Noble Prize Awarded by Trump for Paper on Covid-19 to Harvard Med School Epidemiologist Brownstein
Summery: The paper “Analysis of hospital traffic and search engine data in Wuhan China indicates early disease activity in the Fall of 2019” by John Brownstein et al of Harvard Med. School is proved to be total garbage that it deserves a Noble Prize, the Trump version of Nobel Prize. Based on this trash paper, Trump ‘s manager Lewandorski spearheaded a hate propaganda on China, similar to Powell’s WMD charge on Iraq with a tube of detergent, while also covering up his boss’s failure. Trump, Fox News etc. then helped to spread this vicious disinformation around the world with little resistance. While cunning, he is proved with solid logic to be either a Moron or something bizarrely worse: deliberately letting loose the pandemic. This hoax exemplifies the gist of Trump philosophy: build trumpers core by bombarding out lies upon lies at presidential scale that the fact-checkers can’t keep up with. Brainwashing the population with lies, hatred, and bigotry, continuously and hardly corrected at all, will have accumulated effect in all Americans minds. When hatred has been sowed, an evil political correctness will be formed, a cold war or even a hot war is underway. The cleanup of Trump disinformation is a tough job but necessary before it’s too late.
The paper (from now on refer to the above paper) states:
“Evidence suggests that the virus may have already been circulating at the time of the outbreak. Here we use satellite imagery of hospital parking lots and Baidu search queries of disease related terms to investigate this possibility.”
In short, they concluded that Covid-19 may have started at ~2019–08–01, instead of the patient 0 (a backtracked case, also called index case, ref 8.) date ~2019–12–01.
( Quick note, another academic paper appeared on Harvard site debunking the Brownstein paper, see ref. 11 )
1. The paper will lead to absurd contradiction If assuming the transmission rate and death rate have remained roughly constant, a legitimate assumption currently: ~350 millions of people would have died globally, and the whole world population would have been infected, and we would be herd-immune now.
This is from the fact that covid-19 cases increases with an exponential law if uncontrolled, the speed is doubling per ~3 days, observed in most countries, with few exceptions, such as Japan and India, most likely due to that the transmission there is not free.
Exponential increase of “doubling per ~3 days” looks like this:
1, 2, 4, … 2¹⁰=1024, … 2²⁰= ~1 million, … 2³⁰= ~1 billion, as time passes by its doubling unit,
The doubling unit time is ~3 days (2.5–4 days), that means, the infections cases will be ~1000 in 1 month, ~1 million in 2 month, ~1 billion in 3 months.
The paper says the epidemic started in early Fall 2019. more specifically say 2019–08–01 as indicated by the paper. So there are 5 months, or ~150 days for the virus to spread freely until China locked down on 2020/01/23. So by the time of lockdown, there would be 150/3=50 doubling periods passed, or 2⁵⁰ infections, that’s a million times of China total population!
We can also estimate the approximate delay for the virus to spill over across country border, by assuming that a spill-over is about to happen when infection# reached 10000 in a country, i.e., it takes log2(10000) doubling periods, = ~14 * 3 = ~42 days. This delay is about equal to the delay observed between S.Korea’s outbreak and China’s.
So, the virus would have reached US soil on ~2019/09/15, long before the Trump travel ban date 2020/01/30. Then what’s the point to have a travel ban if covid-19 were already all over the country? How ironic that they were bragging (ref 4.) Trump’s great travel ban using this shoddy paper while not realizing it would actually nullify it.
US implemented social distancing on 2020/03/16, from 2019/09/15 to this date, there’s 6 months in which the virus can spread freely, more than enough to infect the whole US population, and it would be impossible to have observed the current US curve that we have observed actually.
Actually, even moving back the outbreak date by just one month, i.e. to ~2019/11/01, would have caused total disastrous effect. China’s death toll would have exceeded ~1000 times of its current death toll, i.e. ~4 millions, and US’s total infections would be 1000* 2 millions, a number bigger than US population, meaning all Americans were infected, death# in US would be 15 millions.
