Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Frontline doctors in China have claimed a small Russian strain Covid-19 outbreak in North East China has a longer symptom free infectious period, making it more difficult to detect and contain. But US Epidemologist Keiji Fukuda thinks the apparent change in behaviour is more likely an artefact of rigorous testing, leading to earlier detection.
China’s New Outbreak Shows Signs the Virus Could Be Changing
Bloomberg News 20 May 2020, 16:02 GMT+10 Updated on
Patients in new cluster take longer to show symptoms, recover.
Uncertainty over virus mutation is hindering control efforts.…
“The longer period during which infected patients show no symptoms has created clusters of family infections,” said Qiu, who was earlier sent to Wuhan to help in the original outbreak. Some 46 cases have been reported over the past two weeks spread across three cities — Shulan, Jilin city and Shengyang — in two provinces, a resurgence of infection that sparked renewed lockdown measures over a region of 100 million people.
Scientists still do not fully understand if the virus is changing in significant ways and the differences Chinese doctors are seeing could be due to the fact that they’re able to observe patients more thoroughly and from an earlier stage than in Wuhan. When the outbreak first exploded in the central Chinese city, the local health-care system was so overwhelmed that only the most serious cases were being treated. The northeast cluster is also far smaller than Hubei’s outbreak, which ultimately sickened over 68,000 people.
…
“In theory, some changes in the genetic structure can lead to changes in the virus structure or how the virus behaves,” said Keiji Fukuda, director and clinical professor at the University of Hong Kong’s School of Public Health. “However, many mutations lead to no discernible changes at all.”
It’s likely that the observations in China don’t have a simple correlation with a mutation and “very clear evidence” is needed before concluding that the virus is mutating, he said.
…
Officials now believe that the new cluster stemmed from contact with infected arrivals from Russia, which has one of the worst outbreaks in Europe. Genetic sequencing has showed a match between the northeast cases and Russian-linked ones, said Qiu.
…
Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-20/china-sees-signs-new-cluster-carries-virus-longer-than-in-wuhan
Whatever is going on in North East China and Russia, more testing is clearly the key to containing this nasty disease.
My biggest fear is that if we do not pinpoint exactly where it came from, then how can we be certain that yet another strain of something similar will not emerge.
All that countries can do is to spend a lot more on health, and not to use the health budget to then fund other causes that cry out for support.
Countries have no gone into so much debt that I cannot see us ever recovering to the level that we all had before it.
VK5ELL MJE
If it came from wet market or from lab, it may not make much difference, one way or the other the cost in human life and to economy in many western countries it is enormous.
Question is how to move forward, has lock down saved lives and has the economy been irreparably damaged for decades to come? This is important question if there is a second wave, a lot of fate was put into the Swedish approach, a very important experiment but now that the date rate is just behind France, the way forward is not any clearer.
http://www.vukcevic.co.uk/EuropeCV.htm
Let’s hope that vaccine or some kind of a treatment comes along before next winter’s flu season, since combination of two would totally devastate western economies.
We have here warnings for a soon coming second wave.
People has to be under fire the whole time.
The expected “second waves” simply did not materialise. That means the models are severely deficient. There is one or more significant factors which are not accounted for and the simplistic “flatten the curve” by confinement tactic was successful in reducing initial daily case loads but cases should be rebounding now countries like Italy and Spain have been back to work since April 14th !!
That , luckily, is not the case so the models are broken and do not match reality.
Well if we don’t know where it came from, hard to know how to prevent it reoccurring.
The bottom line is they WHERE working on engineering chimera corona virus strains to attack human airway cells in the lab : because they published about it in Nature !! doi:10.1038/nm.3985 ( look at figure 1 caption ).
The question is, do we do something about stopping the kind of insanely risky “gain of function” research which is being done at many P4 labs around the world.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985
full down load.
Greg,
I think the Imperial College in London has an awful lot to answer for regarding the massive innacuracys of the models. They have mad predictions of massive project death tolls almost annually here covering everything from BSE (mad cow disease) to the foot and mouth outbreak leading to the mass slaughter of millions of animals. Nothing has ever been done about them and probably nothing will.
People are working on ebola in labs but that is not where the outbreaks come from.
Disclaimer: I don’t rule out the possibility that this virus escaped from a lab. It happened with SARS in 2004 after the epidemic was already over.
Sorry. the MIT model has predictions with errors less than .0002%
The second wave has always been predicted for his coming winter, as per the Spanish Flu.
Sweden is better off than France which locked down and that’s a reason to think it failed? Huh? And what about Belarus, which didn’t even do much social distancing and is doing fine?
Well, you know. The virus is afraid of Bat’ka.
Lukaschenko ordered him not to infekt more than 1000 persons a day.
Never!
The virus has to obey.
😃😎
Sweden failed to sufficiently protect older people, but that is equally or more true for those countries which did a strict confinement policy. They screwed the economy, civil rights and still managed to kill about 25% of those in “care homes”.
Sweden failed to sufficiently protect older people, but that is equally or more true for those countries which did a strict confinement policy. They screwed the economy, civil rights and still managed to ki11 about 25% of those in “care homes”.
There is now convincing evidence from a number of countries that in clearing the decks in hospitals fir the projected viral onslaught, and sending in- patient senior back to their care homes, we in in fact seeded the disasters that unfolded there – see e.g. France or Canada.
Tetris,
That is definitely what happened in NY and other Democrat-misgoverned states. Instead of setting up COVID isolation wards in hospitals, governors idiotically ordered still infectious elederly patients sent back to their nursing homes and other care facilities.
Cumom reversed his brain-dead order, but far too late. Maybe he and other governors wanted to k!ll off the elderly to save money. This is the same miscreant who supported the lottery rather than restock ventilator supplies, instead setting up new death panel guidelines to decide who gets the limited stock of machines.
