Chinese dropping like flies

[james03]

Perhaps, then, a modified, temporary socialism is warranted?  One where the usurers are taxed of every last penny they have and the funds used to pay off the debt?

In our case the usurors are insurance companies and pensions. 

The problem with usurious collapse is that there is no way out unless everyone loses.  Which is politically impossible, so we will go Detroit.  As stated above our grand kids are already screwed.

One thing you could do is outlaw usury payments so only the principle is due and outlaw future usury.  You have to immediately balance the US budget and run a slight surplus.  You also need to slap on big tariffs until the trade deficit is eliminated.  This would be the least painful, but you would have the following consequences:  1 year recession due to huge government layoffs, pensions cut to say 90 cents on the dollar, and somewhat higher prices due to more expensive local goods.  You could alleviate the last by swapping the tariff for corporate income tax cuts, and make it revenue neutral.  So maybe we end up with a 15% tariff and 5% corporate rate.

[Vetus Ordo]

You could be right, but "healthcare system" doesn't necessarily equal "hospital care".

No, it's more comprehensive. As your link states, quoting from the WHO, "a well-functioning healthcare system requires a steady financing mechanism, a properly-trained and adequately-paid workforce, well-maintained facilities, and access to reliable information to base decisions on."

Having said that, you can't have an excellent healthcare system and third world hospitals at the same time.

The "healthcare system" in Europe is obviously miles better than the US. However, in America, I've never heard of anyone spending almost a week in a hallway. I've never heard of waiting all day for water (happened to me). Just from personal experience, you can feel the billions of dollars being pumped into American hospitals, and that's just not the case in Europe.

Both systems cannot be compared. In the US, healthcare facilities are largely owned and operated by private sector businesses. Private hospitals are always less crowded than public hospitals where everyone, regardless of the weight of their wallets, can flock in.

[Miriam_M]

For those who are critical of calling this a mild disease, consider that there are consequences to treating this like the plague.  Illinois is now de facto bankrupt.  We will either create $200 BILLION in debt for our unborn grandkids to pay off (with usury), or we will have to slash the pensions of these people.  People who are retired and have a 401K plan are in serious trouble.  New Jersey, California, Connecticut, and Kentucky will likely go bankrupt.  Millions will lose their jobs.  I was predicting a $30 TRILLION debt load by 2024.  Likely we'll breech that in 2021.  Again this means that our unborn grand kids will do without street lights, good roads, and police protection while paying a 70% tax rate to the usurors.  Or we go bankrupt (we have to), and everyone will lose their pensions and life insurance.

So this is not simply a case of "playing it safe".  We might have just detonated our economy.  If it turns out that quinine is the miracle drug (positive effect on market psychology) and the market rebounds due to the bail out, we'll survive.

But this is also a glimpse into the future that our grand kids will have.  Even if we escape a complete collapse, this WILL happen, and not 50 years out.  It happens when the world loses faith in the dollar.  Usury is pure evil.

Utterly.  And I would like to scream this from the housetops.  Every bleepin' press conference -- of anyone's, any group's, truly makes me want to call out an Emperor With No Clothes.  Whether a country is socialistic or capitalistic in its economy, a tanked economy makes people suffer.  The rate of our economy, and our micro economies within it, that collectively do or don't determine whether our national economy is healthy, is falling exponentially faster than the virus is rising, per capita. 

It's a slippery slope toward a Third World economy from a First, simply because every aspect of it is so interconnected: governmental structure, transportation, housing, and food.  Lose one of those elements, and you are well on a fast trajectory toward chaos, anarchy, and death. Reduced availability of all of the services that have distinguished the U.S. from so many of our dysfunctional neighbors. 

I want the medical "experts" to shut up already.  They are one important but not singularly important part of the equation.  Not normally a violent person, I wanted to punch a doctor in the face last night as he was waxing ecstatically about lockdowns.  To him -- and he admitted this -- the whole world is merely a lab, with his single goal to defeat a virus.  But Dr. whoever you are, we are not mere specimens.  Take off your white coat -- you, too, Dr. Fauci -- and get a reality check.  The United States of America is not merely your personal giant hospital.

What they and governors are trying to do is compensate for the frustration of trying to manage 331M+ people over an enormous land mass, and their reaction is to halt activity in its tracks so that they can accomplish this overnight.

