Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

[alloneword]

This guy's probably a Nazi or something:



He's certainly a bit 'shouty' and he seems to like 'data'. He'll shout at you about 'data' for 2 hours if you let him - which you might as well do... I mean, it's not like you've got anything better to do.

[JackRiddler]

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What's your first thought when you see this headline?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/04/worl ... -rate.html

A German Exception? Why the Country’s Coronavirus Death Rate Is Low

The pandemic has hit Germany hard, with more than 92,000 people infected. But the percentage of fatal cases has been remarkably low compared to those in many neighboring countries.

By Katrin Bennhold
April 4, 2020
Updated 3:34 p.m. ET

Mine was this, although in the article it took until paragraph 13 to appear:

Another explanation for the low fatality rate is that Germany has been testing far more people than most nations. That means it catches more people with few or no symptoms, increasing the number of known cases, but not the number of fatalities.

“That automatically lowers the death rate on paper,” said Professor Kräusslich.

Widespread testing, including of people without symptoms, would also explain the first reason given for Germany's so-far low death rate, an anomaly described in an earlier paragraph:

The average age of those infected is lower in Germany than in many other countries. Many of the early patients caught the virus in Austrian and Italian ski resorts and were relatively young and healthy, Professor Kräusslich said.

“It started as an epidemic of skiers,” he said.

As infections have spread, more older people have been hit and the death rate, only 0.2 percent two weeks ago, has risen, too. But the average age of contracting the disease remains relatively low, at 49. In France, it is 62.5 and in Italy 62, according to their latest national reports.

The combination suggests not that Germans are younger than people in the other countries mentioned (they are not, or barely), or that the German strain of the virus hits younger people more often, but that the apparent higher occurrence in younger people is artifactual.

More testing, early and widespread, means more asymptomatic cases (positives) are detected, and thus more of the total number of positives are young, relatively more are asymptomatic and relatively fewer die.

Now see what the initial outbreak in Germany was:

The average age of those infected is lower in Germany than in many other countries. Many of the early patients caught the virus in Austrian and Italian ski resorts and were relatively young and healthy, Professor Kräusslich said.

“It started as an epidemic of skiers,” he said.

So it seems the initial group was relatively younger and suffered relatively mild or asymptomatic cases. The state responded swiftly to implement relatively broad testing -- again yielding a group of positives on average younger than in other places, where testing had not been as initially broad and had to catch up with cases where they actually manifested most dramatically (i.e., among older people).

It seems that in Germany, the testing initially outpaced the spread of the virus.

As of the time of the article:

According to Johns Hopkins University, the country had more than 92,000 laboratory-confirmed infections as of midday Saturday, more than any other country except the United States, Italy and Spain.

But with 1,295 deaths, Germany’s fatality rate stood at 1.4 percent, compared with 12 percent in Italy, around 10 percent in Spain, France and Britain, 4 percent in China and 2.5 percent in the United States. Even South Korea, a model of flattening the curve, has a higher fatality rate, 1.7 percent.

So the spread of the virus and the resulting emergence of an increased number of serious cases is catching up with the testing. Therefore the mortality rate (correct usage, I believe, not "fatality") -- meaning the number of those who die diagnosed with the virus divided by the total number of those who test positive -- rises accordingly from the initial 0.2 to the current 1.4.

Sounds like a point may be reached soon wherein the German Covid mortality rate (by the definition of deaths of those "diagnosed with" divided by total positives tested) and the average age of positives ("cases") rise to the level of the other countries (Germany having a similar population distribution by age).

It will probably remain a bit lower, given that this is Germany, as opposed to countries with underdeveloped and unprepared health care systems and/or governments and ruling classes less diligent about the welfare of the general population.

The likely rise in the death rate sounds dire, and may be, but still doesn't answer what the number of positives who are asymptomatic (or who show the antigens, now that antigen tests are also being conducted) will be, once the number of tests goes into the millions.

At that point, the recorded death rate following infection may again be revised downward, perhaps radically, and not just in Germany.

Note that none of this considers the matter of strains, which we haven't considered much on this thread either. These suckers evolve, and while selection generally favors the less deadly, mutation doesn't care: it can produce more deadly strains and these can run wild. This appears to have happened in 1918, when the second wave in the fall killed many more people than the first.

The further reasons given for the low German Covid mortality so far, not at all surprising, would seem more significant than the currently low average age of tested positives:

But there are also significant medical factors that have kept the number of deaths in Germany relatively low, epidemiologists and virologists say, chief among them early and widespread testing and treatment, plenty of intensive care beds and a trusted government whose social distancing guidelines are widely observed.

The rest of the article elaborates upon and confirms the reading I'd have considered obvious:

Testing

In mid-January, long before most Germans had given the virus much thought, Charité hospital in Berlin had already developed a test and posted the formula online.

By the time Germany recorded its first case of Covid-19 in February, laboratories across the country had built up a stock of test kits.

“The reason why we in Germany have so few deaths at the moment compared to the number of infected can be largely explained by the fact that we are doing an extremely large number of lab diagnoses,” said Dr. Christian Drosten, chief virologist at Charité, whose team developed the first test.

