Corona Virus Updates Part 6

Numbers Update for Europe, and Elsewhere (Still no BNO) :

USA Hits a Million, winner winner, chicken dinner.
You'll also notice how low Hong kong has gotten now, and will soon no longer be on my updates....Kudos to them.
Also, we will soon only have numbers over 1000 cases on these four caps...progress I suppose.







www.worldometers.info...

Little update :

I won't be doing the evening updates for the USA any more, as I have to get back into a normal sleep cycle, as I will most likely be going back to work in a couple of weeks. (I can't work from home, yay).
Currently doing 3am to 10 am, and need to slowly get back to 00 - 7am.
I'll still post the FT graphs, but the next morning.

People seem to have started to go out more here since easter, with this weekend being the worst.
haven't seen so many cars on a sunday for a few weeks, and today, monday, it was like a normal work day.
One motorbike on sunday must have got way over 200kph, I heard his engine rev like a formula 1 (11k rpm), in multiple gears, and he got over the 2 mile stretch between the villages very, very fast.
It seems like this is just a bore for some, and they don't care.
If they aren't dying from it, or sick, then it doesn't concern them, and they don't care.
Humanity deserves what it gets I suppose.

I feel the governments have been to light on the population. If they actually read what happened in 1918, they would be able to make people realise that this should last for a couple of months, now its going to last much much longer, because we get bored after a few weeks.

Spain opened up to let the kid's out, for one hour 1km from your home, and loads of people went out, to the beach, to sit on park benches, like it was all over.
We'll see in a couple of weeks or so if it was worth it or not.

The second lockdown will be much more harsh than the first, I just hope it won't cost lives as payment for our foolishness, and selfishness.

No vaccine yet, No proven immunity after infection, No proven immunity from re-infection. No Proven Meds.
Mulitple strains/variants, and maybe even mutations by now.
Wish I had beer left....

Doctors Are Using This Heartburn Drug(Pepcid) to Treat Almost 200 Coronavirus Patients


Doctors Are Using This Heartburn Drug to Treat Almost 200 Coronavirus Patients

Doctors in New York have a hunch: that famotidine, the active ingredient in the common over-the-counter heartburn drug Pepcid, might help treat the coronavirus.

Based on evidence from Wuhan, China, doctors at a network of 23 hospitals run by Northwell Health in New York started a trial to figure out whether the drug might be effective. In New York, they’ve only just started giving the drug to about 187 patients, according to Science Magazine, which first reported on the trial. If famotidine does prove useful, it’s plentiful, cheap, and fairly safe to take. The researchers hope to find 1,100 patients to treat as part of the trial.

link

I don't know if it's been discussed on here but have you heard of the PREDICT program?

The Wuhan lab received funding to do this work in part from a ten-year, $200 million international program called PREDICT, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and other countries. Similar work, funded in part by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, has been carried out in dozens of labs throughout the world. Some of this research involves taking deadly viruses and enhancing their ability to spread quickly through a population—research that took place over the objections of hundreds of scientists, who have warned for years of the program's potential to cause a pandemic.

Ron Fouchier, a scientist at Erasmus University in Holland, wondered what it would take for the bird flu virus to mutate into a plague virus. The question was important to the mission of virologists in anticipating human pandemics. If H5N1 were merely one or two steps away from acquiring human transmissibility, the world was in danger: a transmissible form of H5N1 could quickly balloon into a devastating pandemic on the order of the 1918 flu, which killed tens of millions of people.

The answer that Fouchier came up with was a technique known as "animal passage," in which he mutated the bird-flu virus by passing it through animals rather than cell cultures. He chose ferrets because they were widely known as a good stand-in for humans—if a virus can jump between ferrets, it is likely also to be able to jump between humans. He would infect one ferret with a bird-flu virus, wait until it got sick, and then remove a sample of the virus that had replicated in the ferret's body with a swab. As the virus multiplies in the body, it mutates slightly, so the virus that came out of the ferret was slightly different from the one that went into it. Fouchier then proceeded to play a version of telephone: he would take the virus from the first ferret and infect a second, then take the mutated virus from the second ferret and infect a third, and so on.

