If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;

— From “IF” by Rudyard Kipling

As Corona-chan continues to perform quite splendidly the task that jolly old Grandfather Nurgle assigned to her – she has effectively shut down the entire world economy – it is worth taking a step back, sucking in a deep breath, and asking whether all of this insanity is really worth it.

There is no getting away from the fact that the never-to-be-sufficiently-cursed mainstream (((media))) is responsible for blowing this crisis – and it is a crisis, certainly – FAR out of proportion. Just take a look at today’s headlines from PommieBastardLand’s biggest daily tabloid:

• The dossier that horrified British experts: It predicted up to 250,000 Britons could be killed…
• First ever dog to catch coronavirus DIES after it was declared disease-free…
• 20,000 could die, says government as UK coronavirus deaths increase by SIXTEEN to 71…

And that, be it noted, is from the relatively sane and sensible British (((media))), who are neither as stupid nor as hysterical as their American counterparts.

The view from across the Pond in Yankeeland is a bit different (read: much, much worse):

You see, as awful as the media have been over the last three years, the Russia Hoax and the Impeachment Hoax were D.C. food fights. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t collateral damage or that innocent people weren’t hurt — like President Trump and his family — but politics is politics. You know the risks going in…

Coronavirus is not a D.C. food fight. Like the CNN Race Riots of 2014, it affects everyday people: we have shut down our economy. The stock market is going insane. People are scared, worried, stressed, and have reason to be. Even if you remove the fear of the virus, no one can escape the fear of the panic, and the media’s blatant lies are only adding to this uncertainty and fear — and are doing so by design.

And for what? To what end..? Well, for the exact same reasons the media ginned up those race riots: a depraved indifference to human life driven by nothing more than a political agenda and the naked greed that comes with ratings and clicks.

So maybe it’s time to take a step back and adopt some basic common sense views about the whole situation.

The first thing to note about COVID-19 is that the mortality rate is vastly exaggerated. Make no mistake, this is still a very dangerous disease – but ONLY to specific groups of people. The reality is that if you are relatively young, relatively healthy, and relatively fit, you will be – relatively – just fine.

The second thing to note is that most people who catch COVID-19 won’t even know it.

I was thinking about exactly this fact when I was out for a walk yesterday. At that point, the total number of confirmed infections stood at about 189,000 or so. I reckoned that this was anywhere between 2 and 10 times too small a number, because it has been well established that most people who pick up the virus will not even know that they are carrying it – they will not show any symptoms whatsoever.

That was confirmed by a recent study from Columbia University that suggests that around 86% of people who catch the virus, will not show any real symptoms at all.

Let’s do some MAFF using this information.

As of this exact moment of writing, the total number of confirmed cases worldwide stands at just a whisker under 200,000, and the global death toll just shy of 8,000.

Now that all sounds pretty bad – until you remember that nearly 83,000 of those infected have already fully recovered. And that is before we remember the stat from above, which is that 86% or so of people who potentially have this disease, don’t show any real symptoms.

So if 200,000 represents only about 14% or so of the total number of infected worldwide, that brings us to… let’s see now, drop the one, carry the two, and…

1,428,571 potentially infected people around the world.

And now, all of a sudden, that number of 8,000 dead is not nearly so scary. Because if you divide 8,000 by 1.428 million, you get a mortality rate of:

0.56%

It is worth comparing the COVID-19 toll, worldwide, with that of the seasonal flu. It so happens that the CDC just released its delayed weekly Influenza Surveillance Report. It was delayed simply because COVID-19 has taken up so much of everyone’s time and resources.

That report states that the death toll from the 2019-20 flu season was 22,000 people, including 144 children.

By contrast, thus far not one single child worldwide has died from COVID-19, of the 8,000 deaths we have seen.

Look, I’m not saying that COVID-19 is not serious. It is. Initial reports have shown that the people most at risk are the elderly – or, not to put so fine a point on it, Ye Olde Phartes – with existing health issues, particularly respiratory ones. And it is definitely worth taking some preventive measures to keep them safe and healthy.

But does that mean we have to shut down the entire global economy, putting literally millions of people out of work and tens of millions more on unpaid leave and furlough, and putting countless families through tremendous hardships?

Hell no.

This disease is not SARS from 2003, with its 9.6% mortality rate. It is not MERS with its nearly 40% mortality rate. It is not Ebola, where the mortality rate ranges anywhere from 20% to 90% depending on where the outbreak occurs. It is not bubonic plague, which may have killed off 60% of Europe’s population in the mid-14th Century. It is not some form of fast-spreading antibiotic-resistant superbug, which truly will be devastating when – not IF, but WHEN – it emerges out of China.

And it certainly is not rapidly-moving human-transmissible H5N1, more commonly known as “bird flu”, with a 60% or so mortality rate.

The maximum mortality rate that we have observed from this disease is about 15%, among people older than 70. And that is in parts of the world with terrible conditions to begin with.

Consider this:

The three worst-hit parts of the world right now are China, Italy, and Iran. The air quality in Chinese cities is appalling – I remember visiting Beijing in October 2001, and the smog was so bad and so caustic that my dad and I both came down with horrid sore throats within two days of landing. That only cleared up a few days later after we went to Xian, and we only got shot of them after coming back to Singapore, where the air is clean and the doctors actually know what the hell they’re doing.

This lousy air quality greatly weakens the immune system because it constantly has to fend off the diseases and contaminants carried in the air. Add to that the smoking rates among Chinese men, and the fact that China is one of the three fastest-aging societies in the world, and you have perfect conditions for a disease that attacks Ye Olde Phartes and kills them fast.

