Good morning. Interesting information this morning suggesting that one reason Taiwan was so far ahead of the Covid Crisis was that the deputy director of its CDC found information on the Taiwanese version of Reddit in late December. Some of that information came from doctors within Wuhan, information that was quickly repressed by the Chinese Communist party. Fascinating that even the people in charge need to turn to alternate media to source information these days. Let's continue the conversation.
Comments
The RAF plane has arrived from Ankara - with half the amount of PPE there should have been...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52378491
Fuller account here:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8243479/RAF-plane-flying-desperately-PPE-FINALLY-leaves-Turkish-airport-UK-coronavirus-battle.html
I wasn't aware we had a surplus of anything right now, we keep being told we have a serious lack of masks, gowns, ventilators... the list goes on... so what on earth do we actually *have* a surplus of to send out to other countries?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EWMpZV_XkAAm8oW?format=jpg&name=small
Of course, our gangster Minister of Police would like to keep the country in brutal lockdown forever!
Looting and attempted looting continues in parts of South Africa where people are hungry.
The latest number of confirmed cases is 3 465.
The Western Cape is now the second province to have more than 1 000 cases, after Gauteng.
No new deaths were reported - the total stands at 58.
So far, 126 937 tests have been conducted.
Recoveries are at 1 055.
For those who are not familiar with the Geography of South Africa, here is a graphic that shows the provinces:
https://cdn.24.co.za/files/Cms/General/d/8656/8d0e1b3c1e9f499594762cd1ce6fdec7.jpg
And yes, it is called South Africa because it is the southernmost country in Africa! (And the informal local name for the country - Mzansi - means ... south!)
I left the corporate world about a decade ago, but in the last few years while I was employed, I travelled a lot. I always found it frustrating that I had to get up before dawn to get to the airport to catch a flight to another part of the country, where someone would pick me up from the airport or I would hire a car, drive to the local office and conduct a series of meetings, then race back to the airport, wait for hours because flights were delayed and the delays would accumulate during the day, fly back, drive home and fall into bed way past midnight.
We did use conference calls (video meetings were way too advanced at that stage) but senior management really wanted us to TRAVEL (I suppose to spend that travel budget - the bigger your budget, the more important you are ... I remember a British woman joining the company and freaking out about my travel budget and credit card allowance being bigger than hers and was not mollified when I pointed out to her that I was going overseas on a business trip that particular year, as dictated by the MD, hence the budget was much larger than for local trips, but gosh she was outraged and hated me from then on!)
In my roundabout way, what I am trying to say is that there is a lot of our work (including meetings) that we can do from home through video calls and some of the advantages are that things take less time and are more efficient and people are more focused. Why spend so much on travel when you do not need to and people in the world are starving?
Maybe the virus will change the world?
I think the synergy of being in 1:1 conversations with coworkers that are in direct contact with problems can stimulate creative solutions to problems. In meetings where the solutions created by people that have never actually been in contact with the problems and are dictated to the masses from the top, not so much.
But I agree, more and more people will be telecommuting. I learned about the two-edged sword aspect (cuts both ways) of telecommuting when I thought it was a great thing 20 years ago; however, if I can do the job from my home, so can somebody in Bangalore (or Bengaluru), and the cost savings may make up for what may be lacking in quality.
Who will the big losers be?
>>>>In my roundabout way, what I am trying to say is that there is a lot of our work (including meetings) that we can do from home through video calls and some of the advantages are that things take less time and are more efficient and people are more focused. Why spend so much on travel when you do not need to and people in the world are starving?
Maybe the virus will change the world?<<<<<
Yes, I was thinking the same thing. There are many reasons working from home would be advantageous. Back in 1988 when 'Telecommuting" was bandied about as a way to reduce air pollution (AP) in Southern Calif. at the time I was charged with reducing A.P. for a regional govt. agency, and we found resistance by companies. They felt that workers would not do their jobs if at home; they felt they did not have control of their workers. However studies bore out the opposite. This was also the era where Carpool lanes were created in LA which are now know as H.O.V. lanes and telecommuting has not been a big solution as it should have been until now. Perhaps people seeing the positive effects of reducing car pollution in big cities will realize many companies can utilize workers staying away from the office has a myriad of benefits besides reducing Smog (and to a lesser degree PM10 and PM2.5 AP).
