Covid-19

[jpatter666]

Re: Covid-19

ROTFL. Touché, sir.

[shiny!]

Re: Covid-19

The canary in the coal mine is the Swedish position, quite clearly enunciated here by Professor Johan Giesecke, one of the world’s most senior epidemiologists, advisor to the Swedish Government (he hired Anders Tegnell who is currently directing Swedish strategy), the first Chief Scientist of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, and an advisor to the director general of the WHO. Dr Giesecke lays out the epidemiological case with typically Swedish bluntness:

- UK policy on lockdown and other European countries are not evidence-based
- The correct policy is to protect the old and the frail only
- This will eventually lead to herd immunity as a “by-product”
- The initial UK response, before the “180 degree U-turn”, was better
- The Imperial College paper was “not very good” and he has never seen an unpublished paper have so much policy impact
- The paper was very much too pessimistic
- Any such models are a dubious basis for public policy anyway
- The flattening of the curve is due to the most vulnerable dying first as much as the lockdown
- The results will eventually be similar for all countries
- Covid-19 is a “mild disease” and similar to the flu, and it was the novelty of the disease that scared people.
- The actual fatality rate of Covid-19 is the region of 0.1%
- At least 50% of the population of both the UK and Sweden will be shown to have already had the disease when mass antibody testing becomes available."

Fascinating interview. If you want the right answers, you have to ask the right questions. That interviewer asked excellent questions.

Prof. Giesecke validates Martin Armstrong's longtime assertion that the Imperial College paper, the basis for panic and lockdowns around the world, is a flawed piece of work.

[Mega]

Re: Covid-19

[jk]

Re: Covid-19

unfortunately you can't have "herd immunity" unless surviving the disease gives you individual immunity. at the moment there is no evidence of that, only reasoning by analogy that you MIGHT have relative immunity for 12-18mos.

read Who Is Immune to the Coronavirus?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/o...-immunity.html

Marc Lipsitch (@mlipsitch) is a professor in the Departments of Epidemiology and Immunology and Infectious Diseases at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he also directs the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics.

[bpr]

Re: Covid-19

Who is the authoritarian in the scenario where Trump is resisting authoritarian elements?

Lets see... Some of the leading contenders are Climate Change activists, One Worlders, Bill Gates, WHO, UN, Soros, anti-gun lobby, Socialists and Communists. I know I've left out somebody.\

Wow, at a time when the president of the United States threatened to adjourn both houses of congress for the first time in history, and declared his power as “total authority”… I'm pretty sure you’ve left out somebody, too. :-/

If you’re looking for the answers you want, ask the questions that will generate them.

[globaleconomicollaps]

Re: Covid-19

From the Pasteur Institute
https://hal-pasteur.archives-ouverte...48181/document

Abstract

France has been heavily affected by the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic and went into lockdown on the 17th
March 2020. Using models applied to hospital and death data, we estimate the impact of the lockdown
and current population immunity. We find 2.6% of infected individuals are hospitalized and 0.53% die,
ranging from 0.001% in those <20y to 8.3% in those >80y. Across all ages, men are more likely to be
hospitalized, enter intensive care, and die than women. The lockdown reduced the reproductive number from 3.3 to 0.5 (84% reduction). By 11 May, when interventions are scheduled to be eased, we project 3.7 million (range: 2.3-6.7) people, 5.7% of the population, will have been infected. Population immunity appears insufficient to avoid a second wave if all control measures are released at the end of the lockdown.

I would speculate that the low death rate is due to the rigid lockdown reducing case loads and freeing up ICU beds for affected patients and exceptional vigilance leading to rapid identification and treatment.

[Mega]

Re: Covid-19

My Mal-ware warning just came up!
Mike

[Woodsman]

Re: Covid-19

I turn off JavaScript, so it doesn't seem to impact me. But there's definitely some sort of persistent script pointing to a h[tt]p://peterfir[e.n]et address.

[Mega]

Re: Covid-19

Yes that's what am getting as well

[shiny!]

Re: Covid-19

My Mal-ware warning just came up!
Mike

Stay off the porn, Mike! (just kidding)

Running Firefox with Ghostery, Cookie Auto-delete and Privacy Badger add-ons. No malware showing here.

[jpatter666]

Re: Covid-19

I turn off JavaScript, so it doesn't seem to impact me. But there's definitely some sort of persistent script pointing to a h[tt]p://peterfir[e.n]et address.

Got the same alert.

[jk]

Re: Covid-19

someone sent me the missive below. i haven't checked the numbers but i'll assume they're accurate. my only disagreement is with so-called "fact" #3, which is not a fact, but pure speculation. the degree of immunity conferred by a viral infection can vary widely and we have no data on covid-19 conferring immunity. to the contrary, we have reports of people being infected a second time, and having worse illness the second time around. but the plural of anecdote is not data, so bottom line we don't know about immunity. the rest of his argument seems reasonable, provided we as a society accept the low but non-zero death rates even among the young and middle-aged.



BY DR. SCOTT W. ATLAS - A David and Joan Traitel Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the former chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center.

