Update from the war-room

The third world war has been raging for one year. Europe has been the hardest hit, with its economy partially shut down for most of this period. We are now an aging continent living on credit. Children have lost one year of education and are now considerably more addicted to electronic devices compared to one year ago. This will have wide ranging consequences. We should not forget that accelerating a gifted child in school doubles the number of publications in science that this child will achieve in life. It's reasonable to believe that slowing children down will have the opposite effect.

The US has the world's largest number of Covid-19 deaths. In a large number of states, over half of these deaths have occurred in hospices and retirement home -- i.e., institutions designed to cater for people at the end of life, and from which, in general, inmates are not expected to exit alive. For their safety, security and in order to avoid the rather unavoidable infection, they were also robbed of their chance to see their infectious children or otherwise live dangerously.

The US was led by an extremist fool -- sabotaged, hated and ridiculed by his own people and, perhaps, supported from outside, Donald Trump may not have acted at all times in the interest of the people who didn't elect him with a majority of votes. Fools, however, are known for telling the truth. Was Donald Trump a truth telling fool when he called Covid-19 the Chinese Virus? Was the virus made on purpose? Maybe as a weapon of war? K. Andersen et al. in Nature Medicine say it is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus.

But what is the circumstatial evidence? The Wuhan institute of Virology has long been an active research center for the study of coronaviruses. Scientists from Wuhan have well known long published research on engineering bat coronaviruses to enable them to infect human cells. They have the expertise and technology to do this. It's a somewhat similar process to creating a vaccine like Sputnik -- adding some Covid-19 genes to an otherwise harmless adenovirus creates a hybrid that is hopefully harmless and can create immunity to Covid-19.

Vineet D Menachery; Boyd L Yount; Kari Debbink; et al. (9 November 2015). "A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence". Nature Medicine. 21 (12): 1508–1513. doi:10.1038/NM.3985. ISSN 1078-8956. PMC 4797993. PMID 26552008. S2CID 5953778. Wikidata Q36702376. (erratum) Butler, Declan (12 November 2015). "Engineered bat virus stirs debate over risky research". Nature. doi:10.1038/nature.2015.18787.

On January 2, 2020, the whole genome sequence of the new coronavirus was determined. But was it also created there? Maybe as a weapon of war? We may never know ... or we may have to look the other way if we come too close to the truth.

Even if there is no clear evidence that COVID-19 was man-made-- so far it seems it was not -- there is ample evidence that China hid deaths, and then argued that they managed the infection perfectly. They used lies to convince the world that lock-down and loss of human rights is the way to go. So, China closed for a brief period, and then remained open while the rest of the world closed down and was locked in for more than a year so far. This leads to growth in China, and destruction everywhere else.

On the bright side, the vaccination campaign is ongoing and the virus will soon be gone. As the winter fades, with most people infected and somewhat immune, the number of cases falls much faster than it could be justified by the vaccine alone. Yesterday, India had 79 Covid-19 deaths across the whole subcontinent.

Strangely enough, with about over half of the population immunized, Israel has seen a smaller decrease in deaths compared to the UK, US and Germany, who have been immunizing vastly less. This is probably because the population in the US, UK and Europe have aquired more immunity from natural infection with the virus than people in Israel or UAE. The natural immunity combined with the immunity aquired from the vaccine leads to the larger drop in deaths and cases. Note that I am not claiming the vaccine is ineffective, just that populations with less immunity (i.e., from areas that have not been affected by the virus to the same extent as Europe, the UK and the US) might need to vaccinate more to achieve the same drop in cases and deaths.

There is also a subjective element -- with the vaccine on the horizon, and peace in America, people are, perhaps, testing less. But why are they also dying less?