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Do 10,000 extra infections matter?
JoNova — cheaper and faster than a Parliamentary Report — said two months ago that it was baffling that the UK locked everyone down, but kept flying in the virus. Now British MP’s are saying the same.
UPDATE: Given Boris Johnson suddenly changed policy on flights from Spain last week, immediately adding a mandatory quarantine, what’s the bet someone told him this report was coming?
No 10’s ‘inexplicable’ decision to lift quarantine at height of pandemic: MPs’ damning report condemns ‘serious mistake’ that allowed 10,000 infected people into the UK
David Barett, DailyMail
Delaying quarantine measures at the border was a ‘serious mistake’ that allowed 10,000 infected people into the UK accelerated the virus spread, a major report by MPs says.
The cross-party inquiry is highly critical of the Government’s ‘inexplicable’ decision to lift its initial quarantine measures in mid-March, ten days before lockdown.
Experts from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine calculated that up to 10,000 infected people, largely from Spain, France and Italy, imported the virus into the UK.
Viruses can only survive in people temporarily, so to beat a rogue chemical […]
On average, every 3 days, wind farms generating as much as one coal fired unit, fail on the Australian grid
TonyfromOz exposes a failure rate so common it’s hidden in plain view. Wind “Farm” intermittency is even worse than we thought.
On average, every three days within a one hour period there’s a sudden failure of 500 MW of wind generation — equal to one industrial coal turbine. That’s four full wind farms or about 250 spinning turbines that stopped spinning.
Every time a coal plant trips out, it’s reported as a problem of relying on our “old coal fleet”. But when the same power output fails from wind, it’s the new clean green future at work (!) , and a sign we need to spend another $20 billion to “upgrade the grid” with interconnectors we don’t need, and Hydro schemes we don’t want.
A few wind farms are bad for the grid. More windfarms are worse.
100 times a year we get a 500MW outage
TonyfromOz (Anton Lang) laboriously finds and documents two different kinds of failure. The largest and longest outages are when wind farms are becalmed. But there are many more short sharp and very sudden failures […]
More ironies. One fifth of all soil carbon is stored in peat bogs. Unfortunately when industrial wind turbines are built on them, the damage turns them from carbon sinks to carbon sources thus neutralizing the point of building the wind farm.
The headline evokes some supernatural power:
Wind farms built on carbon-rich peat bogs lose their ability to fight climate change
As if the magical whirly totem stick loses the gift of weather control when placed on a peat bog?
But the real damage is not just to wallets for another pointless windfarm. Peat bogs are so much more than carbon sinks — they are also an archive of paleohistory and the ancient climate. Indeed, even though cattle, wind and rain can damage the bogs, the researchers now say the wind farms now pose the “most serious risk” of all. Apparently the vehicle access tracks create artificial streams that drain the peat. The drainage changes are pervasive and “affect the whole peatland” not just the part near the track.
The “blanket bogs” are rare, but occur from Spain to Norway in Europe as well as in Canada, New Zealand and Korea.
The paper is a thinly disguised plea from bog […]
An open thread, with remarkable footage and terrible state of affairs in Lebanon. Pray for the people of Beirut.
Apparently someone didn’t think much about storing 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer in one spot in a city for six long ticking years. Two tons of the same was used to kill 168 people in the Oklahoma terrorist bombing. In this case, the worst “terrorist” appears to be bureaucratic negligence. Lebanon is in a dire state, with hyperinflation ruining life savings, and coronavirus accelerating.
Chatter suggests the explosion was set off by workers welding the doors to stop thieves?
Because there was a smaller fire, many cameras were on when the second explosion started.
Phenomenal footage and news on #BeirutBlast
Afterwards
Beirut port after explosion.
Fully destroyed. Too much bodies to count. #beirutexplosion @akhbar pic.twitter.com/TYMVx0WZVo
— Jenan Moussa (@jenanmoussa) August 4, 2020
The danger of uncontrolled chemistry.
9.9 out of 10 based on 36 ratings
The global economy has been sucker punched by a world wide pandemic, but ABC propaganda writers don’t miss the chance to push their ultimate fantasy, that coal has turned a magical point in a terminal decline. Global coal fired capacity fell by an awesome 0.14 percent for the “First Time On Record”. Hyperbole knows no bounds.
How excited can someone get over a decline of one sixth of one percent? This much:
The world is now shutting down coal plants faster than it’s opening them
by James Purtill, ABC
The world’s combined coal power capacity has fallen for the first time on record as the closure of generators outstripped stations being commissioned. That’s good news for global emissions.
Note the numbers:
Coal power capacity fell by 2.9 gigawatt in the first half of 2020 — a small though significant drop of about 0.14 per cent, according to US research group Global Energy Monitor, which monitors fossil fuel developments.
