Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

[§ê¢rꆧ]

Hello friends, acquaintances, and frenemies alike!!

I've been seeing so many old screennames since I started lurking in February and I'm nostalgic for the bad old days of 2001 through 2008. The urgency and panic I felt then over 9/11 and the Great Recession seems almost quaint compared to the sheer terror I feel today about the Covid 19 pandemic and what may come of it all.

Is it possible that different strains of the virus are (partly) accounting for the wildly different experiences and perceptions everyone is having about this global crisis?

The South China Morning Daily reports Coronavirus’s ability to mutate has been vastly underestimated, and mutations affect deadliness of strains, Chinese study finds


Professor Li Lanjuan is a leading Chinese epidemiologist. Photo: Xinhua

A new study by one of China’s top scientists has found the ability of the new coronavirus to mutate has been vastly underestimated and different strains may account for different impacts of the disease in various parts of the world

Professor Li Lanjuan and her colleagues from Zhejiang University found within a small pool of patients many mutations not previously reported. These mutations included changes so rare that scientists had never considered they might occur.

They also confirmed for the first time with laboratory evidence that certain mutations could create strains deadlier than others.

“Sars-CoV-2 has acquired mutations capable of substantially changing its pathogenicity,” Li and her collaborators wrote in a non-peer reviewed paper released on preprint service medRxiv.org on Sunday.

Li’s study provided the first hard evidence that mutation could affect how severely the virus caused disease or damage in its host.

<....>

The deadliest mutations in the Zhejiang patients had also been found in most patients across Europe, while the milder strains were the predominant varieties found in parts of the United States, such as Washington state, according to their paper.

A separate study had found that New York strains had been imported from Europe. The death rate in New York was similar to that in many European countries, if not worse.

<...>

To verify the theory, Li and colleagues infected cells with strains carrying different mutations. The most aggressive strains could generate 270 times as much viral load as the weakest type. These strains also killed the cells the fastest.

<...>

Li’s team used a more sophisticated method known as ultra-deep sequencing. Each building block of the virus genome was read more than 100 times, allowing the researchers to see changes that could have been overlooked by the conventional approach.

<...>

The researchers also found three consecutive changes – known as tri-nucleotide mutations – in a 60-year-old patient, which was a rare event. Usually the genes mutated at one site at a time. This patient spent more than 50 days in hospital, much longer than other Covid-19 patients, and even his faeces were infectious with living viral strains.

“Investigating the functional impact of this tri-nucleotide mutation would be highly interesting,” Li and colleagues said in the paper.

Professor Zhang Xuegong, head of the bioinformatics division at the National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology at Tsinghua University, said ultra-deep sequencing could be an effective strategy to track the virus’ mutation.

<...>
“Our understanding of the virus remains quite shallow,” Zhang said. Questions such as where the virus came from, why it could kill some healthy young people while generating no detectable symptoms in many others still left scientists scratching their heads.

“If there is a discovery that overturns the prevailing perception, don’t be surprised.”

^^Some foreshadowing at the end there! Is Zhang Xuegong just Rumsfelding about unknown unknowns, or what?


Article link: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science ... nese-study

One of the infographics from the same source:


A week ago, Grizzly's post of that Kim Iversen video started me on this train of thought, and for me it helps explain why this is so confounding and insidious.

[kelley]

is it becoming more and more likely that Our Furor DJT is set up as history's biggest patsy?

aside from the pathological narcissism and the criminal incompetence and self-delusional idiocy and everything else

it's one thing to be an imbecile and quite another to take the fall for the utter collapse of, well, everything

[JackRiddler]

De Vos Inc have a much bigger goal here than Trump's reelection. Much like the Tea Party, which was template for this, the goal is to get ahead of an actual incoming tidal wave of populist anger. This serves two purposes: one, it provides a channel for them to profitably divert that anger -- but two, and probably most important, it's an innoculation, as Hugh used to put it. Now the association is with nitwit assholes in F-350s that have never seen dirt waving cardboard signs at nurses. Now the actual rage of working class people is just "ignorant, right wing assholes," poor deluded MAGA chumps.

The reality, though, is that Americans aren't going to be upset about "being inconvenienced," they're upset because they are broke, abandoned, unemployed and worried about feeding their families and themselves. That's a dangerous mix, so it's important to get ahead of that.

Up to there I can see a lot of this!

[identity]

Activity within this thread seems to be slowing down somewhat (Covid-19-fatigue?), so this might be a good time to place the following here for others to reflect upon in their less-occupied moments. Hopefully, the relevance of the piece to this thread will be obvious to all.

Suppression of Science Within Science
By Henry Bauer
December 17, 2009

I wasn't as surprised as many others were, when it was revealed that climate-change "researchers" had discussed in private e-mails how to keep important data from public view lest it shake public belief in the dogma that human activities are contributing significantly to global warming.

I wasn't particularly surprised because just a few weeks earlier I had spoken at the Oakland Rethinking AIDS Conference about the dogmatism and strong-arm tactics that are rampant in a seemingly increasing range of fields of medicine and science. PowerPoint presentations of most of the talks at the Conference are available at the Conference website. Here's a slightly modified, more readable, text version of my own talk. The theme in a nutshell:

For several centuries, modern science was pretty much a free intellectual market populated by independent entrepreneurs who shared the goal of understanding how the world works. Nowadays it's a corporate enterprise where patents, pay-offs, prestige, and power take priority over getting at the scientific truth, and the powers-that-be have established knowledge monopolies.