By now, Germany is conducting around 350,000 coronavirus tests a week, far more than any other European country. Early and widespread testing has allowed the authorities to slow the spread of the pandemic by isolating known cases while they are infectious. It has also enabled lifesaving treatment to be administered in a more timely way.

“When I have an early diagnosis and can treat patients early — for example put them on a ventilator before they deteriorate — the chance of survival is much higher,” Professor Kräusslich said.

Medical staff, at particular risk of contracting and spreading the virus, are regularly tested. To streamline the procedure, some hospitals have started doing block tests, using the swabs of 10 employees, and following up with individual tests only if there is a positive result.

At the end of April, health authorities also plan to roll out a large-scale antibody study, testing random samples of 100,000 people across Germany every week to gauge where immunity is building up.

This is the first I'm hearing of anyone finally doing this (or being in a position to do this). Large random samples. Hello, science.

Stop me if I'm getting this wrong, and forgive any imprecision in the language if I'm basically right, but only two procedures can measure actual contagion rates in the population, and death rates among the infected. One is to preemptively test large random samples of people for antibodies in cross-sections of all age groups and all conditions of health, regardless of whether they display symptoms. The other is to allow the virus to run its course, uncontrolled, until infection reaches 60 or 70 percent or whatever the level of herd immunity will be in this case, and then hold up mirrors to everyone's faces and see who's still alive.

One key to ensuring broad-based testing is that patients pay nothing for it, said Professor Streeck. This, he said, was one notable difference with the United States in the first several weeks of the outbreak.

Duh! Duh! Duh, motherfucking stupid heartless ultra-capitalist underdeveloped reckless incompetent country! Duh!

The coronavirus relief bill passed by Congress last month does provide for free testing.

“A young person with no health insurance and an itchy throat is unlikely to go to the doctor and therefore risks infecting more people,” he said.

Tracking

On a Friday in late February, Professor Streeck received news that for the first time, a patient at his hospital in Bonn had tested positive for the coronavirus: A 22-year-old man who had no symptoms but whose employer — a school — had asked him to take a test after learning that he had taken part in a carnival event where someone else had tested positive.

In most countries, including the United States, testing is largely limited to the sickest patients, so the man probably would have been refused a test.

Not in Germany. As soon as the test results were in, the school was shut, and all children and staff were ordered to stay at home with their families for two weeks. Some 235 people were tested.

“Testing and tracking is the strategy that was successful in South Korea and we have tried to learn from that,” Professor Streeck said.

Germany also learned from getting it wrong early on: The strategy of contact tracing should have been used even more aggressively, he said.

All those who had returned to Germany from Ischgl, an Austrian ski resort that had an outbreak, for example, should have been tracked down and tested, Professor Streeck said.

Image
Construction workers beginning to prepare an exhibition hall in Berlin to become a treatment center for coronavirus patients. Construction workers beginning to prepare an exhibition hall in Berlin to become a treatment center for coronavirus patients. Credit...Pool photo by Clemens Bilan/EPA, via Shutterstock

A Robust Public Health Care System

Before the coronavirus pandemic swept across Germany, University Hospital in Giessen had 173 intensive care beds equipped with ventilators. In recent weeks, the hospital scrambled to create an additional 40 beds and increased the staff that was on standby to work in intensive care by as much as 50 percent.

Giessen, pop. 83,628 (2015), town in central Germany, north of Frankfurt.

“We have so much capacity now we are accepting patients from Italy, Spain and France,” said Susanne Herold, a specialist in lung infections at the hospital who has overseen the restructuring. “We are very strong in the intensive care area.”

All across Germany, hospitals have expanded their intensive care capacities. And they started from a high level. In January, Germany had some 28,000 intensive care beds equipped with ventilators, or 34 per 100,000 people. By comparison, that rate is 12 in Italy and 7 in the Netherlands.

By now, there are 40,000 intensive care beds available in Germany.

Some experts are cautiously optimistic that social distancing measures might be flattening the curve enough for Germany’s health care system to weather the pandemic without producing a scarcity of lifesaving equipment like ventilators.

“It is important that we have guidelines for doctors on how to practice triage between patients if they have to,” Professor Streeck said. “But I hope we will never need to use them.”

The time it takes for the number of infections to double has slowed to about eight days. If it slows a little more, to between 12 and 14 days, Professor Herold said, the models suggest that triage could be avoided.

“The curve is beginning to flatten,” she said.

Trust in Government

Beyond mass testing and the preparedness of the health care system, many also see Chancellor Angela Merkel’s leadership as one reason the fatality rate has been kept low.

Ms. Merkel has communicated clearly, calmly and regularly throughout the crisis, as she imposed ever-stricter social distancing measures on the country. The restrictions, which have been crucial to slowing the spread of the pandemic, met with little political opposition and are broadly followed.

The chancellor’s approval ratings have soared.

“Maybe our biggest strength in Germany,” said Professor Kräusslich, “is the rational decision-making at the highest level of government combined with the trust the government enjoys in the population.”

Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting.

It's not Merkel per se, although she is competent and now becomes the beneficiary of incumbency during a competent response, at least so far. A minoirty may hate their government in Germany, much like elsewhere, a few may even want to overthrow it for some of the same reasons people do anywhere, but they don't doubt that, regardless of its political makeup at a given time, it takes public health seriously, proceeds from scientific findings in its public health policy, and has the high expertise and competence available for this. That's a function of investing enough in the education and infrastructure over decades.