The elementary science behind the above reasoning
Let’s have a look at the epidemic curves for covid-19 below this paragraph. To demonstrate the exponentially increasing feature of the epidemic, the Y-axis is in logarithmic scale. Observe that the curves of various countries are clustered in the proximity of “every 3 days” straight line for the initial part of outbreak. This is why I said earlier “the speed is doubling per ~3 days”. This only occurs for initial part, because then the virus is in free spreading mode.
Any theory of covid-19 must reconcile itself with the highly consistent collection of curves above, which Brownstein, a epidemiologist of the Harvard Medical School ignored. The curves and data, although not 100% accurate, are works from all countries in the world, and the paper ignored and would actually contradict with the curves.
We see that China’s data sits very well in the cluster. So, unless the Chinese had time-traveled to the future to have a sneak at all other countries’ curves, how could they have “faked” it this perfectly?
Stable Genius is either a Moron or Something bizarrely worse.
Let’s review Trump’s hunch remark about covid-19 on Mar 5. 2020 (google for its video or audio): “The 3.4% number is really a false number, My hunch is, … personally, I’d say the number is way under 1%.” He further called it a “corona flu”.
We know a flu has a death rate of ~0.1%, basically Trump accused China and WHO overplayed the severity by 34 times.
Can you believe it that China would tarnish its own image by overstating the death rate by 34 times? Furthermore, China actually had locked down entire country for one and half months to fight it at the time of Trump speech, that’s an effort with enormous cost. All of these were just for one purpose: to cheat Trump? What a bizarre hunch! There can be only two possible explanations: either he is a moron, or he downplayed the pandemic on purpose so he can let loose it for some dark agenda.
In addition to the stupid hunch speech, there are also his “Slow the testing down” remark, the bleach and light remark, the hydroxychloroquine remark, his stupid bullying words attacks on many, these evidences point him to the direction of moron. These certainly can not be behaviors of stable genius(IQ > 145), not even mediocre (IQ 100), most likely dumb (IQ ~90).
As if not enough, in the spirit of his bizarre hunch, he tweeted on Apr 17, “Liberate Michigan! Liberate Virginia!” while US infection# was still on the plateau. Clearly even a guy with mediocre IQ would have waited for the cases to go down to a level manageable, which wont be long.
If Trump is not a moron, then he must be downplaying the pandemic on purpose. so he can let loose it. His deep-down purposes can only be guessed, 1, he wants to get rid of some “lowlifes”, one of Trump’s favorite words, utilizing the fact that death rate of certain races are exceptionally high. 2, he wants a staggering number of Americans killed and then he can nurture a deep hate to a foreign country: China, just like the conspiracy theory of FDR and Pearl harbor, to prepare for a war. This has many evidences too. For example, the hate speech by Lewandorsky on China based on this trash paper.
2. Another possibility is, which is hinted but not stated unambiguously by the paper, that covid19 was not so contagious and lethal initially, and only later mutated to become its final form. In another words, it’s like a flu initially. Then there is no reason to blame the cover-up.
We have seen that it is impossible to move back the outbreak date of covid19 even by one month, not to say to Aug 1 2019, if covid19’s transmission speed and mortality are roughly constant. So this is the only way that the paper’s claims can hold out.
If this was the case, even though there was little known facts and science supporting it yet at the time of the paper and Trump tweet ( ref 4. ), then covid19 could go unnoticed, below the radar of clinic doctors in China and the rest of the world (e.g. in Italy, ref 3.). So if they did not even know that a pandemic happened, in Trump’s term, it’s only a flu, how can they be blamed for cover-up?
Conclusion, regardless of option 1 or option 2, the paper can not be used as evidence to accuse cover-up of covid-19 by China.
3. Specific flaws of the paper
This section is bit boring, you can skip to next if you like.
