Coronavirus may cause acute kidney damage in one third of hospital cases

Just another reason to keep the virus out until things improve.

Acute Kidney Injury Seen in Most Severe COVID-19 Cases

— One third of all hospitalized cases also affected in NYC data

New data from two health systems in New York City — where hospitals struggled to keep up with dialysis demands as they were flooded with COVID-19 patients — detailed a high rate of acute kidney injury among infected patients.

In the first 1,000 patients with COVID-19 at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center, 33.9% developed acute kidney injury. Of the 236 who ended up in the ICU, 78% developed AKI, Ruijun Chen, MD, and colleagues reported in The BMJ.

In another study of 5,500 patients the rate was 36% of those hospitalized, and 89% of those in ICU on ventilators. Quite a few of these people went on to die, so, to put it bluntly, they wont be in need of dialysis or further care. But some part of the population in a post corona world will need ongoing care and won’t be able to work at their former level.

At least one person in the US likely died because there wasn’t enough dialysis equipment.

Docs are not sure if the kidney injury is from the virus or a side effect of the treatments. As we get better at treating this we may prevent this damage happening. Though, any disease involving mass clotting could cause damage in most organs, some of which can be repaired, but some of which will cause scarring that may be permanent. If Coronavirus is like a stroke-machine, the cognitive damage may be significant.

An Overlooked, Possibly Fatal Coronavirus Crisis

By Reed Abelson, Sheri Fink, Nicholas Kulish and Katie Thomas, New York Times.

April 18th, 2020

“Nothing like this has ever been seen in terms of the number of people needing kidney replacement therapy,” [said Dr. David S. Goldfarb, chief of nephrology at the New York campus of the New York Harbor VA Health Care System].

Outside of New York, the growing demand nationwide for kidney treatments is fraying the most advanced care units in hospitals at emerging hot spots like Boston, Chicago, New Orleans and Detroit.

Kidney specialists now estimate that 20 percent to 40 percent of I.C.U. patients with the coronavirus suffered kidney failure and needed emergency dialysis, according to Dr. Alan Kliger, a nephrologist at Yale University School of Medicine.

One doctor in New York City, who was not authorized to speak publicly, recalled anguished exchanges with other physicians last week. “You’re yelling at them. You’re telling them you don’t have a dialysis machine to give them. You hear the intensity and the desperation in the other person’s voice,” the doctor said. “My job was hell.”

7.7 out of 10 based on 48 ratings

56 comments to Coronavirus may cause acute kidney damage in one third of hospital cases

  • #
    Mal

    What was the age groups of these patients?
    Did they have other morbid conditions. ( heart, stroke,cancer etc)
    Were their immune system already
    deficient?
    2.8million people died in USA in 2018
    The bulk were over 65 and the biggest killer were heart attack and strokes followed by cancer pneumonia

    Need to put these findings into context

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    • #
      Ted O'Brien.

      76, 23% kidney function can’t afford to lose more, asthma, attrial fibrillation, a stone too much weight.

      Better take care to dodge it.

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      • #
        AZ1971

        Ted O’Brien, that’s true of any number of things — influenza, pneumonia, malaria, undercooked meat, sushi — the list is long. Stay healthy, but recognize that as we age (I’m almost 49) the deck is increasingly stacked against us. A person has to weigh the risks of living to that of spending life in fear.

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      • #
        sophocles

        The kidneys are important, if not critical, for the body’s vitamin-D 3 manufacture and control. They’re a bad place for anything to attack.

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    • #
      Geoff Croker

      The NYT is a rag. This paper ran an Op Ed by Adolf Hitler. The Jews who owned it knew about the eugenics pushed by Adolf and the Democratic Party of the USA.

      It is ALWAYS about sensationalism to get the numbers to get the $$$.

      https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-sulzberger-family-a-complicated-jewish-legacy-at-the-new-york-times/

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  • #
    Another Ian

    Have they worked out how to blame HCQ yet?

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  • #
    Gerard

    NYC and others refused to use Hydroxychloroquine.

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    • #
      Another Ian

      Obviously just Trump’s fault then?

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      • #
        OriginalSteve

        Nah…like “Animal Farm”…

        Vaccines good….Hydroxy bad…..baaaaaa

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        • #
          Roger Knights

          I suspect many bigshots in public health, like whistleblower Dr. Bright formerly of the FDA, are strong partisans of vaccines and strong disparagers of lesser measures, which they view as not getting to the root of the problem. In such a purist view, treatments that alleviate the symptoms are mere band-aids, to be given a public cold shoulder whenever possible.

