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COVID-19

You don’t have to be afraid but you have to stay at home – From the front line in Italy

Published

5 years ago

5 minute read

Dr. Daniele Maccini is a doctor on the front line of Italy’s fight against coronavirus 

This is from his Facebook post from late February which is just as COVID-19 began to devastate Italy’s health care system.  It has been translated from Italian.

Good morning everyone. For various reasons it’s been a lot since I posted on Facebook. But today I think it is useful to spend a page to share and ask you to share the words of a fellow common sense reanimator who in my opinion has been able to summarize a message that I would like to be transposed by everyone, regarding what is happening about the epidemic from Coronavirus Covid 19.

Therefore I quote:

” Coronavirus: we explain why you don’t have to be afraid but you have to stay at home.
I’m a CPR doctor and this is why I allow myself to explain why the State is making such drastic decisions.
The problem with Coronavirus is not its gravity, since it is only 10, or maybe 20 times more serious than the flu. Why is it more serious than flu?
It’s different, so we’re not very used to it;
Elders are not vaccinated.
So who is more at risk? The elders. As usual. Children much less, no serious paediatric cases are reported for the time being.
So why do we worry so much? Because it is MUCH MORE INFECTIVE than the flu, that means it is transmitted with enormous ease.
At this point let’s do some calculations so we can better understand what the problem is.

The Influence
As a rule, flu hits over a season, let’s assume in 5 months, about 10 % of the population. So it hits around 5 million Italians in the span of 30*5 = 150 days. Mortality is 0,1 %, so we have about 5000 deaths (almost all elderly) every year in 150 days. For each dead, we suppose we have about 4-5 patients in CPR, to keep us wide, and everyone should be put into ICU. We then put 25.000 people in ICU in 150 days, with an average inpatient of 7 days, which means 1000-2000 patients a day in ICU in Italy during the winter.
Let’s summarize:
Infectivity: 10 % potential (real data) = 50 million * 10 % = 5 million infected, many of them unaware.
Mortality: 0,1 % estimated = 5000 people in 150 days.
Critics: 5*0,1 % = 25.000 people in 150 days. so about 1000-2000 people in ICU a day due to flu.
The beds in ICU are for the province of Venice, where I live, about 60 out of 1 million inhabitants, so it could be about 4000 across Italy. This means that at worst case scenario patients with flu and its complications, i.e. pneumonia, occupy between 25 % and 50 % at maximum intensive therapies in Italy at peak.

The Coronavirus
Let’s see now what can happen with the Coronavirus. Let’s remember that the big difference is that Coronavirus is extremely more infectious and could infect us, instead of in 150 days, in 30-60 days. Suppose 60 days. Let’s remember that it can affect up to 60 % of the population, estimated data, so let’s do some calculations:
Infectivity: 60 % potential (estimated data) = 50 million * 60 % = 30 million infected, of which the vast majority unaware.
mortality: 1-2 % estimated = between 500.000 and 1.000.000 million people.
Critics: 5 % = 1.500.000 people in 60 days. so about 300.000 people in ICU.
But we only have 4000 beds! How can we put 300.000 people in ICU when we only have 4000 beds?
NOW YOU UNDERSTAND WHY YOU NEED TO BE HOME?
If you stay home, people get infected little by bit. Many don’t notice. The others, especially the elderly, but also some young people, we doctors and nurses take them, put them in ICU, treat them and return them to you. A little bit at a time.
If everyone leaves the house, the risk is that they will all get infected together and that we cannot manage them, with an important increase in mortality.
YOU DON ‘ T HAVE TO PANIC BUT TAKE IT SERIOUSLY. STAY HOME.

And above all, let me add, don’t come to the ER for futile reasons. We always say it but this time it’s even more important.”

So don’t be scared: each of you who will read this message has a very low probability of having big trouble from this infection, but try to behave so as to safeguard everyone’s good because there are many people (maybe even your acquaintances) who can instead risk a lot.

My endless date with self-isolation has led to some sobering realizations

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After 15 years as a TV reporter with Global and CBC and as news director of RDTV in Red Deer, Duane set out on his own 2008 as a visual storyteller. During this period, he became fascinated with a burgeoning online world and how it could better serve local communities. This fascination led to Todayville, launched in 2016.

