There is still no vaccine to typhus, but overcrowded ghettos of partially starving people managed to stop the spread in 1941. The Nazis crammed some 450,000 people into a 3.4km2 area in Warsaw. In the first round, typhus spread rapidly, infecting 120,000 people and killing 30,000. But the Jews got organized and just as everyone was expecting rates to rocket with winter approaching, the exponential curve fell off suddenly “to extinction”. A new paper claims they beat it with social distancing, hygiene, and home quarantine.
Typhus is due by a bacterium transmitted by lice and fleas. It causes a fever, headache and rash. It was such a scourge that in 1759 one estimate suggests as many as a quarter of all prisoners in England died from typhus. Infection rates were so bad in prison that the disease was called ‘gaol fever’ and prisoners on trial would even infect court members from time to time. In the early 1600’s more than 10% of the total German population may have been killed by typhus. Currently it is infrequent except for in a few African and South American nations. There were less than 50 cases in the US during the 35 years up to 2010.
RMIT via MedExpress,
“Fortunately, many of the anti-epidemic activities and interventions are documented, and it turns out that Warsaw Ghetto had many experienced doctors and specialists,” he says.
Stone found evidence of well organized training courses covering public hygiene and infectious diseases, hundreds of public lectures on the fight against typhus and an underground medical university for young students.
General hygiene and apartment cleanliness were encouraged and sometimes enforced. Social distancing was considered basic common sense, and home quarantining was not uncommon. Many volunteer soup kitchens were opened up in the period before the epidemic’s decline.
“In the end, it appears that the prolonged determined efforts of the ghetto doctors and anti-epidemic efforts of community workers paid off,” Stone says.
“As those in the Warsaw Ghetto demonstrated, however,” Artzy-Randrup explains, “the actions of individuals in practicing hygiene, social distancing and self-isolating when sick, can make a huge difference within the community to reduce the spread. It is the cooperation and active recruitment of communities that beat epidemics and pandemics, not government regulations alone.
Typhus was largely controlled around the world in the 20th Century because in 1909 Charles Nicolle realized that lice were the vector. In World War I, delousing stations were set up on the Western Front, though typhus killed thousands on the Eastern Front, and by 1922 it was raging in Russia with some 25 million cases. After World War II major outbreaks were quelled, largely with personal and public hygiene and a lot of DDT.
The Rickettsia bacterium is not the same as coronavirus which can spread through the air, but it’s kind of inspiring that community compliance and public health measures can stop deadly killers even in crowded impoverished ghettos.
We can’t stop coronavirus with the exact same measures, but it’s still possible to extinguish transmission lines with determined dedication. It’s harder to stop an airborne spread but we have so many more tools at our disposal than imprisoned Jews did in 1941. What we seem to lack is the will. Coronavirus is only a fragile string of chemical code that will decay in two weeks if it doesn’t find any new bodies to live in. Thankfully it’s nowhere near as deadly as typhus, but ironically, if it were that deadly, it’d probably kill less people in the West overall. We’d be shutting borders, wearing masks, and we’d be galvanized into action, not squabbling.
How much damage has already been done to our formerly high-trust societies?
When universities like James Cook Uni sack their whistleblowers and turn themselves into Government PR machines, the price is far more than the billions it costs to keep the “safe spaces” working. The real price is that, on the odd occasion, even when academics give good advice, people don’t believe them.
There is remarkable footage coming out of flooding in China #Chinafloods.
I can’t verify the authenticity, or dates, but it seems likely that terrible things are happening in China. There are shots of levees being deliberately broken to allow waters to flood fields to take the pressure off the dams, and some say the flooding is done without warning and even at night. One shot shows a barge with people on board crashing into bridge pillar and breaking apart. Lord help them. There are reports that the grain crops have been hit hard. “Agriculture wiped out”. There are multiple other reports of thousands going without food or water, with no attempts to rescue them. And there are scores of videos of ferocious torrents raging through streets.
