All around the world are dawning headlines wondering if we have founds signs of life on Venus.
Despite the hunt for life on star systems that are lightyears from Earth, it turns out there may be something on the Planet-next-door. “May” being the operative word. A team found phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus and can’t think of any other way it could have got there. Phosphine is considered to be a biomarker. And microbes on Earth would have no trouble making it, though none of them could easily survive on Venus where the atmosphere clouds and rain are nearly pure hot sulphuric acid.*
Sara Seager, a planetary scientist on the study at MIT in the US, called the finding “mind-boggling”. She hypothesises a lifecycle for Venusian microbes that rain down, dry out and are swept back up to more temperate altitudes by currents in the atmosphere.
For 2bn years, Venus was temperate and harboured an ocean. But today, a dense carbon dioxide atmosphere blankets a near-waterless surface where temperatures top 450C. The clouds in the sky are hardly inviting, containing droplets of 90% sulphuric acid.
“It’s completely startling to say life could survive surrounded by so much sulphuric acid,” said Prof Jane Greaves, an astronomer at Cardiff University, leader of the team who made the discovery. “But all the geological and photochemical routes we can think of are far too
There are still a lot of ducks that need to line up before we could say we’ve found life on Venus (if it exists). It’s a competition of disbelief — we can’t believe lightning or volcanoes could have made that much phosphine and we can’t believe microbes can live in near pure sulphuric acid either.
Still, it’s interesting to wonder whether life could have evolved on Venus during that two billions years of oceans and this is all that’s left? If there were once fish on Venus, how would we know on a 450 degree C planet, and from 200 million years in the future and from Earth?
Venus is a notoriously inhospitable planet, where surface temperatures hover around 860 degrees Fahrenheit (460 Celsius). Travel high into the atmosphere, where it’s cooler, and you’ll find more bearable, even comfortable, temperatures, closer to what we experience on Earth. This is where the telescopes detected the signature of phosphine. But Venus’s atmosphere is so acidic, with clouds made of droplets of sulfuric acid, that any phosphine would be quickly zapped. For the gas to stick around, something must replenish the supply.
Yes, there’s a climate simulation involved and we all know what that means.
Until now, phosphine has been detected only on three other worlds in the solar system. On Earth, it is found in swamps and marshlands, and in the intestines of some animals. On Jupiter and Saturn, the gas is forged within the planets’ violent storms, under extreme conditions that aren’t known to exist anywhere else. Sousa-Silva and the other researchers mimicked similar processes on Venus using computer simulations. They sent jolts of lightning coursing through the atmosphere and meteorites crashing through the clouds. They simulated the scraping of crust against crust, even though Venus doesn’t have plate tectonics, because they couldn’t think of anything else that could produce enough energy to force phosphine into existence.
It’s easy to pooh-pooh the evidence, but having studied microbiology, it’s hard to imagine a whole planet being sterile. The phosphine clue might be a fizzer, but it won’t surprise me if there is some microbial life there. And if there is, I want to see what it uses for DNA. But to get that we need a titanium rocket, or something.
*Edited: Thanks to Bob Fernley-Jones for pointing out that I meant to say clouds and rain specifically are sulphuric acid. The atmosphere is mostly CO2 (of course).
Given that people with dark skin are more likely to be deficient in Vitamin D, wouldn’t studies like these be the best way to show that black lives actually matter? Would you like training in cultural sensitivity or to avoid the intensive care unit?
A free antiviral shining down on you?
In the Castillo study in Spain, 76 patients were randomly assorted into Calciferol treatment ( 0.532 mg Vitamin D ). Of the 26 who didn’t get it, 13 were admitted to the ICU. Of the 50 who got Vitamin D doses on days 1, 3, and 7 — only one ended up in the ICU. It’s worth noting that all patients got HCQ as well, and azithromycin too.
A second study tested 500 people to find out if they were deficient and followed them to see if they caught Covid.
Why has it taken 6 months of pandemic to do these small studies?
Our pilot study demonstrated that administration of a high dose of Calcifediol or 25-hydroxyvitamin D, a main metabolite of vitamin D endocrine system, significantly reduced the need for ICU treatment of patients requiring hospitalization due to proven COVID-19. Calcifediol seems to be able to reduce severity of the disease, but larger trials with groups properly matched will be required to show a definitive answer.
People who were seriously deficient in Vitamin D were nearly twice as likely to get sick
Could Boosting Vitamin D Cut COVID-19 Risk?
