Coronavirus / COVID-19

[Hooahguy]

Its going to be a million times worse, but maybe when children start dying en masse the GOP will finally get its head out of its

[ReluctantSamurai]

Hopefully, common sense and better protocol will prevail in other states. Remember, Georgia is a state whose governor, not too long ago, claimed he didn't know that asymptomatic people could spread the disease My guess is that in-house schooling will last a month or so, and then will have to go to online learning only. And with an administration that refuses to allocate resources to schools to deal with the pandemic, even that is not going to go well. Of course you have these morons:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...-says-n1233061

Florida's education commissioner said Monday all public schools must reopen to students in-person when the academic year begins next month, even as cases of the coronavirus continued to surge in his state. In the emergency order, Commissioner Richard Corcoran called schools "not just the site of academic learning" but also crucial places in students' lives that provide "nutrition, socialization, counseling and extra-curricular activities," adding that their reopening was critical to "a return to Florida hitting its full economic stride."

Of course, the almighty dollar above the lives of children and teachers....and of course a moronic governor [Ron DeSantis] making the statement that "if you can do Walmart, then we absolutely can do schools".

And then there's this bit of hypocrisy:

https://www.texastribune.org/2020/07...s-coronavirus/

Particularly galling for some teachers is the TEA's [Texas Education Agency] own behavior. Even as the agency compels teachers back to the classroom, its own offices remain all-but-closed with most staff working from home to protect their own health. As of July, agency staff have had the option to return to the office building on a “voluntary basis” and the TEA is working on next steps for “later this summer and beyond,” according to a written statement from the agency.

And there will be serious blowback if/when disaster strikes the rush to reopen schools when people realize that the original CDC guidelines were suppressed by the White House:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/u...sultPosition=1

“While many jurisdictions and districts mention symptom screening, very few include information as to the response or course of action they would take if student/faculty/staff are found to have symptoms, nor have they clearly identified which symptoms they will include in their screening,” the talking points say. “In addition, few plans include information regarding school closure in the event of positive tests in the school community.”

One only has to look at MLB here in the States to see what kind of mayhem will result from that lack of planning.....

Lastly, our Fearless Leader has once again managed to turn a crucial health issue into a personal one:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/u...ronavirus.html

The issue has enormous consequences for the economy as well as the upcoming election. With children at home, many parents are unable to resume work, hindering the economic resurgence Mr. Trump hopes to spur before the Nov. 3 vote. And so, like wearing masks, the issue of reopening schools has become one more battleground in the ferocious ideological wars that divide America. Mr. Trump brushed off the rise in virus cases, pointing instead to lower death rates, and characterized those reluctant to reopen the schools as partisans trying to hurt him politically at the height of his re-election campaign this fall. “They think it’s going to be good for them politically, so they keep the schools closed,” he said. “No way.”

Of course it has nothing to do with thousands of teachers and students who will be at risk of contracting COVID-19. "It's damn simple America....it's a political ploy to keep me from being RE-ELECTED!!!".

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Its going to be a million times worse, but maybe when children start dying en masse the GOP will finally get its head out of its

The statistics say that they will not, and even the incidence of post-covid syndrome stuff (which is worse than the disease itself for most kids, just as with chicken pox) is at a low enough rate to make 'en masse' quite unlikely.

However, 10 and ups apparently spread it to adults just as readily as do other adults, so the school openings could still jack the rate of infection, death, etc. quite a bit.

However, nothing short of a punitive electoral debacle in November will stop the GOP's rectal insertion of cranium behavior. I look forward to voting my part in making this happen.

[Montmorency]

OT: UK MP rape

36 crew members test positive for coronavirus on cruise ship docked in Norway

Thirty-six crew members have tested positive for COVID-19 aboard Hurtigruten cruise line’s MS Roald Amundsen after the virus rippled through the ship, the Norwegian cruise company said Saturday.

The outbreak scuttled a sailing scheduled for Friday.

Passengers on voyages that departed July 17 and July 24 have been contacted, according to the cruise line.

The ship, a small ocean liner that can accommodate 530 passengers, has emptied of passengers and sits in dock in Tromsø, Norway, Hurtigruten said.

The rest of the crew of 158 tested negative, according to the cruise operator.

In the U.S., cruising is suspended. A no-sail order is set to last at least into the fall.

Gottem.

‘Not handling the pandemic well’: Man fires at officers with AK-47 after refusing to wear a mask, police say

When a cigar shop clerk told Adam Zaborowski on Friday he had to wear a mask in the shop, the 35-year-old angrily refused. Instead, he grabbed two stogies, stormed outside — and then pulled a handgun and shot at the clerk, Bethlehem Township, Pa., police said.

The next day, cornered near his home, Zaborowski allegedly fired at police with an AK-47, sparking a wild shootout with at least seven officers that ended with him shot multiple times and under arrest.

True American, just like the lady from this older story.

https://www.wsoctv.com/news/local/wo...ys/1012483719/

Channel 9 got a hold of the 911 call made from the tower, where a three-person crew was doing work south of Taylorsville.

"I've got a lady across the street that's been yelling and raising hell since we've been here -- that we're on her property -- and now there's shots that have been fired," the caller told a dispatcher. "I've got two guys on the tower."

Deputies said when they arrived, Moose was armed with two axes and had barricaded herself inside her house across the street from the tower.

Authorities were able to eventually get her out of the home. She was arrested and charged with misdemeanor assault with a deadly weapon and resisting arrest.

Sheriff Chris Bowman said Moose has contacted deputies previously over concerns about the tower.

"She's hearing voices from that tower, they're sending signals -- this type of thing," Bowman told Channel 9. "It concerns me she has a weapon and actually discharged that weapon."

None of the workers were struck by the bullets.

[Montmorency]

The statistics say that they will not, and even the incidence of post-covid syndrome stuff (which is worse than the disease itself for most kids, just as with chicken pox) is at a low enough rate to make 'en masse' quite unlikely.