Cuomo. Dystypic.
We have working treatments but they are restricted in certain states by the government. As to a vaccine, don’t hold your breath. So far it has been all hype all the time.
We are trying to balance compassion (prevent as many deaths as possible) and economy (how much will it cost). Including only US direct stimulus money $2.8 trillion so far, and taking about 75,000 US deaths so far, one COVID-19 death did cost about $37 million. If we guess that an equal number of deaths were prevented, tho COVID cost per life is somewhere around $40 million.
At the moment, my money is on Oxford’s Jenner Institute, whose vaccine is being made by AstraZeneca. That’s not literally true, since AZN is going to sell the vaccine at first at cost.
But their vaccine is more tried and true, old-fashioned than alternatives. It does take advantage in bioengineering advances, but is based upon a real, whole virus, a weakened chimp adenovirus, harmless and far removed from the coronavirus family. Genetic engineering comes in with inserting CoV spike protein sequences (genes).
Nasty diseases will emerge from wherever they can. And always have, long before bio warfare labs.
species crossover, natural mutation, why?
“…this nasty disease.”
Are there any nice ones?
Disputin
May 24, 2020 at 4:26 am
The herd “COVID-19”, maybe an answer to consider. 🙂
There are a lot that are a lot less nasty.
This was not even bio-weapons research, it was openly published “gain of function” research, ie. they just do it because they can and no one has the brains to stop them.
https://medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748
Leaks have been going on for decades, just now we are actually teaching viruses how to attack us and making them.
https://slate.com/technology/2014/04/how-dangerous-viruses-could-escape-from-laboratories.html
This particular type of COV comes from Intermediate Horseshoe Bats that live in caves in remote areas of a tropical environment. They are “micro-bats” that feed on insects that are caught in flight during the night.
They have little to no interaction with humans. They sleep during the day and come out to feed at night.
The virus strain is under intense natural selection pressure from the antibodies generated by the host bats. The host tries to rid the system of the virus, and the virus must jump to a new host before that happens. If the bats live in an enclosed colony within their “home caves”, they will rapidly develop herd immunity to the virus, and remove it from the colony. The virus must either infect new colonies or mutate to a strain that the current antibodies will not attack immediately, before the virus can reproduce in the host, and infect new hosts.
The mutations are random, with most of them having no benefit to the survival of the virus, and are not continued through the “reproduction and reinfection cycle” that the virus must use for propagation. Those that are beneficial to surviving the cycle become dominant through natural selection.
This particular type of virus was present in a minority of colonies in the area, so did not rely on infecting new colonies, as much as it relied on mutating enough to survive the host antibody immunity virus attack. This implies several important insights.
If the contagious ability of the virus is too high, the colony would become immune before the virus can mutate enough to develop a strain that is immune to the current antibodies.
If the contagious ability of the virus is too low the remaining minority uninfected bats would never get infected as the herd immunity reached a majority of 70% or so, also removing the virus from the colony.
If the virus had fatal effects on the infected bats, it would reduce the viruses ability to spread to others as the bat would be removed from the colony.
If the virus mutated to access cells that belonged to animals it was not in regular contact with, those viruses would be eliminated by natural selection because they would not provide an advantage for surviving the next “antibody – viral mutation” cycle.
So this is a finely tuned evolutionary process, that rewards extreme optimization between the parasite and the host. It is a microcosm of why we have binocular vision, the ability to speak, and the mental capacity to control fire and develop tools.
The reason it is Novel, is because this natural selection cycle demands a fine balance for the virus to survive. Very few bats are infected at any one time. A chance interaction between humans and that rare bat are unlikely, and it is extremely unlikely to have the correct receptors to infect the human cells. And if all of that happened the human would only be infected for a few weeks in a remote area with limited ability to spread to others. This is a virus specifically adapted by natural selection to not burn itself out in a enclosed colony.
In its natural form it posed no threat to humans, and was never able to be spread in human populations the way flu viruses passed within domesticated animals have mutated strains that jumped to humans through frequent prolonged contact between humans and these animals.
That is how we know this could not have occurred spontaneously in the Seafood Market in Wuhan. The traits that distinguish this virus form a “naturally occurring” strain are not beneficial to survival within the framework of its evolutionary development. They would only have occurred within a lab setting where mutations that would die off from non-beneficial variations, were allowed to reproduce and reinfect, because they were beneficial for infection of a new host. Humans.
Correct. You’ve described the gain of function “research” conducted by Bat Woman Shi, partly funded by Fauci. Such “work” is absurdly dangerous and has never produced anything of value.
The animal model used to simulate human lungs in this directed evolution project is the ferret. When Shi was forced to leave UNC in 2014 after the US temporarily stopped funding such insane projects, she returned to China to join the new (2015) BSL-4 lab at Wuhan. Then the US started funding again, because the Obama Admin trusted FauXi. Crazy! The program ended in 2018 and wasn’t renewed, but too late.
Little horseshoe bats weren’t sold in the wet market. Probably not even juicy fruit bats. Pangolins, maybe. None of the early WuWHOFlu cases has any connection with the market.
There are photos of fruit bat’s being sold in the markets. They are considered a delicacy in many Asian regions.
The idea of the wet markets is to sell anything. I do not understand why horse shoe bat’s are exempt.
The wet market is the “patsy”. It is actually the Huanan Seafood Market, where the majority of the sales are seafood based. The other animals that are sold are raised in captivity not caught in the wild.
Fruit bats can weigh up to 1.45 kg and provide significant meat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megabat
But the Intermediate Horseshoe Bats average 14 grams. Most of that is skin, fur and bones. You would get more meat from a common mouse. And a mouse can afford to pack on a few extra grams. He doesn’t have to fight gravity in flight catching insects to get his next meal.
