Hepatitis Outbreak in Children.

It appears from reports that there is currently an outbreak of Hepatitis in children. The World Health Authority (for what it's worth) report on the outbreak here. The circumstances surrounding the outbreak and the current theory for the reason: that due to lockdowns there's been less exposure to Adenoviruses out in the wild, seem highly implausible.

First thing to realise is that the "normal" Hepatitis virus strains are not involved, or at least haven't been detected in the children affected.

The second thing is that the outbreak started in the West. In the UK actually, and has spread to other Western countries. Almost like the spread of an entirely new virus strain.

It's now in the past few days been reported in Asia.

It's interesting in the WHO report that there are various suggestions regarding this new viral mechanism. It's virtually unheard of for healthy children to contract Hepatitis unless the usual viruses and methods of infection are involved.

This is yet another entirely new phenomenon. The mechanism that causes the Hepatitis hasn't yet been identified.

Adenovirus 41 seems to be implicated in the report, but it looks like number 41 isn't present in all cases, just the majority. So that may not be the actual infection at play.

The interesting fact are the countries involved: The UK tops the list and Spain and Israel come second in case numbers. But what is common between those three countries? And what part in the mechanism has lockdown played?

Being facecious, could it be linked to hot tub or swimming pool use? After all Hot Tubs had a bit of a boost in the UK during lockdown, and Israel and Spain use similar chemicals to hot tubs in their very popular swimming pools. Could it be prolonged exposure to clorine or other chemicals like algae-killing ones that produce the reduction in resistance to hepatitis-causing viruses or bacteria. Or could this be a new virus incubated in Hot tubs or swimming pools a-la Legionaire's disease?

Of course there are already conspiracies that the Covid-19 vaccine is involved, with no evidence that the children involved had been vaccinated. Although truth be told, the three top countries have some of the highest global vaccination rates in children so it's worthy of further study.

More needs to be done to fully investigate the links and come up with the definitive mechanism at play here. It does seem as if the scientists are clueless at the moment, sadly.

Virology is currently at a pretty early stage in understanding the roles that viruses play in secondary infections and things like triggering cancer, MS and immune system illnesses. 

The Rise of Corporate Landlords.

 It seems over in America there are strange goings-on in the housing market. A global corporation called BlackWater is buying up houses at a phenomenal rate. Not only is this snatching houses from normal people, but the corporation has the ability to pay over the odds if necessary (which it is), thereby inflating the price of houses and the US housing market in general.

Now, from what I can see this has no happy ending. Not for US house buyers who have to pay artificially inflated prices for the house of their dreams, but also in the long term. Because take the fact that a large proportion of houses in the US will become rental properties, but also those that have been able to buy their house are sitting on an inflated asset. Hopefully the value of the house will keep rising and cancel out the inflated element of the price they paid. Hopefully.

I assume that Blackwater sees housing stock as better than stocks when it comes to investment. Not only do you own an asset, but you have the ability to rent it out and generate revenue all the time you own the asset. With stocks and shares you only own the share and it only generates income if it rises in value. You can't rent it out. 

Well, someone in the city hasn't yet found a way to rent out shares. Yet.

Here in the UK, I'm getting similar signals from the housing market, but whoever is buying up relatively expensive houses and renting them out en-masse is keeping pretty low-key. But it is happening, adding about 5% or more to UK to house prices.

I hate to be a conspiracy theorist, but some would say that this is part of the great reset, where you own nothing and all your money goes to the corporate state. 

Sounds like Fascism to me.

Considering what's happing in Austria and Germany regarding mandatory vaccinations with no choice or consent, it sounds like they've got the hop on all the other countries regarding our future. 

It seems we're looking at a no choice, no ownership, no consent, no free will sort of future. Yep, sounds like Fascism to me.

COVID-19 Government's top Doictor admits it's out in the wild now.

Back in my Game Changer post over 3 weeks ago I aid that the virus was most liklely out in the wild and therefore more likely to spread and less likely to be controlled.

Well, Professor Chris Whitty, the Cheif Medical officer has admitted as much. There are now a handful of confirmed cases where there is no defined source of the virus. i.e. no direct link to an outbreak or pocket of the virus.



Video courtesy of the Sun.

So those people in the planes with the "super-spreader" that came over from France, the people he walked past or stood in a queue with may have the virus and not know about it. Those people he had contact with may have had further contact and it's these secondary and tertiary contacts that are cropping up when tested.

