New Covid-19 Thread

[shiny!]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

Could that flatness be the result of a high percentage of false-negative tests? Either a lot less people have it than was assumed, or they had a false-negative test, do have it, but didn't get sick.

Either way, it's good.

[Woodsman]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

The curve is so bent.

Vanderbilt reduces coronavirus hospitalization estimates from thousands to 300.

An orgy of plague death, deferred; Democrats and liberal pundits hit hardest.

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/n...eath-deferred/

Knox County reports no new COVID-19 cases, no current hospitalizations.

https://www.wate.com/news/knox-count...pitalizations/

Spot The Difference: Two Governors Reopened Their States, Only One Was Accused of ‘Human Sacrifice’

https://freebeacon.com/media/jared-polis-brian-kemp/

Cuomo kills seniors, gets a pass because shut up rube.

https://nypost.com/2020/05/05/over-1...nursing-homes/

[shiny!]

Re: French Study on Early Treatment with HCQ+AZ

I don't know what an appropriate dose of quinine might be for daily prophylactic use. But quinine comes from cinchona bark which was used safely for many years before they learned how to synthesize it. I've taken cinchona succirubra for muscle spasm and nerve pain on an as-needed basis for over 30 years. Not massive doses, just 2-4 capsules a day with a little food when needed. I think it's good stuff. I buy the powder and "00" blank capsules and make my own in a capsule press.

Quinidine can have serious impacts on heart rhythm, particularly those with "prolonged QTc." It can also interact with certain other drugs. Anyone considering taking cinchona should do their due diligence.

https://rain-tree.com/quinine.htm

https://www.herbal-supplement-resour...hona-bark.html

Different varieties of cinchona have different concentrations of alkaloids. I used to have a chart (can't find it now) that showed the quinine potency of the most common varieties. Cinchona Rubra aka Succirubra is the most potent. But still, we're talking about maybe 5% total alkaloids with quinine being a small percentage of those total alkaloids. A gram of cinchona powder might contain less than 1% or 10mg actual quinine.

Yet even in such a low dose, I feel it has a beneficial effect. It's probably a synergy of quinine and the other alkaloids in the cinchona working together. Just as whole turmeric seems more effective to me than the isolated curcumin that's so often sold OTC.

I'm at work and don't have time to provide links to support the following, but you can look it up if you're interested:

Quinine plus zinc seem to have an effect on Covid-19. Quinine might not even attack the virus directly. There's a theory that what quinine does is drive zinc into the cells, whereupon the zinc interferes with RNA replication of the virus. Apparently Azithromycin has a similar effect on zinc. Perhaps the real key here is zinc, and the other things just help deliver it. If so, then having an abundant supply of zinc available in the body could be essential and it would need to be taken at early onset to do any good.

I would love to see the zinc, selenium, vitamin A and D levels of people who test positive but have mild or no symptoms, versus the zinc, selenium vitamin A and D levels of those who got very sick and/or died from Covid-19. Is there is a nutritional aspect as to who gets sick and who stays well?

I'm not waiting on studies that will probably never be done. Since this whole thing started my daily regimen has been 2 capsules of cinchona succirubra, modest daily doses of zinc picolinate (the most absorbable form of zinc), selenomethionine (the most absorbable form of selenium), a little Vitamin C, plus Vitamins A and D in a 4:1 ratio. I'm going on the theory that if I have ample amounts of these things in my body to start with, then my body might have the tools it needs to fight off a virus before it can take hold.

[globaleconomicollaps]

Re: French Study on Early Treatment with HCQ+AZ

From Science Direct. A French study showing that when used early before complications occur, the combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin is safe and effective.

Safe, effective and cheap, so the U.S. pans it and bans it.

This is Didier Raoult ( the guy behind the above mentioned study)

He points out that in Marseille, where he is running things, the disease has effectively disappeared. When asked why the death rate is so high in much of Europe including most of France he responds that other hospitals are not implementing an effective treatment protocol. By this he means that if you go the emergency room with COVID-19 they will put you in a room and watch you until you get sick enough to require oxygen. At that point you will be sedated, intubated and are unlikely to wake up. I had to watch this several times. The COVID-19 patients outside of Marseille don't get aspirin or quinine or anything at all. That is why they die.

This got me to thinking. If the doctors are incompetent, malicious, or so hogtied by regulations to the point where they are ineffective or downright dangerous then people should care for themselves. Quinine was originally introduced as a prophylactic in 1850. That is to say the intended use of the drug was BEFORE you get sick. This is important because COVID-19 is frequently asymptomatic for the first week after you contract it.

What would an appropriate dose of quinine be for daily use?

