At least 5 dead as tornadoes touch down in Oklahoma, Texas
A sixth person died in Louisiana floodwaters.
By Mark Osborne and William Mansell
April 23, 2020,
An outbreak of reported tornadoes across Oklahoma and Texas on Wednesday night has killed at least three people.
An official with Marshall County Emergency Management confirms that at least two people were killed and several others injured when a tornado struck in Madill, OK. It hit as people were getting off of work in two manufacturing facilities and were in cars. He could not confirm if the two dead were in cars or in buildings.
There are at least three people dead in Polk County, Texas, following severe weather Wednesday. The hardest hit area was in Onalaska, Texas.
At this time, search and rescue is ongoing, and Polk County Emergency Management officials said there are at least 20-30 injuries.
Video showed a massive tornado in Madill, flinging sheet metal and debris into the air Wednesday afternoon.
Madill is in far southern Oklahoma, about 10 miles from the Texas border.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott confirmed there was tornado damage in Polk County, in eastern Texas. There was a “large and extremely dangerous” tornado near Sebastopol at about 5:45 p.m. local time, according to the NWS.
“My office, the Texas Division of Emergency Management, and other state agencies are working with local officials to provide immediate support to the areas devastated by this tornado,” Abbott said in a statement. “The state has already deployed response teams and medical resources to help Texans in need and to provide assistance to these communities. Our hearts are with our fellow Texans tonight and the state will continue to do everything it can to support those affected by this severe weather.”
Polk County issued a disaster declaration, saying there has been significant damage to residential and commercial structures, and to public infrastructure.
There was also a confirmed tornado on the ground in Jasper, Texas, near the Louisiana border.
Officials in Louisiana said a man died after getting caught in floodwaters.
Deputy Mark Pierce, a spokesman for DeSoto Parish Sheriff’s Office, told ABC News a male victim somehow got caught in a drain/ditch and was swept away by floodwater in Mansfield, Louisiana.
“Mansfield PD received a call in reference to an individual that was seen trying to get a trash can from some flooded water,” Sheriff Jayson Richardson told ABC affiliate KTBS. “He ended up getting swept into that water. We, ultimately, found him 50 to 60 yards downstream.”
As of 7 a.m. Eastern time Thursday, there had been 24 tornadoes reported across Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi and Louisiana.
There are still tornado watches in effect until 2 p.m. for Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.
At least 34 people were killed in an outbreak of tornadoes earlier this month in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi.
ABC News’ Marilyn Heck, Melissa Griffin and Cammeron Parrish contributed to this report.
Never underestimate the intelligence or abilities of dolphins. (Photo: Matt9122/Shutterstock)
Dolphins never cease to amaze. As researchers delve into the underwater world of these brilliant cetaceans, we’re learning how full of surprises these creatures are, from their intricate social lives to their intelligence. Here are just some of the ways dolphins are exceptional, both physically and mentally.
1. Dolphins evolved from land-based animals
Dolphins didn’t always live in the water. They are what’s called reentrants. Millions of years ago, the ancestors of dolphins roamed across land. The dolphins we know today are evolved from even-toed ungulates, which had hoof-like toes at the end of each foot. But around 50 million years ago, these ancestor animals decided the ocean was a better place to live. They eventually returned to the water and evolved into the dolphins that we know today.
The evidence for this evolutionary history can still be seen in dolphins today. Adult dolphins and whales have remnant finger bones in their flippers, as well as vestigial leg bones. (For a quick refresher on homologous structures, the structures found in different species that originated from a common ancestor, read 8 uncanny examples of convergent evolution.)
2. Dolphins stay awake for weeks on end
A female dolphin with her calf. Neither of them are getting much sleep! (Photo: Jman78/iStockPhoto)
Recent research has shown the surprising capability of dolphins to stay awake for days or weeks on end — or possibly indefinitely.
On the one hand, the ability makes perfect sense. Dolphins need to go to the ocean’s surface to breathe, so they can’t simply breathe automatically like humans do. They have to stay constantly awake to take a breath and avoid drowning. How do they do this? By resting just one half of their brain at a time, a process called unihemispheric sleep.
Brian Branstetter, a marine biologist with the National Marine Mammal Foundation, and fellow researchers conducted a test with two dolphins, seeing how long they could stay alert. According to Live Science:
The scientists found these dolphins could successfully use echolocation with near-perfect accuracy and no sign of deteriorating performance for up to 15 days. The researchers did not test how much longer the dolphins could have continued. “Dolphins can continue to swim and think for days without rest or sleep, possibly indefinitely,” Branstetter said. These findings suggest that dolphins evolved to sleep with only half their brains not only to keep from drowning, but also to remain vigilant.
Breathing and not being eaten are two excellent reasons to keep at least half of the brain active at all times. But what about baby dolphins? Turns out, they don’t sleep either. For as long as a month after birth, dolphin calves don’t catch a wink of sleep. Researchers think this is an advantage, helping the calf to better escape predators, keeping the body temperature up while the body accumulates blubber, and even encouraging brain growth.
3. Most dolphins don’t chew
Dolphin do have teeth, but they aren’t used for chewing. (Photo: Alicia Chelini/Shutterstock)
If you’ve ever watched a dolphin eat, you may have noticed that they seem to gulp down their food. That’s because dolphins can’t chew. Instead, their teeth are used to grip prey, according to Whale and Dolphin Conservation. Sometimes, they’ll shake their food or rub it on the ocean floor to tear it into more manageable pieces. One theory for why they’ve evolved to do away with chewing is because they need to quickly consume fish before dinner can swim away. Skipping the process of chewing ensures their meal doesn’t escape.
4. Dolphins have worked for the Navy since the 1960s
The idea of dolphins being employed by the military to scan harbors for enemy swimmers or pinpoint the location of underwater mines may seem like the plot of a B-rated movie, but it’s true — and has been for decades.
