An alarming scientific report compiled by British researchers and shared with the Trump White House warns that, in the absence of drastic and coordinated government action, the novel coronavirus could kill as many as 2.2 million people in the United States alone.

The new research (pdf), led by epidemiologist Dr. Neil Ferguson and published Monday by the Imperial College of London, shows that merely acting to slow rather than completely stop the spread of COVID-19 would “still likely result in hundreds of thousands of deaths and health systems (most notably intensive care units) being overwhelmed many times over.”

“For countries able to achieve it, this leaves suppression as the preferred policy option,” the researchers wrote. “In the U.K. and U.S. context, suppression will minimally require a combination of social distancing of the entire population, home isolation of cases, and household quarantine of their family members. This may need to be supplemented by school and university closures.”

Successful suppression of the virus could take a significant amount of time, the researchers noted—”potentially 18 months or more.”

The New York Times reported late Monday that the researchers’ “terrifying” projection of as many as 2.2 million possible deaths in the U.S. was shared with the White House’s coronavirus task force last week, when President Donald Trump was still downplaying the threat posed by the COVID-19 outbreak.

“We don’t have a clear exit strategy,” Ferguson told the Times. “We’re going to have to suppress this virus—frankly, indefinitely—until we have a vaccine. It’s a difficult position for the world to be in.”

Ferguson likened the possible health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic to those caused by the 1918 influenza outbreak, which killed an estimated 675,000 people in the United States and tens of millions more worldwide.

Here's the @nytimes article about the new coronavirus model, noting it suggests that 2.2 million Americans could die if there is no action: https://t.co/Oj9BLN1q1I The study apparently shook the White House partly out of its passivity.

— Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof) March 17, 2020

The team of researchers “also shared its fatality estimates with the CDC,” according to the Times, “including that eight to nine percent of people in the most vulnerable age group, 80 and older, could die if infected.”

During a press conference on Monday, Trump falsely claimed that “nobody ever thought about” the coronavirus threat a month ago.

“This is a bad one,” said Trump, who on Sunday recommended that people in the U.S. avoid gathering with more than 10 people. “This is a very bad one. This is bad in the sense that it’s so contagious. It’s just so contagious.  Sort of, record-setting-type contagion.”

Trump: "We have a problem that a month ago nobody ever thought about."

False. Both with regard to pandemics generally, coronavirus pandemics in particular, and this specific coronavirus.

And the US had its first confirmed case in January. https://t.co/GipI01oUBg

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) March 16, 2020

In an interview with CNN Sunday, Harvard University epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch said the coronavirus crisis “was foreseeable, and foreseen, weeks and months ago.”

“Only now is the White House coming out of denial,” said Lipsitch, “and heading straight into saying it could not have been foreseen.”

By Jake Johnson | CommonDreams.org | Creative Commons

The brother of a woman who died in their home of coronavirus was forced to resort to issuing desperate a plea on social media in a bid to convince Italian authorities to come collect her body.

Actor and mixed martial arts trainer Luca Franzese was confined to his Naples home with the decaying corpse of his sister Teresa Franzese, 47, who died of the illness on Saturday.

Their elderly parents and other relatives, including young children, were also in the home.

Her health rapidly degraded shortly after she began to show symptoms of the novel virus. Al Jazeera reports that she was known to suffer from a form of epilepsy but was otherwise quite healthy.

In a heartbreaking video posted on Facebook, her grief-stricken brother issued an emotional appeal. Franzese said:

“I am waiting for the institutions to give me answers since last night. Nobody came forward,” the grief-stricken man said Sunday in the emotional video posted on Facebook.

I am making this video for the good of Italy, for the good of Naples. My sister died last night, probably because of the virus, and I’ve been waiting for answers since last night.

” had to force them to come and do the test. I’ve had to put myself in self-isolation. I might have the virus. To keep my sister alive, I tried to give her mouth to mouth resuscitation and no one cared, no one is calling me.

We are ruined, Italy has abandoned us.

But we must give each other strength.”  

Due to the mass anxiety and uncertainty regarding the virus, undertakers and medical personnel refused to collect her body.

Once the video went viral, a local politician intervened to find a funeral home willing to help the family’s plight.

Pasqual Pernice of the Aprea Funeral Home explained:

“It was surreal … We used masks, sterile shoes, hazmat suits, glasses and gloves. Luca and another relative were there, but other family members were all in another room.”

Teresa Franzese was buried without any family members present.

Pernice added:

“If it gets worse, and we have to do it again, we will. It’s our job.”