There is no reasonable explanation how this virus would originate in the market. It is a concocted story to be parroted by the propaganda outlets. Any examination of it shows that it has no basis in reality. It is a lie made by people that are bad at lying, because they own the media and that media does not question authority. And a significant percentage of the media in the rest of the world is afraid of offending the CCP.
Peter,
Not just photos of fruit bats, but whole videos on cooking them in Indonesia.
But not horseshoe bats.
The Wuhan wet market story is a lie.
While your argument is basically sound, there is still a chance that the virus “gained” function accidentally within a host infected with multiple viruses. Just because the “gain” or “change” is not beneficial to the virus in the original environment does not preclude it from randomly occurring. In fact almost all mutations are not beneficial and fade from the gene pool (RNA pool?) quickly.
The chance of the mutation (an intermixing of RNA) occurring naturally would be correlated with how fast the virus mutates through gene swapping, what percentage are able to intermix with other compatible viral RNA (so what percentage of the infected hosts are also infected with other compatible viruses), and so on. Natural evolution cannot be, to my knowledge, ruled out.
HOWEVER, that said, the odds seem to greatly favor a directed gain of function occurring within a laboratory environment. Combine that with the presence of such a laboratory, the published papers showing they were experimenting with RNA compatible viruses, the identification of a RNA sequence that almost certainly came from another virus, and then the appearance of a cover-up afterwards and you are reaching near certainty.
When I studied epidemiology in the Masters program, there was a detailed section on the wet markets.
If the little horseshoe bat was sold, and there is no reason it isn’t eaten, then there must have been stocks of bat’s kept live in the markets. Large numbers, in close proximity to other species including the pangolin and customers. This is precisely the environment that gave us sars, bird flu and a bunch of other pandemics. I recomend that you visit a wet market.
I wouldn’t dismiss the wet market theory. If the virus escaped from a lab, I am sure the Chinese will make sure it never happens again. It cost the nation too much.
If, as has happened before, again and again, the virus came from the wet markets, this is far more scary. The market in Wuhan has already reopened. It’s not the only one. It means we will continue to see other novel viruses emerging every few years. The markets will be difficult to close because they are such a major part of the food chain, in Wuhan, in China, and in Asia.
Let us hope the virus did come from a lab.
What has it cost them?
At least so far it has damaged their enemies much more than it has damaged China.
I have been to wet markets, and they are all locally sourced. You do not see animals from far away. Transporting live animals is costly and suppliers want to make a profit. Customers want protein at a reasonable cost.
What they are not looking for is 14 gm bats caught, transported live, fed insects on the way (?), and then prepared for eating. It is beyond ridiculous. It is bordering on an insane attempt to deflect blame from an obvious source to a source that has no ability to defend itself. And provide the western world with a bad guy to condemn. This is how markets have operated for thousands of years, in all of the world. It is only recently that refrigeration has made it possible to separate the butchering and the consumption of animal products for food.
If this came from the wet markets it would have happened long ago and it would not be Novel. It would be another reoccurring strain of disease that can transition from one species host to another. There is absolutely nothing new about wet markets. What is new is WIV!
China has a huge financial motive to reduce the cost of payments and benefits to retired workers. They currently have 250 million people at or above the official retirement age, which is manageable because they had a baby boom in the 60’s and 70’s. After Mao starved millions of people in the Cultural Revolution, families returned to an average of 5 children per family. This dramatically increased the population so much that the CCP imposed the one child rule in 1979. To make this rule acceptable the CCP implemented programs to support the elderly in their old age. This was the traditional reason for large families was to pass on a name, property, and have providers for the elderly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China
The baby boom retiring will cause a large financial problem for the CCP. The pension system is a transfer payment scheme that taxes the working and transfers the payments to the retired. It works great when your baby boom is working. It is a disaster when your baby boom is retired, and your workers are artificially reduced in numbers by imposing a birth limit in comparison to the birth rates when retirees were born.
Current estimates are that taxes will have to increase 150% to cover the shortfall.
There is no evidence that this virus was released intentionally, but it sure provides a motive to do so. So we have Motive, Means and Opportunity. Add to that the actions of a guilty party after the sick people started showing up at hospitals and you have a very good reason to deny, obfuscate, blame others, and hire an army of Trolls to keep the public confused.
The Troll-e-tariat is well funded and very busy. But the truth is logical, and the lies are not. And there is only so much you can do to fool people that are willing to look at how the virus originated, how it was allowed to spread, and what were the actions of those best positioned to prevent it.
This doesn’t have the attributes of a random event. And pretending it does can only fool some of the people. Many people want to think we have left our barbaric nature in the past. We may get there some day, but the best we can hope for now is to not let the guilty profit from their crimes.
How about the null hypothesis in Covid 19. Is sars cov2 guilty until proven innocent?
It seems like the scientific principle of disproving the null hypothesis has been thrown completely out the window. It seems really heretical to suggest disproving the null hypothesis in covid 19. The argument seems to be: People are dying, we have to act, we cannot sit around and do good science.
The null hypothesis is that the sars cov2 has no effect on the population. Innocent until proven guilty. If we don’t use this principle in science, we could in principle imagine that bad spirits were behind the flu symptoms we see. If we should react like we do now, it would be the task for scientists to find out what could stop the bad spirits from moving from person to person.
Is the virus hypothesis falsifiable? Do we have any way of proving that the pneumonia’s or kidney problems or heart problems don’t come from sars cov2?
Not really. Now it seems like the virus can give any kind of problem or absolutely no problem. As long as we find some sars cov2 virus in the organs, we may say it is covid 19.
But if we had tested for other corona viruses or adeno or rhino or flu, we would have found those too.