However, 10 and ups apparently spread it to adults just as readily as do other adults, so the school openings could still jack the rate of infection, death, etc. quite a bit.

However, nothing short of a punitive electoral debacle in November will stop the GOP's rectal insertion of cranium behavior. I look forward to voting my part in making this happen.

At least 1100 people under age 25 have died - call it a thousand kids. How many tens of thousands with subtle to crippling sequelae, who knows.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/c....htm#AgeAndSex

EDIT: Sorry, I read the wrong numbers. Here, for more clarity.
https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisiona...9bhg-hcku/data

244 deaths under 25, but that's are outdated (135,579 total deaths vs. 158,929 on other online sources) so let's round it to 250 kids. In that case a thousand dead in the minor age range would be the plausible projection.

When schools were shutting down in March, the actual prevalence of the virus around the country was orders of magnitude lower than it is now.

Here's an example of a school that just reopened, and had to close due to contagion the same day. After exposing everyone.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/31/us/in...ool/index.html

What I'm saying is, half-assed policy and an increasingly well-distributed (i.e. uncontrolled) virus certainly has the potential to kill a few thousand more kids by election day. Our hair is getting mussed.

EDIT: Even better, the school I referenced above did not appear to close after the D1 fail. More here, and some prayerful tripwire strategies from school systems around the country:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/01/u...ronavirus.html

Because of the low infection rate locally, New York City, the largest district in the country, plans to reopen schools on a hybrid model on Sept. 10, with students attending in-person classes one to three days a week. Yet even there, the system might have to quickly close if the citywide infection rate ticks up even modestly.

On Friday, Mayor Bill de Blasio laid out a plan for responding to positive cases that would mean many of the city’s 1,800 public schools would most likely have individual classrooms or even entire buildings closed at certain points.

One or two confirmed cases in a single classroom would require those classes to close for 14 days, with all students and staff members ordered to quarantine. The rest of the school would continue to operate, but if two or more people in different classrooms in the same school tested positive, the entire building would close for an investigation, and might not reopen for two weeks depending on the results.

In California, where schools in two-thirds of the state have been barred from reopening in person for now, state guidelines call for a school to close for at least 14 days if more than 5 percent of its students, faculty and staff test positive over a two-week period.

Chicago, the nation’s third-largest school district, has proposed a hybrid system for reopening that would put students into 15-member pods that can be quarantined if one member tests positive. School buildings should close if the city averages more than 400 new cases a week or 200 cases a day, the plan states, with other worrying factors like low hospital capacity or a sudden spike in cases taken into account.

[ReluctantSamurai]

The statistics say that they will not, and even the incidence of post-covid syndrome stuff (which is worse than the disease itself for most kids, just as with chicken pox) is at a low enough rate to make 'en masse' quite unlikely.

There are approximately 56.6 million students, here in the US, in the K-12 range. The incidence rate per 100,000 in the 10-19 year old range is about 117.4 in the US. So about 66,000 students would contract COVID-19 at that rate. With a 0.2% CFR in that age group, that's 1,329 deaths (if my math is correct). Not an insignificant number, IMHO.

Then, of course, there's the risk to teachers and staff, and the risk of students bringing the virus home. And all of this is assuming an individual that has contracted COVID-19, will not get reinfected, which is an unfounded assumption at this time.

[ReluctantSamurai]

Resistance to wearing a mask during a pandemic is nothing new:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/03/u...e=articleShare

[Idaho]

Trump's covid interview as Lisa Minelli:
https://mobile.twitter.com/SoozUK/st...20617361219586

[edyzmedieval]

I've seen multiple reports of cruise liners being infected - my question is, who goes on a cruise at this very moment? This is unreal. Why would you do that?

[Gilrandir]

I've seen multiple reports of cruise liners being infected - my question is, who goes on a cruise at this very moment? This is unreal. Why would you do that?

Because tickets were booked a year in advance and it's a shame to waste the money. Or because the tickets were bought a week ago at a cut-throat discount and its a shame to miss so cheap an offer.

[ReluctantSamurai]

I would add a third reason...denial of the seriousness of COVID-19. "If I get corona, I get corona...At the end of the day, I'm not going to let it stop me from partying."

[Furunculus]

entertaining oopsy in british covid stats:

https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/why-no...tical-anomaly/

That method could certainly be problematic in the long-term, but there is no reason to believe it includes more than a handful of questionable categorizations. The PHE (Public Health England) began recording all deaths associated with a COVID test at the end of April, in part due to concerns that deaths outside hospital were being missed. Before then only hospital deaths were counted. Evidence toward this was the discrepancy from ONS (Office of National Statistics) reported deaths up to that time, which defined deaths according to inclusion of COVID in death certificates. While that can also miss or miscategorize deaths, particularly in overflow conditions, it at least more directly attempts to capture etiology.

Meanwhile, the PHE definition continues to exclude all deaths without a positive test result, though we know many people were missed entirely by testing, and since March there have been tens of thousands of excess deaths (~65K excess deaths total since March) beyond the PHE death count (excess deaths returned to historical levels only at the end of June). I assume the commonly-reported figures are the PHE data, since those are updated daily compared to weekly or monthly for ONS. Currently if you look up "UK coronavirus deaths" you are presented with 45K and change. So, correct me if I'm wrong here, but it indeed appears that PHE figures continue to come lower than ONS figures, which reported ~46K deaths through the end of June.

So the method of counting all deaths associated with a positive COVID test still produces a dramatic undercount as of now.