By comparison, the global coal fleet had grown by an average of 25GW every six months over the previous two decades, from 2000-2019.
In a nutshell, or just a nut, coal power grew by […]
A telling incident in Western democracies about borders
The electoral power of strong borders is vastly underestimated.
Western Australia has hard borders at the moment, and no coronavirus — other than a few cases getting caught in the mandatory quarantine. That’s 2.5 million people who are almost living a normal life. This is not to boast (we wish you could be here), but to point out how politically popular closed borders are in the current pandemic. The Premier is wildly popular, polling close to 90%. To all the people who said “states can’t close borders” the message is that it’s bonkers not to close borders. When the Commonwealth government joined the bizarre High Court push to force them open, the pushback was ferocious. A poll today showed that West Australians are fed up. The West Australian collected 245,000 signatories to a petition supporting the border closure.
Not only do 96% say the borders should stay shut, but when asked, a whopping 34% of Western Australians said the state should secede. How fast did it come to that?
Never, have I seen such vitriol towards the Commonwealth from WA. …the Commonwealth’s decision to effectively join hands with […]
No wonder the Chinese lockdown a million people with every outbreak. Two thirds of these cases were not hospitalized.
These studies are small and need confirmation, but the medical specialists are asking if it is possible that Covid infections create new cases of heart failure which may trigger problems long after infection?
A startling number of COVID-19 patients suffer lasting heart damage
Fermin Koop, ZME Science
A study from the University Hospital Frankfurt looked at the cardiovascular MRIs of 100 people who had recovered from the coronavirus and compared them with heart images of people who hadn’t been infected.
Most of the patients hadn’t been hospitalized and recovered at home, with symptoms ranging from none to moderate. Two months after recovering from COVID-19, the patients were more likely to have troubling cardiac signs than people in the control group. Up to 78% of them had structural changes to the heart, while 76% had evidence of a biomarker signaling cardiac injury typically found after a heart attack, and 60% had signs of inflammation.
The Puntmann study was based in Germany, and the average age of cases was 49. Troponin is a marker used in standard […]
For Peter Ridd, it would have been so much easier if he had gone quietly. This battle is not for him, but for our Australian Universities. He shouldn’t need to take this to the High Court, or even the Federal Court. The Scott Morrison government could turn off the tap to every institution which won’t guarantee free speech and enshrine it in their employee contracts. Dan Tehan is reviewing the university model code, but they don’t need a review. They know, we know, everyone knows, without free speech our universities are just Big Government advertising agencies, or victims of the latest FashionThink trend. Those funds could be frozen tonight, and watch how fast the universities can rewrite their contracts. At the speed of light…
Donations are already flowing in for the High Court Battle. Thank you to all who can help his GoFundMe Campaign.
From John Spooner, The Australian.
Peter Ridd Seeks High Court Appeal
Charlie Peel, The Australian
Sacked James Cook University professor Peter Ridd will go to the High Court over his controversial sacking for publicly criticising the institution and his colleagues over their climate change science.
A week after the Federal Circuit Court overturned […]
New research shows that families with teenage children were three times more likely to get Covid (odds of spread , 18%) than families with children under ten (5%). It appears that it’s more dangerous to live with teens than to live with adults (12%). It may be that teens are more likely to be asymptomatic which means people don’t realize they need to isolate from them.
The question of opening primary schools is potentially very different to high schools. Quite possibly puberty affects immune systems in ways that make teens effectively young adults.
Older Kids May Transmit COVID-19 as Much as Adults Do, New Evidence Shows
ScienceAlert
The results also showed up something unexpected, however. When index patients were categorised by age (0–9, 10–19, 20–29, 30–39, 40–49, 50–59, 60–69, 70–79, and >80 years), households with older children (index patients of 10–19 years) had the highest rate of infection spread to household contacts, with 18.6 percent of household contacts later showing the infection.
By contrast, young children (index patients 0–9 years of age) seemed to confer the least amount of spread of the virus, with just 5.3 percent of household contacts contracting the infection, which […]
For 450 years Typhus ravaged Europe. The death rate without antibiotics is somewhere from 10 – 40%.
Warsaw Ghetto workers
There is still no vaccine to typhus, but overcrowded ghettos of partially starving people managed to stop the spread in 1941. The Nazis crammed some 450,000 people into a 3.4km2 area in Warsaw. In the first round, typhus spread rapidly, infecting 120,000 people and killing 30,000. But the Jews got organized and just as everyone was expecting rates to rocket with winter approaching, the exponential curve fell off suddenly “to extinction”. A new paper claims they beat it with social distancing, hygiene, and home quarantine.
