|
|
 How times change. Last November Jacinda Ardern announced a zero carbon plan for New Zealand.
Six months later, after Coronavirus, saving the planet barely gets a mention.
Once the luxury money is gone, the golden gravy train will dry up. Crazy ideas about changing the global weather are a boom time activity.
Analysis: In responding to the Covid-19 crisis, the Government appears to have completely forgotten about the climate crisis.
In announcing the 2020 Budget, which creates a $50 billion Covid-19 recovery and relief fund and pumps billions into health, infrastructure and wage subsidy extensions, Jacinda Ardern said.
The climate is hardly mentioned in the Budget – the word itself is used just four times in the entire document and not at all in Ardern’s speech to Parliament.
h/t RicDre, Eric Worrall at WUWT who found the gentlest spin:
9.5 out of 10 based on 41 ratings
Just….
9 out of 10 based on 19 ratings
The claims that the current pandemic Coronavirus is natural all rely on it being 96% closely related to a natural bat virus known as the RaTG13 virus. But new analysis suggests this “natural” virus only exists as a fake creation on a Chinese computer.
The implications of this type of work will affect global politics. The anger towards the Chinese CCP mismanagement, dishonesty, and the coverup will unite the world against the global bad-citizen player. It also drives a pike through the casual globalist academic programs, and the role of people like Anthony Fauci, chief advisor to Trump, head of the Expert Swamp in the US. Why was he sending money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology? Why did the West help train and supply this lab?
h/t ramblingidiot, Choroin, Selwyn, El Gordo, Rob Dinn, Mike Mitchell
The virus that SARS-CoV-2 is supposed to have evolved from looks unmistakably artificial — in sections it contains far too many “mutations” that matter but hardly any of the normal noise of silent mutations which always occur naturally alongside the mutations which change the end product. Like someone cut and pasted multiple photos together with different background noise. Other sections of the code which ought to mutate quickly are suspiciously identical and unchanged, and didn’t mutate at all. (In the wild there is little selective pressure on something called “E Proteins” and they vary a lot in other coronaviruses. They are already mutating fast in the pandemic but somehow were “frozen” in time in RaTG13.)
Dr. Shi Zhengli is known as the Bat Woman of Wuhan Virology. We’ve already heard how her lab was central to research on Coronaviruses and how she and others were ordered to destroy all copies of the laboratory viruses on Jan 2nd this year in what appears to be a mass cover up.
A string of papers were released in February claiming the Wuhan Virus was “96% related” to a known Bat Coronavirus and was therefore natural (see Zhao et al 2020, Shan-Lu Liu, 2020, Andersen et al 2020). Two of these papers appeared in Nature. But what we didn’t know was that the RNA sequence for the original bat Coronavirus that the new pandemic evolved from, which was called RaTG13, was only registered on Jan 27th this year, despite it supposedly being discovered in 2013. The first Nature paper appeared only 6 days later. So much for Peer Review…
No one has a sample of that virus, no one else has sequenced it, and it, as Steven Mosher says may only exist “in a string of letters on her computer”.
NerdHasPower describes how easy it is to create a “natural bat virus” that matches the Wuhan virus:
Can the sequence of such a virus be fabricated? It cannot be any easier. It takes a person less than a day to TYPE such a sequence (less than 30,000 letters) in a word file. And it would be a thousand times easier if you already have a template that is about 96% identical to the one you are trying to create. Once the typing is finished, one can upload the sequence onto the public database. Contrary to general conception, such database does not really have a way to validate the authenticity or correctness of the uploaded sequence. It relies completely upon the scientists themselves – upon their honesty and consciences. Once uploaded and released, such sequence data becomes public and can be used legitimately in scientific analysis and publications.
NerdHasPower, with several helpers, shows there are sections which are missing the silent mutations which would normally occur in a virus due to natural mutation. Think of these as the noise that should be there, but isn’t. The lack of this background noise shows the mutations were “designed” by the hand of man (or woman, in this case) with an aim in mind.
He points out that scientists like Zhengli would not sit on a hot new natural bat virus like RaTG13 for six or seven long years without publishing it. The first thing they would do is analyze it for sequences that show whether it would bind to human ACE2 receptors like SARS did — making it a potential human threat. It’s exactly the kind of discovery researchers are hunting for, the kind that make that researcher a highly cited, author.
As an expert as Shi is, she only needed to take one peek at the sequence of RaTG13’s RBD and immediately realize: this virus closely resembles SARS in its RBD and has a clear potential of infecting humans. If Shi’s public statement is true and she indeed intends to discover bat coronaviruses with a potential to cross-over to humans, how could she possibly overlook this extremely interesting finding of RaTG13? If this RaTG13 was discovered SEVEN years ago in 2013, why did Shi not publish this astonishing finding earlier and yet let the “less-attractive” viruses take the stage? Why did she decide to publish such a sequence only when the current outbreak took place and people started questioning the origin of the Wuhan coronavirus?
None of these makes sense. These facts only add to the suspicion – Zhengli Shi either was directly involved in the creation of this virus/bioweapon, or helped cover it up, or both.
Steven Mosher has done a masterful job of explaining the whole story of the master code cracking done by NerdHasPower, who published in Chinese and English and who says only he is “A Nobody Scientist”. Presumably honest Chinese scientists need to be nobodies.
Steven Mosher:
To reinforce the “Wet Market” cover story, namely, that this new pathogen had come from nature and not from her lab, something had to be done. And it had to be done quickly, since by then the China Coronavirus had spread to the rest of the world. Anger against China for its lack of transparency about the origins and characteristics of the virus was growing.
The similarity between the two coronaviruses—including their common ability to infect humans–would greatly reinforce [Dr Shi Zhengli’s] story that the SARS-CoV-2 had jumped from a bat to a human, perhaps through some intermediate species at the Wuhan wet market.
So, all Dr. Shi had to do was sit down before her computer keyboard, open a word file, and begin to fabricate the SARS-CoV-2 analogue that she would claim to have found in nature seven years before. All she had to do was type in the genetic sequence of her own creation, SARS-CoV-2, changing a few nucleotides now and again to mimic the “random mutations” that regularly occur in nature.
She could easily have completed the “data entry” part of her task in a day, since all she was doing was entering in a string of letters alternating between the four nucleotides, A, U, G, and C. And coronaviruses contain less than 30,000 different nucleotides.
Dr. Shi registered her new virus on January 27th, 2020, with the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the customary repository for such information. She called it RaTG-13, Ra for Rhinolophus affinis, the Latin name of the Intermediate Horseshoe Bat, and 13 for 2013, the year she supposedly “discovered” it.
A lot of people have been taken in by Dr. Shi’s clever “discovery,” which is looking more and more like a forgery. No one else has independently verified its existence. No other lab has a sample of it, and no one else has ever sequenced it. And of course, they likely never will, because more and more evidence suggests that it exists only in a string of letters on her computer.
The case of the missing silent mutations
NerdHasPower has shown that the changes that supposedly occurred by natural mutation from the wild RaTG13 virus to the SARS-Cov-2 virus have a very unnatural pattern.