There are three countries which have succeeded in containing the virus with exceptional speed, and keeping it contained.  Hello, they are tiny countries by comparison to us:  Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan.  They are also far more homogeneous in a variety of homogeneities than we are -- culturally, especially.  They have much less to manage and more ability to manage it.

Lose economic strength, and also lose global political power rather rapidly.  Call in the National Guard and whatever other military forces the individual megalomaniacs want to own to establish their little empires, and you increase your military vulnerability on top of everything else. 

COVID-19 is a challenge; it's a problem, particularly two states.  I'll even go so far as to concede it's a temporary crisis.  But it is hardly "an emergency."  Only if optimum wellness of every citizen is your standard for essential health of a whole nation would you call a new virus of any sort "an emergency."  It's troubling; it requires aggressive action, but shutting down entire segments of the economy and reducing people to additional kinds of desperation, besides medical, is a different form of killing and unnecessarily cruel.

[Vetus Ordo]

Just 8 minutes long. Worth it.

In December 2019 the Chinese authorities notified the world that a virus was spreading through their communities. In the following months it spread to other countries, with cases doubling within days. This virus is the "Severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus 2", that causes the disease called COVID19, and that everyone simply calls Coronavirus. What actually happens when it infects a human and what should we all do?

[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtN-goy9VOY[/yt]

[Kreuzritter]

Okay I'll humour you for a bit Kreuzritter.

Hasn't Koch's postulates been supplanted by the Bradford Hill criteria?

If you mean that the scientists couldn't fulfil Koch's postualtes and so have adopted successively weaker criteria which fail to establish causality, yes.
...

Okay, but what do you make of this quote from the Koch's postulates page?

Koch applied the postulates to describe the etiology of cholera and tuberculosis, but they have been controversially generalized to other diseases. These postulates were generated prior to understanding of modern concepts in microbial pathogenesis that cannot be examined using Koch's postulates, including viruses (which are obligate cellular parasites) and asymptomatic carriers. They have largely been supplanted by other criteria such as the Bradford Hill criteria for infectious disease causality in modern public health.

This is exactly what I mean. The translation there is that scientists could not get their hypothesised "viruses" to fulfil Koch's postulates, so they developed new ad hoc criteria that would allow them to maintain their viral theory of disease and demonstrate "causation" in specific cases. Of course "viruses" cannot be examined using Koch's postulates; firstly they are merely hypothesised from various phenomena and scientists in principle cannot purify these "organisms" from a supposedly infected case and transfer them into a healthy animal to, contrary to a control group injected in the same way with a sterile version of the solution, induce a specific disease; secondly, these phenomena are not found in every case of the symptoms associated with the disease, nor, what they here call asymptomatic carriers, is every case of these phenomena being found associated with such symptoms, meaning that the "virus" is neither necessary nor sufficient to induce the disease 9but is still identified as a "cause" - this is insane).

And these retards are still operating on the assumption of the genome as the unchanging blueprint and control system, the book of life, of the entire human organism, a notion that is now ancient history in the science of molecular genetics, even if it's still the popular perception and drummed into heads at school. Because once you pull that rug from under their feet, the basis for identifying the existence of these "viruses" by detecting "foreign" genetic material is destroyed.

[diaduit]

In terms of flu deaths, nothing unusual is happening in Italy.

On average, 1,750 people die every day in Italy. In winter the rate will be higher and in summer lower.

Italy's Wednesday death toll  from the coronavirus was 475.

Nothing unusual is happening in Italy in terms of flu deaths.

Just to add, Dad still in hospital and upto today still not one case of the virus in the hospital.

The panic mongers here have nothing to say.

They just double down and continue to spread the hype.

So the chaotic scenes of people on trolleys gasping for air and waiting for a ventilator happens every year!!  The drs and nurses do a round of Whats app and facebook posts all distressed over their patients!!

If its not an anomaly then why are the hospitals behaving like it is??

I am not saying it does not happen but what is the SOURCE of the chaotic scenes.

Can you provide a link.  Does it say CNN or BBC or CBS.

I went on Youtube today and typed something like "Chaotic scenes in Italy" and EVERY SINGLE RESULT for at least 5 pages was major news broadcasters.
Where is all the independent reporting.

Can anybody post a link of what looks like independent journalism of the chaotic scenes.

Yes Clau , you are right, independent journalism usually can expose fake news.  However there aren't any videos of drs shrugging their shoulders saying what are ye on about , its business as usual.

Dad is still in hospital and as of today , no virus case yet.  It seems it is mostly in the East of the country which is funnily enough, the most liberal part of the country.