          It may be there’s another motive for disparagement of HCQ, etc.: fear that drug companies will not invest the large sums needed to develop a vaccine if there appears to be a mostly effective non-vaccine treatment.

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          • #
            Roger Knights

            PS: My suspicion is that this pro-vaccine purism is the main motive behind their disparagement of HCQ, not anti-Trumpism. I suspect the media, in adopting their attitude, is doing so not primarily out of anti-Trumpism, but mostly because these bigshots are viewed as comparatively reliable authorities

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  • #
    JF

    Hi Jo,

    Thank you for your amazing blog. Your articles and research are nothing short of outstanding. At the start of the C19 outbreak, when almost every other political commentator was asleep at the wheel, you were lightning years ahead of the game in identifying the serious nature of the outbreak and also in outlining the solutions, all of which were eventually proven to be correct.

    Just a quick comment … I would have rated this article 10/10 but accidentally rated it 1/10 when touching “view comments”. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to correct this error. My apologies for this long-winded explanation, but I hate the idea of giving discouraging feedback, even inadvertently, to your excellent work, and just wanted to offer an explanation.

    JF

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  • #
    RK

    ” If Coronavirus is like a stroke-machine, the cognitive damage may be significant”

    Is is possible that Coronavirus has given rise to reduced cognitive function worldwide and that this is contributing to the individual and government insanity that we are all witnessing?

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  • #
    Broadie

    Benjamin Carson has identified this problem. The health system will not be able to cope with the coming wave of illness requiring intensive hospital treatment.

    Health care starts at 21:00

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFb6NU1giRA

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  • #
    OriginalSteve

    https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30937-5/fulltext

    CORRESPONDENCE| VOLUME 395, ISSUE 10234, P1417-1418, MAY 02, 2020
    Endothelial cell infection and endotheliitis in COVID-19
    Zsuzsanna Varga
    Andreas J Flammer
    Peter Steiger
    Martina Haberecker
    Rea Andermatt
    Annelies S Zinkernagel
    et al.
    Show all authors
    Published:April 20, 2020DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30937-5

    “SARS-CoV-2 infects the host using the angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptor, which is expressed in several organs, including the lung, heart, kidney, and intestine. ACE2 receptors are also expressed by endothelial cells.3 Whether vascular derangements in COVID-19 are due to endothelial cell involvement by the virus is currently unknown. Intriguingly, SARS-CoV-2 can directly infect engineered human blood vessel organoids in vitro.4

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  • #
    Rob Kennedy

    The “health” care system in the USA has been so monetised, politicised and bastardised that I would be very wary of believing any news at all. Disinformation campaigns such as the Hydroxychloroquine scaremongering are just one proof of this. Medical doctors and researchers who publish their research or studies of case histories are suicided at a greater rate than the Clintons “Arkancided” those who were a threat to their prosperity. The recent interview of the Russian chief medical officer during which he grew tired of the inane questioning by the journalist and finally told her the whole “pandemic” was B.S. and he could not believe that countries were going mad trying to prevent a normal upper respiratory virus which resulted in comparatively so few deaths by such destuctive policies. When the full extent of the economic and social destuction becomes self-evident to people I suggest then will be the time to watch-out and stay home. A lot of normally docile citizens may become very angry.

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  • #
    AndyG55

    Covid-19 related. Interesting to read page 3 of the George Floyd autopsy

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  • #
    tom

    …. at least one person in the US died

    That’s it, shut it all down!! Strict lockdown.
    Oh wait…that’s playing out in our streets so well.
    Cant wait to see whos is left homeless & starving 6 months
    from now. But at least they wont die of the corona.

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  • #
    Rob Kennedy

    The first Director General of W.H.O. George Brock Chisholm said this: “To achieve World Government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men, their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas.” This ideology still drives the UN and its directorates such as W.H.O.

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    • #
      OriginalSteve

      They can go jump….

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    • #
      Alessandro

      Chisholm appears to have read some of Viktor Frankl’s landmark text Man’s Search for Meaning in which wrote about the existential vacuum clearly highlighting how man (sorry ladies) has lost his instinct and traditions. Instinct tells him what he ought to do and tradition tells him what he ought to do. Sometimes he does not even know what he wished to do. Instead he either wishes to do what other people do (conform) or he does what other people tell him to do (totalitarianism).