[jk]

Re: French Study on Early Treatment with HCQ+AZ

I've so often heard about acitomenophen for the fever... Local stores are out of Tylenol (but not the generic store brand), but what about aspirin as an anti-coagulant and anti-pyretic? Anyone you've heard using or looking into this? Or is it just not profitable enough, or known to be ineffective?

aspirin is anti-inflammatory and so like libuprofen

[Woodsman]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

Bpr, I don't care. I don't care what your opinion is. I have no interest in what you believe, what you don't, or who you think is credible. It makes no difference to me, none of it. It has no influence, no gravitas, no impact, whatsoever. It's of no consequence to me. As far I'm concerned, I've given you a fair hearing, and I don't think you're tall enough for this ride. If that upsets you or irritates you, deal with it. Or don't. I don't care a whit. Have a great life, enjoy yourself, enrich yourself. But find yourself another playmate. I'm not your guy.

[bpr]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

Haven't you heard? Almost everybody who dies in hospital during this pandemic dies of COVID-19. So let it be written, so let it be done.

video...

Anything from Project Veritas has to be taken with a good deal of scrutiny.

That said, on a first pass the funeral director from Staten Island seems legit. The other two...

One is from a funeral home that has zero obituaries on either their website or on legacy.com since 2016. That is wildly out of the ordinary for a funeral home, though I admit I have no experience with Queens. It's not uncommon for funerals to not have obituaries or for funeral homes to not put them on their website to keep competitors from knowing how busy they are or what families they are serving. But if they're burying or hiding data from competitors, why keep obits from 2016 on their site? Also, why is a funeral director from Queens mentioning a case from Dutchess County? Odd. Queens is the hottest part of the hottest spot in the country.

Another guy interviewed is not a licensed funeral director in New York State. Which is troubling. It's easy to look up. It's illegal to misrepresent yourself as a funeral director in our (neighboring) state. Not sure about NY.

[bpr]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

You admit that you have no argument...

Yep, I was being cute. That video was promoted with a considerable bankroll, though. It appeared everywhere overnight, and I could smell it from the lighting and the use of stock footage and the lack of corroborators. Two people talking in dramatic lighting just doesn't convince me, even if they are discussing things that appeal to my broader sensibilities (big pharma coverup). Five minutes of Googling confirmed my suspicions. Since then, hundreds of folks way more qualified than I (lots of letters after their names) have debunked this.

If you'd like the science folks' refutations, PM me, because I don't want to derail this thread on a crappy video. But I suspect you've already seen them and likely disregarded them because they're part of the coverup.

For the record, I am against the video's wholesale repression/removal from sites like Youtube and... well, Youtube, because we are experiencing a near monopoly on distribution. So I agree with you there: it's ridiculous that this keeps getting taken down. The suppression of the video has given it an ethical claim that it does not deserve, which works entirely against the purpose of the suppression and the pursuit of truth.

[bpr]

Re: French Study on Early Treatment with HCQ+AZ

...at harvard's mgh they're starting prophylactic anticoagulants, remdesivir for a defined subset of patients. they're using acitominophen as a preferred anti-pyretic...

I've so often heard about acitomenophen for the fever... Local stores are out of Tylenol (but not the generic store brand), but what about aspirin as an anti-coagulant and anti-pyretic? Anyone you've heard using or looking into this? Or is it just not profitable enough, or known to be ineffective?

[Mega]

Re: The Importance of Masks

Trump has sussed all of this............he ensure the public become aware that it was the DNC that kept them closed down MUCH long than required....
If Biden is the DNC "plant" then forget it, he bliz him ....it will be a joke....it will even make Hillary's loss look good.............China hacking?

Mike

[Woodsman]

Re: The Importance of Masks

...They have destroyed the economy for years to come. They want to authorize billions for contact tracing and other compilicated schemes instead of spending billions on MASKS. With the full support, no, collusion of the MSM, they try to make people feel so frightened and helpless that the people welcome the abridgement of their constitutional rights in the name of "keeping us safe."

From a comment in a story posted at the Tuscon Sun Sentinel:

Spoke with a friend of mine who works in DC. He is sick to his stomach every day he goes to work. He said democrat congress members are literally giddy with the results the virus is having on the economy. They eagerly compare unemployment and market numbers every morning in the halls, offices and over phone conferences, laughing and mocking Trump as they watch the economy he built crumble. They are actually excited about what the virus is doing to America during an election year and the opportunities it presents to go after Trump. He said that their intention is to drag the shutdown out as long as possible in order to crash the economy (Trump’s strength) right before the election to make Trump look bad. He said Pelosi is ordering/threatening democratic state governors to keep their states shut down as long as possible, assuring them they will be rewarded when they take the Senate and White House.
All at the expense of America.
This isn’t rumor or opinion; this is happening.

Hearing similar stories myself. Can't say I'm the least bit surprised. But I have my suspicions about who will be surprised once this is all said and done.