Is this the power of reading through? I hope.

about 10% apparently:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ng-fiasco.html

[ReluctantSamurai]

about 10% apparently

But 10% over or under? If one uses the actual mortality vs the expected mortality method, then the number of deaths is 53,641 since 20 March, or about 8% higher than the official toll

https://fingertips.phe.org.uk/static...nd-latest.html

[ReluctantSamurai]

In a nutshell, here's why the United States has had one of the worst responses to the SARS-2 pandemic:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...virus-pandemic

The crowd at Sturgis will represent one of the biggest in the world since the coronavirus pandemic began. People are expected to pack concerts with at least 34 acts playing. Most rallies bring a sea of black leather, boots and bandannas into Sturgis, population 6,900 in normal times.

In a videotaped address to city residents the day after the city council voted to move ahead with the rally, Mayor Mark Carstensen said throughout the pandemic, “the state of South Dakota has been the freedom state and the city of Sturgis has stayed true to that”.

Carstensen emphasized that public health could not be pitted against the economy and people’s ability to maintain livelihoods.

“It’s a situation where those can work together. It’s not easy,” the mayor said, “but we’re all in this together.”

For the prospect of short-term financial gain for a single state, the governor of S. Dakota and everyone else involved, is willing to put the entire country at risk when all these yahoos return to whatever part of the country they came from. The mayor of Sturgis STILL doesn't understand that the longer the SARS pandemic rages, the longer the economy is suppressed for everyone. And the BS excuse that it can't be stopped anyway is tragically lame.

Thanks South Dakota for punting the virus to every corner of the US where the bikers will be coming from

[CrossLOPER]

Because tickets were booked a year in advance and it's a shame to waste the money. Or because the tickets were bought a week ago at a cut-throat discount and its a shame to miss so cheap an offer.

Accountants call that a sunk-cost fallacy, and it usually results in disappointing returns.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

The selfish arrogance of that attitude is the assumption that "I am too tough to die," so I am just gonna live my life. Like the old fighter pilot concept of "the right stuff," it is a belief that you are somehow better/stronger/purer and that anyone who ends up not being that way, like from catching COVID and ending up dead, does NOT mean that your view is skewed but that THEY didn't have "the right stuff." It's tautological bovine excrement.

Moreover, this attitude runs counter to libertarianism and reasoned conservatism in that it demands that you not only value your own life and freedom (reasonable), but that you actively value their life and freedom LESS than your own. Libertarianism generally holds that you should have the maximum degree of individual freedom possible, but that your rights "stop at the other person's nose." ALL must be free to the fullest extent possible without impinging on the equally valuable rights of others.

The attitude displayed by continuing Sturgis etc. is to ignore that last portion. Selfish at a minimum, arrogant in its attitude, utterly reckless in its occurrence -- and blithely risking others directly and most of the country at some remove just to enjoy a good drunk and some ear damage.

[Montmorency]

More evidence on SARS-CoV-2 being transmitted primarily by respiratory (i.e. airborne) route; large droplets are still the emphasized mechanism. Theatrical measures such as hand sanitizer (hand washing still a good idea) and area disinfection first undertaken as early precautions might be deprecated.
https://www.vox.com/science-and-heal...t-transmission

Perhaps part of the reason the WHO has been slow to address the airborne transmission of Covid-19 is because in a health care setting, “airborne” means a very specific thing.

Though infection prevention experts know there’s a fuzzy boundary between drops that fall and specks that float, the dichotomy between airborne and droplet-borne is baked into how health care workers are trained to respond to outbreaks. “We’ve trained [health care workers] for decades to say, airborne is tuberculosis, measles, chickenpox, droplet is flu and pertussis and meningitis,” Saskia Popescu, a hospital epidemiologist in Arizona, says. “And that’s, unfortunately, kind of antiquated. But that’s how we’ve always done it.”

They do it because there are very specific sets of guidelines in place to deal with extremely contagious airborne diseases in a hospital setting. For instance, a patient with a dangerous airborne disease often needs to be put in a room with an air pressure lower than the rest of the rooms in the building. That way, no virus in the air of that room can escape it (since air flows from high pressure to low pressure).

For droplet transmission, health care workers can be a little more lax; they can wear simple surgical masks during routine care and can save high-filtration (and sometimes scarce) respirators for the most dangerous procedures and cases.

In this light, it makes some sense that the WHO has been hesitant to label Covid-19 an “airborne” infection. It’s not an airborne infection like measles is. It is not as contagious. Contact tracing studies consistently find that Covid-19 is spread most readily among people in the closest physical contact to one another. “Airborne” means something very specific, very resource-intensive, and very scary for hospitals and the people who work in them. And Covid-19 doesn’t match that definition.

“The debate often isn’t very nuanced because of these rigid categories,” Daniel Diekema, an infectious diseases physician and epidemiologist at the University of Iowa, says. “As soon as you say ‘airborne’ in the hospital infection prevention world, it brings to mind pathogens like tuberculosis, measles, chickenpox. It’s clear the respiratory viruses, influenza, coronaviruses, are not airborne in the same way that the measles, varicella [chickenpox] become airborne.”

But at the same time, with Covid-19 and other respiratory viruses, “there definitely are small-particle aerosols produced,” he says. “And in the right setting, where there’s poor ventilation, indoors, and a crowded environment, there is a risk for transmission among individuals, even if they may be more than 6 feet apart.”

There has been a lot of discussion on the effectiveness of masks, and their indication at micro and macro levels, since the pandemic emerged. (I mean nuanced, scientific discussion here, not the reactionary indoctrination and social media hearsay.) The weight of evidence that I've been aware of for universal masking of a spectrum of materials has since spring shifted from 'Sure, maybe, give it a shot' to 'This probably helps as a rule.' Another Vox article rounding up findings.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2...earch-evidence

The situation with masks and the evidence for them shows how quickly things can change in the midst of a fast-moving disease outbreak. In just a few months, the US has gone from no government recommendations and wide expert skepticism of masks to embracing them.

