Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by JackRiddler » Sat Jun 13, 2020 10:02 pm
Wombaticus Rex » Sat Jun 13, 2020 8:42 pm wrote:^^Wrong thread or what? Grateful for the read, though.
I don't think closing this thread is a good idea
by norton ash » Sat Jun 13, 2020 11:00 pm
More locally to the United States (and our useless peanut gallery to the North)
by Spiro C. Thiery » Sun Jun 14, 2020 1:11 am
by thrulookingglass » Sun Jun 14, 2020 8:20 am
by SonicG » Sun Jun 14, 2020 10:25 pm
Monday, June 15
00:05 GMT - China ramps up testing in Beijing after spike in cases
China's vice premier Sun Chunlan is calling for "decisive measures" in Beijing as the capital moves to mass coronavirus testing after a spike in cases connected to a major wholesale food market.
Late on Sunday, all companies were ordered to supervise a 14-day home quarantine for employees who'd visited the Xinfadi market or been in contact with anyone who had been there. The market has been closed and a number of residential estates around it sealed off. Schools and kindergartens in the area have been closed too.
"Beijing has entered an extraordinary period," city spokesman Xu Hejian said.
According to state media, latest figures show 49 new cases in mainland China, ten imported and 39 acquired locally - 36 of them in Beijing.
(Al Jeezera)
Mike Davis: Reopening the Economy Will Send Us to Hell
People desperately need to go back to work and save what they can of their lives. But heeding the siren call of the MAGA demonstrators, puppets on strings manipulated by hedge funds and billionaire casino owners, to “reopen the economy” would only result in tragedy. Consider these points:
Sending millions of people back to work without protection or testing would be a death sentence for thousands. Thirty-four million workers are over fifty-five; ten million of them over sixty-five. Millions more suffer from diabetes, chronic respiratory problems, and so on. Straight from home to work to ICU to morgue.
Millions of our “essential workers” face intolerable hazards because of the shortage of protective equipment. It will be weeks, at best, before there will be an adequate supply for medical workers. Workers in warehouses, markets, and fast food have no guarantee of ever receiving masks, unless legislation compels it. If this is a war, Trump’s refusal to use existing laws to federalize the manufacture of masks and ventilators is a war crime.
The proposal to test people’s blood and then issue back-to-work certificates if they have the right antibodies is mere fantasy at the moment. Washington has allowed more than a hundred different firms to sell serological kits without human trials or FDA certification. The results they give are all over the map, just a mess. It may be weeks or longer before public health workers have reliable diagnostics to use. Even then it would take months to test the workforce and it’s doubtful that enough people would have the antibodies to safely staff all the closed businesses.
The most heroic assumption is that a vaccine could be available by spring 2021, although no one knows how long its conferred immunity would last. Meanwhile, hundreds of research teams and smaller biotech firms are working on medicines that will reduce the risk of respiratory failure and serious heart or kidney damage. But this sprawling scientific experiment lacks coordination and funding from Washington.
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/04/mike-dav ... isis-trump
by Spiro C. Thiery » Tue Jun 16, 2020 1:42 am
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/06/covid-19-coronavirus-longterm-symptoms-months/612679/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB
COVID-19 Can Last for Several Months
The disease’s “long-haulers” have endured relentless waves of debilitating symptoms—and disbelief from doctors and friends.
Story by Ed Yong | June 4, 2020 | Health
For Vonny LeClerc, day one was March 16.
Hours after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson instated stringent social-distancing measures to halt the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, LeClerc, a Glasgow-based journalist, arrived home feeling shivery and flushed. Over the next few days, she developed a cough, chest pain, aching joints, and a prickling sensation on her skin. After a week of bed rest, she started improving. But on day 12, every old symptom returned, amplified and with reinforcements: She spiked an intermittent fever, lost her sense of taste and smell, and struggled to breathe.