[Woodsman]

Re: The Importance of Masks

a security guard at a dollar general was shot to death 2 days ago when he insisted that some customers put on masks.

Well, isn't that something of a non-sequitur? So how precisely do you see the actions of a violent criminal in this incident as relevant to the efficacy of ubiquitous masking, Doctor?

Sharmel L. Teague, 45, of Flint, was arraigned Tuesday, May 5, 2020 in 67th Distirct Court on first-degree murder and felony firearm charges. The charges stem from the May 1, 2020 shooting death of 43-year-old Calvin James Munerlyn, a security guard at the Family Dollar off East Fifth Avenue in Flint who was allegedly killed following a dispute over a customer not wearing a mask into the store. (Jake May | MLive.com)The Flint Journal, MLive.com

[jk]

Re: The Importance of Masks

a security guard at a dollar general was shot to death 2 days ago when he insisted that some customers put on masks.

[shiny!]

The Importance of Masks

From Vanity Fair. (I like to copy/paste in plain text to avoid breaking the pages here. There are several links embedded in this article that I didn't bother to hyperlink, but you can see them if you go to the source article.)

All of this makes me want to tear my hair out, that our so-called leaders aren't really, really emphasizing this message! Instead, they continue to mismanage funding and resources. They have destroyed the economy for years to come. They want to authorize billions for contact tracing and other compilicated schemes instead of spending billions on MASKS. With the full support, no, collusion of the MSM, they try to make people feel so frightened and helpless that the people welcome the abridgement of their constitutional rights in the name of "keeping us safe."

If 80% of Americans Wore Masks, COVID-19 Infections Would Plummet, New Study Says

There’s compelling evidence that Japan, Hong Kong, and other East Asian locales are doing it right and we should really, truly mask up—fast.

By David Ewing Duncan
May 8, 2020

It sounds too good to be true. But a compelling new study and computer model provide fresh evidence for a simple solution to help us emerge from this nightmarish lockdown. The formula? Always social distance in public and, most importantly, wear a mask.

If you’re wondering whether to wear or not to wear, consider this. The day before yesterday, 21 people died of COVID-19 in Japan. In the United States, 2,129 died. Comparing overall death rates for the two countries offers an even starker point of comparison with total U.S. deaths now at a staggering 76,032 and Japan’s fatalities at 577. Japan’s population is about 38% of the U.S., but even adjusting for population, the Japanese death rate is a mere 2% of America’s.

This comes despite Japan having no lockdown, still-active subways, and many businesses that have remained open—reportedly including karaoke bars, although Japanese citizens and industries are practicing social distancing where they can. Nor have the Japanese broadly embraced contact tracing, a practice by which health authorities identify someone who has been infected and then attempt to identify everyone that person might have interacted with—and potentially infected. So how does Japan do it?

“One reason is that nearly everyone there is wearing a mask,” said De Kai, an American computer scientist with joint appointments at UC Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute and at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is also the chief architect of an in-depth study, set to be released in the coming days, that suggests that every one of us should be wearing a mask—whether surgical or homemade, scarf or bandana—like they do in Japan and other countries, mostly in East Asia. This formula applies to President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence (occasional mask refuseniks) as well as every other official who routinely interacts with people in public settings. Among the findings of their research paper, which the team plans to submit to a major journal: If 80% of a closed population were to don a mask, COVID-19 infection rates would statistically drop to approximately one twelfth the number of infections—compared to a live-virus population in which no one wore masks.

The mask debate, of course, has been raging for weeks in the States and globally. Pro-maskers assert that the widespread use of face coverings can diminish the spread of COVID-19. Some anti-maskers, including various politicians and public health officials, have insisted that there is no proof of the efficacy of face guards. According to some activists, a blanket mask mandate places a limit on individual liberty and even one’s right to free speech. (Pro-mask advocates are fighting back with #masks4all and #wearafuckingmask Twitter campaigns).

Representatives of the World Health Organization have also been sounding rather anti-mask, fretting that many people won’t wear masks properly, thereby risking infection, or that masks will give people a false sense of security and encourage risky behavior, such as partying up close and personal—none of which seems to have played out, as far as we know, in Japan or Hong Kong or other mask-wearing places. Adding to the brouhaha has been the shortage of medical masks for doctors, nurses, bus drivers, and the guy who delivers burritos to your door.

The muddle over masks is what drove Berkeley’s De Kai to drop everything two months ago and help convene an ad hoc team of scientists and academics: a physician from London, a bioinformaticist from Cambridge, an economist from Paris, and a sociologist and population-dynamics expert from Finland.