Experts caution that this kind of situation is going to happen again and again with Covid-19. There’s simply going to be a lot of uncertainty with the coronavirus for some time, even after we’ve — hopefully — vanquished it with a vaccine. This is a virus that’s new to humans, causing a pandemic of the likes that modern society hasn’t seen. We’re still learning, for example, just how airborne the coronavirus is, if children widely spread it, what kinds of medical treatments work against it, and whether immunity is long-lasting.

Given how new this all is, experts say the public and its leaders need to be ready to act on changing evidence, and officials shouldn’t be criticized too harshly for adapting on the fly. “It’s never too late to say the right thing,” Wehby said.

So while it’s unfortunate that the CDC and surgeon general worked against public mask use at first, and they arguably moved too slowly, it’s also good that they rigorously reviewed the research and embraced change once they felt there was enough evidence to do so. It’s the kind of model that everyone should be encouraged to follow.

For a loose case study of the potential* for masks to mitigate transmission, see:

Among 139 clients exposed to two symptomatic hair stylists with confirmed COVID-19 while both the stylists and the clients wore face masks, no symptomatic secondary cases were reported; among 67 clients tested for SARS-CoV-2, all test results were negative. Adherence to the community’s and company’s face-covering policy likely mitigated spread of SARS-CoV-2.

There's even a neat infographic that might as well be titled 'So This Is the Power of Mask Instinct':

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

*It's possible that the customers all had prior resistance or immunity or luck or good health, or the hairdressers coincidentally had very low viral load.



Capstone pieces by The Atlantic, the NYT, and WaPo on the total failure of the United States government to manage the epidemic.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...ailure/614191/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/u...avirus-us.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...741_story.html

Not only did Trump always approach the crisis as a rhetorical challenge rather than a technical or administrative one, he has done so increasingly over time, as the federal government dropped what little pretense it once assumed that there was any need for collective or individual action. For undermining state and local responses alone - even the most dismal of which were more useful than the feds' - Trump and his lackeys should be condemned as criminals against humanity. And that was not alone.


On school reopening, within the month:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/07/us/st...georgia-school

At least 260 students and eight teachers from a suburban school district in Atlanta, Georgia, were quarantined after multiple students and teachers tested positive for Covid-19 during the first week of school.

https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020...education.html

"Keeping our schools closed a moment longer than absolutely necessary is socially intolerable, economically unsustainable and morally indefensible," [Boris] Johnson wrote.

It's great to run experiments when you know what the results will be, just not with human lives.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/04/w...ls-reopen.html

As the United States and other countries anxiously consider how to reopen schools, Israel, one of the first countries to do so, illustrates the dangers of moving too precipitously.

Confident it had beaten the coronavirus and desperate to reboot a devastated economy, the Israeli government invited the entire student body back in late May.

Within days, infections were reported at a Jerusalem high school, which quickly mushroomed into the largest outbreak in a single school in Israel, possibly the world.

The virus rippled out to the students’ homes and then to other schools and neighborhoods, ultimately infecting hundreds of students, teachers and relatives.

Other outbreaks forced hundreds of schools to close. Across the country, tens of thousands of students and teachers were quarantined.

Israel’s advice for other countries?

“They definitely should not do what we have done,” said Eli Waxman, a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science and chairman of the team advising Israel’s National Security Council on the pandemic. “It was a major failure.”

I have a sinking feeling about Japan. Their out-Swedening Sweden may be catching up to them. You can plug a hole with your thumb, but not ten at once - then ten becomes a hundred.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/w...ronavirus.html
https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/07/asia/...hnk/index.html

They're going to have to crank up a testing regime that remains one of the weakest in the developed world, barely budged since April. Something more than 20X smaller than Iceland's, around less than a fifth of France's, adjusted for population.

Dr. Shibuya said that such retrospective testing may have worked in the early days of the pandemic, but that a broader approach was now necessary. Japan has consistently performed tests at well under its stated capacity: It says it can conduct as many as 30,000 a day, but it has more recently conducted fewer than 15,000 on a daily basis, and some days much fewer.

New Zealand has gone more than 3 months without a recorded case of community transmission (there's a steady single-digit drumbeat of cases from abroad).


I haven't read this beyond the headline, would be great if someone could look into it and tell me what to think before I form any judgments.

55% of coronavirus patients still have neurological problems three months later

about 10% apparently:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ng-fiasco.html

The blunder could see up to 4,000 deaths removed from England's official toll of 41,749, according to reports [Ed. whose 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.

That makes it sound like nobody knows what adjustment should be made.

Professor Heneghan, director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the prestigious university, told the Sun: 'It is a sensible decision. There is no point attributing deaths to Covid 28 days after infection.

Cutoffs like 28 days or X days are applied to promote real-time approximation in the data set, when conclusive fact-finding, registration, etc. for each death for the purpose of national statistics may not be available or will take weeks or months or longer to determine, validate, and compile. But literally adopting the position that someone can die of COVID at X-1 days but cannot die of COVID at X+1 days sounds like an arbitrary threshold with no medical basis. If someone has an extended disease course they have an extended disease course, irrespective of bureaucratic deadlines. Or someone who dies of COVID as a secondary or contributing cause, someone whose lungs or heart or kidneys fail without transplant 3 months subsequent to infection because they were so badly damaged by the illness, they too are plausibly recorded in any preliminary accounting. These latter could best be captured by abducing COVID as a cause of death in the death certificate and then counting death certificates.

Similar maybe to what the ONS is doing.

The Office for National Statistics, another Government agency, also records Covid-19 deaths, and is considered the most reliable source.

The ONS — which is not affected by the counting method — has confirmed at least 51,596 people have died in England and Wales up to July 24.

Its calculations are based on death certificates with Covid-19 as a suspected contributor.

Wait, what's that? ONS?

Let's compare.

England's official toll of 41,749

Currently the PHE site, reports 41082 deaths for England through July 24. What's the death toll for Wales through July 24? 1548. What's 1548 + 41082? 42630. And what's that quote about the ONS?

