Is Italy On Lockdown Because It's An Election Year In The US?

We might as well write an article about how Bigfoot is affecting cell phone service, because that makes just as much sense. For the sake of those who think that US Democrats are behind the coronavirus, or for every armchair warrior armed with Google who thinks they know more than literal doctors... This article is for you.

Is the entire country of Italy on lockdown because it's an election year in the US?

First, let's touch on the testimony of ​Cristina Higgins, an American who lives in Italy with her husband and two daughters. On Tuesday, Higgins posted a description of life "at the heart of the coronavirus crisis" on Facebook.

"Each of you, today, not the government, not the school district, not the mayor, each individual citizen has the chance, today to take actions that will deter the Italian situation from becoming your own country’s reality," she wrote. "The only way to limit contagion is for millions of people to change their behavior today."

Italy has placed 60 million residents on a nationwide lockdown for at least a month, banned travel, and closed schools and other large gathering places. Grocery stores, banks, and pharmacies remain open, but people must stand 3 feet apart to help avoid spreading the virus.

Below is the Vatican before and after the  ̶c̶o̶r̶o̶n̶a̶v̶i̶r̶u̶s̶  US Presidential election:

And here is the Piazza Duomo in Milan before and after the  ̶c̶o̶r̶o̶n̶a̶v̶i̶r̶u̶s̶   Democrats tried to thwart the US election:

We know. The delusion is harder to keep up with when presented with facts.

Maybe it's not the Democrats trying to mess with the election... Let's switch focus to the media!

The MEDIA is causing panic!

Let's run with this for a minute and talk about all the fear and panic the mainstream media is causing. First of all, they keep sharing all this information that the CDC and WHO keeps sending them. This is clearly the biggest problem. Forget the election. Why would the media disperse information released by these people? What does some guy working at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention know about this? What makes someone at the World Health Organization an expert on the coronavirus?

Let's look at some of the information that isn't coming from the CDC or the WHO and isn't being widely spread on the mainstream media. 

The story of Luca Franzese and his sister Teresa Franzese begins when Teresa died. Teresa died of the coronavirus in her bed at home Saturday. By Sunday, Luca posted a video on Facebook pleading for help because no one would remove his 47 year old sister's corpse from the home that Luca was now quarantined inside of.

“I have my sister in bed, dead, I don’t know what to do,” he in the video. “I cannot give her the honor she deserves because the institutions have abandoned me. I contacted everyone, but nobody was able to give me an answer.” 

A funeral home finally agreed to remove Teresa's body on Monday, wearing used masks, sterile shoes, hazmat suits, glasses, and gloves.

Okay. Maybe this isn't the media blowing it out of proportion or some kind of insane attempt to sway a US election. 

We still need something to grasp onto though, damn it. Let's maybe repost flu statistics and point out how many people the flu kills versus the coronavirus! That's it. That's what we've got to do. Screw those doctors. A simple Googling would show you that more people died of the flu than the coronavirus, so obviously the flu is worse!

The flu! It killed more people than the coronavirus has!

Yes. Raw numbers show that the flu has killed more people than the coronavirus. But that's not how these things work.

First, the flu is a widespread virus. Everyone everywhere can get the flu. Some people get the flu yearly. There have been no attempts to slow or contain the flu. The flu is everywhere. In order to compare the two, the playing field must be even. 

​Let's use Pennsylvania as an example with it's 12 million residents. health.pa.gov says that between 600,000 and 2,400,000 PA residents get the flu each year and 120 to 2,000 Pennsylvanians die of the flu each year. That's a VERY conservative 0.1% mortality rate.

Now let's be generous with the flu statistics and assume that, I dunno, 100,000 people are infected with the flu. This means that statistically, 100 people would die. Unfortunately, global numbers for the coronavirus reached 100,000 infected on March 6th. The death toll that day was at 3,500. If you're having trouble with the math, that's 35 times more people dead per 100,000.

But since we love grasping at straws, let's go ahead and talk about how these other countries have poor Healthcare systems. (Actually, Italy is ranked 2nd, Japan is 10th, and Australia is 32nd with the US coming in at 37th.) But let's grasp those straws and pretend that the US has the best Healthcare in the whole world and we can handle this thing better and we will make the mortality rate go down...

When the US had 1,000 confirmed cases, there were 30 deaths nationally. To compare the US statistics with the flu figures above, that's approximately 3,000 deaths per 100,000 infections. (not to mention that US health officials have confirmed that they have posthumously tested deaths believed to be the flu but found out that they were in fact the coronavirus.)

So in a fair comparison, the flu has a 0.1% mortality rate and the coronavirus has ~3% mortality rate.

Before you go off on a tangent about how the numbers may be off and people might have it and not be reported, let's first understand that the flu also has the ability to go undetected and have skewed statistics. Then let's think of a fair margin of error.  Let's say that twice as many people have gotten the coronavirus and never reported it. That still leaves the mortality rate at ~1.5% which is still 15 times the mortality rate.

If the flu has 100 deaths per 100,000 infections, how many coronavirus infections would be needed to be less deadly than the flu? For the mortality rate to be 0.1% with the current 38 US coronavirus deaths, the total infected would need to be 38,000. Globally, with 4,600 deaths, there would have to be 4,600,000 people infected to parallel the flu mortality rate. But there aren't 4,600,000 people infected. There are 126,000. 

Conspiracy theorists... You have been defeated with facts, math, and reality. The coronavirus is a pandemic. In the words of the CDC: your life will be severely impacted.