I had met Peter Duesberg in person only at the Conference, but I had been quite familiar with him from many videos. What had always stuck in my mind was his expression of surprise, astonishment, sheer disbelief, as he told what happened to him after he questioned whether HIV could be the cause of AIDS:

I had all the students I wanted . . . lab space . . . grants . . . . elected to the National Academy. . . . became California Scientist of the Year. All my papers were published. I could do no wrong . . . professionally . . . until I started questioning . . . that HIV is the cause of AIDS. Then everything changed.

What happened then was that he got no more grants; his manuscripts were rejected without substantive critiques, just that "everyone knows that HIV causes AIDS"; Robert Gallo, who earlier had talked of Duesberg's distinction as a leading retrovirologist, now publicly called him dishonest on scientific matters. Defenders of the mainstream view have even held Duesberg responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of South Africans and have described him as the moral equivalent of a Holocaust denier.

What had Duesberg done to bring about that radical change?

Absolutely nothing. He was doing science just as before: gathering data, documenting his sources, making his analyses, presenting his conclusions for comment by others. Of course Duesberg was surprised that suddenly he had gone from lauded leading scientist to discredited crackpot.

Of course Duesberg was surprised, because his experience of suddenly being sent beyond the pale was obviously an aberration. Science isn't like this. Science is done by the objective self-correcting scientific method. Peer review is impersonal and impartial. Arguments are substantive, not ad hominem. This experience must be unprecedented, unique.

Or, perhaps, shared just by other AIDS Rethinkers, because questioning that HIV causes AIDS is just too outrageous, and quite justifiably it puts AIDS "denialists" outside the norms of scientific behavior and discourse. You wouldn't find anything like this in other, more normal fields of medicine or science.

Well, actually, you would. You do. Duesberg and AIDS Rethinkers are not alone in this. Duesberg's experience is not unique, it's even far from unique.

For example, there's The Skeptical Environmentalist (Cambridge University Press, 2001) in which Bjørn Lomborg discussed global warming and pointed out, documented by >500 mainstream source-references, that Kyoto-type policies would not reduce warming enough to avoid such major consequences as sea-level rises. Therefore it makes sense to devise adaptations that will be needed in any case, a much better investment than trying to reduce global CO2 emissions.

A rather unremarkable economic argument based solidly on calculations from mainstream data.

So Lomborg was surely just as surprised, astonished, disbelieving, as Duesberg had been, to find that his scholarly discussion placed him beyond the pale of civilized scientific discourse. The Chair of the International Panel on Climate Change asked, Where is the difference between Lomborg's view on humans and Hitler's? An Australian columnist agreed: Perhaps there is a case for making climate change denial an offence – it is a crime against humanity after all. An American environmentalist seconded the notion, writing that there should be "war crimes trials for these bastards – some sort of climate Nuremberg."

Of course those comments were not made in the scientific literature, which doesn't countenance that sort of character assassination. Or so one might hope. Hope in vain, it turns out, because a book review in Nature (414: 149-50) held that Lomborg's text employs the strategy of those who . . . argue that gay men aren't dying of AIDS, that Jews weren't singled out by the Nazis for extermination. . . .

So global-warming denialism is as much beyond the pale as AIDS denialism. Except that – and perhaps you've noticed – Duesberg has never denied that AIDS exists, he just has a different explanation for what caused it. And Lomborg doesn't deny that global warming is occurring, he doesn't even question that human activities are contributing significantly to it, he is just making a cost-benefit argument.

Of course, both HIV/AIDS and global warming are matters that involve not just science but public policy and large public expenditures. You wouldn’t find anything like this in a pure science like astronomy or cosmology, would you?
Yes, you would. Yes, you do.

Take cosmology and the Big-Bang theory of the origin of the universe. Halton Arp was a respected, senior American observational astronomer. He noticed that some pairs of quasars that are physically close together nevertheless have very different redshifts. How exciting! Evidently some redshifts are not Doppler effects, in other words, not owing to rapid relative motion away from us. That means the universe-expansion calculations have to be revised. It may not have started as a Big Bang!

That's just the sort of major potential discovery that scientists are always hoping for, isn't it?
Certainly not in this case. Arp was granted no more telescope time to continue his observations. At age 56, Halton Arp emigrated to Germany to continue his work at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics.

But Arp was not alone in his views. Thirty-four senior astronomers from 10 countries, including such stellar figures as Hermann Bondi, Thomas Gold, Amitabha Ghosh, and Jayant Narlikar, sent a letter to Nature pointing out that Big Bang theory
• relies on a growing number of hypothetical . . . things . . . never observed;
• that alternative theories can also explain all the basic phenomena of the cosmos
• and yet virtually all financial and experimental resources in cosmology go to Big-Bang studies.

Just the sort of discussion that goes on in science all the time, arguing pros and cons of competing ideas.
Except that Nature refused to publish the letter.

It was posted on the Internet, and by now hundreds of additional signatures have been added – just like what happened with the letter the Group for Rethinking AIDS had sent to Nature, Science, the Lancet, and the New England Journal of Medicine, all of which had refused to publish it.