The ONS — which is not affected by the counting method — has confirmed at least 51,596 people have died in England and Wales up to July 24.

51,596 people have died in England and Wales up to July 24.

Let's assign some variables.

PHE is Wales + UK deaths through July 24 = 42630
ONS is Wales + UK deaths through July 24 = 51596

What is PHE - ONS? 42630 - 51596 = -8966 or negative eight thousand nine hundred sixty six

The ONS figure, itself widely acknowledged as an undercount, attributes up to ten thousand more deaths (by now, 2 weeks later) to COVID than the PHE figure does. And someone wants to knock off a few thousand from the PHE figure for unspecified raisins?

It seems some people may be confused by very basic math(s), or perhaps by the concept of cross-verification. Or maybe they're not confused at all. If their aim is what it appears to be, I can't wish elements of the UK government and media luck with misleading the British public into thinking you've had fewer deaths than your already-undercounted headline statistics have indicated, while continuing to bungle testing, tracing, tracking, and regulatory environment. Excuse my bitterness at this confounded planet.

https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020...education.html

"Keeping our schools closed a moment longer than absolutely necessary is socially intolerable, economically unsustainable and morally indefensible," [Boris] Johnson wrote.

[ReluctantSamurai]

From the above Atlantic article:

“There is no way to get spillover of everything to zero,” Colin Carlson, an ecologist at Georgetown University, told me. Many conservationists jump on epidemics as opportunities to ban the wildlife trade or the eating of “bush meat,” an exoticized term for “game,” but few diseases have emerged through either route. Carlson said the biggest factors behind spillovers are land-use change and climate change, both of which are hard to control. Our species has relentlessly expanded into previously wild spaces. Through intensive agriculture, habitat destruction, and rising temperatures, we have uprooted the planet’s animals, forcing them into new and narrower ranges that are on our own doorsteps. Humanity has squeezed the world’s wildlife in a crushing grip—and viruses have come bursting out.

This is going to be the most difficult aspect of the pandemic for world leaders to grasp. Here in the States, you have a president doing his best to gut anything resembling environmental protection; and in India you have a government preparing to destroy thousands of acres of primal forest to strip mine coal---

https://caravanmagazine.in/communiti...t-chhattisgarh

SARS-CoV-2 is going to happen again. We've had 6 world-wide disease outbreaks in the last 20 years, including the current one. I don't find it co-incidence that climate change in the last 20 years has begun to accelerate faster than in any previous period.

[Gilrandir]

From the above Atlantic article:



This is going to be the most difficult aspect of the pandemic for world leaders to grasp. Here in the States, you have a president doing his best to gut anything resembling environmental protection; and in India you have a government preparing to destroy thousands of acres of primal forest to strip mine coal---

https://caravanmagazine.in/communiti...t-chhattisgarh

SARS-CoV-2 is going to happen again. We've had 6 world-wide disease outbreaks in the last 20 years, including the current one. I don't find it co-incidence that climate change in the last 20 years has begun to accelerate faster than in any previous period.

Such diseases result not so much from destroying animals' habitats but from eating bats, groundhogs and other species which is symptomatic of Asia.

[ReluctantSamurai]

Such diseases result not so much from destroying animals' habitats but from eating bats, groundhogs and other species

Not so, although the ingestion of disease-bearing animals can account for the jump of vector type pathogens to humans. Vector pathogens have been around for thousands of years, and hosts such as bats have carried them for just as long. However, our destruction of wildlife habitat has forced animals that carry vector-borne diseases into closer contact with humans as they search for food and suitable habitat, increasing the chances that a pathogen makes the leap from animal to humans. But it goes beyond that.

I picked this article out of many at this site...

https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/106...e=fr&locale=es

....because it points up some salient points:

https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/...=1&isAllowed=y

Epidemics of vector-borne disease occur in unprotected populations which lack sufficient immunity and/or effective public health measures. Many regions in the tropics are without an effective public health infrastructure. In these regions, the transmission of vector-borne diseases has a natural boundary where ecological or climatological conditions limit the distribution of the pathogen or vector. Often pathogen and vector share the same ecological niche having shared their evolutionary pathway. In these “unstable” or “fringe” areas, small changes in weather between years may dramatically change the conditions for disease transmission.

There is good epidemiological evidence that El Niño is associated with an increased risk of certain diseases in specific geographical areas where climate anomalies are linked with the ENSO [El Niño-Southern Oscillation] cycle. The associations are particularly strong for malaria but suggestive for other mosquito-borne and rodent-borne diseases. More research is needed to determine the nature of the ecological mechanisms of these relationships. Reports that link disease outbreaks to a single El Niño event are difficult to interpret because there are a number of potential confounding factors that may be responsible for the observation. Therefore, in this report, more emphasis has been placed on the results of analysis which have included a number of events or a long data series.

This essay is also particularly good:

https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/...=1&isAllowed=y

It is commonly accepted that climate plays a role in the transmission of many infectious diseases, some of which are among the most important causes of mortality and morbidity in developing countries. Often these diseases occur as epidemics which may be triggered by variations in climatic conditions that favour higher transmission rates.

For infectious diseases caused by a pathogen that develops outside the human host (i.e. in the environment or in an intermediate host or vector), climate factors can have a direct impact on the development of the pathogen. Most viruses, bacteria and parasites do not complete their development if the temperature is below a certain threshold (e.g. 18 ºC for the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum and 20 ºC for the Japanese encephalitis virus; Macdonald, 1957; Mellor& Leake, 2000). Increases in ambient temperature above this threshold will shorten the time needed for the development of the pathogen and increase reproduction rates, whereas temperatures in excess of the tolerance range of the pathogen may increase mortality rates.

Weather and climate (two separate things) certainly enhance or retard the incidence of diseases such as malaria, dengue fever, and others. It's not a great leap to foresee an impact on emerging pathogens.