After passing the virus through 10 ferrets, Fouchier noticed that a ferret in an adjacent cage became ill, even though the two hadn't come into contact with one another. That showed that the virus was transmissible in ferrets—and, by implication, in humans. Fouchier had succeeded in creating a potential pandemic virus in his lab.

When Fouchier submitted his animal-passage work to the journal Science in 2011, biosecurity officials in the Obama White House, worried that the dangerous pathogen could accidentally leak from Fouchier's lab, pushed for a moratorium on the research. Fouchier had done his work in BSL-2 labs, which are intended for pathogens such as staph, of moderate severity, rather than BSL-4, which are intended for Ebola and similar viruses.

What followed was a fierce debate among scientists over the risks versus benefits of the gain-of-function research. Fouchier's work, wrote Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch in the journal Nature in 2015, "entails a unique risk that a laboratory accident could spark a pandemic, killing millions."

Really interesting article (with way more info) worth a read:
www.newsweek.com... ivKNPOPWPLfK7b0Gq2fV_Bfwqvoy2M

a reply to: cirrus12

A couple of Mink Farms are infected in Holland.

a reply to: MonkeyBalls2

I can feel it in my bones, just as sure as China is getting a second wave we will as well unless every last case in a country is identified and isolated until clear. We are obviously incapable of that for various reasons , its all luck on what strain is dominant. This thing is mutating fast.

2 confirmed and 1 probable cases in Aotearoa/New Zealand today. We are now at alert level 3. This means people can extend their bubbles to include one other bubble exclusively. Some people cued up to buy their crap Donald's food to celebrate.

originally posted by: Byrd
a reply to: Arbitrageur

Thank you for the excellent data crunching and the graphs. I can see where the "uptick" comes from. I think there needs to be a longer stretch of low numbers. There certainly isn't a consistent trend of lower numbers here in the US.

The lower trend was not consistent as you say, when I made those graphs, but we've had 2 more days of lower death numbers in the US which is starting to solidify the downward trend, though I wonder if the following is an exception or if there could be some reporting pressures to reduce the numbers?

originally posted by: MrRCflying
She is under sedation, and they are going to try to remove fluid from her lungs today. She is on oxygen, but not a ventalator.

She has had 3 tests, 2 came back negitive, the thrid was "lost".

I call BS on that. Either they did not do the tests correctly, or since this is Kentucky that wants to start to open early, they want to keep the numbers low.

The apparent false negatives and the lost test certainly raise questions, don't they? It's amazing how the US death numbers started dropping like a rock just before Trump wanted the US to stop the lockdowns. Good luck? Coincidence? Shenanigans? I don't know but I can't blame you for questioning those tests. I hope she will be OK.

originally posted by: cirrus12
I don't know if it's been discussed on here but have you heard of the PREDICT program?

"Fouchier had done his work in BSL-2 labs, which are intended for pathogens such as staph, of moderate severity, rather than BSL-4, which are intended for Ebola and similar viruses."

Really interesting article (with way more info) worth a read:
www.newsweek.com... ivKNPOPWPLfK7b0Gq2fV_Bfwqvoy2M

I didn't know it was called "the Predict Program" but I did post earlier about the US funding the research at Wuhan lab using what seemed like inadequate safety protocols for such potentially deadly pathogens. The obvious question is if they are researching things that can turn into a deadly plague that will kill millions, why are they only using BSL-2 safety procedures instead of something more secure that fits the greater risk of a potential plague?

The bigger question mentioned is if the potential rewards of such research programs which may create and leak plague-inducing pathogens are really worth the risks. At least the risks should be minimized by using stronger safety protocols than BSL-2.

originally posted by: Arbitrageur

originally posted by: Byrd
a reply to: Arbitrageur

Thank you for the excellent data crunching and the graphs. I can see where the "uptick" comes from. I think there needs to be a longer stretch of low numbers. There certainly isn't a consistent trend of lower numbers here in the US.

The lower trend was not consistent as you say, when I made those graphs, but we've had 2 more days of lower death numbers in the US which is starting to solidify the downward trend, though I wonder if the following is an exception or if there could be some reporting pressures to reduce the numbers?

My guess is that it's genuine simply because there's too many individual data points (we can get zip code specific data and there's too many people involved in producing the data) to be a true collusion. The rise in daily cases is tapering off in Dallas. HOWEVER... we've had some rallies and protests and they're opening businesses back up. I expect another increase next month.

