Covid-19 Global Lockdown

Let’s try a little thought experiment. Just for fun. To pass the time while we’re indefinitely locked down inside our homes, compulsively checking the Covid-19 “active cases” and “total death” count, washing our hands every twenty minutes, and attempting not to touch our faces.

Before we do, though, I want to make it clear that I believe this Covid-19 thing is real, and is probably the deadliest threat to humanity in the history of deadly threats to humanity. According to the data I’ve been seeing, it’s only a matter of days, or hours, until nearly everyone on earth is infected and is either dying in agony and alone or suffering mild, common cold-like symptoms, or absolutely no symptoms whatsoever.

I feel that I need to state this clearly, before we do our thought experiment, because I don’t want anyone mistakenly thinking that I’m one of those probably Russian-backed Nazis who are going around saying, “it’s just the flu,” or who are spreading dangerous conspiracy theories about bio-weapons and martial law, or who are otherwise doubting or questioning the wisdom of locking down the entire world (and likely triggering a new Great Depression) on account of the discovery of some glorified bug.

Obviously, this is not just the flu. Thousands of people are dying from it. OK, sure, the flu kills many more than that, hundreds of thousands of people annually, but this Covid-19 virus is totally new, and not like any of the other millions of viruses that are going around all the time, and the experts are saying it will probably kill, or seriously sicken, or briefly inconvenience, millions or even billions of people if we don’t lock down entire countries and terrorize everyone into submission.

Which, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for that … this is not the time to be questioning anything the corporate media and the authorities tell us. This is a time to pull together, turn our minds off, and follow orders. OK, sure, normally, it’s good to be skeptical, but we’re in a goddamn global state of emergency! Idris Elba is infected for Chrissakes!

Sorry … I’m getting a little emotional. I’m a big-time Idris Elba fan. The point is, I’m not a Covid-denialist, or a conspiracy theorist, or one of those devious Chinese or Russian dissension-sowers. I know for a fact that this pandemic is real, and warrants whatever “emergency measures” our governments, global corporations, and intelligence agencies want to impose on us.

No, I’m not an epidemiologist, but I have a close friend who knows a guy who dated a woman who dated a doctor who personally knows another doctor who works in a hospital in Italy somewhere, and she (i.e., my friend, not the doctor in Italy) posted something on Facebook yesterday that was way too long to read completely but was a gut-wrenching account of how Covid-19 is killing Kuwaiti babies in their incubators!

Or maybe it was Italian babies. Like I said, it was too long to read.

Also, did you see the story about the baby that was born infected?! Or the stories about the people in their 30s and 40s who were more or less in perfect health (except for, you know, cancer or whatever) who died from (or with) the Covid plague?! And what about all those charts and graphs?! And those pictures of people in hazmat suits?! And those Italians singing Turandot on their balconies?! Doesn’t that just make you want to break down and cry over the sheer humanity of it all?!

No, there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that Covid-19 is the deadliest global pandemic humankind has ever faced, and that we have no choice but to cancel everything, confine everyone inside their home, wreck the entire global economy, force working class people even further into debt, pour trillions into the investment banks, cancel elections, censor the Internet, and otherwise implement a global police state.

But what if it wasn’t? Just hypothetically. What if this wasn’t the deadliest global pandemic humankind has ever faced? (I’m just posing the question as a thought experiment, so please don’t report me to the WHO, or the CDC, or FEMA, or whoever.) What if this new coronavirus was just another coronavirus like all the other coronaviruses that people die from (or with) all the time? What if the fact that this one is “new” didn’t really mean all that much, or possibly anything at all, because coronaviruses are always mutating, and every year there are a lot of new variants?

Relax, OK? I know this one is different, and totally unlike anything ever encountered by virologists in the history of virology. Remember, this is just a thought experiment. These are just hypothetical questions.

Here’s another hypothetical question. What if all the scary statistics we’ve been seeing (e.g., the death rates, the explosion of “cases,” etc.) weren’t unquestionable scientific facts, but rather, were, like other statistics, based on things like sample groups, and dependent on a host of factors and variables, which you kind of need to know to make sense of anything?

Say, for example, you tested everyone that died of acute respiratory failure on a given day in your Italian hospital, and you discovered that, let’s say, five of those patients had been infected with Covid-19. So you feed that number to the WHO, and they add it to the “total deaths” count, regardless of whether the folks who died had terminal cancer, or heart disease, or had also been infected with the common flu, or some other type of coronavirus. That would probably skew your “death” count, wouldn’t it?

