Martin Armstrong is correct that shutting down the global economy for weeks or a month will pin prick the massive global debt bubble and set the Greater Depression into motion, as well as many other likely or possible ramifications such as an eventual global monetary reset, elimination of cash, increased totalitarian edicts, accelerated inflation (demand push from handing out $1000 to every adult American and cost push from shuttered production), etc..
France in on a total lockdown, meaning citizens must have a specific form filled with permission to leave homes.
[…]
President Trump admitted that there have been issues with testing for the virus. The US is working to expand the current process and aims to move toward self-swab testing whereby people can administer their own examines and seek professional help if needed. Vice President Pence reiterated during today’s announcement that only those exhibiting symptoms should seek a test.
Why does Pence not follow the research which clearly indicates this virus spreads from those with only very mild symptoms that resemble a common cold or flu. Many kids do not even realize they have it yet they are spreading it. So they want it to spread even more undetected.
FedEx Ends Signature Requirements
Armstrong blogged The Insanity Continues:
Even in Thailand, they have shut down all nightclubs and bars. Nobody can work and they do not have unemployment. You are looking at a massive global depression with the rise that a lot more people will starve to death before they ever get this virus.
Lol, I bet there is a lot of increase in sex chat online going on instead.
I expect and hope tropical countries will soon realize there is very low spread in such heat and humidity — except of course in air-conditioning and where people lived packed-in-like-sardines:
Coronavirus Lockdown Launches Manila Into Pandemonium
Chaos As 'Enhanced Screening' Airports Overwhelmed
Armstrong’s Inkblots
However Martin is incorrect about his implied claim of the non-necessity for aggressive social distancing, because we had no way of knowing how widespread the virus was already nor any way of doing robust selective contact tracing quarantines — due to two reasons:
- The fact that unlike SARS which became most contagious when significant illness manifested, nCov-19 has maximum shedding (through the nose!) in the asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic stage earlier in the infection. I documented that in my prior blog Diabolical MERS-derived, “Chimera” Coronavirus Masquerading as the ‘Common Cold’?.
China has only contained the virus where they had blocked off all flow of infected individuals, but they’re still lying about the true number of cases and deaths:
In Wuhan when they recently tried to relax the lockdown, then cases started to spike again as I documented in my prior blog Bitcoin’s Whiplash Spike Low is Even More Bullish:
Follows is claimed to be a recent video from Wuhan wherein woman suspected of suffering from a heart attack can’t even be admitted into any hospital:
Twitter: “#Wuhan overwhelmed. No beds, no doctors.”
Again China is allegedly refusing to test and document most infections in Wuhan. UPDATE: Reddit censored the information, but someone sent me a copy:
Wave 2 of covid-19 in China Discussion
https://twitter.com/jenniferatntd/status/1239183215161683969?s=21
Who would’ve thought the China#1 is telling the truth. There is another wave of cases in China, also hospitals rejecting to accept new patients due to no beds.
This video was shot yesterday: https://twitter.com/jenniferatntd/status/1239195945465786372?s=21
Hold your puts, worse is coming. edit: Sealing cars
https://twitter.com/jenniferatntd/status/1238882326127525889
No traffic allowed on Hubei highway
https://twitter.com/jenniferatntd/status/1238876456224272384
- And the other reason we had no way of knowing nor performing less destructive, more robust selective contact tracing quarantines — is because I documented in my prior blog how
the CDC, WHO and China conspired to hide how many cases there were, to make testing fail, and discourage and not allow widespread testing in the West:
Americans are most pissed off that Trump raves about how great our country is and then we can not even test everyone who has flu symptoms for the nCov-19 virus, so that we could have done proper isolation and contact tracing at the onset. This does not inspire confidence that he will effectively handle the crises that are coming. Trump banned travel from some places in China
but up until late February the USA had only tested less 500 people for the virus! The virus was spreading and the authorities were incapable of doing detection and containment because the CDC would not allow anyone to perform the detection test under its apparent“Don’t test, don’t tell”policy! And then the CDCmandatedtest kit conveniently had a faulty reagent, lol.What comes next as they ramp up testing and find out how pervasive the spread is in some regions, is quarantines on domestic travel such has been done in the Philippines. Then the people are really going to panic. Grocery store shelves may be emptied, because people will fear of eventual “no travel” orders and inability to source food.
[…]
Trump has been a month or more behind the curve. I publicly predicted the arrival of the pandemic on December 16. Upon the first peep of news on December 31, I remarked to many people that I think that was the start of the pandemic. In late January I was already pissed off that countries were not doing more to test and isolate. By mid-February it became a comedy of errors among most governments with S.Korea and Singapore being exceptions. And I caught the WHO intentionally lying about the severity in China. Appears to have been motivated by wanting a pandemic (perhaps to make the pandemic bonds trigger?)
Only S.Korea and Singapore did widespread testing and selective contact tracing early on. The West still hasn’t caught up on testing.
Martin Armstrong has constructed an erroneous strawman and is wagging his self-important, condescending, pointy finger at the incorrect generative essence. The generalized taxonomy of Armstrong’s inkblots are explained in the How to piss me the fuck off guide.
Armstrong should instead realize that China, WHO, and CDC conspired early on to make the lockdowns inevitable and unavoidable! In fact, Armstrong contributed to this phenomenon by misrepresentation of substantive facts about and downplaying the seriousness of the situation from the get go as I documented in my blog and numerous warnings and corrections I emailed to him which he refused to correct publicly. And Trump played along because he was more worried about a drop of the stock market, than doing aggressive testing and contact testing early on to avoid a future lockdown. Trump fucked up and there were people conspiring to make sure he fucked up. This all part of the grand plan.
Even the FDA bureaucracy appears to be (joining in the conspiracy by?) filibustering to maximize the spread and deaths from this pandemic by blocking Americans’ access to the prophylactic CHLOROQUINE which has been studied to determine some efficacy against both the infection of nCov-19 and COVID-19 deaths:
The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that the White House was urging an executive order that would take virtually all investigational drugs and allow them to be used quickly against the coronavirus, a step that senior officials of the Food and Drug Administration pushed back on because they contend the step could likely harm patients.
Are politicized elements with our governmental bureaucracies colluding to try to make a pandemic worse on Trump's watch?
Armstrong had repeatedly in numerous public blogs since January claimed that the count of deaths and infections outside of China were too low to warrant extreme social distancing measures, refusing to acknowledge that testing for confirmed cases was nearly non-existent and as I explained in my aforelinked blogs, China is believed to have understated their infections (and possibly deaths) at least in Wuhan by up to a factor of 10, as if the man does not comprehend the exponential function and the fact that we only have 31 ICU beds per 100,000 people in the USA. I explained this typical human myopia in my blog McAfee’s Dick Math: illuminating Bitcoin’s ACCELERATING price:
Dr. Albert Bartlett stated, “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”
Imagine a caretaker that comes to check on his lily pond once a month. It requires 36 visits (i.e. months) for the pond to be completely covered with lily pads. But on the 35th visit the pond is only half covered. If not thinking in terms of exponential math, the typical human caretaker’s linear extrapolating, visual mind will be fooled into thinking there’s 35 more visits after the 35th visit before the pond will be fully covered.
He lied again this week in his blog Killing the Patient to Cure the Disease When Solutions Are Emerging:
You cannot shut down the world economy to simply stop the common cold.
COVID-19 is not a common cold by any metric. This has been explained to him numerous times. He is hard-headed or deaf.
Armstrong has numerous conflicts of interests which preclude him from being critical of for example China. He blogged Answering Questions:
We are not blocked in China BECAUSE they know it is a computer that writes all the reports. We have been negotiating with a major Chinese institution that has hundreds of billions of clients. They want to provide all our research to their clicks on a per click basis. Even if you charged even $1 per click on every stock in Asia, and just 1 million people looked at one thing, that is $1 million per day. We are negotiating such projects in India and the Middle East.
Armstrong blogged Socialism & the Coronavirus:
COMMENT: I think this is being used by socialists to justify complete government control. They criticize Trump saying he did not act soon enough. I just do not understand that these people think the government should protect us from everything […] Over 38,000 people die in car crashes every year. So using their logic, we should all give up our cars and just stay in our houses and never leave. They are getting really scary.
Inkblot! This is the sign of a lower IQ, not-so-astute mind (or being too vested in a confirmation bias and being unwilling to weigh all the facts). Perhaps Armstrong has only about 120 – 130 I.Q.? Sometimes he seems a bit slow and unable to comprehend simple explanations like this.
