Posts by ZenoOfElea

On the point of freedom to continue to have religious services one of the most notorious episodes from the 1918 Spanish Flu occurred in the deeply pious Spanish city of Zamora, where the local bishop defied the health authorities by ordering a novena – evening prayers on nine consecutive days – in honour of Saint Rocco, the patron saint of plague and pestilence. This involved churchgoers lining up to kiss the saint’s relics, around the time that the outbreak peaked. Zamora went on to record the highest flu-related death rate of any city in Spain, and one of the highest in Europe.

In 1918 germ theory was still not appreciated widely and perhaps people were less educated.

So here we are 100 years later, surely things will be better.

The Vatican seems to have learned some lessons.

A friend of mine who is a priest is basically saying mass, over Easter, in an empty church while some churches are broadcasting services on the Internet.

However some religious groups are not doing themselves, or their communities any favours.

The South Korean cluster of Covid-19 seems to have spread via churches. To be fair the general awareness was not widespread in the early stages but at least one religious group refused to provide names to the Korean authorities to assist in tracing cases.

Meanwhile pilgrims in Iran have posted videos of themselves defiantly licking the Fatima Masumeh shrine in the city of Qom.

Also I read one story of a pastor in the USA who was defiant about the pandemic and boasted that his congregation would lick the floor of the church if he asked them.

I am getting confused on the conspiracy theories during this non-pandemic thing, that may, or may not, be occurring.

So on the one hand we are being told that the number of Covid deaths are being exaggerated. That it is including elderly people who would have died anyway (andrea.s points out that should be easy to fix statistically since we know how many die each year from each age group).

But also now that insurance companies pay more for a Covid ICU death so there is a motivation to fudge the figures!

So the actual fatalities are allegedly lower than stated.

Then from sources in the same part of the political spectrum we are told that the figures in China are manipulated and should have been allegedly much higher!

So which is it? Is the pandemic overblown or understated?

Personally I would not be surprised if the Chinese government had massaged the figures. The regime likes to control everything and does not want to look too bad. But the CFR changes from one country to another depending on factors such as pollution, effectiveness of health service, average age, etc.

If the US is similar to the UK the figures for Covid deaths is based on hospital figures and do not include deaths in care homes or at private residences.

There is no conspiracy here just that we do not have enough tests available to do much about this discrepancy.

So just down to lack of preparedness.

Which in turn is down to political idiocy.

Therefore it would point to the real fatalities being higher than what is reported for the UK at least.

This is a link to a BBC article about some of the trials that are ongoing.

Research at Bradford Royal Infirmary

The patients can agree to be in the trials; they are told the may be getting a placebo;

The other four possibilities are:

• Hydroxychloroquine, the antimalarial drug that President Trump said he had a good feeling about - which then led to a spate of overdoses and acute shortages
• Kaletra, a combination of antiretroviral drugs used in treating HIV
• Dexamethasone, a steroid, which is an old favourite in medicine when we don't quite know what's going on
• Interferon, a cytokine, which may help fight the infection

The patients only get the drugs while they are in the hospital, once they leave hospital the drugs stop.

I bet some might want to comment on the word "spate".

Has anyone mentioned melatonin. It is a very safe drug to take and readily available in the USA.

Melatonin as a potential adjuvant treatment

Quote from THHuxleynew

Utilitarian ethics is held be some people but not most. In other words it is not a quantitative matter of lives saved, but how and why they die. Thus in the US 20% of population dying early because of sub-standard health care is fine, whereas other causes of death less so.

Clearly there is a medical strategy that each country needs to decide upon.

There is also a political strategy - because it is also a political problem to get the populace to stick to the lockdowns (and also personally for those politicians who want to "survive" Coronavirus at the next election).

There is also an economic strategy to be decided as to how to best limit the economic fallout.

I don't think anyone should want to just be guided only by economists on this (apart from some greedy sociopaths who focus only on the stock market or their personal wealth, surprisingly there are quite a few of those).

As Dr Fauci said - the virus dictates the timeline.

As Jed said above, and I said a week or more ago, if goverment does not control the lockdown then fear will make it happen anyway and government risks things spiralling into chaos. So lockdown it is.

Having read the link to the Bristol University study I now see more clearly that Shane D and others who have raised the economic aspect have valid concerns.

Clearly it is not a choice of one strategy, we need a joined up approach for all 3 strategies so they support each other.

