New Covid-19 Thread

[shiny!]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

a less potent mutated version of the virus would have a selective advantage over a more potent one. i.e. if the virus were immediately lethal it wouldn't have a chance to spread to other hosts. otoh if it were very contagious but totally benign we'd all have it and not care. so perhaps there is a new, less dangerous strain which is displacing the earlier one. that would be a gift.

That's what I'm thinking.

i hope it's true. i am beginning to resign myself to the possibility that i will never see my children or grandchildren again except on a computer or phone screen. [i'm in ct while my family is in southern california and the uk, so it's 3000 miles either way]

I hope you get to be with your family again, jk.

[jk]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

a less potent mutated version of the virus would have a selective advantage over a more potent one. i.e. if the virus were immediately lethal it wouldn't have a chance to spread to other hosts. otoh if it were very contagious but totally benign we'd all have it and not care. so perhaps there is a new, less dangerous strain which is displacing the earlier one. that would be a gift.

i hope it's true. i am beginning to resign myself to the possibility that i will never see my children or grandchildren again except on a computer or phone screen. [i'm in ct while my family is in southern california and the uk, so it's 3000 miles either way]

[Mega]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

Don't want a date with her!

[shiny!]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

I emailed the above two links to several friends with the simple comment, "Doctors from Italy and Pennsylvania reporting that Covid-19 appears to be weakening."

My libertarian and conservative friends replied with comments like "That's interesting" or "That's good news."

My liberal Democrat friends responded with fear. One wrote:

"Interesting, but I am afraid people here will read this and think we are out of the woods. This is not the case. There are already so many people who refuse to wear masks, which I feel is a disrespect to others. We don’t need people letting their guard down and relaxing their precautions because of what they are reading is happening in other countries. Italy lost tens of thousands of people before COVID-19 allegedly began to wane. It is good to be hopeful, but I believe too many people are being foolish instead."

She is so fearful, she would have censorship if she could.

Same stimulus, such different responses.

[Mega]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

Its taken all the "Low hanging fruit".................

[shiny!]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-h...-idUSKBN2370OQ

New coronavirus losing potency, top Italian doctor says

ROME (Reuters) - The new coronavirus is losing its potency and has become much less lethal, a senior Italian doctor said on Sunday.

“In reality, the virus clinically no longer exists in Italy,” said Alberto Zangrillo, the head of the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan in the northern region of Lombardy, which has borne the brunt of Italy’s coronavirus contagion.

“The swabs that were performed over the last 10 days showed a viral load in quantitative terms that was absolutely infinitesimal compared to the ones carried out a month or two months ago,” he told RAI television.
WHO and other experts say no evidence of coronavirus losing potency

Italy has the third highest death toll in the world from COVID-19, with 33,415 people dying since the outbreak came to light on Feb. 21. It has the sixth highest global tally of cases at 233,019.

However new infections and fatalities have fallen steadily in May and the country is unwinding some of the most rigid lockdown restrictions introduced anywhere on the continent.

Zangrillo said some experts were too alarmist about the prospect of a second wave of infections and politicians needed to take into account the new reality.

“We’ve got to get back to being a normal country,” he said. “Someone has to take responsibility for terrorizing the country.”

The government urged caution, saying it was far too soon to claim victory.

“Pending scientific evidence to support the thesis that the virus has disappeared ... I would invite those who say they are sure of it not to confuse Italians,” Sandra Zampa, an undersecretary at the health ministry, said in a statement.
A lifeguard wearing a protective face mask takes the temperature of a woman at a newly reopened beach after months of closure due to an outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), at Punta Hidalgo, in Punta Ala, Italy May 31, 2020. REUTERS/Jennifer Lorenzini

“We should instead invite Italians to maintain the maximum caution, maintain physical distancing, avoid large groups, to frequently wash their hands and to wear masks.”

A second doctor from northern Italy told the national ANSA news agency that he was also seeing the coronavirus weaken.

“The strength the virus had two months ago is not the same strength it has today,” said Matteo Bassetti, head of the infectious diseases clinic at the San Martino hospital in the city of Genoa.

“It is clear that today the COVID-19 disease is different.”

[shiny!]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

https://www.pennlive.com/news/2020/0...w1siANtOr2PQhM

UPMC doctor says COVID-19 has become ‘less prevalent’ and isn’t making people as sick

Updated Jun 05, 6:41 AM; Posted Jun 04, 1:24 PM

By David Wenner | dwenner@pennlive.com


Fewer people are testing positive for COVID-19 and those who test positive don’t seem to be getting as sick, a UPMC doctor said Thursday.

