COVID roundup
There are so many good articles around that I despair of doing them all justice with a full discussion, so here’s a short roundup of some of the best or most interesting.
(1) Germany has a plan to start testing people for antibodies to determine who has gained immunity to the virus and therefore can go back out into the world:
The antibodies will indicate that the test participants have had the virus, have healed and are thereby ready to re-enter society and the workforce. The researchers plan to test 100,000 members of the public at a time, issuing documentation to those who have overcome the virus.
The researchers will use the information to determine how to properly end the county’s lockdown, including re-opening schools and allowing mass gatherings.
It’s conducted by a research firm. But there’s something somewhat creepy about a country (especially Germany, I must say) issuing certificates of healing to certain people that allow them safe passage into the world, while everyone else must stay put. I understand the need, but it still gives me the willies. Will we do something similar?
(2) There’s an analogy to be made between Trump’s approach to cutting red tape now and his method for restoring NY’s Wollman skating rink, 34 long and winding years ago. I remember, back when Trump was campaigning for the Republican nomination in 2016 and I was so heavily critical of him, many pro-Trump commenters would point out what he did with the rink. My reply at the time (if I recall correctly) was that it was nice but small potatoes and could not even be remotely compared to the tasks of a POTUS. Well, it was indeed relatively small potatoes, but many of the skills involved are the same, and one big one is the need to cut red tape.
(3) Rhode Island is serious.
(4) The governor of Michigan has been threatening doctors and pharmacists for providing a drug treatment that seems safe and has shown promise. I wonder whether Chuck Todd will ask her one day if she has blood on her hands?
(5) The biggest lesson we actually should be learning is this one, which is that government regulations have crippled our response to COVID. Please read the whole thing.
you left out Stanford surmising that the actual death rate and such is orders of magnitude lower… which is something once found out, will do what politically to all those panic bunnies? they do not realize that given the rates of asymptomatic being estimated at 80%, the numbers will suddenly drop like lead zeppelins… and suddenly what will the optics be?
COVID-19’s Worst Case? 10.6% Jobless Rate, $1.5 Trillion GDP Drop
https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2020/03/21/covid-19s-worst-case-106-jobless-rate-15-trillion-gdp-drop/
The SLOW deaths and things from the economic hit will probably be greater but spread out over years as older people wont be able to buy meds, or get care, or pay rents and move to not so good places… all will be ignored..
“What you can safely say […] is that if you divide the number of reported deaths by the number of reported cases [to get the case fatality ratio], you will almost certainly get the wrong answer.”
– Prof. John Edmunds
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
“Though there is disagreement about this, some studies have suggested that it is approximately 10 times too high. This would bring the death rate in line with some strains of influenza.”
– Prof. Mark Woolhouse
IF the public figures out that we just destroyed the economy for a death rate that matches the flu… will there be hell to pay? will things recover really fast? will everyone vote in communism to save the future?
Age (deaths/cases) – CFR (95% CI)
? 9 years (0/416) – 0%
10 to 19 years (1/549) – 0.18% (0.03 to 1.02%)
20 to 49 years (63/19790) – 0.32% (0.25% to 0.41%)
50 to 59 years (130/10,008) – 1.3% (1.1% to 1.5%)
60 to 69. years (309/8583) – 3.6% (3.2% to 4.0%)
70 to 79 years (312/3918) – 8.0% (7.2% to 8.9%)
?80 years (208/1408) – 14.8% (13.0% to 16.7%)
They are being very careful to not mention that they may find out later that all these numbers are garbage… not to mention that they cant go UP they can only go down (with testing and knowing more of the unknown population!)
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/global-covid-19-case-fatality-rates/
Yes to the last item! Time and again I read that federal agencies are in the way of progress in the response to the disease. CDC tests didn’t work; it had to be pushed to allow commercial testing. FDA didn’t have enough inspectors and protective equipment shipments sat in warehouses; the agency had to be pushed to permit direct shipments from suppliers with good quality records. FDA held up use of a new method for sanitizing N-95 masks, and had to be pushed to allow it. Who’s doing the pushing? Trump, the coronavirus team, and governors of affected states.
I hope one good result will be the end of the idea that nationalizing health care would benefit the nation.
Oh, and the hydroxychloroquine-azithromycin treatment is working. Patients not in “clinical trials” should ask for it. We have an agreement in our house that if one of us is stricken, the other will throw fits until the treatment is given.