Also people may realize that they don't have to go to the store very day nor take idle trips for no important reason. The there is a benefit to keeping your pantry stocked rather than running to the store so often People learning to practice better hygiene practices. Families learning to communicate more with heir elderly family members. The world learning to cooperate more between countries; politicians working better with their historical opponents (ie. Dems and GOP). People praying more and going back to their religious roots.
There was a meme on Instagram the other day showing a long line of people queuing to get to divorce court yesterday. It rwally stuck with me. Because I think that might be accurate.
I'm rather grateful to be single now, the only people for me to get turned off by are Slebs.
And then I just move on with my life, fantasise about the good memories, and I have a choice to spend my hard-earned cash on them or not, or pay them any attention or not. It's not like I'm stuck to them because they're the father of my child or something.
I hope I marry the right person someday. 💜💜🍹
Moments in history like this really make you think.
I really do wonder.
As for poverty, I think the Earth will have to sail around the Sun many more times before humans all understand what causes persistent poverty, and before corporations value spiritual intelligence. I worked for a corporation that made tentative small steps but a lot of people resented that (or even mocked it) and the small steps were not enough to create real lasting and significant change.
One small example of how money can be better used: a lot of money was spent on 'team building' and 'brainstorming' (a weekend away for everyone so that we can do these things, or a day on a wine farm ... most people just wanted to get the job done well, get a good bonus, and go home to their private life, and the MD was the one who was required to come up with the ideas (in her job description)! That money (and it added up to a large line item in the annual budget) could have done a lot in supporting a local school in an impoverished neighbourhood and a good investment in the future (investment rather than charity).
I hope that the pandemic does get some people to question their values and lifestyle and appreciate things they did not notice before ... and so on.
Being a student of human nature (what with being human and all *grin*), I think that people will FLOCK to their previously closed favorite places. I will wait a couple weeks before flocking off to my favorite places.
I'm thinking of taking Uncle Sugar's stimulus funds and putting it toward buying a home freeze dryer for vegetables and meats because, let's face it, while canning and freezing veggies and meat is a good way to have supplies on hand, it has a tendency to be expensive PLUS not exactly portable in cases of having to hurriedly evacuate. People in earthquake, flood, tornado, and hurricane zones know what I'm talking about. (Dehydration is a low-cost ease of portability solution as well.)
Cans of food from the grocery store and bagged frozen fruits, veggies, and meats are the lowest-cost solution (until they aren't there, but keeping a deep pantry will ameliorate that). I'm just a stubborn grandma that prefers to raise my own because I know what went into it.
SwampMan has alternate uses for the stimulus funds which do NOT include a home freeze dryer, BTW.
Your idea of freeze drying food is great. I have a relatively cheap feed hydrator and it as ok but as like many people never utilized it enough to help me significantly. However was impressed with drying Okra, my favorite group lol, :) But freeze-drying now that is a better idea.
I used to have a big vegetable garden but here in NE Texas the last few years the excess rain had a terrible effect of drowning the seedlings in water for weeks at a time so haven't planted. This year even my 72 yr. old brother said we should put in a garden. Little late and we are still having a lot of rain (great for our reservoirs tho). I'm a believer that anyone who can even put in a postage size veg. garden ought too. Maybe this CV-19 crisis will inspire people to grow their own food. People I talk with all seem to think there may be good things to come out of this CV-19 situation, not the least of which is people being prepared for the next disaster to hit.
https://blindgossip.com/insufferable-celebrities-part-1/
I don’t know all of these but I do know #2 is JLo and ARod. They were pictured here in Miami and the gym door behind them clearly had a closed for COVID sign on it.
https://blindgossip.com/insufferable-celebrities-part-2/
This may not pertain to any of y'all because it is all about how to kill WuFlu so that it doesn't in turn infect and kill the lab workers that are doing the diagnosing. The consensus is that this is a hardy little organism that requires being heated to 92C (197.6F) for 15 minutes and it gives information re using various lysis buffers that are made in Germany.
LAHORE:The Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) has confirmed that there is no evidence that oral polio vaccine protects people from infection from Covid 19.