The code for RNA is a string of four letters A, T, C and G. Each Coronavirus is a string of these letters 29,000 bases long. It is the same code as all life on Earth (or it wouldn’t be able to be used inside our cells). The string is read as three letter codons (Eg: ATG, or ATC). Each three letter codon is translated into one particular amino acid, but there is redundancy built in to the code. So often one letter of each codon can mutate but still code for the same amino acid. This protects the code, so that most mutations won’t change the end product. They are “silent” mutations which don’t change the end product – they are the spelling error that can’t be heard — like reading Cat and Kat. (Synonymous mutants don’t change the meaning)
Steven Mosher:
In nature, the ratio of synonymous to non-synonymous is approximately 5:1.
Here’s where Dr. Shi got into trouble. When typing in the genomic sequence of her “discovery” she made way too many non-synonymous changes at the beginning. Then, one-third of the way through the sequence, she apparently realized her error. After that, she made way too few non-synonymous changes. So while the entire genome has the expected 5:1 ratio, there are stretches where the ratio is closer to 2:1, and other long stretches where it is as high as 44:1.
Nature’s mutations are random. Dr. Shi’s “mutations” are not. Dr. Lawrence Sellin has calculated that the odds that her “mutations” occurred naturally in just one area—the critical spike protein–at almost ten million to one.
Thank the Expert Swamp for help creating this virus
Dr Anthony Fauci sent $US to do this work in China.
Steven Mosher on Fauci’s role:
…here is one thing about Dr. Shi’s research that we do know with absolute, ironclad certainty: The U.S. was helping to fund it. From 2013 onwards, the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, run by the now-famous Dr. Anthony Fauci, gave $7.4 million for research involving gain-of-function work and collecting and studying bat coronaviruses, $600,000 of which went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Much of the rest went to other labs in China.
If Dr. Fauci was as familiar with the Chinese Communist Party as he is with viruses, he would not have sent the Wuhan Institute of Virology one thin dime. He would have known that the PRC has a long-running program to develop bioweapons. He would have concluded that China’s only BSL-4 high containment lab was the obvious place to carry out at least some of this research. And he definitely did know that the “Gain-of-Function” research he was funding had the potential to create “Pathogens of Pandemic Potential” that might not be used for peaceful ends.
NerdHasPower on the E proteins that don’t mutate
The E protein of β coronaviruses is a structural protein that is tolerant of mutations as evidenced both in SARS and in bat coronaviruses. However, on the amino acid level, E protein of the Wuhan coronavirus identified at the beginning of the outbreak is 100% identical to those of the suspected templates, ZC45 and ZXC21 (Figure 4). What is striking is that, after a short two-months spread of the virus in humans, the E protein is already mutating. Sequence data obtained within the month of April indicate that mutations have occurred to four different locations (Figure 4). Note that the E protein makes very limited interactions with host proteins and thus is not under evolutionary pressure to adapt to a new host. Not only can the E protein tolerate mutations but also its mutational rate is held constant across different coronavirus species. The fact that the E protein of the Wuhan coronaviruses is already mutating in the short period of human-to-human transmission is consistent with its evolutionary feature. In stark contrast, while ZC45/ZXC21 and the Wuhan coronavirus are more distant evolutionarily, the E proteins within them are 100% identical. In no way this could be a result of natural evolution.
Those who know genetics will get a lot out the collective investigation going on at NerdHasPower.
Long live free speech.
REFERENCES
Zhao et al 2020 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2012-7
Shan-Lu Liu, 2020 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7054935/
Andersen et al 2020 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
9.4 out of 10 based on 85 ratings
Five million people live on Hokkaido, north of Japan. They went into a lockdown early on Feb 28th. By March 19th Hokkaido looked like a success and was showing the world how to manage Coronavirus (they started early, and used masks). But then they reopened too soon, when there were still a few cases around and within a month had to lockdown again.
UPDATE: From readers in Japan (or who know people there) we hear that this is voluntary self-isolation, the government can declare “A State of Emergency” but the people are asked to comply, not forced. The Japanese government cannot order the population to “lock” down. Presumably “restrictions” are therefore “recommendations”.
The restrictions were released just before a three day holiday weekend and the border with the rest of Japan was not closed, which meant workers and students returned quickly and brought infections in. Three weeks later on April 14th Hokkaido closed down again.
The lag is diabolical. Most of the cases in Hokkaido were reported after the second State of Emergency was declared.
h/t David E.
 … As long as the borders are open, the lockdown cannot succeed until the whole country is cleared.
As long as there are cases circulating, a second wave is likely.
States that don’t close borders are not serious.
By Abigail Lenard, Time Magazine
Keep reading →
7.8 out of 10 based on 48 ratings
Despite doing everything it could to gain herd immunity Iran starts on second wave
Iran was one of the first countries to succumb to the pandemic, and so it is for the second wave. Back on Feb 25th Iran emerged as a new epicentre — whereupon smart nations like Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Oman, Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Jordan, Ankara, Georgia and Tajikistan immediately closed borders and flights from Iran. Rich nations with Expert-Swamps, however, would wait until they actually caught cases before they stopped the flights.
Iranian leaders worked to spread the virus: they were slow to close religious institutions, and quick to claim they’d be immune, right up until the day the leaders started catching the virus themselves. They declared quarantine was stone age, and shipped their masks off to China, but like everywhere, when things got bad, they started quarantine.
The peak came and went and things were headed in the right direction so Iran started releasing restrictions from April 11th. By May 2nd, less than a thousand new cases a day were being recorded. But five days later cases had doubled. Now they are back to where they were when they started releasing restrictions.
Just in time to catch the second wave, Iran reopened Mosques on May 4th in about one third of the country. Expect these numbers to rise. But also expect that these are not too accurate. No point in doing p tests on the slope. We hope for Iranians sake, this peak is lower.
May 11th Aljazerra
A county in southwestern Iran has been placed under lockdown to prevent the spread of coronavirus, Tasnim news agency reported, also quoting the provincial governor as saying there had been a sharp rise in new cases across the province.
Gholamreza Shariati, governor of Khuzestan province that borders Iraq and includes the county of Abadan, said people had not been observing social distancing rules.
May 14th Aljazerra
Fresh spike in infections reported in several provinces following the lifting of restrictions in April.
Iran has deemed more than 150 counties across the country as low-risk from the virus and has allowed them to reopen mosques.
Since April 11, it has allowed a phased reopening of its economy and lifted restrictions on intercity travel.
Things must be serious, last week Iran cancelled the annual Quds day rally which calls for Israel’s annihilation.
Meanwhile the Iranian rial has lost much of its value and will be replaced with a new currency, called the toman which will be worth 10,000 rials. Inflation is a sign the Iranian economy has been subject to a currency virus.
Pakistan has decided to build a wall — or at least fencing along the 959km border –– to keep out Iranians. The Iranians are reportedly not happy about that. Possibly, neither are the drug lords of body traffickers.
Foreign Policy Mag has a good description of the dismal response the first time around.
Wikipedia on Iran and Coronavirus
Things worth knowing about Coronavirus:
7.9 out of 10 based on 33 ratings
In Northern Italy, people are talking about how some people have not recovered even two months later. Patients with mild infections can recover, feel fine, and test negative, but then slide into debilitating fatigue, with strange aches and pains, bouts of diarrhea, and burning eyes. Some of them even test positive again.