“All signs that we have available right now show that this virus is less prevalent than it was weeks ago,” said Dr. Donald Yealy, the chair of emergency medicine at UPMC.
Yealy further said, among people who test positive, “the total amount of the virus the patient has is much less than in the earlier stages of the pandemic.”

RELATED: UPMC doctor argues COVID-19 not as deadly as feared, says its hospitals will shift back to normal
The proportion of people with COVID-19 getting so sick they need a breathing ventilator has fallen, according to Yealy.
“We see all of this as evidence that COVID-19 cases are less severe than when this first started,” he said.

Yealy said those observations apply to western and central Pennsylvania along with communities in New York and Maryland served by UPMC.
He said UPMC has so far conducted about 30,000 coronavirus tests, with less than 4% showing positive. He further said UPMC has tested about 8,000 patients who had no symptoms, with those patients testing positive at a rate of about 1 in 400.

He said that suggests the widely-feared prospect of getting COVID-19 from someone with no symptoms is unlikely. However, that assessment is based on the likelihood of encountering someone who is COVID-19 positive but doesn’t know it. It doesn’t address the likelihood of catching COVID-19 from someone who actually has it but doesn’t feel sick.
“Your risk of getting into a car accident if you go back and forth across the turnpike in Pennsylvania is greater than your risk of being positive for asymptomatic COVID-19 infection,” he said. “This should give you some reassurance that the risk of catching COVID-19 … from someone who doesn’t even know they have the infection, in our communities, is very small.”

Yealy said he doesn’t know exactly why the prevalence and severity of COVID-19 seems to have fallen. He said it likely reflects an interplay of things including weather, possible genetic changes in the virus, people watching themselves more closely for symptoms, and better medical decisions and treatment.

UPMC hospitals have discharged about 500 people who had been hospitalized with COVID-19, Yealy said. They are presently treating about 100.

[shiny!]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

As I suspected would happen and posted somewhere earlier in this thread, the much publicized Lancet study damning the efficacy of hydrochloroquine FAILED to use ZINC.

Zinc is the "heavy lifter" that kills Covid-19. Hydrochloroquine and azithromycin only help to deliver the zinc to where it can do its work. If the body doesn't have enough zinc to work with, those drugs alone are useless.

But zinc is dirt cheap and can't be patented. Hydrochloroquine and azithromycin are dirt cheap as well. There's no profit in this for Big Pharma. Just as scurvy is a deficiency disease of Vitamin C, I submit that flu in most cases is a deficiency disease of Vitamin D. Covid-19 is a deficiency disease of zinc, and cardiomyopathy complications from Covid-19 are a deficiency disease of selenium.

Blood work would tell us if I'm right or not, but that isn't on the agenda.

[Southernguy]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

God bless Uruguay! You guys are doing just about everything right.

Thanks for your generous comment, Shiny. Not so much as that, there are a lot of not so good things to say about Uruguay. But the present gov. (which I did not vote, by the way) is doing things relative to Covid 19 mostly right. The most important: they called the scientists and followed their advice. Also the scientists themselves, before the first cases appeared (March 13) were already hoarding test kits. They knew the thing was coming and acted before the old and new government did. In fact, in my opinion both (the past one who stepped down March 1) and the present should have taken some measures (quarantine passengers from places where the virus was circulating as Europe for example) at least one month earlier. All in all, yes, we are so far faring very well in this respect.

[shiny!]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

God bless Uruguay! You guys are doing just about everything right.

[Southernguy]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

So much for a "banana republic" as someone here dared call us.

Why Is Uruguay Beating Latin America’s Coronavirus Curse?

Mac Margolis
21 hrs ago

Counties with the most COVID-19 cases



McConnell: Next stimulus bill will be 'final' one

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- As the novel coronavirus cyclones through Latin America, it has staggered almost every nation. So how to explain Uruguay? Its infection rate of 2.1 cases per million inhabitants is the second lowest in South America and already falling, with just 22 fatalities by May 27. Ahead of many of its neighbors, Uruguay is already glimpsing a safe return to economic normalcy.

