Covid-19 News

.......or we'll all (over sixties, diabetics, etc,) be brown bread.

Here is the imperial College authored report that underlies the UK govt's strategy (which appears recently to have changed).

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf?mc_cid=04ca947d2a&mc_eid=%5bUNIQID%5d

Various things: page 5: best guess IFRs for COVID by age.

Worth remembering:

• IFR is less than CFR due to unreported cases
• Severe lung damage posible even if no death, so you might want to dounble (?) the IFRs to get "chance of significant long-term damage"
• these are whole population figures. Healthy people will be lower, those with co-morbidities higher.
• these figures assume health system not overwhelmed and intensive care available.
• these figures do not take into account future drug therapies that are not currently implemented, so may go down.
• these figures are only best guess, and with COVID virus chnages can never be ruled out

In addition p10 shows the strengths and weakneses of the UK govt approach.

They assume a max 5 months lockdown window. Given that, controlling infection rate rather than minimising it reduces overall deaths.

however, if you are prepared for indefinite (till vaccine or miracle treatment) lockdown you can get much lower fatalities, and much greater economic cost.

The interesting question is whether politically, now these trade-offs are published, the government will be able to increase expected deaths by 100K or so for economic reasons. Even though that is probably wise in terms of the indirect deaths from severe economic depression, it is probably not politically sustainable?

Mass produce chloroquine and remdesivir and distribute free to all pharmacies would probably end this crisis within a few weeks. The Chinese are quite capable of doing this in compensation for releasing this viral plague in the first place. The sub-Saharan African malaria- infested regions still have very few cases making it very likely chloroquine use is preventing transmission of COVID-19 whilst remdesivir should clear the viral infection by blocking its RNA dependent RNA polymerase. All the evidence shows that this is a successful treatment - why wait for further clinical trials in Australia etc,

Quote from Dr Richard

Mass produce chloroquine and remdesivir and distribute free to all pharmacies would probably end this crisis within a few weeks. The Chinese are quite capable of doing this in compensation for releasing this viral plague in the first place. The sub-Saharan African malaria- infested regions still have very few cases making it very likely chloroquine use is preventing transmission of COVID-19 whilst remdesivir should clear the viral infection by blocking its RNA dependent RNA polymerase. All the evidence shows that this is a successful treatment - why wait for further clinical trials in Australia etc,

All these drugs are being tested, and tests will not take that long. I'm pretty confident mortality rates (if hospital systems are not overwhelmed) will improve as treatment gets better. It usually happens. Even a 20% decrease in intensive care demand would be a great boon, so there is every motivation to roll out anything that works.

How much they work do not know, and the chances of such drugs ending the crisis within weeks of being widely used is small. You have I think no evidence for believing they are so miraculous.

Quote from Shane D.

Well, tell me what do you think the consequences of shutting down the developed worlds economies, as we are in the process of doing, will be, as compared to fighting COVID19, as we fight the flu? Which exacts the most damage, which the least? Which will cause more hardships, more deaths, and misery?

Obviously, if you feel this lock-down will be the less harmful than the world recession it will cause, you will think a politician urging people to "get out to restaurants" should be run out of office. If not, then someone advocating normalcy, getting about ones business, while taking safety precautions, than that politician will be viewed as a leader with vision...and a lot of balls!

Time will tell and books will be written about how all of this went down. All I can think is look at what works. The virus is a new virus and no one knows it’s behaviors yet. So the best thing is to just try to shut it down fast. It’s like a 100 acre forest fire vs a 25,000 acre forest fire. Just take whatever measures necessary to stamp out the 100 acre forest fire, it’s much easier to fight than a 25,000 acre fire. If that means shutting stuff down fine, then let the government cut people checks and just get through it. For countries that don’t have the ability to send their people money perhaps there is an international fund they can tap into. But the cost of not stamping this out could be immense.

China and South Korea show us what works. China’s containment of this has been a remarkable accomplishment. Unfortunately they have the stigma of being the place where the virus started. But they have also shown the world how to stop it. China will survive and move on from this because they did it right. We simply need to follow what they have done. If countries don’t do that then they have a real risk of becoming Italy, who is now fighting a 25,000 acre forest fire.

No miracle but C21 medical science. Of course it can all be refined to be more effective but at some point you have to just get on with it and save as many lives as possible. You never questioned why even in China, African nationals never caught the coronavirus?