And these were not the serious ICU cases which are paralyzed and ventilated. The head doctor of a hospital in Lombardy said “the discomfort often seems to last even longer for people with lighter symptoms. “
Debilitating symptoms can last long after a person’s body has gotten rid of the coronavirus, a reality Italians are now confronting.
Jason Horowitz, New York Times
The stubbornness of the virus and the length of the convalescence have become topics of conversation in northern Italy where some of the longest-suffering Italians are finding themselves in physical and financial uncertainty, unable to shake sickness and fatigue and get back to work.
But even some of the infected who have avoided pneumonia describe a maddeningly persistent and unpredictable illness, with unexpected symptoms. Bones feel broken. The senses dull. Stomachs are constantly upset. There are good days and then bad days without apparent rhyme nor reason.
The ACE2 receptors the virus binds to are expressed in the lung, kidney, heart, stomach, liver, thyroid, bladder, breast, uterus, and prostate. Theoretically, especially with random clots, problems could crop up anywhere.
Edmondo Cirielli, a member of Parliament, got sick on March 7th, he suffered debilitating fatigue, sore throat, diarrhea and intense pain at the base of his neck that made it impossible to concentrate. It was up and down for a month,” he said.
Then things got stranger. After 40 days of feeling lousy, he tested negative for the virus, but his eyes still burned and bouts of diarrhea continued, he said.
At the end of the month, he finally felt better, but another test result came back positive, forcing him to spend weeks more in isolation…
There is so much we don’t know about this virus. We don’t know the long term sequelae, or the productivity cost (how many people does this apply too, and how long will it be before these people return to work?). It’s possible the virus may reduce lung capacity (which is associated with higher mortality). It could affect kidney health, or cause heart muscle scarring. If this virus were to shorten life spans by five or ten years, we won’t even know that for twenty years. And if asymptomatic cases can suffer silent effects like microclots, they could still suffer some longer term damage –even though they might not realize they ever had Coronavirus. And if they wait years to do an antibody test, it may be too late to find out (if natural immunity does not last), so they may never know.
It will be difficult to even do those long term studies if we do not start now.
Nicola Davis, The Guardian
She is not alone: Fiona Lowenstein, a writer in the US, co-founded a group on the social media platform Slack for people who have experienced Covid-19 after it took her weeks to recover from being admitted to hospital with the disease.
Many report waves of symptoms over a period of weeks – from heart palpitations to headaches, shortness of breath and fatigue.
In a survey of group members, 89% of the 465 respondents said they had symptoms that fluctuated in intensity and frequency; 23% had tested positive for coronavirus, taking on average just over nine days to be tested from the onset to symptoms; 28% tested negative and were, on average, tested after about 15 days; and just 3.5% were admitted to hospital, although 38% visited an emergency department.
The Slack group survey found two-thirds of respondents had a pre-existing medical condition, mainly seasonal allergies or asthma.
But Dr James Gill … said data from the Sars outbreak revealed that almost a third of those who had had that particular coronavirus still had a reduced tolerance to exercise many months later, despite having normal lung function. While Gill stressed that Covid-19 was a different disease, he said it could be that a similar proportion of about a fifth or a third of those with Covid-19 had lengthy recovery time .
Prof David Heymann said concern was starting to mount that the virus might trigger some form of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. “We don’t know”.
Of the 712 cases on the Diamond Princess, three months later, 48 are still listed on worldometer as “active cases” and 4 are listed as still in a serious or critical condition. Does anyone know if these numbers are correct?
REFERENCES
High expression of ACE2 receptor of 2019-nCoV on the epithelial cells of oral mucosa, Nature, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41368-020-0074-x
Pedone, et al (2012) Association of Reduced Total Lung Capacity With Mortality and Use of Health Services, April 2012Volume 141, Issue 4, Pages 1025–1030 , DOI: https://doi.org/10.1378/chest.11-0899
Things worth knowing about Coronavirus:
8 out of 10 based on 50 ratings
…
9.6 out of 10 based on 12 ratings
Border closures and Quarantine appear to be reducing all respiratory diseases
It’s a striking pattern all over the world. Measures taken to reduce the spread of Covid have, not surprisingly, reduced the spread of all respiratory diseases.
 This years flu season is smaller than the last five years Good news: due to the pandemic it’s likely many people are not catching Influenza and other respiratory diseases.This shows a rather predictable result that quarantine reduces the spread of respiratory diseases. It’s a banal and uncontroversial finding.
Chris Gillham is a part of the unofficial BOM audit team here, and below he looks at WHO data across 17 countries for Influenza. (The WHO Chief of course is a belt-n-debt-trap apologist for China, but this is not their modeled interpretation, just the data). Laboratory indicated influenza cases are down an astonishing 87% in 17 nations compared to the five year period.
Quarantine is textbook microbiology, and for most of history, the best way to reduce the spread of disease. In many countries 12 days after major isolation measures started, viral growth flattened off the dreaded exponential curve. Despite that, some commentators still wonder if the lockdowns achieve anything for Coronavirus. And so it is, that we reach this strange point in the debate, where it is worth stating the blandly obvious: that lockdowns slow the spread of respiratory viruses. This is not to say they are cheap, just effective.
Some argue that “coronavirus cases are inflated”, and in the pandemic fog some deaths no doubt are. But the big-picture is writ in the all-cause-mortality data which shows the opposite. In cities where Coronavirus is known to kill many, the deaths are far higher than even the confirmed coronavirus deaths — possibly 60% higher. And we know that Coronavirus causes massive clotting, leading to strokes, heart disease, and pulmonary embolism. Far from overestimating the deaths from Coronavirus, many deaths are going unrecorded, as people die in homes without even getting tested. Contrary to this, deaths due to influenza are often inflated, with modeled, statistical estimates of the “burden” raising the death tolls from 3,000-15,000 up to “60,000”.
Time to move the debate along
Instead of asking if lockdowns work, we should be talking about which aspects are the most cost effective. The more effective the lockdown is, the shorter it needs to run. We also need to ask why anyone (especially the US and the UK) would lock up their citizens but allow foreigners to fly in through airports, and not even bother to enforce the quarantine. Why are so many nations paying the expense of a lockdown, but not doing the cheap masks and Vitamin D options? It’s almost like the Expert Swamp doesn’t want to eliminate the virus…
The US and UK are flying into a perfect storm. To anyone who wants to find a way out of The Virus Trap, and wants the economy to fly again, keep an open mind and your eye on the target (and the target is not the people who also want the same thing you do).
A healthy economy starts with a healthy population. When there is a deadly new virus around, worried citizens don’t want to eat out, send their kids to school, or get a new Gucci. Nor do they want to lock up the 60+ group, or lose 1 in 10 grandparents. The best way to restart the economy is to get rid of the virus, which is exactly what most rich western nations are doing. The few that aren’t may get stuck in the slow bleed option where neither the people, nor the economy, are healthy.
