So odd that the Marquis of Bath should sadly have died as Longleat featured in one of my pieces. I have a sixth sense. Sweden, not in lockdown of the kind many of us find ourselves in, appears to have similar figures to most other places.
What's up?
THE INSIDIOUS EFFECTS OF SYSTEMIC PARANOIA
1. Why the Chinese Actively Looked For Coronavirus
It transpires that I was wrong to suggest early on that the coronavirus strategy game involving, among others, the Rockefeller Foundation and Bill and Melinda Gates took place at the Military (Olympic) Games in Wuhan. Blame that on wrong information I received. Many of you will have worked out the truth of what happened anyway. But for those who haven't, it occurred in the United States on 18 October 2019 on the precise day that those games opened in Wuhan.
That accounts for the latest spat between Trump and China, with Trump outraged at a Chinese suggestion the 300 American troops simultaneously brought the virus to those games. Notwithstanding that one of the last times the US conducted a chemical or other attack strategy game was in 2001 - less than eight weeks before 9/11, the notion that the American troops would have done such a thing is clearly ludicrous. But much of this now explains why having tested just seven people who fell ill in the Chinese market, the Chinese immediately concluded that they had contracted coranavirus.
2. Psychological Transmission
Given the timing of the strategy game and the arrival of US troops, coronavirus was uppermost in Chinese minds. As such, it was nothing more or less than paranoia. That paranoia informed Chinese minds that it was a coronavirus which they were looking for inside those patients. So then one goes to the way in which it then took off in Wuhan and arrived not so much later in Italy before crossing the world and subsiding in China. If it wasn't and isn't a coronavirus - if it isn't even a flu virus - what happened and what is going on? It isn't as if thousands of people didn't become very unwell. Well, first let's look at Italy. Astute readers will recall that with the Chinese business having been in an alarmist European media, it kicked off in Italy with the arrival of Chinese tourists. In the UK it was much the same. A Chinese student in York. And here one has to go to the nature of paranoia, to paranoid schizophrenia even, and certainly to the medical area of mass hysteria. That is, if the theory started with paranoia then it would be natural that it then travelled with paranoia.
But let's for a moment pitch it slightly lower at the medical condition of anxiety which I and many others have suffered from in everyday life as we knew it. A lot of us in our time have been shown a list by our medics of no less than 30 odd symptoms of anxiety. Many of them are linked to breathing. Breathing irregularities. Breathing constraints. Tightness around the chest. Sweating as if having a fever. Cold or flu like symptoms in the nose and throat as a consequence of inadequate breathing. And a racing or irregular heartbeat. Of course, rationally those people who suffer from other more immediately serious ailments and conditions will be impacted physically to a much greater extent by anxiety of this nature. After this, panic can set in and build upon panic so that their combination of illnesses becomes worse.
3. The Globalisation of Anxiety
This, I suggest, is what happened first in Wuhan. A localised news network bringing in that controlled media way of the Chinese the story of those who had fallen ill, the idea that it was a coronavirus, and linking it with an attack from an enemy, the United States, which inadvertently heightened paranoia as well as anxiety. Other parts of China were barely affected not so much because of roadblocks as media silence everywhere else in China. Wuhan folks who were all set to travel then took those heightened anxieties with them when they got on the plane. By the time they got to Italy or Britain, they were in two completely different minds. One, relief at escaping coronavirus in China as they believed it to be and two, new concerns about their own welfare in the West if the US had indeed attacked China in that way as they saw it.
From thereon, Western media and politicians did the rest, creating an unprecedented climate of intense anxiety and paranoia which then affected the breathing of many with other very serious conditions and with a cumulative effect. Politicians and media types were, of course, not immune from their own impacts themselves. Indeed, it was they who were consumed daily by them, hence the far higher rates of illness in such people certainly at least at the outset.
It may be worth asking the question here why it is that a coronavirus should have had such devastating effect now when in humans coronaviruses have only recently been discovered. In fact, they weren't known at all until 1937 when they were discovered in birds. In 1965, it was declared that a few very mild diseases in humans were coronaviruses but it wasn't until SARS in 2002 when they were seen to be serious. Suddenly, just 19 years later, and via the film "Contagion", here we all are with nothing in centuries of history that preceded it. No I'm sorry. That is too much of a coincidence of timing. Rationally, one might have expected someone to have gone back in distant history and renamed known pandemics coronaviruses but so far as I am aware no one ever has done. And in terms of any mutation, 19 years is a mere blink.
4. The Unscientific Method of Management
Contrast with Trump's America. it was much slower to take off in the United States. What an odd phenomenon given the number of Chinese people who travel there. That is, until one realises that Trump's unscientific bluster was a barrier. Unwise in the extreme no doubt - the man is a crazy loose cannon - but it may well have kept levels of paranoia down in popular Trump areas and with it the statistics remained low. The polarised media there was perhaps for the first time in history not entirely unhelpful. Fox News viewers probably panicked less until the line from the White House shifted.
In parallel, it is popular to say that countries which claim not to have any or many cases are lying. North Korea, some ex states of the old Soviet Union, and so on. That may or may not be true. I started with Sweden. Sweden is not in that category but nor are its figures especially high given its comparative liberalism to date. But it will not be permitted to see if its strategy is working. It will be required under ratcheted up international peer group pressure to kowtow. Elsewhere - in those regimes which always do their own bizarre thing - the fact that the political line is denial and the media is heavily censored will without doubt minimise mass hysteria. Many are probably breathing more easily in such places, That is, in the absence of a systemically induced borderline schizophrenia. So their statistics may be fairly accurate and remain low.
5. Test the Children - Learn The Truth
Finally, a brief word here about children. Children generally suffer terribly with influenza. Spanish Flu mainly affected young people. There is no intrinsic reason why a coronavirus should not impact to the same rate on children as a flu although survival rates in this age would for them be promising. For example, one coronavirus is the common cold and kids catch that and pass it on with ease too. No. Children don't understand what is happening here. They are almost as oblivious to the horrific detail as a citizen in Turkmenistan which has even banned the use of the word "coranavirus".
Consequently most are largely absent of extreme anxiety and paranoia. And while a tiny number of children in the UK have sadly died in hospital, a tiny number always sadly do. They always have serious health conditions. There is no current evidence whatsoever that there is a virus which is rapidly passing from child to child and given testing priorities and shortages there won't be information on them for a long time. It may well be that a virus isn't passing through them.