David Perlin, chief science officer at the Center for Discovery and Innovation in New Jersey, said the following about the paper:
“I think some of the methods are questionable and their interpretation is slightly over-interpreted,… The problem is we only have a subset of data here. I always worry when people start drawing inferences from data subsets, cherry-picking data.”
The orange curve in the above graph is the extrapolated cabs volume in several related Wuhan hospitals, the 1st dash-line is 2019/08/01, 2nd is 2019/12/01 (the current presumed patient 0), 3rd is 2020/01/23 (Wuhan lockdown). Put aside whether the curve is correctly extrapolated and can represent the reality, the rise-up between line 1 and line 2 is not significant, and the decrease starting from line 2 is even strange, why should traffic volume in hospitals decrease while the epidemic was rising up sharply if the theory and data of the paper were consistent and factual?
In the above graph, the dash lines have the same meaning as above, the black curve is search volume for cough, the orange curve is search volume for diarrhea. Between dash 1 and dash 2 is the alledged time period that the paper say is the unreported (or “cover-up”) initial outbreak period. However, the cough curve is both low in terms of level and rising-up rate with respect to the curve before it, this means it is most likely an over-interpreted fake signal. For the diarrhea curve, note it only has sharp rise before line 1, i.e. outside the outbreak period, and then remained almost constant up to line 2. If this curve can be interpreted as an indicator, shouldn’t it rise up a little as the cough curve does? Furthermore, this curve even fell down a little after line 2 (correspond to presumed patient 0 date), this is even more inconsistent. To be honest with Brownstein, a Harvard Medical School Epidemiologist, what you have done is not “slightly over-interpretation”, it is way over-interpretation or distortion.
For other specific flaws of the paper, see ref. 11.
4. ABC News “cover-up” accusation on China
The above picture is presented to audiences on ABC News, provided by Brownstein et al, as an insinuation that China made a huge cover-up. Look, for this hospital alone, for this single time, the cabs number increase is 321, there might be some 10 hospitals like this in Wuhan, so presumably there were already a few thousands covid19 patients ( A ridiculously big number that makes me laugh). But, notice that the two pictures are for two different dates of the year, one for Oct 10, another for Oct 17. Common sense tells us that occupancy in hospital parking lots varies a lot, both randomly and also correlates to time of day, date of year, month, and week to some degree. How much meaning can be assigned to comparing data of Oct 10 2018 with Oct 17 2019? This make no sense! Using the same shenanigan, but picking a different pair of dates to compare, I can for sure make it look like the cabs number was decreasing from 2018 to 2019 from the same raw data set. This is downright cherry-picking and outright distortion. Compared with the original paper, ABC News and Brownstein both went further down the line of cherry-picking and distortion, it’s more like cheating.
I can’t help but wonder how ABC News behaved during the Iraq frame-up by Bush administration.
5. Based on the shoddy paper, Lewandorski launched a vicious racist attack on 1.4 billion or more people, using presidential resource, to cover Trump’s ass
Let’s hear out the interview of Lewandorski on Fox News:
Here is a part of the transcript,
At 1:38 Lewandorski: “the people of China have not only been dishonest with the people of United State, but also the people of the world, we need to make sure they are held accountable for that. Either they lied to the world health organization, or WHO did not do their due-diligence when they said the virus could not be spread from person to person contact….”
1st off, “they said the virus could not be spread from person to person contact”, this statement is a cherry-picking, some Chinese doctors indeed said that, but that’s when the they were in the dark and knew very little about the virus. This was corrected publicly as soon as Jan 20 when more senior Chinese experts (Zhong Nanshan etc.) got involved.
The shoddy paper provided the false basis of “dishonest” charge on China and “cover-up” accusation by ABC News, Fox News etc. Here I call into doubt of the ethics of Brownstein team. Since he is an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, it is highly possible he knew all the above things I just wrote, yet he and the team choose to write and publish it, and when it was used as the basis of a hate speech, they have stayed silent and did not murmur a word. Brownstein deserves a “Noble” Prize, a Trump version of Nobel Prize bestowed by Trump personally.
