You are correct. The CDC began hiring quarantine managers in many states a month before the virus was known. High paid managers, like up to $100K per year. Careers are being invested in quarantines... in a country which has never had major quarantines... a month before the virus was even known. So. That tells me that all the hysteria is engineered.
It's not uncommon in Italy for 20,000 people to die of the flu in any flu season. And since November, only about 4500 have died of the virus. So. I rule Italy out as proof of a pandemic.
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In my area, funerals are prohibited. Over 50 at church is prohibited.
There weren't such stringent measures taken during the polio epidemics of the 20th Century! Theaters and swimming pools closed, stuff like that, but not ordinary businesses.
Everyone buys into this mass hysteria, in part because of the way charts show the virus deaths' growing exponentially. However, the charts are completely irrational, because they start at zero. But there never was a zero. There just weren't tests widely available.
Reliable sources say the virus did not come from China necessarily. So, it may have been around for decades undetected. After all, the symptoms are the same as the flu.
I've been asking on Quora what makes people think this virus is "novel". The answer is that "novel" has a technical meaning in virology or maybe biology generally of which I was unaware -- and I used to
teach biology! Apparently "novel" means "not previously discovered", "not previously characterized", "not previously recognized as such"...words to that effect. But people have been assuming it's actually
new. Maybe it's like patent practice, wherein if something was not publicly known, it can be claimed as novel.
If this virus is not new, then some people may have had specific immunity to it. Apparently antibodies aren't widespread, though, because the virus does not find any antibody to react to in pooled human sera.
A virus doesn't have to be new to cause epidemics. The agent of the aforementioned polio, poliovirus, was ancient. Sanitation had gotten too good, so that while cholera and dysentery were prevented, people were also prevented from getting the early exposure, and hence natural immunity to, poliovirus, so epidemics with signficant numbers of paralytic cases started occurring.
We old and sick types get viral pneumonias. Enough of us die from it that it's considered one of the leading causes of death. The people dying from Covid-19 would likely have gotten some other fatal pneumonia sooner or later. Nobody previously has thought to try to prevent this phenomenon by controlling pneumonia viruses in the general population, even if somewhat effective vaccines for them are developed.
2 years ago at this time of year, I contracted parainfluenza B, an infection that mainly affects babies. I wound up nearly dying, not from the infection, but from overaggressive treatment for it. I think I might've explained how here. Some fraction of cases of Covid-19 will result in stories like that too, just going by the odds in medical treatment.