Since the 1960s, the U.S. Navy has been utilizing dolphins and training them to detect underwater mines. Much the same way bomb-detecting dogs work by using smell, dolphins work by using echolocation. Their superior ability to scan an area for particular objects allows them to zero in on mines and drop a marker at the spot. The Navy can then go in and disarm the mine. The echolocation abilities of dolphins far outstrip any technology people have come up with to do the same job.
Dolphins are also used to alert the Navy to the presence of enemies in harbors. There has also been much speculation about other uses of dolphins for the military, including claims they train them to kill people or plant explosives on ships. None of this has been confirmed by the military. Still, animal activists have long opposed the use of dolphins for military purposes.
5. Dolphins teach their young how to use tools
Dolphins possess several behaviors that are passed down from one generation to the next. (Photo: Joost van Uffelen/Shutterstock)
Researchers discovered that a population of dolphins living in Shark Bay, Australia, use tools, and they pass that knowledge down from mother to daughter. The behavior is called “sponging,” and the researchers found it was not only the first instance of tool use in cetaceans, but it was also evidence of culture among non-humans, according to research published by Eric M. Patterson and Janet Mann in the journal PLOS ONE.
Individuals in this small group of dolphins search for several minutes to find cone-shaped sea sponges. They tear this sea sponge free of the ocean floor, then carry it on their beaks to a hunting ground where they use it to probe the sand for hiding fish. The researchers think this helps protect their sensitive snouts while they hunt.
6. Dolphins form friendships through shared interests
This particular group of dolphins in Shark Bay have been keeping researchers busy over the years, revealing information about group culture and social habits.
Researchers from the universities of Bristol, Zurich and Western Australia discovered that the Shark Bay dolphins form friendships based on a shared interest — in this case, the sponge-hunting habit. This tool-using characteristic was found primarily in female dolphins, but by studying the behavior of the few male dolphins that exhibited the behavior, the researchers saw something new: relationships formed over shared tool technique.
“Foraging with a sponge is a time-consuming and largely solitary activity so it was long thought incompatible with the needs of male dolphins in Shark Bay — to invest time in forming close alliances with other males. This study suggests that, like their female counterparts and indeed like humans, male dolphins form social bonds based on shared interests,” Dr. Simon Allen, a co-author of the study and senior research associate at Bristol’s School of Biological Sciences, told Phys.org.
When dolphins hear their names, they respond. (Photo: Tory Kallman/Shutterstock)
We know dolphins communicate, but we’re learning more about how they do this all the time.
Dolphins have names and respond when called. Dolphins within pods have their own “signature whistle,” just like a name, and other dolphins can use that special whistle to get the attention of their pod mates. Considering dolphins are a highly social species with the need to stay in touch over distances, it makes sense they would have evolved to use “names” much the same way people do.
According to the BBC, researchers followed a group of wild bottlenose dolphins, recording their signature whistles and then playing the calls back to the dolphins.
“The researchers found that individuals only responded to their own calls, by sounding their whistle back. The team believes the dolphins are acting like humans: when they hear their name, they answer.”
What’s more, they don’t respond when the signature whistles of dolphins from strange pods are played, showing that they’re looking for and responding to specific information within whistles. The research opens up whole new questions about the extent of dolphin vocabulary, and it also could reveal clues about the evolution of our own language skills.
Male dolphins synchronize their calls when they work together as a team, a behavior once thought to be unique to humans. (Photo: bluehand/Shutterstock)
More recent research takes this idea of cooperative communication even further. A team of researchers from Bristol University found that male dolphins don’t just synchronize their calls; they work together as a team, and attribute previously thought to unique to humans.
In describing the behavior of male dolphins as they work together to herd female dolphins, the researchers saw cooperative rather than competitive behavior, which is especially unusual in terms of finding a mate.
We know that pufferfish have strong toxins. Apparently dolphins know this too, and they use this for recreational benefit.
Normally, pufferfish toxin is deadly. However, in small doses the toxin acts like a narcotic. BBC filmed dolphins gently playing with a pufferfish, passing it between pod members for 20 to 30 minutes, then hanging around at the surface seemingly mesmerized by their own reflections.
Rob Pilley, a zoologist who also worked as a producer on the series, was quoted in The Independent: “This was a case of young dolphins purposely experimenting with something we know to be intoxicating … It reminded us of that craze a few years ago when people started licking toads to get a buzz, especially the way they hung there in a daze afterwards. It was the most extraordinary thing to see.”
Apparently humans aren’t the only species to knowingly dabble in strange substances to achieve an altered state of mind.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated with new information since it was first published in June 2016.
What is action for the Earth? What is within our power to change during this time of great pain and peril for our world? I’ve spent 30 years struggling with this question: through great throes of pain, fear, activism, study, contemplation, prayer, hope, visioning, writing, teaching, and more and more often lying face down on the Earth begging for guidance.
What I’ve learned from this long and ongoing struggle—what the Earth teaches me—is that the power of love in community is greater than we can possibly imagine in the context of the global techno-industrial mindset. Though it can seem ridiculous to the “rational” mind, our usual guidance system in Western culture, one person sending love to all things in the world ripples and grows beyond what seems possible to us in “this” reality. How can we love the pain, the horror, the “bad actors” – in my longest and most quiet times of listening, my heart tells me that this is what the Earth asks of us now.
Many people sending love to all things in the world with commitment and shared intention is a re-evolution of consciousness. In these moments we connect with others across time and space, pulsing the thrumming rhythm from the center of the Earth across the plane of the human world. With each new dream that echoes from within our Earth-grounded heart-minds, we become the Healers of the Earth.
I invite you now to join with me: to commit each day to consciously give love and gratitude to the Earth. And, to give love to all things in the world if you can, or to whatever you can.
