Covid-19 News

Quote from seven_of_twenty

Yes, sure, heparin is side effect free as long as you do not consider a stroke or bleeding to death as side effects.

The subcutaneous injections are safe!! Patients (after deep surgery) in Switzerland are sent home with 2-3 weeks pre-filled injections they have to daily apply themselves.

Quote from seven_of_twenty

If you do get COVID-19, the story below may happen to you and it can happen even to relatively young and productive people, if that matters to you. This is from a health care provider - an ICU nurse, from Facebook

It's all matter of your perspective. 95% ( see latest ant body tests - Spain Switzerland) ) of all people that get COV-19 don't see/feel any symptoms other then be a tiny headache or some cough. Even such people can later see lung, kidney damage. But such cases are very rare.

Please be aware that the press currently hypes everything as it is well known that people like/enjoy to read scary stories. Even the Kavasaki syndrome is now misused to bash the poor people even stronger.

In a perfect hospital you get the perfect treatment. But why do/did 2'000'000'000 people get HCQ without any test?? - for malaria prevention. Possibly because most were young. You can also prescribe Clarithromycin instead of Acithromycin. It is only a bit less antiviral according to the lab/chemo fit algorithm.

Do you understand that the active people (age < 65) want to work and in fact most of them are not at risk? I would narrow your advises for targeting the really endangered groups that will also become the worst spreaders. Live will and must go on and as with the classic flue, - yes - you will be very busy the next 4 months. But please do send nobody home that has clear symptoms without giving him basic medication.

Working with no clear guidelines can be trained if you once do extreme forest or mountain trips without any supportive tools. I agree that there is not enough data to fully trust in any medication. But there is more than enough evidence that at least the collected ones do help if given early enough or some (Heparin/Ivermectin) even at a very late stage. So if you give nothing then you do not trust yourself and just wait for your daddy telling you what to do in an unexpected situation.

And last: Young boys like to drive at 300kmh... so some will have a major accident. But on the other side 30% of the New York bankers take cocaine and nobody tells them about the accidents...

Quote from seven_of_twenty

Biden, Trump, Pence and many other prominent politicians are not exactly "young people." Shall we simply write them off as useless and expendable? I don't know where you live, Mark U, but that is not USA tradition and practice. All lives are valuable here.

Absoluately, all lives have equal worth though in some cases we might strongly wish those lives did not have such an affect on current world geopolitics.

It is beginning to look like Mexico may have a problem:

https://news.sky.com/story/mex…s-analysis-finds-11987235

Coronavirus: Morgues and storage rooms are full of bodies. The true death toll in Mexico City is staggering

A government official, speaking anonymously, says the mortality rate is five times the published figure.

https://www.eluniversal.com.mx…ity-and-metropolitan-area

COVID-19 has overflowed crematoriums in Mexico City and the metropolitan area

Since the pandemic started, funeral services increased between 95% and 200%.

Quote from Navid

You can find the publications, commentary on is assessment and his response online.

Our challenge at this time is that we have a whole slew of factors that make the IFR hard to pin point. Some people claim 18% CFR in Wuhan at a time. We have bad data all over the place, poor treatment (ventillators - which has gotten better now), or no treatment (no drugs early on).

So you will quickly realize that summing together a bunch of datapoints and claiming you have a valid scientific answer is laughable. We are all a little in the dark, and it takes some guesswork (cherry picking, if you will) to find out what's probably going on.

For your information, I've talked to the senior scholar at John Hopkins Center for Health Security and he said they all along expected this was going to be 0.5% IFR or less and still assume that.

    

You won't find him saying that on MSM.

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Navid - you are correct in saying IFR is difficult to calculate. You are wrong in making any comparison with CFR - which is a different figure - and typically much higher in early stages of any epidemic.

The only answers we will ever have to IFR is summing data points. We have enough now for a (not very accurate) guess. It is just that your < 0.3% is contrafactual.

Anybody who claims < 0.5% is not likely to publish it, because it is contrary to all evidence. I wonder also whether the person you talked to was selected one way or another to share your views? But 0.5% - 1% is not a hard limit - you could justify 0.3% - 1.5%.

Anyway we can agree that IFR is still uncertain, and difficult to calculate. That makes your < 0.3% prescription look even more biassed.

Quote from Alan Smith

Further COVID-19 outbreaks are unavoidable. To detect and suppress them, governments ought to implement a range of public health measures aided by technology.

