CDC USA Stats: 2/1/2020 to 9/16/2020 - 7 months of data on 6,649,000 cases.
Note that these numbers are a snapshot in time
and literally change by the minute as people catch and survive/die from
Covid-19. The best use of these numbers is to show us the trend and
provide a statistical answer to the question "what's
happened so far?'.
~~~~
Comorbidity Deaths = 94% of deaths.
- Covid-19 >AND< some other serious health issue were recorded on
the death certificate: Covid-19 was present and contributed to the
death.
Covid-19 Deaths = 6% of deaths
- Covid-19 was recorded on the death certificate as the sole cause of death...Covid-19 killed the person.
~~~~
USA “odds of dying” from Covid-19 vs. 2018/19 common flu
Age 14 and younger :
>1 in 167,715 chance of dying from the common flu (ages 0 to 17)
>1 in 1,010,223 chance of a Comorbidity death
>1 in 15,826,823 chance of a Covid-19 death
Age 15 to 24 :
>1 in 60,687 chance of dying from the common flu (ages 18 to 49)
>1 in 134,506 chance of a Comorbidity death
>1 in 2,107,257 chance of a Covid-19 death
Age 25 to 44:
>1 in 60,687 chance of dying from the common flu (ages 18 to 49)
>1 in 18,059 chance of a Comorbidity death
>1 in 282,927 chance of a Covid-19 death
Age 45 to 64:
>1 in 10,943 chance of dying from the common flu (ages 50 to 64)
>1 in 2,672 chance of a Comorbidity death
>1 in 41,862 chance of a Covid-19 death
Age 65 to 84:
>1 in 2,066 chance of dying from the common flu (age 65 plus)
>1 in 572 chance of a Comorbidity death
>1 in 8,956 chance of a Covid-19 death
Age 85 and older:
>1 in 2,066 chance of dying from the common flu (age 65 plus)
>1 in 111 chance of a Comorbidity death
>1 in 1,738 chance of a Covid-19 death
What is “The Science” telling us?
If you have a serious preexisting condition,
Covid-19 is a threat to your life; and the older you are, the more
extreme the threat.
If you do not have a serious preexisting condition, Covid-19 is less deadly than the common flu; exception being age 85 plus.
~~~~
Disclaimer:
I am not a statistician, I only play one on the
internet.
If statistics is your line of work... please check my work and
report back.
off-guardian | New rules passing in the Australian state of Victoria
could see “conspiracy theorists” and those “suspected by health
authorities of being likely to spread the virus” detained in quarantine
centres, according to The Age
The rules are amendments being added to the Omnibus (Emergency Measures) Bill, which was first passed back in April.
The proposed detention would last “for the period reasonably necessary to eliminate or reduce a serious risk to public health”.
To translate that from bureaucrat into English: it means as for long as they want, or can get away with.
Legislation with this kind of vague verbiage is always a red flag,
but then Victoria is currently over-flowing with warning signs of this
kind.
Victoria – The World’s Fascist Test Run?
Maybe you haven’t been following exactly how bad things are getting
in Australia – and most especially Victoria – but they have essentially
aggressively seized their opportunity to create a fascist micro-state. A
social Petri dish, in which to culture some tyranny.
They have declared both a “state of emergency” AND a “state of
disaster” for a disease which has killed fewer than a thousand people in
9 months across the entire country.
Though notionally intended to be “temporary measures” which only
lasted six weeks, they have already extended that timeline for a further
six months. There is some planned “loosening” of these restrictions, but with such vague and mutable conditions it’s unlikely this “new normal” is going away.
Indeed the “emergency” is so comparatively minor that this precedent
means almost any future event can be designated a “disaster” or
“emergency”, and used as excuse to impose authoritarian social controls.
This, of course, is despite the fact that “Covid19 deaths” are incredibly vaguely defined.
Under UK law a person only has to test positive for the Sars-Cov-2 virus at any point in the 28 days prior to their death
for “Covid19” to be on their death certificate, a policy which totally
ignores the fact the majority of Sars-Cov-2 infections are completely
symptomless (and has already resulted in huge over-counts).
Meanwhile boring old influenza is lumbered with having to actually contribute to the death
before being added to the death certificate. And nevertheless, for
three straight months, the UK has recorded more flu deaths than Covid
deaths.
“Ah”, some of your may be saying, “this is just evidence that the lockdown, social distancing and masks have worked.”
But that is obviously not the case. Clearly, if these measures did
anything to halt viral transmission, the flu deaths would have gone down
as well. They have not. They are right in line with the five-year
average.
Despite social distancing and wearing masks and hand sanitizer on
every corner…the spread of the flu virus has not halted one bit in its
usual annual progress through society.
Ergo – the “emergency measures” have little to no impact on viral transmission.
nydailynews | “Opening restaurants, I understand the economic benefit and I understand
the economic pressure they’ve been under,” Cuomo said of struggling Big
Apple restaurants that have been shuttered, relegated to takeout or
serving customers outdoors for months.
The governor, who has faced criticism for his hesitation to allow
restaurants to seat diners indoors, set a Nov. 1 deadline to reassess
the COVID-19 infection rate. If the number remains low, indoor dining
capacity could increase to 50%.
