior associate tutor at the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University, and visiting professor at Britain's Newcastle University, says there is growing evidence the virus was elsewhere before it emerged in Asia.

Last week, Spanish virologists announced they had found traces of COVID-19 in samples of waste water collected in March 2019, nine months before the disease was seen in China. Italian scientists have also found evidence of the virus in sewage samples in Milan and Turin, from mid-December, many weeks before the first case was detected, while experts have found traces in Brazil from November.

Dr Jefferson believes that many viruses lie dormant throughout the globe and emerge when conditions are favourable. It also means they can vanish as quickly as they arrive.

"Where did SARS-1 go? It's just disappeared," he said. "So we have to think about these things. We need to start researching the ecology of the virus, understanding how it originates and mutates. We may be seeing a dormant virus that has been activated by environmental conditions. There was a case in the Falkland Islands in early February. Now, where did that come from?

"There was a cruise ship that went from South Georgia to Buenos Aires and the passengers were screened and then on day eight... they got the first case. Was it in prepared food that was defrosted and activated?

Exploring why so many outbreaks happen at food factories and meat-packing plants could uncover major new transmission routes.

"Strange things like this happened with Spanish Flu. In 1918, around 30 per cent of the population of Western Samoa died of Spanish Flu and they hadn't had any communication with the outside world.

"The explanation could only be that these agents don't come or go anywhere. They are always here and something ignites them, maybe human density or environmental conditions, and this is what we should look for."

Dr Jefferson believes that the virus may be transmitted through the sewerage system or shared toilets, not just through droplets expelled by talking, coughing and sneezing.

Jefferson and Professor Carl Heneghan, director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, have called for an in-depth investigation similar to that carried out by John Snow in 1854, which showed cholera was spreading in London from an infected well in Soho.

Exploring why so many outbreaks happen at food factories and meat-packing plants could uncover major new transmission routes, they believe. It may be shared toilets coupled with cool conditions that allow the virus to thrive.

The Tonnies slaughterhouse in Germany was the centre of a major outbreak last month, and in May, Melbourne's Cedar Meats also recorded a cluster of cases.

"We're doing a living review, extracting environmental conditions, the ecology of these viruses which has been grossly understudied," said Dr Jefferson.

"There is quite a lot of evidence of huge amounts of the virus in sewage all over the place, and an increasing amount of evidence there is faecal transmission. There is a high concentration where sewage is four degrees, which is the ideal temperature for it to be stabled and presumably activated. And meat-packing plants are often at four degrees.

"These meat-packing clusters and isolated outbreaks don't fit with respiratory theory, they fit with people who haven't washed their hands properly.

"These outbreaks need to be investigated properly. You question people, and you construct hypotheses that fit the facts, not the other way around."

The Telegraph, London

Read more:

https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/coronavirus-pandemic-may-not-have-started-in-china-experts-say-20200706-p5599t.html

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Google has already banned adverts promoting phony coronavirus cures or touting “medical misinformation,” but the tech giant went one step further on Friday, telling CNBC that as of next month, it will ban publishers from displaying Google ads next to coronavirus conspiracy content. The firm added that if a site violates this policy sufficiently, the ban will be extended to the entire site.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/495122-google-ban-coronavirus-conspiracies/

This is a google conspiracy!... to attract more conspiracies!  See also:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/488678-google-censorship-mikovits-pandemic/

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...

In short, as one government insider is quoted in the Evening Standard:

It turns out you could have been tested positive in February, recovered, then hit by a bus in July and you’d be recorded as a covid death.”

Of course, none of this is news for people who have been paying attention – OffG and many others have been reporting this could be happening for months.

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2020/07/17/uk-govt-finally-admits-covid-statistics-are-inaccurate/

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As many as 3,621 additional people may die from breast cancer, bowel cancer, lung cancer or oesophageal cancer in the UK over the next five years.

That's according to new modelling published in The Lancet last week, which looked at the impact on cancer deaths from delays in testing and diagnosis due to the COVID-19 response.

"What we've seen in the UK, particularly in the English NHS, is a radical reduction in the number of new patients that have been presenting with cancer," Richard Sullivan from King's College London told the Health Report.

"The important point here is these are much younger patients, so what that means essentially is around 59,000 to 63,000 years of lost life."

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/health/2020-08-01/cancer-costs-covid-19/12508230

Read from top.