We take so much, consciously and unconsciously, from the planet. We are so often pulling from the Earth in ways that are completely out of our awareness. We want, we need, we crave, we draw from Earth sources with every breath. Shifting this orientation by actively focusing love and gratitude to the Earth, whenever and wherever we are able, shifts who we are, what we think and feel, how we know.
Our dominant human paradigm on the planet at this time may laugh at the simplicity of such acts; we may ourselves question the power of something so seemingly ephemeral in the face of so much destruction and madness. Yet love is a true and powerful path to finding our way back to our home within the Earth community.
As we take actions of love for the Earth, together in concentric circles of care for one another and all of life, we open channels to speak with Earth. As we enter into this communication that is always available to us, we can bring the questions that are aching within our hearts. Give the gift of your feelings, your questions, your dreams to the Earth, so that together we may grow our collective wisdom as dreamers of a healing dream.
Buckminster Fuller was one of the most brilliant thinkers of the 20th century, an architect and designer who created inventions like the geodesic dome. He saw the best in humanity, and had a vision for how we could engineer a world with enough for everyone. Here’s three critical things we can learn from him.
Buckminster Fuller was one of the most brilliant thinkers of the 20th century, an architect and designer who made it his mission to advance the evolution of humanity and to “do more with less.” He created inventions like the geodesic dome (most prominently seen in Disney World’s Epcot Center) and the Dymaxion car, and sought to use technology to benefit humanity, specifically to provide cheap shelter and transportation for the world. Though his inventions have not been widely adopted (yet), his theories and ideas have influenced the world in many key ways (if you’ve ever heard anybody in an office meeting use the word “synergy,” for instance, you’ve just heard a Fullerism — he popularized the phrase to mean doing more with available resources).
Fuller’s key idea is that we have enough resources to house, clothe and feed everybody on the planet, but we aren’t doing so. His mission, then, was to create systems solutions that would allow us to properly use the resources we already have for the good of all, instead of maintaining inequality.
Here are three key concepts that Buckminster Fuller embodied that can bring immense value to your life, whatever you do:
1. Your life does not belong to you.
As a young man, Fuller worked in a textile mill, in the US Navy and in the meat-packing industry. In his twenties, he founded a company with his father-in-law to build lightweight housing—but the company failed. By the age of 32, he was broke and living in public housing in Chicago; his daughter died of complications from polio and spinal meningitis. Deciding he was a complete failure and responsible for his daughter’s death, Fuller became a heavy drinker and decided to kill himself. On the verge of suicide, he had a transcendental insight—his life was not his own property; it belonged to humanity. He then pledged to dedicate the rest of his life to “an experiment, to find what a single individual [could] contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity.” (This would be an example of the “deal with God,” little publicized compared to the “deal with the Devil.”)
2. Don’t change people—change the environment.
Buckminster Fuller was an architect, on a mission to change our species, traditionally the role of religious reformers. But his approach was different—he realized that it’s nigh-on impossible to change people. He instead sought to change the environment around people, prompting inventions like the geodesic dome and Dymaxion house: simply seeing or walking around in such structures could shift people’s idea of the possible and prompt them to start rethinking their assumptions. Instead of grabbing and shaking people and shouting “The world’s on fire!” he created environments that demonstrated a possible solution.
3. We have enough for everybody—to see how, think of the world as a whole system.
Fuller thought of the world as a whole system, instead of as disconnected nations and warring tribes. (This type of thinking is still the number one thing we need as a species, and is less common than you might believe.) He coined the phrase “Spaceship Earth” to describe where we are, famously stating that “The most important fact about Spaceship Earth: an instruction manual didn’t come with it.” If we can think of the world of a coherent system, we can begin to address resource-waste problems as a whole instead of leaving some to die while others have too much.
Fuller’s work is extensive and complex to say the least—if this starting point has raised your curiosity, check out A Fuller View, which is a collection of introductory essays by other people explaining his key concepts. It’s a great and quick read.
The star Betelgeuse might just be dusty, not about to explode
The red supergiant’s time doesn’t appear to be nigh after all
This infrared image, taken in December 2019 with the Very Large Telescope in Chile, shows dust surrounding the star Betelgeuse. That dust may explain why the star recently dimmed, scientists say. The orange dot is Betelgeuse, and the black disk blocks out most of the star’s light so that the dust can be seen.
Betelgeuse, one of the brightest stars in the sky, suddenly faded in late 2019, startling astronomers and prompting speculation that the star was about to explode.
“I think some people wanted this to be seen as the death throes of the star, and it’s very much not,” says astrophysicist Emily Levesque of the University of Washington in Seattle.
Betelgeuse, a type of massive, elderly star called a red supergiant, lies about 700 light-years away from Earth and marks the shoulder of the constellation Orion. Astronomers have known for decades that, someday soon, the star is going to run out of fuel and detonate in a brilliant supernova (SN: 2/8/17).
So when the star began dimming in October 2019, astronomers took notice. By December 23, it had slipped from the sixth or seventh brightest star in the sky to the 21st. That didn’t necessarily mean an explosion was imminent, but any strange behavior in a red supergiant is worth watching, Levesque says.
“When people think about stars that are visible in our sky that could explode soon, Betelgeuse is near the top of the list,” she says. “So when people said this star is doing something weird, it caught people’s attention.”
Levesque and astronomer Philip Massey of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., decided to investigate more mundane possibilities than an imminent supernova that could explain the dimming. Those options include the star’s surface cooling off suddenly, as boiling blobs of plasma rise and sink within it (SN: 1/29/20), or a cloud of dust recently puffing off the star, temporarily obscuring starlight and making Betelgeuse appear dimmer than it really is.
The pair observed the star on February 14 — when it was nearly at its dimmest — looking for signs of titanium oxide molecules in the star’s outer layers, a clue to its temperature. Comparing those observations with similar ones that Levesque had taken in 2004 showed that the temperature had dropped by about a measly 50 degrees Celsius.