It's safe to say there are by now thousands of people with the virus. My colleague across the desk has today taken a day off sick after being in work for the past few days with a serious upper chest infection. My previous comments re: sick pay stand and he's a prime example.

Of course we have put up with things like coughs and colds in the past with very little impact because even serious influenza kills a very low percentage of people that catch it. 0.1 percent or something similar.

COVID-19 has a far higher mortality rate, initially listed as 10%. But even that is an order of magnitude higher than 'flu.

Now there are unconfirmed reports the mortality rate could be as high as 30%.

The reports that there are two strains of the virus might be the only saving grace. It looks like the UK carriers have the less deadly/aggressive strain and people are just putting up with coughs and chest infections and the number of fatalities will be low.

My only current criticism is that even Chris Whitty in the video above assumes an 80% infection rate across the country, but then goes on to say that this figure is based on the 'flu and assumes some level of immunity after infection. At that point his predictions don't bear scrutiny, because as far as is known, infection with COVID-19 imbues the sufferer with no such immunity. They can be re-infected immediately if exposed to an infection.

We still haven't clearly understood if the virus has some form of dormant state where it fails to register on tests, so it's entirely plausible that once infected, people can re-infect themselves, until the point the infection overwhelms their system and they succumb and die.

The eventual infection rate will most likely be close to 100% with no natural immunity to re-infection. So coughs and chest infections will be the future of humanity in the short term at least. As long as we keep the nasty strain away, deaths could be relatively low.

But like I said previously, even if 1% are killed off in the first wave, the ability to continually infect people over and over again means the virus has the capability to chip away at the population, 1% at a time until there is no-one left to infect. The 30% strain of the virus just means that more people die more quickly until the number of people spreads out thinly enough that infected people never meet uninfected ones.

I don't think the population was that thin back even in Medieval times. But that may be where we're heading. Back to pre-industrial population levels, but hopefully not the stone age. At least the survivors should be able to retain some form of civilisation. I'd like to hope we don't get kicked back to the hunter-gatherer stage.

The thing that keeps bugging me is the lengths to which the Chinese government has gone to limit the spread. It seems they have not told us the full picture and I think hindsight will show the W.H.O. and our governments woefully naive in believing the output of the Chinese agencies.

Why are they spraying disinfectant all over the streets? Why are they burning the bodies?

It all points to something more than we are being told at the moment. Western Governments are being left to react to an in-country infection rather than China sharing all the information it has. It clearly has more information on the virus after having at least a month more experience than the West.

Ah well, I suppose time will tell if my fears are correct. So far I'm on the money. I wish I wasn't but sadly I have a brain that can quickly analyse these things and make mostly correct assumptions and model outcomes. In cases like this, I hate it when I'm proved right.

UPDATE.

After thinking about it, the reports of two strains of Corona Virus out in the wild may just mean that there is a previously undetected Corona virus out in the wild and the full deadly Wuhan variety is a different Corona virus.

So the less lethal virus is "a" corona virus and not "the" corona virus from Wuhan.

It could well be the less lethal variety would have passed through the population and been overlooked as a 'flu infection. The full Wuhan obviously is a different beast and cannot be ignored.

We'll see in the next month or so if the Corona virus at large in the UK begins to kill people off. We may have been lucky and all of the people infected in the UK may have been fit enough to survive. But I think that's a bit of a stretch.

The conspiracy theorists may like to debate whether the non-lethal strain was released as a test to see how far it would spread without killing people to test the efficacy of the lethal version, but somehow the full monty was released accidentally instead at some point.

Novel Corona Virus (COVID-19) Update

So Novel Corona Virus (2019) has an official title now: COVID-19. Not as snappy as NCoV but hey, officialdom isn't renown for it's snappiness...

So, an update: The Southampton school was deep-disinfected because some kids had a cold when they came back from Singapore. Fair play, better safe then sorry.

Mr Super-spreader has been given the all-clear and sent home. He's no longer infectious. Hopefully.

There's a prisoner in Bullingdon jail that is suspected of having the virus after being shipped over from Thailand. We'll see how that pans out.

A bunch of people (apparently foreign tourists) in London are in isolation at St. Thomas' after having flu-like symptoms after coming back from the far East.

So, thankfully it appears the UK is on top of the situation.