The announcement comes after business owners filed a $2 billion
class-action lawsuit, alleging the state is violating the constitutional
rights of more than 150,000 New York City restaurateurs. The industry
employs roughly 300,000 people in the city.
New York State Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis (R-Staten Island), who
joined the suit against the governor earlier this week, said the state
should act faster to assist eateries.
“While we’re happy the city and state have acknowledged the plight of
the restaurant industry, it’s not enough," she said. "We will continue
to proceed with the lawsuit until New York City is granted the 50%
capacity like every other municipality in New York State.”
New Jersey began allowing eateries to welcome back customers last week
with a similar 25% limit on capacity while restaurants upstate and on
Long Island have been operating at 50% since June.
The governor has repeatedly railed against City Hall in recent weeks,
accusing the mayor and NYPD of not doing enough to enforce measures
meant to stem the spread of coronavirus.
On Wednesday, Cuomo said the city will contribute 400 personnel to an
existing task force headed by the State Liquor Authority and state
police to ensure compliance with the new orders, a deal apparently
hammered out not just with Mayor Bill de Blasio, but with other city
officials too.
“We have been talking to all stakeholders up until the moment I just walked out,” Cuomo said.
technologyreview | The large number of people already infected with the coronavirus in
the US has begun to act as a brake on the spread of the disease in
hard-hit states.
Millions of US residents have been infected by
the virus that causes covid-19, and at least 160,000 are dead. One
effect is that the pool of susceptible individuals has been depleted in
many areas. After infection, it’s believed, people become immune (at
least for months), so they don’t transmit the virus to others. This
slows the pandemic down.
“I believe the substantial epidemics
in Arizona, Florida and Texas will leave enough immunity to assist in
keeping COVID-19 controlled,” Trevor Bedford, a pandemic analyst at the
University of Washington, said on Friday, in a series of tweets. “However, this level of immunity is not compatible with a full return to societal behavior as existed before the pandemic.”
The
exact extent to which acquired immunity is slowing the rate of
transmission is unknown, but major questions like school reopening and
air travel may eventually hinge on the answer.
What is known is
that after rising at an alarming pace starting in May, new cases of
covid-19 in Sun Belt states like Florida have started to fall. Some of
that may be due to social distancing behavior, but rising rates of
immunity are also a factor, according to Youyang Gu, a computer
scientist whose Covid-19 Projections is among 34 pandemic models tracked
by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Immunity
may play a significant part in the regions that are declining,” says
Gu. At least until the fall, which is how far his models look forward,
he says, “I don’t think there is going to be another spike” of
infections in southern states.
justthenews | Dr. Sonia Angell, California's director of the Department of Public
Health, abruptly resigned on Sunday. Angell, who had been in the
position for less than a year, reportedly resigned via an email sent to
the California Health and Human Services Agency.
Angell has, among others, been leading the state's battle against the
novel coronavirus. More than 10,000 Californians have died of the
illness, and most of the state remains on shutdown following a brief
reopening period in early summer.
"Our department has been front and center in what has become an
all-of-government response of unprecedented proportions to COVID-19. In
the final calculation, all of our work, in aggregate, makes the
difference," Angell reportedly wrote in her resignation letter.
Angell's departure comes as the state government reckons with a data
glitch that failed to log nearly 300,000 infectious disease
testing records, resulting in hindered decision-making at the highest
levels of the California government.
The secretary of California Health and Human Services, Mark Ghaly,
recently apologized to state residents for the error. "Bottom line, our
data system failed," said Ghaly. With more than half a million
reported cases of the virus, California tops the nation for positive
diagnoses. The data blunder, however, has impeded state authorities'
ability to determine policies moving forward, specifically the decision
on whether to reopen schools for in-person learning as the new school
year is set to begin.
dailymail | Thousands of coronavirus deaths are set to be wiped from the government's official count, it was claimed today.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock last month ordered an urgent review into how daily death counts are calculated in England because of a 'statistical flaw'.
Academics
found Public Health England's methods meant ministers count victims as
anyone who died after ever testing positive for Covid-19 — even if they
were hit by a bus after beating the disease months later.
It would've meant that, technically, no-one
could ever recover from the virus and all 265,000 of England's
confirmed patients would eventually have had their deaths attributed to
the disease.
The blunder could see up
to 4,000 deaths removed from England's official toll of 41,749,
according to reports. One of the leading experts who uncovered the flaw
told MailOnline his 'best guess' was that more than 1,000 people have
had their deaths wrongly recorded as caused by Covid-19.
It would've meant that, technically, no-one
could ever recover from the virus and all 265,000 of England's
confirmed patients would eventually have had their deaths attributed to
the disease.
The blunder could see up
to 4,000 deaths removed from England's official toll of 41,749,
according to reports. One of the leading experts who uncovered the flaw
told MailOnline his 'best guess' was that more than 1,000 people have
had their deaths wrongly recorded as caused by Covid-19.
turcopelier | Florida is home to 21,933,000 people (see here). How many have succumbed to Covid since March 6, when Florida's Government started keeping tabs on the disease? 7,084.
That means 0.032% of the population have died from Covid in the last
six months. To put this into perspective, the CDC reports for 2017 that
46,044 Floridians died from heart disease. I do not recall nightly news
broadcasts wailing hysterically about fat Floridians eating double
cheeseburgers and clogging their arteries. But less than 8,000 deaths in
six months and we are supposed to put on masks and hide in our closets?