At a mainstream conference on "Outstanding questions for the standard cosmological model" – there was not even a mention of the stunningly outstanding question of those anomalous redshifts. So the non-Big-Bang cosmologists organized their own separate meeting – again, like AIDS Rethinkers, or like those who question the mainstream dogma about how to cope with global warming.

For some reason, non-Big-Bang cosmology is as much beyond the pale as AIDS "denial" which isn't denial or global warming "denial" which isn't denial.

Then there's that most abstract of fundamental sciences, theoretical physics. The problem has long been, How to unify relativity and quantum mechanics? Quantum mechanics regards the world as made up of discrete bits whereas relativity regards the world as governed by continuous, not discrete, fields. Since the mid-1970s, there has been no real progress. Everyone has been working on so-called "string theory," which has delivered no testable conclusions and remains a hope, a speculation, not a real theory. Nevertheless, theoretical physicists who want to look at other approaches can't find jobs, can't get grants, can't get published. (Read Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics.)
You begin to wonder, don't you, how many other cases there could be in science, where a single theory has somehow captured all the resources? And where competent scientists who want to try something different are not only blocked but personally insulted?

Well, there's the matter of what killed off the dinosaurs. Everyone knows that the dinosaurs were killed off 65 million years ago when an asteroid hit the Earth. Everyone knows that, that is, except the paleontologists, whose specialty this sort of question is supposed to be.
The asteroid theory had been developed by Luis Alvarez, Nobel Laureate in physics, and his son Walter, a geologist. Paleontologist Dewey McLean had earlier developed a detailed theory based on volcanism – it had long been known that tremendous volcanic activity, the "Deccan Traps," had occurred at the relevant time.

Do you think Alvarez engaged McLean in civilized, substantive discussion?
Or would you be surprised to hear that at a conference, Alvarez said to McLean in private: "I'll wreck your career if you persist." And Alvarez did indeed contact McLean's university and tried to block McLean's promotion – I know that for sure because I was Dean of Dewey McLean's College at the time.

Of course, there's always been resistance to change in science, as in other human activities. But this degree of suppression of minority views and the use of gutter language and character assassination makes it seem like a new phenomenon. At least it has seemed so to the people who have found themselves suddenly ejected from mainstream discourse and resources.

Arp, Duesberg, Lomborg, McLean and other "denialists" of various mainstream theories are surprised because it isn't supposed to be like that in science. Lomborg doesn't know that "AIDS denialists" are treated rather like "global warming denialists." Arp doesn't know that AIDS and global warming "denialists" have it even worse than those who question the Big Bang. McLean doesn't know that "denialists" about AIDS, Big-Bang, and global warming also have their careers threatened. Everyone who experiences personally this sort of thing imagines it's a unique experience, because science isn't supposed to be like this.

But science nowadays IS like this: Disagree with the conventional contemporary scientific wisdom and you won't get grants, won't get published, will be compared to Holocaust deniers.

And it really wasn't always this way. Nowadays "science," "pure research," has become cutthroat in the extreme, and there's much corner-cutting and sheer dishonesty in science. For example, NIH newsletters routinely name specific individuals who are being barred from seeking grants for some specified period because of some act of dishonesty.

There was no need, in the good not-so-old days, for a federal Office of Research Integrity – a designation that George Orwell would have relished. But now we do have such an Office, and at colleges there are Centers for Research Ethics, and publishers put out journals like Accountability in Research – there's a burgeoning young academic industry devoted to telling scientists how to behave properly.
That's what science has come to. Genuine science, the search for better understanding, has been hijacked by self-interest and vested interests and is now captive to knowledge monopolies and research cartels: A single theory exerts dogmatic control over grants, publications, jobs, promotions.

WHY?? How did this happen?

[identity]

And here's a recent piece by Henry Bauer on the coronavirus itself:

Never again say “just the flu”

Posted by Henry Bauer on 2020/04/14

Trying to understand whether CoVID-19 really is a disease caused by the new (in humans) virus SARS-CoV-2 has instead made me realize that I never had a proper understanding of so-called “normal” “seasonal flu”.

Now I’ve learned that “influenza A and B viruses can cause epidemic disease in humans” whereas “type C viruses usually cause a mild, cold-like illness”.
And it is not only new viruses jumping to humans from other species that cause exotic dangerous diseases like SARS or MERS; influenza viruses too have natural reservoirs in other species, in particular aquatic birds, and can cause disease in a range of mammalian species including pigs, seals, horses, and humans (https://www.afro.who.int/health-topics/influenza).

During the so-called “flu season”, we often respond to inquiries about minor discomforts by saying, “it’s just the flu”, but we really should say, “it’s just a cold”, because flu — influenza — is not at all a negligible matter; it can result in significant illness and mortality and can spread rapidly around the world in seasonal epidemics. “Pandemic influenza is caused by a new or novel influenza that is introduced into a population where few people are immune. . . . The 1918 pandemic (influenza A/H1N1) which infected an estimated 500 million and killed 50-100 million people worldwide has been the most devastating pandemic to date . . . [while the] 1957 Asian Flu pandemic (influenza A/H2N2), 1968 Hong Kong flu pandemic (influenza A/H3N2) and the 2009 (influenza A[H1N1]pdm09) result[ed] in far fewer deaths” (https://www.afro.who.int/health-topics/influenza).

