I know everyone is fed to the back teeth with this whole COVID-19 situation, and the lies and deceptions of the (((media))) whorenalist classes really aren’t helping things at all. We are actually dealing with two global pandemics right now – one that is an actual virus of the flesh, that is far less dangerous than we think, and one that is a virus of the mind, which is far more dangerous and insidious.

I don’t particularly want to add to the mass distribution of fear porn concerning COVID-19. There are some 220,000 cases worldwide as of this writing – which by the way is still nowhere near as bad as your typical flu season – and of those, nearly 86,000, or approximately 40%, have fully recovered. Of the 220,000 or so infections that we’ve seen, there have been about 9,000 deaths, resulting in a supposed mortality rate of 4.09%.

That sounds pretty bad – until you remember the points that I raised in yesterday’s post.

Most of the people who have this virus will show either no or very mild symptoms. Roughly 86% of those infected will not feel any real effects, if the clinical data so far can be believed. So the actual death rate is maybe half a percent.

Again, this does not mean that quarantine measures are unnecessary. But the evidence so far tells us unequivocally that the people most at risk are those over 60 with pre-existing respiratory, immune, and other medical issues.

Even in Italy, where the virus appears to be rampaging out of control, there is plenty of reason for optimism. So far, COVID-19’s lethality has been confined almost entirely to Ye Olde Phartes with pre-existing medical conditions, and as our friend Adam Piggott the Gentleman Adventurer pointed out in a comment to yesterday’s post, the part of Italy where this virus has hit hardest, is one of the most polluted places in Europe in terms of air quality.

Furthermore, commenter furor kek tonicus (whose handle keeps changing to ever more awesome lines) provided us with a very interesting link to an article about a town called Ferrarra in Italy, which has seen precisely ZERO infections or deaths, carrying on a tradition stretching back 444 years to the days of the Black Death.

How did they do it? By NOT BEING STUPID.

The people of Ferrarra deal with crises like these by quarantining hard and fast, and by not panicking when they see a problem. And, most importantly, they don’t just let all and sundry in through the gates – which is a lesson that the rest of Europe is learning VERY MUCH the hard way.

That being said, the Italians are doing the best that they can in a very difficult situation. The very same Olde Phartes who are flooding the hospitals with breathing difficulties, are the ones being left to die. That is an extremely unpleasant choice and I don’t envy those who have to make it. But the fact is that the medical personnel dealing with the emergency right now are facing wartime conditions, and that means that they have to adopt the wartime practice of triage.

This is a horrid thing to do. It is also inevitable. It involves separating patients into three categories:

• Those who need help, but not immediately;
• Those in serious condition who will probably survive if they get help right away;
• Those who probably will not survive even if helped straight away;

Any one of my readers who has ever been on a battlefield can tell you that this is an ugly, awful, horrible way of treating people. It is also absolutely necessary to ensure the survival of a unit or group.

The first group is left for later; they can survive on their own. In the context of COVID-19, that comes down to young and relatively healthy people who have fevers and sore throats but no real breathing problems.

The second group is dealt with right away. Again, in the context of COVID-19, that means usually middle-aged folks with pre-existing respiratory conditions who will probably respond well to antivirals and respiratory assistance.

The third group is LEFT. TO. DIE.

With COVID-19, that means – and I am truly sorry to say this – anyone over the age of 70 who has a past history of breathing problems and who shows frank symptoms of respiratory distress.

There just aren’t enough resources and beds to go around to deal with all of them. And that is the horrible, miserable reality of this virus.

There is simply no getting past the fact that most of the people in that third group are 70 and older, with pre-existing medical conditions that make their recovery less likely. And that means that – again, I am very sorry to say this – they will be left to suffer and choke and die.

And, guess what: when the survival of an entire society is at stake, that is precisely what has to happen.

I write all of those basic truths to point out another one:

This plague came from China.

Make no mistake, China is the problem. And this is not the first time that the Chinese have acted in such fashion and caused a catastrophe for everyone else. As I keep pointing out, I was there in Singapore in 2003 when SARS hit. I saw what happened firsthand as the Chinese first lied about the SARS outbreak, then tried to cover it up, then finally gave up being idiots and started implementing extreme quarantine measures.