Nonsense.
Let's take a closer look at Sarasota County over the last 30 days. According to the US Census, Sarasota County was inhabited by 433,742 souls as of July 1, 2019. Here are the numbers according to the Florida Covid 19 "Dashboard." Just follow this link and click
on Sarasota County. Five thousand nine hundred seventy four Sarasotans
tested positive since the first of July (July 7 to be precise). That is
1.3% of the total county population. Hospitalized? 360, which represents
0.08%. How about deaths? 160. That is roughly consistent with the
number of deaths recorded state-wide--0.036%.
What about neighboring Manatee County (seat of the city of Bradenton
and winter home of the Pittsburgh Pirates)? Manatee has a slightly
smaller population than Sarsota, weighing in with 413,655 happy inhabitants.
Eight thousand nine hundred fifty six Manatee maniacs tested positive
for Covid--i.e., 2.1%. More have been hospitalized--589, which
represents 0.14%. The death count is 189 or 0.045%.
Ever hear of the concept of "perspective?" I am sure that the
families of those whose kith and kin perished from Covid and/or
co-morbidities exacerbated by Covid don't care a whit about the stats.
But the truth is the disease is not spreading like wildfire. People are
not flooding the hospitals.
cnbc | The coronavirus pandemic has pushed the jobless rate in New York, Los
Angeles and other major urban areas to near or above 20%, nearly twice
the national rate.
The unemployment rate is a barometer of financial hardship for American families, since losing a job typically leads to a significant drop in household income.
A rate of 20% means 1 in 5 Americans in the labor force can’t find work.
That’s double the national peak during the financial crisis of 2008-2009 and a level unseen since the 1930s, when the country was in the throes of its worst-ever economic downturn in the industrial era.
“It’s
devastating, in terms of how high that unemployment rate is,” said
Ioana Marinescu, an assistant professor of economics at the University
of Pennsylvania.
The
local business mix and policies around mandated business closures are
likely partly responsible for elevated joblessness in some major urban
areas, said Wayne Vroman, a labor economist at the Urban Institute.
Cities are also generally areas of higher business concentration when
compared with other regions, he said.
New York’s unemployment rate rose to 20.4% last month, according to state-level data
issued Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics that detailed figures
for some large metro areas. That’s up from 18.3% in May and 15% in
April.
The ranks of unemployed New Yorkers have grown by 261,000 people since April, to more than 811,000, according to the Bureau.
The trend stands in contrast to the broader U.S. labor-market recovery in May and June.
The U.S. unemployment rate fell to 11.1% last month
from 14.7% in April, largely driven by furloughed workers being
recalled to their jobs as states began reopening their economies.
New
York, the hardest-hit area of the country early in the health crisis,
has been cautious in lifting the economic shutdowns officials imposed to
contain the spread of Covid-19.
WaPo | The
coronavirus is spreading at dangerous levels across much of the United
States, and public health experts are demanding a dramatic reset in the
national response, one that recognizes that the crisis is intensifying
and that current piecemeal strategies aren’t working.
This
is a new phase of the pandemic, one no longer built around local or
regional clusters and hot spots. It comes at an unnerving moment in
which the economy suffered its worst collapse since the Great Depression, schools are rapidly canceling plans
for in-person instruction and Congress has failed to pass a new
emergency relief package. President Trump continues to promote fringe science, the daily death toll keeps climbing and the human cost of the virus in America has just passed 150,000 lives.
“Unlike
many countries in the world, the United States is not currently on
course to get control of this epidemic. It’s time to reset,” declared a report released this week by Johns Hopkins University.
Another report from the
Association of American Medical Colleges offered a similarly blunt
message: “If the nation does not change its course — and soon — deaths
in the United States could be well into the multiple hundreds of
thousands.”
The
country is exhausted, but the virus is not. It has shown a consistent
pattern: It spreads opportunistically wherever people let down their
guard and return to more familiar patterns of mobility and socializing.
When communities tighten up, by closing bars or requiring masks in
public, transmission drops.
That
has happened in some Sun Belt states, including Arizona, Florida and
Texas, which are still dealing with a surge of hospitalizations and
deaths but are finally turning around the rate of new infections.
There
are signs, however, that the virus is spreading freely in much of the
country. Experts are focused on upticks in the percentage of positive coronavirus
tests in the upper South and Midwest. It is a sign that the virus could
soon surge anew in the heartland. Infectious-disease experts also see
warning signs in East Coast cities hammered in the spring.
Time |In spring, as Colombia settled into a nationwide COVID-19
lockdown, some Colombians received troubling new guidelines—and not
from the government. In remote parts of 11 of the country’s 32 states,
armed groups began enforcing their own quarantine measures, according to a report published July 15 by Human Rights Watch.
Through pamphlets and WhatsApp messages, the groups laid out curfews,
restrictions on movement, categories of essential work, and more. These
restrictions were sometimes stricter than government rules, and
punishments for breaking them far more serious.
One pamphlet seen by HRW, released in early April by Marxist guerrillas the National Liberation Army (ELN)
in the northern BolÃvar department, warned that fighters would be
“forced to kill people in order to preserve lives” because residents had
not “respected the orders to prevent Covid-19.”