What we — meaning I — have been thinking of as “normal seasonal flu” is potentially much more deadly than I had realized. Between 1976 and 2006, annual influenza-associated deaths “with underlying pneumonia and influenza causes” averaged 6300 in the USA. But what makes flu so dangerous is that it can greatly exacerbate other “underlying” challenges to health; so the number of annual influenza-associated deaths with underlying respiratory and circulatory causes averaged 23,600, ranging in individual years from 3300 to more than 48,000; for instance, nearly 41,000 in 2001-2 and more than 95,000 in the two years 2003-5 (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 59 [2010] # 33).

The substantial mortality of “normal flu” hints at the problem of trying to understand whether what is happening nowadays can or must be properly attributed not to influenza but to a novel strain of a Corona virus. When it is “only” a matter of the flu, of course we do not see the sort of panic that the news currently brings us daily about overwhelmed healthcare systems, lack of protective equipment for caregivers, tragic individual deaths, and so on.

But what I just wrote happens not to be true. It turns out that such rather panicked communal behavior was in fact described in the 2017-18 flu season, with no other virus than influenza being blamed:

“medical centers are responding with extraordinary measures: asking staff to work overtime, setting up triage tents, restricting friends and family visits and canceling elective surgeries, to name a few. . . . The hospital’s urgent-care centers have also been inundated, and . . . outpatient clinics have no appointments available. . . several hospitals have set up large ‘surge tents’ outside their emergency departments to accommodate and treat flu patients. . . . some patients had to be treated in hallways . . . . Nurses are being ‘pulled from all floors to care for them’ . . . . Many nurses have also become sick, however, so the staff is also short-handed. . . ‘More and more patients are needing mechanical ventilation due to respiratory failure . . . .’ (Amanda Macmillan, “Hospitals overwhelmed by flu patients are treating them in tents”, TIME, 18 January, 2018).

Just like now, it seems. Yet I do not recall anything like the present media-wide, nation-wide hysteria accompanying these conditions — even though the death toll being ascribed to CoVID-19 seems unlikely to end up any higher than that attributed to “flu” in 2017/18: the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) estimated the number of “influenza-associated” deaths then at 61,000 — which happens to be the same as the current estimated projection for CoVID-19, down from much larger numbers projected a few weeks ago.

The many uncertainties in the 2017-18 estimate are illustrated by the range of the “95% confidence interval”: 46,404 – 94,987 (https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm): not far from 100,000 Americans might have died of flu in that season.

Why did not the mass media as a whole pick up the story about the 2017-18 epidemic after it was published, including on-line, by TIME magazine? Is it just that a novel non-influenza virus thought to have come from China is more newsworthy than “just another bad flu season”?

The last question is, of course, of much less immediate interest than the issue of trying to find out whether the contemporary pandemic really is owing to a novel corona virus originating in China, as opposed to being a misdiagnosed pandemic of “seasonal flu”.

That question may be well-nigh intractable, unanswerable with any degree of certainty, because of many uncertainties that are unlikely ever to be resolved, given the lack of sufficiently specific and genuinely trustworthy data. The reports of mortality from the CDC reflect the data available to them, and there is no obvious other source for such data. The CDC’s publications do not make it possible to specify the actual individual causes of death: deaths of patients suffering from influenza as well as other respiratory diseases and cardiovascular problems are designated “influenza-associated”, and similarly with patients dying of pneumonia, no matter what other than influenza might have been the precipitating cause of the pneumonia.

In the absence of better data than that available from the CDC, we will have to be satisfied with less than demonstrable certainty in seeking to answer the salient question, whether the global pandemic attributed to CoVID-19 might in fact be owing instead to a particularly virulent strain of influenza, or perhaps even some other virus.

But does it really matter, which virus is responsible for what is now happening? After all, the same practical measures — careful personal hygiene, social distancing — would be taken toward trying to limit the spread of whatever the infectious agent is.

In the long run, of course a vaccine could only the effective if it targets the actual cause, but that bridge cannot be crossed now, it lies more than a year in the future.

Irrespective of now or later, though, it does matter very much if we come to believe something about this pandemic that is not true. The consequences of being wrong could do damage in unforeseeable ways far into the future. The inescapable precedent for that is the case of HIV.

More than three decades ago, it came to be almost unanimously but wrongly believed that HIV causes AIDS (for overwhelming proof, see THE CASE AGAINST HIV). Among the consequences have been immeasurable physical and psychological harm to innumerable people; the establishment, as more or less routine medical practice, the use of inevitably toxic substances as though they could kill viruses without killing the host’s cells that the virus uses for its own replication; and the mistaken but widespread belief that testing HIV-positive is in itself proof of active infection with HIV.

That last belief seems to have become generalized to the extent that at present a positive test for “CoVID-19” is accepted without further ado as proof of infection, even as none of the tests have been established as valid in the only way that could be trustworthy, namely, the prior isolation of pure virus direct from an infected individual. How long-lasting the sad consequences of such mistakes can be is illustrated by the fact that no HIV test has yet, after some 35 years, been established as valid for diagnosis of active infection. The mistaken belief concerning HIV has even survived the open fact that a vaccine against HIV had been projected within a couple of years of 1984 but has never eventuated despite much effort.