When I spoke with LeClerc on day 66, she was still experiencing waves of symptoms. “Before this, I was a fit, healthy 32-year-old,” she said. “Now I’ve been reduced to not being able to stand up in the shower without feeling fatigued. I’ve tried going to the supermarket and I’m in bed for days afterwards. It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced before.” Despite her best efforts, LeClerc has not been able to get a test, but “every doctor I’ve spoken to says there’s no shadow of a doubt that this has been COVID,” she said. Today is day 80.
COVID-19 has existed for less than six months, and it is easy to forget how little we know about it. The standard view is that a minority of infected people, who are typically elderly or have preexisting health problems, end up in critical care, requiring oxygen or a ventilator. About 80 percent of infections, according to the World Health Organization, “are mild or asymptomatic,” and patients recover after two weeks, on average. Yet support groups on Slack and Facebook host thousands of people like LeClerc, who say they have been wrestling with serious COVID-19 symptoms for at least a month, if not two or three. Some call themselves “long-termers” or “long-haulers.”
I interviewed nine of them for this story, all of whom share commonalities. Most have never been admitted to an ICU or gone on a ventilator, so their cases technically count as “mild.” But their lives have nonetheless been flattened by relentless and rolling waves of symptoms that make it hard to concentrate, exercise, or perform simple physical tasks. Most are young. Most were previously fit and healthy. “It is mild relative to dying in a hospital, but this virus has ruined my life,” LeClerc said. “Even reading a book is challenging and exhausting. What small joys other people are experiencing in lockdown—yoga, bread baking—are beyond the realms of possibility for me.”
Even though the world is consumed by concern over COVID-19, the long-haulers have been largely left out of the narrative and excluded from the figures that define the pandemic. I can pull up an online dashboard that reveals the numbers of confirmed cases, hospitalizations, deaths, and recoveries—but LeClerc falls into none of those categories. She and others are trapped in a statistical limbo, uncounted and thus overlooked.
Some have been diagnosed through tests, while others, like LeClerc, have been told by their doctors that they almost certainly have COVID-19. Still, many long-haulers have faced disbelief from friends and medical professionals because they don’t conform to the typical profile of the disease. People have questioned how they could possibly be so sick for so long, or whether they’re just stressed or anxious. “It feels like no one understands,” said Chloe Kaplan from Washington, D.C., who works in education and is on day 78. “I don’t think people are aware of the middle ground, where it knocks you off your feet for weeks, and you neither die nor have a mild case.”
The notion that most cases are mild and brief bolsters the belief that only the sick and elderly need isolate themselves, and that everyone else can get infected and be done with it. “It establishes a framework in which ‘not hiding’ from the disease looks a manageable and sensible undertaking,” writes Felicity Callard, a geographer at the University of Glasgow, who is on day 77. As the pandemic discourse turns to talk of a second wave, long-haulers who are still grappling with the consequences of the first wave are frustrated. “I’ve been very concerned by friends and family who just aren’t taking this seriously because they think you’re either asymptomatic or dead,” said Hannah Davis, an artist from New York City, who is on day 71. “This middle ground has been hellish.”
It “has been like nothing else on Earth,” said Paul Garner, who has previously endured dengue fever and malaria, and is currently on day 77 of COVID-19. Garner, an infectious-diseases professor at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, leads a renowned organization that reviews scientific evidence on preventing and treating infections. He tested negative on day 63. He had waited to get a COVID-19 test partly to preserve them for health-care workers, and partly because, at one point, he thought he was going to die. “I knew I had the disease; it couldn’t have been anything else,” he told me. I asked him why he thought his symptoms had persisted. “I honestly don’t know,” he said. “I don’t understand what’s happening in my body.”
On March 17, a day after LeClerc came down with her first symptoms, SARS-CoV-2 sent Fiona Lowenstein to the hospital. Nine days later, after she was discharged, she started a Slack support group for people struggling with the disease. The group, which is affiliated with a wellness organization founded by Lowenstein called Body Politic, has been a haven for long-haulers. One channel for people whose symptoms have lasted longer than 30 days has more than 3,700 members.
