What Australians Were Being Told About New York City in March 2020
What Australians Were Being Told About New York City in March 2020
A prime example of The New York City Pandemic Show script
A March 29, 2020 60 Minutes Australia episode is illustrative of how New York City was used to substantiate a pandemic declaration and sell the world on the story of a sudden-spreading risk-additive coronavirus from China.1
It’s also an excellent example of what I have come to think of as “The New York City Pandemic Show Script.”
Key themes/messages/techniques from this episode - titled “New York: The New Deadly Epicenter of the Coronavirus Crisis”2 - include
New York and the world are at war against COVID-19.3
New York may be experiencing a different version of “the virus.”4
The virus is killing young and healthy people.5
Hospitals are experiencing high patient volume and may run out of supplies.
A mass casualty event necessitating extra storage for bodies is occurring.6
Doctors feel overwhelmed.
There are many sick people.
In the transcript below I use bold font to emphasize words & phrases that are at odds with official data or are otherwise noteworthy or concerning. Some links are embedded. My comments and additional links to relevant content are in the footnotes.
Tara Brown [Reporter/Narrator] Narrator: New York is America's first battleground in the war against COVID-19. The infection rate of the virus here has been more ferocious than anywhere in the world so far.
Mangala Narasimhan [Doctor]: This is different. This is bigger. This is worse. This is young sick people.7 This is high volumes of people.8
Brown: The city is in shock. Makeshift morgues are being built.
Narasimhan: I’m an ICU doctor and I don’t really scare that easily, but this is scary.
Brown: And more and more, the stories of the dead include the young and the seemingly healthy.9 We had a couple - husband and a wife - that both passed away. Lots of devastating horrible stories of people whose whole families are taken out. They were at a party together and the three of people in the same family have passed away.10 So a hundred devastating stories that I could tell you.
Brown: Dr. Mangala Narasimhan is head of intensive care at six major hospitals in New York. The death toll here is seven hundred plus and counting.11 Over 50,000 cases, with hospital admissions increasing by an incredible 40 percent every day.12
Narasimhan: Understanding that a lot of people that we saw today probably won't make it through this.13
Brown: Can you please describe to me the scenes that confront you as you walk through the doors of the hospitals you work at, at the moment?
Narasimhan: Just the sheer numbers of extremely sick people.14 We have numbers of people on ventilators that we normally would never see. And the challenge is just the volume and they're not simple patients. They're very sick and require a lot of care.15
Brown: Do you have the equipment you need? Do you have the personnel you need?
Narasimhan: So our numbers are basically doubling every three days.16 We’ve been able to keep up with it so far. The challenge is that once they go on the ventilators they stay on for a very, very long time.17 At some point there will be an issue with having enough of everything, the way things are going right now in New York.
Brown: How soon do you expect that to be?
Narasimhan: Our prediction is two or three weeks if we keep at this rate.
Brown: But there are already shortages at another New York hospital. This is the emergency ward at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, as its director Dr. Colleen Smith pleads for more ventilators.18
Dr. Colleen Smith:19 Today is kind of getting worse and worse. We are right now scrambling to try to get a few additional ventilators or even CPAP machines. If we could get CPAP machines, we could free up ventilators for patients who need them.
Brown: Outside a truck now the hospital's makeshift morgue.
Smith: We had to get a refrigerated truck to store the bodies of patients who are dying. Leaders in various offices from the president to the head of [NYC] Health and Hospitals20 saying things like, “We're gonna be fine. Everything's fine.” And from our perspective everything is not fine.
Narasimhan: Everyone in my group is actually stunned at how hard this is and how we take care of very sick patients all the time but not like this.21 Not this number.
Brown: But perhaps the most disturbing, most terrifying aspect of this New York outbreak is the age and health of its victims. [To Doctor] Tell me about your patients, you know, what type of people are presenting with their symptoms? Who is being targeted by this virus?22
Narasimhan: So that's a very good question. I think there's a misperception out there that this is targeting older people with a lot of medical problems that is not what we are seeing in our hospitals. Our hospitals have an average age of 60, and I have many 20, 30, 40 year-olds -- many of them very, very sick on ventilators with no medical problems. So the majority of them are younger people with a few or no medical problems.23 So the misperception of this can't hurt me because I'm young, I think, is a dangerous one.
Brown: Is it a misperception, or you actually experiencing something different to many parts of the world?
Narasimhan: I don't know the answer to that. I can only say what I'm seeing. The patients that we have that are younger are the ones that are getting better with time, but not all of them. Many of them have not made it, so I don't know the answer. I don't know if this is a different strain24 that's more virulent and with younger people, or if it's just the population that it's hitting.25 I don't know the answer to that question.
Brown: We’re are watching COVID-19’s unstoppable advance across the world The desperate battles being waged in hospitals from Italy to New York -- a war that is only just beginning in Australia.
Smith: And if this goes on for a month or two or three or five like it did in China,26 and we're already this strained, we don't have what we need. I don't really care if I get in trouble for speaking to the media. I want people to know that this is bad. People are dying.27 We don't have the tools that we need in the emergency department and in the hospital to take care of them. And it's really hard.