A very informative and accurate recounting of the HIV blunder, in the context of the “CoVID-19” pandemic, has recently been posted by Celia Farber (“Was the COVID-19 Test meant to detect a virus?”, 7 April 2020): https://uncoverdc.com/2020/04/07/was-the-covid-19-test-meant-to-detect-a-virus

edit: formatting

[chump]

I feel Sofia has got a good grasp of the corrupt corona situation, and while Part 1 of this interesting discussion was definitely worthwhile, Part 2 immediately elaborates on Dr. Kaufmans's apt description posted above of viruses as an non-organic sloughing of cells rather than the actual cause of diseases.

https://oneradionetwork.com/all-shows/s ... l-15-2020/

[...]

Show highlights:

This a great interview with a guest who has a very inquisitive mind. Sofia Smallstorm has greatly researched this topic and you may be shocked by some of the information presented. It’s probably time for everyone to start asking more questions, especially to the so called experts. Please pass this podcast around. Whether you agree or disagree, there’s certainly a lot of food for thought here.

A straight line is the quickest way to the wrong place

Sofia has a great newsletter which can be found on her blog site

Polio was shaken out supposedly due to the vaccine, but now we have a plethora of other palsy type diseases

Sofia recommends reading A shot in the Dark

It was known for decades that chemicals used in farming was causing paralysis in children starting in the 1800s

Why Sofia doesn’t buy the answer that the conditions that show up later in life are due to bad genetics

Using bleach for cleaning everything can cause halide toxicity

How the numbers were fudged after the polio vaccine failed to do it’s job. This is fascinating

Sofia, through her research, feels that viruses are healing agents which are made in certain crises

What gave us AIDS?

http://www.avatarproducts.com

The social distancing happening now is a great way to demonize those around us and create fear about having a body at all. What an excellent opportunity to usher in AI. Perhaps there will be no trust in anything natural. We hope not

and so much more!

https://soundcloud.com/oneradionetwork/ ... 5-2020-one

https://soundcloud.com/oneradionetwork/ ... 5-2020-two

[stickdog99]

I am struck by how little actual, rigorous, coordinated basic microbiological research seems to be taking place. Sure, hundreds of corporations seem to be working on trying to develop products to cash in on this crisis, but other than the odd paper that's about the extent of our scientific inquiry. Meanwhile, there are scores of scientific papers coming out every day concerned with evaluating various government responses to COVID-19. But where are all the papers about COVID-19 itself and all of its various mutations?

Wouldn't learning more COVID-19 mutations and how these mutations change the deadliness and contagiousness of the disease be of upmost importance? Why aren't huge numbers of otherwise unemployed lab biologists (and epidemiologists) studying everything possible about COVID-19 all over the globe? Shouldn't such work be considered essential?

If they are, where is the repository of this information? If not, why hasn't any philanthropist organization funded such a public repository?

Here are some of the recent papers I found on google scholar --

From Two Days Ago

This suggests that competition between viral strains of varying virulence may be at play during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is unclear whether current serologic or viral PCR based assays are able to detect this variability 8. If this hypothesis is correct, it may be important to develop assays based on local viral clades, to determine the distribution of the virus and its spectrum of effects. It is may also be important for modelers to consider these possible variations in SARS-CoV-2 viral pathogenicity as models are developed for gradual relaxation of social restrictions. In particular, differences and timing of the activation of innate or adaptive immunity to the both viral strains as the pandemic progresses could be considered

https://journals.lww.com/em-news/Fullte ... stArticles

Ignore All Rates on COVID-19

United States rates for now will be completely dependent on testing and reporting. This will vary from day to day, from city to rural town, from region to region. We are actually reporting a rate of testing, not a rate of true disease incidence. ...

Be Skeptical of All Subgroup Analyses

Because sample sizes are small and our data are dependent on testing, not true prevalence, any information about subgroups of populations is de facto suspect. Data about subgroups are not prospective, and are not randomized in this scenario, so it is confounded by many unforeseen variables. No one can assume causes, only correlations. Even here, without recognizing potential confounders, this can be obfuscated.

A few days ago, for instance, a report said Americans of relatively young ages—20-64—were the most likely to die from COVID-19. This statement runs counter to everything we know from other countries. How can it be true? There is little testing in the United States. The people who have been tested were most likely international travelers. And those 20-64 are the most likely to be mobile and travel on planes and cruises, so they are the most likely to be infected. This information is subject to selection bias—the number one risk factor was chosen, international travel, and it was conflated with a particular age group.

https://cambridge.org/core/journals/eur ... A08EB53F3B

COVID-19 hits all of the cognitive triggers for how the lay public midjudges risk. Robust
findings from the field of risk perception have identified unique characteristics of a risk that
allow for greater attribution of frequency and probability than is likely to be aligned to the
base-rate statistics of the risk. COVID-19 embodies these features. It is unfamiliar,
invisible, dreaded, potentially endemic, involuntary, disproportionately impacts vulnerable
populations like the elderly, and has the potential for widespread catastrophe.When risks
with such characteristics emerge it is imperative for there to be trust between those in
governance and communication and the lay public in order to quell public fears. This is not
the environment in which COVID-19 has emerged, potentially resulting in even greater
perceptions of risk. ...