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[Grizzly]

The Staggering Collapse of U.S. Intelligence on the Coronavirus
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-staggering-collapse-of-u-s-intelligence-on-the-coronavirus/
An agency tasked with tracking future bio threats fell down on the job, causing us to wonder what else we don't know.

Of course! *smacks my own forehead* Give em, more Money!!!

[JackRiddler]

I think the banks and urban luxury real estate also probably weren't getting enough government support to deal with an epidemic because too much money was still being spent on stuff like drinking water. Fucking socialism.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Great piece up thread Jack. Widespread testing, contact tracing and isolation seems to be the only way this thing will be properly controlled. It works okay here cos we're a big island miles from anywhere but a lot of the rest of the world doesn't have that advantage.

S Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Singapore all are islands or places that can control their borders relatively easily compared to other nations.

One other thing. We've stopped air travel. There is a little but, but we live under flight paths, and there is always the background rumble of planes, well was. Even at cruising height you still hear them. Adults might switch the noise off but our youngest kids, 2 and 4 now would always comment or ask what the noise was.

At any time we can look at flight tracking software and in the US for example there is heaps of commercial air activity. Something like 10% of our cases so far have been traced to one cruise ship that was allowed to unload passengers in Sydnet without medical testing, other cruise ships in Melbourne (they are capital cities in different states, the two biggest Victoria and NSW) were kept isolated until crew and passengers had passed tests to see if they were carrying the virus. Limiting travel is a vital part of stopping the spread of the virus.

[identity]

Is the following relevant to this thread? I think that's for each reader to decide.

Kary Mullis, on virus(es) and not taking anything for granted, even when there is a strong scientific consensus that things are this way and certainly not that way. (Oh, wait, I seem to remember that Mullis was a contactee and actually thought there was something of value in astrology! Obviously a kook like Josephson. Maybe you should just skip the following.)

In 1988 I WAS WORKING as a consultant at Specialty Labs in Santa
Monica, setting up analytic routines for the Human Immunodeficiency
Virus (HIV). I knew a lot about setting up analytic routines
for anything with nucleic acids in it because I had invented the Polymerase
Chain Reaction. That's why they had hired me.
Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), on the other
hand, was something I did not know a lot about. Thus, when I
found myself writing a report on our progress and goals for the
project, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, I recognized
that I did not know the scientific reference to support a
statement I had just written: "HIV is the probable cause of AIDS."
So I turned to the virologist at the next desk, a reliable and
competent fellow, and asked him for the reference. He said I didn't
need one. I disagreed. While it's true that certain scientific discoveries
or techniques are so well established that their sources are no
longer referenced in the contemporary literature, that didn't seem
to be the case with the HIV/AIDS connection. It was totally
remarkable to me that the individual who had discovered the
cause of a deadly and as-yet-uncured disease would not be continually
referenced in the scientific papers until that disease was
cured and forgotten. But as I would soon learn, the name of that
individual-who would surely be Nobel material-was on the tip
of no one's tongue.
Of course, this simple reference had to be out there somewhere.
Otherwise, tens of thousands of public servants and esteemed scientists
of many callings, trying to solve the tragic deaths of a large
number of homosexual and/or intravenous (IV) drug-using men
between the ages of twenty-five and forty, would not have allowed
their research to settle into one narrow channel of investigation.
Everyone wouldn't fish in the same pond unless it was well established
that all the other ponds were empty. There had to be a published
paper, or perhaps several of them, which taken together
indicated that HIV was the probable cause of AIDS. There just had
to be.
I did computer searches, but came up with nothing. Of course,
you can miss something important in computer searches by not
putting in just the right key words. To be certain about a scientific
issue, it's best to ask other scientists directly. That's one thing that
scientific conferences in faraway places with nice beaches are for.
I was going to a lot of meetings and conferences as part of my
job. I got in the habit of approaching anyone who gave a talk
about AIDS and asking him or her what reference I should quote
for that increasingly problematic statement, "HIV is the probable
cause of AIDS."
After ten or fifteen meetings over a couple years, I was getting
pretty upset when no one could cite the reference. I didn't like the
ugly conclusion that was forming in my mind: The entire campaign
against a disease increasingly regarded as a twentiethcentury
Black Plague was based on a hypothesis whose origins no
one could recall. That defied both scientific and common sense.
Finally, I had an opportunity to question one of the giants in
HIV and AIDS research, Dr. Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute,
when he gave a talk in San Diego. It would be the last time I
would be able to ask my little question without showing anger,
and I figured Montagnier would know the answer. So I asked him.
With a look of condescending puzzlement, Montagnier said,
"Why don't you quote the report from the Centers for Disease
Control?"
I replied, "It doesn't really address the issue of whether or not
HIV is the probable cause of AIDS, does it?"
"No," he admitted, no doubt wondering when I would just go
away. He looked for support to the little circle of people around
him, but they were all awaiting a more definitive response, like I
was.
"Why don't you quote the work on SIV [Simian Immunodeficiency
Virus]?" the good doctor offered.
"I read that too, Dr. Montagnier," I responded. "What happened
to those monkeys didn't remind me of AIDS. Besides, that
paper was just published only a couple of months ago. I'm looking
for the original paper where somebody showed that HIV
caused AIDS."
This time, Dr. Montagnier's response was to walk quickly away
to greet an acquaintance across the room.
Cut to the scene inside my car just a few years ago. I was driving
from Mendocino to San Diego. Like everyone else by now, I
knew a lot more about AIDS than I wanted to. But I still didn't
know who had determined that it was caused by HIV. Getting
sleepy as I came over the San Bernardino Mountains, I switched
on the radio and tuned in a guy who was talking about AIDS. His
name was Peter Duesberg, and he was a prominent virologist at
Berkeley. I'd heard of him, but had never read his papers or heard
him speak. But I listened, now wide awake, while he explained
exactly why I was having so much trouble finding the references
that linked HIV to AIDS. There weren't any. No one had ever
proved that HIV causes AIDS. When I got home, I invited Duesberg
down to San Diego to present his ideas to a meeting of the
American Association for Chemistry. Mostly skeptical at first, the
audience stayed for the lecture, and then an hour of questions, and
then stayed talking to each other until requested to clear the room.
Everyone left with more questions than they had brought.
I like and respect Peter Duesberg. I don't think he knows necessarily
what causes AIDS; we have disagreements about that. But
we're both certain about what doesn't cause AIDS.