“The group was a savior for me,” said Gina Assaf, a design consultant in Washington, D.C., who is now on day 77. She and other members with expertise in research and survey design have now sampled 640 people from the Body Politic group and beyond. Their report is neither representative nor peer-reviewed, but it provides a valuable snapshot of the long-hauler experience.
Of those surveyed, about three in five are between the ages of 30 and 49. About 56 percent have not been hospitalized, while another 38 percent have visited the ER but were not admitted. About a quarter have tested positive for COVID-19 and almost half have never been tested at all. Some became sick in mid-March, when their home countries were severely short on tests. (Most survey respondents live in the U.S. and the U.K.) Others were denied testing because their symptoms didn’t match the standard set. Angela Meriquez Vázquez, a children’s activist in Los Angeles, had gastrointestinal problems and lost her sense of smell, but because she didn’t have a cough and her fever hadn’t topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit, she didn’t meet L.A.’s testing criteria. By the time those criteria were loosened, Vázquez was on day 14. She got a test, and it came back negative. (She is now on day 69.)
A quarter of respondents in the Body Politic survey have tested negative, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have COVID-19. Diagnostic tests for SARS-CoV-2 miss infections up to 30 percent of the time, and these false negatives become more likely a week after a patient’s first symptoms appear. In the Body Politic survey, respondents with negative test results were tested a week after those with positive ones, on average, but the groups did not differ in their incidence of 60 different symptoms over time. Those matching patterns strongly suggest that those with negative tests are indeed dealing with the same disease. They also suggest that the true scope of the pandemic has been underestimated, not just because of the widespread lack of testing but because many people who are getting tested are receiving false negatives.
COVID-19 affects many different organs—that much is now clear. But in March, when many long-haulers were first falling sick with gut, heart, and brain problems, the disease was still regarded as a mainly respiratory one. To date, the only neurological symptom that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists in its COVID-19 description is a loss of taste or smell. But other neurological symptoms are common among the long-haulers who answered the Body Politic survey.
As many people reported “brain fogs” and concentration challenges as coughs or fevers. Some have experienced hallucinations, delirium, short-term memory loss, or strange vibrating sensations when they touch surfaces. Others are likely having problems with their sympathetic nervous system, which controls unconscious processes like heartbeats and breathing: They’ll be out of breath even when their oxygen level is normal, or experience what feel like heart attacks even though EKG readings and chest X-rays are clear. These symptoms wax, wane, and warp over time. “It really is a grab bag,” said Davis, who is a co-author of the Body Politic survey. “Every day you wake up and you might have a different symptom.”
It’s not clear why this happens. Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale, offers three possibilities. Long-haulers might still harbor infectious virus in some reservoir organ, which is missed by tests that use nasal swabs. Or persistent fragments of viral genes, though not infectious, may still be triggering a violent immune overreaction, as if “you’re reacting to a ghost of a virus,” Iwasaki says. More likely, the virus is gone but the immune system, having been provoked by it, is stuck in a lingering overactive state.
It’s hard to distinguish between these hypotheses, because SARS-CoV-2 is new and because the aftermath of viral infections is poorly understood. Many diseases cause long-lasting symptoms, but these might go unnoticed as trends unless epidemics are especially large. “Nearly every single person with Ebola has some long-term chronic complication, from subtle to obviously debilitating,” says Craig Spencer of the Columbia University Medical Center, who caught the virus himself in 2014. Some of those persistent problems had been noted during early Ebola outbreaks, but weren’t widely appreciated until 28,600 people were infected in West Africa from 2013 to 2016.
The sheer scale of the COVID-19 pandemic, which reached more than 6 million confirmed cases worldwide in a matter of months, means that long-haulers are now finding one another in sufficient numbers to shape their own narrative.
As the pandemic continues, long-haulers are navigating a landscape of uncertainty and fear with a map whose landmarks don’t reflect their surroundings. If your symptoms last for longer than two weeks, for how long should you expect to be sick? If they differ from the official list, how do you know which ones are important? “I’m acutely aware of my body at all times of the day,” LeClerc told me. “It shrinks your entire world to an almost reptilian response to your surroundings.”