[mikemac]

Okay I'll humour you for a bit Kreuzritter.

Hasn't Koch's postulates been supplanted by the Bradford Hill criteria?

If you mean that the scientists couldn't fulfil Koch's postualtes and so have adopted successively weaker criteria which fail to establish causality, yes.
...

Okay, but what do you make of this quote from the Koch's postulates page?

Koch applied the postulates to describe the etiology of cholera and tuberculosis, but they have been controversially generalized to other diseases. These postulates were generated prior to understanding of modern concepts in microbial pathogenesis that cannot be examined using Koch's postulates, including viruses (which are obligate cellular parasites) and asymptomatic carriers. They have largely been supplanted by other criteria such as the Bradford Hill criteria for infectious disease causality in modern public health.

This is exactly what I mean. The translation there is that scientists could not get their hypothesised "viruses" to fulfil Koch's postulates, so they developed new ad hoc criteria that would allow them to maintain their viral theory of disease and demonstrate "causation" in specific cases. Of course "viruses" cannot be examined using Koch's postulates; firstly they are merely hypothesised from various phenomena and scientists in principle cannot purify these "organisms" from a supposedly infected case and transfer them into a healthy animal to, contrary to a control group injected in the same way with a sterile version of the solution, induce a specific disease; secondly, these phenomena are not found in every case of the symptoms associated with the disease, nor, what they here call asymptomatic carriers, is every case of these phenomena being found associated with such symptoms, meaning that the "virus" is neither necessary nor sufficient to induce the disease 9but is still identified as a "cause" - this is insane).

And these retards are still operating on the assumption of the genome as the unchanging blueprint and control system, the book of life, of the entire human organism, a notion that is now ancient history in the science of molecular genetics, even if it's still the popular perception and drummed into heads at school. Because once you pull that rug from under their feet, the basis for identifying the existence of these "viruses" by detecting "foreign" genetic material is destroyed.

But isn't Koch's postulates an outdated system from 130 years ago?  It seems like it.

From the page previously posted.

Koch's postulates (/?k??x/)[2] are four criteria designed to establish a causative relationship between a microbe and a disease. The postulates, later entirely disproven as naive and oversimplified, were formulated by Robert Koch and Friedrich Loeffler in 1884, based on earlier concepts described by Jakob Henle,[3] and refined and published by Koch in 1890.

Koch's Postulates
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/kochs-postulates

The Evolution of Koch's Postulates

Jonathan Cohen, in Infectious Diseases (Fourth Edition), 2017
Conclusions – and a Note of Caution

Koch's postulates were invaluable at the time they were developed and remain largely valid for a relatively small number of defined circumstances in which bacteria can be precisely tied to the cause of a particular clinical syndrome. But in a world in which viruses cause cancer and noncultivable bacteria can be demonstrated by molecular probes, Koch's postulates are no longer fit for purpose. What is more, used uncritically they have the potential to mislead.16 Their main purpose now is to provide a framework to ensure that scientific rigor is applied when proposing an organism as the cause of a disease – exactly as Koch intended when he first conceived them.

The potential role of infectious agents in diseases of unknown etiology

Steven M. Opal, in Infectious Diseases (Third Edition), 2010
CULTURE-INDEPENDENT TECHNIQUES TO DETECT NOVEL PATHOGENS

In the genomic age in which we now live, Koch's postulates need to be modified or even discarded as an obsolete system to define the essential elements of what identifies a microbial pathogen.
...

[Miriam_M]

I thought I'd post a source I've been using myself:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Distributions here:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics/

This page is also helpful and provides statistical study sources:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-symptoms/#pre

[Miriam_M]

And another one.  Although a month old, I believe the trend headlined has been maintained.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/18/coronavirus-is-more-fatal-in-men-than-women-major-study-suggests.html

It's important that the public read some of the actual data instead of listening to generalized statistics which magnify the situation artificially.

Please note differences in rates of death tied to underlying conditions.  One of the real problems with the sensationalistic media is their refusal to contextualize any of the deaths reported, especially locally.  Last night our local news broadcast reported one young death (30's, I think).  On and on about how tragic it was and "how it could happen to anyone." Very, very, very tail end of audio, spoken like a footnote was, "the man had struggled his whole life with respiratory problems."

Other young people who have died were plagued by immunodeficiency problems as an underlying susceptibility or had other compromises to their system, some biological-genetic, others lifestyle.