It might not have turned out this way. The nation of 3.5 million people is rife with risks. It is the Latin American nation with the largest share of elderly, and all but 4% of the national population lives in cities. Those are the kind of demographics made for contagion. Uruguay is wedged between ailing giants: Brazil is the pandemic’s new epicenter, while Argentina was already nearing economic collapse when it defaulted on its debt last week.
And yet — stricken neighbors take note — Uruguay has not only contained the outbreak, it has done so without a lockdown, harsh quarantines or heavy-handed policing. Most schools and restaurants closed their doors, but shops and businesses were allowed to stay open. Unlike its outsize neighbors who mostly flew blind into the pandemic, Uruguay built its crisis response on proactive testing and tracing — it has the second highest testing rate in South America — and cajoling its citizenry to do the right thing, as in this national mask-wearing campaign.
Its liberal social engineering strategy is similar to Sweden’s, yet Uruguay has managed to avoid the Scandinavian country’s soaring death toll. Its policies have drawn praise from the World Bank and earned Uruguay favorable comparisons to New Zealand, minus the benefit of being surrounded by ocean.
A near-universal health care system, years in the making, has helped. So has the country’s relatively low population density (Montevideo is about half as densely occupied as Buenos Aires) as well as Uruguay’s overall well-being. The Boston Consulting Group in 2018 ranked Uruguay as Latin America’s most prosperous nation. It boasts one of the region’s highest scores on the human development index. Extreme poverty has all but disappeared.
But perhaps Uruguay’s biggest assets are its intangibles. Uruguayans, while hardly complacent, tend to follow rules and heed authorities. Mind you, social distancing doesn’t come naturally to the gregarious Charrua, as its natives call themselves. “People crowd the Rambla [a shoreline drive] on Sunday, share the cup of mate tea and congregate for barbecue on Sunday,” said Benjamin Gedan, deputy director of the Wilson Center’s Latin America program.
Uruguayan voters also share a political culture that allows adversaries to disagree without descending into toxic dissent. A center-right political alliance narrowly won the election last year, after a decade and a half of rule by a left-wing coalition, but the switch was not the product of the same popular revilement that sent millions to the streets across Latin America. “In a region roiled by political chaos and uncertainty, we have seen social stability and a considerable degree of political consensus,” said Ignacio Munyo, an economist who teaches at the University of Montevideo.
Tellingly, the most remarkable protest in Uruguay was last year’s mass march for the rule of law and against a controversial amendment to crack down on a crime surge by creating a national guard with praetorian powers. The bill was defeated. A message hoisted by a lone leftist partisan in the crowd gathered to hail conservative president-elect Luis Lacalle Pou’s victory last November became a unifying national meme: “Congratulations. If you fare well, so will I,” read his placard.
So far, Lacalle Pou has mostly returned the favor. “While this is definitely a government of the right, it’s also a broad coalition,” said Nicolas Saldias, a Latin America scholar at the Wilson Center. “You don’t see wild policy swings. Lacalle Pou has mostly maintained the social and labor policies from before. There’s broad agreement among political actors despite their differences.”
Shared commitments could presage a quicker recovery. Although the International Monetary Fund reckoned the Uruguayan economy will shrink by 3% this year, the regional contraction will be far more severe: 5.2%. What’s more, the fund touts Uruguay to log the region’s sharpest rebound (5%) in 2021.
That forecast affords Uruguay a rare chance for a reset. The economy was already in a five-year rut heading into the health crisis. The World Economic Forum ranked Uruguay poorly in hiring and firing policies and worker-employer cooperation, and 108th among 141 countries for overall labor flexibility. The country also must deepen pension reform to provide for the quickly graying population. “This is the right moment to restructure,” Munyo said. “That’s critical for putting Uruguay in the center of multinational sights for investment.”
In this way, Uruguay’s penchant for national accord can be good medicine. Shared sensibilities could not only help inoculate its struggling economy with vital structural reforms but also spread a salutary message to the rest of a region riven by politics.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Mac Margolis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Latin and South America. He was a reporter for Newsweek and is the author of “The Last New World: The Conquest of the Amazon Frontier.”
For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion
©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

[Techdread]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

Proprietary? Tensorflow, Pytorch are opensource . If lawmakers want to know how it works.

Its the search engine that is a trade secret i believe.

[Techdread]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

I'm pretty sure youtube will be forced to expose their censorship algo in a matter of time. Look at the news.

https://support.google.com/youtube/a..._topic=9282436

I think it is self censored by users hitting a violation button, then if the creator objects a Human will look at it.
The criteria for pulling a video is written for anyone to examine. see above link.

The recommender system is algorithmic, so the computer learns what you like and seems to be optimised for getting advertising views.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

I'm pretty sure youtube will be forced to expose their censorship algo in a matter of time. Look at the news.

Youtube/Google opening their proprietary code for inspection and criticism?
It would be wonderful but I won't hold my breath. Google has 117 billion dollars cash on hand. I suspect they would be happy to spend ten percent of it on legal fees to keep their code a trade secret. 11 billion dollars will buy a lot of lawyers, several senators, and a few judges.

[touchring]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

Oh good idea, good luck in suing an algorithm.

I'm pretty sure youtube will be forced to expose their censorship algo in a matter of time. Look at the news.