Watching the Three Gorges Dam
According to the Taiwan News this video of a simulation of the collapse of the Three Gorges Dam has gone viral in China, as the rain continues and towns are being sacrificially flooded to reduce the risk of the Three Gorges Dam breaking up. The initial flood will supposedly be 100m in height and moving at 100km and hour. Ten hours later, by the time it reaches the hapless Wuhan the water will “only” be 7m deep.
On Tuesday, the Chinese financial news site Caijing Lengyan released a controversial video that simulates the devastating flooding that would occur if the vaunted Three Gorges Dam collapsed.
According to Chinese government statistics, 45.2 million people have been affected by the floods that have ravaged 27 provinces along the Yangtze River, Huai River, and Yellow River, as well as southern China since the start of June. Many have cast doubt on the integrity of the Three Gorges Dam as it faces the greatest test in its history, while others have questioned the structure’s purported purpose of flood control, given the extensive flooding recently seen both above and below the dam.
A new study near Sicily shows the sea surface temperatures were a whole two degrees Celsius warmer then. The worst-case scenario of the Paris Agreement has already happened, and it was nearly 2,000 years ago. And instead of being a baked-earth apocalypse, the Roman empire flourished during the warmth and declined as it cooled.
A formanifera with the awkward name of Globigerinoides ruber apparently likes to live near the sea surface around 10 to 50 m down. Depending on the temperature, it ends up with slightly different ratios of calcium and magnesium. At some point it dies, sinks and sits in a mud layer on the sea floor 475m below. Eventually, for this lucky mud, someone digs it out and analyses it. This new study suggests the Mediteranean warmed up during Roman times from AD 1 to AD 500.
This was the Roman Climatic Optimum — an era we are spending trillions to avoid.
The researchers suggest that cooling and drying conditions helped bring down the Roman Empire. Though, judging by the current state of civilization, it appears vandals can work with any kind of weather.
The media’s take on this is not to take the obvious headlines like, say, Rome was once hotter than now — man-made climate change is irrelevant. OR:
Climate change has happened before. So What?
Instead this new study is a reminder of how climate can alter the course of civilization. That serves two purposes. It bolsters the sense that climate change is all doom and gloom, and Very Important. Secondly, it distracts people from looking at other reasons that Roman civilization collapsed — like corruption, complacency and currency inflation.
The greatest time of the Roman Empire coincided with the warmest period of the last 2,000 years in the Mediterranean, according to a study published in the journal Scientific Reports, from the Nature group. The climate conditions derived progressively towards arid conditions and later colder ones coinciding with the historical fall of the empire,
Previous studies had related the fall of the Roman Empire to some natural factors (climate change, volcanic eruptions, etc.). With a large-scale regional view, the study provides high resolution and precision data on how the temperatures evolved over the last 2,000 years in the Mediterranean area. “For the first time, we can state the roman period was the warmest period of time of the last 2,000 years, and these conditions lasted for 500 years”, notes Isabel Cacho, professor at the Department of Earth and Ocean Dynamics of the UB.
‘For the first time, we can state the Roman period was the warmest period of time of the last 2,000 years, and these conditions lasted for 500 years,’ said Professor Isabel Cacho at the Department of Earth and Ocean Dynamics, University of Barcelona.
The Mediterranean is a semi-closed sea, meaning it is surrounded by land and almost only connected to oceans by a narrow outlet, and is a climate change ‘hot spot’ according to a previous paper.
Antibody tests versus PCR tests: PCR tests are nose or throat swabs that amplify up short fragments of viral RNA. They only detect infection in the day or two before symptoms show, and for a few days to a few weeks later. The PCR tests cannot show past infections. Antibodies take around a week or two to rise so don’t show active infections, but will show up past ones, though — in the case of Coronavirus, may still produce no result after a few months in some people as antibodies decline.
Test results like these must finally have convinced Donald Trump to change course. It’s long past time the US got serious about this disease, but hopefully rapid action now — masks and distancing and more testing can prevent the trainwreck of rapidly rising infections across the US in two months time as winter and the US election approach.
