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By Nancy Thorner & Ed Ingold –
As Alexander Hamilton said: “Every act of a delegated authority, contrary to the tenor of the commission under which it is exercised, is void. No legislative act, therefore, contrary to the Constitution, can be valid. To deny this would be to affirm that the deputy is greater than his principal; that the servant is above his master; that the representatives of the people are superior to the people themselves; that men acting by virtue of powers, may do not only what their powers do not authorize, but what they forbid.”
U.S. officials are mimicking China’s efforts at tracking and attempting to destroy coronavirus; however, big tech companies are also getting involved as they work on location data contact tracing and gathering data that can track people who might not be complying with lockdown orders.
Meanwhile New York’s Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) announced Wednesday, April 22, 2020, that Mayor Bloomberg is stepping in to help create an “army” of contact tracers to help determine how many people have been exposed to the new coronavirus.
It is reasonable to ask if contact tracing is practicable or even necessary. In the few areas in which randomized testing has occurred, as many a 20% of the population have antibodies, indicating they have or have recovered from the disease. Nationwide, that means nearly everyone has had contact with the disease, even if they didn’t catch it.
According to the Stanford study, the number of “silent” or asymptomatic cases outnumber the acute cases requiring hospitalization by up to 90 to 1. By simple math, the mortality rate of COVID-19 is on the order of 0.1% – comparable to that of the seasonal flu.
The number of infections spread by one person, the R0 factor, has fallen to 0.8, . Any value less than one means the infection rate will fall slowly as quickly as it increased in the early stages, when it reached about 1.3 nationwide. Estimates of a value of 2.5 to nearly 6 were never realized.
Contact Tracing
We hear a lot about widespread testing and contact tracing. It’s time to look at possible implications, approaching that of a new world order. Contact tracing involves the identification of persons who were exposed to a coronavirus victim. In practice, each of these would be contacted by health department officials, personal information on each household collected, and put into a database. In principle, the entire household could be subject to an enforced 14-day quarantine. It is likely they would be asked to identify others with whom they had contact, ad infinity. In just a few iterations of these contacts, the entire country could be placed in lockdown.
The “Get Out of Jail” card would be proof that an individual had recovered from coronavirus and had antibodies to prove it (another round of testing). As proposed by Dr Fauci and the CDC, this proof would enable you to return to work, and to move freely in public (i.e., buy and sell). Bill Gates and Google are developing iPhone apps which would identify you as “safe,” and probably your contact tracing information as well.
These apps would trace your movements via GPS and cell tower and make that information available to public officials (and hackers, no doubt). This “permit” to be in public would not be guaranteed. The “experts” on the coronavirus task force are hinting that immunity may be only temporary, and that you can still be contagious weeks or months after contracting the disease. Testing free of the disease does not mean you can’t acquire an infection within days or hours of the testing.
This scheme correlates well with the concept of regional startups. While the coronavirus has had less impact on some locations than others, the infection can spread very rapidly from a single source. This means travel between locations could be restricted. The granularity of these regions extends to the county and city level, so each supervisor or mayor could have wide reaching authority to restrict movement in and out of his domain.
Small wonder that mayors of New York, Chicago and other major cities are already exercising their authority. It extends down to the village level, where mayors in Chicago’s North Shore, even Mundelein, are issuing “executive orders” on related issues.
How long before people seek favor from officials by denouncing their neighbors? Oh wait! Didn’t New York and Chicago invite cell phone videos exposing violators. We got along just fine with land line telephones for over 100 years. If the government tries wide-scale cell phone tracking, many will leave their phone at home, turn it off, or put it into an RF blocking pouch. Be aware that Google can track you, even if you’re not using a Google app at the time.
From Pandemic to Totalitarianism
Rosemary Frei, a freelance medical writer and journalist for 22 years with a MSc in molecular biology from a faculty of medicine, now an independent investigative journalist in Toronto, Ontario, wrote the following article on April 23, 2020, The Seven-Step Path from Pandemic to Totalitarianism, with a template for rolling it out. This article presents a dystopian, yet entirely plausible view of the future of our culture.
With the arrival of COVID-19 many countries quickly completed Steps 1, 2 and 3. Step 4 is well under way in many jurisdictions, with other jurisdictions about to start Step 5 in early May.
As if it were planned for in advance, billions of people around the globe are being forced step by rapid step into a radically different way of life, one that involves far less personal, physical and financial freedom.
Freedom and the American People
The American people seem so willing to give up their freedoms in order to avoid a potential health threat, even if it costs millions of people their livelihood and this nation its economy. We’ve experienced other health threat over the past two decades, and we didn’t carry on as if the sky was falling.
If there’s one thing we all knew even before the Chinese unleashed their latest virus on the world, it’s that politicians crave power. Over the past couple of months, America’s governors and mayors have tasted it and they want even more than they want their Big Mac’s.
Now that they’ve seen how complacent we’ve become – wearing our silly masks, shopping at dawn in hope of finding toilet paper on the shelves, queuing up outside markets to be allowed in one at a time, not hugging one another, not even shaking hands – many politicians are feeling a drug-like induced exuvberate over their new found power and control.
Not to be forgotten: Once freedom is lost it is difficult to win back, but confiscating additional freedoms become easier with each further assault on our freedoms.
Nancy J. Thorner 