Emergence of a Deadly Coronavirus

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The Effect of the Coronavirus on Young Adults

More young adults live at home now than during the Great Depression, according to a Pew Research poll, as 52% reported living with one or both of their parents in July.

The number of young adults, aged 18 to 29, living at home is now 26.6 million, which is up 2.6 million since the coronavirus pandemic swept the globe in February, when just 47% were living with their parents.

At the end of the Great Depression in 1940, 48% of young adults lived at home. Pew points out that there were likely more living at home in the 1930s, but there is no data for that period.

The pandemic hit youngest adults particularly hard, as they’ve had to relocate due to the shutdown of college campuses and job losses.

The youngest of adults, age 18 to 24, accounted for 2.1 million of the 2.6 million who had to move back home. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the employment rate for this Gen Z group, aged 16-24, was 46.7% in July, down from 56.2% in July 2019.

The lack of job prospects also has taken a toll on the mental health of young Americans. A fourth of those between the ages of 18 and 24 have considered suicide this year due to the pandemic, according to a June survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Anxiety and depression also have skyrocketed recently. The CDC found that the prevalence of anxiety disorders was three times higher for young Americans than in the second quarter of 2019, and the prevalence of depression was roughly four times higher.

Source: Coronavirus has record number of young adults living with parents in US

Coronavirus Controversies

Are vaccines going to be adequately tested for safety and efficacy if Phase III clinical trials are not completed?
Maybe, maybe not. The FDA recently announced that it could issue an emergency authorization for a coronavirus vaccine before Phase III clinical trials are finished. We believe this is a reckless gamble because the agency probably won't have collected enough data to make a truly informed decision as to the vaccine's safety and efficacy.

On the other hand, Dr Anthony Fauci just said that Phase III trials could be ended early if there is "overwhelming" data on safety and efficacy. This can and does happen. For instance, if a clinical trial is assessing a cancer drug, the trial will be cut short if the drug is shown to be statistically significantly better than the other drug (or placebo). It's considered unethical to continue the trial because there is sufficient evidence that the treatment works; thus, it would be wrong to keep giving patients in the control group an inferior drug (or placebo).

The same logic applies here. If sufficient evidence from the clinical trials show that the vaccines are safe and effective, they can receive approval before the trials are complete. This is probably unlikely to happen because the vaccine must be tested on tens of thousands of people in order to detect rare but dangerous side effects.

Does convalescent plasma work to treat COVID?
The FDA and NIH are fighting this one out. The former says that convalescent plasma can treat COVID-19, but the NIH says that there is "insufficient data." Specifically, the NIH said in a statement, "There are currently no data from well-controlled, adequately powered randomized clinical trials that demonstrate the efficacy and safety of convalescent plasma for the treatment of COVID-19."

In other words, the experiments that were conducted weren't good enough. They didn't meet basic scientific or statistical criteria. The NIH concluded that it could not recommend for or against convalescent plasma because the data were insufficient. Tellingly, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn apologized for hyping convalescent plasma, indicating that the answer to the originally posed question is probably, "No."

Is the COVID death toll closer to 200,000 or 10,000?
The CDC said that 94% of COVID deaths were in people who had underlying conditions. Many took that to mean that the COVID death toll is greatly exaggerated. That's not true. As my esteemed colleague Dr. Chuck Dinerstein said, "Death certificates are the stories we tell ourselves, how we connect the dots at the end of one's life." They are certainly not the final arbiter of truth.

Why not? Consider the following explanation, also by Dr. Dinerstein:
The main cause of the death is the more proximate, that is timely, driver of the event, whereas co-morbidities become secondary factors. Identifying the proximal event can be tricky and may require judgment. If someone has a heart attack, loses control of his car, and subsequently has a head-on collision at 60 mph and dies, is the cause of death the car accident or the heart attack?