      As for me I’m assuming that people with good instinct and an understanding of traditions would today be described as freedom fighting radicals. Strange eh? Chisholm and his successors appear to have and continue to be working assiduously towards eradicating instinct and traditions.

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  • #
    truth

    Makes this sound more plausible unfortunately…

    …from https://harvardtothebighouse.com/

    ‘The Wuhan Strain was likely developed as part of a defensive dual-use gain-of-function project possibly linked to immunotherapy or vaccination programs – never meant to leave the lab, but meant to serve as a Red Team to fight back against.

    . However this is exactly what researchers looking to design something for a “safe” vaccine candidate to target would engineer ie a sequence that’s NOT engineered nucleotide-by-nucleotide to increase virulence…to be safe.

    The successful end results of the aforementioned bat coronavirus bio-engineering research at UNC that was critiqued for being too risky in 2015, was published the following year and described the successful bio-engineering of a highly-virulent coronavirus derived from bats which was achieved by tinkering with its spike-protein genes.

    In this paper, researcher #8 is listed as one “Zheng-li Shi” ‘ [she’s the researcher in question at the Wuhan lab]

    ‘The Wuhan Strain COVID-19 appears to be thirty-four times more lethal than the seasonal flu. It should also be noted that several years prior to tinkering directly with bat coronavirus spike-proteins, Baric orchestrated research that involved isolating a coronavirus from civets and then passing it through mammalian ACE2 receptor cells that were grown in the lab from kidney and brain samples – serial passage through host cell lines instead of entire hosts, which imparted a strong affinity for ACE2, and presumably created an airborne strain of coronavirus. And if cells derived from kidneys and brains were used for the serial passage development of COVID-19, that might help explain its affinity for attacking the kidneys and brains of its human hosts.’

    Could Zhengli-Shi have brought the IP from the Baric lab at UNC back to Wuhan with her….and maybe gave it extra function?

    Did Baric know or suspect that’s what had happened I wonder..when it’s said that…

    ‘oddly, in late January right as the pandemic was blooming, Dr. Ralph Baric claimed in an interview that people should be more concerned with the seasonal flu’

    ….but now he’s supposed to be furiously working to get a vaccine.

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  • #
    Environment Skeptic

    *sigh…

    From: https://youtu.be/W1k1sUoLPlA

    “COVID and the ACE-2 surface protein
    75,470 views
    •May 4, 2020

    ” Doctor Klioze
    15.9K subscribers

    Describes the ACE-2 cell membrane protein, its relationship to the renin-angiotensin system and how the protein may increase or decrease your risk of a severe clinical response to a SARS-CoV2 infection.

    01

  • #
    OriginalSteve

    This is interesting – chimera research?

    https://harvardtothebighouse.com/2020/01/31/logistical-and-technical-analysis-of-the-origins-of-the-wuhan-coronavirus-2019-ncov/

    “By 2015, Dr. Ralph Baric and his team at UNC were conducting research that was met with an enormous amount of concern, they successfully created a “chimeric, SARS-like virus” by altering the viral genome of a Chinese bat coronavirus’s spike-protein genes – sequences that code for the spikes that poke out from surface of viruses and allow them to unlock entry into hosts, in this case making the bio-engineered coronavirus incredibly contagious.

    “This research raised eyebrows since it was clearly dual-use gain-of-function research, a practice banned in America from 2014 until December 2017 when NIH lifted the ban, specifically to allow research on this sort of virus.

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    • #
      truth

      The Baric lab at UNC appealed that NIH ban since they were in the middle of their ‘gain of function’ research…and they were given special dispensation to complete it.

      Researchers are extremely cagey about the idea of Covid19 being a lab-engineered virus.

      Nevertheless there are quite a few scientists who are sceptical of the claims that the gain of function all happened naturally within the bat virus…along with the perfection of its ability to bind with human cells…not just with the cells’ ACE2 receptors but with the cell membranes….this on how it happens is from researchers of a candidate vaccine…Biovacc-19…they appear to believe… from other reports… that the virus is lab-engineered and they take flak for that .