[Gilrandir]

Not so, although the ingestion of disease-bearing animals can account for the jump of vector type pathogens to humans. Vector pathogens have been around for thousands of years, and hosts such as bats have carried them for just as long. However, our destruction of wildlife habitat has forced animals that carry vector-borne diseases into closer contact with humans as they search for food and suitable habitat, increasing the chances that a pathogen makes the leap from animal to humans. But it goes beyond that.

Still, eating such animals is as close a contact as might be.

[ReluctantSamurai]

Still, eating such animals is as close a contact as might be

If the meat is cooked, highly unlikely there's a disease transfer. If eaten raw, then yes. Read the material provided. It's not as simple as vector-transmitting animals as a food source.

[Montmorency]

Sadly, a family in New Zealand just turned up infected in an apparent reemergence of community spread. Coming just after the ostensible 100-day milestone of eradication.

On the possibility that cross-resistance and effective herd immunity (in the sense of a combination of disease point prevalence and active adaptive measures), both varying across demographics and communities, have reduced the ultimate or potential severity of the pandemic.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020...-immunity.html

This is going to be the most difficult aspect of the pandemic for world leaders to grasp. Here in the States, you have a president doing his best to gut anything resembling environmental protection; and in India you have a government preparing to destroy thousands of acres of primal forest to strip mine coal---

https://caravanmagazine.in/communiti...t-chhattisgarh

SARS-CoV-2 is going to happen again. We've had 6 world-wide disease outbreaks in the last 20 years, including the current one. I don't find it co-incidence that climate change in the last 20 years has begun to accelerate faster than in any previous period.

Article on pandemic gaming and modeling before and after COVID19. See bold for TLDR.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02277-6

Morhard was not the only one sounding the alarm. Event 201 was one of dozens of simulations and evaluations over the past two decades that have highlighted the risks of a pandemic and identified gaps in the ability of governments and organizations around the world to respond.

The exercises anticipated several failures that have played out in the management of COVID-19, including leaky travel bans, medical-equipment shortages, massive disorganization, misinformation and a scramble for vaccines. But the scenarios didn’t anticipate some of the problems that have plagued the pandemic response, such as a shortfall of diagnostic tests, and world leaders who reject the advice of public-health specialists.

Most strikingly, biosecurity researchers didn’t predict that the United States would be among the hardest-hit countries. On the contrary, last year, leaders in the field ranked the United States top in the Global Health Security Index, which graded 195 countries in terms of how well prepared they were to fight outbreaks, on the basis of more than 100 factors. President Donald Trump even held up a copy of the report during a White House briefing on 27 February, declaring: “We’re rated number one.” As he spoke, SARS-CoV-2 was already spreading undetected across the country.

Now, as COVID-19 cases in the United States surpass 4 million, with more than 150,000 deaths, the country has proved itself to be one of the most dysfunctional. Morhard and other biosecurity specialists are asking what went wrong — why did dozens of simulations, evaluations and white papers fail to predict or defend against the colossal missteps taken in the world’s wealthiest nation? By contrast, some countries that hadn’t ranked nearly so high in evaluations, such as Vietnam, executed swift, cohesive responses.

By late January, Inglesby was anxious. The coronavirus outbreak was escalating at a frightening pace in China and spreading to other countries, including the United States. These were the kinds of foreboding signs that he had plugged into his simulations. But the Trump administration seemed to view the outbreak as China’s problem, says Inglesby. During the third week of January, Trump posted one reassuring tweet about the coronavirus and around 40 regarding his impeachment hearings, his rallies and defeating the Democrats. The only public action that the government took was to screen travellers coming from China for symptoms at a handful of international airports.

Inglesby knew that travel bans and checkpoints don’t sufficiently prevent the spread of contagious pathogens. So, on 26 January, he listed a series of actions needed to prepare the United States for the coronavirus — dubbed nCoV — in a 25-part Twitter thread. “Global and national leaders should be looking ahead to what must be done to prepare for the possibility nCoV can’t be contained,” he wrote. The list included vaccine development, expansion of personal protective equipment for health-care workers, and “very high numbers of reliable diagnostic tests”.

These actions are key to curbing most infectious diseases, but, in an outbreak, they must occur at hyperspeed. Biosecurity experts had woven this lesson into every simulation, because muddling the response in the early months of an epidemic has catastrophic repercussions. J. Stephen Morrison, director of global health policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC, says: “You can’t fart around for weeks on end and then give a confused, half-baked, not very serious response.”

Infectious-disease researchers were also worried. Fearing undetected transmission in the United States, scientists in the states of Washington, New York and California started vetting tests that detect the genetic sequence of the virus in late January — including a protocol developed by German researchers and disseminated by the WHO. But their efforts to roll tests out for public use hit a wall at the FDA, which wasn’t ready to authorize them. Meanwhile, officials at the CDC insisted that labs exclusively use tests that it had developed.

The CDC started shipping test kits to public-health departments on 6 February. On a Sunday morning, three days later, Kelly Wroblewski, the infectious-disease director at the Association of Public Health Laboratories in Silver Spring, Maryland, woke up to a flood of e-mails saying that the tests didn’t work. “We always knew laboratory testing was complicated, but it’s something that was often overlooked in these simulations,” says Wroblewski; she had participated in Crimson Contagion just months earlier.

While the CDC scrambled to fix the faulty tests, labs lobbied for FDA authorization to use tests that they had been developing. Some finally obtained the green light on 29 February, but without coordination at the federal level, testing remained disorganized and limited. And despite calls from the WHO to implement contact tracing, many city health departments ditched the effort, and the US government did not offer a national plan. Beth Cameron, a biosecurity expert at the Nuclear Threat Initiative in Washington DC, which focuses on national-security issues, says that coordination could have been aided by a White House office responsible for pandemic preparedness. Cameron had led such a group during Barack Obama’s presidency, but Trump dismantled it in 2018.