This study shows that most people in the US have not had this virus, and herd immunity is unattainable without hundreds of thousands more deaths. It also shows how inadequate testing is in the US.
Many antibody studies have tried to estimate the true extent of the Coronavirus infection. Some were ludicrously high (as I said they would be and these new results confirm), but this new study is better. Blood tests (called serology tests) can detect antibodies from past infections but few of the past studies were randomized which means they were doomed to wildly overestimate the rate of infection due to their selection bias. Infected people are much more likely to volunteer to get tested, and uninfected people are much less likely to roam to shopping centres or respond to ads to get tested. This study tested 16,000 people, and used leftovers of blood at large commercial pathology laboratories. In other words, these were people who got blood tests done for some other reason. Not randomized, still biased, but much better than past efforts.
The serum was collected from March 23 through May 12, so biased low in that they don’t contain infections from the latest outbreaks. But it was also biased high because people getting blood tests done are still more likely to be infected people turning up to get blood tests. The peak of NY infections was April 4, so the testing here relates to the week before that NY peak. Thus infections may have been easily twice as high in NY. But — healthy people were also much more likely to be avoiding routine blood tests during the peak week of the pandemic. So double it, halve it, chuck in a guesstimate. All we know for sure is that the 7% result here is not 25% which might have indicated NY was on its way to herd immunity. Cuomo is right to try to close the borders. There are still too many people at risk in NY.
Assuming that the low scorers here (like Florida) may now be up at NY levels, they still need five to ten times the infections to slow the spread. And we are still not sure if people can re-catch Covid a year later.
Ridd loses: Federal Court rules that science is whatever the JCU Vice Chancellor says it is.
JCU wins the appeal on all 17 points that Justice Vasta scathingly awarded to Peter Ridd.
If, hypothetically, fraud was happening at JCU and a staff member reported it, the Australian Federal Court decision has just declared that its fine for JCU to sack that whistleblower for being uncolliegiate.
As I said, this is a case so pointless that even if JCU wins, it loses. And it has spent a fortune to win the legal battle and prove that we cannot trust anything anyone says from JCU.
This win doesn’t just tarnish the VC and admin, it taints everyone who works there. No matter what any good academic says at JCU, the world will wonder what they didn’t say. We can’t know whether they would have preferred to say something else, but couldn’t out of fear that they will be sacked because the VC might not like it.
After this ruling, nothing any academic at JCU says can be trusted. Are they censoring what they really think? Is JCU riddled with incompetence but the staff won’t dare say so because they are frightened to use their emails? Is the evidence fraudulent? Could be. JCU doesn’t care if it is. They only care if they look good. Unfortunately, they look terrible. JCU has spent a fortune defending the indefensible.
It’s time the The Hon Dan Tehan explained why taxpayers should fund research at JCU which has no quality control, wastes money on lawyers, doesn’t investigate fraud, and does not enshrine free speech in employment contracts.
Academic Freedom is “historical” because “the internet”?
The judges reasoning is essentially that academic freedom doesn’t mean freedom in academia because J S Mill, John Locke and Isiah Berlin didn’t have any facebook trolls.
From Gideon Rozner at the IPA:
… this decision has proven how serious the freedom of speech crisis on campus is. You can read the judgment here, but this part in particular – found at paragraph 94 – is absolutely unbelievable:
There is little to be gained in resorting to historical concepts and definitions of academic freedom. Whatever the concept once meant, it has evolved to take into account contemporary circumstances which present a challenge to it, including the internet, social media and trolling, none of which informed the view of persons such as J S Mill, John Locke, Isaiah Berlin and others who have written on the topic.
The judges argue that academic freedom is indispensable to universities, but is dispensable enough to toss to the wind. The right of Professors to speak is now determined by students who are demanding safe spaces where their favourite delusions can hide. The judges admit they are in uncharted territory.
Australian law is now set by teenage twitter mobs.