Given heightened public awareness of primary public health impacts associated with the
novel coronavirus, media coverage has acted as a feedback loop—reinforcing the generated
public awareness of these impacts. Mass media has showcased epidemiological, medical, and
public health perspectives on the impacts of COVID-19—primarily the lives lost—at a
serious detriment to understanding the big picture. Observationally, there has been rare
inclusion of risk or behavioral science expertise in the media. Analysis of mass global media
and social media coverage in the coming months and years will surely verify this observation.
Even being several months into the COVID-19 outbreak, a comprehensive cost-benefit
analysis of the various policies and combinations of policies put in place around the world
has yet to be produced. Policies have been based on historical data, models and
disproportionate emphasis on mitigating against primary public health impacts. Practitioners
in risk analysis know all to well the dangers of risk analysis and policymaking in silos, and
yet there has been no mainstream thorough cost-benefit analysis on COVID-19 in the context
of a complex, global interconnected risk landscape. ...

What the risk perception and
communication community has urged since the development of the CDC Crisis
Communication Lifecycle26—honest, accurate information (ideally researched and tested)
from trusted spokespeople—has been clearly been ignored at any meaningful level.
The consequences of such poor preparedness and policies have real world implications.
Governance decisions made in reaction to public fears err on quelling short-term hysteria at
the expense of worse overall outcomes. The secondary and tertiary impacts stemming from
COVID-19 will go well beyond the primary public health impacts. Reactive policies like
prolonged quarantines and isolations may very well increase the odds of negative outcomes.
For example, Brooks et al. found negative psychological effects of severe social distancing
measures including post-traumatic stress symptoms, confusion and anger. They
recommended for policymakers to minimize such measures and to communicate consistently
throughout in order to reduce harm.

The ripple effects of the policies put in place to mitigate against the primary public health
impacts of COVID-19 may very well turn out for a worse overall outcomes picture. The role
of the media in contributing to public perceptions of heightened risk, and the reaction of
policymakers to govern based on public fears and not base-rate statistics of the disease
(however fluid) will present several research opportunities in the future across multiple
disciplines. This need not have been the case. It is evident that existing risk communication
research has not been consistently consulted in managing the COVID-19 outbreak, nor has
comprehensive risk-benefit analysis been conducted to prevent worst overall outcomes.
These measures might have offset the power of the media in shaping risk perceptions, which
might have in turn resulted in preventing potentially harmful policies and misallocation of
precious resources in battling this global disaster. Hopefully the takeaways from COVID-19
will prove helpful for the next inevitable disease outbreak.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ful ... /hast.1091

In “Flattening the Curve, Then What?,” Hastings Center fellow Mark Rothstein, of the University of Louisville School of Medicine, argued that flattening the curve in the United States—delaying the spread of infection by imposing physical distancing measures—is not a long‐term strategy but, rather, “a short‐term necessity thrust on the nation by our failure to plan for an inevitable public health crisis.” Jeremy Snyder, of Simon Frasier University, reported on the surge in crowdfunding campaigns to meet Covid‐19‐related needs—“a makeshift response to institutional failures and not a fair or sustainable solution to crises.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41577- ... andingPage

Severe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is characterized by pneumonia, lymphopenia, exhausted lymphocytes and a cytokine storm. Significant antibody production is observed; however, whether this is protective or pathogenic remains to be determined.

https://nature.com/articles/s41591-020- ... andingPage

We report epidemiological and clinical investigations on ten pediatric SARS-CoV-2 infection cases confirmed by real-time reverse transcription PCR assay of SARS-CoV-2 RNA. Symptoms in these cases were nonspecific and no children required respiratory support or intensive care. Chest X-rays lacked definite signs of pneumonia, a defining feature of the infection in adult cases. Notably, eight children persistently tested positive on rectal swabs even after nasopharyngeal testing was negative, raising the possibility of fecal–oral transmission.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586- ... andingPage

There is an urgent need for information on body site-specific virus replication, immunity, and infectivity. Here we provide a detailed virological analysis of nine cases, providing proof of active virus replication in upper respiratory tract tissues. Pharyngeal virus shedding was very high during the first week of symptoms (peak at 7.11 × 108 RNA copies per throat swab, day 4). Infectious virus was readily isolated from throat- and lung-derived samples, but not from stool samples, in spite of high virus RNA concentration. Blood and urine never yielded virus. Active replication in the throat was confirmed by viral replicative RNA intermediates in throat samples. Sequence-distinct virus populations were consistently detected in throat and lung samples from the same patient, proving independent replication. Shedding of viral RNA from sputum outlasted the end of symptoms. Seroconversion occurred after 7 days in 50% of patients (14 days in all), but was not followed by a rapid decline in viral load. COVID-19 can present as a mild upper respiratory tract illness. Active virus replication in the upper respiratory tract puts the prospects of COVID-19 containment in perspective.

link to pdf

To our knowledge, no tools for the assessment of the impact of the covid-19 pandemic and accompanying social distancing rules on daily life in older adults currently exist.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm ... id=3569884

YouTube as a Source of Information on COVID-19: A Pandemic of Misinformation?