Reassuringly Jerome Powell said this;

"We are not experts in pandemic ... We would tend to listen to the experts. Dr Fauci said something like the virus is going to set the timetable, and that sounds right to me," Powell said, in reference to Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who is on the White House's coronavirus task force.

"The first order of business will be to get the spread of the virus under control and then resume economic activity."

Corona Virus; How to understand the death toll.

I found this illuminating article on the BBC that helps to put into perspective the much debated stats on the Corona virus death toll vs the economic cost of the shutdown.

The economic hit is something University of Bristol researchers have now looked at. Their conclusion? Trashing the economy costs lives.

They found the benefit of a long-term lockdown in reducing premature deaths is outweighed by the cost in terms of lost life expectancy from a prolonged economic dip.

And the tipping point is a 6.4% decline in the size of the economy - on par with what happened following the 2008 financial crash - which leads to a loss of three months of life on average across the population because of factors from declining living standards to poorer health care.

The problem with beautiful maths is that much of the data going into it at the moment seems to be poor.

Now I am not a scientist so perhaps some others here could kindly put me right.

The R0 is still up for debate and changes depending on local conditions. As has been pointed out different societies have different habits, such as hugging or not.

Worse the "testing" is pretty flawed. It seems there are different tests being used each with different weaknesses and accuracies in terms of false positives.

Additionally many countries the testing is sporadic and seemingly not systematic. And even where it might be systematic that can change. For instance I read somewhere that Italy had a testing process that was pretty much abandoned when the health system got overloaded. So how much can we trust the figures in the US and UK?

Similarly the CFR is all over the place from WHO figure (somewhere north of 3%) to Trumps gut feeling (somewhere around 0.1%). A lot of authorities seem to agree around 1%.

I am surprised that the interesting link that Rends published further up has not been commented on.

A Swiss doctor on Covid19

There are very interesting observations in here from people that are scientists, immunologists, and doctors.

I mean it has numbers and graphs and everything

But seriously; we potentialy have no good outcomes here.

At the higher end we have millions of deaths.

At the lower end if it turns out that this was all a crazy panic then maybe those who argued that it is overblown could yet be vindicated and the WHO, doctors and science in general will have shot itself, not in the foot, but in the head!

From the BBC new site;

UK, residents are now only allowed to leave their homes for “very limited purposes” like shopping for necessities.

The direction of travel is clear, but the restrictions announced by the UK prime minister still fall short of the measures in place in many European countries, where most people can’t now leave their houses without a special permit.

In Italy and Spain even outdoor exercise is banned.

UK now officially on lockdown from tonight.

Briefing at work today NHS is looking at 12 weeks minimum for this.

JedRothwell

At least 2 senators are taking this seriously.

Burr and Loeffler sold a significant amount of their shares after senators received a Corona virus briefing.

It has occurred to me that if I lived in a country where I thought the health service was likely to get swamped and disfunctional with the number of cases in a few weeks then maybe the logical thing to do is to make sure that I would catch the Corona virus now while there is access to the best care.

Not a great choice to have to consider and hopefully in the UK not a likely scenario.

Hmmm, closing the borders.

Reminds me of a true story told a few weeks ago on the radio by an expert on epidemics.

Some years ago he was advising the UK government and there was an epidemic.

The minister said well we must close the borders and suspend flights to the effected countries.

The expert said; but there is no point minister because the virus will already be here.

The minister said, yes that is the science, but the politics says if I do not close the borders then on Monday the press will scream blue murder and have my head.

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.

This is one of the things I do not understand.

On the one hand thank you to the knowledgable contributors to this board who have provided advice on how to boost ones immune system taking vitamin D etc.

A few posts back we also had news from a French expert advising not to take ibuprofen as;

“Anti-inflammatory drugs increase the risk of complications when there is a fever or infection.”

It is also known that patients with compromised immune systems are more at risk.

But then it is usually the patients immune response that kills them and some have posted news that some countries are trying to use immunosuppressants on Corona cases.

So I am finding it hard to make sense of this.

I guess that the immune system has different layers and mechanisms and some individuals are prone to a cytokine storm and that is what kills the patient.

Trump offers large amount for exclusive access to vaccine.

The Trump administration has offered a German medical company “large sums of money” for exclusive access to a Covid-19 vaccine, German media have reported.

The German government is trying to fight off what it sees as an aggressive takeover bid by the US, the broadsheet Die Welt reports, citing German government circles.

The US president had offered the Tübingen-based biopharmaceutical company CureVac “large sums of money” to gain exclusive access to their work, wrote Die Welt.