Latin America is the current center of the pandemic, with more than 3.5 million cases across the region and numbers in many countries still rising sharply. Analysts say COVID-19 is worsening the region’s problem with “criminal governance” –
where the state loses control over a part of its territory as non-state
armed groups, such as drug gangs and guerrilla forces, take over and
effectively govern small areas. Groups in Colombia, Brazil,
Mexico and elsewhere have taken on the fight against COVID-19, allowing
them to claim an interest in the public good, and strengthen their
violent grip on local communities—in a way that could be permanent.
Which armed groups control territory in Latin America?
The nature of criminal governance varies hugely
between regions and countries across Latin America, according to Chris
Dalby, managing editor of investigative news site InSight Crime,
which examines organized crime in the region. But it tends to take
hold, he says, in poor or remote areas where the state presence is weak;
that is, where the government has failed to provide effective law
enforcement, public services, and economic opportunity.
In Colombia, armed groups are mostly a legacy of
the country’s decades-long conflict with rebel groups. Though the
Colombian government reached a landmark peace deal with the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC)
in 2016, other guerrilla groups, including the ELN, and paramilitary
forces remain powerful in some rural areas. In Brazil, drug traffickers
exert more influence than the police in some of the favela neighborhoods
that lie on the outskirts of large cities, with the largest gang being
the First Capital Command (PCC) in São Paulo. In Mexico, drug cartels, such as the Sinaloa Cartel in the northwest of the country, have similar control over poor communities.
These distinct groups use their
territories for a range of illicit businesses: drug trafficking, people
trafficking, illegal mining, extortion rackets and more. But they often
also provide resources and public services for communities, as a way of
legitimizing their control and buying loyalty. During the pandemic, with
many money-making activities harder to carry out thanks to national
restrictions on movement and businesses, many groups have leaned into
this role of governing, Dalby says. “They’ve taken the opportunity to
reaffirm that control.”
In March, after COVID-19 started to spread through Brazil,
gangs in Rio de Janeiro favelas drove through streets using a
loudspeaker to tell residents they were putting a curfew in place and
threatening violence if they did not comply, according to Brazilian newspaper UOL. Traffickers reportedly also handed out hand soap, and issued edicts banning tourists
from entering the area in case they infect the residents. In Mexico, in
April, drug cartels handed out boxes of food and other basic supplies
to people struggling with the economic impact of the pandemic. Images
circulated in Latin American media showed packages branded with the names of cartels.
In Colombia, some armed groups implemented stricter
restrictions than the government did on people’s movement, humanitarian
workers and community leaders told HRW, allowing no exceptions for
accessing health services or banks during curfews, for example. People
who did not comply with the rules faced brutal punishments: HRW
documented at least 8 killings of civilians who apparently did not abide
by COVID-19 measures imposed by armed groups between March and June.
counterpunch | Our proposal is consistent with all the
principal undisputed facts concerning SARS-CoV-2 and its origin. The MMP
proposal has the additional benefit of reconciling many observations
concerning SARS-CoV-2 that have proven difficult to reconcile with any
natural zoonotic hypothesis.
For instance, using different approaches,
numerous researchers have concluded that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein
has a very high affinity for the human ACE2 receptor (Walls et al., 2020; Piplani et al., 2020; Shang and Ye et al., 2020; Wrapp et al., 2020).
Such exceptional affinities, ten to twenty times as great as that of
the original SARS virus, do not arise at random, making it very hard to
explain in any other way than for the virus to have been strongly
selected in the presence of a human ACE2 receptor (Piplani et al., 2020).
In addition to this, a recent report found that the spike of RaTG13 binds the human ACE2 receptor (Shang and Ye et al., 2020).
We proposed above that the virus in the mine directly infected humans
lung cells. The main determinant of cell infection and species
specificity of coronaviruses is initial receptor binding (Perlman and Netland, 2009).
Thus RaTG13, unlike most bat coronaviruses, probably can enter and
infect human cells, providing biological plausibility to the idea that
the miners became infected with a coronavirus resembling RaTG13.
Moreover, the receptor binding domain
(RBD) of SARS-CoV-2, which is the region of the spike that physically
contacts the human ACE2 receptor, has recently been crystallised to
reveal its spatial structure (Shang and Ye et al., 2020).
These authors found close structural similarities between the spikes of
SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 in how they bound the human ACE2 receptor:
“Second, as with SARS-CoV-2, bat RaTG13
RBM [a region of the RBD] contains a similar four-residue motif in the
ACE2 binding ridge, supporting the notion that SARS-CoV-2 may have evolved from RaTG13 or a RaTG13-related bat coronavirus
(Extended Data Table 3 and Extended Data Fig. 7). Third, the L486F,
Y493Q and D501N residue changes from RaTG13 to SARS CoV-2 enhance ACE2
recognition and may have facilitated the bat-to-human transmission of
SARS-CoV-2 (Extended Data Table 3 and Extended Data Fig. 7). A
lysine-to-asparagine mutation at the 479 position in the SARS-CoV-2 RBD
(corresponding to the 493 position in the SARS-CoV-2 RBD) enabled
SARS-CoV to infect humans. Fourth, Leu455 contributes favourably to ACE2
recognition, and it is conserved between RaTG13 and SARS CoV-2; its
presence in the SARS CoV-2 RBM may be important for the bat-to-human
transmission of SARS-CoV-2″ (Shang and Ye et al., 2020). (italics added)
The significance of this molecular
similarity is very great. Coronaviruses have evolved a diverse set of
molecular solutions to solve the problem of binding ACE2 (Perlman and Netland, 2009; Forni et al., 2017). The fact that RaTG13 and SARS CoV-2 share the same solution makes RaTG13 a highly likely direct ancestor of Sars-CoV-2.