In a statement issued Wednesday, the GPEI said that a clinical trial addressing this question is planned in the US and World Health Organization (WHO) will evaluate the evidence when it is available. The GPEI statement reads that, in the absence of any evidence, WHO does not recommend oral polio vaccination (OPV) for the prevention of Covid-19.
WHO continues to recommend OPV as part of essential immunisation services to prevent poliomyelitis and as part of global polio eradication efforts. There are experimental signals from various studies over the years that OPV has non-specific effects on the immune system. These effects have not been well characterised and their clinical relevance is unknown. Such non-specific effects may not be limited to OPV, as other live vaccines have also been associated with non-specific protective effects (such as BCG vaccine against tuberculosis). Non-live vaccines in contrast do not seem to have the same effects.
The exact mechanism of non-specific protection induced by live vaccines needs to be elucidated further. Clinical studies could begin immediately because the vaccines in question are licensed and have an excellent safety record. Clinical trials involving off-label use of various drugs licensed for other indications are currently underway. The existing scientific rationale suggests that the same should be done for OPV and other live vaccines.
Coronavirus death rates are nearly six times lower in countries that use a nearly century-old tuberculosis vaccine, a new study found.
The study, conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, found that the COVID-19 mortality rate among countries that use the Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccination was 5.8 times lower than in those that do not.
“Demonstration that exposure to BCG vaccination can ameliorate severe COVID-19 disease and lower mortality could rationalize a therapeutic or preventive strategy that can have immediately deployable global impact,” the researchers wrote.
“Therefore, using existing publicly available data, we examined at the ecological level whether country-level COVID-19 mortality was associated with BCG use in national immunization schedules.”
The vaccine, first administered to a human in 1921 and primarily used to protect against tuberculosis, is undergoing clinical trials to test its ability to ward off COVID-19.
Using the mortality per 1 million residents of each country with sufficient data, researchers estimated the coronavirus fatality rate from the 50 countries with the highest number of cases.
After accounting for the economic status of the countries and their elderly populations — both of which contribute to death rates — “the intriguing observation of a significant association between BCG use and lower COVID-19-attributable mortality remained discernable,” the researchers said.
I was reading last night about a study saying basically the same thing about the polio vaccine, but it had to be the live vaccine which protected against various respiratory ailments such as influenza for @ a year, I believe. (Fatigue put an end to my researching and I haven't been able to remember where I found the article.)
Excerpt:(CNN)Dr. Kathryn Hibbert's Covid-19 patient in the intensive care unit was not doing well. As his blood pressure plummeted, she tried to insert an intravenous line into an artery in his wrist. A blood clot clogged the tubing.
Frustrated, Hibbert tried again with a new needle. A blood clot clogged up that line as well.
It took three tries to insert the IV.
"You just watch it clot right in front of you," said Hibbert, director of the medical intensive care unit at Massachusetts General Hospital. "It's rare to have that happen once, and extremely rare to have that happen twice."
Hibbert and other doctors are finding that some patients infected with the novel coronavirus have a propensity towards developing blood clots, which can be life threatening if the clot travels to the heart or lungs.
"The number of clotting problems I'm seeing in the ICU, all related to Covid-19, is unprecedented," Dr. Jeffrey Laurence, a hematologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, wrote in an email to CNN. "Blood clotting problems appear to be widespread in severe Covid."
Laurence and his colleagues looked at autopsies on two patients and found blood clots in the lungs and just beneath the surface of the skin, according to a study published last week. They also found blood clots beneath the skin's surface on three living patients.
In the Netherlands, a study found "remarkably high" rates of clotting among Covid patients in the ICU.
An international consortium of experts from more than 30 hospitals gathered to consider the issue. Their conclusion: It's unclear exactly why, but coronavirus patients may be predisposed to having clots.
"This is one of the most talked about questions in Covid right now," said Dr. Michelle Gong, chief of the division of critical care medicine at Montefiore Medical Center in New York City.
At Montefiore, they've started to put all Covid-19 patients on low doses of blood thinners to prevent clots, Gong said.
Not all hospitals have taken that step -- but they're still concerned.
To go along with what you’ve found. It seems a high percentage of the sicker cases have clotting issues. The sicker Covid patients would end up in the ICU’s.