The moral of the story is that death certificates try to piece together why a person died. It attempts to build a story, such as A caused B caused C caused D, which resulted in death. What the CDC said is that in 6% of cases, the only cause of death listed was coronavirus. That does not mean that coronavirus was not a driving force behind the other 94% of deaths.

Source: COVID: Coronavirus Controversies Over Vaccine Trials, Convalescent Plasma, Death Toll

I guess from my opinion, the logic is a little bit like this:
Your house is on fire.
Do you perform hundreds of academic studies to explore all the outcomes of optimally putting out the fire.
Or do you call the fire department and have them do their best.
Inaction by itself is a decision and it has consequences. Life is messy. Hindsight is always 20/20. So sometimes you just need to pick yourself up by the seat of your pants and do something.

Jimmy have you heard the news the Oxford vaccine trial has hit a major hitch with one of the volunteers in the trial suffering a serious adverse reaction?

The trial has been stopped and some talk the release of the vaccine has been put in jeopardy?

Yes Astrazeneca have reported to have paused the trial because of one adverse reaction which is considered standard.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ ... articipant

What is perhaps not standard is that 10% of Covid cases are "long haulers" where the symptoms of the virus don't subside even months after lung infection.

I am wondering if people in this category who are exposed to the vaccine risk similar adverse reactions?

Yet more data support COVID-19 aerosol transmission

Two studies published late last week in Clinical Infectious Diseases highlight the role of airborne spread of COVID-19 and the importance of efficient ventilation systems. One study found that patients can exhale millions of viral RNA particles per hour in the early stages of disease, and the second tied an outbreak affecting 81% of residents and 50% of healthcare workers at a Dutch nursing home to inadequate ventilation.

In the first study, researchers in China analyzed exhaled breath samples from 49 COVID-19 patients from 10 countries, 4 hospitalized patients without COVID-19, and 15 healthy people from Beijing using reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction. They also tested 26 air samples and 242 surface swabs from quarantine hotels, hospitals, and personal belongings.

Of the exhaled breath samples, 26.9% were positive for RNA from SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, while 3.8% of air samples and 5.4% of surface swabs tested positive. The viral RNA breath emission rate was highest in the first stages of disease.

Breath samples from two patients were positive for coronavirus RNA, but surface swabs of their cell phones, hands, and toilets were negative. Viral RNA was also detected on an air ventilation duct below another patient's bed.

Semi-enclosed environments

Among the 242 surface swabs, viral RNA was found most often on toilet bowls (16.7%); floors (12.5%); patient hands, pillowcases, mobile phones, and computer keyboards (4.0%); and surfaces that healthcare staff touched (2.6%). But only 2 of 22 mobile phone surface samples tested positive for viral RNA, and all object handles were negative.

The authors said that the viral RNA breath emission rate appears to vary based on factors such as patient activity level and disease stage and may be affected by age. Viral RNA emission was sporadic in at least one patient, whose samples generated different test results on different days.

The findings support previous studies that concluded that COVID-19 is mostly likely spread by aerosols rather than large respiratory droplets or contaminated surfaces, the researchers said. Such studies have documented airborne spread in semi-enclosed environments such as a choir practice in Washington state and a restaurant in Guangzhou, China.

"Though we did not study infectivity or transmission probability and other virus releasing activities such as talking and singing, our study demonstrates that exhaled breath emission plays an important role in SARS-CoV-2 emission into the air, which could have contributed greatly to the observed airborne cluster infections and the ongoing pandemic," the authors wrote.

Stale indoor air

In the second study, researchers in Rotterdam and Utrecht, the Netherlands, wrote a research letter documenting a COVID-19 outbreak that sickened 17 residents and 17 healthcare staff in one of seven wards in a nursing home for people with psychiatric or behavioral conditions. None of the 95 residents or 106 healthcare staff in the other six wards tested positive.

The authors noted that the Netherlands was experiencing a low prevalence of COVID-19 the week of the outbreak, with only 493 of that country's residents testing positive, compared with 8,391 cases during the most intense week of the outbreak in April.