The court went on to quote a passage from an academic textbook that endorses the view that intellectual freedom is an outdated concept:
Academic freedom plays an indispensable role in fulfilling the mission of the university… But a host of new challenges have arisen in recent years in response to the changing norms and expectations of the university. With the increasing role of the Internet in research, the rise of social media in both professional and extramural exchanges, and student demands for accommodations such as content warnings and safe spaces, the parameters of, and challenges to, academic freedom often leave us in unchartered territory.
Today the University won in the Federal Court. In the judgement, Peter Ridd’s academic freedom is portrayed as his ‘personal opinion’.
It is not Peter Ridd’s personal opinion that the corals are alive, and the Great Barrier Reef resilient to climate change. It is fact. I’ve seen the coral reefs whose health is contested with my own eyes: they are very much alive.
What is dead is academic freedom in Australia.
This is not a one off. JCU has a pattern of evicting, blackbanning, and ousting people who disagree with the bureaucrats pet fashions (vale, Bob Carter!). In this culture, more funding means more strangling. So just stop.
Welcome to the Era of the Anti-Virals. They’re everywhere.
A legacy of the coronavirus pandemic is the dawn of new ways to stop viruses. Here’s another new (old) one — it’s only a small trial, but if it can stop 4 out of 5 people developing the severe form of the disease it will be a gamechanger. If this gets similar numbers on larger trials, then we still need mass production. But national policies will swing on a dime if a safe drug with this much potential appears.
After Coronavirus we might not be so content to accept the annual seasonal virus scourge.
Postenote: These are preliminary results, not a large trial, but at least it is placebo controlled and randomized.
In a randomised trial of 100 patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19, those who received an inhaled formula of the protein interferon beta were at 79 percent lower risk of developing severe disease compared to those who received a placebo.
They were also more than twice as likely to make a full recovery compared with the control group.
The firm behind the treatment, known as SNG001, said the preliminary results suggested “a major breakthrough” in the pandemic.
Interferon beta is a natural cytokine — our bodies produce it during infections, and some think that older people are just not producing enough of it. We may be just replacing something that was meant to be there, or indeed we might be replacing something that the virus has suppressed.
Interferon beta is a naturally occurring protein, which orchestrates the body’s antiviral responses. There is evidence that deficiency in IFN-beta production by the lung could explain the enhanced susceptibility of these at-risk patient groups to developing severe lower respiratory tract (lung) disease during respiratory viral infections. Furthermore, viruses, including coronaviruses such as SARS-CoV-2 and MERS-CoV, have evolved mechanisms which suppress endogenous IFN-beta production, thereby helping the virus evade the innate immune system.
The current market for Interferon beta is already $5 billion a year. At the moment the cost is reportedly about $7,000 USD per 30 mcg vial. (Not that I can tell you what size the normal dose is).
AIDS wasn’t solved by a vaccine, but by three anti-virals. Unlike AIDS, coronavirus patients won’t need to take the medicine for years. Thankfully RNA viruses don’t insert themselves into our genes the way retroviruses like AIDS do.
It’s possible viruses may find a way to adapt and grow resistant to individual antivirals which is why AIDS patients take the triple cocktail.
REFERENCES
A Randomised Double-blind Placebo-controlled Trial to Determine the Safety and Efficacy of Inhaled SNG001 (IFN-β1a for Nebulisation) for the Treatment of Patients With Confirmed SARS-CoV-2 Infection, https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04385095
It says something about the mortality rate of Covid19, and also about the burden on the healthcare sector
According to the CDC, there have been 103,643 cases of Covid-19 in US Healthcare workers of which 543 have died. That makes the death rate per infection a hefty 0.5% among these working age people. Obviously some of these people have co-morbidities, but would be under the retirement age.
We would hope US Healthcare workers are reasonably well tested. They may have a higher death rate because they are subject to a higher viral load and working under long hours in a stressful situation. But they also (presumably) wear PPE and are trained to use it.
An Amnesty International report estimates at least 3,000 health care workers have passed away around the world, with the highest tally from Russia (545) and the UK (540).
Elsewhere, the countries with the highest numbers of health worker deaths are USA (507), Brazil (351), Mexico (248), Italy (188), Egypt (111), Iran (91), Ecuador (82) and Spain (63).