In a study by Tang et al from Wuhan, 71% of non-survivors from COVID-19 infection met the ISTH criteria for DIC compared to 0.4% of survivors. Elevated D-dimer at admission and markedly increasing D-dimer levels (3- to 4-fold) over time were associated with high mortality, likely reflecting coagulation activation from infection/sepsis, cytokine storm and impending organ failure.
Source: https://www.hematology.org/covid-19/covid-19-and-coagulopathy
It is hard reading the articles written by nonprofessionals because, well, some of the medical things that they have written are not accurate (see inserting a IV line into an artery).
I need to wander away to read your Chinese study now.
My question to myself was whether hospitals routinely use blood-thinning drugs to reduce the possibility of clotting in immobile patients, and the answer apparently would be yes. Apparently.
It would be interesting to go back and look at the step-by-step treatment of patients in hospitals with high mortality rates as opposed to hospitals with lower mortality rates.
Prophylactic dose LMWH is recommended for all hospitalized COVID-19 patients despite abnormal coagulation tests in the absence of active bleeding, and held only if platelet counts are less than 25 x 109/L, or fibrinogen less than 0.5 g/L. Abnormal PT or aPTT is not a contraindication for pharmacological thromboprophylaxis. Mechanical thromboprophylaxis should be used when pharmacological thromboprophylaxis is contraindicated. Limited data from China suggest that those with severe COVID-19 infection or markedly elevated levels of D-dimer (>6 x ULN) have decreased mortality with prophylactic doses of LMWH or UFH, however most European and North American ICU patients receive routine LMWH/UFH prophylaxis regardless of diagnosis..
You do insert an IV into an artery, but not to give fluid. It’s called an arterial line and it is an invasive measure of blood pressure that allows you to see the BP with every beat of the heart. Used at times in surgery and often in intensive care when patients are critically ill and need to be on IV medication to regulate their blood pressure. In this case of Covid, as the infection spreads throughout the body the blood vessels start massively dilating and you need to give lots of fluid and medications to keep the blood pressure up enough to keep perfusing vital organs.
Look up invasive (arterial lines) versus noninvasive blood pressure readings (syphygmomenometers, good old blood pressure cuffs).
PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. – A man discovered inside a stolen vehicle in Sawgrass was “gravely wounded” after firing shots at a deputy on Wednesday, according to the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office.
Sheriff David Shoar said deputies were on the lookout for a pickup truck that was recently reported stolen out of Pennsylvania about 12:45 p.m. when they spotted the vehicle in the parking lot of the Sawgrass Village shopping center off A1A.
Shoar said one of the deputies performed a stop and a man in his 20s exited the vehicle with a shotgun and fired a couple of shots at the deputy. The sheriff said the deputy, who was not struck, returned fire.
The suspect then locked himself in the vehicle, Shoar said.
About 2:15 p.m., Shoar said, a SWAT team used tear gas to extricate the suspect out of the vehicle. He said the suspect suffered life-threatening injuries and was airlifted to a hospital.
“We’re not sure if it was from us or if it was a self-inflicted wound,” Shoar said during a media briefing. “He has been gravely wounded.”
I bet he was mad when he went to all that trouble of stealing a vehicle and heading to the beach to find out that it was closed except for morning exercise only. I guess he heard about the Pennsylvanian arrested for murder at Jacksonville Beach so he thought he'd head down to St. John's County.
>>>CatEyes, same rain situation here in north Florida. SwampMan said the way to dry it out or even cause a drought would be to plant rice.
April 22, 2020 at 7:44 PM<<<
Oh that is too funny. Please tell SwampMan I might try that. I already have the first ingredients for Crawfish Etouffee the darn crawdads are all over the place! Now I just need the rice. My next door neighbor state, Louisiana, grows plenty of it and I figure we can now too. Heck I had okra, 'Star of David' variety that grew like 6-7 ft tall with the fattest pods ya'll would ever see, to add to the dish.
>>>Researchers found that 20 percent of all those hospitalized died — a finding that’s similar to the percentage who perish in normal times among those who are admitted for respiratory distress.