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International

Pentagon agency to simulate lockdowns, mass vaccinations, public compliance messaging

Published on June 12, 2025

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Tim Hinchliffe

With lockdowns, mass vaccination campaigns, and social distancing still on the table from the last around, it appears that AI and Machine Learning will play a much bigger role in the next.

DARPA is getting into the business of simulating disease outbreaks, including modeling interventions such as mass vaccination campaigns, lockdowns, and communication strategies.

At the end of May, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) put out a Request for Information (RFI) seeking information regarding “state-of-the-art capabilities in the simulation of disease outbreaks.”

The Pentagon’s research and development funding arm wants to hear from academic, industry, commercial, and startup communities on how to develop “advanced capabilities that drive technical innovation and identify critical gaps in bio-surveillance, diagnostics, and medical countermeasures” in order to “improve preparedness for future public health emergencies.”

As if masks, social distancing, lockdowns, and vaccination mandates under the unscientific guise of slowing the spread and preventing the transmission of COVID weren’t harmful enough, the U.S. military wants to model the effects of these exact same countermeasures for future outbreaks.

The RFI also asks participants “Fatality Rate & Immune Status: How are fatality rates and varying levels of population immunity (natural or vaccine-induced) incorporated into your simulations?“

Does “natural or vaccine-induced” relate to “population immunity” or “fatality rates” or both?

Moving on, the RFI gets into modeling lockdowns, social distancing, and mass vaccination campaigns, along with communication strategies:

Intervention Strategies: Detail the range of intervention strategies that can be modeled, including (but not limited to) vaccination campaigns, social distancing measures, quarantine protocols, treatments, and public health communication strategies. Specifically, describe the ability to model early intervention and its impact on outbreak trajectory.

The fact that DARPA wants to model these so-called intervention strategies just after the entire world experienced them suggests that these exact same measures will most likely be used again in the future:

“We are committed to developing advanced modeling capabilities to optimize response strategies and inform the next generation of (bio)technology innovations to protect the population from biological threats. We are particularly focused on understanding the complex interplay of factors that drive outbreak spread and evaluating the effectiveness of potential interventions.” — DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

“Identification of optimal timelines and capabilities to detect, identify, attribute, and respond to disease outbreaks, including but not limited to biosensor density deployment achieving optimal detection timelines, are of interest.” ­— DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

With lockdowns, mass vaccination campaigns, and social distancing still on the table from the last around, it appears that AI and Machine Learning will play a much bigger role in the next.

For future innovation, the DARPA RFI asks applicants to: “Please describe any novel technical approaches – or applications of diverse technical fields (e.g., machine learning, artificial intelligence, complex systems theory, behavioral science) – that you believe would significantly enhance the state-of-the-art capabilities in this field or simulation of biological systems wholistically.”

Instead of putting a Dr. Fauci, a Dr. Birx, a replaceable CDC director, a TV doctor, a big pharma CEO, or a Cuomo brother out there to lie to your face about how they were all just following The ScienceTM, why not use AI and ML and combine them with behavioral sciences in order to concoct your “public health communications strategies?”

When you look at recently announced DARPA programs like Kallisti and MAGICS, which are aimed at creating an algorithmic Theory of Mind to model, predict, and influence collective human behavior, you start to get a sense of how all these programs can interweave:

“The MAGICS ARC calls for paradigm-shifting approaches for modeling complex, dynamic systems for predicting collective human behaviour.” — DARPA, MAGICS ARC, April 2025

On April 8, DARPA issued an Advanced Research Concepts (ARC) opportunity for a new program called “Methodological Advancements for Generalizable Insights into Complex Systems (MAGICS)” that seeks “new methods and paradigms for modeling collective human behavior.”

Nowhere in the MAGICS description does it mention modeling or predicting the behavior of “adversaries,” as is DARPA’s custom.

Instead, it talks at length about “modeling human systems,” along with anticipating, predicting, understanding, and forecasting “collective human behavior” and “complex social phenomena” derived from “sociotechnical data sets.”

Could DARPA’s MAGICS program be applied to simulating collective human behavior when it comes to the next public health emergency, be it real or perceived?