Because no one stopped the Virus-Flights in February, with a new unknown disease spreading rapidly, the lockdowns were the only choice. Now, in countries tracking to zero, they’re being lifted. It’s time to restore manufacturing, national borders, and get back to work. If only the US and UK didn’t knobble their own lockdowns…
— Jo
PS: In comments it would be useful if people could be polite, well mannered, and logical.
________________________________________________
Are COVID lockdowns suppressing other diseases?
Guest Post by Chris Gillham
Influenza data from the World Health Organization hints at a reduction of almost 90% in global infections of communicable diseases, the only sensible explanation being social distancing lockdowns imposed to target the COVID-19 virus.
The WHO website provides influenza laboratory surveillance information from most countries, although not all of them keep their notifications up to date. It’s not know how they reflect on actual flu numbers in each country’s community but it’s assumed there’s a correlation since the WHO publishes the data and keeps it fairly current. Spotlight on 17 countries
I chose 17 countries, partly because of their population size, partly because of the media attention they’ve attracted over the past few weeks of the COVID-19 crisis, and partly based on whether or not they’ve supplied adequately up-to-date weekly reports within the timeframe.
His analysis starts in week 14 of 2019 and goes to week 18 of 2020, which was the end of April.
This allows a comparison of positive flu tests in the 17 countries from week 14 to week 18 of both 2019 and 2020. The most recent WHO notification from the US at the time of analysis was week 14.
Firstly, the 11 countries that had flu test results from week 14 2019 through to week 18 2020 …
 The difference in influenza rates one year apart in 11 countries …
Compare the first five columns with the last five columns in the above graphic and it’s pretty clear that a lot fewer people in those 11 countries have this year had the sniffles, a cough or potentially died from influenza.
It’s worth magnifying the figures during those five week blocks …
…
 … That’s an 88.0% reduction in positive laboratory influenza test notifications from 11 countries.
Keep reading →
7 out of 10 based on 52 ratings
With 1.4 million confirmed infections about 0.4% of the United States has had a known infection. But we know testing is inadequate given that there is such a high positive test rate (14% of all tests so far are positive). So we know the real rate of infection is higher than that.
The group that did the Santa Clara antibody test have run another test on 5,600 baseball employees and this time found only 0.7% carry the antibodies. The researchers were surprised.
About the only message we can really draw from this is the US is a long way from Herd Immunity, and as the US reopens there are twenty to fifty times as many people who could still catch this.
Of the 5,603 major league employees who submitted to what researchers called the largest national antibody study to date, only 60 tested positive, researchers said Sunday.
The researchers announced an estimated positive rate of 0.72% after adjusting the results for what they said were false positives and false negatives.
Still, the minute percentage of positive tests provided a data point as scientists determine how wide the coronavirus has spread within the United States. Bhattacharya said he expected a larger positive rate.
“The epidemic has not gotten very far,” he said. “We have quite a way to go.”
There are many caveats. This test is still not random, nor as Steve Sailer notes, does it appear to be published (can anyone find it?). The adjustments are still large. The Santa Clara test found 1.5% of those who answered an advertisement carried antibodies to Covid-19 in that high risk county. The authors corrected for postcodes but not age, and estimated that was really 3 -4%. Here, perhaps responding to the criticisms of their first study, they adjusted the 1.1% result down to compensate for the false positive rate.
Most of the antibody studies struggle with randomizing their data, and selection bias. They often draw on higher risk groups like pregnant women, homeless people, or attract in the high risk people in high risk areas. This study had more white men aged under 65.
Ultimately antibody tests may not be much use as long as the infection rate is so low it in the same range as the false positives (around 0.5%). It’s some use to public health officials, but not to the people who got tested. Around half the positive tests may be false — which is not much help to employers or employees looking to get people back to work. They only have a 50:50 chance the test is right.
But the message is that even if as many as 2% of the US population had been exposed to Coronavirus, 98% haven’t been.
The lack of any closed borders or mass mask wearing has cost the US dearly.
Things worth knowing about Coronavirus:
7.5 out of 10 based on 40 ratings
OK. It’s late Tuesday somewhere in the world.
9.7 out of 10 based on 11 ratings
It’s almost like the swamp in the UK wants to keep the infections running as long as possible.
The UK Government have scored heat on the pointless sabotage of their own lockdown by flying in the virus through open borders. So in reply, instead of doing an immediate proper quarantine, like most countries in the world, the UK is giving everyone with an infection and the means to travel three good weeks to plan their trip so that they can avoid the two-week quarantine.
If they beat the easy deadline they can stay at home for seven days instead and “only” go out to infect people at chemists, shops, and anywhere they deem essential, including their workplace, during that week.
Boris needs new advisors.
Tom Burridge, BBC
UK airlines say they have been told the government will bring in a 14-day quarantine for anyone arriving in the UK from any country apart from the Republic of Ireland in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
The new restriction is expected to take effect at the end of this month.
Industry body Airlines UK said the policy needed “a credible exit plan” and should be reviewed weekly.
People arriving in the UK would have to self-isolate at a private residence.
Government and aviation sources told BBC News that the quarantine would mean people might be expected to provide an address when they arrive at the border.
The 14-day quarantine is still not a quarantine unless there is enforced isolation. Australians coming home have to stay in hotels and are fed and guarded.
In Victoria when people were allowed to “self isolate” — even knowing there were going to be checks and follow ups, 20% of those in isolation flouted the rules and were caught going out.
Josh Hanrahan, Daily Mail
More than 140 people have been fined across Victoria for breaching self-isolation or social distancing laws so far this weekend.
Of the 751 spot checks carried out at homes and businesses by police, almost one in five were found to be breaching the recently implemented laws.
When Italy got serious about a lockdown it only gave people hours notice and the masses crammed trains trying to “beat” (meaning “ruin”) the quarantine. We’re all human, and given the cost of getting stuck far from home, their reaction is very understandable. But if the UK government were serious about slowing the caseload they would instigate an enforced two week quarantine immediately.
There must be thousands of spare rooms at hotels right now that would love the business, and the cost of paying for it is nothing compared to holding the nation in another sabotaged week of lockdown.
Things worth knowing about Coronavirus:
7.8 out of 10 based on 50 ratings
…
8.7 out of 10 based on 18 ratings
Australia and New Zealand may soon open up a safe travel zone in the South Pacific and some mock it as a “bubble”. But many other nations could potentially join this growing virus-free zone. Countries which could get there sooner include Germany, France, Norway, Ireland, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, Czechia, Serbia, Croatia, Greece and Iceland. Plus South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, Israel, and even perhaps Italy and Spain not long after that. And there are others.
Countries that are only flattening the curve, and not crushing it, include bizarrely the powerhouses of the Western world, the UK and US, as well as Sweden and Canada. It also includes Russia, Brazil, and a lot of the third world. But even Turkey is bringing the curve down. Forgoodnesssake, Jordan looks impressive. Even Cuba looks like reaching zero before the US of A does.
The US and UK are keeping their virus cases alive by flying them in through open borders. Sweden is just not doing enough. Canada? Good question. Please tell us.
We know how to beat this virus yet top level expert advisors are telling Boris and Trump they need to leave the borders open. Can someone shake these men and tell them to get better advice? The Experts from the Swamp may not want to solve this. Especially if profits or elections are on the line. They could have stopped the flights in February, but they didn’t.