But the numbers diverge more for the critically ill put on ventilators. Eighty-eight percent of the 320 covid-19 patients on ventilators who were tracked in the study died. That compares with the roughly 80 percent of patients who died on ventilators before the pandemic, according to previous studies — and with the roughly 50 percent death rate some critical care doctors had optimistically hoped when the first cases were diagnosed.<<<
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/in-new-yorks-largest-hospital-system-88-percent-of-coronavirus-patients-on-ventilators-didnt-make-it/ar-BB133Act?ocid=spartanntp
Obviously the perception, and rightly so, is that people on ventilators are suffering extreme respiratory distress but it may just be that these patients died not because of their compromised respiratory system but a host of underlying medical issues (as some has inferred for instance blood clots, etc,.). Their systems (all or many of them) have just got overwhelmed.
Any one in ICU is in a critical state and then if you need a ventilator it means such a more serious situation. But statistically the difference between 80% and 88% is not very significant IMO.
The US has now experienced about 47,000+ deaths and it is still not exceeding the numbers of deaths usually attributed to the flu every year. I worry about the smaller bell curve (second wave) that is projected to hit in the fall (when many of our states will have been "reopened".
I hope and pray that some promising medication (the one that starts with an 'R') or experimental vaccine is ready by fall.
I am donating my C-PAP, used but flawless machine. Here on Medicare, one usually is allowed a new machine every 5 yrs. I bet other jurisdictions might have similar needs. I read that some smart people devised a way to make an insert (and programming) into these devices to convert them to being ventilators. How clever people are getting during this crisis, bringing out the best in people in so many ways.
https://www.instagram.com/tv/B_PrvZdhMiR/
Seriously, this was when New York horror news was coming out and some of the young and/or computer adept were upset that their aged parents or grandparents might be denied help as was reportedly the case in Italy where they saved the ventilators for the younger people that had a better chance of recovery.
No, I do not have a home-fabbed ventilator (grin).
Does your country/state have them?
Have government people promoted them?
Are they being used?
Who uses them?
The news from the UK is that a lot are standing empty most of the time.
143570 Tests Conducted
3953 Positive Cases Identified
1473 Recoveries
75 Deaths
Hopeful indications are that when lockdown ends a week from today, it will at least be partially lifted. Draft plans were leaked of different stages of lockdown with a description of what the restrictions would be for each stage (which is what the official opposition suggested - that we have 4 different stages that can be imposed on an area quickly, depending on need, i.e. how many people infected and how quickly it is spreading in an area). Alcohol sales resume at Stage 3 so guess what everyone is praying for?!
I can’t speak for the drive-through testing, but I can tell you that my father is from the Midwest and has several business clients that are large hospitals. They put up large structures to have make-shift areas for Covid 19 patients and are now taking them down. Completely unused. Large areas of the US are like this. Largely untouched with a few cases here and there, but nowhere near necessitating the draconian measures forced on everyone.
I went to JoAnn's Fabrics this morning and had to wait in a loooooong line, all of us at least 6 feet apart, because *looking at toes and scuffing them in the dirt in shame* I did not have color-coordinated thread for the fabric for homemade masks I want to make for use on walking trails and the beach. There. I admitted it.
SwampMan's big head is not a good fit for the commercial masks made by tiny people in China. I'm thinking that even a pleated surgical-type mask with a blue shop towel or a non-woven surgical material filter would be preferable to him wearing an ill-fitting one. And those are LARGE masks; they cover up pretty much my entire face underneath my glasses. When I go into shops with that mask on, I'm functionally blind.
Anyway, a family with small children, NONE of them wearing masks, finally exited, and they waved all the rest of us masked folk in. They were going to keep me outside because of numbers, but I had a DOUBLE mask on (an N95 behind a pretty mask cover) and so waved me in as well.
Our county does not have drive thru testing; there just isn't enough population to warrant it. We can either make an appointment or use Jacksonville's drive thru testing. (Our largest city has had 19 cases that were positive; many of them are over it now.)
I am about 45 minutes outside Atlanta, GA and we do have drive-thru testing except that it is by appointment only (which, I believe, requires a physician referral,) So the number of tested individuals has risen (as has the number of cases) but it's not like anybody who thinks they need a test can get one.