“The goal of an upcoming program will be to develop an algorithmic theory of mind to model adversaries’ situational awareness and predict future behaviour.” — DARPA, Theory of Mind Special Notice, December 2024.

In December 2024, DARPA launched a similar program called Theory of Mind, which was renamed Kallisti a month later.

The goal of Theory of Mind is to develop “new capabilities to enable national security decisionmakers to optimize strategies for deterring or incentivizing actions by adversaries,” according to a very brief special announcement.

DARPA never mentions who those “adversaries” are. In the case of a public health emergency, an adversary could be anyone who questions authoritative messaging.

The Theory of Mind program will also:

… seek to combine algorithms with human expertise to explore, in a modeling and simulation environment, potential courses of action in national security scenarios with far greater breadth and efficiency than is currently possible.

This would provide decisionmakers with more options for incentive frameworks while preventing unwanted escalation.

We are interested in a comprehensive overview of current and emerging technologies for disease outbreak simulation, how simulation approaches could be extended beyond standard modeling methods, and to understand how diseases spread within and between individuals including population level dynamics.

They say that all the modeling and simulating across programs is for “national security,” but that is a very broad term.

DARPA is in the business of research and development for national security purposes, so why is the Pentagon modeling disease outbreaks and intervention strategies while simultaneously looking to predict and manipulate collective human behavior?

If and when the next outbreak occurs, the same draconian and Orwellian measures that governments and corporations deployed in the name of combating COVID are still on the table.

And AI, Machine Learning, and the military will play an even bigger role than the last time around.

From analyzing wastewater to learning about disease spread; from developing pharmaceuticals to measuring the effects of lockdowns and vaccine passports, from modeling and predicting human behavior to coming up with messaging strategies to keep everyone in compliance – “improving preparedness for future public health emergencies” is becoming more militaristically algorithmic by the day.

“We are exploring innovative solutions to enhance our understanding of outbreak dynamics and to improve preparedness for future public health emergencies.” — DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

Reprinted with permission from The Sociable.

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Business

Audit report reveals Canada’s controversial COVID travel app violated multiple rules

Published on June 11, 2025

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Canada’s Auditor General found that government procurement rules were not followed in creating the ArriveCAN app.

Canada’s Auditor General revealed that the former Liberal government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau failed multiple times by violating contract procurement rules to create ArriveCAN, its controversial COVID travel app.

In a report released Tuesday, Auditor General Karen Hogan noted that between April 2015 to March 2024, the Trudeau government gave out 106 professional service contracts to GC Strategies Inc. This is the same company that made the ArriveCAN app.

The contracts were worth $92.7 million, with $64.5 million being paid out.

According to Hogan, Canada’s Border Services Agency gave four contracts to GC Strategies valued at $49.9 million. She noted that only 54 percent of the contracts delivered any goods.

“We concluded that professional services contracts awarded and payments made by federal organizations to GC Strategies and other companies incorporated by its co-founders were not in accordance with applicable policy instruments and that value for money for these contracts was not obtained,” Hogan said.

She continued, “Despite this, federal government officials consistently authorized payments.”

The report concluded that “Federal organizations need to ensure that public funds are spent with due regard for value for money, including in decisions about the procurement of professional services contracts.”

Hogan announced an investigation of ArriveCAN in November 2022 after the House of Commons voted 173-149 for a full audit of the controversial app.

Last year, Hogan published an audit of ArriveCAN and on Tuesday published a larger audit of the 106 contracts awarded to GC Strategies by 31 federal organizations under Trudeau’s watch.

‘Massive scandal,’ says Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre

Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre said Hogan’s report on the audit exposed multiple improprieties.

“This is a massive scandal,” he told reporters Tuesday.

“The facts are extraordinary. There was no evidence of added value. In a case where you see no added value, why are you paying the bill?”

ArriveCAN was introduced in April 2020 by the Trudeau government and made mandatory in November 2020. The app was used by the federal government to track the COVID jab status of those entering the country and enforce quarantines when deemed necessary.

ArriveCAN was supposed to have cost $80,000, but the number quickly ballooned to $54 million, with the latest figures showing it cost $59.5 million.

As for the app itself, it was riddled with technical glitches along with privacy concerns from users.

LifeSiteNews has published a wide variety of reports related to the ArriveCAN travel app.

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