[martin88nyc]

Miriam M, bravo! spot on.
This is very well orchestrated; this whole situation is preposterous and diabolical.  If we continue like this then we'll surely become a third world economy. Anarchy and chaos will be the end of it and then millions will in fact lose their lives due to crime and hunger. It will come down with a vengeance. No Mass, no grace. it's that simple. If our bishop don;t get their act together we will soon find ourselves enveloped in darkness never seen before. We are experiencing the diabolical disorientation within and without the Church.

[queen.saints]

You could be right, but "healthcare system" doesn't necessarily equal "hospital care".

No, it's more comprehensive. As your link states, quoting from the WHO, "a well-functioning healthcare system requires a steady financing mechanism, a properly-trained and adequately-paid workforce, well-maintained facilities, and access to reliable information to base decisions on."

Having said that, you can't have an excellent healthcare system and third world hospitals at the same time.

The "healthcare system" in Europe is obviously miles better than the US. However, in America, I've never heard of anyone spending almost a week in a hallway. I've never heard of waiting all day for water (happened to me). Just from personal experience, you can feel the billions of dollars being pumped into American hospitals, and that's just not the case in Europe.

Both systems cannot be compared. In the US, healthcare facilities are largely owned and operated by private sector businesses. Private hospitals are always less crowded than public hospitals where everyone, regardless of the weight of their wallets, can flock in.

You often do have an excellent health-care system and hospitals that would be considered shocking by American standards. You might also say, you can't be number one in the world for healthcare and also have months long waiting lists for the GP and dentist. Yet, that's just the case in France.

I'm not the one comparing the systems. They are being compared in millions of people's minds when they see a picture of an overwhelmed Italian hospital that looks like most of the hospitals in Europe on any given day and they subconsciously think, "That doesn't look like any of the hospitals I've seen on tv. Things must be totally out of control."


"Italy can often seem like a country of extremes.  The extreme beauty of a Bernini fountain right next to a big pile of uncollected garbage. Prestigious universities filled with learned professors, but sorely lacking resources and adequate classroom space.  Physicians that are highly skilled, but trapped inside facilities that were already outdated when they were built in the 1950's."

https://rickzullo.com/healthcare-in-italy/

[Aeternitus]

And another one.  Although a month old, I believe the trend headlined has been maintained.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/18/coronavirus-is-more-fatal-in-men-than-women-major-study-suggests.html

It's important that the public read some of the actual data instead of listening to generalized statistics which magnify the situation artificially.

Please note differences in rates of death tied to underlying conditions.  One of the real problems with the sensationalistic media is their refusal to contextualize any of the deaths reported, especially locally.  Last night our local news broadcast reported one young death (30's, I think).  On and on about how tragic it was and "how it could happen to anyone." Very, very, very tail end of audio, spoken like a footnote was, "the man had struggled his whole life with respiratory problems."

Other young people who have died were plagued by immunodeficiency problems as an underlying susceptibility or had other compromises to their system, some biological-genetic, others lifestyle.

Precisely.  From one of Awkward's posts pages ago:

But Prof Ricciardi added that Italy's death rate may also appear high because of how doctors record fatalities.

The way in which we code deaths in our country is very generous in the sense that all the people who die in hospitals with the coronavirus are deemed to be dying of the coronavirus.

On re-evaluation by the National Institute of Health, only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88 per cent of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity - many had two or three," he says.

[Kreuzritter]

But isn't Koch's postulates an outdated system from 130 years ago?  It seems like it.

Koch's postulates are sound from the perspective of the philosophy of causality and logic, although insufficient to prove "causation"; they are "outdated" according to the adherents to the viral theory of disease because they cannot get their postulated viral agents of disease to fulfil them.

"Viruses" may or may not cause disease in a host, who knows why, and though we can't tell you all the factors involved, and we can't observe the actual process from start to finish, and we sure as hell can't use our theory to predict anything regarding who is going to actually get sick, and we sure as damned hell can't prevent disease or cure you once you're sick using technology developed on its basis, we know that when there are symptoms in the host and we find the markers of our virus, the virus is behind them. It must be, because we know that viruses cause disease. Our postulates, which we set up to do so, do so. So see, our viral theory of disease is confirmed, because we can show that these viruses caused these diseases.

From the page previously posted.

Koch's postulates (/?k??x/)[2] are four criteria designed to establish a causative relationship between a microbe and a disease. The postulates, later entirely disproven as naive and oversimplified, were formulated by Robert Koch and Friedrich Loeffler in 1884, based on earlier concepts described by Jakob Henle,[3] and refined and published by Koch in 1890.