      They apparently have another paper coming that’s specifically on the origin of the virus.

      https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/DBBC0FA6E3763B0067CAAD8F3363E527/S2633289220000083a.pdf/biovacc19_a_candidate_vaccine_for_covid19_sarscov2_developed_from_analysis_of_its_general_method_of_action_for_infectivity.pdf

      They say…’ the molecular structure of the SARS-CoV-2 Spike receptor binding domain, with its accumulated charge from inserts and salt bridges in surface positions, is capable of binding with cell membrane components. This is an essential key to understanding its potency…’

      and…’the human cell envelops the virus due to its opposite charged binding to co-receptors on the cell membrane and possibly to the membrane itself’….

      ‘it will take over cell machinery, replicate and kill the host cells and rapidly increase systemic infection.’

      30

    • #
      truth

      Where is the Wuhan researcher Zenghli-Shi right now I wonder.

      After all…it’s her research so she knows exactly how the virus emerged..or was made.

      She has worked with numerous American and Australian scientists…has spent time in both countries…used their TPM… and probably in Europe as well…so surely her research colleagues in our two countries are calling for her to come clean on everything about the virus.

      I’d like to know whether she is even now withholding information…or whether she’s among the ‘disappeared’.

      20

  • #
    Salome

    Death is overrated as a measure of seriousness. I’m sick of hearing ‘It’s only killed x people and cancer and heart disease kill so many more’. Remember The Day of the Triffids? No-one got killed by whatever was in that meteor shower, but everyone went blind. You wouldn’t wish that on people. You wouldn’t wish permanent kidney or lung damage on people and you wouldn’t wish strokes on people. And there are even old folks with premorbid conditions who are still playing an active role in society or their families and who have a lot of living left to do and whose premorbid conditions are a long way from killing them. Yup. This Wuhan Virus is a nasty piece of work (one wonders whose work) and we’ve done right to take extraordinary measures to stop it. Best of all was shutting the borders, it would seem. Sure, there have been some, like Chairman Dan, to whose heads has gone the power to stop people doing harmless things, but I think Australia has been doing pretty much the right thing most of the time. And if the result of that is the hospitals weren’t overloaded, fewer than the projected number of people died, etc, then perhaps that’s a sign we did the right thing.

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  • #
    Ross

    Thanks for your blog Jo. But I think using data or results from the NYC COVID-19 situation are really of academic interest only, from an Australian point of view. There were (are) a lot of variables attached to the NYC situation which made their situation much worse than the rest of the US and indeed many other countries. The AKI situation maybe something that is only observed in that area. Worth noting indeed but just another piece in the Coronavirus jigsaw.

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    • #
      Environment Skeptic

      In NY, if a person was hit by a car, and then run over by a bus, ‘poof’!!, the cause of death was Corona.

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      • #
        Environment Skeptic

        I maintain the way Corona numbers are collected is highly dubious in the extreme, and varies country/state to country/state.

        71

      • #
        Environment Skeptic

        I maintain the way Corona numbers are collected is highly dubious in the extreme, and varies country/state to country/state.

        41

        • #
          Bill In Oz

          Trolling is useful livilihood or business for you E S ?

          [Anti-trolling is useful livilihood [SIC] or business for you Bill In Oz? No answer required really, just prepare yourself for a strong dose of reciprocal moderator attention. ]ED

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        • #
          Serp

          Agreed; nothing controversial in that statement whatsoever. It very quickly became every state for itself as Italy discovered when appealing to the EU for help and no two places keep books the same even to the point of concealing the figures in the UK and the Netherlands.

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  • #
    Serp

    Has TdeF racked his cue here and moved to another venue; I can’t find anything since http://joannenova.com.au/2020/05/trump-is-the-only-president-in-history-wont-leave-the-office-richer/#comment-2333928 (forgive the off topic remark).

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  • #
    Bill In Oz

    I rarely rust the Guardian – too much bleeding heart garbage.
    But occasionally it throws light on places which would otherwise not be known.
    This is an example
    Covid 19 in Nicaragua : The Sandinista regime there decided that the pandemic was a hoax and discouraged any social distancing or masks or lock down or quarantine for incoming travellers.
    Well now that progressive left wing totalitarian brutal regime is suffering the consequences with many of it’s inner circle sick with Covid 19 or dead.
    Could it happen to nicer people ?

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/08/nicaragua-coronavirus-sandinista-leaders-fall-victim

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  • #
    Roger Knights

    “Nothing like this has ever been seen in terms of the number of people needing kidney replacement therapy,” [said Dr. David S. Goldfarb, chief of nephrology at the New York campus of the New York Harbor VA Health Care System].
    —————

    But the alleged experts—”ethicists”—have forbidden kidney donors from being paid for their donation. It would upset their sense of seemliness for there to be stinking lucre involved in this transaction. It would agonize them. So it’s a No-No. Tough noogies, kidney-needers.