To prevent coronavirus transmission, all healthcare workers were assigned to specific wards and required to wear surgical masks during patient care starting Apr 26. Residents lived in individual rooms and spent part of each day in shared living rooms; some residents were mobile.

Suspecting that the ventilation system of the affected ward could have contributed to the outbreak, investigators found that an energy-efficient system had been installed in which indoor air was refreshed only when indoor carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations detected elevated levels. If CO2 levels didn't exceed a certain threshold, unfiltered indoor air was simply recirculated throughout the ward. In contrast, the six unaffected wards were refreshed regularly with outside air.

The researchers noted that low CO2 levels produced by inactive patients may have led to stale air in the affected ward, which was cooled by two air conditioning units that also recirculated the air in the shared living areas. SARS-CoV-2 RNA was found in dust on the mesh dust filter of living room air conditioners and in four filters from three of eight ventilation units.

The research letter was written in support of findings of a study published in the same journal on Jul 6 warning of the hazards of airborne COVID-19 transmission in poorly ventilated environments.

"We advise that prevention of COVID-19 transmission should take into account the possibility of aerosol transmission in healthcare facilities and other buildings where ventilation systems recirculate unfiltered inside air," the authors of the Aug 28 study wrote.

Source: Yet more data support COVID-19 aerosol transmission

The evidence keeps piling up that aerosol transmission is a major component of coronavirus transmission. Since we have not as of yet taken adequate measures to limit this transmission route. IMHO when winter hits and humidity levels again drop, we will again experience a surge of coronavirus deaths. A SECOND WAVE

Schools Opening

There was all types of panic about opening up schools. In my town, we have one school. It is a combination elementary, junior high, high school with around 1,000 students. School opened around 4 weeks ago. So what happened?

Well so far, the school has experienced 4 positive coronavirus cases. Two in students and two in staff. Everything seems to be rather controlled. Many of the students were segregated into small manageable pods and contact between members of pods were very limited. So when someone contracted COVID, only the pod was affected. Students riding the bus were assigned permanent seats. If someone came back positive, those that sat next to the student were easily identified. So the school is still open and students are continuing their in-classroom learning.

A health expert has revealed a coronavirus vaccine is far from a given despite worldwide investment.
In an explosive interview with the Australian Herald Sun, Brian McNamee, the chair of the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories – the firm tasked with producing vaccines in Australia – said the treatment could face a lengthy delay, if one arrives at all.
“If they had asked us we would have told them that drug development is a very complex thing,” Dr McNamee said.
“We can’t bank on a vaccine. I think the treatments are improving but we have to learn to live with COVID. We have to manage it.”
However, Dr McNamee said the company was “cautiously optimistic”, but warned of “risks”.
“…that’s why at CSL we’ve got two vaccines we could manufacture because the likelihood of both working is not high,” he told the publication.

Fauci warns US needs to 'hunker down' for fall, winter: 'It's not going to be easy'

We Aussies went through winter with COVID-19.....the spring weather is back and more people going outside so we survived

In the recent Pocket newsletter, I found this recommended article from the Atlantis:
It says America stuck in the pandemic spiral.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/arch ... er/616204/

According to our Queensland chief health officer, Jeanette Young, that for celebrities like Tom Hanks and high profile sports stars like footballers "COVID-19 border rules didn’t apply because ‘we need every single dollar in our state"

I wonder if that's why Tom Cruise is currently allowed to fly to Norway to film Mission Impossible and why tennis players are allowed to travel internationally to play the US open?

Currently we have people who are unable to visit their sick or dying family members or attend funerals interstate. Quite cruel.

My mother works as a secretary in a small company which products background elements for filming and she told me some film makers came back here to Hungary from the USA at the end of the summer. My mother also told that even she is regularly tested by the new safety protocol.

Very scary for those of us that live alone.
https://kwwl.com/2020/09/12/mississippi ... -two-days/