While we see some amelioration in the big cities, particularly where the mayors and governors have come down strongly on quarantine and social distance and masks, it's the rural areas which are farther away from hospitals that will get hammered. And Tony Spell, who styles himself "pastor" is still holding services, busing people into his megachurch. One of his parishioners died from Covid-19... he calls that a lie.

I wonder what it'll take to convince them to stay home for another month.

I'm going to contact the county and ask about safety procedures for voting this November. I suspect that I will have to rent a hotel room (since I'm a judge) and quarantine myself after voting day. I've been looking into getting a face shield as well as a mask (I could see up to 600-1,000 voters at my site.) The family won't like it, but this is a critical election.

Just one paper for today (it was the only one I thought might be of interest to the discussion)

The Dynamics of Covid-19: Weather, demographics, and infection rate

This is a preprint article and is not peer reviewed... additionally, it's a sole researcher and they're from GIS. GIS is a logical group to process this data, as long as it's not taken any deeper (GIS looks at information and geography. So patterns of where things appear and when they appear... but no more than that.)

Partial abstract

We study the effects of three types of variables on the early pace of spread of Covid-19: weather variables, temperature and absolute humidity; population density; the timeline of Covid-19 infection, as outbreak of disease occurs in different dates for different regions. The regions considered were all 50 U.S. states and 110 countries (those which had enough data available by April 10th. We looked for associations between the above variables and an estimate of the growth rate of cases, the exponential coefficient, computed using data for 10 days starting when state/country reached 100 confirmed cases. The results for U.S. states indicate that one cannot expect that higher temperatures and higher levels of absolute humidity would translate into slower pace of Covid-19 infection rate, at least in the ranges of those variables during the months of February and March of 2020 (-2.4 to 24C and 2.3 to 15g/m3). In fact, the opposite is true: the higher the temperature and the absolute humidity, the faster the Covid-19 has expanded in the U.S. states, in the early stages of the outbreak. Secondly, using the highest county population density for each state, there is strong positive association between population density and (early) faster spread of Covid-19. Finally, there is strong negative association between the date when a state reached 100 accumulated cases and the speed of Covid-10 outbreak (the later, the lower the estimate of growth rate).

Data scraped from the Johns Hopkins site that everyone uses and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control
(ECDC/EU)16 for other countries. Weather data comes from NOAA, and population density (at least from the US) comes from the census.

Basic findings:
* the bigger the population of an area, the faster it spreads
* high temperatures and humidity actually increase the spread (not as illogical as you might think... when it gets hot, we head for the air conditioned indoors. The virus CAN spread through the AC and people are more likely to cluster together then.

a reply to: Byrd

Why post this? Not peer reviewed? If a potential cure is not peer reviewed and posted here it’s tossed out and not worth considering.

Yet you post a hypothetical fear based scenario and you want us to consider it.

This is ridiculous.

I hope you all see how the narrative is being controlled.

originally posted by: Observationalist
a reply to: Byrd

Why post this? Not peer reviewed? If a potential cure is not peer reviewed and posted here it’s tossed out and not worth considering.

Yet you post a hypothetical fear based scenario and you want us to consider it.

This is ridiculous.

I hope you all see how the narrative is being controlled.

Because non-peer reviewed information about possible transmission of the Virus isn't dangerous.

Non-peer reviewed "Cures" which talk about this or that medication, are potentially dangerous, in that they may harm or kill some people, or cause a certain drug to be unavailable to those who need it.

originally posted by: Observationalist
a reply to: Byrd

Why post this? Not peer reviewed? If a potential cure is not peer reviewed and posted here it’s tossed out and not worth considering.

Yet you post a hypothetical fear based scenario and you want us to consider it.

This is ridiculous.

I hope you all see how the narrative is being controlled.

I heard drinking chlorine kills germs, do me a favour will you, go drink some chlorine and let me know how many germs died during the process.

Tim Pool was on Joe Rogan today, brace for impact on a bunch of BS conspiracy theories about “left wing news bias/fake news”.