“I felt like this was pretty urgent,” said De Kai, who was born in St. Louis, and is the son of immigrants from China. “I saw the country where I grew up, where my family lives [now mostly in the Bay Area], about to face this pandemic without knowing much about something as simple as wearing a mask to protect themselves and others.” In part, this comes from a cultural difference between East Asia, where masks have been routinely worn for decades to fend off pollution and germs, and other parts of the world. This includes the U.S., where people are unaccustomed to wearing masks, and, in the past, have sometimes been insensitive, even stigmatizing East Asians, many of whom had chosen to wear them in public prior to the pandemic, and had continued the practice in the aftermath of the SARS and MERS outbreaks. (In part, this habit was meant to show other people that they were concerned about transmitting the disease—something we in the West would do well to emulate.)

De Kai’s solution, along with his team, was to build a computer forecasting model they call the masksim simulator. This allowed them to create scenarios of populations like those in Japan (that generally wear masks) and others (that generally don’t), and to compare what happens to infection rates over time. Masksim takes sophisticated programming used by epidemiologists to track outbreaks and pathogens like COVID-19, Ebola, and SARS, and blended this with other models that are used in artificial intelligence to take into account the role of chance, in this case the randomness and unpredictability, of human behavior—for instance, when a person who is infected decides to go to a beach. De Kai’s team have also added some original programming that takes into account mask-specific criteria, such as how effective certain masks are at blocking the invisible micro-droplets of moisture that spray out of our mouths when we exhale or speak, or our noses when we sneeze, which scientists believe are significant vectors for spreading the coronavirus.

Along with the masksim site, the team is also releasing a study that describes their model in detail as well as their contention that masksim’s forecasts support a growing body of pro-mask evidence. “What’s most important about wearing masks right now,” said Guy-Philippe Goldstein, an economist, cybersecurity expert, and lecturer at the Ecole de Guerre Economique in Paris—and a masksim collaborator, “is that it works, along with social distancing, to flatten the curve of infections as we wait for treatments and vaccines to be developed—while also allowing people to go out and some businesses to reopen.”

While all models have limitations and are only as good as their assumptions, this one is “a very thorough model and well done,” said William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University, who reviewed the De Kai team’s paper. “It supports a notion that I advocate along with most other infectious disease experts: that masks are very, very important.” Jeremy Howard, founding researcher at fast.ai and a distinguished research scientist at the University of San Francisco, also assessed the paper. “It’s almost overkill how careful they were with this modeling,” said Howard, who also coauthored and spearheaded a study last month (recently submitted to the journal PNAS) that reviewed dozens of papers assessing the effectiveness of masks.

During a screen-share Zoom from his home office in Hong Kong, De Kai, who has not had to shelter in place (“because nearly everyone in here wears masks”), explained to me how the model works. (Check out this video where De Kai demos the site). On De Kai’s Zoom screen, a box pops up filled with dozens of blue dots, each representing a person who is publicly zipping and zapping about, doing their thing, and sometimes interacting with others. These blue dots denote the “uninfected, but susceptible.” As the simulation rolls along, one of the dots becomes orange, representing a person who has been exposed to the coronavirus. This orange dot then touches a nearby blue dot, which also changes to orange while the original orange dot changes to red. This means that dot-person is now infected. As the model runs and simulated “days” pass by, with the dots continuing to bounce around, some of the oranges and reds turn green, meaning they have recovered—or died.

On the screen-share, De Kai first ran a simulation that shows what happens when COVID-19 strikes a population in which no one wears a mask. The orange and red dots proliferate at a frightening speed; “susceptibles” becoming “exposed/infected,” then recovered or dead. “This is what you don’t want,” said De Kai. He changed the setting to simulate what would happen if 100% of the make-believe population wore masks; almost all of the dots would stay blue—with each of them surrounded by a white square, representing someone wearing a mask.

Next De Kai added another tweak, modeling a situation in which 80% of a given population wore a mask. Here, most of the dot-people stay blue, with a few going orange, red, and green. “This is the goal,” De Kai maintained. “For 80 or 90% of the population to be wearing masks.” Anything less, he added, doesn’t work as well. “If you get down to 30 or 40%, you get almost no [beneficial] effect at all.”

“I started to go out just to buy food in mid-March,” recalled economist Guy-Philippe Goldstein. “I was the only one wearing a mask, and people were making fun of me. They aren’t now, although there still aren’t enough people in Paris wearing masks.” This may be one reason why only a few states in the U.S. currently require people to always wear masks when they are out in public, although many states require masks for certain workers, for entering businesses, and on public transportation. Many cities and counties, including Denver and Los Angeles County, require them too. Whether you’re in a blue state or a red one, you don’t want to become one of De Kai’s red dots.

[shiny!]

Re: French Study on Early Treatment with HCQ+AZ

Heartbreaking.

Virus Rampages across Navajo lands, close-knit families