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  • #

    It has been apparent that deaths have been falling worldwide for at least a month. Yet the number of cases stabilised or grew slowly for a bit longer after the turning point in deaths before now mostly falling. The initial case loads were obviously predominantly from self presentation at hospitals. Subsequently, community testing ramped up and more cases were identified, but are not being converted to deaths. This all goes to support the view that there has been a mass hysterical reaction to what is broadly a severe form of flu for the old and infirm, but benign for everyone else.

    A number of commenters here over the last few months have been postulating ghastly scenarios that have come straight out of their imaginations. Fair enough, what do I care about them? It is when those imaginations gain traction in the minds of the policy makers that I get angry.

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    • #
      Bill In Oz

      Don’t know the facts ? If so go check here David:
      https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

      [SNIP. baiting. Tone down the know-it-all rhetoric Bill in OZ. Truth abhors an echo chamber and lately there is a very annoying reverberation that sounds of Bill…] ED

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      • #
        Bill In Oz

        Such a pity when some folks post lies on this blog.

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        • #
          Rob Kennedy

          In an Orwellian world do you believe The Ministry of Truth? The Russians coped with the reporting from their two news journals (Pravda – truth and Izvestia – news) by making the joke, “There is no izvestia in Pravda and there is no pravda in Izvestia.” The accurate reporting of Covid19 deaths is contingent on accurate testing of the presence of the virus (highly contentious considering the high number of false positives), and outright falsification of causes of deaths e.g. in Italy and NewYork.
          Fact checking websites have been, for the most part, corrupted by relying on funding from outside. “He who pays the piper, calls the tune”.

          This was recently in The Australian National Review: Facebook released a statement on December 15 advising users that they were starting a program to “work with third-party fact checking organizations that are signatories of Poynter’s International Fact Checking Code of Principles (IFCN)”.

          Here’s an interesting fact about Poynter, the self-proclaimed “global leader in journalism”. They are funded by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy (which has financial links to the State Department), Ebay’s Omidyar Foundation, and Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist who donated a massive $1 million to Poynter to create this anti fake news mechanism.

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    • #
      Rob Kennedy

      The original ghastly scenario was postulated by Prof Neil (Lockdown) Ferguson of the Imperial College London from his computer modelling legerdemain. Some sleuths have found out he has been wildly wrong many times in the past. He is the Tim Flannery of pandemic predictions. But, don’t worry, he was sacked after he advertised the fact that he did not believe his own B.S. by getting his married lover to disobey the rules he formulated to cross town to visit him on two occasions. The trouble was that the UK, USA and probably Australia took notice of him because he was a leading ‘expert’.
      Apart from this, never before in the recent history of epidemics have healthy people been quarantined – you quarantine the sick and those likely at risk – the elderly and health compromised. Otherwise you destroy your economy, the suicide rate goes up, the children suffer cruel abuse with needless restrictions and everyone behaves in inhuman ways, informing on their neighbours just like any decent totalitarian state.

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  • #
    hillbilly33

    Recently turned 87, I have had Chronic Kidney Disease for many years together with some asbestosis scarring on the lungs, Cardiac conditions and a few other medical (and accident) problems along the way. Medical advances have saved my life numerous times and I am currently totally reliant on a CRT Pacemaker. However, with the love and support of a great family and lifetime friends, I have still managed to live a very full and happy personal, social and sporting life.

    Some time ago I looked into all that was involved in dialysis, and decided I would not be taking that option when the time came. Similarly with the Covid-19 virus. If I am unfortunate enough to contract it, I am aware I would not survive if put on a ventilator, but would simply be subjecting myself to more unnecessary pain and suffering – for what?

    Fortunately, I am told I can (under proper Medical protocol and supervision) elect to have my Pacemaker switched off, let nature take its course, and with the full support of my close family, that’s just what I’ll be doing.