An interesting point with the FDA approving the use of certain drug combos for C19 is that the drugs must be donated to the government, who would then distribute to only hospitals since they put requirements that the person has to weigh at least 110 pounds, be positive for C19, and be in the hospital. So, what about those people who test positive but have milder symptoms and are sent home?
One thing we do not know is the long term effect of the virus on humans. Does the virus impact fetal development like Zika? If you are one of the severe cases, will you end up with chronic lung issues? What if you are one of those who are at home then suddenly turn worse, get admitted to the hospital and die within 2-3 days?
Early administration of the drug combo may be the best thing, but the FDA steps in the way again.
About the blood test for antibodies – if you take the test and find out that you were lucky to have a mild case, does that mean that you should or should not get the vaccine? When everyone was going nuts about the resurgence of measles, my doctor suggested that I get the vaccine since I only had a first grade health card showing I had the wild versions of the measles. I opted for the antibody test and my results were on the high level or as my Dr. joked “super immunity”. I imagine the vaccine quantity will initially be tight, so if I don’t need it, I’ll pass on using up a dose.
To echo Artfldgr a little, here is a chart that Dr. Roy Spencer put together of excess deaths in the EU. It would almost be funny if the chart didn’t represent millions of deaths. The time axis is a little odd. The second axis number is the week (from 1 – 52) and there are 12 weeks between time divisions.
The whole Roy Spencer month of March blog is here. Many interesting things there, and I linked it again in my comment in the following Neo post about Mexico.
“you left out Stanford surmising that the actual death rate and such is orders of magnitude lower”
That’s two doctors who wrote an editorial at the Wall Street Journal. And what did they base their analysis on?
“The numbers the doctors use to extrapolate their case come from Wuhan, the northeastern Italian town of Vò, and the NBA.”
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/stanford-doctors-coronavirus-fatality-rate-may-be-far-lower-current
Their argument is built on…
1. A place where it seems the Chinese government is lying its ass off.
2. A town with a population of 3,400 people.
3. A national sports organization based in 30 different cities in two different countries.
I’m not much of a science-guy but that seems a dubious premise upon which to theorize.
Mike
So now the state of Virginia is in lockdown until June 10 and the Washington governor just we may be in stay at home into the summer.
At what point do people start to revolt at this stuff?
Oh and the state of Washington is setting up a snitch line to report on violators. Nothing creepy about that at all.
Every model and number cruncher I’ve seen in this whole sorry episode has been horrible. Every single one suffers from a very serious lack of humility.
The only good thing that can be said for this mess is that the “science” (worthless as it is) is a perhaps a bit better in quality to the crap that supports global warming catastrophe.
Maybe in the near future we can redirect some of the windmill and solar farm money to pandemic preparation. Also, how about getting rid of those ‘Certificate of Need’ laws that serve to restrict the number of hospital beds.
By the way, if the advocates of government provided health care were looking out for our best interests, where were the provisions of Obamacare that built more hospitals or provided scholarships for medical students. And did you hear the one about the qualified medical school graduates who can’t get residencies because the government controls malpractice insurance and doesn’t provide enough to cover all of them? They have to change their decade-long plans and hope to place in a job related to but not providing health care.
Argh. Here the excess deaths chart in the EU again, correctly this time I hope.
Every doc in Michigan should write a HCQ/Z-pack Rx. for the Governor.
The link about Certificate of Need Law reminds me of when this revolting CON law came into effect in New York State, in the earliest days of CT scanning, back in the 1970s, IIRC: Harlem Hospital was disallowed a CON for a CT scanner since there was already one (1) CT scanner on Manhattan, to which its patients by regulatory edict could have access one day per week. Real nice if you the patient at Harlem had a brain hemorrhage or tumor and had to wait up to 7 days until you were eligible to be scanned, if you were still alive!
Now of course there is a CT scanner literally on every block, scanning all parts of the body, not just the brain. And the hospitals all have many more than one each.
The CON laws apply to hospitals, not to MD offices…which was one of the chief ways of circumventing the law to make CTs available, and so making medicine more of a business as a side effect due to the then very high costs of buying and staffing and maintaining the CT scanners. They’re still not cheap!
Oddly, CON laws are still on the books in some states; including Mississippi!
I’m interested in knowing more about Trump and the skating rink but the link sent me back to this page.
Liz:
Well, until we have enough of the drugs, wouldn’t they have to be limited to more severe cases? It is a dilemma, though, because they may be more effective earlier. Or maybe not; we don’t know yet.
lost and weeping:
Broken link. Thanks for letting me know. I’ve fixed it now.