These images, from the SPHERE instrument on the Very Large Telescope in Chile, show Betelgeuse before (left) and after (right) its dramatic dimming episode.ESO, M. Montargès et al
“To our surprise, Betelgeuse didn’t look that different,” Levesque says. “The temperature couldn’t explain how much dimmer Betelgeuse had gotten in the last few months.”
That leaves the dust explanation, the scientists report in a study to appear in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. “It’s partly process of elimination,” Levesque says. Red supergiants like Betelgeuse are known to puff out clouds of gas which condense into dust. And the star did dim uniformly over all wavelengths of light that Levesque and Massey measured, which supports the idea that dust from the star is to blame. By contrast, dust that lies in the spaces between stars would block certain wavelengths of light more than others.
The study “is a first step to a better understanding of what is happening to Betelgeuse,” says astrophysicist Miguel Montargès of KU Leuven in Belgium, who wasn’t involved in the research.
Montargès and colleagues have observed Betelgeuse with the Very Large Telescope in Chile. The star looked markedly dimmer in December 2019 than it did when the telescope observed it in January 2019, before the fade-out began. But the dimming seemed to appear only in the star’s southern hemisphere, not uniformly across Betelgeuse, according to an image the team released February 14. That could be explained by an asymmetrical dust cloud, although the situation may be more complicated. Montargès plans to observe Betelgeuse again the week of March 16 and publish the results later this year.
If the dimming is due to dust, that will give astronomers an opportunity to watch a nearby star losing mass in real time. “There’s that famous quote, we are stardust,” Montargès says, paraphrasing a line spoken by the late astrophysicist Carl Sagan. “Perhaps the atoms we are looking at will one day be part of a planet, and perhaps sentient beings. That’s why it’s really exciting.”
Other astronomers are holding out for more information. “The dust model is viable, but it also doesn’t rule out changes in the star itself,” says astronomer Edward Guinan of Villanova University in Pennsylvania, who has also been observing Betelgeuse since the fall. Betelgeuse naturally dims and brightens on a 420-day cycle, and although the dimming is not usually this extreme, it could still be nothing out of the ordinary. “I think the jury is still out.”
Below is our list of twelve medical experts whose opinions on the Coronavirus outbreak contradict the official narratives of the MSM, and the memes so prevalent on social media.
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Dr Sucharit Bhakdi is a specialist in microbiology. He was a professor at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz and head of the Institute for Medical Microbiology and Hygiene and one of the most cited research scientists in German history.
What he says:
We are afraid that 1 million infections with the new virus will lead to 30 deaths per day over the next 100 days. But we do not realise that 20, 30, 40 or 100 patients positive for normal coronaviruses are already dying every day.
[The government’s anti-COVID19 measures] are grotesque, absurd and very dangerous […] The life expectancy of millions is being shortened. The horrifying impact on the world economy threatens the existence of countless people. The consequences on medical care are profound. Already services to patients in need are reduced, operations cancelled, practices empty, hospital personnel dwindling. All this will impact profoundly on our whole society.
All these measures are leading to self-destruction and collective suicide based on nothing but a spook.
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Dr Wolfgang Wodarg is a German physician specialising in Pulmonology, politician and former chairman of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. In 2009 he called for an inquiry into alleged conflicts of interest surrounding the EU response to the Swine Flu pandemic.
What he says: Politicians are being courted by scientists…scientists who want to be important to get money for their institutions. Scientists who just swim along in the mainstream and want their part of it […] And what is missing right now is a rational way of looking at things.
We should be asking questions like “How did you find out this virus was dangerous?”, “How was it before?”, “Didn’t we have the same thing last year?”, “Is it even something new?”
That’s missing.
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Dr Joel Kettner s professor of Community Health Sciences and Surgery at Manitoba University, former Chief Public Health Officer for Manitoba province and Medical Director of the International Centre for Infectious Diseases.
I have never seen anything like this, anything anywhere near like this. I’m not talking about the pandemic, because I’ve seen 30 of them, one every year. It is called influenza. And other respiratory illness viruses, we don’t always know what they are. But I’ve never seen this reaction, and I’m trying to understand why.
[…]
I worry about the message to the public, about the fear of coming into contact with people, being in the same space as people, shaking their hands, having meetings with people. I worry about many, many consequences related to that.
[…]
In Hubei, in the province of Hubei, where there has been the most cases and deaths by far, the actual number of cases reported is 1 per 1000 people and the actual rate of deaths reported is 1 per 20,000. So maybe that would help to put things into perspective.
Dr John Ioannidis Professor of Medicine, of Health Research and Policy and of Biomedical Data Science, at Stanford University School of Medicine and a Professor of Statistics at Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences. He is director of the Stanford Prevention Research Center, and co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS).
He is also the editor-in-chief of the European Journal of Clinical Investigation. He was chairman at the Department of Hygiene and Epidemiology, University of Ioannina School of Medicine as well as adjunct professor at Tufts University School of Medicine.
As a physician, scientist and author he has made contributions to evidence-based medicine, epidemiology, data science and clinical research. In addition, he pioneered the field of meta-research. He has shown that much of the published research does not meet good scientific standards of evidence.
Patients who have been tested for SARS-CoV-2 are disproportionately those with severe symptoms and bad outcomes. As most health systems have limited testing capacity, selection bias may even worsen in the near future.
The one situation where an entire, closed population was tested was the Diamond Princess cruise ship and its quarantine passengers. The case fatality rate there was 1.0%, but this was a largely elderly population, in which the death rate from Covid-19 is much higher.
[…]
Could the Covid-19 case fatality rate be that low? No, some say, pointing to the high rate in elderly people. However, even some so-called mild or common-cold-type coronaviruses that have been known for decades can have case fatality rates as high as 8% when they infect elderly people in nursing homes.
[…]
If we had not known about a new virus out there, and had not checked individuals with PCR tests, the number of total deaths due to “influenza-like illness” would not seem unusual this year. At most, we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average.