(From the Foreward to Peter Duesberg's Inventing the AIDS Virus)

[JackRiddler]

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Sweden.

Coronavirus: To Swedes, it's the rest of the world engaging in a reckless experiment

Fraser Nelson
21:46, Apr 03 2020

https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health ... experiment

Coronavirus: Sweden's unique approach to fighting the pandemic

DAVID KEYTON
07:12, Mar 30 2020

https://www.stuff.co.nz/world/europe/12 ... e-pandemic

[Belligerent Savant]

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Cross-post:

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https://off-guardian.org/2020/04/04/did ... ock-downs/

Did Bill Gates Just Reveal the Reason Behind the Lock-Downs?

Rosemary Frei

Rosemary Frei has an MSc in molecular biology from a faculty of medicine and was a freelance medical journalist for 22 years. She is now an independent investigative journalist in Canada. You can find her recent detailed investigative analysis of COVID here and follow her on Twitter.

On March 24 Bill Gates gave a highly revelatory 50-minute interview (above) to Chris Anderson. Anderson is the Curator of TED, the non-profit that runs the TED Talks.

The Gates interview is the second in a new series of daily ‘Ted Connects’ interviews focused on COVID-19.

Anderson asked Gates at 3:49 in the video of the interview – which is quickly climbing to three million views – about a ‘Perspective’ article by Gates that was published February 28 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“You wrote that this could be the once-in-a-century pandemic that people have been fearing. Is that how you think of it, still?” queried Anderson.

“Well, it’s awful to say this but, we could have a respiratory virus whose case fatality rate was even higher. If this was something like smallpox, that kills 30 percent of people. So this is horrific,” responded Gates.

“But, in fact, most people even who get the COVID disease are able to survive. So in that, it’s quite infectious – way more infectious than MERS [Middle East Respiratory Syndrome] or SARS [Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome] were. [But] it’s not as fatal as they were. And yet the disruption we’re seeing in order to knock it down is really completely unprecedented.”

Gates reiterates the dire consequences for the global economy later in the interview.

“We need a clear message about that,” Gates said starting at 26:52.

“It is really tragic that the economic effects of this are very dramatic. I mean, nothing like this has ever happened to the economy in our lifetimes. But … bringing the economy back and doing [sic] money, that’s more of a reversible thing than bringing people back to life. So we’re going to take the pain in the economic dimension, huge pain, in order to minimize the pain in disease and death dimension.”


However, this goes directly against the imperative to balance the benefits and costs of the screening, testing and treatment measures for each ailment – as successfully promulgated for years by, for example, the Choosing Wisely campaign – to provide the maximum benefit to individual patients and society as a whole.

Even more importantly, as noted in an April 1 article in OffGuardian, there may be dramatically more deaths from the economic breakdown than from COVID-19 itself.

“By all accounts, the impact of the response will be great, far-reaching, and long-lasting,”

Kevin Ryan wrote in the article. Ryan estimated that well over two million people will likely die from the sequelae of the lock-downs and other drastic measures to enforce ‘social distancing.’

Millions could potentially die from suicide, drug abuse, lack of medical coverage or treatment, poverty and lack of food access, on top of other predictable social, medical and public-health problems stemming from the response to COVID-19.

Gates and Anderson did not touch on any of those sequelae. Instead, they focused on rapidly ramping up testing and medical interventions for COVID-19.

Gates said at 30:29 in the interview that he and a large team are moving fast to test anti-virals, vaccines and other therapeutics and to bring them to market as quickly as possible.

The Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust with support from Mastercard and now others, created this therapeutic accelerator to really triage out [candidate therapeutics]…You have hundreds of people showing up and saying, ‘Try this, try that.’ So we look at lab assays, animal models, and so we understand which things should be prioritized for these very quick human trials that need to be done all over the world.”