Molly Walker, Medpage
One Vitamin D trial shows that people with very low vitamin D levels are 80% more likely to catch Covid. The message here is that it’s wise to get tested, and make sure you are in the healthy range. (Don’t forget to get Vitamin K as well if you take large doses of D).
Among nearly 500 patients, the relative risk for infection was 1.77 (95% CI 1.12-2.81, P=0.02) in those judged to be vitamin D-deficient (below 20 ng/mL or 18 pg/mL, respectively) compared with patients believed to have sufficient vitamin D, reported David Meltzer, MD, PhD, of the University of Chicago, and colleagues writing in JAMA Network Open.
It’s an observational study, not a randomized one. Cause and effect is not guaranteed:
The authors acknowledged one major caveat, however: vitamin D deficiency may be associated with many other COVID-19 risk factors, including age, obesity, diabetes, and chronic illness. Their statistical analysis included adjustments for many of these, but potential remained for residual confounding.
Meltzer and colleagues suggested that interventions to reduce vitamin D deficiency, as a means to reduce COVID-19 risk, be tested in randomized trials. Such research would be especially pertinent since both African-American and Hispanic populations not only have disproportionate morbidity and mortality from COVID-19, but also high rates of vitamin D deficiency.
It’s possible that SARS-2 could strip out Vitamin D, or that the co-morbidities could, in which case it may be coincidental to some degree. Then again, it could be that a lack of Vitamin D contributes to those comorbidities in the first place.
So what’s it like? “It’s just … well … it’s horrible. Horrible to see this happening when the science is so clear and has been clear for years. I suffer from Cassandra syndrome,” Ingalsbee said. “Every year I warn people: Disaster’s coming. We got to change. And no one listens. And then it happens.”
The pattern is a form of insanity: We keep doing overzealous fire suppression across California landscapes where the fire poses little risk to people and structures. As a result, wildland fuels keep building up.
This week we’ve seen both the second- and third-largest fires in California history. “The fire community, the progressives, are almost in a state of panic,” Ingalsbee said. There’s only one solution, the one we know yet still avoid. “We need to get good fire on the ground and whittle down some of that fuel load.”
Modern Californians are burning 0.1% of what indigenous California’s used to do:
Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres. The state passed a few new laws in 2018 designed to facilitate more intentional burning. But few are optimistic this, alone, will lead to significant change. We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire.
..is there is any meaningful scientific dissent about controlled burns? \
“None that I know of.”
The incentives are all wrong. There is a risk in doing cool burns, but no immediate risk in foregoing them. And among other things, fires are big business. Cal Fire may spend $1 billion this year. Full time Firefighters earn $148,000 a year.
A lot of the money though, goes on late afternoon planes dumping fire retardant to save a few wild trees:
It appears people who wear masks are much less likely to get severe infections
This will make some heads spin.
Child Wearing a a Mask. Author vperemen.com
Not only do masks reduce the odds of getting infected, but if people do get infected while wearing a mask — the severity of Covid is so much milder. With masks on, the odds of getting an asymptomatic infection improve. Masks don’t stop all viral particles but they stop the large droplet clusters, and thus reduce the viral load. If asymptomatic people get some protection (and we still don’t know for sure) it could solve so much.
Consider the two cruise ships where the asymptomatic rate varied from 18 to 81%:
In February, one of the first outbreaks of COVID-19 outside of China occurred on the Diamond Princess cruise ship docked in Yokohama, Japan. Of the 634 people on board who tested positive, about 18 percent of infections were asymptomatic. In March, an Argentinian cruise ship found itself in a similar predicament, but of the 128 people on board who eventually tested positive, 81 percent were asymptomatic— Ghandi et al.
Nations that use masks have lower death rates:
In countries where mask wearing was already commonplace, such as Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea, and Singapore, and in countries where mask wearing was quickly embraced, such as the Czech Republic, rates of severe illness and death have remained comparatively low. — Nina Bai, UCSF
In food plants up to 95% got an asymptomatic infection:
In two recent outbreaks in U.S. food-processing plants, where all workers were issued masks each day and were required to wear them, the proportion of asymptomatic infections among the more than 500 people who became infected was 95%, with only 5% in each outbreak experiencing mild-to-moderate symptoms.3
The initial dose of virus appears to be likely to be a key driver of severity. Those who get a small dose to start with, get extra hours to get their immune system activated. Those who breathe in a large dose, perhaps don’t have time to react before they are overwhelmed.
The idea of viral load being important has been around for a long time. Before vaccines, people would sometimes try to protect themselves from smallpox by inoculating themselves with tiny doses of the real deal. It was called Variolation, and must have been a dangerous game to play. (And we think we are hard done by).