A further widely noted feature of SARS-CoV-2 is its furin site (Coutard et al., 2020).
This site is absent from RaTG13 and other closely related
coronaviruses. The most closely related virus with such a site is the
highly lethal MERS (which broke out in 2012). Possession of a furin site
enables SARS-CoV-2 (like MERS) to infect lungs and many other body
tissues (such as the gastrointestinal tract and neurons), explaining
much of its lethality (Hoffman et al., 2020; Lamers et al., 2020).
However, no convincing explanation for how SARS-CoV-2 acquired this
site has yet been offered. Our suggestion is that it arose due to the
high selection pressure which existed in the miner’s lungs and which in
general worked to ensure that the virus became highly adapted to the
lungs. This explanation, which encompasses how SARS-CoV-2 came to target
lung tissues in general, is an important aspect of our proposal.
The implication is therefore that the
furin site was not acquired by recombination with another coronavirus
and simply represents convergent evolution (as suggested by Andersen et al., 2020).
An intriguing alternative possibility is
that SARS-CoV-2 acquired its furin site directly from the miner’s lungs.
Humans possess an epithelial sodium channel protein called ENaC-a whose
furin cleavage site is identical over eight amino acids to SARS-CoV-2 (Anand et al., 2020).
ENaC-a protein is present in the same airway epithelial and lung
tissues infected by SARS-CoV-2. It is known from plants that
positive-stranded RNA viruses recombine readily with host mRNAs (Greene and Allison, 1994; Greene and Allison, 1996; Lommel and Xiong, 1991; Borja et al., 2007).
The same evidence base is not available for positive-stranded animal
RNA viruses, (though see Gorbalenya, 1992) but if plant viruses are a
guide then acquisition of its furin site via recombination with the mRNA
which encodes ENaC-a by SARS-CoV-2 is a strong possibility.
A further feature of SARS-CoV-2 has been the very limited adaptive evolution of its genome since the pandemic began (Zhan et al., 2020; van Dorp et al., 2020; Starr et al., 2020).
It is a well-established principle that viruses that jump species
undergo accelerated evolutionary change in their new host (e.g. Baric et al., 1997). Thus, SARS and MERS (both coronaviruses) underwent rapid and readily detectable adaptation to their new human hosts (Forni et al., 2017; Dudas and Rambaut, 2016).
Such an adaptation period has not been observed for SARS-CoV-2 even
though it has now infected many more individuals than SARS or MERS did.
This has even led to suggestions that the SARS-CoV-2 virus had a period
of cryptic circulation in humans infections that predated the pandemic (Chaw et al., 2020).
The sole mutation consistently observed to accumulate across multiple
studies is a D614G substitution in the spike protein (e.g. Korber et al., 2020).
The numerically largest analysis of SARS-CoV-2 genomes, however, found
no evidence at all for adaptive evolution, even for D614G (van Dorp et al., 2020).
The general observation is therefore that
Sars-CoV-2 has remained functionally unchanged or virtually so (except
for inconsequential genetic changes) since the pandemic began. This is a
very important observation. It implies that SARS-CoV-2 is highly
adapted across its whole set of component proteins and not just at the
spike (Zhan et al., 2020). That is to say, its evolutionary leap to humans was completed before the 2019 pandemic began.
It is hard to imagine an explanation for this high adaptiveness other than some kind of passaging in a human body (Zhan et al., 2020). Not even passaging in human cells could have achieved such an outcome.
Two examples illustrate this point. In a follow up to Shang and Ye et al., (2020),
a similar group of Minnesota researchers identified a distinct strategy
by which the spike (S) protein (which contains the receptor bind
domain; RBD) of SARS-CoV-2 evades the human immune system (Shang and Wan et al., 2020).
This strategy involves more effective hiding of its RBD, but it implies
again that the spike and the RBD evolved in tandem and in the presence
of the human immune system (i.e. in a human body and not in tissue
culture).
The Andersen authors, in their critique of
a possible engineered origin for SARS-CoV-2, also stress the need for
passaging in whole humans:
“Finally, the generation of the predicted
O-linked glycans is also unlikely to have occurred during cell-culture
passage, as such features suggest the involvement of an immune system” (Andersen et al., 2020).
The final point that we would like to make
is that the principal zoonotic origin thesis is the one proposed by
Andersen et al. Apart from being poorly supported this thesis is very
complex. It requires two species jumps, at least two recombination
events between quite distantly related coronaviruses and the physical
transfer of a pangolin (having a coronavirus infection) from outside
China (Andersen et al., 2020).
Even then it provides no logical explanation of the adaptedness of
SARS-CoV-2 across its whole genome or why the virus emerged in Wuhan.
By contrast, our MMP proposal requires
only the one species jump, which is documented in the Master’s thesis.