"The tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be entering the containment phase. Tens of thousands of Americans have died, and Americans are now desperate for sensible policymakers who have the courage to ignore the panic and rely on facts. Leaders must examine accumulated data to see what has actually happened, rather than keep emphasizing hypothetical projections; combine that empirical evidence with fundamental principles of biology established for decades; and then thoughtfully restore the country to function.


Five key facts are being ignored by those calling for continuing the near-total lockdown.


Fact 1: The overwhelming majority of people do not have any significant risk of dying from COVID-19.

The recent Stanford University antibody study now estimates that the fatality rate if infected is likely 0.1 to 0.2 percent, a risk far lower than previous World Health Organization estimates that were 20 to 30 times higher and that motivated isolation policies.

In New York City, an epicenter of the pandemic with more than one-third of all U.S. deaths, the rate of death for people 18 to 45 years old is 0.01 percent, or 11 per 100,000 in the population. On the other hand, people aged 75 and over have a death rate 80 times that. For people under 18 years old, the rate of death is zero per 100,000.

Of all fatal cases in New York state, two-thirds were in patients over 70 years of age; more than 95 percent were over 50 years of age; and about 90 percent of all fatal cases had an underlying illness. Of 6,570 confirmed COVID-19 deaths fully investigated for underlying conditions to date, 6,520, or 99.2 percent, had an underlying illness. If you do not already have an underlying chronic condition, your chances of dying are small, regardless of age. And young adults and children in normal health have almost no risk of any serious illness from COVID-19.



Fact 2: Protecting older, at-risk people eliminates hospital overcrowding.

We can learn about hospital utilization from data from New York City, the hotbed of COVID-19 with more than 34,600 hospitalizations to date. For those under 18 years of age, hospitalization from the virus is 0.01 percent per 100,000 people; for those 18 to 44 years old, hospitalization is 0.1 percent per 100,000. Even for people ages 65 to 74, only 1.7 percent were hospitalized. Of 4,103 confirmed COVID-19 patients with symptoms bad enough to seek medical care, Dr. Leora Horwitz of NYU Medical Center concluded "age is far and away the strongest risk factor for hospitalization." Even early WHO reports noted that 80 percent of all cases were mild, and more recent studies show a far more widespread rate of infection and lower rate of serious illness. Half of all people testing positive for infection have no symptoms at all. The vast majority of younger, otherwise healthy people do not need significant medical care if they catch this infection.



Fact 3: Vital population immunity is prevented by total isolation policies, prolonging the problem.

We know from decades of medical science that infection itself allows people to generate an immune response — antibodies — so that the infection is controlled throughout the population by “herd immunity.” Indeed, that is the main purpose of widespread immunization in other viral diseases — to assist with population immunity. In this virus, we know that medical care is not even necessary for the vast majority of people who are infected. It is so mild that half of infected people are asymptomatic, shown in early data from the Diamond Princess ship, and then in Iceland and Italy. That has been falsely portrayed as a problem requiring mass isolation. In fact, infected people without severe illness are the immediately available vehicle for establishing widespread immunity. By transmitting the virus to others in the low-risk group who then generate antibodies, they block the network of pathways toward the most vulnerable people, ultimately ending the threat. Extending whole-population isolation would directly prevent that widespread immunity from developing.



Fact 4: People are dying because other medical care is not getting done due to hypothetical projections.

Critical health care for millions of Americans is being ignored and people are dying to accommodate “potential” COVID-19 patients and for fear of spreading the disease. Most states and many hospitals abruptly stopped “nonessential” procedures and surgery. That prevented diagnoses of life-threatening diseases, like cancer screening, biopsies of tumors now undiscovered and potentially deadly brain aneurysms. Treatments, including emergency care, for the most serious illnesses were also missed. Cancer patients deferred chemotherapy. An estimated 80 percent of brain surgery cases were skipped. Acute stroke and heart attack patients missed their only chances for treatment, some dying and many now facing permanent disability.



Fact 5: We have a clearly defined population at risk who can be protected with targeted measures.

The overwhelming evidence all over the world consistently shows that a clearly defined group — older people and others with underlying conditions — is more likely to have a serious illness requiring hospitalization and more likely to die from COVID-19. Knowing that, it is a commonsense, achievable goal to target isolation policy to that group, including strictly monitoring those who interact with them. Nursing home residents, the highest risk, should be the most straightforward to systematically protect from infected people, given that they already live in confined places with highly restricted entry.

The appropriate policy, based on fundamental biology and the evidence already in hand, is to institute a more focused strategy like some outlined in the first place: Strictly protect the known vulnerable, self-isolate the mildly sick and open most workplaces and small businesses with some prudent large-group precautions. This would allow the essential socializing to generate immunity among those with minimal risk of serious consequence, while saving lives, preventing overcrowding of hospitals and limiting the enormous harms compounded by continued total isolation. Let’s stop underemphasizing empirical evidence while instead doubling down on hypothetical models. Facts matter."

[jk]

Re: Covid-19

good, understandable article on antibodies

https://www.vox.com/science-and-heal...id-19-immunity