There is at least a new study on Covid (Pujadas et al ) which shows that viral load at diagnosis is an independent predictor of mortality. Though this doesn’t tell us necessarily about viral loads at the time of infection.
Mask wearing explains some of the paradoxes of Covid-19. All around the world, there are big variations of both the death rates and the estimates of how many people are asymptomatic. Case Fatality rates range from 2% to 14%, and countries which wear masks or mandated masks tend to have a lower death rate. There are hints that the first wave iun some places was much more deadly than the second, but little evidence that this was due to mutations. Could it be due to mask wearing (as well as Vitamin D in summer, and a younger demographic)?
A study published in May by scientists at Public Health England’s National Infection Service at Porton Down, Salisbury, gave ferrets varying doses of Sars-Cov-2 and found a clear difference in outcomes.
Animals given high and medium doses contracted the virus and suffered many of the same ailments as humans. But a low dose “appeared to result in infection of only one ferret”. It also escaped the worst effects of the disease, with no scarring of its lungs or fatigue reported. — Paul Nuki, The Telegraph.
And we know it matters for the Flu:
A major 2010 study of influenza A concluded that there was a clear relationship between the infectious dose of that virus and patient outcomes. …. one retrospective study of the 1918 Spanish Flu finds the much higher fatalities seen in its second and third waves can be explained entirely by people being exposed to a larger infectious dose rather than a mutation in the virus, as has previously been assumed.
— Paul Nuki, The Telegraph.
In 2015, researchers tested this concept in human volunteers using a nonlethal flu virus and found the same result. The higher the flu virus dose given to the volunteers, the sicker they became.
At this point we need to know whether low dose exposure and an asymptomatic infection also helps us avoid the silent heart damage and other potentially longer term problems. Then we need to know whether an asymptomatic infection gives long term protection, or even a reduction in symptoms the next time around.
Masks are so cheap compared to all the other options. It seems crazy not to use them while we wait to get past the Medical Swamp and get cheaper treatments approved. The more masks we use, the less excuse there is for all the other pandemic control measures.
h/t to useful tips and discussion over the months from Slithers, Rudi K, Meglort, Bulldust, Heber Rizzo, TdeF, cedarhill, A C Osborn, Sunni Bakchat, Orson, DOC, Konrad, Annie, ren, PTR, bobl, Stephen Wilde, David A, Rud Istvan.
Ghandi et al (2020) Masks Do More Than Protect Others During COVID-19: Reducing the Inoculum of SARS-CoV-2 to Protect the Wearer, Journal of General Internal Medicine. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11606-020-06067-8
Pujadas E, Chaudhry F, McBride R, et al. SARS-CoV-2 viral load predicts COVID-19 mortality. Lancet Respir Med2020; published online Aug 6. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S2213-2600(20)30354-4
The UK parliament has decided to phase out fossil fueled cars entirely by 2040 or even 2035, but right now only 4% of the UK public are even planning to buy an EV, which makes it a very forced transition. Forty four percent say they won’t even be ready in fifteen years time, and a quarter effectively say “over my dead body”.
But despite the growing availability and wider selection of motors to choose from, a survey commissioned by the SMMT found that almost half of drivers are not only unprepared to make a transition to zero-emission motoring now but don’t think they will be in 2035 – five years ahead of the existing deadline for the sale of new petrol, diesel and hybrid cars to be banished.
A quarter (24 per cent) of the 2,185 drivers interviewed claimed they don’t foresee themselves ever buying an electric car in their lifetimes, despite the impeding ban in 2040.
96% say they are not even thinking of buying one at the moment
The number of people in the UK planning to purchase an electric vehicle has collapsed as the pandemic squeezed finances for potential car buyers, according to a leading online automotive portal. A survey by Auto Trader of 2,300 consumers in January found 16 per cent were planning to buy a battery-only car. But in an August survey of 2,700 people, just 4 per cent were considering a pure electric car.
The two big reasons cited are the lack of charging points and the cost — even though the government effectively does a £3,000 cashback deal to help sell them.
Government subsidies for electric cars were cut in March from £3,500 to £3,000, although the benefit does not apply for used vehicles.
In tight pandemic times, EV’s are so unpopular people don’t even want a second hand EV. The average selling prices for second hand EV’s fell 5% in August.
Since the tiny number of electric vehicles we have in Australia are already causing the odd blackout, UK Grid managers must be slightly relieved. The UK Minister for the Environment, not so much.