Interpretation: Over one-quarter of most viewed YouTube videos on COVID-19 contained misleading information, reaching millions of viewers worldwide. As the current COVID-19 pandemic worsens, public health agencies must better utilize YouTube to deliver timely and accurate information and to minimize the spread of misinformation. This may play a significant role in successfully managing the COVID-19 pandemic.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm ... id=3580550

Did California's Shelter-in-Place Order Work? Early Coronavirus-Related Public Health Effects

Conservative back of the envelope calculations suggest that there were approximately 2 to 4 job losses per coronavirus case averted and 113 to 300 job losses per life saved during this short-run post-treatment period.

https://academic.oup.com/neurosurgery/a ... 55/5822830

In our neurosurgical practice, we have noticed an increasingly alarming number of non-COVID-19 patients being affected by the current pandemic. The same has been seen by our cardiovascular surgical colleagues (personal communication). Given the growing demand for regular hospital and intensive care unit (ICU) beds, the care of patients with diverse neurosurgical pathologies is being delayed or directly canceled, bringing dire consequences to what should be a standard clinical outcome. For example, a 70-yr-old woman who developed a central cord syndrome after traumatic vertebral body fractures, involving the end plates of C4 and C5, underwent an uneventful regular anterior cervical fusion. We usually send such patients to the ICU overnight, but given the high proportion of COVID-19 cases in our ICU, we decided to send her to a regular hospital bed instead, after a few hours in the recovery room. Once there, she developed epiglottic edema, and not being immediately intubated or tracheostomized, she died. We consider her to be the collateral casualty of this viral pandemic, knowing well that she would have been saved if the regular protocol could have been followed. ...

Perhaps to some this may seem like an acceptable trade, a pawn sacrifice as in a chess game or in a war, but this is certainly not the case. An increased number of COVID-19 patients are occupying beds, while non-COVID-19 patients, some of whom are young and with life-threatening conditions, including tumors, aneurysms, and other vascular malformations, are not receiving timely neurosurgical procedures. In the past 2 wk, we have been following this alarming tendency, and it looks like it will not diminish, at least in the short term. These cases stand to increase during this viral pandemic and in the immediate aftermath to the extent that at some point the number of collateral victims may surpass the direct COVID-19 casualties.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 3220301165

Interpret with caution: an evaluation of the commercial AusDiagnostics versus in-house developed assays for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 virus

Conclusions

The AusDiagnostics assay is not specific for the detection SARS-CoV-2. Any positive results should be confirmed using another NAT or sequencing. The case definition used to investigate persons with suspected COVID-19 infection is not specific.

Finally, and completely predictably

Science could be failing to convince a significant number of people about COVID-19 scientific findings, the measures needed to be taken for fighting this pandemic and related present (e.g. social distancing), and future actions (e.g. vaccinations). There are several individual and social factors that are creating and maintaining myths and conspiracy theories. Most of those factors seem to be in play in the current pandemic, as well. The findings of the current study show that the pandemic is creating myths and conspiracy theories believed even by highly educated individuals and that such beliefs could be predictors of health-related risky behavior, such as refusing social distancing, pushing for mass gatherings for demonstrations, and refusing future vaccinations.

[identity]

Useful background info/perspectives on virus-related matters in this free download from archive.org:

VIRUS INC. SCIENTISM'S HIGH PRIESTS FOR PROFIT

https://archive.org/details/virusincscientismshighpriestsforprofit/mode/2up

From the Foreward:

The Content of This Book Has To Be Read, Quickly and Worldwide

The book Virus Mania by Torsten Engelbrecht and Claus Kohnlein presents a
tragic message that will, hopefully, contribute to the re-insertion of ethical values in
the conduct of virus research, public health policies, media communications, and
activities of the pharmaceutical companies. Obviously, elementary ethical rules have
been, to a very dangerous extent, neglected in many of these fields for an alarming
number of years.

When American journalist Celia Farber courageously published, in Harper's
Magazine (March 2006) the article "Out of control-AIDS and the corruption of
medical science," some readers probably attempted to reassure themselves that this
"corruption" was an isolated case. This is very far from the truth as documented so
well in this book by Engelbrecht and Kohnlein. It is only the tip of the iceberg.
Corruption of research is a widespread phenomenon currently found in many major,
supposedly contagious health problems, ranging from AIDS to Hepatitis C, Bovine
spongiform encephalopathy (BSE or "mad cow disease") , SARS, Avian flu and
current vaccination practices (human papillomavirus or HPV vaccination).

In research on all of these six distinct public health concerns scientific research
on viruses (or prions in the case of BSE) slipped onto the wrong track following
basically the same systematic pathway. This pathway always includes several key
steps: inventing the risk of a disastrous epidemic, incriminating an elusive pathogen,
ignoring alternative toxic causes, manipulating epidemiology with non-verifiable
numbers to maximize the false perception of an imminent catastrophe, and promising
salvation with vaccines. This guarantees large financial returns. But how is it possible
to achieve all of this? Simply by relying on the most powerful activator of human
decision making process, i.e. FEAR!

We are not witnessing viral epidemics; we are witnessing epidemics of fear. And
both the media and the pharmaceutical industry carry most of the responsibility for
amplifying fears, fears that happen, incidentally, to always ignite fantastically
profitable business. Research hypotheses covering these areas of virus research are
practically never scientifically verified with appropriate controls. Instead, they are
established by "consensus." This is then rapidly reshaped into a dogma, efficiently
perpetuated in a quasi-religious manner by the media, including ensuring that
research funding is restricted to projects supporting the dogma, excluding research
into alternative hypotheses. An important tool to keep dissenting voices out of the
debate is censorship at various levels ranging from the popular media to scientific
publications.