– “A fiasco in the making? As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data”, Stat News, 17th March 2020
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Dr Yoram Lass is an Israeli physician, politician and former Director General of the Health Ministry. He also worked as Associate Dean of the Tel Aviv University Medical School and during the 1980s presented the science-based television show Tatzpit.
Italy is known for its enormous morbidity in respiratory problems, more than three times any other European country. In the US about 40,000 people die in a regular flu season and so far 40-50 people have died of the coronavirus, most of them in a nursing home in Kirkland, Washington.
[…]
In every country, more people die from regular flu compared with those who die from the coronavirus.
[…]
…there is a very good example that we all forget: the swine flu in 2009. That was a virus that reached the world from Mexico and until today there is no vaccination against it. But what? At that time there was no Facebook or there maybe was but it was still in its infancy. The coronavirus, in contrast, is a virus with public relations.
Whoever thinks that governments end viruses is wrong.
– Interview in Globes, March 22nd 2020
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Dr Pietro Vernazza is a Swiss physician specialising Infectious Diseases at the Cantonal Hospital St. Gallen and Professor of Health Policy.
What he says:
We have reliable figures from Italy and a work by epidemiologists, which has been published in the renowned science journal ‹Science›, which examined the spread in China. This makes it clear that around 85 percent of all infections have occurred without anyone noticing the infection. 90 percent of the deceased patients are verifiably over 70 years old, 50 percent over 80 years.
[…]
In Italy, one in ten people diagnosed die, according to the findings of the Science publication, that is statistically one of every 1,000 people infected. Each individual case is tragic, but often – similar to the flu season – it affects people who are at the end of their lives.
[…]
If we close the schools, we will prevent the children from quickly becoming immune.
[…]
We should better integrate the scientific facts into the political decisions.
– Interview in St. Galler Tagblatt, 22nd March 2020
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Frank Ulrich Montgomery is German radiologist, former President of the German Medical Association and Deputy Chairman of the World Medical Association.
I’m not a fan of lockdown. Anyone who imposes something like this must also say when and how to pick it up again. Since we have to assume that the virus will be with us for a long time, I wonder when we will return to normal? You can’t keep schools and daycare centers closed until the end of the year. Because it will take at least that long until we have a vaccine. Italy has imposed a lockdown and has the opposite effect. They quickly reached their capacity limits, but did not slow down the virus spread within the lockdown.
– Interview in General Anzeiger, 18th March 2020
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Prof. Hendrik Streeck is a German HIV researcher, epidemiologist and clinical trialist. He is professor of virology, and the director of the Institute of Virology and HIV Research, at Bonn University.
The new pathogen is not that dangerous, it is even less dangerous than Sars-1. The special thing is that Sars-CoV-2 replicates in the upper throat area and is therefore much more infectious because the virus jumps from throat to throat, so to speak. But that is also an advantage: Because Sars-1 replicates in the deep lungs, it is not so infectious, but it definitely gets on the lungs, which makes it more dangerous.
[…]
You also have to take into account that the Sars-CoV-2 deaths in Germany were exclusively old people. In Heinsberg, for example, a 78-year-old man with previous illnesses died of heart failure, and that without Sars-2 lung involvement. Since he was infected, he naturally appears in the Covid 19 statistics. But the question is whether he would not have died anyway, even without Sars-2.
– Interview in Frankfurter Allgemeine, 16th March 2020
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Dr Yanis Roussel et. al. – A team of researchers from the Institut Hospitalo-universitaire Méditerranée Infection, Marseille and the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Marseille, conducting a peer-reviewed study on Coronavirus mortality for the government of France under the ‘Investments for the Future’ programme.
The problem of SARS-CoV-2 is probably overestimated, as 2.6 million people die of respiratory infections each year compared with less than 4000 deaths for SARS-CoV-2 at the time of writing.
[…]
This study compared the mortality rate of SARS-CoV-2 in OECD countries (1.3%) with the mortality rate of common coronaviruses identified in AP-HM patients (0.8%) from 1 January 2013 to 2 March 2020. Chi-squared test was performed, and the P-value was 0.11 (not significant).
[…]
…it should be noted that systematic studies of other coronaviruses (but not yet for SARS-CoV-2) have found that the percentage of asymptomatic carriers is equal to or even higher than the percentage of symptomatic patients. The same data for SARS-CoV-2 may soon be available, which will further reduce the relative risk associated with this specific pathology.
– “SARS-CoV-2: fear versus data”, International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, 19th March 2020
Dr. David Katz is an American physician and founding director of the Yale University Prevention Research Center
I am deeply concerned that the social, economic and public health consequences of this near-total meltdown of normal life — schools and businesses closed, gatherings banned — will be long-lasting and calamitous, possibly graver than the direct toll of the virus itself. The stock market will bounce back in time, but many businesses never will. The unemployment, impoverishment and despair likely to result will be public health scourges of the first order.
– “Is Our Fight Against Coronavirus Worse Than the Disease?”, New York Times 20th March 2020
Michael T. Osterholm is regents professor and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
Consider the effect of shutting down offices, schools, transportation systems, restaurants, hotels, stores, theaters, concert halls, sporting events and other venues indefinitely and leaving all of their workers unemployed and on the public dole. The likely result would be not just a depression but a complete economic breakdown, with countless permanently lost jobs, long before a vaccine is ready or natural immunity takes hold.
[…]
[T]he best alternative will probably entail letting those at low risk for serious disease continue to work, keep business and manufacturing operating, and “run” society, while at the same time advising higher-risk individuals to protect themselves through physical distancing and ramping up our health-care capacity as aggressively as possible. With this battle plan, we could gradually build up immunity without destroying the financial structure on which our lives are based.