The accelerator was launched March 10 with approximately $125 million in seed funding. Three days later Gates left Microsoft.

Not long before that, on January 23, Gates’s organization the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) announced it will fund three programs to develop COVID-19 vaccines. These are the advancing of DNA-vaccine candidates against MERS and Lassa fever, the development of a “‘molecular clamp’ platform” that “enables targeted and rapid vaccine production against multiple viral pathogens,” and the manufacture and Phase 1 clinical study of an mRNA vaccine against COVID.

“The programmes will leverage rapid response platforms already supported by CEPI as well as a new partnership. The aim is to advance nCoV-2019 vaccine candidates into clinical testing as quickly as possible,” according to a news release.

Then at 32:50 in the video, Anderson asked whether the blood serum from people who have recovered from a COVID infection can be used to treat others.

“I heard you mention that one possibility might be treatments from the serum, the blood serum of people who had had the disease and then recovered. So I guess they’re carrying antibodies,” said Anderson. “Talk a bit about that and how that could work and what it would take to accelerate that.”

[Note that Anderson did not ask Gates about, instead, just letting most of the population – aside from people most vulnerable to serious illness from the infection, who should be quarantined — be exposed to COVID-19 and as a result very likely recover and develop life-long immunity. As at least one expert has observed, “as much as ninety-nine percent of active cases [of COVID-19] in the general population are ‘mild’ and do not require specific medical treatment” to recover.]
“This has always been discussed as, ‘How could you pull that off?’” replied Gates. “So people who are recovered, it appears, have very effective antibodies in their blood. So you could go, transfuse them and only take out white cells, the immune cells.”

However, Gates continued, he and his colleagues have dismissed that possibility because it’s “fairly complicated – compared to a drug we can make in high volume, you know, the cost of taking it out and putting it back in probably doesn’t scale as well.”

Then a few seconds later, at 33:45, Gates drops another bomb:

We don’t want to have a lot of recovered people […] To be clear, we’re trying – through the shut-down in the United States – to not get to one percent of the population infected. We’re well below that today, but with exponentiation, you could get past that three million [people or approximately one percent of the U.S. population being infected with COVID-19 and the vast majority recovering]. I believe we will be able to avoid that with having this economic pain.”

It appears that rather than let the population be exposed to the virus and most develop antibodies that give them natural, long-lasting immunity to COVID-19, Gates and his colleagues far prefer to create a vast, hugely expensive, new system of manufacturing and selling billions of test kits, and in parallel very quickly developing and selling billions of antivirals and vaccines.

And then, when the virus comes back again a few months later and most of the population is unexposed and therefore vulnerable, selling billions more test kits and medical interventions.

Right after that, at 34:14, Gates talked about how he sees things rolling out from there.

Eventually what we’ll have to have is certificates of who’s a recovered person, who’s a vaccinated person […] Because you don’t want people moving around the world where you’ll have some countries that won’t have it under control, sadly. You don’t want to completely block off the ability for people to go there and come back and move around. So eventually there will be this digital immunity proof that will help facilitate the global reopening up.”

[Sometime on the afternoon of March 31 the last sentence of this quote was edited out of the official TED video of the interview. Fortunately, recordings of the complete interview are archived elsewhere.]

In the October 2019 Event 201 novel-corona virus-pandemic simulation co-sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum and a division of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, a poll that was part of the simulation said that 65% of people in the U.S. would be eager to take a vaccine for COVID-19, “even if it’s experimental.”

This will be tremendously lucrative.

Vaccines are very big business: this Feb. 23 CNBC article, for example, describes the vaccine market as six times bigger than it was 20 years ago, at more than $35 billion annually today, and providing a $44 return for every $1 invested in the world’s 94 lowest-income countries.

Notably, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – which has an endowment of $52 billion – has given more than $2.4 billion to the World Health Organization (WHO) since 2000, according to a 2017 Politico article. (While over the same time frame countries have reduced their contributions to the world body, particularly after the 2008-2009 depression, and now account for less than one-quarter of the WHO’s budget.) The WHO is now coordinating approximately 50 groups around the world that are working on candidate vaccines against COVID-19.

The Politico article quotes a Geneva-based NGO representative as saying Gates is “treated liked a head of state, not only at the WHO, but also at the G20,” and that Gates is one of the most influential people in global health.

Meanwhile, officials around the world are doing their part to make sure everyone social distances, self-isolates and/or stays locked down.

For example, here’s Toronto’s Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Eileen de Villa, at her and Toronto Mayor John Tory’s March 30 press briefing:

“We find ourselves in the midst of a global pandemic. We should expect some more people will get sick – and for some, sadly, will die. This is why it is so important to stay at home to reduce virus spread. And to protect front-line workers, healthcare workers and our essential workers, so they can continue to protect us. People shouldn’t have to die, people shouldn’t have to risk death taking care of us because others won’t practice social distancing or physical distancing.”

Yet look how close Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health, Dr. David Williams, is sitting to Haley Chazan, Senior Manager, Media Relations, for Christine Elliott, Deputy Premier and Minister of Health of Ontario.