Thanks to climate activists, coal deposits underground are safe but Europe’s old forests are being converted to industrial plantations and wood pellets
Pierre Gosselin of NoTricksZone thinks the media, which raged over Brazil’s Amazonian forest fires may be finally noticing their own man-made disaster.
The ARD’s “Das Erste” reports how satellite images show deforestation has risen 49% since 2016 in Sweden, Finland and the Baltic countries. The reason: “Because of the CO2 targets.
Who needs massive hardwoods anyway?
For “CO2-neutral” wood pellets
Where once massive hardwoods once stood now grows tiny fir trees. The harvested trees, the report says, were used for wood pellets – a form of renewable green energy. The trees, the pellet industry says, will grow back.
Not only are the forests taking a hit, but so is the wildlife that once inhabited in them. According to Ms. Steinberg, bird life has fallen some 25%. “It’s wasted. Now we have to start all over again.”
The problem is particularly severe in Estonia where one sixth of the forest has been razed since just 2001 to feed the worlds second largest pellet company.
“The main driver of the pellet industry in Estonia is the renewable energy subsidies by the European Union,” said Asko Lõhmus, lead research fellow of conservation biology at the University of Tartu. “They are making the richest people in Estonia out of European taxpayers’ money.”
Carbon accounting tricks kill forests:
Under an international accounting framework, wood pellet emissions are tracked in the land use sector (where trees and plants soak up and store carbon) rather than in the energy sector (where burning fossil fuels emit carbon.) Countries that burn wood pellets for electricity count their emissions as zero and heavily subsidize the fuel.
Estonia lost 15% of its forest cover since 2001, with only a fraction getting replaced with new tree canopy. Data from the Ministry of Environment show more and more land is clear cut or cut to leave only middle-aged trees that can produce seeds.
Finally, some unexpectedly good news on community spread in Victoria:
Untrackable new cases in Victoria are drying up. The incidence of community spread cases with an unknown source are every epidemiologists nightmare. So their absence is a marker of how well the restrictions work– and whether the “fire” is under control. It’s cheery news.
Community spread is the number that matters most — more than daily infections. Known cases can be track-and-traced. Unknown cases mean whole clusters are spreading invisibly and restrictions need to be wider. Despite the depressing schedule planned in Victoria, if this reduction in unknown cases is sustained, then other options for pandemic management become possible. The NSW-style-management with intense tracking and tracing may suddenly become an option within weeks. (Though there may be a 50 case spike tomorrow just to prove me wrong.) Tracking and tracing works best at lower levels, and becomes overwhelming quickly as the number of clusters rise.
With strong restrictions, the exponential rise in infections can become an exponential fall. Where before each person might infect three new people, now three people staying home are only infecting one (or something like that). Two lines get extinguished instead of amplified, as the virus runs out of fresh bodies to hijack.
Victorians, no doubt, are fed up to the nth with lockdowns. At least a graph like this shows the end is in sight, and the isolates have achieved something. It augurs well.
Victoria, unknown cases of Covid-19, March to Sept 2020.
Unknown cases in NSW are also graphed (in blue, above) for comparison (and below in more detail). The spread in the Victorian community was vastly larger than what NSW faced in March when many cases were from overseas.
Don’t confuse this graph up for Daily New Cases, which are still coming in this week at 112, 79, 64, 59, 36…. New infections are still popping up, but mostly they are connected to known outbreaks, which are easier to manage (usually).
The Victorian modeling of how long strict conditions need to run apparently doesn’t take this into account. So the harsh conditions are likely to end sooner than expected as long as people stay distant.
The modelling did not attempt to estimate the number of community transmission “mystery cases” in the weeks ahead, nor did it model differing risks of transmission in industries like healthcare and meatworks.
The makeup of cases each day is important in determining the risk of a resurgence.
This is especially promising when we consider how well NSW is doing.
For the last two months NSW has danced with the tiger and kept daily new mystery source cases under 5.
Given that this was in winter, in a big city, this is good news too. This appears to be quite the success with tracking and tracing, and presumably with compliance.
NSW, unknown cases of Covid-19, June to September 2020.
Currently there are a stream of random closures of schools or gyms and resturants. Sydneysiders can have gatherings of up to 20 people at one time. Funerals, with 100. Weddings with 150 people. Large sporting events are limited to 500. Stadiums are at 25% capacity.
The problem is, of course, that NSW is running along a razor thin fence, one superspreader event away from bad news, and while they are moving a lot more than they were during the official lockdowns of April, it is still below normal levels.
Let’s hope the numbers stay this low. At least in Australia, days are getting longer, and the sun and Vitamin D are rising.