If you’re still symptomatic, could you conceivably infect someone else if you leave your home? Garner, the infectious-disease expert, is confident that this far out, he’s not shedding live virus anymore. But Meg Hamilton, who is a nursing student in Odenton, Maryland—and, full disclosure, my sister-in-law—said that her local health department considered her to be contagious as long as she had a fever; she is on day 56, and has only had a few normal temperature readings. Davis said that she and her partner, who live in different apartments, talked through the risks and decided to reunite on day 59. Until then, she had been dealing with two months of COVID-19 alone.
The isolation of the pandemic has been hard enough for many healthy people. But it has exacerbated the foggy minds, intense fatigue, and perpetual fear of erratic symptoms that long-haulers are also dealing with. “It plays with your head, man,” Garner said. Some feel guilt over being incapacitated even though their cases are “mild.” Some start doubting or blaming themselves. In her fourth week of fever, Hamilton began obsessively worrying that she had been using her thermometer incorrectly. “I also felt like I wasn’t being mentally strong enough, and by allowing myself to say that I don’t feel good, I was prolonging the fever,” she said.
Then there’s the matter of who to tell—and when. At first, Hamilton kept the news from her parents. She didn’t want them to worry, and she assumed she’d be better in two weeks. But as two weeks became three, then four, then five, the omission started feeling like an outright lie. Her concern that they would be worried morphed into concern that they would be mad. (She finally told them last week; they took it well.)
Other long-haulers have been frustrated by their friends’ and families’ inability to process a prolonged illness. “People know how to react to you having it or to you getting better,” LeClerc said. But when symptoms are rolling instead of abating, “people don’t have a response they can reach for.” They ask if she’s improving, in expectation that the answer is yes. When the answer is instead a list of ever-changing symptoms, they stop asking. Others pivot to disbelief. “I’ve had messages saying this is all in your head, or it’s anxiety,” LeClerc said.
Many such messages come from doctors and nurses. Davis described her memory loss and brain fog to a neurologist, who told her she had ADHD. “You feel really scared: These are people you’re trying to get serious help from, and they don’t even understand your reality,” she said. Vázquez said her physicians repeatedly told her she was just having panic attacks—but she knows herself well enough to discount that. “My anxiety is thought-based,” but with COVID-19, “the physical symptoms happen first,” she said.
Athena Akrami, a neuroscience professor at University College London, said two doctors suggested that she was stressed, while a fellow neuroscientist told her to calm down and take antidepressants. “I’m a very calm person, and something is wrong in my body,” said Akrami, who is now on day 79, and is also a co-author on the Body Politic survey. “As a scientist, I understand there are so many unknowns about the virus, but as a patient, I need acknowledgment.” Every day, Akrami said, “is like being in a tunnel.”
To be sure, many health-care workers are also exhausted, having spent several months fighting a new disease that they barely understand, without enough masks and other protective supplies. But well before the pandemic, the health-care profession had a long history of medical gaslighting—downplaying a patient’s physical suffering as being all in their head, or caused by stress or anxiety. Such dismissals particularly affect women, who are “less likely to be perceived as credible witnesses to our own experiences,” said LeClerc. And they’re especially common when women have subjective symptoms like pain or fatigue, as most long-haulers do. When Garner wrote about those same symptoms for the British Medical Journal’s blog, “I had an unbelievable feeling of relief,” Callard, the geographer, told me. “Since he’s a guy and a professor of infectious disease, he has the kind of epistemic authority that will be harder to discount.”
Garner’s descriptions of his illness are similar to those of many long-haulers who have been taken less seriously. “It wasn’t like he wrote those posts in some arcane language that’s steeped in authority,” said Sarah Ramey, a musician and author in Washington, D.C. “If you took his words, put my name on them, and put them up on Medium, people would say, ‘Ugh, who is this person and what is she talking about?’”