Typhus is due by a bacterium transmitted by lice and fleas. It causes a fever, headache and rash. It was such a scourge that in 1759 one estimate suggests as many as a quarter of all prisoners in England died from typhus. Infection rates were so bad in prison that the disease was called ‘gaol fever’ and prisoners on trial would even infect court members from time to time. In the early 1600’s more than 10% of the total German population may have been killed by typhus. Currently it is infrequent except for in […]
UPDATE: Scroll through the Twitter thread #ChinaFloods
See the spectacular and heart-wrenching footage of raging torrents. I have never seen water move on that scale. Why isn’t this on the news?
But NO evacuation #Hefei #Anhui? Like demons in the night #4thReichChina #Chinazi #Xitler #CCP blew up dams & intentionally flooded & killed a city of 60 million PEOPLE to try save richer more important areas. #ChinaFloods #ChinaTruth #HumanitarianCrisis #EnvironmentalDisaster pic.twitter.com/My8pqbZHUY
— Binni (@ExpelChina) July 25, 2020
There is remarkable footage coming out of flooding in China #Chinafloods.
I can’t verify the authenticity, or dates, but it seems likely that terrible things are happening in China. There are shots of levees being deliberately broken to allow waters to flood fields to take the pressure off the dams, and some say the flooding is done without warning and even at night. One shot shows a barge with people on board crashing into bridge pillar and breaking apart. Lord help them. There are reports that the grain crops have been hit hard. “Agriculture wiped out”. There are multiple other reports of thousands going without food or water, with no attempts to rescue them. And there are scores of videos […]
There’s a reason the Romans wore Togas
A new study near Sicily shows the sea surface temperatures were a whole two degrees Celsius warmer then. The worst-case scenario of the Paris Agreement has already happened, and it was nearly 2,000 years ago. And instead of being a baked-earth apocalypse, the Roman empire flourished during the warmth and declined as it cooled.
Time to burn oil and Make Rome Great Again?
The expansion of the Roman Empire coincided with the warmest period in the Mediterranean of the last 2,000 years.
Probably just a coincidence. /
A formanifera with the awkward name of Globigerinoides ruber apparently likes to live near the sea surface around 10 to 50 m down. Depending on the temperature, it ends up with slightly different ratios of calcium and magnesium. At some point it dies, sinks and sits in a mud layer on the sea floor 475m below. Eventually, for this lucky mud, someone digs it out and analyses it. This new study suggests the Mediteranean warmed up during Roman times from AD 1 to AD 500.
This was the Roman Climatic Optimum — an era we are spending trillions to avoid.
The researchers suggest that cooling and […]
Antibody tests versus PCR tests: PCR tests are nose or throat swabs that amplify up short fragments of viral RNA. They only detect infection in the day or two before symptoms show, and for a few days to a few weeks later. The PCR tests cannot show past infections. Antibodies take around a week or two to rise so don’t show active infections, but will show up past ones, though — in the case of Coronavirus, may still produce no result after a few months in some people as antibodies decline.
Test results like these must finally have convinced Donald Trump to change course. It’s long past time the US got serious about this disease, but hopefully rapid action now — masks and distancing and more testing can prevent the trainwreck of rapidly rising infections across the US in two months time as winter and the US election approach.
This study shows that most people in the US have not had this virus, and herd immunity is unattainable without hundreds of thousands more deaths. It also shows how inadequate testing is in the US.
Many antibody studies have tried to estimate the true extent of the Coronavirus infection. Some were […]
Ridd loses: Federal Court rules that science is whatever the JCU Vice Chancellor says it is.
JCU wins the appeal on all 17 points that Justice Vasta scathingly awarded to Peter Ridd.
If, hypothetically, fraud was happening at JCU and a staff member reported it, the Australian Federal Court decision has just declared that its fine for JCU to sack that whistleblower for being uncolliegiate.
As I said, this is a case so pointless that even if JCU wins, it loses. And it has spent a fortune to win the legal battle and prove that we cannot trust anything anyone says from JCU.
This win doesn’t just tarnish the VC and admin, it taints everyone who works there. No matter what any good academic says at JCU, the world will wonder what they didn’t say. We can’t know whether they would have preferred to say something else, but couldn’t out of fear that they will be sacked because the VC might not like it.
To recap Peter Ridds crimes: he said “for your amusement” in an email once. (Illegal satire). He said “ We can no longer rely on our science institutions.” He talked about the replication crisis in […]
What happens when the left overreach so far they lap the whole argument and hit themselves from behind?
When Wokes and Racists Actually Agree on Everything
by Ryan Long.
Racist:
“We kicked someone out for marrying a black woman, but if you can prove hes still a racist we’ll let him back in”
When there is no rational debate left, there is always satire. Brilliant.
h/t David E
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Welcome to the Era of the Anti-Virals. They’re everywhere.