While the New Zealand Public service took a pay cut of 20%, in Victoria, MPs and Public servants got a pay rise of 2%. Dan Andrews will take home an extra $46,000 per annum despite presiding over the most costly public policy failure in Australian history. The private sector pays for the mistakes, while the public sector earns even more.
Dan Andrews asks so much, but gives so little. And it is a scandal that so many cheap, well known treatments and preventions are not being tested in large trials — Vitamin D,HCQ, Ivermectin, and all the other potential anti-virals like Interferon, Bromhexine, Melatonin, steroids, asthma drugs etc etc.
Private sector wages in Victoria dropped by $1.9bn in the June quarter, while wages in the public sector increased by $88m, according to the IPA’s analysis…
The poll, of just over 1000 Victorians, found only 7 per cent supported the 2 per cent pay rise that MPs and public servants received in July…
In the last five years, the Victorian population grew 12% but the bill for public servants wages grew by 40%.
Robert Gottliebsen wonders if “the state and its bureaucracy simply don’t have the skills to manage a crisis of this magnitude”. Look at the legal charges someone may face:
The unwillingness of anyone to take responsibility is multiplied by the fact that, if there is an occupational health and safety conviction, the minister and senior bureaucrats in the department involved are in danger of being charged with industrial manslaughter which carries a maximum $16.5 million fine and 25 years in jail.
1. The well known hotel quarantine union and diversity hire failures. Emblematic of how inept it was: security staff got one hour of diversity training but no time in infection control.
2. People who tested positive were not notified quickly enough. What was the point of mass testing if the results were not used to stop infections spreading? This failure neutralized the success of mass testing
Extinction Rebellion blockade the Murdoch Press in the UK because climate reporting is supposed to be one-sided
After thirty years of saturation media on climate change, XR realize there is absolutely nothing new they could say that hasn’t already been said 4,000 times. So they attack the newspapers that put forward a few opposing views among the wall-to-wall propaganda.This helps keep the compliant newspapers in line.
So any self respecting editor ought be asking: If Extinction Rebellion aren’t blocking us, what are we doing wrong?
Pity the poor newsagents and delivery boys and girls who lost money so XR could do grand-standing camping, blocking trucks and newspapers from getting out.
More than 100 protesters used vehicles and bamboo lock-ons to block roads outside the printing works at Broxbourne, Hertfordshire, and Knowsley, near Liverpool. By Saturday morning, police said some 63 people had been arrested.
The presses print the Rupert Murdoch-owned News UK’s titles including The Sun, The Times, The Sun on Sunday and The Sunday Times, as well as The Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, and the London Evening Standard.
If only they had evidence instead of bamboo sticks?
What a disgrace it is to see the force’s assistant chief constable saying they were “working to facilitate the rights of both the protesters and those affected by their presence”. What on earth does that mean?
People can protest all they like but the police have a duty to keep roads open, allow people to go to work and newspapers to be published.
“When you tear out a man’s tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you’re only telling the world that you fear what he might say.” — George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings
“Political correctness is fascism pretending to be manners.” — George Carlin
Death data has become a political tool (stretched both up and down by vested interests). We’ve all heard of the motorcyclist who crashed into the Covid tally, and the payments for US docs. We know there’s junk data out there, but the suggestion we only count deaths “from” Covid, and not the deaths “with” Covid is unscientific in the extreme.
Stick with me. We all want WuFlu to be nothing, but scientists and skeptics need to pick their targets carefully. Don’t lose sight of the real scandal and the real solutions. It’s a travesty that people are dying while cheap vitamins and antivirals are being ignored. Let’s fight for Vitamin D,HCQ, Ivermectin, and all the other potentials like Interferon, Bromhexine, Melatonin, steroids, asthma drugs etc etc. But let’s not get distracted by a hopeful fantasy that the true US “death tally” is only 6% of Covid deaths in the US.
There’s an idea out there that only 9,680 people have died of Covid in the US, not 161,392 people. It’s because of this CDC quote:
“For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned. For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 2.6 additional conditions or causes per death. “
Ask yourself: Does Diabetes protect you from Covid?
Think it through. In this scenario, in order to be considered a real coronavirus death, the deceased not only have to have been tested, they can’t have any other contributing factor listed on the death certificate. Which means effectively that people with high blood pressure, cancer, heart disease, asthma, diabetes now cannot possibly die of Covid. (Won’t they be glad to hear that?) Nor can people who don’t get tested. And nor can obese people — unless they slim down first, then die.
In a world where only 6% of the US Covid death tally are truly due to Covid, you can protect yourself from Covid by getting fat, not getting tested and getting diabetes. I don’t think so.