Small infectious-disease outbreaks are hard to detect, especially when governments and society are unprepared and untrained. To reduce outbreaks of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), governments can act early and swiftly when the outbreak is small (Fig. 1), or are forced to respond late and harshly when the virus has furtively made good use of crowds, handshakes and door knobs. There is hardly a middle way; the virus is novel (that is, humanity is susceptible to it) and highly infectious (infected people can transmit it before they become symptomatic), and hence its exponential spread can be rapid: in the absence of adequate public health measures, the average number of people that a carrier goes on to infect raises significantly above 1, with the actual effective reproduction number depending on demography and crowdedness. Letting the virus spread naturally would be inhumane, as its infection fatality rate — 0.5–1% as per the best estimates from early serology surveys — implies that millions would die1 before transmission slows down (rather than stopping) when herd immunity is reached; for a basic reproduction number between two and three, this would happen when 50–66% of the population has been infected.

As Jed will point out, we know how to keep countries out of lockdown. S Korea, Japan (with lapses), China, Taiwan have done this.

I don't see enough urgency from the west in doing these things:

massive testing

massive track and trace (and yes, privacy is sacrificed)

For me given we must have one of:

1. Severe (forced, or strongly pushed e.g. by all shops) loss of privacy
2. A country with millions dying in a very nasty way
3. An impossible and dangerous indefinite lockdown

I would go for 1 any time. It seems many on here want 2. Perhaps a few want 3.?

What really gets me is that we go for leaky lockdowns, which are almost as bad as stronger lockdown in cost, but which take much longer to decrease virus numbers, or maybe never decrease them. It is like someone with a high interest credit card debt who things they are doing well by paying it off every month with minimum payment. That is a recipe for maximum loss.

In addition i don't really see that track and trace can work just via self-isolation from an app - and any other better track and trace requires infection rates down to something much much smaller than most countries seem to be aspiring to.

In the Uk we have coined a few new verbs, obligatory for political leaders. Maybe less so in the US?

sadlyshow (applied to any graph of COVID deaths)

sadlydie (applied to any count of COVID deaths)

They are rolled together like that as single entities. Political leaders need empathy and compassion in these difficult times, I'm just not entirely sure this obligatory sadly prefix is that.

Quote from Wyttenbach

It's all matter of your perspective. 95% ( see latest ant body tests - Spain Switzerland) ) of all people that get COV-19 don't see/feel any symptoms other then be a tiny headache or some cough.

Perhaps you'd like to link these?

My understanding is that the more careful, very recent, tests are bearing out the earlier less definite evidence and NOT showing a large asymptomatic rate.

https://www.reuters.com/articl…coronavirus-idUSKBN22P1IK

So here we have

2.3M antibody positive

27,000 died (and this total not complete due to typical long lag between infeaction and dying).

That is IFR of 1.17. A lower bound because of the cases still not resolved that will die.

Now, the number of cases is 230,000. That is neatly 10% of the number of antibody positive people. But in Spain, as in most other places, many people have clear COVID symptoms, but they are not serious enough to go to hospital, nor are they ever counted as cases.

So let us correct that: 90% of people in Spain with COVID have not been counted as cases, but that would only normally happen if they went to hospital and got tested, e.g. severe cases. Even so friends who have had COVID at home (not severe cases) tell me it is not at all pleasant, like or worse then bad Flu.

Quote from Navid

Why can our institutions now lie admittedly about who dies and of what, and we don't bat an eye.

See: 2:11 for open admission of Covid fraud:

This Ingraham person has a screw loose. She has no idea what she is talking about:

Flu deaths are NOT included in COVID-19 deaths.

When COVID is the main cause of death, along with some other disease, both are listed on the death certificate. It becomes difficult to "count" deaths because of that, but death certificates are not intended to generate an exact count. They are intended to record the cause -- or multiple causes -- of death.

There are far more deaths not correctly attributed to COVID-19 than deaths which might be attributed to some other primary cause. Many people have died outside of hospitals and were never tested. There has been a large increase in deaths, exceeding the officially recorded COVID-19 totals. Clearly, many of these "excess" deaths are from COVID-19. It is not likely that some other disease has suddenly increased, producing an unaccounted-for 10% or 20% increase in deaths in many places in the U.S. If people were suddenly dying of some other disease, the doctors and people doing autopsies would often diagnose it, and we would know what it is.

Quote from Navid

This isn't about Covid folks. It is about the biggest thing, control and power. They have the world locked in their homes, think about that.