China and S Korea have already made antiviral drugs available in all their pharmacies since February. It wasn't just the vigorous quarantine that has reduced cases. As you say we just have to do the same.

Quote from Curbina

What about Hydroxichloroquine Alan?

Don't take it as the doses (need 3 days instead of once a week) that works seems to be risky.

In Switzerland all AIDS patients with a specific medication have been asked to bring in their stock and change for an other one as this specific drug seems to highly efficient in removing the COVID-19 virus from blood and stops the spreading. I guess your doctor will know about it. This is from the state official press meeting.

Swiss company doing extra shifts for producing respiratory devices also for USA! The were clever enough and did order all components they will need for the next 3 months ahead of the China lockdown.

German link:

https://www.srf.ch/news/wirtsc…noetigte-beatmungsgeraete

Quote from Wyttenbach

Yes! This is tried since at least 30 years without success or even worse with strong negative outcome.

WHAT are you talking about? What vaccine have they not been able to develop for 30 years? Flu vaccines are effective. The problem is that there are many species and they keep evolving. There is only one species of the coronavirus at present.

Quote from Shane D.

Well, tell me what do you think the consequences of shutting down the developed worlds economies, as we are in the process of doing, will be, as compared to fighting COVID19, as we fight the flu? Which exacts the most damage, which the least? Which will cause more hardships, more deaths, and misery?

No one knows what will happen if we do not do everything in our power to stop COVID19. If we do a lot but not the most we can, it might cost a few hundred thousand lives. If we do nothing, it will surely cost 3 million lives or more. I would not be willing to pay either of these costs. They are both exorbitant. If we have to shut down the whole nation, and pay every family a thousand dollars a month to buy food and pay the rent, we should do that. That's what Mitt Romney proposes, and for once I agree with him. (Yes, that Mitt Romney. See? This is what a pandemic does to people. It changes their perspective.)

You can always make more money. You can always catch up with your work, be it construction, programming, even scientific research. We only need doctors, farmers, grocers, the power company, water and sewage. The rest of us can sit tight. The Chinese in Wuhan are okay. As long as no one starves and no one is thrown out of their house, it will be no great tragedy. Whereas millions of people dying would rival the Civil War -- the worst thing that ever happened to America. The tragedy and sorrow of that war echo down the present day. The 1918 epidemic was also traumatic. An in-law of mine, now dead, was a little girl when her pregnant mother died and buried somewhere in a mass grave in 1918. It affected her whole life. People of my grandparents generation did not talk about it, but it cast a shadow over the whole world.

Shane D.

Economic damage vs deaths from virus.

A few points;

Yes, certainly the economic damage will in turn cause damage to people, health and probably suicides and financial strains etc. But we can play guessing games with this. Keeping people locked down may cause more divorces, but it may cause less lives lost to traffic accidents. etc. But basically you are probably right about the economic damage, it is not pretty.

However; my guess is that even if we suppose that a government said, "Just carry on ... business as usual" and the press backed the government but when the number of deaths start to get into the hundreds of thousands then the health system would be overwhelmed and people would lose trust in the government. Panic would ensue in any case and spread on the Internet. People would shut themselves into isolation, panic buying, but more frantic. Social gatherings and entertainments would be avoided en masse. Society would likely fragment. Mass rioting might occur and break down of law and order. I think that possibility is more risky than shutting down the economy in a controlled way with the state trying to mitigate the economic fallout.

A final point. If you think Covid19 is not worth the damage to the economy then what level of CFR would you need to convince you? MERS was 36% but thankfully not as transmissable so easy to stop. And as I stated before, when these things start we don't know the characteristics of the virus for many weeks or months.

@ Curbana has given me an idea: why don't we as a forum get together and arrange collection and distribution of the necessary anti-viral drugs? We are after all an international forum with contacts all over the world - we could ask any of our Chinese, S. Korean, Japanese, Indian or Pakistani contacts whether they would be willing to negotiate acquisition of Remdesivir. Favilavir, Choroquine and Hydroxychloroquine from their pharmaceutical suppliers in their native countries for a mass import into European UK and US countries. We have all met such foreign CF/LENR colleagues over the years at ICCF meetings - it would be a matter of sending e-mails round to see who could help organise this. Not forgetting Russia and any other countries which might need a supply. Up until a vaccine is introduced.

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Any opinion?

Sure, if you provide a transcript. Many of us have no time to sit through Youtube videos.