Then we get to Iran and Italy.

Iran isn’t exactly a well-developed country with good infrastructure. It isn’t the world’s most sanitary place. And it, too, has a relatively unknown but serious problem with an aging population – you wouldn’t know this from listening to Western (((media))) whorenalists, but their birth rate has collapsed within a single generation and they are rapidly turning into a middle-aged society.

Italy is, of course, one of the greyest countries in Europe. And here’s a dirty little secret that, again, the (((media))) whorenalists didn’t want you to know: the area where the outbreak is worst, in the Lombardia region where Milan is located, was until fairly recently a place with about 300,000 Chinese workers and had regular flights back to Wuhan.

On top of this, both nations are heavily involved in China’s One Belt One Road initiative, which is basically a new program of imperialist expansion from a nation that suffered greatly at the hands of Western imperialists in the past, and is now using the exact same tactics and strategies that Westerners used on China, against them.

Think what you will about the Chinese government – I regard them with great distrust, personally – but they do have their flashes of brilliance.

Probably the simplest way to explain the situation globally is with a few graphs, showing the way that this virus is hitting various countries. These graphs also show which countries have been able to respond effectively, and which ones have totally screwed the pooch. All of these come from our friends over at Power Line, and they got them from elsewhere.

The first graph is from the Financial Times – that most globalist of neoliberal (((media))) institutions – and shows that the cumulative number of deaths in China is already leveling off:

More to the point, though, it also shows that the US response to the outbreak has, in fact, been highly effective – almost as effective as that of South Korea and Japan, and more effective than China’s by some distance.

This is yet more evidence that His Most Illustrious, Noble, August, Benevolent, and Legendary Celestial Majesty, the God-Emperor of Mankind, Donaldus Triumphus Magnus Astra, the First of His Name, was absolutely right to slam the doors shut to Chinese air travel and traffic back in January, when everyone else was dithering and figuring out what to do.

Interestingly, there is one country missing from the data set above: Taiwan.

This is important because, after Hong Kong, Taiwan is basically the next closest developed territory to China. And as of right now, they have only 54 active cases and precisely one death to deal with – four months after the outbreak.

How did they manage to contain the threat so fast? By being prepared and not panicking, and by taking proactive measures to slam shut the doors on travel from mainland China as fast as possible.

That was the right thing to do. Quarantining and isolating sick patients as fast as possible, taking preventive measures where necessary, but not panicking.

Europe didn’t learn that lesson, and now there is a full-blown panic underway. The USA has managed to avoid a complete meltdown, so far, but there is no question that vast amounts of economic pain and misery are in America’s future. The worst is definitely to come, even if the disease itself is relatively contained.

As for how America has handled the disease itself, despite heated and frankly stupid criticisms from the (((media))), the fact is that America’s Federal infrastructure and healthcare systems have responded quite well, overall. Take a look at the per capita mortality rates:

Now, that chart shows that China is actually doing really well compared with the US, but here is one big problem: China’s population is roughly 4 times that of the USA, and the outbreak was worst in one particular region.

So if you control for that, and put everything into logarithmic scale, here’s what we get:

The simple takeaway here is that the USA is doing quite well in fighting the virus, especially on a per-capita basis.

Here is more evidence of the same:

So… why is Italy’s per-capita mortality rate so high compared to the rest of Europe?

I don’t have a good answer for that right now. We probably will not know for at least a year after the crisis itself dies down. But we can all make some reasonably educated guesses, and most of them have to do with the fact that, a) the virus outbreak started in a part of Italy with a LARGE Chinese population; and b) Italy has a rapidly aging population.

But the most important factors that have favoured America are explicated quite well in the article whence that last graph came:

The data and analysis are real. The question is what conclusions you draw from them. I think the data provide some confirmation that the US’s early decision to ban travel from China and broad dissemination of hygiene and social distancing guidelines has had a positive effect. It may also reflect other factors independent of mitigation efforts, such as our lower population density, lower smoking rates, and lower proportion of multiple generations of families living together.

That all sounds about right. America is still a land of EXTREMELY standoffish people – the most standoffish that I’ve ever met, and I’ve spent quite a bit of time around Russians – as well as a land of high societal trust.

This is a combination of factors that keeps America strong and safe during times of crisis – just as the Prophet John Ringo (PBUH) noted in The Last Centurion, and at considerable length.

(Seriously. The dude has some sort of weird crystal ball on his desk. He predicted so much of what would happen in the 2010s, writing back in 2009, that it’s actually kind of scary.)

The lying (((media))) would have you believe that the US Federal government completely bungled the response to COVID-19 and isn’t doing enough to stop the virus from spreading. I would argue that governments around the world are actually doing too much right now because they’re all running scared from something that doesn’t deserve anything like this level of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The figures and data clearly support that notion; COVID-19 is NOT as lethal as we think it is.

Moreover, while the death rates in the US, per capita, will certainly get worse over the coming days and weeks, the evidence so far tells us that the USA has done a far better job of “flattening the curve”, to use a bit of annoying recent jargon, than pretty much anyone else other than the Japanese, South Koreans, and Taiwanese.

And the reasons for that likely have to do with the fact that the latter three societies are highly homogeneous, high-trust, and quite xenophobic societies with little patience for politically correct idiocies.

Draw your own conclusions from what you’re seeing these days, but one conclusion appears inescapable:

The whorenalists of the mainstream (((media))) all need to be lined up and tried for treason.