A world divided…
Imagine the effect on those nations considered “unsafe” which are locked outside the Virus-free Zone. Their travellers can enter the safe zone with a two week quarantine. The world could become carved into the clean and unclean. Only nations with no infections and hard border control could be admitted, but once inside, people could fly with normal border checks and no extra quarantine. Economies would return to near normal levels within and tourism could rebound within the clean zone. People would have the confidence to go out for dinner and plan weddings and visit their relatives in nursing homes.
Countries with out-of-control infections would lose out in so many ways — and the pressure to join the virus free zone will be huge. Tourists from the safe zone could visit the land of infections, but face a two week quarantine on return. Once countries are “in” they will want to maintain any borders with the infected zone — if an outbreak occurs, they may lose their own safe status.
But the world sits at a vulnerable fork in the road
Many nations are potentially only weeks from zero cases — but burning cash. If nations reopen to fast or too early, the second waves will come, economies will struggle on for months, tip toeing around the virus, redoing the lockdowns, or just suffering the deaths and the fear. But for those with the wealth and the resolve to beat this, the No-Virus World offers real freedom and a V shaped recovery. All the infrastructure and workforce is still there, mostly intact. The bridges have not been burned. (Yet).
But there are some major players both within and without who benefit from dragging out the problem. Some are seeding the message that we can’t get rid of the virus, that we have to have vaccines, or drugs, or herd immunity, when what we really need right now is strong borders and just to finish the job.
A healthy economy starts with healthy people.
The Globalists will hate that success is measured one nation at a time, depends on strong borders and was achieved despite the EU and the UN. This virus is the anti-thesis of Open Borders and a pox on the biggest layer of useless government in the world. The WHO only had one job and they failed us.
All around the world, nations are beating Coronavirus
Everyone knows Australia and New Zealand are close to zero, but they could still muck this up.
All across Europe there are signs of success. Not long after strong quarantine measures started the curves started to flatten:
 Stats and graphs thanks to Worldometer | Click to enlarge. Asian nations near China were better prepared. These numbers were nothing like the West.
 Click to enlarge. Even in Italy and Spain, the curves are promising, though as they reopen, there is plenty for the virus to spring off…
 … The mysteries of the Americas:
 This is what flattening the curve looks like in the USA and Canada. Obviously, in a divided world, constant vigilance is required, but the West already successfully keeps out many diseases that used to be endemic. Testing would have to be maintained to cope with the odd inevitable breach, along with tracking and tracing teams ready to go. At the first hint of reinfection, the borders lock down around the region til it’s cleared. We know what to do.
Go hard and Go Early. Short sharp and fast.
Things worth knowing about Coronavirus:
8.2 out of 10 based on 64 ratings
Figure that UK residents can be fined for gathering in a group of three in the park across the road, but can legally travel to Tehran or Moscow if they reckon it’s essential (though the Russians might not let you in). Coronavirus is raging in Moscow but Russians can fly to Heathrow for a bargain next week.
For seven weeks of lockdown people have been flying straight in without even a temperature check. Though Healthrow just announced it will trial some thermometers and ask people to wear masks. Bravo, eh?
The idea of keeping people in their homes but letting planes come and go is so bizarrely strange it didn’t even occur to me.
The US appears largely the same
The good news is this explains why the UK is stuck in Viral-Neverland, with cases not declining, despite the lockdown. It’s something that can be fixed. The bad news is that Brits have been wasting weeks in lockdown running to stand still, instead of crushing the curve.
The awful news is that it says something dreadful about the health advice Boris is getting. The rot run deeps in the hallowed institutions.
In the UK, 18 million people arrived from Jan 1st to March 22. Of those only 273 people were quarantined. That explains, right there, why the UK dug such a huge hole for itself. Since then, flight traffic has continued, albeit at only 1% or so of normal levels, because nearly every other country on Earth closed borders, and most passengers don’t want to fly. That is still 10,000 people arriving every day in the UK with no mandatory quarantine at all. Like four Ruby Princesses cruise ships every single day. This alone explains why the UK is stuck in the same hole week after week.
UK Travel advice recommends not travelling unless it’s essential (as decided by the traveller) and advises travel insurance (which possibly no one is selling). On return it asks people to stay home for 7 days and “and only go outside for food, health reasons, daily exercise or work if you absolutely cannot work from home.” In Australia everyone flying in is escorted to a hotel, prevented from leaving, and fed and monitored for two weeks. That’s a quarantine.
Sir Patrick Vallance wanted Herd Immunity for the UK, but officially that suicidal policy was junked, so what gives — is the UK on a “silent Herd Immunity” plan?
Jamie Grierson, The Guardian
Vallance said that studying the genomics of the virus had allowed them to determine the origin of cases brought into the UK.
Arrivals into the UK have plummeted by as much as 99% on some routes but the country has been described as an “outlier” in its approach to border controls during the crisis. The only measures being taken at the border are the use of posters, digital displays and leaflets with information about the measures in place.
The Home Office has insisted that the scientific advice showed that placing restrictions at the border would not have had a significant impact on the spread of the virus in the UK.
“Scientific Advice” is the great abrogation of responsibilities. Once the virus had spread and it was too late to stop it — then it’s possible that the extra infections might not make much difference, but when the nation is in lockdown at great expense, surely priority one is to limit the flow. And not just because of its a soul destroying symbolism. The extra cases keep the tally stubbornly flat, looking like a failure, demoralizing and disincentivizing, and making the lockdown longer…
The open borders madness explains why the United Kingdom wallows in an extended constant infection rate. Why pay the pain of the lockdown while allowing people to bring back the virus? It’s as if London is dooming itself to lockdown until the whole world clears the virus first.
The places with open borders will be the last places on Earth to get rid of the virus
According to the BBC on May 5th “When will the lockdown end and how?” the UK lockdown has dropped the Ro from nearly 4 down to about 0.7 (as eyeballed of the graph below from the much maligned Imperial College. A college headed by the even more maligned Neil Ferguson, Grade A hypocrite, caught for visiting his lover while telling the nation not to). Assuming that the R0 calculation of Imperial College is correct (below), the UK Daily Infection rates ought to be falling and “tracking to zero” like most of the rest of the world. Any number below one is a winner.
Though I can’t find the source document for this graph, and it is suspiciously, unnaturally, square, with a very modeled look about it, despite the headline.
 Ro infection in the UK, Coronavirus spread and the effects of lockdown.
But how important are the flights?
The additional load of new incoming passengers with infections could easily be the difference between the UK daily infections shrinking or not.
If 1% of passengers are infected on take-off as they head toward the UK, by the time they land, that may be 3% infected on touchdown (I can’t find any data on flight Ro — can anyone else?) So that would mean 300 new infections arriving every day in the UK. It doesn’t sound like much when there are 5,000 new infections reported every day, but those 300 could infect 200 more in the next 5 days (let’s assume they adopt the lockdown practices and same Ro of the UK as soon as they arrive, so an Ro of 0.7, as per the graph above). Those 200 will infect another 140 and so on. In the end, the 300 infected passengers arriving each day will cumulatively add a load of around 900 cases before the chain extinguishes itself. It could be a lot more if flights are mainly coming from countries with poor infection control (like the US, Brazil or Russia). And flights, by definition, will be coming from places with poor infection control. All the nations that are trending to zero will have closed their borders, and they won’t want flights from the UK.