What is not shown in the graphic at top is the number of deaths related to smoking tobacco: about 2.5 million in the January-May period worldwide...

See also: 

Lifesaving cancer screening tests have plummeted in Australia during the coronavirus pandemic, fuelling fears of a surge in delayed diagnoses and avoidable deaths.

A stark new report by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare on the impact of the pandemic on national screening tests found there had been a worrying decline in screening for breast, bowel and cervical cancer.

It found just 1100 mammograms were performed nationally in April, compared to 70,000 the month before – a drop of 98 per cent in one month – as COVID-19 infections soared and restrictions to contain the virus were enforced.

There was a 30 per cent drop in mammograms nationally from January to June, with 344,000 tests conducted compared to around 489,000 in the same period two years prior.

There were more than 364,000 cervical cancer tests between January and June this year, compared to almost 807,000 for that period in 2019, a drop of 45 per cent.

Bowel screening also dropped rapidly, with about 145,000 fewer bowel screening tests completed between January and June. This year, 680,000 were returned, compared to 825,000 for the first half of last year.

‘‘The health impacts of coronavirus itself are going to be way less than the impacts on other health issues induced by the COVID response,’’ said Grant McArthur, who chairs the Victorian COVID-19 Cancer Network. ‘‘We are anticipating we will see cancers that are much more advanced and a greater number over the next 12 months as well as significant increase in cancer diagnoses.’’

Read more:

https://todayspaper.smedia.com.au/smh/default.aspx

Read from top

WHO (Accidentally) Confirms Covid is No More Dangerous Than Flu

Head of Health Emergencies Program “best estimates” put IFR at 0.14%

Kit Knightly

The World Health Organization has finally confirmed what we (and many experts and studies) have been saying for months – the coronavirus is no more deadly or dangerous than seasonal flu.

The WHO’s top brass made this announcement during a special session of the WHO’s 34-member executive board on Monday October 5th, it’s just nobody seemed to really understand it. 

In fact, they didn’t seem to completely understand it themselves.

At the session, Dr Michael Ryan, the WHO’s Head of Emergencies revealed that they believe roughly 10% of the world has been infected with Sars-Cov-2. This is their “best estimate”, and a huge increase over the number of officially recognised cases (around 35 million).

Dr. Margaret Harris, a WHO spokeswoman, later confirmed the figure, stating it was based on the average results of all the broad seroprevalence studies done around the world.

As much as the WHO were attempting to spin this as a bad thing – Dr Ryan even said it means “the vast majority of the world remains at risk.” – it’s actually good news. And confirms, once more, that the virus is nothing like as deadly as everyone predicted.

The global population is roughly 7.8 billion people, if 10% have been infected that is 780 million cases. The global death toll currently attributed to Sars-Cov-2 infections is 1,061,539.

That’s an infection fatality rate of roughly or 0.14%. Right in line with seasonal flu and the predictions of many experts from all around the world.

0.14% is over 24 times LOWER than the WHO’s “provisional figure” of 3.4% back in March. This figure was used in the models which were used to justify lockdowns and other draconian policies.

In fact, given the over-reporting of alleged Covid deaths, the IFR is likely even lower than 0.14%, and could show Covid to be much less dangerous than flu.

None of the mainstream press picked up on this. Though many outlets reported Dr Ryan’s words, they all attempted to make it a scary headline and spread more panic. 

Apparently neither they, nor the WHO, were capable of doing the simple maths that shows us this is good news. And that the Covid sceptics have been right all along.

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2020/10/08/who-accidentally-confirms-covid-is-n...

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According to Gus-stimates, based on the recorded 35 million infected, the 1 million who have died make it a ratio of nearly 3 per cent deaths per infection. Should 750 million people become infected worldwide, this would kill 22.5 million people overall, but we might run out of oldies in "age-care facilities" before reaching this number.

The year 2020 has been abnormal for mortalities. At least 356,000 more people in the United States have died than usual since the coronavirus pandemic took hold in the country in the spring. But not all of these deaths have been directly linked to Covid-19.

More than a quarter of deaths above normal have been from other causes, including diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, high blood pressure and pneumonia, according to a New York Times analysis of estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Diabetes

15% above normal

Alzheimer’s disease and dementia

12%

High blood pressure

11%

Pneumonia and flu

11%

Coronary heart disease

6%

Stroke

5%

Sepsis

4%