It is interesting to see how difficult it is to find out a simple fact in the Covid 19 debate: does Hydroxy Chloroquin work or not, but on other much more complicated matters there seems to be a certainty from the start.
1. Can we be hundred percent certain that the physical symptoms we see come uniquely from Sars CoV 2? Not really. If they had really been unique, doctors could easily just diagnose based on symptoms, and there would be no reason for a test. They tried that in china , but stopped after 1 day.
2. Patients don’t really die from Covid, they die from pneumonia, heart attacks, renal failure and all the other typical reasons of death for old age.
3. The age of death seems to match very closely that of the general population, sometimes it seems even higher.
4. In medicine it is very difficult to establish causation. Just see how difficult it is to determine if a simple drug like Hydroxucloroquin really works. How can we trust that the virus is really causing anything?
5. So since we cannot really prove that sars cov 2 kills a patient, it makes no sense to call it the cause of any death. Death could come from any. Combination of factors; toxins, lifestyle, comorbidities, pollution, medical error, medication side effects.
6. Actually, drug side effects can be a major cause. Several typical drugs common in older people almost double pneumonia, causes heart arrhythmia etc. These include sleeping pills, antidepressant , and the worst of all antipsychotics to keep the senile calm.
7. There are hundreds of viruses and bacteria going around at any time, being deadly in the cold season. These cause excess deaths of around 50000 in the UK cold season. It could be just a bad general flu/clld season and the Coronavirus just happens to go around.
8. The fact that some don’t seem to get immunity and are reinfected, could be indicating that the virus is just something that replicated and can be measured. If it is not really causing distress for the body, so there will be no immunity for some. The same goes for the virus not producing antibodies in all patients.
9. The point is that we don’t know if the mostly old age deaths that we see, come from Sars Cov2. They could come from any other viruses and bacteria or even from the non communicable diseases patients have; diabetes, hypertension etc. Sars Cov2 just happened to be there the time of death, and we happened to test just some RNA sequences from this virus, and not the hundreds of others.
We have cause and effect. A new unknown virus is circulating and we have systemic failures in greater numbers than we would expect in people who have been exposed to it.
All of your smoke and mirrors are deflections from what is known, not clarification.
Certainty in a new pathogen is rare. We get certainty from accumulation of evidence. What we have now is matching unknowns. But much can be leaned by examining what people are sick, and what they have in common.
There is a big difference between “we don’t have all the answers” and “we have to question the fundamentals of everything we know”. Getting to certainty is a luxury that take time. Time that will cost lives at this point. By then the old and infirm will be cleansed and you and your ghoul supporters will have won.
We are not so easily manipulated by “sowing the seeds of doubt”. Sounds to me like you have a guilty conscience.
ClO2 will be tested for treating covid 19:
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04343742
Trump bad ?? 😀
Is that for real? Drinking poison does not sound like a good idea.
No idea if that’s fake or truth
I have read of similar successes using ozonated blood.
It’s true.
Orange Man maybe not so crazy after all?
Determination of the Effectiveness of Oral Chlorine Dioxide in the Treatment of COVID 19
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04343742
Haven’t you read ? Or were you sleeping ?? 😀
We would know a lot more about ChiCom-19 if the regime had allowed Western specialists into Wuhan and shared their data with others.
Instead, many died while foreign practioners had to learn the hard way themselves. And still are learning.
Do you drink chlorinated water?
I haven’t Corona 😀
Yes, but they are talking about a much higher doseage – it appears to be about 30ppm (10 ml @ 3000ppm added to 1 liter), vs a standard 4% for tap water. So, about 7.5x what you’d normally get.
I don’t know who can submit a study to that database but tests on 20 patients and gmail and hotmail accounts !?
“Genesis Foundation ”
Isn’t that the Christian fundamentalist nutjobs that think ClO2 cures all?
Look up the basic theory behind chemotherapy and stop embarrassing yourself.
Wow, someone’s got their panties in a twist.
Interesting comment to a true statement.
It has been used in a variety of ways.
Here is a published example, open access:
https://benthamopen.com/DOWNLOAD-PDF/TOANTIMJ-2-71/
The oral LD50 of chlorine dioxide is similar to that of caffeine!
As with everything, the dose makes the poison.
You drink chlorine everyday, it’s put into the water supply.
This actually sounds like a great idea, but the study looks like it’s designed to fail because it’s using oral rather than IV ClO2.
IV ClO2 overcomes a difficulty of ozonated blood treatment because the latter has to be extracted, ozonated and then re-injected.
The Coronavirus Vaccine May Not Work on the Elderly
For those over 65, the pandemic is unlikely to end when the first vaccines arrive
Brendan Borrell May 21 · 8 min read
https://onezero.medium.com/the-coronavirus-vaccine-may-not-work-on-the-elderly-3fc176f75751
this is not an issue.
it is important to vaccinate 60% of the population to stop the epidemics.
these 60% do not have to be the elderly ones.
the residual risk will remain forever.
Moderna’s vaccine caused 20% of the 15 human guinea pig cohort to have a “serious adverse event”. Rushing these things to market is a recipe for disaster.
Moderna COVID Vaccine Trial Sees 20% “Serious” Injury Rate as U.S. Invests BILLIONS More on Experimental COVID Vaccines
https://healthimpactnews.com/2020/moderna-covid-vaccine-trial-sees-20-serious-injury-rate-as-u-s-invests-billions-more-on-experimental-covid-vaccines/
The article is misrepresenting the facts. For people who want to have more insights:
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/05/18/first-results-from-modernas-coronavirus-vaccine
Binding antibodies create the paradoxical enhanced immune response when exposed to wild virus that can be deadly. Nothing new here; that’s been the problem with all coronavirus vaccines.