A neighbor and I were just discussing Trump (yes we were outsides and at least 6ft apart) and we both agreed that Trump as a CEO is coming to the forefront.
As opposed to Biden as putting out drivel.
Neo:
We all know the answer to that. 🙂
This
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tn6O09fSui4
Those who trade liberty for security deserve neither
https://techstartups.com/2020/03/28/dr-vladimir-zelenko-now-treated-699-coronavirus-patients-100-success-using-hydroxychloroquine-sulfate-zinc-z-pak-update/
Like Kate said plus zinc!
hydroxychloroquine-sulfate-zinc-z-pak = azithromycin (Z-Pak, anti-bacterial)
We need treatment, even more than testing — so the hospitals can avoid being overwhelmed. This one seems to work; and is fairly cheap.
Make it! Ship it! To NYC, and all over America. And Italy, Spain, China (?), the world. (I suggest Slovakia make it, too.)
Tom Grey:
I posted a new post on that almost at exactly the same time you were posting your comment.
“Argh. Here the excess deaths chart in the EU again, correctly this time I hope.”
Someone needs to explain that graph to me. It purports to put forth a “baseline” but it doesn’t track AT ALL with the supposed actual number of deaths. The death total goes way above the supposed baseline but virtually never goes below it. What is that baseline supposed to be indicating?
Mike
As I’ve mentioned before, Michigan is one of those states where the state government has decided that they will not release detailed information on the infection demographics and geographical spread, other than case totals, fatalities, and affected counties.
Infection rates by sex are published in the media, but even that reporting is uneven. The bold media, upon learning early on that this information would be unavailable to them, by and large responded by meekly informing the public that it would no be forthcoming.
A County northeast of Detroit, Macomb, has however a chief executive who decided that this public health information should be available to the public by right and tradition and interest.
By way of contrast, the next county to the west, Oakland, has an information site informing you that you should wash your hands, and proclaiming “Together”, along with inspirig closeup images of smiling faces and the hand stacking seen between the conclusion the coach’s pep talk and the actual commencement of a high school girls volley ball game.
What the Hell has happened to this country?
Tom Grey:
I hope that I speak for all sensible Men of Good Will everywhere when I say ‘Fuck China!’ They do not need or deserve any help or consideration after their obfuscations, outright lies, and (obvious to anyone who is not a pundit and needs to cover their asses and preserve caste and income streams by not sounding unNPRlike) strategic decision to allow the CNY mass egress to occur and thereby take the Rest of the World down with them.
In any case, one of the main take home lessons of this pandemic is that the problem is that the manufacturing capacity for all this good stuff and its precursors and the machines that make the machines that make the machines… Well I don’t need to tell you where they all reside now, I guess.
But absolutely the West ought to throw big resources at Hydroxychloroquine Sulfate, Zinc, Azithromycin. There’s a time for the boring plodders and their double blind studies and their rampant pharmaceutical p-hacking frauds, but this is not it. There needs to be a decision to test this on critical cases whilst putting the Tort Bar on notice that any attempts to profit will result in exemplary public lynchings.
Restoring manufacturing capacity is going to be a long and painful road. Worth remembering that a lot of the institutional memory of how stuff gets done in factories is now in more at risk demographic of older males. So folks had best extract digits and hop to it.
I was just reading over at Ace about CBS getting caught using footage of overcrowded hospitals in Italy and passing them off as hospitals in NYC.
I’m not usually one to talk of pitchforks and torches. But I’m getting there.
http://acecomments.mu.nu/?post=386590
It’s interesting to read all the stories now out, some of which have been noted here, of the defective nature of so much of the Chinese gear and equipment sold to Europe.
“Gee, if our leaders were only as farsighted as the Chinese Communist leadership, and our equipment and test creators as talented and skilled. “.
YEAH …
DNW,
Considering how much of that Chinese gear is defective, I’m ready to attribute it to malice rather than stupidity.
MBunge,
Yes, that chart is a little complex, and I didn’t help by calling an excess deaths chart, which it is not. It is a chart of how many people die in the EU zone in a week. The chart shows that something 47K to 57K die per week, ignoring excess deaths from influenza etc. Also, that it oscillates regularly from the lower number to higher number based purely on season or how cold it is.