People on the frontline must also die of the flu, but the number is small enough that there don’t appear to be lists in memorium. Indeed, papers on occupational deaths of Health Care Workers don’t even mention influenza. About half are likely vaccinated.
Who would want to work like this for months?
It’s easy to assume pandemic decisions play off economic costs against the death tally, but it’s much bigger than that.
While lockdowns are unbearable for some businesses, roaming viruses are unbearable for the health care industry. There is a burden that makes “suppression” unsustainable. It’s not just the medico’s health, but the threat they may post to loved ones. Doctors are writing up wills just in case, and sending their toddler age children to grandparents for extended stays. I’ve spoken to retired doctors who are concerned about being called up if an outbreak stretches medical services. In March, I talked to medical personnel who were having discussions about whether it would be ethical to retire early — they were torn, juggling what they owe patients with what they owe their family. People with high risk partners were living in different parts of their own homes. Many were quietly envious of home lockdowns, commenting that the safety of that sounded appealing.
The only situation that solves both problems at once is “Elimination”. Happy doctors. Happy businesses.
Hundreds of doctors and nurses at Melbourne hospitals have contracted COVID-19 or been quarantined …
“As a frontline doctor in Victoria’s fight against the virus, my view is that the rate of health care worker infection is unsustainable,” quarantined Melbourne doctor Aaron Bloch…
Suppression has failed because it underestimates this virus, it overestimates our ability to control it, and it fundamentally misunderstands human nature.
We escaped the initial feared tsunami, but do not underestimate the ongoing physical and emotional toll. Many of us have not had a good night’s sleep in a long time.
***
There are a quarter of a million new infections around the world today, and a new study with headlines that claim to have found six different “types” of covid with six clusters of symptoms. These don’t appear to be different viral mutations, so are likely the same virus causing different clusters of symptoms. But that helps identify the higher risk patients earlier. Hope you don’t get the abdominal pain kind with confusion which appears to be the worst sort.
The Prime Minister, who has conceded the lockdown of Greater Melbourne was necessary given the size of the outbreaks, warned that any pivot to an elimination strategy would double unemployment.
Suppression sounds like a management plan but means rolling waves of infection and isolation, with outbreaks of chaos and a constant higher level of fear and avoidance. This does not seem like a jobs creation machine.
Would we prefer one lockdown or three?
1. The hospitalization rate means hospitals will be overwhelmed within weeks (see Victoria). Therefore repeat lockdowns are inevitable.
2. It’s hard to protect the vulnerable when half the population is at risk. Almost one fifth of the Australian population is over 60 years old. One third of Australians have some form of high blood pressure. 67% are overweight or obese. Then there are cancer patients, asthmatics, people living with transplants and people with cardiac disease. Even if they all overlap, that’s a lot of people with co-morbities who won’t be spending much money on travel and restaurants while they hide from the virus. Protecting the vulnerable might be its own economy wrecker.
3. We lose access to hospitals during the waves. How much is it worth living in a community that has access to cancer care, elective surgery, stuff like that? What’s the cost of that burden?
4. The burden on the healthcare profession. Doctors and nurses are getting sick and some are dying from Covid-19, possibly from being exposed to high viral loads and working under pressure or with inadequate PPE. Some are living apart from their families, or in the basement, so they don’t infect loved ones if they bring germs home. Others are wondering if they should retire, and whether it’s fair on their family to keep working.
Suppression is the losers game. One rogue superspreader can infect 100, and suddenly it’s lockdown time again. Living with the virus means the constant threat of a major outbreak and the certainty of morbidity, mortality and lockdowns. It means we risk losing our hospitals for weeks or months on end, we can’t do large events. We can’t visit grandparents, and about half the population needs to hide away, as do those with high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer and transplants.
Eradicating Eliminating* the virus means life as normal except for strong borders and quarantine and lots of testing. People can use hospitals, restaurants, and visit their old folks.
For some reason, Morrison is aiming instead for rolling outbreaks and repeat lockdowns.