Deaths are not simple one-cause events
Most deaths are due to a bunch of bad factors overwhelming the system. The only pure deaths are things like bullets to the head (in homocide, not even in suicide which has its own collection of contributing factors). Death certificates reflect that, allowing doctors to list a lot of contributing factors (read ZdoggMD for a US doctors perspective). The 6% of certificates which didn’t list other factors may represent 10,000 totally healthy people cut down ahead of time, which is it’s own tragedy, surely. But, mundanely, it may also represent that some busy distracted doctors don’t always fill in the form properly.
The question that matters is: How much longer would victims have lived if Covid hadn’t hit them?
We will all die sometime. What matters is whether we are losing people who would have lived years longer. The average age of death in the US might be 78, but that means about half the population expects to live to be older than that. Some 78 year olds have a lot to contribute. Sometime in the next four years, the leader of the free world will be 78.
So people with co-morbidites are at higher risk of dying of Covid, but someone with high blood pressure can survive years with the condition. Covid may trigger their early death, but if the US borders had been shut in time, that same person might have survived for another decade of holiday and family moments. Another decade of voting and adding a long-life perspective to younger generations.
The real toll of Covid may be higher than the listed Covid deaths
Get ready: Rather than being 6% of the official tally, there are credible arguments that the real tally is probably higher than the official tally, not lower. The US is not testing adequately, the test positivity is still above 5%, and for large periods it’s been as high as 15%. Australia’s test positivity has mostly been below 1%. We know there are many missed cases in the USA.
Nationwide, 223,900 more people have died than usual from March 15 to Aug. 8, according to C.D.C. estimates, which adjust current death records to account for typical reporting lags. That number is 62,000 higher than the official count of coronavirus deaths for that period. Higher-than-normal death rates are now widespread across the country; only Alaska and Hawaii, states outside the contiguous United States, show numbers that look similar to recent years. — New York Times.
So 60,000 extra people have died in the pandemic above and beyond the covid deaths listed on death certificates. Some of them were due to the pandemic, and not due to Covid. But equally, some of them were due to Covid in people that didn’t get tested. There were people who died from heart attacks and strokes who wouldn’t have died if they weren’t afraid to visit hospital during an epidemic. We know people died of cancer due to delays in treatments. We know people in homes died because their families couldn’t get in to see them and report neglect, or changes that only loved ones can spot. We know people died because of the way governments responded to the pandemic — but some of these people, or even more, would have died even if there were no lockdowns. If the virus ran free in the population, more high risk people would have been afraid to visit the local ER.
For every motorcyclist who was listed as a Covid death — and shouldn’t have been — there might have been ten heart attacks or strokes in people who didn’t realize they had Covid. Ambulance officers reported turning up to homes to find people sitting up with blood oxygen saturation levels we thought were impossible — a classic sign of covid-19.
We need to know excess deaths for the next ten years
Has Covid lowered life expectancy in a measurable way? Anyone who claims to know the definitive answer at this stage is making stuff up.
All death statistics now are subject to change. Three quarters of mild to moderate Covid cases showed signs of heart damage. How do we know if a heart attack victim who wasn’t tested for Covid had an infection that ultimately caused their death? We don’t.
Only changes to excess deaths in coming years will reveal how many effective years Covid has stolen from people. We’ll never know on an individual basis, but only on a population-wide basis as we plot ongoing changes in deaths due to many conditions. Will there be a drop in stroke deaths next year because people at high risk of strokes died a year too soon? Has Covid fished out the high risk people from 100% or only from 20% of the population?
After the pandemic has long gone, PhD’s will be made by studying graphs of excess mortality from various conditions in various towns. Will there by a dip in mortality figures “after the virus” — a classic sign that the virus took only a short time off the tally, or will the spike stand above the norms, marking deaths of people who died too young? Will there be fewer stroke victims in 2021 because they died in 2020, or will strokes continue at much the same rate?
The Cause of Death is not singular or obvious
Death is a complex event with a chain of dependent variables, which all contribute to the outcome. The true cause of death is often impossible to know without a full autopsy, and sometimes even with one.
To understand how complicated this is, read the 8 page coroner’s report on Patricia Dowd, possibly the first Covid death in the US. She was 57, with no known cardiac risk factors, but was overweight. To accurately figure out what caused her death took hours of work by someone with years of medical training, plus many blood tests, a long write up, and a cost of $3,000 to $5,000.