Ramey can empathize with long-haulers. In her memoir, The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness, she writes about her 17-year ordeal of excruciating pain, crushing fatigue, gastro-catastrophes, and medical gaslighting. “Being isolated and homebound, incredible economic insecurity, the government not doing enough, testing not being up to snuff—all of that is the lived experience of someone like me for decades,” she says. “The illness itself is horrible and ravaging, but being told you’ve made it up, over and over again, is by far the worst of it.”
Formally, Ramey has myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and complex regional pain syndrome. Informally, she’s part of a group she has dubbed WOMIs—women with mysterious illnesses. Such conditions include ME/CFS, fibromyalgia, and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. They disproportionately affect women; have unclear causes, complex but debilitating symptoms, and no treatments; and are hard to diagnose and easy to dismiss. According to the Institute of Medicine, 836,000 to 2.5 million people in the U.S. alone have ME/CFS. Between 84 and 91 percent are undiagnosed.
That clusters of ME/CFS have followed many infectious outbreaks is noteworthy. In such events, some people get better quickly, others are sick for longer with postviral fatigue, and still others are suffering months or years later. In one Australian study, 11 percent of people infected with Ross River virus, Epstein-Barr virus, or the bacterium behind Q fever were diagnosed with ME/CFS after six months. In a study of 233 Hong Kong residents who survived the SARS epidemic of 2003, about 40 percent had chronic-fatigue problems after three years or so, and 27 percent met the CDC’s criteria for ME/CFS. Many different acute pathogens seem to trigger the same inflammatory responses that culminate in the same chronic endgame. Many individuals in this community are worried about COVID-19, according to Ramey: “You’ve got this highly infectious virus sweeping around the world, and it would be unusual if you didn’t see a big uptick in ME/CFS cases.”
ME/CFS is typically diagnosed when symptoms persist for six months or more, and the new coronavirus has barely been infecting humans for that long. Still, many of the long-haulers’ symptoms “sound exactly like those that patients in our community experience,” says Jennifer Brea, the executive director of the advocacy group #MEAction.
LeClerc, Akrami, and others have noted that their symptoms reappear when they try to regain a measure of agency by cleaning, working out, or even doing yoga. This is post-exertional malaise—the defining feature of ME/CFS. It’s a severe multi-organ crash that follows activity as light as a short walk. It’s also distinct from mere exhaustion: You can’t just push through it, and you’ll feel much worse if you try. The ME/CFS community has learned that resting as much as possible in the early months of postviral fatigue is crucial. Garner learned that lesson the hard way. After writing that “my disease has lifted,” he did a high-intensity workout, and was bedridden for three days. He is now reading literature about ME/CFS and listening to his sister, who has had the disease. “We have much to learn from that community,” he says.
The symptoms of ME/CFS have long been trivialized; its patients disbelieved; its researchers underfunded. The condition is especially underdiagnosed among black and brown communities, who are also disproportionately likely to be infected and killed by COVID-19. If the pandemic creates a large population of people who have symptoms that are similar to those of ME/CFS, it might trigger research into this and other overlooked diseases. Several teams of scientists are already planning studies of COVID-19 patients to see if any become ME/CFS patients—and why. Brea says she would welcome such a development. But she also feels “a lot of grief for people who may have to walk that path, [and] grief for the time we could have spent over the last four decades researching this so we’d have a better understanding of how to treat patients now.”
Some long-haulers will get better. The Body Politic Slack support group has a victories channel, where people post about promising moments on the road to recovery. Such stories were scarce last month, but more have appeared in the past weeks. The celebrations are always tentative, though. Good days are intermingled with terrible ones. “It’s a reverse-circling of the drain,” Vázquez said. “It has gotten better, but I track that trajectory in weeks, not days.” The COVID-19 dashboard from Johns Hopkins shows that about 2.7 million people around the world have “recovered” from the disease. But recovery is not a simple matter of flipping a switch. For some, it will take more time than the entire duration of the pandemic thus far.