ONS figures released today in the UK for the week of the 17th April. UK total deaths for the week were 22K against a 5 year average of 10K. Of the 12K increase in deaths, nearly 9K were confirmed as COVID. That is now 26K deaths above average in just 3 weeks in the UK. Deaths in all age ranges above 50 years old are at double or more than average for the period. Scary stuff.

originally posted by: DavidMK
ONS figures released today in the UK for the week of the 17th April. UK total deaths for the week were 22K against a 5 year average of 10K. Of the 12K increase in deaths, nearly 9K were confirmed as COVID. That is now 26K deaths above average in just 3 weeks in the UK. Deaths in all age ranges above 50 years old are at double or more than average for the period. Scary stuff.

In the last month in my town in total 175 people were registered dead .....
In 2017 in the same month 184 deaths were registered.
In 2016 there were 164 deaths registered.

Thought this was interesting about Sweden Herd Immunity Approach compared to Denmark. My cousin was just touting how Sweden did the right thing by not quarantining and allowing herd immunity to occur...well....

Sweden and Denmark both had relatively mild flu seasons this winter, with fewer people dying compared to recent years. Then COVID-19 struck, and the neighboring countries adopted very different strategies. While the Danes were among the first in Europe to go into lockdown, Sweden opted for the herd immunity approach, making it one of the few advanced economies in the world to do so. There was no strict lockdown, and social distancing was recommended but not dictated. A visiting ban at care homes was introduced at the beginning of April to protect the elderly, gatherings of more than 50 people were prohibited, and universities and colleges were recommended to offer remote learning. But otherwise, life carries on essentially unchanged: Most schools, restaurants, bars, clubs, and gyms are open, and people are practicing social distancing.

In the 21 days before April 19, 7,169 people died — 1,843 more people compared to the average number of deaths during the same weeks between 2015 and 2019. That’s the equivalent of a 34.5% increase. And on Monday, the Swedish statistics office said the number of deaths recorded in the week ending April 12 was the highest this century, surpassing a milestone set in the first week of 2000 when 2,364 people died. Three of the four weeks with the highest death tolls in the past two decades have occurred this month.

Perhaps this virus is just too unique to respond to herd immunization efforts

Update: April 28, 2020 Tuesday Tokyo time: evening

I mention earlier on one of my post that I'd try to make my updates a bit more international and perhaps more on "what's happening in your front yard" type of post. The reason is because: Chinese updates are rare and Japanese updates are beginning not to be of much of interest these days to what is happening to the outside world. Actually, the events in Japan (somewhat untruthful as far as reporting cases and deaths of the virus ) still hold a lot of weight. I say that because ,well, for those that follow the financial post, I posted about investing in UBE KOSAN in Ube, Yamaguchi Pref a while back. That was another one of MIM's Street Talk that panned out. So for you that buy stocks, check them out. I'll post the link here .

www3.nhk.or.jp...

Update

1. Japanese govt. tonight admits "our economy now is worse then the "Great Depression".
If you are reading this, watch now other countries will be following suit. Yes, it is very true. I see it very clearly since
I'm not working at the moment.
2. MIM's Street Talk about school not starting until Sept. , well guess what, tonight the politicians with many school board
members are some what in agreement with it.
3. Airline business in Japan is toasted. Asking now for some staff to take 2 days of work off. (not sure if it is paid,
since they get paid monthly
4. People are applying now for 40 to 50 job positions just to find work
5. Employment job opening are down sharply
6. Welfare in Japan is to increase
7. Something about 3400 people lost jobs in one month (couldn't make it out, might have been 340,000 people)
8. Been 3 weeks now since the "State of Emergency" has been declared
9. In Osaka, the governor is insisting that people stay home. Even closed (tried to ) all the Pachinko Parlors. Those that
refused to do so, well, he (the Governor) goes on national TV to give the names that do not close.
10. Hotels are now at 6% occupancy
11. Shinkansen is at 5% accupancy
12. Okinawa has 15000 reservations from the mainland this Golden Week (kind of like 4th of July holiday)
13. Tokyo today 112 tested positive
14. Japan 14000 tested postive
15. Japan 407 have died of the virus
16. Hospital beds are at 80% capacity at the moment
17. There are over 2400 cases of people quarantine at home or as designated hotels throughout Japan
18. There is now talk of schools opening up in September (hmm. mim's street talk just may pan out here)