No those deaths don’t overwhelm the hospital system, because many or most of them never end up in ICU (dead on arrival). And the unknown potential exponential spread wasn't limited to potentially 38,000 people annually in ICU.
And Armstrong is aware of this issue as he stated in his blog Will Coronavirus Alter the Economy Forever? :
The real problem is that there was not enough testing available and it was restricted to those who traveled. That is what Trump addressed to expand the ability to test based upon symptoms rather than limited to travel.
[…]
The primary issue is that this is a parallel outbreak that is similar to the flu but different. This tends to require respirators and hospitalization at a higher rate than the flu. The real crisis is just that there can be a shortage of beds.
Yeah but testing was ramped up [intentionally] too late to avoid the necessity of a lockdown. Why can’t Armstrong put 2 + 2 = 4 together and assimilate.
Again to reiterate what I wrote in my prior blog Bitcoin’s Whiplash Spike Low is Even More Bullish, the point is that medical systems couldn’t possibly handle the onslaught that could come from the unknown level of exponential spread:
Then Armstrong cites the 2017–18 influenza statistics which were 61,000 deaths out of 45 million estimated infections. So that was a CFR of
0.14%.From the Diamond Princess and S.Korea’s extensive testing we have an indication that the true CFR for nCov-19 may be
~1%. But that is with good healthcare. When our hospitals are overflowing with ICU patients as is case in Italy already, CFR may be higher.
[…]
In any case, if 45 million Americans will be infected with nCov-19 during the 2021 flu season, then deaths will be up to 1 million. The USA has 32 ICU beds per 100,000 people. 61,000 divided by 300 million is 61 per 300,000 which is only 20 per 100,000. Whereas 300,000 per 300 million is 100 per 100,000 or 3 deaths per ICU bed — tipping our healthcare systems over the threshold of being able to provide care. And that’s not even factoring in what happens when many of the healthcare workers become infected and have to be quarantined unable to fulfill their duties in the healthcare system.
Thus nCov-19 will likely overwhelm the U.S. healthcare system.
If by 2022 some 60% of the USA population will have been cumulatively infected, then cumulative deaths could be over 2 million. That’s 666 deaths per 32 ICU beds or 20 deaths per ICU bed.
Here’s my source for the ICU beds stat:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/no-state-prepared-mapping-where-hospitals-will-run-out-beds-first-if-virus-cases-spike
And that’s if nCov-19 is not a bioweapon designed to insidiously cause worsening or chronic illness over time, or does not naturally mutate into a more deadly variant.
Note a new research article Legumes and the Corona Virus Direct Correlation: Low legume consumption leads to very low corona virus deaths implicates legume consumption as a possible reason for higher case-fatality-rate (CFR) in Italy and the fact that some young people are dying in Italy and half the people in ICU in Netherlands are under 50 years old.
Latest Updates on Coronavirus; Possible Cure
Tangentially readers make sure you re-read my prior blog Bitcoin’s Whiplash Spike Low is Even More Bullish and continue to re-read it as I continue to add important updates (about both the coronavirus and Bitcoin).
Also it appears that the anti-malaria drug chloroquine may be an effective remedy for COVID-19 and can even possibly be used as a prophylactic to prevent infection:
An effective treatment for #Coronavirus #COVID-19 has been found in a common anti-malarial drug
Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as a treatment of COVID-19
Retinopathy associated with [multi-year] chloroquine phosphate therapy
Possibly also effective in curing pernicious Tuberculosis, which appears to be what may be causing my autoimmune health problem with my NASH/NAFLD liver:
https://www.drugtargetreview.com/news/47893/key-mechanism-in-tuberculosis-survival-discovered/
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-11-chloroquine-tuberculosis-bacteria-susceptible-antimalarial.html
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28506804
https://aac.asm.org/content/aac/34/11/2217.full.pdf
Armstrong’s Preferred Non-Solution
In his private blog (I'm not a subscriber), Armstrong advocates an insane proposal which I will paraphrase so I don’t violate any copyright as follows:
COMMENT: Instead of a draconian lockdown it would be better to just quarantine the elderly and those at risk of severe COVID-19 disease such as those with chronic illness. With the goal of encouraging the virus to spread quickly through the population so that herd immunity will be developed. This would cost less.
REPLY: Your proposal is so sensible but was unfortunately not imple