This was on Friday, March 27, just before the start of that day’s daily press conference by Dr. Williams and Ontario’s Associate Medical Officer of Health Dr. Barbara Yaffe:



They were sitting two seats, or just a couple of feet, apart. A short time later Chazan got up and stood even closer to Dr. Williams for a little while:



Dr. Williams and Chazan do not live together. Rather, Dr. Williams very likely knows – just as Gates knows – that there is little if any reason to worry about being in close contact with other people unless you or they are vulnerable to developing a severe illness from COVID-19. He surely knows, also, that if you contract COVID-19 and you’re otherwise healthy you’ll very likely have few symptoms, if any, and recover quickly. And that this exposure in fact is beneficial because in the process you will develop antibodies to the virus and have natural, long-lasting immunity to it.

Yet in the March 27 press conference, just like all the others he has participated in during the COVID-19 crisis, Dr. Williams lectured the public about maintaining social distancing. He told people not to go outside on the coming weekend to enjoy the nice weather because, otherwise, they might walk past someone and not be two metres apart.

Dr. Williams is among the large cadre of powerful officials who’ve crashed the global economy by forcing tens of millions of small- and medium-sized businesses to close in the name of the need for forced, severe, social distancing and lock-downs.

They’ve shattered society, suspended most civil liberties and prohibited most activities and connections that keep people mentally and physically healthy. At the same time the officials have prioritized COVID-19 care over everything else and, as a result, severely limited billions of people’s access to life-saving healthcare services ranging from acquiring medication and blood transfusions to having organ transplants and cancer surgeries.

[Spiro C. Thiery]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/04/worl ... -rate.html

A German Exception? Why the Country’s Coronavirus Death Rate Is Low

Another explanation for the low fatality rate is that Germany has been testing far more people than most nations. That means it catches more people with few or no symptoms [emphasis mine], increasing the number of known cases, but not the number of fatalities.

“That automatically lowers the death rate on paper,” said Professor Kräusslich.

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I don't doubt this is generally true, and the conclusions drawn by the article and JR are likewise accurate in that sense. However, it might give one a false image of broader reality as regards the difficulty in testing the population even under circumstances of wider availability of testing.

To get a better picture, one should be aware of two key points:

1) In order to have got tested early on, you had to have symptoms and been recently in a crisis region AND been in direct contact with another person confirmed to have already tested positive. The first requirement has since been waived, as the world is essentially now a crisis region. Confirmation of the strictness of the testing policy as regards the second requirement was confirmed by a Berlin journo who wrote about her experience, wherein she went to one of the testing facilities, waited in a long line (about a meter-and-a-half longer per person than would be normal), and answered a questionnaire only to be turned away and told to socially isolate at home.

2) The various hotlines available for those experiencing symptoms are virtually always too busy to even get through to be put on automatic hold, which the health ministry itself makes clear in its advisories, along with the instruction to contact one's primary care physician. I have no idea what managing to get put on automatic hold means in terms of numbers or wait time. The basic instruction however is the same: In order to get tested, you should have been in contact with a confirmed positive. In spite of the, seemingly, large number of kits available, not even Germany can manage to test everyone with symptoms.

Therefore, while they might be catching more asymptomatic cases, it is only due to, I have to assume, competent tracing protocol, because there are no other circumstances under which they are carrying out testing symptoms or not.

Aside from the lessons of in-patient care capacity and the societal benefits of social health care (Germany is quite the hybrid here and far from perfect e.g. freelancers are, as with the US ACA, often left twisting in the wind) - something that should concern everyone is that even best case test kit availability as it currently stands renders it nigh impossible to establish reliable data. As far as how robust the after-the-fact antibody testing will go, i.e. whether it is "free", to take one example, remains to be seen.

[Heaven Swan]

ΝYC ΙCU DR with nothing to gain shares INCREDIBLE insight t...
Apr 4, 2020

[JackRiddler]

I don't doubt this is generally true, and the conclusions drawn by the article and JR are likewise accurate in that sense. However, it might give one a false image of broader reality as regards the difficulty in testing the population even under circumstances of wider availability of testing.

I don't doubt that you evidently know this in better detail than I do, or the article did, and thank you for the post pointing out the difficulty and the limits of Germany's testing efforts.

To get a better picture, one should be aware of two key points:

1) In order to have got tested early on, you had to have symptoms and been recently in a crisis region AND been in direct contact with another person confirmed to have already tested positive. The first requirement has since been waived, as the world is essentially now a crisis region. Confirmation of the strictness of the testing policy as regards the second requirement was confirmed by a Berlin journo who wrote about her experience, wherein she went to one of the testing facilities, waited in a long line (about a meter-and-a-half longer per person than would be normal), and answered a questionnaire only to be turned away and told to socially isolate at home.

2) The various hotlines available for those experiencing symptoms are virtually always too busy to even get through to be put on automatic hold, which the health ministry itself makes clear in its advisories, along with the instruction to contact one's primary care physician. I have no idea what managing to get put on automatic hold means in terms of numbers or wait time. The basic instruction however is the same: In order to get tested, you should have been in contact with a confirmed positive. In spite of the, seemingly, large number of kits available, not even Germany can manage to test everyone with symptoms.