And if a city should really go pear shaped, there aren’t too many places a person would want to escape too. London might be too infected for most of the world to want to fly to, but in the worst hot-spots on Earth, it might still look better…
As infections spread in the poorly controlled parts of the world, the load will increase. (And if flight traffic is 3% of normal as suggested by some, then overseas infections will be bigger).
In other words, 67 million people are living under expensive and strict lockdown conditions, and the thing stopping that from eliminating the virus are the 10,000 or so people who arrive daily without quarantine. How does any science advisor justify flying in new cases daily? How does any policy-maker explain holding the nation to extended ransom week after week just so a few people can arrive without the hassle of a two week mandatory quarantine?
For people who want strong borders, this is the biggest chance to get them since WWII. Where are the sovereign battlers who want border controls?
After searching, I found readers in the UK didn’t need medical degrees to be baffled at why flights were still arriving at Heathrow.
But where were all the medical advisors?
Save the economy, set up proper quarantines.
If we get rid of the virus — everyone can get back to work.
9.2 out of 10 based on 58 ratings
…,
8.4 out of 10 based on 11 ratings
The annual Flu death tally is not what it seems
It’s another bubble I don’t want to pop. Thanks for sticking in there in the quest for data that counts.
People worry that doctors are inflating the number of Coronavirus-deaths by listing other kinds of deaths in the Covid category. Fair enough. But they miss that this has effectively already been done with the famous flu death count. The national discussion is stuck in a rut, because it’s trying to compare confirmed cases of Coronavirus with modelized broad category influenza “burdens”.
It’s tempting to cite the current toll of 72,000 US Coronavirus deaths and wonder why we’ve reacted so differently to the worst influenza season where 62,000 people died of the flu (supposedly). But the actual confirmed cases of influenza deaths in the US are only 3,000 – 15,000 annually. Coronavirus really is on a different scale.
The headline grabbing flu numbers are modeled guesses based on assumptions about things like how many people go to hospital, how many get tested, or what other diseases were around at the time. It’s called the Influenza Disease Burden, not the List of Those Who Died, because it’s statistics and word-games. And probably the biggest adjustment of them all is that the big killer, pneumonia, is bundled in with influenza when it could be caused by as many as 30 different things. Thus a whole range of viral, bacterial, and mycoplasma-related pnumonia cases get collected under the “influenza” banner. It’s as if we are comparing all known respiratory diseases with the new one on the block.
Death is messy and multifactorial. There will be heart attacks labeled as “Covid” that shouldn’t have been, but there will be Covid deaths labeled as heart attacks that never got tested for Covid. And somewhere there will even be someone sitting behind a wheel who’s tired with coronavirus, who makes a mistake they wouldn’t have made… The best we can do is look at is all-cause-mortality or at least, confirmed cases. What matters is that we compare like with like to decide what to do.
As Doctor Jeremy Faust noticed, despite all the deaths he’d seen, he could hardly remember more than a single person who had died from the flu, and nor, he found, could his colleagues:
Jeremy Samuel Faust, Scientific American
…it occurred to me that, in four years of emergency medicine residency and over three and a half years as an attending physician, I had almost never seen anyone die of the flu. I could only remember one tragic pediatric case.
Based on the CDC numbers though, I should have seen many, many more. In 2018, over 46,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses. Over 36,500 died in traffic accidents. Nearly 40,000 died from gun violence. I see those deaths all the time. Was I alone in noticing this discrepancy?
I decided to call colleagues around the country … Most of the physicians I surveyed couldn’t remember a single [flu death] over their careers. Some said they recalled a few. All of them seemed to be having the same light bulb moment I had already experienced: For too long, we have blindly accepted a statistic that does not match our clinical experience.
He calculates that in the worst ever week of both covid and flu deaths, the confirmed covid deaths were 10 to 44 times higher:
In the last six flu seasons, the CDC’s reported number of actual confirmed flu deaths—that is, counting flu deaths the way we are currently counting deaths from the coronavirus—has ranged from 3,448 to 15,620, which is far lower than the numbers commonly repeated by public officials and even public health experts.
… we have to compare counted deaths to counted deaths, not counted deaths to wildly inflated statistical estimates. If we compare, for instance, the number of people who died in the United States from COVID-19 in the second full week of April to the number of people who died from influenza during the worst week of the past seven flu seasons (as reported to the CDC), we find that the novel coronavirus killed between 9.5 and 44 times more people than seasonal flu.
My kingdom for good statistics
We want good stats, but we’ve got what we’ve got. Both Flu and Covid contribute to heart attacks and strokes (and undoubtedly others too — as the burden of a major disease adds one more straw to any condition.) We just know Coronavirus bodies clot so fast, from head to toe that even Heparin can’t stop it. But even with a $5000 autopsy for every patient — which won’t be done — we won’t always be alble to say if the heart attack was 46% Covid, or 64% Covid. And then there are the people who die in their homes and will never be tested.
US testing statistics for Covid are still inadequate and missing some cases — with a positive rate (positive results per test) up in the 20% range — it means there are still more people out there with Covid who don’t know it, than are showing up in tests.
Deaths from coronavirus are almost certainly underestimates:
If Coronavirus were stealing bodies from the cardiovascular tally — the all-cause-mortality numbers would show that. Instead there’s a wave of people dying above and beyond what we’d expect in places like London and New York, and there are deaths even above and beyond what we’d get from adding normal deaths to Coronavirus deaths. It’s likely thousands of people in corona-hot-spots are also dying of strokes and heart disease or things related to clotting and inflammation.
 All cause mortality shows this is “not just the flu”. Though thankfully action stopped it hitting most places as bad as it hit New York.
Whatever it is running through the biggest cities of the Northern Hemisphere (and places like Ecuador) looks like a deadly pandemic, spreads like a deadly pandemic, and kills like a deadly pandemic…
Lawrence Solomon, who wrote “The Deniers” –a book about climate skeptics who stood up to global warming hysteria — wrote in 2014 that the CDC were inflating flu numbers as a way to market flu vaccines.
Lawrence Solomon, Huffington Post.
“U.S. data on influenza deaths are a mess,” states a 2005 article in the British Medical Journal entitled “Are U.S. flu death figures more PR than science?” This article takes issue with the 36,000 flu-death figure commonly claimed, and with describing “influenza/pneumonia” as the seventh leading cause of death in the U.S.
“But why are flu and pneumonia bundled together?” the article asks. “Is the relationship so strong or unique to warrant characterizing them as a single cause of death?”
Dr. David Rosenthal, director of Harvard University Health Services. “People don’t necessarily die, per se, of the [flu] virus — the viraemia. What they die of is a secondary pneumonia.”
The CDC itself acknowledges the slim relationship, saying “only a small proportion of deaths… only 8.5 per cent of all pneumonia and influenza deaths [are] influenza-related.”