Other news

1. Hong Kong now restricts 2 visitors to a persons residence (strictly enforced as of today )

2. Taiwan now fines people that are infected and that leave their quarantine area a sum of $35000 bucks. Yes, you read
that right. Serious stuff here people

3. Hong Kong: As at noon today (April 28), public hospitals had reported to the Department of Health the admission of 15 patients (13 male and two female, aged 13 to 92) in the past 24 hours who met the reporting criteria of COVID-19. Appropriate tests have been arranged for the patients. There are 246 patients under isolation currently. So far, 811 patients who had COVID-19 confirmed or probable infections have been discharged upon recovery.

4. China: Diabetes can cause complications such as heart disease and stroke. In 2017, it killed about 843,000 people across China. ( still trying to get update on the death toll in China from the virus )

5. Taiwan: Taiwan's Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) on Monday (April 27) announced there were no new cases of Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19), with Minister of Health and Welfare and CECC head Chen Shih-chung (陳時中) saying if this trend continues for the next two weeks, the local epidemic could come to an end by June.

6. China accordingly stands at 4700 dead of the virus. ( I don't think that is true by all means ) www.taiwannews.com.tw...

7. Italy: Doctors in northern Italy, one of the world’s hardest-hit areas during the pandemic, have reported extraordinarily large numbers of children under age 9 with severe cases of what appears to be Kawasaki disease, more common in parts of Asia.

8. ROME: One of Italy's top public health officials warned yesterday that wearing face masks should not give people a false sense of security against the new coronavirus.Italy and other countries are debating whether people should wear masks outdoors at all times – even while not in a confined space.The Mediterranean country is making the use of face masks mandatory on transport and in stores as it gradually rolls back lockdown measures starting next Monday.

9. Japan: Up to about 8,800 PCR tests were carried out per day in Japan in mid-April. The figure is about four times the number from a month earlier, and is likely to rise.

10. Japan's health ministry has allowed dentists to carry out coronavirus tests when physicians and other qualified health care personnel are not available.

11. Okinawa — U.S. Forces Japan has ordered the approximately 50,000 active-duty service members under its umbrella to maintain a log of daily personal contacts and interactions to track the potential spread of the coronavirus.

12. This may be of interest to you all:
The new symptoms, which the CDC reports could appear 2-14 days after exposure to the virus, are:

Chills
Repeated shaking with chills
Muscle pain
Headache
Sore throat
New loss of taste or smell

13. Its happening folks:
As pork, beef, and chicken plants are being forced to close, even for short periods of time, millions of pounds of meat will disappear from the supply chain,” John Tyson, Chairman of the Board of Tyson Foods, wrote in the letter, adding that closures of slaughterhouses mean farmers can’t sell their livestock, and that “millions of animals—chickens, pigs, and cattle—will be depopulated because of the closure of our processing facilities.”

14. Is this really true:
New figures released by the Office for National Statistics on Tuesday show that a total of 22,351 people died in the UK on the week ending 17 April 2020. This is the most deaths that occurred in any week since statisticians began compiling the figure 27 years ago. Staggeringly the grim statistic is 11,854 more than the five year average.


Will your school children start wearing these to school ? Only in Asia ?




Thanks every one for reading my updates.

More to come maybe after 9 pm tonight.

a reply to: MrRCflying

Really hope your aunt makes it through, sending prayers and best wishes to her, yourself and family.

a reply to: Itisnowagain

I don’t understand what point you are trying to make? It is clear that here in the UK it is having an impact, 26K extra deaths in just 3 weeks, that is almost a 100% increase on the 5 year average.

originally posted by: primalfractal
a reply to: MrRCflying

Really hope your aunt makes it through, sending prayers and best wishes to her, yourself and family.

Thank you. I have not heard anything this moring. As of last night they were giving her 50/50 chances. I am not sure if they tried to remove fluid from her lungs or not.

I was thinking last night. This makes 5 people I know that have had this crap. 2 confirmed, 3 unconfirmed but I don't see how it could be anything but.

3 have made full recovery. One has recovered, but had a stroke and is now home on Hospice care, and my aunt in the hospital not doing good.