What a moronic statement! The virus, not politicians or subjects of conspiracy theories have the world by the gonads. And the world is not locked in their homes at all, not even the USA, not by far. But if cautions by reputable scientists are not heeded, a total lockdown may happen.

So I call:

Quote from JedRothwell

This Ingraham person has a screw loose. She has no idea what she is talking about:

Laura Ingraham is flagrantly ignorant on many subjects which never stops her from waxing eloquent and pretending to know about them. She's basically a fetid gas bag.

Quote from Wyttenbach

Do you understand that the active people (age < 65) want to work and in fact most of them are not at risk?

Nonsense. You are confusing a *relatively* low risk of death with a) the possibility of being maimed and permanently injured or disabled and b) the very real chance of bringing the virus to a loved one, young or old, who may end up seriously hurt or killed. But no worries. There are so many stupid people in the US, the experiment is being done and they are the "controls." We're rapidly coming up on 100.000 deaths and uncounted injuries and misery. And it will get much much higher because of stupid and poorly considered statements like yours.

Quote from Alan Smith

An interesting cultural difference here between the UK and the USA. Perhaps because of slightly better job security and social welfare networks in the UK than in America, in the USA when politicians suggest 'get America back to work' people go out and demonstrate against lockdown restrictions. In the UK when the politicians suggest going back to work, a lot of people say 'no thanks', it isn't safe.'

Yes. Also, I read but did not have the time to check, that the UK is one of the worst affected first world countries in terms of both number of cases and also number of deaths.

Quote from Roseland67

This is why we have new “models” almost daily, as we find the previous ones were inaccurate.

That is incorrect. The previous models were accurate, but they were predicated on conditions which we deliberately changed. For example, the models showing millions of deaths in the U.S. were predicated on the assumption that the U.S. would not impose lock-downs, like the one in Wuhan. Supposedly because Americans would not put up with it. It turned out that 95% of Americans were okay with a lockdown if it means avoiding a serious illness or death, or overwhelmed hospitals. If we had not done that, the exponential increase in mid-March shows that we would have hundreds of thousands of people dying every day by now.

Quote from Roseland67

We will probably never have an accurate count on total global cases or deaths.

We will not have an accurate count of global deaths because third world countries have difficulty counting the dead. We do have an accurate count in first world countries with good medical care and few cases, such as Japan, Korea or Greece. We also have a very accurate count of the mortality rate in these countries, because nearly all of cases have now cleared, meaning the patients either recovered or died. And because nearly all patients in these countries were tested and confirmed to have the disease. There are few hidden cases, where people never went to the doctors, or never even realized they were sick. If there had been more hidden cases, there would be many more people infected by unknown people. There would be more cases popping up out of nowhere, untraceable. In Japan the number of traceable and untraceable cases are shown in the national news every night, and there are not many untraceable ones. *

In February and March, experts estimated the mortality rate was ~2.0% to ~3.5%, depending on the quality of medical care. Some experts thought that the Korean data showed the mortality is ~0.6%. Korean healthcare is excellent, and the hospitals were not overwhelmed, so experts thought that ~0.6% was what you can expect with a top-notch, fully functional healthcare system. Now that the epidemic has ended in Korea (for now, anyway) the total cases were 10,962, deaths 259, which works out to 2.4%. In Japan, there were 16,055 confirmed cases and 708 deaths, which is 4.4%. There is no doubt this number is too high. In March, the doctors in Japan realized that many patients had mild cases, and they told these patients to self-quarantine, in some cases without testing them or adding the numbers to the official totals. There was a shortage of test kits at first. The situation was not chaotic the way it was in the U.S., where infected people continued to work and go out in public without masks, sometimes without realizing they were infected. Although many cases were not officially recorded, in nearly every case the doctors and patients took immediate steps to quarantine. After all, the goal was to stop the epidemic, not to get an exact count. Probably, after antibody tests are administered, they will find that many more people were infected and the mortality rate was ~2%, not ~4%. I expect any first-world country will find it is ~2%. In the U.S. it varies a great deal from one social class or race to another. In Japan there is a smaller healthcare gap between social classes so the rate will be ~2% throughout society.