By then, it was far too late. The SARS virus had spread throughout Southeast Asia and was well on its way to infecting the rest of the world.

That virus was anywhere between three and ten times as lethal as COVID-19, but it wasn’t as infectious. The total number of people infected during that outbreak was less than the number of people who have actually died in this one.

And the fact is that China is nowhere near done with causing huge problems for the rest of the world, because it turns out that the next plague is almost certain to start in China too – and that is due to China’s poultry-feeding practices:

God Almighty… what were You thinking when You created China?!?!

There was a time when the Chinese were centuries ahead of the Europeans in virtually every aspect. Back when Christopher Columbus was looking to travel to the New World in three relatively small boats, the Ming Empire sent off a eunuch admiral with fleets of HUGE war junks on seven voyages of discovery, diplomacy, and trade to explore the entire world around the Middle Kingdom. Five hundred years ago, the idea that the next major plague would come from China, instead of Europe, was absolutely laughable.

Today, it is difficult to think otherwise.

Now, before we bag on the Chinese too much, the use of antibiotics in chicken feed is not exclusive to them. Western industrial farmers do the same thing. Antibiotics are fed to livestock and poultry because those animals are fed substances that they do not digest well, simply in order to fatten them up for slaughter. Cattle are kept in cages and fed grain and soy, which they don’t digest well, rather than grass, which they do – and in order to prevent them from getting sick, they get pumped full of antibiotics. The same is true for chickens on Western chicken farms.

Using antibiotics to make livestock bigger, fatter, and more productive absolutely has long-term ramifications, and Western livestock manufacturers use a shit-ton of the stuff in their own food supply.

So why is it, then, that – for the most part – antibiotic-resistant superbugs haven’t really spread like wildfire through the Western world, but have been found, repeatedly, in China?

Because Western industrial farming has become far more sanitary, clean, and efficient over the past 100 years, while Chinese industrial farming has not. And because, for all that Western and especially American culture is far too litigious, at least when people get sick in Western societies, they can sue the pants off the farmers and farms that poisoned them.

In China, the legal “system”, such as it is, revolves entirely around the whims of the CCP.

The major enduring lesson of the COVID-19 crisis is likely to be a simple one:

You cannot trust people from a low-trust society.

The Chinese have many admirable and splendid qualities. Trust, between themselves and especially toward outsiders, is absolutely not one of them. The Chinese have shown repeatedly that they do not care in the slightest what happens to anyone else when they screw up; all they care about is what is good for them.

In this respect, they are not really particularly different from any other race or tribe – but in all of my years of travel and work around the world, I have observed one odd peculiarity with white people in particular.

Of all of the races that I have ever worked with, it is only white people that go out of their way to help those who don’t look like themselves. That is a general rule and behavioural trait that they have. It is not universal. But I have seen it in action enough times to state with certainty that it is probably something in their genes.

No such statement can be made about the Chinese.

Nor can it be made about pretty much any other racial group except for whites. The difference between “everyone else” and the Chinese, of course, is that SARS, COVID-19, H5N1, and antibiotic-resistant super-bacteria came from one place in particular.

The original meaning of “China Syndrome” has to do with a theoretical situation in which a nuclear reactor melts down and the fuel will then burn straight through the containment structure and burrow into the ground underneath it. Nowadays, it should be taken to mean that the Chinese cannot be trusted to be responsible partners or good actors, in any scenario – economic, military, diplomatic, and anything else.

From that lesson, we can take other major lessons.

Outsourcing manufacturing to China has been a catastrophic mistake, and a significant correction is needed – which is very likely to happen.

Accepting Chinese money as part of their One Belt One Road global initiative is a poison pill which will more likely than not result in significant losses of sovereignty to China.

And allowing tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants to flood into a country may well result in some excellent culinary choices – though, having eaten more than my share of “Chinese” food in the USA, London, and India, I strongly prefer Chinese food in China – but it doesn’t mean that diversity is a Good Thing at all.

The Wu Flu has been a harsh and necessary lesson about the extreme dangers of trusting untrustworthy people. The Chinese people have suffered greatly from their own regime’s cover-ups and incompetence, and now the rest of us have to suffer from the results too.