Thankfully we closed down direct flights from China some days ago. I was surprised to see a video that insinuated that the USA hadn't closed down air links to China. A bad move, considering anyone can walk through the border without symptoms but still be carrying the virus.

Even indirect flights might be a risk as it's a way of subverting the bio-security afforded by the closure of direct links.

I've actually got a car part coming from Hong Kong. Hopefully it'll be in the post long enough so the virus won't be a risk factor. ;-) Maybe I'll give it a wipe with a disinfectant wipe, just in case...

But hopefully as we reach the limits of the quarantine/incubation period, the UK will emerge COVID-19 clear.

Then we just nuke China... sorry, I mean hopefully the Chinese can get on top of the virus and get back to normality.

The Gamechanger: Novel Corona Virus.

The New infectious disease, the Novel Corona Virus that originated in the Wuhan region of China, is a real gamechanger amongst infectious diseases.

The more we hear about it, the more it seems the "precautions" advised by the World Health Organisation and the various foreign governments are following the curve, rather than ahead of it.

Standard procedures for this sort of thing used in the past for the SARS and MARS outbreaks don't work with NCoV.

Both SARS and MARS weren't infectious until symptoms emerged. That's why an effective method of spotting infected cases at airports and the like was to use temperature sensors.

The first scary thing with NCoV is that those sort of checks don't work with NCoV. Patients are without symptoms (asymptomatic) and still infectious. So a carrier can walk around without a temperature, or a cough or any other symptoms and still spread the virus.

That means the virus is hard to contain. If it's spread without symptoms, ANYONE could be a carrier no matter how healthy they look or feel. The only way to contain it is to contain and isolate the area of the outbreak.

For cases that arrive in new countries, the only effective way to contain the virus is to close down the area around the cases and let the virus run it's course. The current practice of taking patients to hospitals outside the infected area is bad. Believe me, it's very bad. You just end up creating new hotspots.

Travel into and out of infected areas should be stopped.

In the UK we've already seen how a person can pick up the virus in an area away from the initial outbreak (in this case Singapore), then flew to France (possibly infecting a new bunch of people on that flight), he then stopped off in France infecting a whole ski-chalet's worth of people, one of whom flew back to Spain (again possibly infecting a flight's worth of people). The Brit then climbed aboard an EasyJet flight back to the UK, most likely infecting another bunch of people because by now we know he was infectious from the cases in France.

The Brit then infected another person in the UK. There's now a link with a Doctor's surgery in Brighton and a school in Southampton. The details are sketchy at the moment, but if this is true, then the virus is already out in the wild in the UK. We may never isolate the virus or stop it from spreading. Not without drastic measures.

But even if this person infected 10, 20, 30 or even a hundred people on the flights he took between countries and then infected a bunch more wherever he landed, this UK case proves the infectious nature of the virus. The WHO infection rating of 2-3 is way off the mark. How many other people will these new infections go on to infect?

The second scary thing about NCoV is that if you are infected and survive, unlike the flu, you don't get immunity. China has already reported instances of re-infection. Whether this is just people with colds wrongly diagnosed as NCoV sufferers going on to contract NCo after being dragged onto plague wards with NCoV sufferers, or whether it truly is re-infectious we have yet to really confirm. But governments should be treating it like it is. The best defence is not to get infected, so isolation of infected areas needs to happen and happen quick.

The thing is, if the virus is re-infectious and kills off a small percentage of it's victims. You can be in the first wave and survive, a small percentage dies. In the second wave of re-infections, another small percentage dies off. But if you don't get immunity from previous infection, that cycle continues until there is no-one to infect. EVERYONE DIES FROM NCoV EVENTUALLY.

The third scary thing about NCoV is (and it is only supposition at the moment), but if satellite pictures coming out of Wuhan are correct, there is a chance that even dead bodies are infectious. It seems that China may now be burning dead bodies  on a large scale. This suggest that even dead bodies are not safe to handle and the only way to "sterilise" them is to burn them.

That suggests the virus can live without the host being alive for some time. A very scary thought.

Not only for the management of the bodies of victims, but also for the spread of the virus. If it can live on without a live host, then it can live on door handles and other public surfaces for some time and be passed onto people without direct contact.