Francesco Emilio Borelli, a local health official and councilor, said:

“It was the first case in Italy in which a person with the virus dies at home, so there was some confusion on what to do.

The family [exemplifies] altruism, they are doing everything they can to protect their community, and the community is staying close to them by bringing food.

Now the big problem is that they have been closed in there for four days, and no one is taking away their trash. It’s getting unhygienic and we don’t know what to do about it. Someone needs to help them.” 

Italy has so far been the most impacted country by the virus after China. The BBC reports that as of Friday, the coronavirus has claimed 1,016 lives amid a total number of 15,113 infections.

Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio told the British outlet:

“Italy was the first nation in Europe to be affected so badly … But I hope it also means that Italy is the first one to leave the emergency behind.

Our grandfathers were drafted to go to war; we’re being asked to stay at home.

If a doctor and a nurse can work for 24 hours non-stop, we can give up leaving our own home. The huge majority of citizens are respecting the rules. Those who aren’t will face sanctions: either fines or criminal charges.”

By Elias Marat | Creative Commons | TheMindUnleashed.com

In 2016 Nature Magazine published an article about China engineering a bat coronavirus and scientists worried it would leak.

Combining HIV with SARS in 2010 in Wuhan, China

In 2010 scientists in Wuhan published a study stating they combined HIV parts with SARS. This was building on a 2007 study where they tried combining a SARS-like bat coronavirus with HIV pseudovirus that was not previously infectious to humans. While they were researching the SARS-like bat Coronavirus, they were unhappy with the low rate at which it infected human cells. So they genetically altered it to make it infect human cells more effectively — by giving it an HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) outer shell, which enabled the SARS-like coronavirus to attack human cells via ACE2 receptors.

Modifying the Bat Coronavirus in Wuhan in 2015

2015 study, scientists in Wuhan: They took a bat coronavirus and made a chimera virus that specifically attaches to the ACE2 protein to “to maximize the opportunity for pathogenesis and vaccine studies in mice”.

And this is significant because what we just described pretty much sums up our current Coronavirus (first study published about COVID-19, ACE2 receptors, same scientists as the study from a decade ago, Peng Zhou) .

A picture of the Lab in Wuhan, tweet from the Chinese gov. in 2018:

Take a look at the largest #virus bank in Asia! Wuhan Institute of Virology in Central China's Hubei province preserves more than 1,500 different strains of virus. pic.twitter.com/0iPE4uAMiH

— China Daily (@ChinaDaily) May 29, 2018

Where’s the hazmat suit? N95? Nope. The only BSL4 Lab in all of China, in the epicenter of the outbreak. With Asia’s largest virus bank.

Reports that the lung damage it causes is like a combination of SARS and AIDS.

Know what we have legitimate proof of? SARS accidentally leaking out of bio labs multiple times in China before.

We are merely spreading legitimate articles, studies, and news stories that span over a decade, all tying back to Wuhan, engineered viruses, bat coronaviruses, shady Chinese student arrests smuggling vials into China and Harvard Bio-Chem head getting money from Wuhan. Canadian government scientists who trained at Wuhan Lab getting fired last year.. These are the facts. What is also a fact is when you piece them all together, they get labeled as unverified claims with absolutely no valid counterargument or evidence against it. Yet, despite how much overwhelming facts point to this, it’s still not true because they said so?

FYI you’ll notice a lot of these articles have disclaimers (some brand new since yesterday) about them being used as a conspiracy. They offer absolutely no counter argument other than “it came from bats, therefore it is not from the lab.” Uhh okay, not disputing it came from bats… You will also notice the Chinese trolls tearing apart the HIV aspect of this, while ignoring all the rest of the evidence.

Watch this get censored. and this, too., We’ve also been permanently banned from r/worldnews for writing this as a comment. It would be impossible to post this in the r/coronavirus subreddit.

Here’s another example of how China is trying to censor China related content all around the globe: Cyberspace Administration of China Internal Documentation for Internet Commentators. -from popular ex-CCP whistleblower.

There is a lot of shady suspicious shit going on with Wuhan institute being a common denominator. With nefarious looking experiments that go back decades, all similar to what we have today. And a history of lab accidents. There are several reputable articles, peer reviewed studies, suspicious arrests. ALL tied to Wuhan, but once we start questioning things, we are labeled as spreading misinformation and fear mongering. No, these are all factual reports for people to make their own judgment, we are merely publicizing them because it is vital for the scientific community to know its origins and composition.