Or, say you wanted to test for the virus to keep track of all the “active cases” and generate an infection rate, but you can’t test hundreds of millions of people, because no one has that many tests. So, you test everyone who turns up sick, or thinks they’re sick and demands to be tested, or who touched someone sick who you already tested (though you’re not even sure that your test is accurate) and you come up with, let’s say, ten positive results. So you feed that number to the WHO, and they add it to the “active cases” count, regardless of the fact that everyone knows the real number is likely twenty times higher.

OK, so now you take your “active cases” number and your “total deaths” number and you do the math (keeping in mind that your “total deaths” include those cancer and heart failure people), and you end up grossly underestimating your “infection rate” and “active cases,” and grossly overestimating your “death rate” and the number of “total deaths.”

Just hypothetically, you understand. I am not suggesting this is actually happening. I certainly don’t want to get censored by Facebook (or accidentally censored by some totally innocuous technical glitch) for posting “Covid misinformation,” or tempt the Wikipedia “editors” to rush back to my Wikipedia page and label me a dangerous “conspiracy theorist” … or, you know, get myself preventatively quarantined.

It probably won’t come to that anyway, i.e., rounding up “infected persons,” “possibly infected persons,” and “disruptive” and “uncooperative persons,” and quarantining us in, like, “camps,” or wherever. All this state of emergency stuff, the suspension of our civil rights, the manipulation of facts and figures, the muzzling of dissent, the illegal surveillance, governments legislating by decree, the soldiers, the quarantines, and all the rest of it … all these measures are temporary, and are being taken for our own good, and purely out of an “abundance of caution.”

I mean, it’s not like the global capitalist empire was right in the middle of a War on Populism (a war that it has been losing up to now) and wanted to take this opportunity to crank up some disaster capitalism, terrorize the global public into a frenzy of selfish and irrational panic, and just flex its muscles to remind everybody what could happen if we all keep screwing around by voting for “populists,” tearing up Paris, leaving the European Union, and otherwise interfering with the forward march of global capitalism.

No, it certainly isn’t like that. It is an actual plague that is probably going to kill you and your entire family if you don’t do exactly what you’re told. So, forget this little thought experiment, and prepare yourself for global lockdown. It probably won’t be so bad … unless they decide they need to run the part of exercise where it goes on too long, and people get squirrelly, and start rebelling, and looting, and otherwise not cooperating, and the military is eventually forced to deploy those Urban Unrest Suppression Vehicles, and those Anti-Domestic-Terror Forces, and …

OK, I’m getting all worked up again. I’d better take my pills and get back to Facebook. Oh, and … I should probably check up on Idris! And see if Berlin has gone to “Level 3,” in which case I’ll need to find whatever online application I need to fill out in order to leave my house.

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CJ Hopkins
March 18, 2020
Photo: Sars-CoV-2-Voren (gelb). Bild: NIAID. Lizenz: CC BY 2.0

CJ Hopkins Summer 2018 thumbnail

DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our in-house satirist and self-appointed political pundit, CJ Hopkins, and does not reflect the views and opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., its staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns. If, for whatever inexplicable reason, you appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to support it, please go to his Patreon page (where you can contribute as little $1 per month), or send your contribution to his PayPal account, so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices trying to hit our staff up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical dystopian novel, Zone 23, or Volume I of his Consent Factory Essays, or any of his subversive stage plays, which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive email, please feel free to contact him directly.

26 thoughts on “Covid-19 Global Lockdown”

  1. Another one hit right out of the park by CJ, you can’t question this narrative. Don’t worry that our CDC in the USA botched all the initial testing with a kit that they had made instead of going with test kits that were readily available.And that they do not do any contact tracing or that this shit has been here since Jan. and there are well over 100,000 cases here. And when they come out with the great VACCINE please get in line and hurry down to get a needle full of aluminum, mercury and other great things to help you. And if that doesn’t work and ends up making you sick don’t worry, they will have another needle full of stuff for that. And don’t you worry that they have fast tracked this whole sequence and passed on any animal testing, I mean what could go wrong?
    On the upside, being a classical guitarist and dealer I am pretty much an introvert anyway so this whole lock down thing is quite normal for me. And as they say in classical guitar circles “the only person lonelier than the classical guitar player is the classical guitar maker”
    I can see quite a few luthiers (guitar builders) emerging from their workshops in three months and not even knowing that the covid19 was here!
    Glad you haven’t been scrubbed as we need all the humor we can get, and if they let me say it, “for humor to be good it has to have some truth in it”.