Brown: As you face each day going into work, do you ever feel overwhelmed?28
Narasimhan: Yes, all the time. I feel like I wish this would end. I wish it would slow down. I worry every day about ventilators and supplies. My colleagues do the same. Everybody's tired and I'm hoping that we see a slowdown soon. Every day we worry. I'm worried.29
Screenshot of image shown at 5:05. The “patients” appear to be dummies placed in the prone position.
Australia reported an off-season rise in flu testing in March 2020. Did propaganda like this video create an excuse to test people already in the hospital and/or prompt a brief surge of people going to the hospital to get tested?
“Epicenter” is earthquake terminology - not outbreak language.
Similar to language used by Pierre Kory in his testimony to the U.S. Senate Homeland Security committee on May 6, 2020 (“we are at war right now with this virus”). Early examples of public officials invoking war metaphors include Andrew Cuomo (March 15, 2020) and Mike Pompeo & Donald Trump (March 20, 2020).
The use of “coronavirus” and “the virus” throughout spring of 2020 very strange, given that the ICTV had already announced the SARS-CoV-2 name in February. Notably, the WHO didn’t use SARS-CoV-2 in its February 11, 2020 press conference or coding guidelines for COVID-19 (U07.1). When referring to a virus, WHO prefers to say “COVID-19 virus”.
New York City appears to be a domestic & global outlier in the number of younger-adult COVID-19 deaths reported (see Figure 14 and Table 1). As far as I can tell, the message among “coronavirus” being a threat to young healthy adults commenced with “15 Days to Slow the Spread” marketing materials. Pfizer board member & ex-FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb also promoted the idea. [See also this page on the message that the young & healthy were at risk.]
An idea also being promoted on the White House lawn the same day the 60 Minutes episode was published.
In contrast to the “young people are getting sick and dying” narrative being reported by media-elevated doctor voices during these weeks (see Healthcare Hero archetypes described here), average New Yorkers I’ve spoken with do not report knowing working-age adults who became suddenly ill and/or were dying.
NYC hospital ED visit data contradicts this claim. “Epicenter of the epicenter” Elmhurst Hospital saw a brief increase in mid-March, followed by a decline, and was nowhere near the levels reported in 2009 or 2022.
Why “seemingly”?
Possibly a reference to this March 18, 2020 story about a New Jersey family.
The report date for this number isn’t clear but it fits with the number reported on March 28, 2020 (i.e., 728 “coronavirus” deaths). Official data I obtained from NYC DOHMH show just over 1,100 deaths with COVID-19 listed as underlying or contributing cause by that date.
I’ve tried to obtain daily hospital admission data for NYC hospitals from both state and city health departments. Both agencies told me it’s not available. Monthly admissions data I scraped from archived SPARCS reports are inconsistent with claims about higher-than-usual admissions rates..
“this” = unclear pronoun reference. Won’t make it through what?
Where are the numbers?
Sick with what? Notice there is no mention of what symptoms these “extremely sick” patients are presenting with.
Numbers of what?
Patients being on ventilators for weeks is a recurrent theme in the NYC script. (For example
, in a video response to me: “Well, when I say, ‘chronically ill with COVID,’ they were so far advanced in the disease, they’d been sick for days to weeks, uh, and on ventilators. Really prolonged ventilator durations.”) Available data are incomplete and hide the “turnover” rate. It’s possible the turnover rate was low.Here the 60 Minutes segment is using video from The New York Times’s March 25, 2020 story featuring “damsel in distress” (my term) Dr. Colleen Smith. (Note: March 25th was the day the CARE$ Act was passed.)
See this thread for information about/other videos from Dr. Smith
The same NYC Health + Hospitals that refused to release basic death data for 2017-2019.
Not like what?
“Target” is war/attack language. Do viruses “target” people/certain people?
This is also the claim of the late-arriving Dr. Kory.
The idea of a different strain in NYC was advanced early on and was suggested by this 2020 paper - also discussed here.
China wasn’t experiencing anything unusual.
People are always dying in hospitals. If Elmhurst was experiencing the level of death reported, it’s hard to imagine Dr. Smith having the time to record a video and sit down for an interview.
The reporter is correct to ask if the doctor feels overwhelmed. Feeling overwhelmed is not necessarily evidence of a real disease-spread emergency and can arise from other stressors/factors that have nothing to do with the number of patients and/or may be contrived. The best analogy I can think of is a server in a restaurant. A server can feel (or be) overwhelmed during a shift not due to the number of tables or guests, but because of staffing levels, demanding patrons, issues with the ordering system, etc.
In a true disaster/emergency, would she be giving this interview at this point in time and in this manner?
I lived in nyc during “covid” and I still don’t know ANYONE who got especially ill or died of “covid” NOBODY
Very scary stuff. BOO. Notable are the seeds of fear planted regarding being “targeted by a virus” and its “unstoppable advance across the world” along with “desperate battles in hospitals from Italy to New York.” Run!
Brings to mind an early 2020 discovery: “The lady walking ahead of me sped up so I did, she began running so I did, she screamed so I did. I never even saw what we were running from.” Because maybe it was…nothing?