As usual, you are wrong about how the immune system works. Enhanced immune response is a dose response curve. Common for vaccines not just coronavirus ones.
O thou knowledgeable one, explain dose response curve in the context of animals given SARS coronavirus vaccines that developed robust antibody response, but when exposed to wild coronavirus suffered hyper-immune response, whole body inflammation. lung infections and death? Also explain same in context of the children who 50 years earlier had a similar enhanced immune response when exposed to wild virus after being given the RSV vaccine.
RSV is not a coronavirus. The two dead children by RSV were 1966. There was a lot unknown in 1966:
https://www.nature.com/articles/news.2008.1302
It pays always of to look at the data. That is the cited study in the video:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3335060/
There are vaccines listed that show protection without immunopathology.
Looking at the study there is another concern: the damage occurred in only two days after infection.
That points to an unnatural high dose of viral exposure in the study to test immunity. Without appropriate site-by-site controls – which are lacking in the study – there is no proof that it is not the experimental setup that causes the response. One study is no study.
Might want to wait on the actual results of the trial. Like all drug trials, everything adverse is reported, whether it actually had to do with the drug or not. “Preventing daily activity and requiring medical intervention.” could mean anything from minor to major. From what I have read, very low doses of the vaccine created antibodies in the blood which is very positive. Since this is an accelerated trial, the protocol of starting at a low dosage rate, then stepping it up was not followed. They gave three dosage rates at the get go.
Seems like healthimpactnews.com is looking for clicks and succeeded.
There were 45 patients involved in the Moderna trial. One third of them got a high dose, one third got a lose dose and one third got a medium dose.
The president of Moderna said that all three groups showed a strong immune response to the Wuhan virus, so maybe it won’t be necessary to give the high dose or medium dose version.
And in other news, a doctor said the other day that the Wuhan virus is different from the flu in that the flu season is generally over by the middle of May in the U.S. but the Wuhan virus has not tailed off so far, although the death rates are dropping quite a bit. That may change as people start getting out and about.
And, isn’t convalescent plasma capable of protecting people from the Wuhan virus? We seem to be building up a big supply of it, and as far as I know, it doesn’t harm patients to give it to them. Won’t this substitute for a vaccine?
Won’t this substitute for a vaccine?
No.
That gives immediate ability to fight the virus if infected but the antibodies do not last long and since the patient is not actually producing them , they are not replaced.
It offers a possible treatment but is totally different from having your own immune response.
Medicine has quite a bad reputation for giving us explanations and cures that are often worse than the disease, just think of bloodletting and lobotomy. Now we have seen this with Covid 19 intubation. It seemed to make sense, and it was the reason for the world shutting down. We needed to make sure we could give ventilators to all the sickest patients. Now, it seems like this was exactly what we should have avoided. If we hadn’t flattened the curve, we could have saved many patients from being put on ventilators, and we could have achieved herd immunity quickly. In principle we should have asked our young and healthy to be brave. They should go out and get covid 19 as quickly as possible, by kissing if needed. They should count themselves as infected and avoid their grandparents. A country with brave active youth could get herd immunity in 2 weeks.
Medicine has quite a bad reputation for giving us explanations and cures that are often worse than the disease, just think of bloodletting and lobotomy. Now we have seen this with Covid 19 intubation. It seemed to make sense, and it was the reason for the world shutting down. We needed to make sure we could give ventilators to all the sickest patients. Now, it seems like this was exactly what we should have avoided. If we hadn’t flattened the curve, we could have saved many patients from being put on ventilators, and we could have achieved herd immunity quickly. In principle we should have asked our young and healthy to be brave. They should go out and get covid 19 as quickly as possible, by kissing if needed. They should count themselves as infected and avoid their grandparents. A country with brave active youth could get herd immunity in 2 weeks.
Rumors of a new outbreak = extend house arrest indefinitely and jail anyone who dissents. Calling it now. Tyrants enjoy feeble excuses to exercise tyranny.
Worrall
“Whatever is going on in North East China and Russia, more testing is clearly the key to containing this nasty disease.”
—————-
I thought it was supposed no worse than flu.
What changed your mind?
I take it very seriously, and always have.
Eric Worrall
May 24, 2020 at 3:39 am
I take it very seriously, and always have.
———————–
Yes, you should take it very seriously, but stigmatizing it does not help,
as it has a very nasty backfiring effect… with very very serious damages following.
cheers
whitten – You are trying to control thought through relationships restricting speech. You are also puppeting ChiCom propaganda.
Please give us the non-stigmatizing names for Ebola, Marzberg, the Hong Kong flu, German measles and the Spanish flu.
Sorry, auto correct messed up my post
Is what I meant to post
Jeffery P
May 24, 2020 at 7:47 am
+
Tom Abbott
May 24, 2020 at 7:18 am
—————
Guys, you got it backwards.
There is nothing in my comment to Eric, in consideration of “stigmatizing” as per how Eric or David call it or prefer to name it, or address it.
It is about the “nasty disease”. (there where the real stigmata, the arbitrary quality or arbitrary value assigned by virtue of “obviousity of obscurity”).
No much problem there unless one really consist as being very serious about it.
So hopefully this clarifies for you guys.
And in this vein you both got to consider, in connection to your comments towards me,
as whether you team trolling with;
” Ghalfrunt.
May 24, 2020 at 7:02 am ”
or
being puppet mastered mentally from Ghalfrunt.
You know that better than me, but there is no any other options I can see there for consideration.
thanks “guys”
cheers
My apologies
“stigmatizing it”
You mean it is stimatizing to call the Wuhan virus what it is? It came from Wuhan, China, so that’s it’s name. If people want to take offense to it, that’s their problem.
The U.S. is not afraid of retaliation from China. China should be afraid of retaliation from the United States.
