Trade Findings and Adjustments 05-12-2020

Dear Daily Prophecy Reader,

Today, I wanted to share the first part in a series on snippets I’ll be sharing from this Swiss Report on the coronavirus.

You’ll find it is a complete and definitive list of the key findings to date, and it entirely supports the position of Gilder’s Daily Prophecy that the lockdown is vastly more destructive than the virus.

Let’s dig in! Below you’ll find a list of 15 facts about COVID-19.

2.        Even in the global “hotspots”, the risk of death for the general population of school and working age is typically in the range of a daily car ride to work. The risk was initially overestimated because many people with only mild or no symptoms were not taken into account.

3.        Up to 80% of all test-positive persons remain symptom-free. Even among 70-79 year olds, about 60% remain symptom-free. Over 95% of all persons show mild symptoms at most.

4.        Up to one third of all persons already have a certain background immunity to COVID-19 due to contact with previous coronaviruses (i.e. common cold viruses).

5.        The median or average age of the deceased in most countries (including Italy) is over 80 years and only about 1% of the deceased had no serious preconditions. The age and risk profile of deaths thus essentially corresponds to normal mortality.

6.        In most Western countries, 50-70% of all extra deaths occurred in nursing homes, which do not benefit from a general lockdown. Moreover, in many cases it is not clear whether these people really died from COVID-19 or from extreme stress, fear and loneliness.

7.        Up to 50% of all additional deaths may have been caused not by COVID-19, but by the effects of the lockdown, panic and fear. For example, the treatment of heart attacks and strokes decreased by up to 60% because many patients no longer dared to go to hospital.

8.        Even in so-called “COVID-19 deaths” it is often not clear whether they died from or with coronavirus (i.e. from underlying diseases) or if they were counted as “presumed cases” and not tested at all. However, official figures usually do not reflect this distinction.

9.        Many media reports of young and healthy people dying from COVID-19 turned out to be false: many of these young people either did not die from COVID-19, they had already been seriously ill (e.g. from undiagnosed leukaemia), or they were in fact 109 instead of 9years old.

10.     The normal overall mortality per day is about 8,000 people in the US, about 2,600 in Germany and about 1,800 in Italy. Influenza mortality per season is up to 80,000 in the US and up to 25,000 in Germany and Italy. In several countries COVID-19 deaths remained belowstrong flu seasons.

11.     Regional increases in mortality may be influenced by additional risk factors such as high levels of air pollution and microbial contamination, as well as a collapse in the care for the elderly and sickdue to infections, mass panic and lockdown. Special regulations for dealing with the deceased sometimes led to additional bottlenecks in funeral or cremation services.

12.     In countries such as Italy and Spain, and to some extent the UK and the US, hospital overloads due to strong flu waves are not unusual. In addition, up to 15% of doctors and health workers were put into quarantine, even if they developed no symptoms.

13.     The often shown exponential curves of “corona cases” are misleading, as the number of tests also increased exponentially. In most countries, the ratio of positive tests to tests overall (i.e. the positive rate) remained constant at 5-25% or increased only slightly. In many countries, the peak of the spread was already reached well before the lockdown.

14.     Countries without curfews and contact bans, such as Japan, South Korea or Sweden, have not experienced a more negative course of events than other countries. Sweden was even praised by the WHO and now benefits from higher immunity compared to lockdown countries.

The fear of a shortage of ventilators was unjustified. According to lung specialists, the invasive ventilation (intubation) of COVID-19 patients, which is partly done out of fear of spreading the virus, is in fact often counterproductive and damaging to the lungs.

Regards,

George Gilder
Editor, Gilder’s Daily Prophecy