* There are fewer and fewer cases, and most are traceable. There are ~80 total cases per day in the whole country. This is becoming a social problem. It is beginning to cause an invasion of privacy for some patients. All cases are listed in public databases with the patients being anonymous; i.e. "female, late 30s" but there are so few, anyone who knows the patient can identify her. In some cases they list the cause as "intimate contact" with some other patient, and apparently you can often trace that intimate contact patient too. I haven't tried. "Intimate contact" does not necessarily mean sex, but in Japanese -- as in English -- it sounds like it does. It could mean spending an afternoon at the person's house playing mahjong. Anyway, it does reveal that people have relationships with other people, which in some cases they do not wish to reveal. Some gay people who wish to keep their sexual orientation secret are upset. There have been only 37 cases in the whole of Yamaguchi prefecture, population 1.4 million. Yamaguchi is mainly rural, and like most rural places, there is not a lot of privacy. If there had been a case on the island of Oshima (pop. 22,000), I guarantee every person there would know who it was, and who they were infected by.

Quote from JedRothwell

This Ingraham person has a screw loose. She has no idea what she is talking about:

The tell is the attack on her. She didn't say it, it was an official who said it. Keep stirring the pot.

I hope someone pays you to wax on in the face of overwhelming evidence. Like Dr. Jensen, Dr. Bukacek, Project Veritas.....and many more...which I could link to but nobody pays me to say this so I'm cutting my hours.

The idea that it becomes difficult to count deaths is a farce. If someone has Covid symptoms, they are on a ventillator and die with an underlying cancer -- there might be a question --- we are not even talkign about that.

Quote from Wyttenbach

The subcutaneous injections are safe!! Patients (after deep surgery) in Switzerland are sent home with 2-3 weeks pre-filled injections they have to daily apply themselves.

Again you are confused about a medical issue. You are referring to low molecular weight heparin (Lovenox or enoxaparin in the US) and even it is not complication free. But this formulation is not known to prevent or treat COVID-19 when given subcutaneously. The heparin proposed against COVID-19 is the traditional short acting formulation and it must be given continuously by IV. Trust me, from personal experience administering it, it is most emphatically not safe and should never be used in the outpatient setting - that type and by that route.

Here is a search to examine: https://scholar.google.com/sch…q=bleeding+heparin+&btnG= If that doesn't cause you considerable concern, then maybe you too got your M.D. degree from Trump University. And remember, complications of heparin are most common in people with organ damage-- just what happens with COVID-19. Bon appetit.

Quote from Navid

I hope someone pays you to wax on in the face of overwhelming evidence.

Oh (fill in whatever deity you prefer)! I have long wished someone would pay me to debunk all manner of bullshit. The supply is endless so anyone finding such a gig could become a billionaire. Someone to pay me? Please Please Please... who? I will make you my agent and pay you the usual commission if you can deliver on your implicit promise.

Quote from seven_of_twenty

[Do you understand that the active people (age < 65) want to work and in fact most of them are not at risk?]

Nonsense. You are confusing a *relatively* low risk of death with a) the possibility of being maimed and permanently injured or disabled and b) the very real chance of bringing the virus to a loved one, young or old, who may end up seriously hurt or killed.

"Not at risk" of death is a relative thing. A young person who is infected is 10 times more likely to die from coronavirus than influenza, and probably thousands of times more likely to suffer from a stroke, brain damage or amputation, which are more common in young people than old ones.

The epidemic is causing many more deaths and serious injuries per day that World War II did, on average for the whole war. The casualty and death rate is similar to what the U.S. army experienced in most places during WWII. Roughly 20% of the patients become seriously ill, and have to be hospitalized. So, imagine a war in which ~25,000 people are injured every day, 5,000 have to go to the hospital, and 1,700 die. That is the coronavirus toll. If it keeps up for a year, that will be ~620,000 deaths, which is about the same as the Civil War, and far more than WWI or WWII. Even if you write off old people because they are going to die soon anyway, it will still kill more people under 65 than WWII did.

People say it resembles the toll from influenza. That's wrong. It resembles the toll from 31 years of influenza happening all in one year. One ordinary year of influenza every 11 days.

Suppose we were fighting a human enemy, and incurring 5,000 serious injuries and 1,700 deaths every day. No one would say: "It is time to ignore this war and get on with our lives. 2,700 deaths is nothing to be concerned about." You would be considered a lunatic for saying that, or a traitor. Trump, in effect, wants to declare victory and go home, doing nothing to reduce the casualty rate or contain the disease. He mentioned having "a few hundred" case tracers, which is about a thousand times fewer than we need. But as far as I know, there are no plans for the Federal government to employ case tracers or maintain a database. Only some states are doing that. The governor of Georgia mentioned this, but no plans to do it have been announced. This is as if FDR announced the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor yesterday, and in response the U.S. has unconditionally surrendered.