I get it, you had dug up this shoddy paper as another fake evidence of China cover-up, feeling so indignant, you may lament on CCP or China government, but what the hell is there a need for you to attack “the people of China”?
To understand the seriousness of Lewandorski’s behaviors, Let’s mimic Lewandorski’s style of speaking,
- Trump/Lewandoski/Fox News have been lying and dishonest with the people of America many times, so “the people of America have been lying and dishonest with the people of America”
- Lewandoski is vicious racism bigot, so: “the people of America” are vicious racism bigots.
- Trump is a pussy grabber, so: “the people of America” are pussy grabbers.
Very lately, solid evidence (ref 3.) showed up that covid-19 was circulating in Italy as early as mid last December, about the same date it began in China, way before Italy’s 1st acknowledged case, so Trump goons should shout out:
- “The people of Italy” have not only been dishonest with the people of America…, should be held accountable…
When Lewandoski used the expression “the people of China”, this represents all the people of China, including newly born babies. So according to Lewandoski, even a newly born babies are “dishonest with the people of America, the people of the world, should be held accountable”.
When talking about Derek Chauvin, Trump said Chauvin is only one bad apple in 100 good apples, he also said “There were very fine people on both sides” when talking about neo-Nazi in Charlottesville, clearly he is very articulate to avoid collateral damage.
Lewandorski is Trump’s campaign manager, clearly he is not so dumb as to confuse a few members with an entire collection, just like Trump. He does not need to expand the scapegoats to all Chinese to cover Trump’s ass. So Lewandorski must be deliberately speaking this way. This is not a slip, this is true representation of the viciousness of Lewandorski. Not only that, they also want to hold “the people of China” accountable, so what’s there in your evil mind for the 1.4 billion people?
Lewandorski is surely more vicious than Hitler, who only hated about 10 millions people (Jewish population then), He hates 1,400,000,000 innocent people of China, some of them are newly born babies! He was publicly sowing hatred towards them internationally, Trump and Fox News were publicly endorsing this hideous behavior, as they always, since they are birds of a feather.
If Trump and Lewandorski can expand their scapegoats to “the people of China”, then certainly the brainwashed Trump supporters can expand it again to include other Asians who look like a Chinese, such as Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, etc. Racists judge people by simple criteria, your nationality or skin color and outlook. This is exactly happening in US and many countries.
Under this Trump administration, accompanying the rise of Trump-Bannon-ism, there has been gushing of false charges and smear campaigns on China, each one deepens the hatred toward China in US populace. Imagine a third or more of population in US are deeply brainwashed with hatred, a huge political pressure and bias will be formed, that will create a mechanism that re-enforce itself and propel US-China into a cold war or even a hot war fast.
This Lewandorski/Brownstein hoax is in a way similar to what Trump did in the Ukraine events that triggered his impeachment course, he is trading a matter of national interests/world peace with a matter of personal interests. Hijacking of national agenda to serve his personal agenda is typical Trump style. Possibly, Trump’s entire political and business life is about trading something that he does not own for his personal profit, even if that something is the fate of earth. The gist of the art of deal by Trump.
References:
2. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/21/politics/trump-china-praise-coronavirus-timeline/index.html
3. Coronavirus was already in Italy by December, waste water study finds
4. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1270538700926136323
5. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/cyber-saturday-doubts-swirl-around-062752175.html
6. https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_COVID-19_pandemic_in_December_2019
9. Kishore Mahbubani talking devil of China, US is setting bad example for China
10. Joe Biden needs a China narrative that refutes todays political angst, by George Will
11. Academic paper refuting Brownstein et al, https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/42689379
12. https://twitter.com/schneiderleonid/status/1279013371753398273
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