Australia was close to eradicating the virus from the nation:
There has been (or was) no community transmission across most of Australia for two to three months. Though that may be about to change as the states open borders just in time to catch the virus from Victoria. If it continues to spread in Sydney, the ACT is a sitting duck even though it might notch up 100 winning days without community spread. But the ACT is only a few hours away from one invisible superspreader from Sydney.
Shame it may unravel in the next week. But it didn’t have to. It was only inept management in Victoria that put the gains of the first lockdown at risk. The states of Australia paid their dues in the late Indian-summer of Vitamin D days and nearly won the battle. Four states and two territories were as good as done. Even NSW managed to notch up 20 covid free days in a row, the day before yesterday (that’s over now) . Even Victoria was scoring 4 days of no new community cases in a row, and that was late April.
This is living with the virus in Victoria
In Victoria there are 2,500 active cases of Covid19/CCPflu, and there are 935 cases with no known contact source. There are 122 in hospital, 31 in ICU which includes five people in their 40’s, six in their fifties, and eight in their sixties. Since July 5 there have been nine deaths, which is bound to rise as it lags infections. About two-thirds in the ICU are on ventilators. Currently 150 healthcare workers are infected.
Victorian hospitals are struggling with the load already, and half of all urgent elective surgery is being delayed in public hospitals. About a quarter of urgent elective surgery is being put off even in private hospitals in Melbourne.
Before the pandemic Victoria had 476 ICU beds. Currently there are 1,000 ICU beds available and ready to go for Covid patients.
What happens next in Australia depends a lot on what happens in NSW.
Mr Preus said he had installed his household solar PV system to save money and help the environment, but was now questioning his investment.
“We’ll never, ever in our lifetime recoup our investment, the return is just not there.”
“People will just disconnect them, and tell them to get stuffed, that’s what I would do,” he said.
They’ve been sold a lemon: misled into believing the energy the panels made was useful and economic. Instead solar owners without batteries can only provide excess energy no one needs at lunchtime. Lunchtime voltages are surging and their inverters are tripping off anyhow. And they themselves need to be hooked up to the grid to get the electro-juice they want, most hours of the day.
Finally there is some attempt to fix the Soviet-level planning disaster. People are just starting to notice that the poor are paying for the networks to supply the rich.
But the call to charge them comes from welfare groups:
As I predicted, borders need to close. Places that don’t close the state border end up putting a border around every single home. It’s the same all over the world. But no one seems to have noticed how spectacular this backflip is.
“I’ve sued the federal government a number of times over the years. I do not believe it’s going to come to that on this,” Cuomo said. “This would be a declaration of war on states, a federal declaration of war.“
Right now there are 22 US states which could threaten to sue Cuomo for the infections New Yorkers gave them.
It was weapons grade bluster on March 28, 2020, but which media outlets and creatures from the Swamp supported Donald Trump, and pulled up Cuomo for statements like this?
“Then we would be Wuhan, China, and that wouldn’t make any sense,” [Cuomo] said, adding that this [a two week quarantine] would cause the stock market to crash in a way that would make it impossible for the US economy to “recover for months, if not years”.
“You would paralyse the financial sector,” he said.
How much healthier the financial sector must look now that the 52,000 New York infections have become three and a half million infections across the US?
So finally, hypocritically, but sensibly, Cuomo has started closing borders; though the enforcement is too weak, and leaks are already occurring. Australia tried this, and it didn’t work. The NY quarantine will get tougher.
In other handy hints from Downunder we suggest using security guards that don’t sleep with their subjects.
July 13: The move is part of the state’s effort to try to enforce its 14-day quarantine requirements for travelers from 22 states who, as of Tuesday, are under a travel advisory because of rising numbers of people testing positive for the coronavirus in their states.
“We can’t be in a situation where we have people coming from other states in the country bringing the virus again,” Cuomo said during a press conference. “It is that simple.”
Travelers who leave an airport in New York state without filling out a form could face a $2,000 fine and be required to attend a hearing and complete a mandatory quarantine.