We haven't learnt well from past experiences. There are still many unanswered
questions on the causes of the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, and on the role of viruses
in post-WWII polio (DDT neurotoxicity?) . These modern epidemics should have
opened our minds to more critical analyses. Pasteur and Koch had constructed an
understanding of infection applicable to several bacterial diseases. But this was
before the first viruses were actually discovered. Transposing the principles of
bacterial infections to viruses was, of course, very tempting but should not have
been done without giving parallel attention to the innumerable risk factors in our
toxic environment; to the toxicity of many drugs, and to some nutritional
deficiencies.

[...]

Etienne de Harven, MD
Professor Emeritus of Pathology at the University of Toronto and
Member of the Sloan Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, New York
(1956 - 1981)
Member of Thabo Mbeki's AIDS Advisory Panel of South Africa
President of Rethinking AIDS (http://www.rethinkingaids.com)

[liminalOyster]

The findings of the current study show that the pandemic is creating myths and [episodes of passionate metastatic skepticism which cloud empirical engagement with overwhelmingly convincing contradictory evidence] believed even by highly educated individuals and that such beliefs could be predictors of health-related risky behavior, such as refusing social distancing, pushing for mass gatherings for demonstrations, and refusing future vaccinations.

Altered lest a weasel word cloud a critical statement of concern.....

[Grizzly]

https://www.instagram.com/tv/B_PrvZdhMiR/?igshid=ysdz4oc2p7w6
HERE’S WHAT WE SHOULD ALL BE DOING RIGHT NOW!

[undead]

Secrets - great article. Mutation is inevitable and makes the whole concept of vaccinating against this basically invalid because there would need to be an endless succession of vaccinations forever. Mutation is not even on the radar. Look at Lyme disease. There are upwards of 50 different strains of Borelia burdorferi, plus the co-infections like erlichia, bartonella, babesia, anaplasmosis, and more - all totally different pathogens that come packaged with B. burgdorferi to create the phenomenon we call "Lyme disease". There is heavy denial in the medical system of the reality of chronic Lyme disease, and researchers debate whether that phenomenon constitutes residual permanent damage from the infection or an ongoing infection. This is up for debate because testing is not accurate. You can test for B. burgdorferi antibodies but the test is so generalized that it can't even distinguish between B. burgdorferi and syphilis, another spirochete. If you test positive for antibodies, there is no way to now if the infection is active or not. Another thing not on the radar for COVID19 - everyone assumes the testing is accurate, even though the are openly saying that there is a 30% false negative rate. Nobody wants to think about the possibility that 1. testing is not accurate and could possibly never be accurate, and 2. all the people who are "asymptomatic" infections could still have a permanent health problem that will manifest later in life as a result of stress, trauma, age, etc. The medical system is not infallible. It is a very real possibility that being "COVID19 positive" could turn out to be a lot like HIV positive - a lifelong crippling issue requiring constant maintenance for millions and millions of people who get it.

[liminalOyster]

https://www.instagram.com/tv/B_PrvZdhMiR/?igshid=ysdz4oc2p7w6
HERE’S WHAT WE SHOULD ALL BE DOING RIGHT NOW!

I hate myself for how much this is making me laugh.

[undead]

comic relief interlude...



The still preview snapshot of the video is even great by itself.

[JackRiddler]

https://www.instagram.com/tv/B_PrvZdhMiR/?igshid=ysdz4oc2p7w6
HERE’S WHAT WE SHOULD ALL BE DOING RIGHT NOW!

I hate myself for how much this is making me laugh.

Is it too late to make her vice-president?

[JackRiddler]

CORRECTED AWESOMELY BAD MATH ERROR

Grrrrrr at myself.

First quasi-random sampling of 3,000 in New York State finds that 21% of those in the five boroughs (pop. 8.8 million) test positive for antibodies. This corresponds to 1.7 million, which honestly seems low to me. I'd guess this is already the second wave, with the first no longer antibody positive. But IANAE!!! A Northwestern model has very credibly revised the number of cases on 1 March from the then-official count of 1 to a very credible almost 11K, given not exactly shocking discoveries that the virus made its entry into the city much earlier than previously determined. Everyone who's been on the subway can guess what happened after that (and why subway workers must have the highest death rate of any profession, with 83 recorded).

The total of NYC deaths by the Johns Hopkins death map is 15K through today, or 17K through 18 April by an estimate of excess deaths since 4 Mar. Excess death may be a small overcount, but we've had another near 2K dead in the last five days. This indicates a lethality (deaths/infections) of ONE PERCENT. Cuomo (McKinsey, actually) called it 0.5 percent on a slide.

Tt looks like relatively low-end models will prevail, although EVERYTHING remains unconfirmed & unproven and in case anyone tells you that a given study is not peer-reviewed, remind them that ZERO studies to date are peer-reviewed (of necessity) and that nothing in the entire field of C19 research can claim a study period more longitudinal than 2 months. I will write up more and do lots of links on the more data-ish thread.

.