Although we do not rule out a possible role for mixed infections in the
lungs of the miners, nor the possibility of recombination between
closely related variants in those lungs, nor the potential acquisition
of the furin site from a host mRNA, only mutation was needed to derive
SARS-CoV-2 from RaTG13. Hence our attention earlier to the figure from P. Zhou et al., 2020showing that RaTG13 is the most closely related virus to SARS-CoV-2 over its entire length. This extended similarity is perfectly consistent with a mutational origin of SARS-CoV-2 from RaTG13.
In short, the MMP theory is a plausible
and parsimonious explanation of all the key features of the COVID-19
pandemic and its origin. It accounts for the propensity of SARS-CoV-2
infections to target the lungs; the apparent preadapted nature of the
virus; and its transmission from bats in Yunnan to humans in Wuhan.
Slate | In early July, a group of scientists authored an article
outlining the evidence for COVID-19 being an airborne disease. It made
plenty of headlines, which was, frankly, a bit confusing. Didn’t the
public already know that COVID-19 was a respiratory illness? And didn’t
medical providers already know that COVID-19 could be transmitted by
aerosols in some situations, not just droplets? Why was this news,
exactly?
To understand the confusion, we have to go back to the definition of airborne.
In medical parlance, an “airborne” disease is one that is spread
primarily by the distribution of aerosols—tiny particles, less than 5
microns in size, that can linger in the air and travel long distances.
They can also travel lower into your respiratory tract. Classic examples
are chicken pox, measles, and tuberculosis. In contrast, a “droplet
disease” is one that is primarily transmitted by much larger droplets
(20 microns or larger) that don’t linger in the air and don’t travel
long distances—they typically fall to the ground within about 3 feet of
the source. Classic examples are influenza, mumps, and whooping cough.
These droplets can land in your eyes, nose, or mouth, and infect you, or
be transferred from fomites (surrounding objects) to hands, and thereby
to the face, infecting the respiratory tract by direct contact with
mucus membranes in the eyes, nose, or mouth. But that doesn’t mean you
can think of a droplet disease as requiring direct contact—this kind of disease can infect you either when you inhale it or when you have direct contact with it.
Which underscores the problem. In real life, what comes out of a
COVID-infected patient when they breathe, cough, or sneeze doesn’t
neatly fit exactly into one category or the other—particles can exist along a size continuum. And just to make things more confusing, not everyone even uses the term airborne
to mean aerosol only—sometimes it means only that the disease is spread
by any size infective particle that is inhaled. On top of that,
while the World Health Organization hasn’t disputed that the disease
can be spread by inhaled droplets, it has focused mainly on direct
contact with droplets, which is why, until recently, it’s mostly pushed
hand-washing and distancing as ways to contain spread, while being
slower to push masks, which are mainly protective against droplet
inhalation. Sorting through these competing transmission ideologies, and
trying to figure out if you are keeping yourself safe from aerosols or
droplets, feels like canoeing through crabgrass.
What I have come to realize is that it really shouldn’t matter that
much. Even as we’ve focused on droplets, in the clinical world, we’ve
always known that a COVID-positive patient could generate aerosols and
spread the disease that way. The WHO and the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention both acknowledged this, hence their recommendation that
medical staff wear an N95 mask when performing a procedure considered
“aerosol generating.” But we couldn’t agree on what these procedures
were either, in practice. Placing a breathing tube into someone’s
trachea before putting them on a ventilator is considered an
aerosolizing procedure, that is certain. But scientists and physicians
quibble about everything else that could be an aerosolizing procedure:
nebulizer treatments for asthma, chest tubes inserted for collapsed
lungs, suctioning, CPR. A patient just sitting quietly by themselves in a
room might cough and generate an aerosol, as well as a spray of
droplets capable of traveling up to 200 mph, a speed that could easily launch them further than 3 feet.
mises | As soon as it became clear that the Swedish state had no plans to
implement harsh lock downs, global media organizations like the New York Times have implemented what can only be described as an ideological jihad against Sweden.
It is common to read articles stating that Sweden has one of the world's worst death rates for COVID-19.
This, however, remains a matter of perspective.
Sweden's total deaths per million in population as of July 14
is 549. That's considerably lower than the deaths per million rate in
the UK, which is 662, and in Spain, which is 608. In Belgium, the death
rate is 884.
Moreover, the Sweden deaths per million is many times better than the rates found in New Jersey and New York: 1,763 and 1,669.
An astute reader, however, will quickly notice that articles
condemning Sweden's "failure" rarely if ever mention these comparisons.
Instead, anti-Sweden articles are careful to only mention countries with
far lower deaths per million, usually Denmark and Norway. A nonspecific
stock phrase is generally inserted which repeats that Sweden has: "a far higher mortality rate than its neighbours."
Articles about countries with far more deaths per million than Sweden
often make excuses for those governments. In May, for example, the BBC
repeated the Belgian government's talking points, which attempted to
explain that things aren't as bad as they seem in
Belgium. In places where harsh lockdowns were implemented—such as New
York or the UK— the explanation is that these countries implemented
their lockdowns too late.
charleshughsmith |The lower reaches of the financial food chain are already dying, and every entity that depended on that layer is doomed.