The Final scary thing is the incubation period seems to be very long. Initially it was thought to be 12-14 days before patients exhibited symptoms. But reports suggest that patients can actually go as long as 24 days without exhibiting symptoms but still be infectious. So in China, patient that had been released from quarantine after not exhibiting symptoms, went on to not only become symptomatic, but also infect any close contacts at the same time.

The more information we get about NCoV the more scary it gets. The more it seems a very efficient virus. Spreading easily, hardy enough to infect without direct contact and able to re-infect. Fatal in a small number of cases, but with the ability to re-infect ad-infinitum and chip away at the numbers of victims until there are no hosts left.

The amazing thing is I see no action from governments to get a handle on the problem. Right now, the situation is fluid and the more we hear about NCoV, the more it seems the "standard" precautions are inadequate.

If I was an isolated country with no cases, somewhere like Iceland, I'd close the borders now. No-one in or out. No flights, no boats, nothing. If necessary for up to 6 months. Let the rest of the world find out how infectious the disease is and how deadly it is.

For the rest of us, well only time will tell. Hopefully on one of the waves of infection the virus will mutate into a harmless version, or possibly it mutates into a version that allows our immune system to recognise the virus and create some immunity.

Without it and without some pretty serious quarantine measures, we are pretty much toast.

We certainly need to get some truthful and open information from the Chinese authorities about numbers of infections, mortality rates, infection rating, re-infections rates, incubation period, longevity out of the body and other information about the virus, otherwise how could we hope to ever contain it. W eneed to be ahead of the information curve, not behind it.

A final note is about the conspiracy theories about NCoV, especially the rumours about it being a Bioweapon accidentally released. It has all the hallmarks of one: being hard to spot, hard to contain, highly infectious, hardy and finally fatal. But a natural-occurring virus transferring between species also has the same traits.

Normally a virus doesn't kill it's host and probably in the original carrier (Supposedly Bats) and probably in the host organism it doesn't kill them all off. But when transferring to humans, there is no such guarantee. The virus could wipe out this new host quite easily, unless it has the chance to mutate into a less deadly version, or something happens to trigger our immune system to fight it off.

It's not necessarily the trait of a bioweapon, just the risk you take when you transfer a disease from one host to another. Bad animal husbandry is a very effective way to initiate this transfer between species. Just remember that the next time you eat one of your eggs from a battery hen...

UPDATE

Doing a mental exercise here: just think if the Government gave out advice to anyone in contact with an NCoV carrier to self-quarantine. Who would pay their wages while they were waiting the two weeks or a month to see if they had contracted the virus? How would the government stop or encourage people to stay indoors?

Given the severity of the virus and the infectious nature, surely another step for the government would be to underwrite any loss in pay and/or benefits for those that had to self-quarantine?

Otherwise people will just go to work as normal.

Without a Hint of Irony....

The SNP in Parliament yesterday tabled an urgent question asking members to condemn the jailing of the Catalan politicians who held an illegal (in Spanish law) referendum and tried to abide by the democratic result.

The same SNP who went to court and continue to fight in Parliament against the democratic result of a legal referendum in the UK.

Now what words would you use to describe such an action? Irony probably isn't correct. Hypocrisy maybe?

The UK: Sponsors of Terrorism

Not for nothing has the UK become a focal point for American anti-terror operations. They know full well the Islamic Ghettos of the Midlands spawn a whole army of young men, ready to die fighting against the very country that gives them shelter and support in the name of Islam.
Fundamental Islam has twisted and warped these men until they will kill without remorse, without sorrow, without any thought for themselves, their families, their country.

We have anecdotal evidence of British Muslims working against our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, of UK-funded medrassas used as fronts to train our young Muslims.

Until now, the righteous would read this and start bleating "racist". But no more. There is a change in US foreign policy and its allowing us to work with foreign governments to unearth proof now that so-called charities that are funded in the UK send British Muslims abroad to train to work against their own nation.

This report proves that medrassas abroad are being used to train UK Muslim men, effectively sponsoring terrorism.

The multicultural project has to come to an end. Its now time that allowing a state within a state, allowing Sharia law to be used instead of Her Majesty's courts is stopped in its tracks.

We are One Nation, with One Goal, One Purpose. Those who work inside the country to subvert the rule of law and the nation should be dealt with severely. It cannot be sugar-coated, it cannot be brushed aside under the guise of religious tollerance: Is Treason, pure and simple.

Uk Industry, What Industry?