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  2. Excellent article. Context is everything. The orchestrated scaremongering is simply overwhelming for the average busy person who as Orwell observed can’t remember what happened to themselves the other day never mind the H1N1 virus ten years ago.

    1984

    ‘“It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grams a week. And only yesterday […] it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grams a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. […] “

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  3. You sir, are a true heretic, and you should burn at the stake for your heretical thoughts.
    Here we are in sad times were millions of people die per minute, where the earth will be depopulated before Christmas thus making all the planning for sales superfluous and you surreptitiously try to sow doubt into the minds of the citizen that has to be contr…ah, helped and guided. SHAME on you sir, SHAME.

    I recommend this video (with subtitles) and the webpage to show the folly of your unsuccessful attempts to grind the concerns of those in charge of taking care of us into the dust with the heels of you Guccis.

    https://www.wodarg.com/?fbclid=IwAR3AbBY7pr4YRAUz83mAPv1UPmjwFQ7PXMq1SdBYz52jBaVrWp88tnttMa8

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  7. A proper disrobing. Well done. Found this on Dissident Voice, where it says, File under Satire. How about file under Satyr? Not for nothing it’s called a PANdemic. What you CG Jung would call the god in this dis-ease. The cure: temper in light and air and nymphs at high noon.

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  8. Great post C.J.! Glad to see you’re a regular over at OffGuardian now.

    PS – I’ve discovered a little trick I’ll pass along that helps expedite things if you happen to be standing in a particularly long line – perhaps waiting to buy yet more toilet paper at Costco for example. I simply fall to my knees and break into a completely fake extended coughing fit! If there are a few particularly stubborn group members you can even fake a brief petit mal seizure to add a little icing on top, so to speak. Works like a freaking charm I must say!

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  9. As I said commenting your previous piece on the Coronavirus… I don’t think this is a case like all the others.
    At least, for Italy it is different. Now, this doesn’t mean the Italian authorities know all the truth about thie emergency, or that if they knew it they’d be allowed to tell it to us. After all Italy is a country occup… I mean, liberated, and kept very much free, by the USA.

    But in the previous “emergencies” (read bird flu, and others, in the last 20 years), it was easy to see that our authorities pretended, and were in fact relaxed (though many million dollar worth of vaccines HAD to be purchased by the government, while it was super-clear they weren’t needed).
    It was easy to see they pretended when it came to the “War on terror”.
    Surely, as a USA-occupied zone, Italy had to send 2 or 3 of its airplanes along with the USA army’s, whenever the time to bully/kill this or that president or “terrorist” came. But you saw easily that they pretended.

    This time you see they are sincerely alarmed, and fear a tragedy,n and they aren’t pretending in the least — for the simple reason that, due also to “economic austerity” imposed by the nice folks we know, hospitals are severely under-equipped. And we are talking… Northern Italy’s hospitals! Southern Italy’s ones are, as anyone knowing the differences between the South and the North would guess, basically zero-equipped.

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  10. As of March 19, there’s a moratorium on issuing US passports (unless you can convince someone to classify you as a special life-or-death case). No specified end date for this measure. I’m sure it’s purely a matter of public health.

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  15. […] See? Everything is perfectly fine. No one is preparing for martial law. Those tanks just returned from the Middle East and are “being sent back home to Texas.” This kind of thing happens all the time. It has nothing to do with the global lockdown. […]

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  18. […] See? Everything is perfectly fine. No one is preparing for martial law. Those tanks just returned from the Middle East and are “being sent back home to Texas.” This kind of thing happens all the time. It has nothing to do with the global lockdown. […]

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  19. There’s only one thing wrong with your hypothesis: this virus unlike the flu or even pneumonia condemns those at risk (i.e. seniors and immune compromised folks) to a horrific and solitary death) and disproportionately targets the poor and people of color. And in case you think we’re expendable, take a look at who is providing your essential services and who in any other disaster would be providing at least half of the volunteer response. Just ask FEMA or the Salvation Army…oh wait you don’t believe in organized aid. Hope you never need it.

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  21. I am a hermit, a doctor of political science (yikes) with no one to rap with except my cat. Recent events catapulted me into a dark night of the soul, and today I found your site thanks to PCR (the pundit not the test) and it restored the fire in my belly along with multiple belly laughs. I am poor as a church mouse but will begin sending you what I can–God (second yikes) knows you deserve it. Merci buckets.

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  24. Why didn’t they shut down the economy for the flu but they did for corona because they are out of gas and they know sooner rather than later the people will see the emperor has no clothes and all their lies will be revealed mainly the biggest fraud ever the price rigging of real $—gold and silver!!!!

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