I heard an interesting conversation yesterday about how China’s commnist leadership may not survive the next five years, over this Wuhan virus attack on the world. It made a lot of sense to me. The prediction was the Communist leadership would be taken down from within China by the Chinese people.
no one is really offended…..they’re all just acting out
LOL, wishful thinking by the same people who thought that would get massive local support for Bay of Pigs, ousting Assad, and the latest botched coup in Venezuela.
I’m no expert on internals of Chinese politics but think they have a much firmer grip on the population than to get ousted for COVID.
All COVID did was the strenghen the measures they have in place to confine and control the population … as is happening much closer to home.
You should probably worry more about what is happening in your own country !
Do you have any evidence that anyone beyond the crazies involved were involved in the attempted coup in Venezuela? Not that it would be a bad thing had it succeeded.
whiten — seems you are another “panties in a twist” case. A very very serious case.
beng135
May 24, 2020 at 8:29 am
What about the mirror!
🙂
cheers
David Middleton / May 9, 2020
Guest “set our people free!” by David Middleton
Shelter in place has been an EPIC FAIL…
You idiotic childish chicom label, your must get back to work comments. etc. show lack of “serious” in my book
How do you get internet in your bunker? Don’t you know you’re safe as long as you’re locked in. Seriously, self-isolate and have no contact with anyone and you’ll be fine. You are in no danger from anyone if you just hunker in your bunker.
BTW, 2/3 of Chicom virus Covid19 infections in New York occurred when the lockdown was in effect. The Chicoms were not successful in their very strict, very strongly enforced lockdowns. There is a new outbreak.
bunkerbasement, aka “bottom of mommy’s house”.Jeffery P May 24, 2020 at 7:53 am
The Chicoms were not successful in their very strict, very strongly enforced lockdowns. There is a new outbreak.
———————
I think everyone knows there will be re-occurrences of covid 19, and worse still it is likely to mutate making herd safety ineffective.
The virus is not going away despite chloroquine and vitamin d.
China is indeed communist. It has indeed got harsher control of its people. But to stop the virus this is needed. Going to rallies with submachine guns (even if it is a childish wooden toy) will in no way stop the spread. Isolating and tracking contacts is necessary to limit the spread. No one has yet said that having the disease gives you immunity there is therefore no cure.
I am totally amazed at the us freedom movement shunning masks, spitting and coughing at people claiming “when I got up this morning I was in a free country”. its like driving the wrong way down a major highway claiming your freedom – you may not die but you may cause others to do so.
Ghalfrunt – So anyone that disagrees with your terminology is “not serious”?
Freedom of speech is a central tenant of scientific inquiry.
Choosing to attack words, instead of the logical progression of ideas, is “not serious”!!
David did not write this article, so lashing out at him is somewhat “childish”.
The coverup, delays and lies of the Communist Party of China and its running dogs at WHO are responsible for spreading the WuWHOFlu virus and the disease ChiCom-19 around the world. Are you being paid to deny this fact? If not, then your denial of reality is childish.
The doctors of Wuhan who tried to alert the world to the threat and the liberty-loving, legitimate government of the Republic of China, who called out both the Red China regime and WHO, are the heroes of this tragic saga. Add more deaths to the bloody account books of your Communist masters.
You know that the standard amongst socialists is that there are no enemies on the left.
Socialists will always defend other socialists.
Until the socialists win. Then the less pure socialists will be massacred by the more pure.
I know it might be difficult for a member of the green collective to grasp, but David has a different opinion to me. Different opinions are allowed in our world, they don’t lead to immediate ostracism, denunciation and online character assassination.
Once again gfront demonstrates that when confronted with facts he can’t refute, he resorts to both insults and a declaration that he is just to good to bother with us peons.
(Yet for some reason he continues to hang around and bother with the peons.)
But GH , flu is recognised as a nasty disease and always has been. Even before the latest version, bred in, and distributed from,China, flu can cause deaths by the thousands in UK winters. This is why the UK Govt offers free vaccines to over 65’s and every pharmacy in England in Autumn advertises flu vaccination at little , some times no, cost to anyone regardless of age. “Manflu” is not just a feminist jibe at the weaker sex, but something that can knock you out of normal life for up to a week.
Possible new outbreak of Wuhan/SARS2, Chicom virus, Covid-19 in China and Russia? Two of the five countries that are in total control of the freedom of speech? So we may never know any useful details about the virus structure, propagation, or lethality from these people. At best, they might say something and it turns out to be disinformation. The more advanced West needs to go their own way with vaccine trials, treatment medicines and techniques, and safety protocols. Good posting, Eric, and clearly indicative of what disregard for international citizenship Russia and China both practice. Stay sane and safe (big day here: family barbecue/walk dogs/exercise outside/swing golf club! Normal things are now special.))
damn sight better chance of truth from Russia especially re medical issues
they led the world in Phage therapies and yet? apart from “intellectual borrowing” to use in the less useful than bragged about CRISPR tech
that amazing works is? well ,damned low key or ignored.
Im hoping Russians can rouse out some of the seniors who did that work and beat everyone to a solution personally.
why?
because of all the present mobs competing theyd be the ones to NOT rip everyone off cost wise and also be most likely to share.
get over the russia bashing maybe?
Chinas the mob with oversize aspirations to control the globe.
Blaming every little peculiarity of a disease on viral mutations is perfect cover for virologists’ ignorance. Does anyone notice the same pattern with climatologists blaming every little hiccup on CO2?
Hows this for an answer to all ?
Confucius once was asked what he would do first if he was to administer a Country
” It would certainly be to correct the language ” he replied.
Why ?
“If a language is not correct , then what is said is not what is ment;
If what is said is not meant then what ought to be done remains undone
If This remains undone morals and arts will deteriorate, justice will go astray,
If justice goes astray there will be confusion.
Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said.
“It would certainly be to correct the language”
In the modern era Confusious would say he would certainly correct the lies of the Leftwing Media, for all the reasons described above.
The Lies of the Leftwing Media are the greatest danger to our freedoms, even more so than foreign enemies, because they create false realities that make it almost impossible to govern ourselves properly.
At some point this needs to be corrected for all of us to move forward. Perhaps this correction is taking place now in slow motion as the Leftwing Media’s approval ratings are worse than used car salesmen and are going lower.
Our world cannot survie if we think partisan political lies are the truth.
It’s past time to take on the entire Left for their deceptions and lies, and that includes all the social media platforms who are in league with the rest of the Leftwing Media in their efforts to distort the truth and reality and censor those who point out what they are doing.
We are going to need a lot of reforms in the future. We can get those reforms if we put the Republicans in power and remove the liars/Democrats from office. And I think this is going to happen.
Not with mail-in voting it won’t.
CVD (Cardiovascular disease) is at pandemic proportions too. We are under attack from all sides…diabetes, liver diseases, and of course corona.
The who says “17.9 million people die each year from CVDs, an estimated 31% of all deaths worldwide.”
@ https://www.who.int/health-topics/cardiovascular-diseases/
It is not to late to extend ‘distancing’ protocols to incorporate travel bans to, or from, known junk food hot-spots, or where clusters of processed food are entering the country. This could save lives.
“It is not to late to extend ‘distancing’ protocols to incorporate travel bans to, or from, known junk food hot-spots, or where clusters of processed food are entering the country. This could save lives.”
Yes, this would definitely save lives. A lot of our common diseases are self-inflicted. The real problem is a lack of self-disciplie on the part of many people. They could cure themselves of very serious illnesses all by themselves, if they would just use a little common sense and self control and lose weight.
I had good results from the Atkins diet, and you can eat all you want on it, as long as you don’t eat sugar. This should not be taken as medical advice, but it worked for me, and there are many other diet plans out there that will all work if they are actually followed.
Let’s get healthy. And a whole lot of doing so is under our control. You just have to want to do it.
Junk and processed food is highly transmissible. It burger/processed food is usually transmitted by a well meaning older person transmitting a burger and trans-fat fries to younger victims early in life. Those infected by the junk food and fast food burgers need to be quarantined. At least quarantined or distanced until the carrier of the burger in my example has consumed it, and then transmission of the burger to others is no longer possible.
Show me the person that never dies! We all have a temporary lifespan, and no amount of nanny state policies can prevent us from our ultimate demise.
Liberty required vigilance and public commitment to the enforcement of our rights. Tyranny will always be looking for weaknesses in our system, probing for opportunities to grow.
A government that derives its power from the “consent” of the governed, allows people to make their decisions about how much risk is appropriate. Getting out of bed implies a risk, but so does staying in bed. There is no perfect model to live your life, and any coercion designed to take choices away from free people, in order to optimize their usefulness, and minimize their expense to society, is a step towards authoritarian rule. I have no problem with governments offering recommendations. When they use force to impose compliance they do so by taking away power from the public, and bestowing it upon themselves. If they fail to follow fully the constitutional limitations on their authority to do this, it needs to be opposed. No matter where you stand on the individual issue.
Don’t give into the desire to run other peoples lives. Worry about your own and the myriad of decisions that go into a life well lived. We always learn more from our mistakes than we do through blind obedience to an “authority”.
Learning to ride a bicycle is an exercise in making mistakes and managing risk. And it has limited usefulness in a modern society. If the government decided the risk was greater than the benefit, and outlawed it, should we comply? And if we do comply what comes next?
For 2020 the USA has an “excess death” rate about 5.5% (50,331) higher than the previous 4 year average for weeks 1 to 16. As a comparison I checked the first 16 weeks of 2018 compared to the previous 4 year average and it was 7.2% (63,260).
The script and all related files are here if you want to kick the tires:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/fh9x5fngmfbeiiu/AAAH-OtOMqiY_R9qqG6YccCRa?dl=0
As of 2020-05-22 the CDC data has North Carolina missing week 16 for 2020. The rest of the states are complete.
Why is “for that same week” relevant ?
That means you are comparing peak COVID to the tail end of “average” flu season. Also COVID is a much sharper peak the flu, so you need to look at a full flu season.
The 2017-18 was a “bad” flu year. Euromomo data for “all causes” shows this year ( now tail end of covid in most EU countries ) is just a bit higher. Nothing that merited screwing the economy of the entire continent.
Confinement was a total over reaction which they are still having trouble correcting.
There are misleading graphs and then there are people misreading graphs.
50% more cumulated excess deaths compared to the worst flu year on record. And it’s not over. This winter’s flu season is.
The CDC does the pneumonia and influenza from week 40 to week 39 the following year. They track total deaths based on calendar year not flu season. That is why I started at week 1. At the end of the year I want to see if there is any excess deaths.
Currently we are 16 weeks in and compared to the same 16 weeks in the previous 4 years we are 5.5% over. The 2017-18 flu season was big and resulted in excess deaths 7.2% over the same 16 week period compared to its previous 4 years (2014-17).
The data, script and readme are at the dropbox if you want to try different time frames etc.
This ^^ is not very well written, sorry.
You said average of 7.2 was previous 4 years, weeks 1-16, years (19-16).
And 2020 was 5.5.
So 2020 is not higher?
Whats the margin of error considering all the 2020 numbers are not in yet?
Also;
Were the stats pulled down from cdc for NY including or excluding NYC. They usually say if they are or are not.
It’s not a respiratory disease. It’s a CV disease.
Respiration is the key functionality of the Cardio Vascular system. Disease in any part of the system, is disease in the system. Your statement is nonsense.