– “Facing covid-19 reality: A national lockdown is no cure”, Washington Post 21st March 2020
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Dr Peter Goetzsche is Professor of Clinical Research Design and Analysis at the University of Copenhagen and founder of the Cochrane Medical Collaboration. He has written several books on corruption in the field of medicine and the power of big pharmaceutical companies.
Our main problem is that no one will ever get in trouble for measures that are too draconian. They will only get in trouble if they do too little. So, our politicians and those working with public health do much more than they should do.
No such draconian measures were applied during the 2009 influenza pandemic, and they obviously cannot be applied every winter, which is all year round, as it is always winter somewhere. We cannot close down the whole world permanently.
Should it turn out that the epidemic wanes before long, there will be a queue of people wanting to take credit for this. And we can be damned sure draconian measures will be applied again next time. But remember the joke about tigers. “Why do you blow the horn?” “To keep the tigers away.” “But there are no tigers here.” “There you see!”
– “Corona: an epidemic of mass panic”, blog post on Deadly Medicines 21st March 2020
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If you can find any other examples of noteworthy experts deviating from the mainstream narrative, please post them below. As always, this list have been impossible to build without Swiss Propaganda Research. Follow their work and share widely. An indispensable resource.
Residents of Brussels have been told to stay at home, leaving the city’s streets empty.Credit: Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty
The coronavirus pandemic has brought chaos to lives and economies around the world. But efforts to curb the spread of the virus might mean that the planet itself is moving a little less. Researchers who study Earth’s movement are reporting a drop in seismic noise — the hum of vibrations in the planet’s crust — that could be the result of transport networks and other human activities being shut down. They say this could allow detectors to spot smaller earthquakes and boost efforts to monitor volcanic activity and other seismic events.
A noise reduction of this magnitude is usually only experienced briefly around Christmas, says Thomas Lecocq, a seismologist the Royal Observatory of Belgium in Brussels, where the drop has been observed.
Just as natural events such as earthquakes cause Earth’s crust to move, so do vibrations caused by moving vehicles and industrial machinery. And although the effects from individual sources might be small, together they produce background noise, which reduces seismologists’ ability to detect other signals occurring at the same frequency.
Source: Royal Observatory of Belgium
Data from a seismometer at the observatory show that measures to curb the spread of COVID-19 in Brussels caused human-induced seismic noise to fall by about one-third, says Lecocq. The measures included closing schools, restaurants and other public venues from 14 March, and banning all non-essential travel from 18 March (see ‘Seismic noise’).
The current drop has boosted the sensitivity of the observatory’s equipment, improving its ability to detect waves in the same high frequency range as the noise. The facility’s surface seismometer is now almost as sensitive to small quakes and quarry blasts as a counterpart detector buried in a 100-metre borehole, he adds. “This is really getting quiet now in Belgium.”
Information boost
If lockdowns continue in the coming months, city-based detectors around the world might be better than usual at detecting the locations of earthquake aftershocks, says Andy Frassetto, a seismologist at the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology in Washington DC. “You’ll get a signal with less noise on top, allowing you to squeeze a little more information out of those events,” he says.
The fall in noise could also benefit seismologists who use naturally occurring background vibrations, such as those from crashing ocean waves, to probe Earth’s crust. Because volcanic activity and changing water tables affect how fast these natural waves travel, scientists can study these events by monitoring how long it takes a wave to reach a given detector. A fall in human-induced noise could boost the sensitivity of detectors to natural waves at similar frequencies, says Lecocq, whose team plans to begin testing this. “There’s a big chance indeed it could lead to better measurements,” he says.
Belgian seismologists are not the only ones to notice the effects of lockdown. Celeste Labedz, a graduate student in geophysics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, tweeted that a similar fall in noise had been picked up by a station in Los Angeles. “The drop is seriously wild,” she said.
However, not all seismic monitoring stations will see an effect as pronounced as the one observed in Brussels, says Emily Wolin, a geologist at the US Geological Survey in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Many stations are purposefully located in remote areas or deep boreholes to avoid human noise. These should see a smaller decrease, or no change at all, in the level of high-frequency noise they record, she says.
On December 10, 1992, Thomas Banyacya, Kykotsmovi Hopi Nation (Arizona), addressed the United Nations General Assembly (Full Text Here). In his speech, he explained to diplomats the significance of a petroglyph at Prophecy Rock (Hopiland). An ancient prophecy apparently predicted a “House of Mica” that feasibly describes the United Nations’ headquarters in New York.
“Greed and concern for material things is a common disease.” Thomas Banyacya, 1992
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“The Hopi and all original native people hold the land in balance by prayer, fasting and performing ceremonies. Our spiritual Elders still hold the land in the Western Hemisphere in balance for all living beings, including humans. No one should be relocated from their sacred homelands in this Western Hemisphere or anywhere in the world. Acts of forced relocation, such as Public Law 93-531 in the United States, must be repealed.
(Thomas and Oren Lyons held up a picture of a large rock drawing in Hopiland)
The United Nations stands on our native homeland. The United Nations talks about human rights, equality and justice and yet the native people have never had a real opportunity to speak to this assembly since its establishment until today. It should be the mission of your nations and this assembly to use your power and rules to examine and work to cure the damage people have done to this Earth and to each other. Hopi Elders know that was your mission and they wait to see whether you will act on it now.
Nature, the First People and the spirit of our ancestors are giving you loud warnings. Today, December 10, 1992, you see increasing floods, more damaging hurricanes, hail storms, climate changes and earthquakes as our prophesies said would come. Even animals and birds are warning us with strange change in their behavior such as the beaching of whales. Why do animals act like they know about the earth’s problems and most humans act like they know nothing? If we humans do not wake up to the warnings, the great purification will come to destroy this world just as the previous worlds were destroyed.