    BTW, blogs like this and many others, many of which are on Jo’s side-panel list, have been a great source of interest and knowledge to me over the last few years. They have also allowed me to ‘vent’, debate and even meet and/or correspond with many interesting people, all of whom have enlivened and enriched my declining years. Cheers to all. H/B

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  • #
    WXcycles

    This is a follow up to yesterday’s comment on a second global surge of cases, here:
    http://joannenova.com.au/2020/06/powerful-protesters-spell-out-love-with-burning-homes/#comment-2336012

    Deaths have likewise begun to rise as the second global growth phase gets rolling.

    I’ve totaled the deaths within each 7-day period up to each Sunday, then compared the total death change in that period, to the previous week’s 7-day total. There had been no rises in the weekly death change since Sunday, the 19th of April, but in yesterday’s ‘Sunday’ death total change figure the deaths rose fairly strongly by +3,241 deaths.

    Which is an upward change of +4,970 deaths when compared to the previous week’s 7-day change total.

    Date | Day | Weekly died | Change
    19-Apr-20 … Sunday … 50,825 … +6,059
    26-Apr-20 … Sunday … 41,910 … -8,915
    03-May-20 … Sunday … 41,223 … -687
    10-May-20 … Sunday … 35,597 … -5,626
    17-May-20 … Sunday … 32,786 … -2,811
    24-May-20 … Sunday … 29,914 … -2,872
    31-May-20 … Sunday … 27,703 … -2,211 <– Initial +540 increase in deaths at the end of May
    07-Jun-20 … Sunday … 30,944 … +3,241 <– Then a +4,970 surge as of yesterday’s ‘Sunday data’.

    So the lagged deaths from where the new case rises began in the second week of May, began to show up in the weekly totals 2 weeks later, with an initial ~+540 deaths change. Then after 3 weeks it produced a +4,970 rise in weekly deaths — the first rise in global death totals in 6 to 7 weeks.

    The new cases and lagged new deaths are not to do with the Western world's infection.

    This is still the expansion of the ‘first-wave’, that’s still building-up outside of China, and outside of Western countries. This new surge is Africa, India, South America, and Central Asia, finally making a significant impact on the totals. They will get steadily larger from here, within a slow acceleration of the infection spread. It’s happening so much later due to fewer initial economic linkages with China spreading it, and international quarantine, plus the rise was slower because they’d been isolating from COVID-19 when they still had very low numbers.

    Plus the Western infection growth was shrinking away fast as this bloomed within the poorer country populations. The steady Western infection shrinkage, and steady developed-world expansion of the infection cancelled each other out for most of May, leading to the flatter global graph plots, but this is no longer the case.

    The numbers are getting bigger within the developed world, and they’re gradually catching up to the western infection. They have had lower spreading rates (compared to the early western infection) but still have daily spreading of 4% to 12% (some are up to 18%).

    Hence the accelerating rise of new cases and a slight (so far) lagged rise in global deaths, which we can expect to get much larger from here into early to mid-July. This slow acceleration of new cases will turn into a moderate acceleration of new cases by the end of June.

    This ‘acceleration’ is not actually new however, it’s been happening all along at this rate, while at lower numbers, in the developing countries. It just took a long time to scale up from a much lower base, to a point where it is now finally registering as a globally significant ‘acceleration’ in the global data.

    Nevertheless, this is a real increase in numbers and the rate of global spreading, and it will become a terrible problem for those countries, especially during July if they could not defeat it even when it was at much lower numbers.

    _
    To be clear, the acceleration has nothing to do with the USA situation. The US spread is still down at ~1.7% daily (Australia is ~1.4% most days). The US finally began to very slightly shrink its active cases during the past week. They’re in a better position to beat it down through July as long as a new surge does not recommence due to the fake-protest movement rabble spreading it around again.

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      Bill In Oz

      WX, Can you differentiate in these statistics between
      Nation states that have rigorously enforced lock downs & quarantines
      From those that have not or not been able to enforce such measures.

      I’m wondering about countries like Brazil, Nicaragua and Belarus
      Where the governments have rejected any lock down or quarantine measures.
      Or such countries as Haiti, Afghanistan, Yemen, South Sudan etc.

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  • #
    Bill In Oz

    New Zealand lifted all domestic COVID-19 restrictions today Tuesday.

    Why ?
    There are no active cases of coronavirus in New Zealand and have not been for about 16 days.
    However restrictions remain in place will be international border controls.
    Some states & territories in Australia are getting to the same stage with this disease.
    So I look forward to most of social distancing restrictions being abolished soon.
    But not in Victoria as that state continues to demonstrate an inability to stoke the virus spreading at a slow burn rate.

    15