In March, the CDC stopped giving press briefings and saw its role diminished as the Trump administration reassured the public that the coronavirus wasn’t as bad as public-health experts were saying. An editorial in The Washington Post in July by four former CDC directors, including Frieden, described how the Trump administration had silenced the agency, revised its guidelines and undermined its authority in trying to handle the pandemic. Trump has also questioned the judgement of Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a leading scientist on the White House Coronavirus Task Force.

Confusion emerged in most pandemic simulations, but none explored the consequences of a White House sidelining its own public-health agency. Perhaps they should have, suggests a scientist who has worked in the US public-health system for decades and asked to remain anonymous because they did not have permission to speak to the press. “You need gas in the engine and the brakes to work, but if the driver doesn’t want to use the car, you’re not going anywhere,” the scientist says.

By contrast, New Zealand, Taiwan and South Korea showed that it was possible to contain the virus, says Scott Dowell, an infectious-disease specialist at the Gates Foundation who spent 21 years at the CDC and has participated in several simulations. The places that have done well with COVID-19 had “early, decisive action by their government leaders” he says. Cameron agrees: “It’s not that the US doesn’t have the right tools — it’s that we aren’t choosing to use them.”

Perhaps the biggest limitation of simulation exercises was that they didn’t actually drive policymakers to prioritize and fund improvements to the public-health system. Morrison now questions whether it’s even possible to do that through simulations alone, or whether people must experience an epidemic at first hand.

Why I fear for humanity this century.

Look, heck, maybe a moderate pandemic incapacitating the largest and richest countries (other than China) will shock the world enough to initiate sweeping reforms that will blunt the inevitable new, potentially more severe, iterations. But we're already facing the effects of moderate climate change, with more baked in as of now, and the confident apprehension remains that our societies is not learning.

Such diseases result not so much from destroying animals' habitats but from eating bats, groundhogs and other species which is symptomatic of Asia.

Animal-human interactions are the interface to zoonotic disease spillover. Your culturally-specific interactions are not somehow purer or more wholesome than others. Emphasizing taste-based accounts, like the Yellow Man being tainted by the eating of strange foods (that they may or may not actually eat), over scientific ones is unhelpful. Keep an eye on your pigs and cows and chickens.

Since bats come up as a meme in connection to SARS-CoV-2, I would emphasize that no evidence has been presented for a direct vector between bats and humans (let alone through consumption).

[Gilrandir]

If the meat is cooked, highly unlikely there's a disease transfer. If eaten raw, then yes. Read the material provided. It's not as simple as vector-transmitting animals as a food source.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-...lague/12459306

A 15-year-old boy has died in western Mongolia of bubonic plague, the country's national news agency reported.
Mongolia reported two cases earlier this month linked to people eating marmot meat
Suspected cases of the bubonic plague have also popped up in China
More than 50 million people died in the 14th century due to the bubonic plague
The Health Ministry said laboratory tests confirmed the teenager died of plague that he contracted from an infected marmot, according to the Montsame News Agency.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/07/a...scn/index.html

Plague, caused by bacteria and transmitted through flea bites and infected animals, killed an estimated 50 million people in Europe during the Black Death pandemic in the Middle Ages.

If you only try to catch these animals you are likely to be bitten by fleas living on them. You don't even have to eat them in any way. This is how plague travelled to Europe in the Middle Ages - on rats that infested ships.

Your culturally-specific interactions are not somehow purer or more wholesome than others.

Historically, plagues have always come from the East. Which is the evidence that my eating habits are at least less deleterious than the Chinese or Mongolian.

And by the way, bite the dust, Western scientific losers. Russia has a vaccine.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53735718

[ReluctantSamurai]

Historically, plagues have always come from the East. Which is the evidence that my eating habits are at least less deleterious than the Chinese or Mongolian.

Again....you focus on one aspect of vector transmission of disease, and ignore the bigger picture. I've already agreed that disease can be transmitted by eating animals, being bitten by animals or insects, even playing in monkey shit. Read the material in the links provided. Climate change can allow insects to move well beyond their "normal" range, as in the case of mosquitoes; habitat destruction directly by humans, or indirectly by humans influencing climate can force animals to seek new habitats closer to humans, increasing the risk of zoonotic transmission.

And as Monty has pointed out, there's little difference between Asian wet markets, and today's animal farms, in their ability to create conditions ripe for vector transmission of disease (the biggest difference in a wet market is that a disease can be transmitted from one animal to another, possibly recombining and then making the jump to humans).

How convenient your historical analysis left out this one:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...bstract/362316

And this one:

https://www.history.com/news/1889-ru...mic-in-america

And btw, the most devastating pandemic in recent history (1918) is strongly suspected as having started in a pig farming area in SW Kansas, USA when an avian flu virus probably brought in by migrating birds, made the jump from bird to swine, before making the move to humans.

And by the way, bite the dust, Western scientific losers. Russia has a vaccine.

Seriously??? Are you really going down the Cold War rabbit hole with that nonsense? You couldn't pay me to take such a vaccine because it hasn't even entered Phase III testing. Oh, that's right, the Russian general public are going to be the test subjects

[Gilrandir]

Again....you focus on one aspect of vector transmission of disease, and ignore the bigger picture. I've already agreed that disease can be transmitted by eating animals, being bitten by animals or insects, even playing in monkey shit. Read the material in the links provided. Climate change can allow insects to move well beyond their "normal" range, as in the case of mosquitoes; habitat destruction directly by humans, or indirectly by humans influencing climate can force animals to seek new habitats closer to humans, increasing the risk of zoonotic transmission.

Climate changes can hardly be called accountable for the medieval plagues.

How convenient your historical analysis left out this one:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...bstract/362316

And this one:

https://www.history.com/news/1889-ru...mic-in-america

My historical analysis dealt with PLAGUES not FLUS. And bird (avian) flu generated in China, btw.

