Emergence of a Deadly Coronavirus

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Church in Australia selling bleach as corona treatment fined $151,000 by Australian authorities
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-13/ ... d/12242150

the economy is screwed either way, just in different ways.

america has very little welfare for people who are not indigent. they especially DON'T have "free" health care unless one is indigent. i have read scary stories of survivors that have been bankrupted by the cost of this care.

That's very bad for those who are not rich but managing... which means the vast majority of a typical population.

lower middle class people with bare bones health coverage with high [$7000/annum] deductibles and high co-pays per visit and low lifetime caps. upper middle class here all have cadillac plans [blue cross/shield] that cover everything. such plans would cost a person like me about $3000/month.

Earning 3000$/month is quite exclusive, not to mention affording to pay that much for healthcare.

if you live in the big city or anyplace close-in to civilization, even the exurbs, if you're not making at least 6 figures there, you can't afford to live there. non-university-educated people are screwed nowadays. in washington state, average property tax is between $5000-$10,000/annum.

No wonder you have significant homelessness problem.

LESSONS LEARNED - INFECTION PERIOD

"Track and Trace" is the latest COVID-19 catchphrase. It describes the process of identifying the ill and exposed, which then can make it safer for us to mingle socially once again. As a program gets underway in the U.S., what lessons can we learn from Asia?

The study comes from Taiwan, the country with the ambiguous “ownership.” The study is small, only 100 patients, but think of it as the pilot, not the definitive report – there is always something to learn.

The first 100 patients with nucleotide amplification proven (PCR) COVID-19 identified between January and March were studied along will all their close contacts. Close contacts were individuals not wearing protective equipment, engaged in face-to-face contact for 15 minutes, or more. They were categorized as members of the same household or family outside the home. In the case of health workers, close contact was defined as being within six feet without appropriate protective equipment for any time. The contact period was from the onset of symptoms or, in the case of the asymptomatic, the date of testing.

All close contacts were quarantined for two weeks after their last exposure to the index patient; all were tested for COVID-19 and retested if symptoms developed. For the 100 index cases

* Median age 44, 56% men, 2761 close contacts identified
* 5.5% were household members, 2.8% family members, and 25.3% healthcare workers
* 22 secondary cases were identified for an infection risk of 0.8%
* 4 of the 22 cases were asymptomatic
* All 22 of the secondary cases were exposed within six days of symptom onset in the index case, but 68% of non-case contacts were seen in the same period.
* An infection risk of about 1% was also identified for contacts within the pre-symptomatic period.
* Attack rates were higher for household and family members and the older members of those groups
* It appears that COVID-19 has a short infectious period, roughly five days, with a peak at the time of symptoms and then lessening over time.
* The time frame seems to correlate with studies of viral load, suggesting that the virus peaks at the time of symptoms and then declines.

“To summarize the evidence, …strongly suggested high transmissibility of the disease near or even before the day of symptom onset. Because the onset of overt clinical symptoms, such as fever, dyspnea, and signs of pneumonia, usually occurred 5 to 7days after initial symptom onset, the infection might well have been transmitted at or before the time of detection. This characteristic makes containment efforts challenging.”

This suggests that contact tracing should focus on the period just before and after the onset of symptoms when infectivity is most significant. The greatest limitation to the study was inconsistent contact tracing for contacts before the index case became symptomatic.

There are some lessons to be learned. First, is that contact tracing must extend backward by about four days. Second, an index case generates lots of close contacts, in this case, 26 people each, so we should not underestimate the exponential difficulty in tracing as we scale up. Third, we need to characterize exposure better; household members had a slightly lower rate of infections than and family members living apart from the index case – so it isn’t just a matter of duration, it is when and how close. Fourth, it seems that transmission is not as great as we once feared.

Source: Track And Trace: What Do We Already Know?

Property taxes pay for government and government services. It can't be had both ways. If extensive government services are desired then taxes will increase to excessive levels.