Maybe you’ve been here a while, but if not, welcome! I have family in GA
Feel free to comment and I will approve all comments in the morning.
They could be doing more tests than elsewhere. For example, the rate of infection seems to be the same as in the Eastern Cape but that province is way behind in testing.
There are three things that make the Western Cape different from the rest of the country (and they may be of no relevance at all):
1. A large Muslim population (of course there are Muslims elsewhere in South Africa, but the biggest population is in Cape Town).
2. The only place in SA where black people are not the majority.
3. It is the only part of SA where the ANC does not govern.
Cape Town is the epicentre and what they have found is clusters (e.g. people who go to the same shopping centre or who worked in the same factory). The area where I am, although it is in the Western Cape, has no COVID-19 at all and the closest is two infected people in a large town a few hours' drive from here.
The latest 3 deaths in the Western Cape are 2 women in their early 60s and a man in his 40s.
So, you won't be catching this at a Florida beach in the day. Maybe in the supermarket or a restaurant, but not at the beach. Well. Maybe at night, but there are a lot of things that can be caught at the beach at night.
One interesting thing noted in this article is that not only is wearing gloves to the super market not helping people (except Swampwoman who does know what she’s doing), but it’s causing an increase in littering. Has anyone else noticed that? I have, in our neighborhood I’ve seen multiple pairs of gloves and masks just thrown down or dropped. It’s sad.
The UK has always had a "referral" testing model, so if you're not referred (or needing medical treatment with symptoms) then you don't get to go for a test. At the beginning you only got a referral if you had symptoms and you'd been abroad or could definitely pinpoint contact with someone who'd either travelled or been tested and confirmed; I tried getting a test when I was sick with the classic symptoms at the beginning of March but was refused as I hadn't knowingly had contact or travelled. They weren't routinely testing medical staff at that point either. Once they started testing medical staff the demand increased a lot (understandably) and it became even harder to get a test without being hospitalised. I think the "empty drive-thru's" happened because of the strict rules on who gets to go to them were still in effect and once the initial rounds of medical staff testing was done they had some spare capacity which they're addressing now.
As of yesterday, they've changed the rules so "ordinary" key workers and their households (ie ones who work in other areas to healthcare/emergency services) with symptoms can now be registered for testing so hopefully we'll see the drive-thru's being used more often going forward. I'm a little irked that although our household now qualifies for tests due to my daughter's job, it's too late to really make a difference unless we get sick again (fingers crossed we don't, it was awful, and to add insult to injury mine triggered a bunch of other health issues following close on its heels including a nasty flare up of shingles thanks to my immune system taking such a battering. I'm literally only just getting somewhere back to normal). All we can really do now is wait for the antibody tests to see if it confirms whether we've had it or not.
^ Irked may not be the right word, I'm kind of "ironically bemused" more than annoyed if that makes sense. I do appreciate that they had to restrict testing to certain criteria once it all kicked off due to demand overtaking the limited stocks but I also believe if they'd tested and contact traced more people with symptoms at the beginning when there weren't as many cases (less than 500 in England when I was sick at the beginning of March) instead of restricting them to people who had known contact, then they'd have had a better idea of what was going on with the spread much earlier.
The govt is also now inviting a large number of households to take part in swab testing for a study of a representative sample of the population, along with a set number of antibody tests (provided they get them to work properly) to see who's had it and is immune.
Links:
Coronavirus: Virus tests now available to millions of workers
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52405852
UK urged ‘do your bit’ with 25,000 to be invited to take part in coronavirus study
https://metro.co.uk/2020/04/23/uk-urged-bit-25000-invited-take-part-coronavirus-study-12602033/
Coronavirus: Test website closes after 'significant demand'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52405852
anyhow ,seems like trouble over here too so unfortunately I will refrain from archives but what I can offer is answer to the drive-thru testing
I live north of Detroit. the entire state of Michigan is considered hotbed and there are several drive up testing options. we also too created a few field hospitals for overflow patients. last I heard plans for more are halted as what we have is sufficient (perhaps 20% capacity)
I think our numbers are so high because when all this first started we were only 1 of 10 states in the US (detroit airport) that still allowed flights from China. scores of travelers ,as you can well imagine
stay safe