It’s not clear how NY officials will be able to enforce the 14 day self isolation required of travellers who fill in the forms.
It’s the same pattern all over the world
Borders are the bargain tools to starve viruses. Only arrogantly rich nations can pretend they don’t need them. But even they succumb after the first wave of rampant RNA.
As usual, it’s all so selfish. Infected states want to keep borders open, sharing deadly germs. The same states suddenly change their minds when the places-they-infected start to send infections back. It happened with China, with New South Wales, and now it’s happened with New York.
How different the world looks when your home has survived the first spike.
How naive all the other states look for letting the virus fly in.
The Swamp has been either incompetent or sabotaging Trump. Borders should be the first tool (after masks) not the last.
If the state and federal lines had been shut in March, with masks and Vitamin D, with HCQ and mass testing, the US might have been down to just a couple of hundred new cases a day like Italy Some states would be completely free. Trump would have been seen as a hero. He’d be unstoppable.
A new study documents the dominance of internal variability in decadal-scale global temperature changes and suggests we may experience a global cooling trend during the next 15 or even 30 years despite rising greenhouse gases.
Maher et al. (2020) acknowledge that internal variability in global surface temperature variations is “a difficult concept to communicate” because we have very few observations of its impact and so we must rely on assumptions about how the climate system might work.
From the paper:
We confirm that in the short-term, surface temperature trend projections are dominated by internal variability, with little influence of structural model differences or warming pathway. Additionally we demonstrate that this result is independent of the model-dependent estimate of the magnitude of internal variability.
Internal variability is the approved term, but if you say natural variability instead, we’ll have to arrest you.
Indeed, and perhaps counter intuitively, in all models a lack of warming, or even a cooling trend could be observed at all individual points on the globe, even under the largest greenhouse gas emissions.
Warming. Cooling. Whatever. It’s all success.
If only climate scientists had evidence — they wouldn’t need to cling to random noise of storms, fires and floods.
Mass gatherings linked to mass outbreaks. Who could have seen that coming?
But many details are missing or unknown. They’re not saying that the protest caused the megacluster, or whether the protestors live in the towers, or whether the virus spread from the family outbreak to the tower or the other way.
We do know that four weeks after the BLM rally the state was in deep trouble.
Victorian health authorities have confirmed a link between two COVID-19 cases in people who attended the Black Lives Matter protest in Melbourne’s CBD just over a month ago, and the cluster of at least 242 cases in public housing towers in the city’s inner northwest.
But the Department of Health and Human Services has refused to say whether members of the cluster, which includes the protest attendees, live in the public housing towers.
One H&M worker was at the rally and later tested positive and that three other H&M workers eventually tested positive. The H&M cluster become “North Melbourne family cluster” which grew to 30 cases. Three weeks after the rally the North Melbourne Tower was confirmed as a major hotspot, and has so far accrued 242 cases.
I predicted that if the rally caused an outbreak it could take a month to show. Young protestors had to go home, get sick, spread it to their families, and then other generations would be noticed in hospital cases.
The Victorian cluster slows (again)
Lockdowns work. Cases were doubling every four days or so last week. If the exponential growth had not slowed, case numbers might now be increasing by 500 a day. If only Daniel Andrews, and most of academia and the media had been brave enough to point out the reckless selfishness of protestors seeking personal glory. Victoria was the only state in Australia that didn’t push back at the rally organizers. The law was not enforced. The Government cowered in fear at the threat of being called racists. No one in power or the Love-media wants to blame the rally, because that shows they should have spoken against the rally. Thus cowardice become complicity.
In the BLM political party, hardly any lives matter
Coronavirus cluster plateaus. Lockdowns work, Victoria Australia.
In future, those wishing to organize mass face-to-face protests during pandemics need to wait for weeks until it’s not illegal, or buy insurance that covers the costs of post-protest lockdowns, hospital care, loss of businesses, jobs and compensation for deaths. What company would cover those billion dollar losses?
The BLM rally was not the sole cause of the Victorian outbreak, but how many subsequent breaches of social distancing were “linked” to the hypocrisy of soft support for the BLM rally?