A legacy of the coronavirus pandemic is the dawn of new ways to stop viruses. Here’s another new (old) one — it’s only a small trial, but if it can stop 4 out of 5 people developing the severe form of the disease it will be a gamechanger. If this gets similar numbers on larger trials, then we still need mass production. But national policies will swing on a dime if a safe drug with this much potential appears.
After Coronavirus we might not be so content to accept the annual seasonal virus scourge.
Postenote: These are preliminary results, not a large trial, but at least it is placebo controlled and randomized.
Breakthrough’ treatment slashes virus death risk: study
by Patrick Galey, MedicalXpress
In a randomised trial of 100 patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19, those who received an inhaled formula of the protein interferon beta were at 79 percent lower risk of developing severe disease compared to those who received a placebo.
They were also more than twice as likely to make a full recovery compared with the control group.
The firm […]
It says something about the mortality rate of Covid19, and also about the burden on the healthcare sector
According to the CDC, there have been 103,643 cases of Covid-19 in US Healthcare workers of which 543 have died. That makes the death rate per infection a hefty 0.5% among these working age people. Obviously some of these people have co-morbidities, but would be under the retirement age.
We would hope US Healthcare workers are reasonably well tested. They may have a higher death rate because they are subject to a higher viral load and working under long hours in a stressful situation. But they also (presumably) wear PPE and are trained to use it.
An Amnesty International report estimates at least 3,000 health care workers have passed away around the world, with the highest tally from Russia (545) and the UK (540).
Elsewhere, the countries with the highest numbers of health worker deaths are USA (507), Brazil (351), Mexico (248), Italy (188), Egypt (111), Iran (91), Ecuador (82) and Spain (63).
These numbers may be underestimates. The Guardian has a list of US Health care worker deaths, and lists the names 787 frontline workers.
Medscape has a […]
Scott Morrison says eliminating the virus is not viable, despite most states in Australia effectively managing to do that already. See the chart below. Instead he talks of suppression as if it’s viable to ride an exponential curve with a default position of “moonshot”.
At the start of June, Victoria was getting 20 new cases a week. In the last three weeks Victoria has added 3,000 cases.
State premiers are being urged to reject an elimination strategy for coronavirus, with Scott Morrison and leading business groups warning the move would double unemployment and wreck the economy.
The Prime Minister, who has conceded the lockdown of Greater Melbourne was necessary given the size of the outbreaks, warned that any pivot to an elimination strategy would double unemployment.
Suppression sounds like a management plan but means rolling waves of infection and isolation, with outbreaks of chaos and a constant higher level of fear and avoidance. This does not seem like a jobs creation machine.
Would we prefer one lockdown or three?
1. The hospitalization rate means hospitals will be overwhelmed within weeks (see Victoria). Therefore repeat lockdowns are inevitable.
2. It’s hard to protect […]
Solar Owners in South Australia are furious that they might be charged to sell back to the grid. They are used to getting all the transmission lines and power plants for free.
The awful truth:
Mr Preus said he had installed his household solar PV system to save money and help the environment, but was now questioning his investment.
“We’ll never, ever in our lifetime recoup our investment, the return is just not there.”
“People will just disconnect them, and tell them to get stuffed, that’s what I would do,” he said.
They’ve been sold a lemon: misled into believing the energy the panels made was useful and economic. Instead solar owners without batteries can only provide excess energy no one needs at lunchtime. Lunchtime voltages are surging and their inverters are tripping off anyhow. And they themselves need to be hooked up to the grid to get the electro-juice they want, most hours of the day.
Finally there is some attempt to fix the Soviet-level planning disaster. People are just starting to notice that the poor are paying for the networks to supply the rich.
But the call to […]
If only they had done that 3 months ago
As I predicted, borders need to close. Places that don’t close the state border end up putting a border around every single home. It’s the same all over the world. But no one seems to have noticed how spectacular this backflip is.
In March when New York was the epicentre begging for ventilators, Donald Trump suggested quarantining the tri-state area to stop infections spreading to the rest of the US. It was exactly the right thing to do, but Governor Cuomo was enraged — declaring the idea was “preposterous”, “anti-American” and a “declaration of war”. Cuomo even argued it would be illegal for Trump to do so, and threatened to sue:
“I’ve sued the federal government a number of times over the years. I do not believe it’s going to come to that on this,” Cuomo said. “This would be a declaration of war on states, a federal declaration of war.“
Right now there are 22 US states which could threaten to sue Cuomo for the infections New Yorkers gave them.
It was weapons grade bluster on March 28, 2020, but which media outlets and creatures from the Swamp […]
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