“Cause-of-death statistics are based solely on the underlying cause of death [internationally defined] as ‘the disease or injury which initiated the train of events leading directly to death,'” explains the National Center for Health Statistics. Because the flu was rarely an “underlying cause of death,” the CDC created the sound-alike term, “influenza-associated death.”
Using this new, loose definition, CDC’s computer models could tally people who died of a heart ailment or other causes after having the flu. As William Thompson of the CDC’s National Immunization Program admitted, influenza-associated mortality is “a statistical association … I don’t know that we would say that it’s the underlying cause of death.”
The CDC’s response was its “Seven-Step ‘Recipe‘ for Generating Interest in, and Demand for, Flu (or any other) Vaccination,” a slide show Nowak presented at the 2004 National Influenza Vaccine Summit.
So the same team that hyped flu deaths cannot be trusted on Coronavirus deaths either, but the freezer trucks are backing up to hospitals and the morgues are overflowing. At least “all cause mortality” just amounts to the counting of bodies and those coronavirus deaths all have names.
We know corruption is endemic, but hopefully we can still, at least, count the dead.
Things worth knowing about Coronavirus:
h/t David and Joseph.
REFERENCES
Excess Mortality in the US state by state. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm
Fluview Interactive Mortality Surveillance from the National Centre for Health Statistics https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/mortality.html
US State by State Testing of Covid data
7.4 out of 10 based on 60 ratings
It turns out being locked up in our own homes with our own families is not the end of the world
Some said the lockdowns would cause skyrocking divorces:
Instead, people like spending time with their partners and kids:
Of all those in live-in relationships, 37 per cent say the experience has led to them wanting to spend more time with their partner, as opposed to the ten per cent who are keen to broaden their horizons again.
A total of 26 per cent say their relationship has improved, while 13 per cent say it has worsened.
Only nine per cent of people think they are now more likely to split up as a result of lockdown, compared to 27 per cent who think it is less likely.
Respondents have, on the whole, also enjoyed being cooped up with their children, with 45 per cent saying it had left them wanting to spend more time with their offspring in future, and just 13 per cent wanting less time.
The survey by the Mail on Sunday finds that people are less likely to divorce, are arguing less, and in a shock, don’t mind spending more time with their spouse and kids. Since they are catching up on sleep, it may make getting along easier.
Deltapoll interviewed 1,564 British adults online on April 30 and May 1. The data has been weighted to be representative of the whole adult population.
This is not to forget that for some life is harder, and the financial pain is bad. (11% saw income go up but 38% said income went down). And we all acknowledge that lockdowns are tougher for singles, both for the young who can’t date and especially for older people living in solitary isolation. It may be singles and the 9% of couples “more likely to split” who said their mood got worse (30%) compared to the 23% who said their mood improved in lockdown.
In the UK, only 31% thought people should be allowed to sunbathe in parks and open spaces. 61% disagreed. Freedom means so much more than just the ability to wander the streets. There is a freedom from fear in places which had less freedom to move.
For those who have lost livelihoods and businesses, governments could do more to to spread the pain fairly. In New Zealand public servants at least took a twenty percent shave. But in most lands the small business entrepreneurs and service industry workers bore most of the cost while the academics and public servants just worked from home.
It’s time for some to admit that an unplanned holiday in our homes is not a disaster for a large part of the population, nor was it unpopular. In other wars, people were separated for years, went hungry or were called up to put their lives on the line. In this war, health workers are paying a terrible price, but for others, the war effort means staying home and watching TV.
7.3 out of 10 based on 51 ratings
…
9.3 out of 10 based on 8 ratings
Could a mass clotting event explain the excess death rate, the hypoxia, the delirium
Stories are now appearing of a few youngish people losing fingers, toes or even getting a leg amputated. And strokes have been seen in some as young as 30. Coronavirus, it seems, doesn’t just cause blood clotting, it causes the large and small sort, arterial ones, venous ones, and now microclots, and many of them all through the lungs and other tissues. This might explain the hypoxia, and also the other cases of organ failure. And while strokes in 33 year olds are still very rare (even in Coronavirus patients) the clotting could be the factor that matters most in the lungs, and in mortality.
This also might explain why ventilators are not working too well. Ventilators are useful for “wet lung pneumonia” because they help use pressure to push fluid out of the lungs. But if the problem is massive clotting, the ventilators that everyone worked so hard to get might be the wrong solution.
It also suggests people in Covid-zones should be on the lookout for stroke type symptoms, and drinking plenty of water and keep moving around.
By AFP, DailyMail.co.uk
After he had spent nearly three weeks in an intensive care unit being treated for COVID-19, Broadway and TV actor Nick Cordero’s doctors were forced to amputate his right leg.
The 41-year-old’s blood flow had been impeded by a clot.
A recent paper from the Netherlands in the journal Thrombosis Research found that 31 percent of 184 patients suffered thrombotic complications, a figure that the researchers called “remarkably high” — even if extreme consequences like amputation are rare.
Coronavirus’s new mystery: It’s causing strokes in healthy people
“These people are clotting, and we can’t shut it off.”
— Katherine Harmon Courage, Vox
Even anticoagulants like heparin are not enough to stop the clotting:
“I’m a hematologist, and this is unprecedented,” says Jeffrey Laurence of Weill Cornell Medical College, who has been in the field for three decades. “This is not like a disease we’ve seen before.”
Laurence also describes the multitude of people sick with Covid-19 whose blood clots are plugging up the dialysis machines in their wards. Beyond that, he says, even “as the nurses are drawing their blood, it’s clotting in the tubes, and they’re on full doses of Heparin” and other blood-thinning medications. “Everyone is seeing a similar kind of thing,” he says.
— Katherine Harmon Courage, Vox
Lawrence saw a photo of a young Coronavirus sufferer with a pattern of skin lesions that was “a picture of microvascular clotting. Lawrence wondered if that kind of clotting was going on in the lungs, and then saw that it was in an autopsy.
Blood markers of clotting are up at 100 times normal:
Dr. Tiffany Osborn, a professor of surgery and emergency medicine at Washington University in St. Louis.
“We are seeing lab values that are off the wall,” she says. For example, doctors are seeing levels of a protein fragment called a D-dimer that are more than 100 times normal levels, Osborn says. This suggests the presence of lots of blood clots that the body is trying to break down.
–Jon Hamilton, NPR
Reports are coming in from all over the world:
Hundreds of small clots throughout the lungs also found in Ireland:
“In addition to pneumonia affecting the small air sacs within the lungs, we are also finding hundreds of small blood clots throughout the lungs. This scenario is not seen with other types of lung infection, and explains why blood oxygen levels fall dramatically in severe COVID-19 infection. — Fogarty et al 2020. ScienceDaily
Also in France: a quarter of ICU Covid patients had a pulmonary embolism (clot in their lung) and nearly 70% had some venous thromboembolism. (Llitjos, 2020)
Young people are not on the look out for stroke symptoms:
For example, the youngest, a 33-year-old woman, developed slurred speech and felt weak and numb on her left side for 28 hours before seeking help. She (as well as one other stroke patient in the study) was “concerned about going to a hospital during the pandemic,” the authors noted — even though she had had a cough, headache, and chills for a week.