The dashed line is a type variability estimate and the chain dashed line is double that variability. So when the actual death rate spikes above either the dashed line or the chain dashed line, one can interpret that as deaths beyond normal and also beyond what data variability might allow. Flu seasons are clearly visible.
You can also see that EU deaths were rather low right at the last reported data point. But there is no data on the chart that includes the big jump in covid-19 deaths, so he has a big UP arrow at the far right representing data yet to come.
One of the questions is: did deaths go down significantly some weeks ago because simply because people got scared by covid-19 before it really hit, and they accidentally drove flu deaths down too?
“… and they accidentally drove flu deaths down too?”
I should have said “flu deaths and any other normal or abnormal deaths.”
_____
Will weather play a significant role in the spread and eventual die-off of covid-19? This short NPR article is not bad. If you want certainty, the short answer is that this a novel virus so we don’t know.
But Art Deco is correct that Dr. Fauci believes that warm weather will likely help.
An infectious disease expert at Penn State, Elizabeth McGraw, says that assuming a virus is transmitted through the air it is more likely to spread in the winter because people congregate indoors more and …
That’s an interesting physics problem Dr. McGraw mentions. I believe she is talking about very rapid evaporation in cool dry air that can quickly take a very tiny droplet down to a super tiny size before it hits the ground.
Re Neo’s comment: “Well, until we have enough of the drugs, wouldn’t they have to be limited to more severe cases? It is a dilemma, though, because they may be more effective earlier. Or maybe not; we don’t know yet.”
Because we don’t know yet, there should be opportunities (ok controlled studies) where the drug combo is given at different stages of the illness and the patients are followed long term re the effects. You have a post about the Dr. in NY who is treating his patients with the combo and they are staying out of the hospital.
Let’s see – early intervention with $30 worth of drugs to keep you out of the hospital with a reduced probability of long-term impact vs wait until you are in the ICU on ventilator until you get the combo with unknown long-term impact on lung health. On a cost basis, the early intervention is a no-brainer. I’d volunteer to be a tester for early intervention. And, remember the quinine based drugs (HCQ) were developed to prevent malaria, not treat it.
I
This is a video from March 10th that explains the logic behind the use of the quinine drugs and zinc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7F1cnWup9M
And, I noticed that he posted a new video… so off to watch that one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFRwnhfWXxo
Never cared for any of the Cuomos; neither the late father (“Americans aren’t ready to vote for a politician whose name ends in a vowel”) to the current son who is governor, nor his lame brother “Fredo” who works for the MSM.
But, I will say that I do agree with Governor Cuomo threatening to sue the state of Rhode Island if they carried out the threat to keep New Yorkers out of Rhode Island – such action, no matter how noble one thinks they are, is just plain wrong. One cannot, and should not discriminate on the basis of state residency.
And if they are, in fact, sending the cops around to check on homes in Rhode Island that have NY state plates on cars in the driveway; well, then I can only say they have too much time on their hands.
I’ve always believed that for many politicians if you scratch off their façade you will find a brown shirt fascist underneath. The Governor of Rhode Island is proving me correct. And it is exactly this kind of intimidating, threatening action that makes me support the 2nd Amendment.
Are COVID-19 precautions driving down flu deaths also?
Well, this researcher agrees with that.
He mostly does the climate science stuff (the post at the top of his blog was very interesting).
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2020/03/covid-19-deaths-in-europe-excess-mortality-is-down/
I speculated that would be the case about 2 weeks ago, but I don’t have a science blog or a Ph.D.
We may have it bad (or not), but we don’t have it black-plague-in-London-without-modern-technology bad.
https://dnyuz.com/2020/03/29/what-social-distancing-looked-like-in-1666/
OK – I am back from watching the second video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFRwnhfWXxo).
It’s a bit technical about heat/cold on the immune response. He looks at past studies on the topic, including the Nordic countries preference of saunas, including the habit of getting hot, then cold, and then reheating. He then looked at how the Nordic countries were doing with respect to C19.
He noted that Finland with the most use of saunas had the “best” situation with the C19. I sent an email to them noting that the Baltic countries are doing even better, with lower cases and deaths per capita. (Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia)
My mother was born in Riga Latvia and told me about the saunas, running in the snow and then reheating. We did the same while on ski trips during the winter as well as plunging into one of the Great Lakes during the summer. If I got sick, mom would bundle me up until I would sweat, cool me off, and make me sweat again. I still do that routine when I start feeling under the weather.
Is medicine catching up to native medicine?