Her cause of death is listed — somewhat ambiguously, and in desperate need of punctuation — as:
“Acute Hemopericardium due to Rupture of Left Ventricle due to transmural myocardial ischemia (Infarction) with a minor component of myocarditis due to Covid-19 infection.” Feb 10th 2020
SARS-Cov2 RNA was detected in Dowd’s heart, trachea, lung, and intestine. She had no coronary atherosclerosis or thombosis. She complained of a “flu like illness” in the days leading up to her death. But, since she was foolish enough to have one comorbidity (excess weight and a BMI of 31, possibly by following the recommended low fat diet), she would later be described by some as “died with covid” not “died from covid”. So even though her heart was officially described as “rupturing”, which was broadcast in many sensational headlines, some people appear to be saying it is just a coincidence that she died at the same time as she had a Covid diagnosis. Seriously?
Even car accidents can be caused by Covid
It sounds ridiculous. But it’s even possible that people who died of road trauma might not have if they weren’t infected. How many? Who knows. We’ll have to wait for those excess death studies, and even then we won’t know for sure. I make the point only to show how complicated the cause of death can be.
Imagine someone with early stage Covid, untested and unaware that they were sick. Rapidly sinking into fatigue, they they make a stupid driving error that they wouldn’t have made if they weren’t infected. This sort of thing often happens, even just with the spring daylight savings transition.
The evidence shows about a six percent increase in the risk of fatal traffic accidents in the week after the time change each spring. In other words, more than 28 fatal accidents could be prevented yearly in the U.S. if the DST transition were abolished. The effect is especially pronounced in the morning hours and in locations further west within a time zone.
Since it was first introduced, the spring transition to DST has been linked to a variety of problems, including increased risk of heart attack, workplace accidents, and suicides. There had been evidence suggesting an increased risk of car accidents, too. (Fritz et al, 2020)*
The cause of a driving death is often a judgement mistake, and we know Covid infections cause cognitive deficits, loss of attention, dizziness, and fatigue. In other words, a true post mortem would take a PhD thesis length analysis of their past driving record, level of illness, type of mistake, sleep patterns, etc. etc. ad infinitum — and we probably still couldn’t say for sure whether they would be alive today if they hadn’t had Covid.
What looks like, smells like and acts like a deadly pandemic?
A wave of excess deaths is traveling around the world. The places with the highest peaks in excess deaths also happen to have the largest positive tests to coronavirus RNA. Coincidence? They also have the highest rates of healthcare worker morbidity and mortality.
Twelve days after quarantine restrictions start or significantly increase in severity, the rate of new infections drops off to a lower rate of exponential growth. People change their behavior in reaction to this new threat as they learn more about it, which is constantly changing all our statistics. It’s highly dynamic situation.
Covid is known to cause major blood clotting which damages organs. It has caused strokes, heart attacks, heart damage, low oxygen levels, and kidney damage, even in mild to moderate cases. There is still much we don’t know about it. Covid probably came out of a Chinese biowarfare lab. Is there something they know about it that we don’t yet? Is it significant that the Chinese put on the most strenuous quarantine measures to date, stricter than any other country? Or is that just another coincidence?
Ominously, there are now four known cases of reinfection only months after the original infection.
* * *
It’s a hot contentious topic. Sorry if it’s not what some what to hear, but thanks greatly to those who stuck with this and read this far. Kudos to skeptics who maintain civility and accurate language even when they passionately disagree. Civil debate is what makes skeptics great.
* Fritz et al say that there were no lives saved in the fall, though this seems rather odd: “there were no effects of the fall-back transition to Standard Time (ST) on MVA risk“.
“They [leaders] are exponentially more culpable for climate catastrophe.
“1990 might as well give them six months in prison, now maybe you should put a bullet through their head – or rather someone probably will.”
The real crime are the leaders and journalists who feed the delusions for their own profit and power. Creating things like pap declarations of “Climate Emergencies”. They are not just symbolism, they become the license for extreme responses. It’s a psychological and legal tool where people can both justify their own reckless behaviour to themselves, but also to justify dangerous acts of civil disobedience in a court.
The founder of Extinction Rebellion wants those responsible for climate change to face Nuremberg-style trials.
Roger Hallam also called for a ‘World War Two mobilisation’ of society, with rationing and the confiscation of private property.
Asked how those responsible for climate change should be dealt with, he told The Times: ‘The question will be who’s culpable, in the same way [as] with the Nazis.
He added that ‘maybe [we] should put a bullet in the head’ as punishment.
A bullet here, and a bullet there, and pretty soon we’ll be talking about a bloody revolution.