Banyyaca explained the meaning of this Hopi petroglyph to the United Nations General Assembly in 1992
This rock drawing shows part of the Hopi prophecy. There are two paths. The first with technology but separate from natural and spiritual law leads to these jagged lines representing chaos. The lower path is one that remains in harmony with natural law. Here we see a line that represents a choice like a bridge joining the paths. If we return to spiritual harmony and live from our hearts, we can experience a paradise in this world. If we continue only on this upper path, we will come to destruction.
It’s up to all of us, as children of Mother Earth, to clean up this mess before it’s too late.”
Soon after Salt Lake City stopped shaking March 18 from its strongest earthquake on record, Amir Allam, a University of Utah seismologist, knew he had to get busy if he hoped to closely study the hundreds of aftershocks he knew would follow the 7:09 a.m. jolt.
The fault that is believed to have moved along the eastern base of the Oquirrh Mountains is virtually unknown, and here was a chance, dropping out of the blue, to image it.
But Allam had a problem.
All 210 of the U.’s portable seismographs, loaf-sized instruments known as nodal geophones, were currently deployed along California’s San Andreas fault and elsewhere, and, therefore, were unavailable for what he needed to do in his own backyard. The Salt Lake Valley hadn’t had a sizable shake since 1962 and last week’s 5.7 magnitude earthquake offered a rare opportunity to better map the network of fractures under the valley.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) University of Utah seismologist Amir Allam unloads 50-pound bags filled with p…
Allam and his U. colleagues quickly mustered up dozens of geophones from other institutions and began burying them near the epicenter of the initial quake, likely on a fault that has remained a mystery to Utah seismologists.
They hope to characterize it and determine how it is interconnected with the Wasatch fault running along the base of the foothills on Salt Lake City’s east side and its lattice of associated faults, or “strands.”
‘Jury is still out’
“We started immediately the morning of the [initial] earthquake, and we have been installing them ever since,” Allam said Tuesday as he unloaded shovels and 43 geophones from his truck. “These are the last bunch.”
He already had deployed 139 geophones, each equipped with 35 days of battery life, around the Salt Lake Valley, each measuring ground movements — vertical, north-south and east-west — from hundreds of aftershocks. These recordings will help scientists with the U., as well as the Utah and U.S. geological surveys, to characterize this intriguing fault.
The Wasatch fault system’s network of cracks in the earth stretches 230 miles from Malad, Idaho south to Fayette, Utah through Utah’s major metropolitan area, where at least 80% of the population resides. A magnitude 6 quake on the main fault could cause severe damage, depending on where it strikes. A 2016 report forecast a 57% chance of such a quake or stronger within the next 50 years. Scientists do not believe last week’s temblor will reduce the chance of a major quake on the Wasatch fault down the road.
“We want to map out the basin depth all over the valley. We actually don’t know it [the fault network] that well,” Allam said. “… We want to capture as many tiny aftershocks as we can, so we have a really dense deployment around the epicenter of the 5.7 quake. We want to get that fault structure. We want to know exactly how the Wasatch and its subsidiary faults are changing their patterns in the subsurface.”
The fault that likely moved dips to the west and is not expressed on the surface, according to Kris Pankow of the U. Seismograph Stations. It could be the same one that shook Magna in 1962 with a magnitude 5.2 quake that touched off a swarm of lesser aftershocks, but it can’t be known for sure because the instrumentation was not in place to precisely locate that quake.
“The jury is still out on the specific fault that moved and produced [the March 18] earthquake,” said Ryan Gold, a research geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. “The specific strand, that’s what we are trying to sort out. Additional instrumentation is being installed to monitor ongoing seismicity.”
‘Aftershocks are going to diminish’
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) University of Utah seismologist Amir Allam deploys 43 portable seismic instruments to be buried above Salt Lake City on Tuesday, March 24, 2020, to capture data following last week’s 5.7 magnitude earthquake.
In the week since the main quake, the ground under Magna has kept shaking.
As of Tuesday at 4 p.m., 456 aftershocks had been recorded, according to Gold, coming at an average rate of one every 20 minutes. At least 29 were magnitude 3 and a handful exceeded magnitude 4. The fault released a magnitude 3.1 temblor Tuesday at 5:32 a.m., followed by many stronger than magnitude 2. Most were located very close to the original epicenter a few miles north northeast of Magna and just six miles beneath the surface.
“The number and size of aftershocks are going to diminish with time but within these sequences. It’s the fault adjusting to the changes in stress. They are kind of chattering,” said Pankow, who is also closely monitoring aftershocks with larger seismographs placed in a few strategic locations. “With time, that stress is going to dissipate.”
The larger instruments are connected to broadband, providing real time data on the aftershocks. Meanwhile, satellite imagery shows the ground moved several centimeters at the surface as a result of the main quake, according to Gold.
The aftershocks don’t occur in steady intervals but in clusters, according to a graphic representation posted by Seismograph Stations. In the first three days after the mainshock, dozens of aftershocks flared. They grew weaker and less frequent until Sunday night, when a magnitude 4 struck, followed quickly by numerous aftershocks.
“That magnitude 4 was its own stress release; it has its own set of aftershocks to go with it,” Pankow said. “We might have some more magnitude 4s before this is all done.”
Seismometers, types of seismograph that measure surface ground movement, are installed in at least three major historic structures in downtown Salt Lake City: the Utah Capitol, City Hall and West High School. These instruments record direction, intensity and duration of earthquakes. The data generated by these instruments helps engineers understand the seismic forces buildings on the Wasatch fault system could be subject to, according to Pankow.
Hillside research
An assistant research professor in the U.’s Department of Geology and Geophysics, Allam teaches jiu jitsu on the side. On Tuesday, he recruited some of his students on a moment’s notice to help schlep instruments into the hills above Salt Lake City’s Avenues neighborhood as the weather deteriorated in front of a snowstorm expected to arrive by Wednesday.
They hoisted 50-pound satchels over their shoulders, each holding six geophones, and trekked a half-mile up the Bonneville Shoreline Trail to a spot where Allam had identified a 500-meter transect along a ravine that was just starting to green up with the coming of spring. Here the team was to plant the geophones along a preselected line spanning a known strand of the Wasatch fault in the undulating terrain overlooking the city.