Just shut those borders. The pain in NSW could have been so easily avoided
Coronavirus tentacles with small yellow virus particles attached.
So once a virus is inside it can not only hijack the cell to make more viruses (the little yellow prickly balls in the photo) it also forces the cell to make all these hairy tentacles to push the viruses into neighboring cells. Apart from being a neat gee-whiz moment in molecular construction, this is worth knowing because it gives us more targets to aim for. (More moving parts to throw spanners at).
To that end, the team found 87 drugs that are already either FDA approved or in clinical trials that might help. And 7 of them have already shown they can inhibit the virus in both human and monkey cells.
There are some major molecular engineering battles going on
Coronaviruses are larger RNA viruses than most, so that gives the virus more tools to work with. All up we know that there are 27 SARS Cov2 proteins which are interacting with as many as 332 human proteins. In the new study the researchers studied all the human proteins that appear to be phosphorylated during infections. The proteins that slap on the phosphate groups (which phosphorylates the proteins) are called kinases. Marking a protein this way activates or deactivates the protein. It’s used in many intracellular pathways, and kinases are master switchboard controllers. So the virus is going straight to the top of the management team in a hostile takeover.
The research team found that nearly 10% of all the 500 kinases they studied were behaving differently, especially the Casein Kinase II (CK2) kinase. This gives us some idea of what kind of intracellular octopus we are dealing with.
Filopodia on Virally Infected Cells Newly Discovered Through Advanced Imaging
Interestingly, while studying the impact of SARS-CoV-2 on CK2, high resolution imaging of virally infected cells produced by the NIH/NIAID/Rocky Mountain Laboratories and University of Freiburg revealed actin-rich filopodia containing viral proteins. Human CK2 and the viral N protein were found co-localized within the filopodia, suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 hijacks CK2 and co-opts it into creating these tentacle-like protrusions that poke holes in their neighboring cells.
Conversely, other viruses including vaccinia, Ebola and Marburg take over the host cell cytoskeleton to promote egress and rapid cell-to-cell spread. However, in SARS-CoV-2 infected cells, the filopodia exhibit longer tentacles and branches, enabling more aggressive transmission than some other viral infections.
Another kinase called the p38 MAPK which may be a zinger of a target since it’s involved in activating the inflammatory cytokines (the interleukin-6 and other messengers). So we may be able to throw anti- p38/MAPK drugs at the virus which appear to both switch off the deadly inflammatory cascade as well as slow virus replication by some unknown means.
The p38/MAPK pathway responds to and controls production of potentially harmful pro-inflammatory cytokines. Several pathogenic viral infections induce a p38/MAPK signaling state that exhibits uncontrolled positive feedback regulation, leading to excessive inflammation associated with severe disease. Inhibition of p38/MAPK signaling suppressed the overproduction of inflammatory cytokines induced by several viral infections, including SARS-CoV, Dengue virus, and influenza A virus, improving survival in mice (Fu et al., 2014; Growcott et al., 2018; Jimenez-Guardeño et al., 2014). However, p38/MAPK inhibition did not directly impair the virus in these cases but, instead, the host’s immune response to the infection. In contrast, during SARS-CoV-2 infection, p38/MAPK inhibition suppressed cytokine production and impaired viral replication by a still unknown mechanism, suggesting that p38/MAPK inhibition may target multiple mechanisms related to COVID-19 pathogenesis.
Of course, the study was done in monkey cells so this may or may not be the same in human cells. And drugs that stop these kinases may have side effects, and even if they work, the virus may still be able to spread through other means. But if we even find one good spanner to toss in here, it may slow the spread of the virus, which buys time for our immune system to fight back and reduces the amount of virus a victim may shed. It also should reduce the amount of damage the virus can cause.
Possibly if the virus mutates to avoid triggering the deadly immune cascade it may become nicer and stop causing such a severe disease. If we throw drugs at it that lock down this mechanism we will be in effect selecting for a virus that doesn’t need to use it.
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