The downright shameful thing I've witnessed firsthand multiple times in my life: People who during their working careers voted religiously for "tax and spenders" (as my Dad would always say) and then up and move to Florida, register as Florida residents but keep a summer home here. They do this because Florida has no state income tax. The hypocrites are tax dodgers who were part of the very problem by voting in "tax and spenders" for years, screwing the rest of us in the process. I have little respect for them.

I'll go back on topic now.

VITAMIN "D", VITAMIN "D", VITAMIN "D"

When your skin is exposed to sunlight, it makes vitamin D from cholesterol. The sun's ultraviolet B (UVB) rays hit cholesterol in the skin cells, providing the energy for vitamin D synthesis to occur. Vitamin D has many roles in the body and is essential for optimal health.

Vitamin "D" is not easy to get from food and is widely deficient across populations, including in the U.S. This and the fact that as warmer months arrive we're still largely locked down and unable to take full advantage of vitamin D from the sun makes it worthy of study in relation to COVID-19.

And the vitamin D/COVID-19 research bandwagon is certainly moving apace. These are snippets from three different three papers released in the last month alone.

* In one study it was found that 100% of ICU COVID-19 patients less than 75 years old had vitamin D insufficiency.

* In another, out of 55 patients with higher blood serum levels of vitamin D metabolite (more than 30ng/ml 25-hydroxycholecalciferol), 47 had mild symptoms, 4 had “ordinary” symptoms, 2 had severe symptoms and 2 had critical symptoms. Of the 157 patients with lower vitamin D (less than 30ng/ml 25-hydroxycholecalciferol), 2 had mild symptoms, 55 ordinary symptoms, 54 severe symptoms and 46 critical symptoms.

* The third found that across European countries, there was a strong association between vitamin D levels and per capita COVID-19 cases and mortality.

Nevertheless, the current rush of COVID-19 vitamin D studies didn’t just come out of nowhere. Previous studies have noted that vitamin D deficiency may be a biomarker of sepsis risk, while data has been growing around a potential benefit of the vitamin D in prevention of and mortality from infections.

In particular, a systematic review and meta-analysis collating evidence from 25 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that gave vitamin D supplements to all age groups with acute respiratory infections found protective effects among all participants, but particularly among those with baseline 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels indicative of deficiency.

Source: Vitamin D & COVID-19: The Evidence So Far

ONE PRIME VARIABLE IN COVID-19 INFECTIONS IS "MASS TRANSIT".

You pack people in like sardines into subways cars and buses, and you breed infections.

COVID-19 is largely a disease of the U.S. East Coast. While Washington (specifically Seattle) was the original hotspot for coronavirus in America, that dubious distinction has decidedly shifted to the U.S. East Coast and to New York City in particular. The map below comes from the New York Times:



The New York Times also breaks down the numbers by each state. When organized by number of cases per 100,000 people, the states hit hardest are mostly in New England or the mid-Atlantic region.

By this measure, the five worst states are New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. Washington, D.C. is #6, if it's treated as its own state. Why would this be the case? Probably because this region is incredibly well-connected in terms of mass transit (as well as international travel) and has a high population density.

Source: Coronavirus: COVID-19 Is Largely An East Coast Disease, For Now

I have seen several articles in the news that tried to frame the coronavirus impact under a racial lens. The fact that more minorities contract the disease MUST BE RACIST!. But in reality, they should be looking at this under the MASS TRANSIT LENS. After all who it the predominant users of Mass Transit? Is it wealthy people like Bill de Blasio?

Our mass transit systems have a major vulnerability risk. IMHO it is something that could be easily fixed. It is an engineering problem that falls under the HVAC designers.

No new cases in the last three days in the county I live in.

Excellent!

Even we in NYC are doing better. Less than 1,000 new cases now.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-46078989

Three cheers for HighLlama!!

Llama Rama Ding Dong!