"Disproven", in other words, our viral theory of disease is correct, therefore Koch's postulates of necessary conditions for a pathogen to fulfil, so as not to be disqualified from causing disease, must be "false".

Koch's postulates were invaluable at the time they were developed and remain largely valid for a relatively small number of defined circumstances in which bacteria can be precisely tied to the cause of a particular clinical syndrome.

Note the words. Koch's postulates "remain valid" when one can actually demonstrate that a microbe causes a disease! You can't make this up.

But in a world in which viruses cause cancer and noncultivable bacteria can be demonstrated by molecular probes, Koch's postulates are no longer fit for purpose.

But in a world in which Koch's postulates would invalidate our claim to have proven causation of a disease by an hypothesised microbe, Koch's postulates are not fit for the purpose of maintaining our theory, insisting that an un-isolateable "virus" causes disease, and profiting from the antivirals and vaccines produced by the big pharma corporations that employ us and fund our research grants.

What is more, used uncritically they have the potential to mislead.16 Their main purpose now is to provide a framework to ensure that scientific rigor is applied when proposing an organism as the cause of a disease – exactly as Koch intended when he first conceived them.

Which they logically fail to do with viruses.

In the genomic age in which we now live, Koch's postulates need to be modified or even discarded as an obsolete system to define the essential elements of what identifies a microbial pathogen.

Nothing will ever change the fact that when one has an invisible organism which cannot be isolated from a diseased individual and, in its purified form, shown to lead to the specific disease when used to infect a healthy individual, and whose alleged presence in an organism is, by their own measures, neither necessary nor sufficient to produce the specific symptoms associated with a disease, one cannot claim to have shown causation by their methods.

Enter the ad hoc hypothesis of "asymptomatic carriers".

I quote from the horse's mouth:

In disease causation, most identified factors are neither necessary nor sufficient alone to produce disease

So A is not necessary to produce B. And A is not sufficient to produce B. But A is the the pillar, the foundation, the cornerstone, the cause of B, viruses are the agents of polio, hepatitis C, cervical cancer, measles, AIDS, etc. Except when they aren't. By their own data, "viruses" may have some involvement some of the time. You know, like when it's HIV, it's AIDS; when it's not HIV, it's just tuberculosis. When it's HPV and no cancer, which is over 99% of the time, it's "asymptomatic carrier"; when it's HPV and cancer, it's HPV gave you cancer; and when it's cancer without HPV, it's just cancer. This is mind-numbingly stupid as a scientific theory.

But it gets better. Those poppers you took every night when you were screwing 30 men at a time, seven days a week, we know they are neurotoxic, destroy bone marrow and immune systems, and cause cancer, and those antibiotics and whatnot you've been on in perpetuity to deal with the repeated parasites and infections wreck immunity and microbiomes, but we found HIV in you, so that's what's killing you homosexuals. Same with you junkies. It's the needles, not the stuff you're injecting with them. And you kids, we know we laced your food with lead arsenate, and that we sprayed you with the DDT trucks, and we know that they are poisons that cause polio-like symptoms includingparalysis, but the polio virus is what made you sick, and our vaccine ended it, not stopping with these pesticides at the same time.

[awkwardcustomer]

Miriam M, bravo! spot on.
This is very well orchestrated; this whole situation is preposterous and diabolical.  If we continue like this then we'll surely become a third world economy. Anarchy and chaos will be the end of it and then millions will in fact lose their lives due to crime and hunger. It will come down with a vengeance. No Mass, no grace. it's that simple. If our bishop don;t get their act together we will soon find ourselves enveloped in darkness never seen before. We are experiencing the diabolical disorientation within and without the Church.

Can you see any way we won't continue like this?  The UK is being shut down from today as schools, cinemas, theatres, pubs, restaurants, clubs, sports centres are told to close, transport is pared back to a minimum and everyone is being told to stay at home.

Meanwhile, martial law is being imposed in Italy and New Yorkers and Californians are being increasingly restricted in their movements.  In fact, it's impossible to keep up with the pace of the lockdowns.  They're also rolling out across South America.

Are you affected yet?  If not then a shock awaits you.  I can't explain what it felt like when Boris Johnson made the announcement today.  People are in a state of fear.  You can see it in their eyes.

I agree with you that this is being orchestrated.  But how to respond? 