If we had a Johns Hopkins style map of influenza and watched it from September to May every year would it be that different from the COVID-19 map?
The CDC says 45,000,000 Americans got the flu in the 2017-2018 season and over 60,000 died.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm
We have been accepting of 20,000 – 60,000 flu deaths every year without closing down the country. I’m worried that now that we’ve gone down this path we will do something similar starting next fall.
I can see the media whipping everyone into a frenzy when flu season starts in the fall. We are at 3,000 deaths from this and people are pissing their pants. We probably had that many flu deaths between September and November, but the media didn’t put a map up every night, so people went about their lives.
This is a serious illness and because it’s a new strain most of us have not developed anti-bodies. This may have been the right approach, but I am also sure the media will have a map up this September and people will start panicking when they see those numbers climb, even if it’s a typical flu season.
Maybe this is the right way to do things going forward, but we have to figure out a way to keep the country functioning and people working between September and May every year without shutting down all the airlines, restaurants, sporting events, concerts, church services, schools…
A slight tangent from my previous comment, but we have had cross dressers and transvestites in our society forever. Wikipedia says it’s half of 1% of U.S. adults. Let’s go with that number.
About 5 years ago there was a big media push to focus on this one half of one percent of our population and within months we had new laws mandating millions of dollars on bathroom construction. We had sporting and other events cancelled when legislatures didn’t react fast enough to address this new, extremely important thing the media was focused on that we had dealt with relatively calmly and effectively forever.
Now the media knows it has a shiny, new toy; viral and bacterial infections that kill primarily elderly and infirm Americans. It’s been around forever. And, like clockwork, ramps up every fall and runs for months. And the media knows a panic might cause another shutdown. This has been a boon for the media. Do you think they will let this go this fall when those red circles start popping up on the map again?
They won’t hit Governors with the data and demand action? “Governor Johnson, there are already 100 deaths in your state and estimates are that number will soar in the next weeks, thousands are likely already infected. Governor Smith has already said he may not accept visitors from your state. Why won’t you act?!”
NYPost: “Mayor Muriel Bowser is threatening residents of Washington, DC, with 90 days in jail and a $5,000 fine if they leave their homes during the coronavirus outbreak.”
https://nypost.com/2020/03/30/dc-mayor-threatens-jail-time-for-leaving-home-during-coronavirus/
So. How’s that “home rule” working out for you now, Congress? Wanna see what else she can do by executive fiat?
A thread from Mike Doran stitching together a series of 4 short videos in China from a Brit fellow staying there now. He describes Big Winnie’s orwellian measures at length. Watch: https://mobile.twitter.com/Doranimated/status/1244987092712722432
Governments across America [have] used the pandemic, and the media-stoked panic around the pandemic particularly, to limit, restrict or remove First Amendment freedoms of speech and free association, with officials complaining about the potential restraints the freedom of religion imposed upon them. Others denied or declared the right to deny Second Amendment rights of gun purchase for personal safety (at a time governments are issuing no-arrest and no-detention orders for a wide range of crimes in their community while publicly freeing inmates from jails and prisons). They want to coordinate with tech companies to surveil and spy on your everyday movements and activities, in violation of the Fourth Amendment and potentially waive, unilaterally, your medical right to privacy in multiple contexts. Stay-at-home orders deprive you of your profession, occupation, business and property, without any due process of law at all beyond an executive fiat in violation of the Fifth Amendment right to due process. Governments request the authority to involuntarily imprison any American on mere fear of infection without any probable cause of crime or clear and present danger of harm by that person’s volitional conduct, deny access to personal counsel in an unsupervised, un-surveilled manner in violation of the Sixth Amendment, and act as judge, jury and executioner in violation of the Seventh Amendment right to a trial by jury, as jury trials themselves get suspended around the country in the nation’s quieted courts and fear-muted public.
RT news (Russia) printed author constitutional lawyer Robert Barnes
A golden oldie (from Italy):
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/chinese-biological-experiments-infect-humans-coronavirus-exposed-2015-italian-state
(Though why it’s been dusted off at this stage of the game is anyone’s guess.)
Barry: maybe because of this –
“Here is an experiment in China, in which a group of scientists has managed to develop a chimera – an organism modified by attaching the surface protein of a coronavirus found in bats of the common species called the Great Horseshoe Bat, to a virus that causes SARS in mice, although in a non-fatal form. It was suspected that the protein could make the chimeric hybrid organism suitable for affecting humans, and the experiment confirmed it.”