Therefore, while they might be catching more asymptomatic cases, it is only due to, I have to assume, competent tracing protocol, because there are no other circumstances under which they are carrying out testing symptoms or not.

Aside from the lessons of in-patient care capacity and the societal benefits of social health care (Germany is quite the hybrid here and far from perfect e.g. freelancers are, as with the US ACA, often left twisting in the wind) - something that should concern everyone is that even best case test kit availability as it currently stands renders it nigh impossible to establish reliable data. As far as how robust the after-the-fact antibody testing will go, i.e. whether it is "free", to take one example, remains to be seen.

I don't see how it could not be, or how they could conduct large random sample tests without that. Supposedly they want to do this by the end of April.

.

[Spiro C. Thiery]

^^ I guess what I mean is that the antibody tests will be most effectively distributed and carried out on those who are covered. Contrary to popular belief (and the law), not everyone is. It won't hamper the sampling, but it won't exactly be random either, as a lot of people are not on the radar.

[identity]

Final paragraphs of Myopic focus on health has overtaken rationality post at /r/CovidCanada

The mortality rate of an average person in their 70s is about 143 times that of someone in their 20s, with the divergence rising to 260 times for people in their 80s (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lani ... 73-3099(20)30243-7/fulltext?utm_source=Spectator+A.M.+New+List&utm_campaign=c03b1f3b4b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_04_01_03_54&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_319f010842-c03b1f3b4b-10481158530243-7/fulltext?utm_source=Spectator+A.M.+New+List&utm_campaign=c03b1f3b4b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_04_01_03_54&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_319f010842-c03b1f3b4b-104811585)). This is despite young people being widely infected, presumably because we socialize more. There are various national approaches that may or may not work, and which I have not studied in detail: South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Sweden, the Netherlands, etc. all seem to, in one form or another, realize that we need to balance costs and benefits of government intervention. Our GDP is nearly $2.5 trillion, which comes out to nearly $350,000 per person over the age of 65, for example. Surely there is a solution where the vast majority of our population who is not elderly and not otherwise immunocompromised can continue to work as usual (with hand washing, mask recommendations, and some less costly limits on gigantic gatherings), and we use a small portion of the vast sum of money being contemplated to more effectively isolate and protect *only* our most vulnerable citizens.

Suppose that each of our ~7 million seniors and immunocompromised people were to receive a free personal hotel room, as a somewhat absurd but plausible lower-cost alternative. Many of these would be couples, but let's be extra conservative and say none are. Let's also give each person their own personal caretaker/chef/maid, who also had an adjoining room, because why not. Throw in a 3-month stock of raw, canned or frozen food. Being generous, this might cost (80$/night x 2 hotel rooms)x(30.5 days in a month) + ($6000/month salary) + ($600/month for food)x(2 people), all multiplied by 7 million and, say, three months for the virus to sweep through and build herd immunity among the young/healthy population. In total, that's about $250 billion, about 10% of Canada's GDP, far less than contemplated by this current lockdown which will grind economic activity to a halt indefinitely and destroy countless businesses. This also would probably not be possible to do legally against anyone's will, given constitutionally-enshrined freedom of mobility and association in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms (unless justified under Charter section 1, but that requires passing the Oaks test, and this would probably fail on the "minimal impairment" criterion and maybe also on "proportionality"); however, in a similar vein, our current lockdown cannot get much stricter before it runs afoul of Charter rights in a way unjustifiable under S. 1.

Is this hotel room quarantine for seniors the best answer? Meh, probably not, I just thought of it now. But let's have a serious discussion not only about the price tag we're accepting, and what exorbitant sums it implies our policymakers should approve for the countless other seemingly outlandish policies that could save lives comparatively cheaply. It's innate in us to fear new and unknown risks (e.g. blatantly wasteful military spending per potential American life saved following 9/11) and events were an identifiable group suffers at once (e.g. plane safety vs objectively much-more-dangerous cars). I know this virus is new and scary, and I know it has and will kill many people. This is a global tragedy, and believe it or not I don't seek to minimize this. However, that fact doesn't warrant throwing out *just this once* our usual cost thresholds, which were thought out rationally during calmer times in order to make these very difficult tradeoffs we now face.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CovidCanada/comments/fvc67k/myopic_focus_on_health_has_overtaken_rationality/

[Harvey]

Final paragraphs of Myopic focus on health has overtaken rationality post at /r/CovidCanada

The mortality rate of an average person in their 70s is about 143 times that of someone in their 20s, with the divergence rising to 260 times for people in their 80s (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lani ... 73-3099(20)30243-7/fulltext?utm_source=Spectator+A.M.+New+List&utm_campaign=c03b1f3b4b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_04_01_03_54&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_319f010842-c03b1f3b4b-10481158530243-7/fulltext?utm_source=Spectator+A.M.+New+List&utm_campaign=c03b1f3b4b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_04_01_03_54&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_319f010842-c03b1f3b4b-104811585)). This is despite young people being widely infected, presumably because we socialize more. There are various national approaches that may or may not work, and which I have not studied in detail: South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Sweden, the Netherlands, etc. all seem to, in one form or another, realize that we need to balance costs and benefits of government intervention. Our GDP is nearly $2.5 trillion, which comes out to nearly $350,000 per person over the age of 65, for example. Surely there is a solution where the vast majority of our population who is not elderly and not otherwise immunocompromised can continue to work as usual (with hand washing, mask recommendations, and some less costly limits on gigantic gatherings), and we use a small portion of the vast sum of money being contemplated to more effectively isolate and protect *only* our most vulnerable citizens.