Some survivors will have scar tissue from the coronavirus’s assault on their lungs. Some will still be weak after lengthy stays in ICUs or on ventilators. Some will eventually be diagnosed with ME/CFS. Whatever the case, as the pandemic progresses, the number of people with medium-to-long-term disabilities will increase. “Some science fiction—and more than a few tech bros—have led us to believe in a nondisabled future,” says Ashley Shew of Virginia Tech, who studies the intersection between technology and disability. “But whether through environmental catastrophe, or new viruses, we can expect more, exacerbated, and new disabilities.”
In the early 1950s, polio permanently disabled tens of thousands of people in the U.S. every year, most of whom were children or teenagers who “saw their futures as able and healthy,” Shew says. In the ’60s and ’70s, those survivors became pioneers of the disability-rights movement in the U.S.
Perhaps COVID-19 will similarly galvanize an even larger survivor cohort. Perhaps, collectively, they can push for a better understanding of neglected chronic diseases, and an acceptance of truths that the existing disability community have long known. That health and sickness are not binary. That medicine is as much about listening to patients’ subjective experiences as it is about analyzing their organs. That being a survivor is something you must also survive.
Ed Yong is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers science.
by Belligerent Savant » Thu Jul 02, 2020 8:06 pm
Good morning,
I am the Managing Partner and General Counsel of a Texas based company that owns and operates 13 free-standing emergency clinics in the State of Texas. I follow your reporting and wanted to share with you some information on Texas. I want people to hear this story as opposed to the mainstream reporting. However, I am sensitive about putting a target on myself or my company for conveying this information. I am not sure how you’ve handled this type of situation but I suspect you’ve had other people send you information who are concerned about becoming a target.
In June, we tested over 2,231 patients (data through last Thursday). Positive rate is now close to 20% (was 4-6% in May). Vast majority of the cases are mild to very mild symptoms. Average age of the people getting tested in mid-30s.
Very different patient (in terms of age) than we’ve seen before June. Most of these patients would not have met criteria that we previously had (and all the health facilities had) for Covid testing. Now with more testing kits we are able to test a broader group of patients.
Clinically, we’ve had very few hospital transfers because of Covid. Vast majority of the patients are better within 2-3 days of the visit and most would be described as having a cold (a mild one at that) or the symptoms related to allergies. We’ve often provided a steroid shot and some antibiotics. By the time we have follow-up calls, most of the patients are no longer experiencing any symptoms. They often say the shot really made a difference.
In terms of what is driving them to the ER — Roughly 1/2 have been told by their employers to get a test. They have a sneeze or a cough and their employer tells them to go get tested. The other 1/2 just want to know. They have mild symptoms (and some don’t have any symptoms but game the system and check a box that they have a symptom so they can get a test — they cannot get a test unless they present with symptoms. If they have no symptoms we send them away — which does happen.)
The average length of stay of Covid patients is 3-5 days. Much lower than the patients being seen in April and early May. Their symptoms are also milder. Most of the patients are not ending up in the ICU. The hospital ICUs are filled with really sick people with non-Covid issues. They [didn’t] come in earlier because they were scared and now they are super sick. From multiple sources at different hospitals — they have plenty of capacity and no shortage of acute care beds.
No real data on breakdown of patients who have Covid but are not in the hospital because of Covid. Recognition that because all patients are tested for Covid you have some percentage of patients listed as Covid patients who are non Covid symptomatic and that the hospitalization rate is somewhat driven by hospitals taking their normal patients with other medical issues.
Finally, heard several stories of how discharge planners are being pressured to put Covid as primary diagnosis — as that pays significantly better. Hospitals want to avoid the discussion but if they don’t they risk another shutdown. This may be an explanation for why there is a gap in hospital executives saying they have plenty of capacity and the increasing number of Covid hospitalizations. You open up your hospitals for normal medical care and you test everyone (sic) of those patients — the result is higher percentage of patients who have Covid — now.