She is one of the lucky ones. She is the only one who has been able to start speaking again.
Coronavirus deaths from stroke or heart attacks could be uncounted Covid deaths
If Coronavirus can cause strokes in otherwise healthy 33 year olds, imagine what happens to 80 year olds at home?
The prevalence of blood clots also raises the question of whether some stroke or heart attack home deaths in recent months were actually linked to Covid-19. It’s yet another possible way Covid-19 fatalities might be being undercounted. Many people who have already died are not currently tested for Covid-19 (often in the interest of preserving tests for those who are still alive). But more widespread posthumous testing could help clarify the full impact of this disease.
— Katherine Harmon Courage, Vox
Previously some docs suggested the “light lung” stage of Coronavirus (where lungs are still flexible and compliant) was a sort of high altitude sickness which leads to clotting. But this newer theory turns it around and suggests that the clotting itself causes the hypoxia which perhaps leads to the appearance of the high altitude sickness.
Obviously it’s not known how long people might be at an increased risk of stroke or heart attack after getting a coronavirus infection.Though there were reports out of China in early February of people having heart attacks weeks later and a suspicion that the virus was increasing the risk.
Note that even influenza increases the risk of heart attacks and strokes, and being immobile in an ICU bed is a well known factor promoting blood clots. That’s why patients are given prophylactic doses of heparin right from the start. The difference here is that the clotting is so strong that even higher doses of heparin are not enough to stop it clotting.
This doesn’t change the fact that it’s likely 75% of people will be asymptomatic or have mild cases.
Things worth knowing about Coronavirus:
7.8 out of 10 based on 44 ratings
A cheap device might keep people off ventilators and be the first warning of trouble
In coronavirus blood oxygen levels can silently drop to unheard of levels. People may be unaware they even have coronavirus as oxygen levels fall to the point, medicos are rewriting the record books. This is a hypoxia crisis — it’s a defining feature of the disease. In the UK, the demand for oxygen at hospitals is so great that the NHS is running out, rationing it, and asking docs to lower their blood oxygen targets.
People are monitoring their “blood oxy sats” at home so they get an early warning that they need more serious medical help. Normal blood oxygen levels are 95-100% saturated. Doctors used to get uppity at levels below 92%, and hospital alarms often go off if children with asthma fall below 90%. At 88% doctors are putting people on continuous oxygen therapy. Levels below 80% are considered dangerous enough to start causing organ damage. But medical staff are finding conscious covid patients with levels so low they are unheard of — an unbelieveable 50 percent. I read somewhere an ambulance medic found someone with a reading of 35%.
Dr Levitan, an emergency doctor in New York recommended a week ago that a pulse oximeter at home would save lives and prevent patients from ultimately needing the highly invasive, expensive ventilator treatment which was so dangerous and such a drain on hospitals.
Oximeters are cheap devices, bound to be disappearing off chemist shelves and from Ebay and Amazon right now, but if you are high risk, or in a high risk area, it might be worth trying to track one down.
Richard Levitan in a New York Times op-ed
…almost all the E.R. patients had Covid pneumonia.
Apparently, some of those asymptomatic cases are already suffering from pnumonia. This wasn’t the point of the article, but the message implied in here is that there may be walking cases of Covid who think they are fine, but they are already suffering lung damage.
Even patients without respiratory complaints had Covid pneumonia. The patient stabbed in the shoulder, whom we X-rayed because we worried he had a collapsed lung, actually had Covid pneumonia. In patients on whom we did CT scans because they were injured in falls, we coincidentally found Covid pneumonia. Elderly patients who had passed out for unknown reasons and a number of diabetic patients were found to have it.
And here is what really surprised us: These patients did not report any sensation of breathing problems, even though their chest X-rays showed diffuse pneumonia and their oxygen was below normal. How could this be?
Normally people with low oxygen levels are struggling to breathe, gasping, working their intercostal chest muscles between their ribs. They are in distress. But with Covid patients they may feel OK, and be able to talk on the phone. By the time they get to the hospital they already have fairly serious case of pneumonia and the chest x-rays show it. About 20% of these patients will go on the the more serious “wet lung” type of pnumonia which needs a ventilator. The hope is that people who get treatment early may be able to avoid the ventilator stage.
…when Covid pneumonia first strikes, patients don’t feel short of breath, even as their oxygen levels fall. And by the time they do, they have alarmingly low oxygen levels and moderate-to-severe pneumonia (as seen on chest X-rays).
He recommends all people who have tested positive for coronavirus, or have respiratory symptoms use an oximeter for two weeks.
Pulse oximeters helped save the lives of two emergency physicians I know, alerting them early on to the need for treatment. When they noticed their oxygen levels declining, both went to the hospital and recovered (though one waited longer and required more treatment). Detection of hypoxia, early treatment and close monitoring apparently also worked for Boris Johnson, the British prime minister.
Teams are currently working on all kinds of ways to monitor blood oxygen levels, including with Raspberry Pi’s.
Not all medicos think this is a good idea, but for a smart audience who can weigh up the pros and cons and give themselves a bit of training, it’s a cheap bit of insurance. I’ve got one and have used it for years.
Laurel Walmsley
…a pulse oximeter might signal that you’re in trouble before you realize it. That’s what Levitan saw when he spent 10 days working in the ER at Bellevue Hospital in New York City earlier this month: Many COVID patients were already very sick with COVID pneumonia by the time they arrived. They were breathing rapidly, their blood oxygen levels dangerously low. Like mountain climbers, the patients had grown accustomed to gradually decreasing levels of oxygen and didn’t realize they were in distress.
Many of them said they only recently started feeling short of breath though they had experienced symptoms of COVID-19 for days. By the time the patients went to the hospital, says Levitan, the virus had already damaged their lungs, and many were in critical condition. He saw COVID pneumonia patients with oxygen saturation levels as low as 50 percent.
NPR goes on to discuss reasons to get one, as well as reasons not to — with warnings and instructions. Read the NPR article and other links, but most of the warnings about using them probably don’t apply to the well educated person. The warnings about untrained users sound like anti-mask messages did — contradictory and patronising. Bright lights can skew the readings, as can nail polish or pre existing conditions like anemia, asthma or lung disease, so using one when you are healthy is good practice to get the “normal” trendline.
Like masks and PPE, pulse oximeters are suddenly going to become hot property, and thus, mass produced.
Curiously, sales of pulse oximeters dramatically rose in the US on Jan 20th when the first case of coronavirus was recorded in the US, but it seems to me more likely to be a sign of our friendly CCP agents at work — posting meters to China without mentioning to the people around them that they might be useful to have at home.
Note to commenters: Since lives and livelihoods are both at stake, good manners and grace will go a long way. Sometime the worst scaremongers are the ones complaining about other scaremongers.
h/t Mum.
Things worth knowing about Coronavirus:
9.6 out of 10 based on 50 ratings
|
JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
Jo appreciates your support to help her keep doing what she does. This blog is funded by donations. Thanks!
Follow Jo's Tweets To report "lost" comments or defamatory and offensive remarks, email the moderators at: support.jonova AT proton.me
Statistics
The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
|
Recent Comments