[Vetus Ordo]

Click in the link to watch the video inside the hospital. It's about 5 minutes long.

Coronavirus: Italy's hardest-hit city wants you to see how COVID-19 is affecting its hospitals

The sheer numbers of people succumbing to the coronavirus is overwhelming every hospital in northern Italy.

In Sky News.



Staff frantically wave us out of the way, pushing gurneys carrying men and women on mobile respirators - it's not chaos, but it is hectic. They rush past wards already rammed with beds all filled with people in terrible distress - gasping for air, clutching at their chests and at tubes pumping oxygen into their oxygen-starved lungs. I'm in the main hospital in Bergamo, the hardest-hit hospital in Italy in the hardest-hit town in the hardest-hit province, Lombardy - and it's just plain scary.

Masked, gloved and in a hazmat suit, my team and I are led through corridors full of gasping people who look terribly ill.

I ask what ward I am in.

"This isn't really a ward, it's a waiting room, we just have to use every bit of space," my guide, Vanna Toninelli, head of the hospital press office tells me.

The medical teams are fighting a war here and they are losing. The sheer numbers of people succumbing to the coronavirus is overwhelming every hospital in northern Italy - and it could easily overwhelm the rest of the country as well. The staff are working flat out trying to keep their patients from deteriorating further. They are trying to stop them from dying. In groups they crowd around the latest patients. Attaching monitors, drips and most importantly respirators. Without them the patients will simply go downhill fast. Really fast. Deadly fast.

It looks like an intensive care unit (ICU), but it is actually just an emergency arrivals ward. The ICU is full. The people being treated are new arrivals, but they look far worse than that. Anywhere else in the world they would be intensive care cases but here, to qualify, you are actually on the point of death, not just gravely ill. In this pandemic, gravely ill is considered a reasonable position. It really is that bad. The arrival of people here is an absolute constant. This killer pandemic is virtually out of control. We have all heard what has been going on here, but no journalist has been allowed in here to see it, until now. The city of Bergamo invited us in to show everyone what a catastrophic emergency, that nobody has ever experienced before, looks like. They want you to see it. They want the world's population to question their own governments' responses. Because there can be no excuse anymore that nobody knew. Italy did not. Now everyone else does.

Through plastic bubbles that fit over the heads of the most ill, staff struggle to communicate with patients. The weak can barely speak and above the noise of the ward and the constant bleep of heart monitors and breathing pumps, it's almost impossible to make out what they are saying. The bubbles are attempting to equalise the air pressure in the lungs. Nobody expected this, nobody even imagined they would be treating so many so quickly.

And for the record, it is NOT like flu, it is more often than not chronic pneumonia and it is killing hundreds here each day. The head of emergency care, Dr Roberto Cosentini, says they have never seen anything like it, and he and his staff are warning other countries, especially the UK, that they will see it soon.

"It's a very severe pneumonia, and so it's a massive strain for every health system, because we see every day 50 to 60 patients who come to our emergency department with pneumonia, and most of them are so severe they need very high volumes of oxygen. And so we had to reorganise our emergency room and our hospital [to] three levels of intensive care."

The Papa Giovanni XXII hospital is one of the most advanced in Europe, but even this gleaming mega hospital is on its knees. Bergamo is the absolute centre of this epidemic and the hospital is attempting to deal with a crisis that was never imagined. Many of the medical staff have worked or trained in the UK. Dr Lorenzo Grazioli worked in Leicester for a year. He says his friends have been ringing him constantly to get a sense of what it is like. He told me they are bracing themselves for the same and are very worried.

He, like every other doctor and nurse I spoke to, urged the UK to follow the example of China and Italy, and lock down everything straight away. It is, they say, the only way to slow the virus down: not beat it, slow it. "I have never felt so stressed in my life, I'm an intensivist, and I am quite used to intense moments, and the choices, and people are critical and die without any treatment, and you [usually] make the difference," he told me. But when you are at this point you realise that you are not enough. We are 100 anaesthetists, we are doing our best, but maybe it's not enough."

In labs, staff are continuously testing for the virus and attempting to find something that can beat it. They say it's a long way off. The problem facing health services across the world is that when the infection curve goes up it rockets, and all resources, all testing, all supplies are used up instantly. Multiple hospitals all making the same demands at the same time. It's crippling - here they call it the apocalypse. Bergamo wanted us to see this, as I have said, and they want to send a simple message: "Get ready."