As a cold rain began to fall, the crews dug 8-inch holes in 13-meter intervals along a downsloping ridgeline on a roughly north-south axis. The geophones were placed in the holes, oriented directly north, and covered with dirt.
In a month, Allam and his associates will return to recover 182 geophones around the valley. The harvest is hoped to yield a bounty of data that paints a valuable picture of what lurks beneath Utah’s most populated region.
Research Fellow, Climate Adaptation, Griffith University
Disclosure statement
Benjamin Preston currently receives funding from the California Hospital Association, the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, Ford Motor Company, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Previously, he has received funding from the U.S. Department of Energy and the Commonwealth of Australia.
Johanna Nalau receives funding from Australian Research Council and Griffith University.
As these reports show, climate change is already occurring, with impacts that will become more intense for decades into the future. They also make clear that reducing greenhouse gas emissions from human activities to a level that would limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) or less above preindustrial levels will pose unprecedented challenges.
Today, however, there is a large and growing gap between what countries say they’d like to achieve and what they have committed to do. As scholars focused on climate risk management and adaptation, we believe it is time to think about managing climate change damage in terms of triage.
Hard choices already are being made about which risks society will attempt to manage. It is critically important to spend limited funds where they will have the most impact.
Annual average temperature over the continental United States has increased by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit relative to 1900. Additional increases ranging from 3 degrees Fahrenheit to 12 degrees Fahrenheit are expected by 2100, depending on global greenhouse gas emission trends.USGCRP
Triaging climate change
Triage is a process of prioritizing actions when the need is greater than the supply of resources. It emerged on the battlefields of World War I, and is widely used today in fields ranging from disaster medicine to ecosystem conservation and software development.
Triaging climate change means placing consequences into different buckets. Here, we propose three.
The first bucket represents impacts that can be avoided or managed with minimal or no interventions. For example, assessments of how climate change will affect U.S. hydropower indicate that this sector can absorb the impacts without a need for costly interventions.
The second bucket is for impacts that are probably unavoidable despite all best efforts. Consider polar bears, which rely on sea ice as a platform to reach their prey. Efforts to reduce emissions can help sustain polar bears, but there are few ways to help them adapt. Protecting Australia’s Great Barrier Reef or the Brazilian Amazon poses similar challenges.
Clare Mukankusi breeds beans for a gene bank in Kawanda, Uganda, with properties including drought resilience to help farmers cope with extreme conditions.Georgina Smith, CIAT, CC BY-NC-SA
The third bucket represents impacts for which practical and effective actions can be taken to reduce risk. For example, cities such as Phoenix, Chicago and Philadelphia have been investing for years in extreme heat warning systems and emergency response strategies to reduce risks to public health. There are a variety of options for making agriculture more resilient, from precision agriculture to biotechnology to no-till farming. And large investments in infrastructure and demand management strategies have historically helped supply water to otherwise scarce regions and reduce flood risk.
In each of these cases, the challenge is aligning what’s technically feasible with society’s willingness to pay.
How can societies enable triage-based planning? One key step is to invest in valuing assets that are at risk. Placing a value on assets exchanged in economic markets, such as agriculture, is relatively straightforward. For example, RAND and Louisiana State University have estimated the costs of coastal land loss in Louisiana owing to property loss, increased storm damage, and loss of wetland habitat that supports commercial fisheries.
Valuing non-market assets, such as cultural resources, is more challenging but not impossible. When North Carolina’s Cape Hatteras lighthouse was in danger of collapsing into the sea, heroic efforts were taken to move it further inland because of its historic and cultural significance. Similarly, Congress makes judgments on behalf of the American people regarding the value of historic and cultural resources when it enacts legislation to add them to the U.S. national park system.
The next step is identifying adaptation strategies that have a reasonable chance of reducing risks. RAND’s support for the Louisiana Coastal Master Plan included an analysis of $50 billion in ecosystem restoration and coastal protection projects that ranked the benefits those projects would generate in terms of avoided damages.
This approach reflects the so-called “resilience dividend” – a “bonus” that comes from investing in more climate-resilient communities. For example, a recent report from the National Institute of Building Sciences estimated that every dollar invested in federal disaster mitigation programs – enhancing building codes, subsidizing hurricane shutters or acquiring flood-prone houses – saves society $6. Nevertheless, there are limits to the level of climate change that any investment can address.
The ‘Resilience Dividend Valuation Model’ provides communities with a structured way to frame and analyze resilience policies and projects.
The third step is investing enough financial, social and political capital to meet the priorities that society has agreed on. In particular, this means including adaptation in the budgets of federal, state, and local government agencies and departments, and being transparent about what these organizations are investing in and why.
Much progress has been made in improving disclosure of corporate exposure to greenhouse gas reduction policies through mechanisms such as the Task Force on Climate-Related Disclosures, a private sector initiative working to help businesses identify and disclose risks to their operations from climate policy. But less attention has been given to disclosing risks to businesses from climate impacts, such as the disruption of supply chains, or those faced by public organizations, such as city governments.
Advocates say corporate disclosure of climate risks would help investors to make informed decisions, and would allow corporations to prepare for climate change and have a strategy to deal with it.
Finally, governments need to put frameworks and metrics in place so that they can measure their progress. The Paris Climate Agreement calls on countries to report on their adaptation efforts. In response, tools like InformedCity in Australia are emerging that enable organizations to measure their progress toward adaptation goals. Nevertheless, many organizations – from local governments to corporate boardrooms – are not equipped to evaluate whether their efforts to adapt have been effective.
There are many opportunities to manage climate risk around the world, but not everything can be saved. Delaying triage of climate damages could leave societies making ad hoc decisions instead of focusing on protecting the things they value most.
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