Overall, based on what we are seeing at our facilities, the above information is really a positive story. You have more people testing positive with really minimal symptoms. This means that the fatality rate is less than commonly reported.
Covid-19 Skepticism Puts Author Alex Berenson at Center of Amazon Controversy
Booklet written by spy novelist and ex-journalist was temporarily rejected by company’s self-publishing unit
Alex Berenson has spent much of his career as an investigative business reporter and a writer of spy thrillers. Now his skepticism of how governments are handling the Covid-19 crisis has put him at the center of a controversy over the pandemic and Amazon.com Inc.’s market power.
Mr. Berenson said Thursday on Twitter that a booklet he wrote about the pandemic was rejected by Kindle Direct Publishing, Amazon’s self-publishing arm. Titled “Unreported Truths About Covid-19 and Lockdowns,” it argues that estimates about the deadliness of the disease have been overstated and that lockdowns have been counterproductive.
Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk criticized Amazon’s decision in a tweet that said, “This is insane@JeffBezos.”
Amazon later said in a statement that “the book was removed in error.”
On Friday, the self-published booklet was No. 2 on Amazon’s Kindle Store bestseller list.
Mr. Berenson’s views on Covid-19 put him out of step with most policy makers and public-health experts, who believe lockdowns have been necessary to slow the spread of the disease and prevent hospitals from being overrun.
Mr. Berenson said that toward the end of March he became increasingly skeptical about the models used to forecast the number of hospitalizations linked to Covid-19. He then used Twitter to raise questions as to whether a national lockdown was necessary to prevent the health-care system from collapsing. “When I said the system wasn’t collapsing and the models were wrong, people hated that,” Mr. Berenson said in an interview.
by Belligerent Savant » Thu Jul 02, 2020 9:10 pm
It turns out that COVID-19 has a much lower fatality rate, especially among young people, when we include all of the previously undiagnosed cases.
The Centers for Disease Control Director Robert R. Redfield now estimates that about 20 million Americans have had and recovered from COVID-19. That means this deadly disease does not have a fatality rate of 6 percent but of 0.6 percent. And among young people the fatality rate is magnitudes lower than that.
The fact that increased testing means we are discovering more young and healthy people with COVID-19 should not be surprising or alarming in the slightest.
The hospitals are under financial pressure from having to mostly stop doing business for months, so they are classifying as many people as possible as a COVID case in order to gain the subsidy offered by the federal government. Overall, this is good news. Somehow, this is being spun as some kind of disaster that once again requires shutting down (though doing so will accomplish nothing).
by liminalOyster » Fri Jul 03, 2020 12:00 am
by Harvey » Fri Jul 03, 2020 6:41 am
by Grizzly » Fri Jul 03, 2020 8:28 pm
Part 2 ----
Brainwashing and Mental Health
Historically speaking, social isolation as a protocol got its start in June of 1951, when a “group of psychologists and doctors with ties to US, UK and Canadian military forces held a secret meeting at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Montreal.”[16]
The minutes from the meeting revealed that the discussion centered on the question of “brainwashing” and focused much on social deprivation and isolation as means to achieving that end, or otherwise “elicit[ing] false confession or manipulat[ing] behaviour.” The doctors “considered various artificial conditions that could be used to create states of helplessness and extreme suggestibility” – of which social isolation and permutations thereof topped the list.
Researcher Hebb was given $30,000 – which was a tidy sum back in 1951 – to study “isolation and solitary confinement, which can have acute and lasting effects on mental health, and has a long history as a form of punishment and as a mode of philosophical inquiry.”
Social isolation was found to be a quite promising technique for the military to deploy, regardless of the fact that it was torture – or perhaps because of the fact that it was torture – in terms of aiding brainwashing. The exact mechanics of which neuroscientist John Lilly explained thoroughly in a paper delivered to a group of military and intelligence officials in the late 1950s:
When a person is isolated for long enough, Lilly wrote, they tend to absorb signal data on demand. Under these conditions there can be an “injection of outside data” into the “inside generators,” with re-programming developing.[17]
Put simply? One can turn human beings into brain-washed robots simply by socially isolating them for short periods of time.