It seems that a UK car plant, employing directly or indirectly 6000 workers is on the brink of closing down.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7901092.stm

It looks like the selling of all our industries will come home to roost over the next 12 months. Its a sad state of affairs that I can't only immediately think of one major manufacturer that is totally British based and owned, of cars or any anything else.

Thats another big problem that will hit hard during the depression: foreign owned manufacturing being dropped here and taken abroad. The same thing happened with the banks: Iceland was slapped and had its banking assets seized under anti-terror laws, then all the other banks decided to pull out, leaving a big hole for UK banks to fill. Thats why no-one can get loans, because the number of banks in the market has suddenly decreased by a huge percentage.

Manufacturing has to go the same way, as owners look at profits and then see how easily/cheaply they can shut facilities here, compared with the rest of Europe. After all, our flexible (read expendable) labour market is the whole reason foreign companies like Toyota, Nissan and Honda came here in the first place and why Tata bought into Land Rover and Jaguar.

One more nail in the coffin of this country. I really do have doubts as to whether we could get a loan off the IMF if it ever came to it. Just what could we guarantee the loan with, or generate the cash with which to pay it back? A nation of minimum wage callcentres and shops isn't going to generate enough wealth to make a dent in the Trillions of pounds worth of debt the country owes.

I really do wonder how bad it has to get before the Mainstream Media, the government and their propaganda arm (the BBC) will start to acnowledge what is happening.

Or are things so scarily bad that they daren't risk letting us know?

The Economy: Like watching a Car Crash in Progress

I have serious fears for the future of my country. In fact I predict that it'll be bankrupt sometime early in 2010.

How does that work, you might ask, given that no-one has yet mentioned the fact. I'll tell you: because not all of UK PLC's debts have been identified, quantified and totalled.

As an example, today it was "discovered" that the government will need to put more money into those PFI initiatives that have gone too far to face the axe. Thats because the PFI contractors are finding it hard to get credit to finance their PFI activities. How that all works in practice (we loan them money to build (say) a hospital, which they then lease back to us while paying off the loan we gave them...) I still can't get my head around. All I can say is that after several interested parties have made profit out of the scheme it looks an extremely inefficient way to deliver a hospital and a misuse of taxpayer's money.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7891475.stm

Another nugget of news is that the CBI reckon the government will need to find another £100-150bn thanks to the depression. This is because of reduced tax revenues and the increased burden of a larger than planned number of people claiming benefit. I expect that figure to grow during 2009.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7891514.stm

Its already been widely reported that there is a public sector pension shortfall. Conservatively estimated at around £690bn. I predict that this figure is grossly conservative, because it's based on higher interest rates than at present. Plus, as councils and the civil service start to shed staff to save costs, the draw on the public sector pension pot will grow, so the government's liability in this area isn't restricted to "just" £60bn and will increase significantly. The same goes for the state pension: employers will just shed anyone of pensionable age in order to reduce staff costs as employment law allows it to happen without redress from the employee.
Anyone thinking like me that we'll have a £1Tn pension shortfall by the end of 2009?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4273515.stm

As the depth of the depression becomes aparrent, it will become increasingly clear that the figures we know about will increase and there will be other liabilities and bailouts to come to be added to the mountain of national debt.

So financially, the situation looks very bleak for the UK. Certainly public spending can't continue at its current rate, but the government still insist on ploughing on with pet projects like ID cards, the NHS database, ContactPoint, et al.
What should happen with them is like with every other person that faces tough financial times: you cut non-essential spending. They and any other superfluous projects should be stopped immediately, as we're doing fine without them, so they're really not necessary, they're a luxury we can't currently afford. Unless of course the contracts with the suppliers means it will cost us more to cancel the projects that see them through to completion. Nothing would suprise me in government.

I hear the budget has been delayed, so I just wonder what's going to be in it. I'm sure the truth won't be spelled out in the Chancellor's speech, we'll have to pick at the fine print in order to get the full picture. I doubt it will be cheery news.

Finally, just what will happen when the country goes bankrupt is close to or actually defaults on loan payments? That's an interesting point. Will we be strongarmed into new alliances or changes in policy in return for renegotiating repayment terms? It would be an interesting exercise to see where the bulk of our liabilities lies and therefore who would have greatest influence over the conduct of the UK government.

I'm watching 2009 with great interest, but what happens in 2010 fills me with great trepidation. The UK will emerge from 2010 a changed nation.