Though
under pressure from climate change, the dinosaurs were still dominant
65 million year ago--until the meteor struck, creating a global "nuclear
winter" that darkened the atmosphere for months, killing off most of the food chain that the dinosaurs depended on. (See chart below.)
The ancestors of modern birds were one of the few dinosaur species to survive the extinction event, which took months to play out.
It
wasn't the impact and shock wave that killed off dinosaurs globally--it
was the "nuclear winter" that doomed them to extinction. As plants withered, the plant-eating dinosaurs expired, depriving the predator dinosaurs of their food supply.
This is a precise analogy for the global economy, which is entering a financial "nuclear winter" extinction event. As I've been discussing for the past few months, costs are sticky but revenues and profits are on a slippery slope.
Businesses still have all the high fixed costs of 2019 but their
revenues are sliding as the "nuclear winter" weakens consumer spending,
investment in new capacity, etc.
Despite all the hoopla about a potential vaccine, no vaccine can change four realities: one,
consumer sentiment has shifted from confidence to caution and from
spending freely to saving. This is the financial equivalent of "nuclear
winter": there is no way to return to the pre-impact environment.
Two, uncertainty cannot be dissipated, either. There are no guarantees a
vaccine will be 99% effective, that it will last more than a few
months, that it won't have side-effects, etc. There are also no
guarantees that consumers will resume their care-free spending ways as
credit tightens, incomes decline, risks emerge and the need for savings
becomes more compelling.
Three, consumer behavior and uncertainty have already changed, and so
businesses that cannot survive on much lower revenues won't last long
enough to emerge from the "nuclear winter" of uncertainty and a shift in
sentiment.
Four, assets based on 2019 revenues, profits and demand are now
horrendously overvalued, and the repricing of all assets will bring down
the predators, i.e. the banks.
As I've noted here before, the top 10% of households account for almost 50% of consumer spending. These
households are older, and own the majority of assets --between 80% and
90% of stocks, bonds, business equity, rental real estate, etc. This is
the demographic with the most to lose in returning to care-free air
travel, jamming into crowded venues and cafes, etc.
WEF | In the US, COVID-19 has taken a disproportionate toll on
African-American communities, low-income people and vulnerable
populations such as the homeless. In Los Angeles, the death rate for black citizens is nearly three times that of its wealthiest residents.
The fact that the pandemic affected so disproportionately black
communities is a reflection not just of historic racism but also their
continuation in existing systemic inequalities. In America, as in many
other countries, people who face racial discrimination and
marginalization are more likely to be unemployed or underemployed and
have poor housing and living conditions. As a result, their access to
health care is more limited and they suffer more from pre-existing
health conditions that make COVID-19 particularly deadly.
The great challenge for all those who share leadership
responsibilities is to respond to the crisis in a way that integrates
the hopes of the future. While reflecting on the aspects that a future
social contract might follow, the opinions of the younger generation
must be integrated, as they are the ones who will be asked to live with
it – the same generation that is now so engaged at the vanguard of the
fight against racism. They have taken to heart the words of Archbishop
Desmond Tutu: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have
chosen the side of the oppressor.”
Their adherence is decisive, and therefore to better understand
what they want, it is necessary for them to be heard. This is made all
the more significant by the fact that the younger generation is likely
to be more radical than the older one in redefining the social contract.
The pandemic has tragically ended lives but it has also upended
them. A whole generation across the globe will be defined by economic
and often social insecurity, with millions due to enter the work force
in the midst of a profound recession. Even for the most advantaged
amongst them, starting off in deficit – many students have educational
debts – is likely to have long-term effects. Already the millennials (at
least in the Western world) are worse off than their parents in terms
of earnings, assets and wealth. They are less likely to own a home or
have children than their parents were.
Now, another generation (Gen Z) is entering a system that it sees
as failing and that will be beset by longstanding problems exacerbated
by the pandemic. As a young student told The New York Times: “Young people have a deep desire for radical change because we see the broken path ahead”.
The worst response the world can have in this situation is
further polarization, narrow thinking and the search for simplistic
solutions – a terrain favourable for propagating rumours,
misinformation and hatred. The COVID-19 pandemic has unequivocally shown
that the world is deeply interconnected and yet also largely bereft of
solidarity between nations, and often even within nations.
WEF | We could try to go back to the world we had before the pandemic,
he said, but that risked "the amplification of many of the trends we see
today: polarisation, nationalism, racism and ultimately social unrest
and conflicts."
A great reset of how the economy and society run would do the opposite, he said.
It was also a time to support those who had been left behind.
Juliana Rotich, Venture Partner at Atlantica Ventures in Nairobi, said
we were at an inflection point.
"There’s an opportunity to centre the reset on those who are most
vulnerable, those on the edge where it only takes something like a
pandemic to slide into poverty."
Other speakers at the launch echoed Schwab's concerns about inequality and racism.
Microsoft President Brad Smith made a direct reference to the
racial conflict in his own country, and how the Great Reset could be
part of the solution.
"Data, and technology more broadly, are indispensable tools to solving almost any of the problems that we confront," he said.
"And so when it comes to protecting people’s fundamental rights,
as we are seeing in the United States today, we have been focused for
several years on using data to shine a light on disparities, for
example, between the practices of police on African-Americans and blacks
in the United States in comparison with other populations - that is a
slice of what we’ll need to address around the world."