Suppose that each of our ~7 million seniors and immunocompromised people were to receive a free personal hotel room, as a somewhat absurd but plausible lower-cost alternative. Many of these would be couples, but let's be extra conservative and say none are. Let's also give each person their own personal caretaker/chef/maid, who also had an adjoining room, because why not. Throw in a 3-month stock of raw, canned or frozen food. Being generous, this might cost (80$/night x 2 hotel rooms)x(30.5 days in a month) + ($6000/month salary) + ($600/month for food)x(2 people), all multiplied by 7 million and, say, three months for the virus to sweep through and build herd immunity among the young/healthy population. In total, that's about $250 billion, about 10% of Canada's GDP, far less than contemplated by this current lockdown which will grind economic activity to a halt indefinitely and destroy countless businesses. This also would probably not be possible to do legally against anyone's will, given constitutionally-enshrined freedom of mobility and association in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms (unless justified under Charter section 1, but that requires passing the Oaks test, and this would probably fail on the "minimal impairment" criterion and maybe also on "proportionality"); however, in a similar vein, our current lockdown cannot get much stricter before it runs afoul of Charter rights in a way unjustifiable under S. 1.

Is this hotel room quarantine for seniors the best answer? Meh, probably not, I just thought of it now. But let's have a serious discussion not only about the price tag we're accepting, and what exorbitant sums it implies our policymakers should approve for the countless other seemingly outlandish policies that could save lives comparatively cheaply. It's innate in us to fear new and unknown risks (e.g. blatantly wasteful military spending per potential American life saved following 9/11) and events were an identifiable group suffers at once (e.g. plane safety vs objectively much-more-dangerous cars). I know this virus is new and scary, and I know it has and will kill many people. This is a global tragedy, and believe it or not I don't seek to minimize this. However, that fact doesn't warrant throwing out *just this once* our usual cost thresholds, which were thought out rationally during calmer times in order to make these very difficult tradeoffs we now face.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CovidCanada/comments/fvc67k/myopic_focus_on_health_has_overtaken_rationality/

[identity]

from the Apr. 5th update:

In a 40-minute interview, the internationally renowned epidemiology professor Knut Wittkowski from New York explains that the measures taken on Covid19 are all counterproductive. Instead of „social distancing“, school closures, „lock down“, mouth masks, mass tests and vaccinations, life must continue as undisturbed as possible and immunity must be built up in the population as quickly as possible. According to all findings to date, Covid-19 is no more dangerous than previous influenza epidemics. Isolation now would only cause a „second wave“ later.

The British Medical Journal (BMJ) reports that, according to the latest data from China, 78% of new test-positive individuals show no symptoms. An Oxford epidemiologist said that these findings are „very, very important.“ He added that if the results are representative, „then we have to ask, ‘What the hell are we locking down for?’“

Dr. Andreas Sönnichsen, head of the Department of General and Family Medicine at the Medical University of Vienna and chairman of the Network for Evidence-Based Medicine, considers the measures imposed so far to be „insane“. The whole state is being paralysed just to „protect the few it could affect“.

In a world first, the Swedish government has announced that it is going to officially distinguish between deaths „by“ and deaths „with“ the coronavirus, which should lead to a reduction in reported deaths. Meanwhile, for some reason, international pressure on Sweden to abandon its liberal strategy is steadily increasing.

The Hamburg health authority now has test-positive deaths examined by forensic medicine in order to count only „real“ corona deaths. As a result, the number of deaths has already been reduced by up to 50% compared to the official figures of the Robert Koch Institute.


The British journalist Peter Hitchens describes in an article entitled „We love Big Brother“ how even previously critical people were „infected by fear“ despite the lack of medical evidence. In an interview, he explains that criticism is „a moral duty“ as fundamental rights are under threat.

The German historian René Schlott writes about the „Rendezvous with the police state„: „Buying a book, sitting on a park bench, meeting up with friends – that is now forbidden, is controlled and denounced. The democratic safeguards seem to be blown. Where and how will it end?“

Several German law firms are preparing lawsuits against the measures and regulations that have been issued. A specialist in medical law writes in a press release: „The measures taken by the federal and state governments are blatantly unconstitutional and violate a multitude of basic rights of citizens in Germany to an unprecedented extent. This applies to all corona regulations of the 16 federal states. In particular, these measures are not justified by the Infection Protection Act, which was revised in no time at all just a few days ago. () Because the available figures and statistics show that corona infection is harmless in more than 95% of the population and therefore does not represent a serious danger to the general public.“

The Open Letter from Professor Sucharit Bhakdi to Chancellor Angela Merkel is now available in German, English, French, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, Dutch and Estonian, other languages will follow.

In a new interview, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden warns that Covid19 is dangerous but temporary, while the destruction of fundamental rights is deadly and permanent.

Original entries with links: https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/