The mechanics behind this are more well understood through today’s world of functional magnetic resonance imaging. Recent studies using fMRI show that people who are shunted into social isolation have a less active part of the brain known as the ventral striatum.
The ventral striatum part of the brain – which is hurt by social isolation – is absolutely “critical to learning” and is a “key portion of the brain” that is “activated through primary rewards such as food and secondary rewards…. Social rewards and feelings of love also may activate the region.”[18] The researchers in this study – like many above – concluded that social isolation is as detrimental as smoking.
How Social Isolation Affects the Brain
Not only does social distancing and social isolation – as visually proven by way of MRI – shut off the very part of the brain children need in order to learn while at school, another study shows that “social isolation causes the build-up of a particular chemical in the brain.” While the study was conducted on mice, humans have the same have an analogous brain signaling structure. The build-up of the protein in the brains of mice exposed to social isolation was once again devastating:
Confirming and extending previous observations, the researchers showed that social isolation leads to a broad array of behavioral changes in mice. These include increased aggressiveness towards unfamiliar mice, persistent fear, and hypersensitivity to threatening stimuli. For example, when encountering a threatening stimulus, mice that have been socially isolated remain frozen in place long after the threat has passed, whereas normal mice stop freezing soon after the threat is removed.
Unless we are looking to create paranoid children living in an adrenalized PTSD world that become prey for predators, or double their risk of death while giving them the functional equivalent of a 15-cigarette-a-day bad alky habit – we would do well to take heed of the vast amount of medical studies on this point – before implementing socially isolating or distancing protocols in the classrooms.
At this point, I’d like to further examine the physical changes to the brain which occur with social isolation by turning back to the New Yorker article, and its examination of the physical reasons underlying why John McCain and other POW’s subjectively experienced social isolation as identical to (or worse than) physical torture. The author of the New Yorker article aptly noted that “what happened to them” in terms of social isolation actually was “physical” – as “EEG studies going back to the nineteen-sixties have shown diffuse slowing of brain waves in prisoners” who are socially isolated for more than a week.
Indeed, as recently as 1992, fifty-seven prisoners of war, released after an average of six months in detention camps in the former Yugoslavia, were examined using EEG-like tests. What those recordings revealed is “brain abnormalities for months afterward.” The article went on to note that the most severe EEG results were found in prisoners who had endured either head trauma sufficient to render them unconscious … or social isolation. It concluded:
Without sustained social interaction, the human brain may become as impaired as one that has incurred a traumatic injury.
To wrap up the harmful neurological, cognitive, physical, emotional and social fall-out from socially-isolating mechanisms, it is worth noting what one author determined after concluding all of his POW interviews:
Whether in Walpole or Beirut or Hanoi, all human beings experienced isolation as torture.
by liminalOyster » Fri Jul 03, 2020 10:33 pm
Curiously, what none of the coverage of [Leigh] Dundas [maker of FB video around which that piece is based] last year mentioned was that she’s been a Scientologist for at least a decade. She went Clear in 2010, and eight years ago she was beginning her OT levels, according to Scientology’s own publications.
by Elvis » Sat Jul 04, 2020 12:57 am
liminalOyster » Fri Jul 03, 2020 7:33 pm wrote:Curiously, what none of the coverage of [Leigh] Dundas [maker of FB video around which that piece is based] last year mentioned was that she’s been a Scientologist for at least a decade. She went Clear in 2010, and eight years ago she was beginning her OT levels, according to Scientology’s own publications.
https://tonyortega.org/2020/05/26/scien ... -near-you/
by PufPuf93 » Sat Jul 04, 2020 1:47 am
By the time I figured out how to post the picture I forgot what I was going to mention. Carry on. 
by LolaB » Sat Jul 04, 2020 11:10 am
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