In a passionate address, Kristalina Georgieva, the head of the
International Monetary Fund said the Great Reset would result in a
"greener, smarter, fairer world".
"We know this pandemic, if left to its own devices, will deepen inequality," she said.
"But if we were to concentrate in investing in people, in the
social fabric of our societies, in access to opportunities and education
for all, in expansion of social programmes - then we can have a world
that is a better world for all."
voxeu | One great unknown about COVID-19 is whether individuals who recover from
it can be reinfected. At the emergence of any new virus, it is
impossible to know whether immunity is permanent or wanes, until enough
time has passed for longitudinal studies to take place. At the moment,
and with limited available data, medical scientists and epidemiologists
are instead comparing SARS-CoV-2 to related coronaviruses, such as
HCoV-HKU1 and HCoV-OC43, which are known to exhibit waning immunity. An
early contribution by Kissler et al. (2020) assumed that immunity to
SARS-CoV-2 wanes in approximately 45 weeks. A recent medical study (Long
et al. 2020) found a significant drop in specific antibody levels after
three months. Nevertheless, the duration of immunity in general is
still far from understood.
In Giannitsarou et al. (2020), we explicitly consider a setting in
which immunity is temporary. We derive a stylised optimal containment
policy and contrast it to policies assuming that once recovered,
individuals are forever immune.
We work with a flexible epidemic model known as SEIRS
(Susceptible-Exposed-Infected-Recovered-Susceptible). The model allows
for natural births and deaths, disease induced deaths, a pre-symptomatic
state in which individuals are exposed to the virus and can be
infectious without exhibiting symptoms, and importantly, waning
immunity. In such a framework, because immunity may slowly disappear
from recovered people, there is the potential for a second (and even
third) wave of infection.
In summary, we find that if immunity to SARS-CoV-2 is temporary, the
disease will become endemic. The optimal policy will make an initial
effort to reduce the first great infection wave and then engage in a
permanent low level management of the persistent infection in the
population in order to keep it under control. In practice, this means
that partial lockdown or social distancing measures may become the norm
for some years to come.
Our analysis assumed that, currently, the only policies at our
disposal are broad-based non-medical interventions such as social
distancing and lockdown measures. At the initial stages of the COVID-19
pandemic, such policies proved to be extremely costly from social,
economic, and health care perspectives. But going forward, we expect
that individuals, businesses, and governments are likely to adapt how
they do things and operate to mitigate the costs of this initial
dramatic shock. People may become more cautious in everyday dealings,
businesses may come to depend less on third parties or off-shoring,
while other organisations such as schools, transport, intermediate goods
producers, and local governments may find innovative ways to become
more flexible and resilient in the ways they deliver services and
products. We hope that with creativity and resourcefulness, humanity
will learn to navigate and live with the disease, should it turn out to
be here for the long term.
wirepoints | Let’s start with a central claim Governor JB Pritzker made Wednesday
in his testimony about COVID-19 policy before the United States House
Committee on Homeland Security: “We instituted [his mandate to wear
masks] in Illinois on May 1st, one of the first in the nation, and it
aligns with our most significant downward shifts in our infection rate,”
he said.
That’s simply untrue and his own administration’s data show why.
Infections turned down well before his mask order went into effect on
May 1. We laid it out in detail in early June.
The evidence of the day-to-day course of the virus closest to being
timely is hospitalizations for it, as Pritzker himself has said. Deaths
provide another index. However, hospitalizations and deaths lag the
actual course of the virus, and that lag time is provided directly by
the Center for Disease Control.
Adjusting for those lags shows that the
virus peaked in Illinois around April 15 or April 18 – before the mask
order even went into effect.
Progress from the mask order would not have shown up until mid-May,
which is when Pritzker’s “science and data” projected the virus would
peak. Those projections are now proved to have been wrong even before
they were announced. Our full analysis, using the state’s own numbers
and the CDC adjustments, includes the details.
And what about Pritzker’s suggestion for going forward, which made
national headlines — a federal mask mandate for the whole nation?
In his testimony Pritzker said, “If there’s one job government has,
it’s to respond to a life-threatening emergency. But when the same
emergency is crashing down on every state at once, that’s a national
emergency, and it requires a national response.”
But remember what he said in April when President Trump and Vice
President Pence were roundly rebuked – properly – for claiming that the
federal government could override state emergency orders and reopening
plans? Pritzker was among the critics. “Well, I think [Trump] is going
to issue some advice about it, but it is true that it’s up to the
governors to make decisions about the executive orders we put in place,”
Pritzker said.
And Pritzker says Trump alone should issue the national mask order,
with no legislation. Executive authority for that is highly
questionable. On executive power, at least he is consistent. It’s also
his position that he can micromanage much of the state through an
emergency order he claims can be renewed for as long as he alone
chooses.
Watch the video
of the rest of his testimony and you will see that the gist of it is
that, when the federal government failed, it was his administration that
stepped up with the right response, which is how much of the press summarized
his testimony. When asked later to elaborate on what lessons Illinois
officials gained from handling the pandemic, Pritzker offered no
specifics, saying
only, “There’s an awful lot of learning that’s taken place from March
until now, so yes I think we’ve created a path for someone in the future
to follow.”
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4/3
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