The classification is about which tissue is affected primarily. Therefore it’s a CV.
Quote: “nasty disease”.
It is only nasty if you are sick or old.
Which is why it was pointless shutting down every Western economy, where the majority of workers are fit and young….
R
Or end up under the care of the wrong doctors.
If you look at any of the websites reporting statistics, such as http://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ or ourworldindata.org/coronavirus, you can see that the pandemic is far from over. Growth in new cases is rapid, if not exponential, in numerous countries, including Russia, Brazil, India, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Bangladesh. These countries comprise a significant percentage of the global population and most of their people don’t have access to the health-care resources that people in Europe or North America have. On top of that, the pandemic has barely hit Africa yet.
The only thing that will stop the pandemic is herd immunity, either due natural immunity from a recovered infection or a vaccine. Considering there have been only ~5M cases (I realize there have been many, many more infections than cases), the world is a very long way from herd immunity. If the virus mutates sufficiently that people who recovered from it no longer have immunity, then we are in for a long and rough ride. There won’t be just a second wave, there will be multiple waves.
Before anyone gets excited, perhaps I should not have included Russia in the list of examples of countries where there is rapid growth of new cases. It may be that growth of new cases has peaked in Russia, but it’s too early to be sure.
Russia lies.
Ya think?
Pretty sure!
Roger Knights says :”The Coronavirus Vaccine May Not Work on the Elderly”
No consequence for many of the seniors, too old, economically less productive and of no long interest to the government as well as an undesirable burden to pension funds.
Get all young vaccinate, just slip in a nano-chip, which can be scanned at any entrance door to a public building or means of public transport, etc.
One of the vital tasks for every progressive government in the mid-21st century is to know what its citizenry is up to at all times, insurance and medical services can monitor in real time all vital body functions, monitor contacts one makes with any beneficiary of such advances in technology, record conversations through sound vibration, even activate psycho-physical actions or functions that I have no idea of. Regretfully as a recently retired man I might not be of a longer term interest to authorities charting this new brave world. Good luck to the rest of you (/sarc, just in case)
We are fighting a cold war with the Medical Industry at the same time we are fighting covid.
We can reduce total US health care costs by more than 60% if we correct the population’s deficiencies. The research has been done.
It has been shown that Vitamin D deficient people regardless of age or sex are 20 times more likely to die from Covid, than Vitamin D normal people.
We could have 2000 deaths, now rather than over 100,000, if we had corrected the US population’s ‘Vitamin’ D deficiency.
42% of the US general population and 82% of the US black population is ‘Vitamin’ D deficient. Why is this fact true? Same for Canada and UK.
Patterns of COVID-19 Mortality and Vitamin D: An Indonesian Study
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3585561
Vitamin D Insufficient Patients 12.55 times more likely to die
Vitamin D Deficient Patients 19.12 times more likely to die
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-52574931
Vitamin D is a proteohormone that controls more than 200 processes in our body. Vitamin D research has shown that 4000 UI/day per person will correct most of the populations severe ‘Vitamin’ D deficiency and will reduce the incidences of most common cancers by more than 60% and will reduce the incidence of type 2 diabetes by 50%.
Prevalence and correlates of vitamin D deficiency in US adults.
https://tahomaclinic.com/Private/Articles4/WellMan/Forrest%202011%20-%20Prevalence%20and%20correlates%20of%20vitamin%20D%20deficiency%20in%20US%20adults.pdf
Finally, Missing link between vitamin D prostate cancer
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/10/141022164052.htm
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960076015300091?via%3Dihub
Incidence rate of type 2 diabetes is >50% lower in Grassroots Health cohort with median serum 25–hydroxyvitamin D of 41 ng/ml than in NHANES cohort with median of 22 ng/ml
This single graph, summarize this key issue.
https://www.grassrootshealth.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/disease-incidence-prev-chart-051317.pdf
We could have 2000 deaths, now in the US rather than over 100,000, if we had corrected the US population’s ‘Vitamin’ D deficiency.
It has been shown that Vitamin D deficient people regardless of age or sex are 20 times more likely to die from Covid, than Vitamin D normal people.
42% of the US general population and 82% of the US black population is ‘Vitamin’ D deficient.
Patterns of COVID-19 Mortality and Vitamin D: An Indonesian Study
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3585561
Vitamin D Insufficient Patients 12.55 times more likely to die
Vitamin D Deficient Patients 19.12 times more likely to die
Prevalence and correlates of vitamin D deficiency in US adults.
https://tahomaclinic.com/Private/Articles4/WellMan/Forrest%202011%20-%20Prevalence%20and%20correlates%20of%20vitamin%20D%20deficiency%20in%20US%20adults.pdf
The link between covid deaths and Vitamin D deficiency explains why more than twice as many blacks are dying of covid than whites in both the US and the UK.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-52574931
Patients with vitamin D3 deficiency may be suffering from other diseases, so one cannot conclude that vitamin d3 deficiency directly lead to a patients death, only that it is correlated.
From one of your sources: “Univariate analysis revealed that older and male cases with pre-existing condition and below normal Vitamin D levels were associated with increasing odds of death”
Note the use of an “and” in their statement. They are both older and had per-existing conditions, and therefore a higher rate of death is expected.
Vitamin D3 likely does apparently help, but it will not reduce the death rate by a factor of 20, and not even 2.
Quoting the BBC as a source destroys the veracity of your entire argument. It would be equivalent to me using CNN as a scientific source.
I don’t know if a statistically significant control group could be assembled which had sufficient vitamin D3 levels and various comorbidities.
But I take supplements, albeit far below the megadose levels recommended by commenters here. It’s fall here in Valparaiso, Chile. I’m at a subtropical latitude, but the lower insolation is noticeable. Comparable to San Diego.