Extinction Rebellion responded that this was old news, and they’re resolutely non-violent now. Roger Hallam supposedly said this a year ago and is not formally involved any more. But there is no denying that he and Gail Bradbrook co-founded Extinction Rebellion. They set up the movement after she was inspired by a hallucinogenic experience. Bradbrook happily admitted that she flew 11,000 air miles to Costa Rica for a holiday in 2016 where she took the drugs. She “tripped” in every sense of the word, and flew home to the UK to start a movement, separate from her family, end a marriage and “that was the right thing to do”.
The era of antivirals has come, not that Big Pharma want you to know that cheap out-of-patent drugs might help. But for years we were told that medical science didn’t have an answer to viruses.
Bromhexine was patented in 1961 and is commonly found in OTC pharmacy cough syrups with names like Bisolvon, Robitussin, and Duro-Tuss (Wiki has a long list).
Theoretically Bromhexine sabotages one of our molecules — with the snappy name of TMPRSS2 (which is shorter than saying Transmembrane protease S2). A protease is a fancy pair of molecular scissors, it chops or tweaks the viral spike and if that doesn’t happen, the virus can’t get into the cell (at least not through its favourite path).
The nice thing about an antiviral acting against our molecules, rather than against the virus itself, is that it’s harder for the virus to mutate to get around it. That means it’s less likely the virus can develop resistance. The downside of targeting our own molecules is that it might fritz things up. Presumably this protease does something useful sometime. To that end, mice that don’t have this protein at all, seem to do OK. And then, there is fifty five years of drug store sales. How bad can cough syrup be?
Bromhexidine, mechanism of action, TMPRSS2, Spike activation. diagram.
It is not at all certain that this drug would thwart the virus. Viruses can get into cells through another method called endocytosis. Possibly bromhexine might not make much difference. Luckily for us, a group in Iran were desperate enough to try it in a small, but reasonable trial, and the results are enticing.
Basically, 39 people were picked at random out of 78 to try the bromhexine. In the half that missed out on Bromhexine, 11 went on to need ICU and 9 died. In the half who got the bromhexine, only 2 went into ICU and none died.
We might feel a bit sorry for the nine in the first trial that didn’t get lucky. We won’t know how unlucky until someone has done a bigger trial. For the moment the p value of avoiding ICU was 0.007. And a p value of 0.027 for avoiding death.
Where are the media?
This paper was published on July 19th. In a world full of journalists, doctors and a million interested onlookers all connected at the speed of light, it’s curious that it hasn’t garnered attention. At this point I can’t find a single news story mentioning these results. There is one Swiss niche group which mentions it (at a dose of 50 – 100mg). And there is a $3,500 market report available from 2 days ago cryptically suggesting the “bromhexine market will grow a significant rate…”. Nearly every pharma company makes it. I’m curious to do this search now, because if the drug is useful, it will be near impossible to search in a few weeks and find “something that wasn’t there”. Not that I’m certain this drug is the answer, but years from now historians will be looking at how well the news got filtered.
“The efficacy of bromhexine in blocking cell entry of coronaviruses was established in 2017.”“
So we had a three year head start and yet, seven months into a global pandemic and almost no one has studied whether cough syrup might help? There are lessons in there for the ways we structure our research, and how useless our universities are.
And it seems frivolous, but Iran’s death toll peaked the week after this study was published and has declined since then. (There is a swamp of factors: It could be bromhexine, or treatment changes, vitamin D levels, a younger age group, or it could be that Iran doesn’t test enough people, and the true number of infections has declined, even though the official daily new cases is steady on 2,000 a day.) But if word is spreading and Iranian drug stores are running out of cough syrup that would be interesting. Anyone know?
Significant?
Eyeballing table 1 of the paper there’s no obvious reason why the drug group would have done so much better. On average both groups waited about 7 to 8 days after symptoms showed up before going to hospital. Their blood oxygen was 88%. The treatment group may have been slightly less sick, with lower levels of lassitude, headache and tummy aches, was slightly younger (58 not 61) but had more diabetes.
The treatment group was given 8mg, three times a day. Imagine if they had started treatment as soon as they felt sick?
h/t thanks to TedM, who heard it from a Dutch doctor.
UPDATE: As TedM notes, Iran may be using low dose HCQ as standard and Bromhexine may only be useful in combination with HCQ:
In another publication from Iran on the trial is this comment: “Whether this promising result is because of bromhexine alone or combination of low dose HCQ [200 mg/d] and bromhexine is not clear at this point.”
200mg/d is half that in the Zelenko protocol. Both groups were on the 200mg/day HCQ, so it would appear that this dose of HCQ alone is too low to be effective.
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