According to an anonymous source quoted in the newspaper, Trump was doing everything to secure a vaccine against the coronavirus for the US, “but for the US only”.

With allies like Trump who needs enemas.

Shane D.

Standard process is some will overreact and some will underreact. Some think it is the end of the world while some think it is fake news.

In 2009 the H1N1 pandemic had the WHO panicking but as far as most people are concerned it was a non-event. A pointless panic of experts crying wolf. After all "only" 600,000 people died!

What I am learning (to my surprise) is how long the scientific process takes to get to the facts about a new virus.

When it first appeared the Chinese goverment tried to ignore it, then went into panic mode simply because they had no way of knowing how deadly this new virus was.

All sorts of figures for R0 and the Case Fatality Rate have been guessed at.

And even now, after 3 months, the experts still do not have this pinned down.

So initially it makes good sense to assume a worst case scenario because if it turned out to be another Spanish flue, or a high CFR like SARS then by the time you know for sure it is too late to stop it.

I heard a program on the BBC the other day where they were talking about the history of epidemics and mentioned some historical cases of dealing with smallpox and I found this link to it;

Lessons for dealing with coronavirus: A tale of two cities—and smallpox

Bottom line was;

1894 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin smallpox epidemic led to month long rioting. The authorities applied forced isolation and vaccination but only for immigrants whereas the wealthy were allowed to self isolate at home.

1947 in New York millions lined up patiently to be vaccinated. The official response was even-handed and involved community groups in the process of getting everyone to buy-in.

The success of the Chinese response was discussed.

The Chinese are to be praised for their success and showing what works with this virus. History will remember the success.

Thing is in hindsight they were lucky. Apparently millions left Beijing when they heard a lock down was coming. And history shows that it was not unlikely that the Wuhan situation could have turned into mass rioting, but it didn't.

If the R0 of this virus were much different then their delayed response may have been too late to stop it.

If the CFR were much higher then the Chinese might have had mass rioting anyway.

Just read on BBC that - Europe now epicentre of pandemic. More cases per day than China at its peak!

I find it stunning after we have had the warning from China and some time to prepare that Europe could be so slack on this.

After some very interesting comments on this board I have stopped taking my Lisinopril (only 5mb anyway) and taking vitamin D.

But I do not judge this pandemic as risky enough to take the alternative risk of ordering strong meds online. If the lethality was higher then maybe I would consider the risk worth taking.

Of course there are all sorts of guesses from Fauci and the WHO and the UK on different estimates.

Well back from my cruise around Spain without managing to catch anything nasty.

Lots of stress at work as NHS shifts into a high rate of preparations. Lots of staff are putting in long hours.

Shortage of alcohol hand wash and when they are put out in clinics the patients nick them.

This week we are seeing areas of clinics being prepped as isolation zones for potential corona patients.

Not a fan of Boris but at least he seems to be listening to the science and the UK strategy seems logical and measured. Lets hope not too measured.

The US on the other hand looks like it might have dropped the ball, we shall see.

Meanwhile - here in Yorkshire things are getting serious and the status has been raised to "put the kettle on".

On the topic of doctors colluding to make as much money as possible from their mistreated patients I would like to start a conspiracy theory that dentists invented meusli since my wife broke a tooth eating hers today.

As I work in the health sector here is an illustrative story from a few days ago at one of our centres.

Anonomised of course to protect the innocent, as well as the foolish.

Patient walked into the centre where notices were prominently displayed and was asked by receptionist if patient had recenty been abroad to any hotspot areas. Patient said no.

Patient waited in area with other patients.

Patient finally went into doctor and announced patient felt unwell and had just got off a flight from Italy that afternoon.

Patient was asked why they had not told this to the receptionist and patient said that personal travel arrangements were not any of their business.

Doctor immediately had to leave the room to request appropriate measures be taken.

Room had to be closed and deep cleaned.

Doctor had to self isolate until results of test for virus could come back.

Doctor out of clinical rotas for this period so either slots had to be closed or doctors moved from other areas.

Reuters UK

It’s notable that three of the four flu pandemics in the past century were followed shortly by U.S. recessions. The exception was the 2009 outbreak, which occurred when the world economy was already in the dumps.

Closed factories and offices reduce output, restaurants and cinemas suffer revenue shortfalls, corporate debt weighs heavier, while small businesses may fail if the owner falls sick or dies.

The 2009 pandemic was "surprisingly mild".