The Lombardy Analysis

A pattern difficult to explain by viral spread.¹An article by eugyppius (The Earliest Days of the Italian Pandemic, or: Why Nobody Wants To Talk About February 2020 Anymore) got Jonathan Engler digging in the Lombardy regional death data.

The first thing to note… is the extreme synchronicity of the excess death curves… surprising in the context of a “spreading” virus. The next thing to note is the height and sharpness of the peaks in deaths.

This extremely rapid rise and fall, to unprecedented levels, also seen synchronously elsewhere in Lombardy, does not look at all natural. However, it does resemble another, non-viral incident. In 2003 there was a huge spike in elderly deaths in France, triggered by a heatwave…

The % excess stands out like a sore thumb. Yet it is only 80% – compared to 800% for Bergamo in March 2020… It was actually a national scandal since the conclusion was that most of the deaths could be attributed to neglect…

It seems like the protective measures were largely common-sense “care” and those who didn’t receive such care were at massively increased risk of dying. We need to think of the social care apparatus around the frail as their vital life-support system.

I suspect that in many places in Spring 2020, this life-support system was essentially switched off, or certainly substantially downgraded…

I don’t think we are asking the right questions about Spring 2020 at all. Timing of “lockdown” is quite obviously a distraction from the core issue. But I also think natural vs lab origin is not the most pressing question to answer…

If I imagine that the major part of the mortality had been caused by a variety of policy decisions I had made, the number one thing I’d want is for people to occupy themselves obsessing over the origin of the virus rather than the cause of the deaths.

So natural or lab-leak, as long as we keep the fear going, we surely need to be better “prepared”. That’s great for business. And great for justifying centralised control.

A more “zoomed out” version of this is: “A virus doesn’t spread across thousands of kilometres within days and peaks at the same time.”

Jonathan Engler, August 22nd

Remind you of anything?

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  An article by eugyppius (The Earliest Days of the Italian Pandemic, or: Why Nobody Wants To Talk About February 2020 Anymore) got Jonathan Engler digging in the Lombardy regional death data.