And btw, the most devastating pandemic in recent history (1918) is strongly suspected as having started in a pig farming area in SW Kansas, USA when an avian flu virus probably brought in by migrating birds, made the jump from bird to swine, before making the move to humans.

There is a whole world of difference between "strongly suspected" and "scientifically proven".

Seriously??? Are you really going down the Cold War rabbit hole with that nonsense? You couldn't pay me to take such a vaccine because it hasn't even entered Phase III testing.

I was being sarcastic.

Oh, that's right, the Russian general public are going to be the test subjects

It has already been tested. On Putin's daughter.

https://www.euronews.com/2020/08/11/...avirus-vaccine

So it is perfectly safe and efficient. Don't you trust His word?

(Again sarcastic, if you don't feel it).

[ReluctantSamurai]

Climate changes can hardly be called accountable for the medieval plagues.

But climate change can certainly have an effect on the frequency and location of emerging viruses. Please just read the material from the links I provided...as a start.

My historical analysis dealt with PLAGUES not FLUS. And bird (avian) flu generated in China, btw.

We are talking about pathogens that cause worldwide pandemics. Doesn't matter if it's an avian flu, a swine flu, a corona virus, or a bacteria like Yersinia pestis.

There is a whole world of difference between "strongly suspected" and "scientifically proven".

The closest you're going to get to "scientifically proven" is this:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC340389/

It has never been clear, however, where this pandemic began. Since influenza is an endemic disease, not simply an epidemic one, it is impossible to answer this question with absolute certainty. Nonetheless, in seven years of work on a history of the pandemic, this author conducted an extensive survey of contemporary medical and lay literature searching for epidemiological evidence – the only evidence available. That review suggests that the most likely site of origin was Haskell County, Kansas, an isolated and sparsely populated county in the southwest corner of the state, in January 1918. If this hypothesis is correct, it has public policy implications.

Concerning some of the other hypotheses put forward as to where the 1918 pandemic originated:

Jordan considered other possible origins of the pandemic in early 1918 in France and India. He concluded that it was highly unlikely that the pandemic began in any of them. That left the United States. Jordan looked at a series of spring outbreaks there. The evidence seemed far stronger. One could see influenza jumping from Army camp to camp, then into cities, and traveling with troops to Europe. His conclusion: the United States was the site of origin.

A later equally comprehensive, multi-volume British study of the pandemic agreed with Jordan. It too found no evidence for the influenza's origin in the Orient, it too rejected the 1916 outbreak among British troops, and it too concluded, "The disease was probably carried from the United States to Europe."

Australian Nobel laureate MacFarlane Burnet spent most of his scientific career working on influenza and studied the pandemic closely. He too concluded that the evidence was "strongly suggestive" that the disease started in the United States and spread with "the arrival of American troops in France."

And BTW, this article is a fascinating (and scary) read about the reconstruction of the Influenza A responsible for the 1918 pandemic:

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-res...918-virus.html

I was being sarcastic.

Don't know you personally. Would have very little idea when you are being sarcastic. But that's what emoticons are for

[Furunculus]

Cutoffs like 28 days or X days are applied to promote real-time approximation in the data set, when conclusive fact-finding, registration, etc. for each death for the purpose of national statistics may not be available or will take weeks or months or longer to determine, validate, and compile. But literally adopting the position that someone can die of COVID at X-1 days but cannot die of COVID at X+1 days sounds like an arbitrary threshold with no medical basis. If someone has an extended disease course they have an extended disease course, irrespective of bureaucratic deadlines. Or someone who dies of COVID as a secondary or contributing cause, someone whose lungs or heart or kidneys fail without transplant 3 months subsequent to infection because they were so badly damaged by the illness, they too are plausibly recorded in any preliminary accounting. These latter could best be captured by abducing COVID as a cause of death in the death certificate and then counting death certificates...

...It seems some people may be confused by very basic math(s), or perhaps by the concept of cross-verification. Or maybe they're not confused at all. If their aim is what it appears to be, I can't wish elements of the UK government and media luck with misleading the British public into thinking you've had fewer deaths than your already-undercounted headline statistics have indicated, while continuing to bungle testing, tracing, tracking, and regulatory environment. Excuse my bitterness at this confounded planet.

and yet...
... this is precisely why PHE have done.
in a puff of smoke 10% of the Covid deaths have vanished. like magic.

[ReluctantSamurai]

This was entirely predictable:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...coronavirus-us

Nationally, children represent 8.8% of all Covid infections, according to the report from the American Academy of Pediatrics. About 70% of the new cases reported among children in July came from states in the south and west, where coronavirus has ripped through the population.

Children represent less than 4% of hospitalizations from the virus and account for less than 1% of Covid-related deaths in states that reported results. Twenty states reported zero child deaths.

Children younger than five tend to be least symptomatic, Williamson said, and outbreaks among children and teachers at care centers and preschools remain low. The risk goes up for children aged five to 10, and children over 12 appear to have more adult-like symptoms, she said.

You don't have to be a medical expert to come to this conclusion:

John Swartzberg, a clinical professor emeritus of infectious diseases and vaccinology at UC Berkeley’s school of public health, said the timing of the case surge highlighted by the report did not bode well for a return to in-person instruction in the near future. “The very significant increase in cases occurred when children were out of school, which suggests that if we put children back in school, it will exacerbate the problem,” Swartzberg said.

And just about anyone can answer this question:

“Putting children back in school, sending students back in universities, is a great experiment,” he said. “We have no idea what’s going to happen.”

Want to take bets on how many "COVID Parties" occur on college campuses once universities are back in session?

[Furunculus]

Normal economic activity cannot resume while dependent minor children are in need of parental care.
Early years education is crucial - and failing here will follow a child through their educational life and economic future.

The calculus is remorseless - schools must open.