Regarding those 21 million cell phone accounts cancelled. This is a good example of how conspiracy theorists use loose thinking to support some conclusion. No one, not even the most rabid China hater, believes that 21 million Chinese died from C19. One article i read suggested it could be one or two million, which is still a huge stretch. But let's say it were one million, that leaves 20 million cancelled accounts unexplained, and if you can find an explanation for those, why can't you find an explanation for 21 million?
In other words, the 21 million cancelled accounts don't provide any evidence at all for unreported deaths. There might be other evidence, but the cell phone theory is a total non-starter.
When there's a lack of doctors and equipment, why use resources on the dead instead of the living with autopsies and posthumous tests?
Yes, but when people die at home, their survivors surely can report the death to some central registry, with some description of the symptoms. That might not be enough to conclude for certainty in all cases that the cause was COVID, but at the least one would get a range.
One thing I feel will come out of all this is that companies will realise how little business trips, international or otherwise, are actually needed. I suspect businesses all over the world are realising how much quicker and more efficient meetings and conferences are when done online.
And this applies to education, too. Do students really need to attend a lecture when they can watch/hear the video? There are always advantages in experiencing something live, but the question is whether those advantages outweigh the possible savings in time, money and energy by doing it online.
But better not get me started, or soon I will be questioning why we need huge stadiums, usually paid for by the taxpayers, to host sporting events.
A comment on that excellent link on counting the virus within the body that Aphro posted upthread.
There's one important point the author didn’t make. In the beginning of the article, he notes how viral spread in a population can be represented by a simple simulation, where red dots, infected individuals, move about randomly, and contact and infect the gray dots. As time goes on, more and more gray dots are converted into red ones.
The point I want to emphasize here is that you can describe movement of viral particles in the body in much the same way. The superficial assumption is that once viral particles get into the body, the person becomes infected, but the reality is probably more complicated. In the first place, multiple particles are required for infection. A single viral particle isn’t going to infect anyone. A few dozen might, depending on the virus, but this is a random process. For example, two individuals might be exposed to an identical amount of viral particles—I mean the virus actually enters their nasal passages--yet one becomes infected and the other doesn’t. Or an individual might be exposed to an identical amount of virus on two different occasions, yet the first time there is no infection, while the second time there is. And just to be clear, when I say that in one situation, there is no infection, I don’t mean the individual is infected but asymptomatic. I mean s/he is not infected at all—would test negative for either the virus or for antibodies to it.
Why? Infection begins when viral particles attach to cells in the body, enter it, and start replicating themselves using the cell’s own synthetic processes. Whether a virus contacts a cell at all is somewhat random; the law of mass action is in play, governed by statistical probabilities. Think of the particles diffusing through the air; at some point they may or may not bump into one of the target cells. If they don’t, they will eventually get flushed out of the system; if they do, they may or may not attach or bind to the cell.
If you have a certain concentration of particles, you can in theory use an equation to calculate, on average, how many of them will contact and bind to cells. It's quite analogous to the equation pharmacologists use to calculate the relationship between dose of a drug and response to it. But like any statistical average, this number is fuzzy. Maybe one hundred particles would be enough sometimes, but by chance it might not be other times, whereas eighty might be enough some other time.
This undoubtedly comes into play during viral spread in a population. Why do some people become infected while others, who may be moving about in pretty much the same environment, don’t? There will be differences in amounts of viral particles exposed to, but also, if these amounts are relatively low, in whether or not they trigger an infection.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram