THE GREAT CHINESE STAGE…HOW TO DOMINATE THE WORLD QUICKLY
Unevaluated as to sources and content claims.
All "information" presented as facts must be independently verified. Posted as assertions requiring independence examination and evaluation.
Wuhan is open for business now. How come Wuhan is suddenly free from the deadly virus?{China's President Xi Jinping...just wore a simple RM1 face mask to visit the effected areas.As President ,he should be covered from head to toe.....but it was not the case.Wasa cure wasalready in place?)
The corona Virus traveled entire world from Wuhan but it did not reach Beijing and Shanghai... Why wereBeijing and Shanghai.not hit?Why only Wuhan?
{China will say that their drasticinitialmeasures they took was very stern and Wuhan was locked down to contain the spread to other areas.}
Russia & North Korea are totally free of Covid- 19. They are staunch alliesof China. Not a single case reported from these2 countries. On the other hand South Korea / United Kingdom / Italy / Spain and Asia are severely hit.
The Chinese Stock Market didn't crash....American and European Markets did....
THE GREAT CHINESE STAGE How to dominate the world quickly?
1. Create a virus and the antidote.
2. Spread the virus.
3. A demonstration of efficiency, building hospitals in a few days. After all, you were already prepared, with the projects, ordering the equipment, hiring the labor, the water and sewage network, the prefabricated building materials and stocked in an impressive volume.
4. Cause chaos in the world, starting with Europe.
5. Quickly plaster the economy of dozens of countries.
6. Stop production lines in factories in other countries.
7. Cause stock markets to fall and buy companies at a bargain price.[Destroy other markets and be ready to capture them in every way]
8. Quickly control the epidemic in your country. After all, you were already prepared.
9. Lower the price of commodities, including the price of oil you buy on a large scale.
10. Get back to producing quickly while the world is at a standstill. Buy what you negotiated cheaply in the crisis and sell more expensive what is lacking in countries that have paralyzed their industries.
Interesting reading: the book by Chinese colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, from 1999, “Unrestricted Warfare: China’s master plan to destroy America”, on Amazon.
Subject:Reference to French study +Israeli-made oral vaccine progress +Cell phone contact tracking + Excerpts from New York Times newsletters 3-24-20
Israeli-made oral vaccine for coronavirus on track, but testing will take months[ …it won’t be available for months because of the lengthy and sometimes bureaucratic testing and approval process ]
State-funded Migal Galilee institute has been working for 4 years on a vaccine that could be customized for various viruses, so it had a head start when COVID-19 emerged
An effective Israeli-developed vaccine for coronavirus is on track to be ready for testing within “a few weeks,”though it won’t be available for months because of the lengthy and sometimes bureaucratic testing and approval process, a member of the development team said Tuesday.
Chen Katz told The Times of Israel that the new oral vaccine for adults and children could “turn this disease into a very mild cold.” He said that for many people who are inoculated and then infected by COVID-19, “potentially it will not affect them at all.”
The rapid potential progress by the state-funded Migal Galilee Research Institute stems from the fact that the institute has been working for four years toward a vaccine that could be customized for various viruses, and has now adapted that work to focus on the coronavirus, he said.
Nonetheless, while Israel’s science ministry made headlines last week by touting the institute’s work and saying that its vaccine could be three months away, Dr. Asher Shalmon, the Health Ministry’s director of international relations, has warned against placing “false hopes” in it.
The vaccine will consist of a specially produced protein, and Katz said he expects to be clutching a bottle of it within “a few weeks.” But then comes clinical testing, which will take place in conjunction with a partner, and the paperwork, both of which will take time.
Katz, Biotechnology Group Leader at the institute, said: “By the time the protein is ready, we hope to have found the right partner who can take us through the clinical stage. The clinical testing experiments themselves are not so long, and we can complete them in 30 days, plus another 30 days for human trials.Most of the time is bureaucracy — regulation and paperwork.”
Time could also be lost because of “waiting points” between the different stages of the process, until regulators give the nod for things to move forward.
He spoke of the excitement that his team felt when it realized that the research it had been engaged in for four years could be tweaked to combat coronavirus. “The opportunity is amazing here,” he said. “Everyone wants to know we can contribute something to humanity and when we found we had the right tools to do it this became is very exciting.”
Katz’s group at Israel’s state-funded Migal Institute has become a source of hope to many around the world since it revealed on February 27 that it is working on the vaccine, and said it hoped to achieve “safety approval” in 90 days.
For four years, the research of Katz’s team had been focused on developing a vaccine that could be customized to various viruses. It was piloting it with Infectious Bronchitis Virus, but as as coronavirus swept China, started adapting the vaccine for COVID-19.
Its February 27 announcement prompted a widespread expectation among the public that people would soon be protected against coronavirus, which prompted Shalmon’s warning against “false hopes.”
Katz clarified that the 90-day time frame in the February 27 statement was until the product is ready for human testing, and said he still believes this is realistic. He said that skeptics should understand that his team is not working on new research, but rather customizing an existing innovation, meaning that a fast turnaround is realistic. He stated: “The important thing is that we were working on a vaccine, unrelated to this outbreak, and this is a great advantage.”
Katz revealed that the development process is sufficiently advanced that his ten-person team doesn’t need the virus. Instead, it went on the internet soon after the outbreak began, found the sequence of the virus which had been published, and got to work.
He said that the vaccine will be double-barreled, deploying two means to defend people against coronavirus.
The first protection triggers a response in the mouth to stop COVID-19 entering the body. Katz explained: “We are developing the proteins that are needed for our technology of the oral vaccination. They are special proteins which, when sprayed in to the mouth, penetrate the epithelial cells inside the mouth and activate a mucosal immune response, which is the part of the immune response in our body that protects the entry point of the virus.”
The second level of protection kicks in if COVID-19 enters the body. It will bolster the immune system in such a way “that when viral particles penetrate, there will be an immune protection, of antibodies and the right white blood cells.”
He said it will be administered by an oral spray, and will protect people who encounter COVID-19 two weeks after being administered. He stressed: “This is not a drug, not for treatment, only for prevention.”
When The Times of Israel talked to him on Tuesday, Katz’s team, like many in Israel, was also celebrating the Purim festival with fancy dress — in Katz’s case a wig — and hamantaschen. Katz explained that there isn’t much that the team can do to further speed its work along, as it is waiting for scientific processes to chug through in their own time. “This is biology, so it takes its time,” he said.
Much of the work is done by bacteria, he stated, explaining a central part of the process, saying: “We take part of the virus DNA and introduce it to bacteria and make the bacteria produce the viral proteins.”
*****
FRENCH STUDY:
+
The coronavirus isn’t mutating quickly, suggesting a vaccine would offer lasting protection
[ By Joel Achenbach]
The coronavirus is not mutating significantly as it circulates through the human population, according to scientists who are closely studying the novel pathogen’s genetic code.That relative stability suggests the virus is less likely to become more or less dangerous as it spreads, and represents encouraging news for researchers hoping to create a long-lasting vaccine.
All viruses evolve over time, accumulating mutations as they replicate imperfectly inside a host’s cells in tremendous numbers and then spread through a population, with some of those mutations persisting through natural selection. The new coronavirus has proofreading machinery, however, and that reduces the “error rate” and the pace of mutation. It looks pretty much the same everywhere it has appeared, the scientists say, and there is no evidence that some strains are deadlier than others.
SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease covid-19, is similar to coronaviruses that circulate naturally in bats. It jumped into the human species last year in Wuhan, China, likely through an intermediate species — possibly a pangolin, an endangered anteater whose scales are trafficked for traditional medicine.
Scientists now are studying more than 1,000 different samples of the virus, Peter Thielen, a molecular geneticist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory who has been studying the virus, told The Washington Post.
There are only about four to 10 genetic differences between the strains that have infected people in the United States and the original virus that spread in Wuhan, he said.
“That’s a relatively small number of mutations for having passed through a large number of people,” Thielen said. “At this point, the mutation rate of the virus would suggest that the vaccine developed for SARS-CoV-2 would be a single vaccine, rather than a new vaccine every year like the flu vaccine.”
It would be more like the measles or chickenpox vaccines, he said — something that would likely confer immunity for a long time.
“I would expect a vaccine for coronavirus would have a similar profile to those vaccines. It’s great news,” Thielen said.
Two other virologists, Stanley Perlman of the University of Iowa and Benjamin Neuman of Texas A&M University at Texarkana, both of whom were on the international committee that named the coronavirus, told The Post that the virus appears relatively stable.
“The virus has not mutated to any significant extent,” Perlman said.
“Just one ‘pretty bad’ strain for everybody so far. If it’s still around in a year, by that point we might have some diversity,” Neuman said.
Neuman contrasted the coronavirus with influenza, which is notoriously slippery.
“Flu does have one trick up its sleeve that coronaviruses do not have — the flu virus genome is broken up into several segments, each of which codes for a gene. When two flu viruses are in the same cell, they can swap some segments, potentially creating a new combination instantly — this is how the H1N1 ‘swine’ flu originated,” Neuman said.
It is possible that a small mutation in the virus could have outsized effects in the clinical outcome of covid-19, the experts say. That has been known to happen with other viruses. But there’s no sign this is happening with the novel coronavirus.
The dramatic death rates in Italy, for example, are most likely due to situational factors — an older population, hospitals being overwhelmed, shortages of ventilators and the resulting rationing of lifesaving care — rather than some difference in the pathogen itself.
“So far, we don’t have any evidence linking a specific virus [strain] to any disease severity score,” Thielen said. “Right now, disease severity is much more likely to be driven by other factors.”
Although one team of scientists earlier this year suggested there might be two distinct strains of the virus with different levels of typical disease severity, that conjecture has not been embraced by the scientific community.
***
Is the cure worse than the problem?
Trump’s argument, laid out at length in a Monday night news conference and at Tuesday’s event, comes down to this: No matter how many people may die because of the coronavirus, millions more face ruin if the economy does not operate. “We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem,” he said.
Already, America’s shift to social distancing has caused widespread layoffs, from restaurants to hotels to the oil industry. Unemployment has health consequences as well as economic consequences, economists have noted. Forecasters on both sides of the debate are trying to weigh these losses against deaths from the coronavirus as well as other medical emergencies that won’t be treated properly if the health-care system becomes overrun with covid-19 patients.
“One of the bottom lines is that we don’t know how long social distancing measures and lockdowns can be maintained without major consequences to the economy, society, and mental health,” John Ioannidis, a medical and epidemiology expert at Stanford University, wrote in an essay last week. “Short-term and long-term consequences are entirely unknown, and billions, not just millions, of lives may be eventually at stake.
“I am deeply concerned that the social, economic and public health consequences of this near total meltdown of normal life … will be long lasting and calamitous, possibly graver than the direct toll of the virus itself,” David L. Katz, a preventive-medicine specialist at Yale University, wrote this weekend. “The unemployment, impoverishment and despair likely to result will be public health scourges of the first order.”
Such arguments raise important points about the full impact of the current strategy, said Inglesby, the infectious-disease expert at Johns Hopkins. But those are long-term scenarios, he pointed out. “What social distancing does is buy us time to replenish supplies like masks and ventilators, deal with the immediate crisis in hospitals and come up with additional strategies."
The question in the long run is how to balance competing economic interests and public health needs when basic questions about the pandemic — like how many Americans are infected — are unknown, said Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health. “If anybody tells you they have the answer to how to thread this needle, they’re lying to you."
While Trump is debating new federal recommendations that the country reopen, orders to stay at home have largely come from state governors, who may simply ignore Trump. But public health experts say the contradictory messaging would make persuading people to comply — already a difficult job — even harder.
******
No easy way back to ‘normal’
While business leaders are ashen about the economic meltdown, very few have been willing to take the argument as far as Trump does.
Instead, they have voiced a more nuanced point — that there should at least be a plan for eventually getting workers back into offices.
Lloyd Blankfein, a former chairman and chief executive of Goldman Sachs, said in a phone interview Monday that U.S. leaders should begin work to identify which milestones would allow the economy, perhaps in stages, to move back toward normalcy. “Let’s have a conversation on what the metrics should be,” he said.
“It would be heartening if people were at least contemplating that this will not go on forever,” he added. “But I’m not really hearing that.”
Even in a hypothetical world where the economy was valued above human life, many economists say it wouldn’t necessarily make sense to sacrifice the elderly, abruptly send everyone back to work and allow the virus to run its course. Restarting international flights, for example, wouldn’t mean consumers would buy tickets. And the shock from the spreading infections and mounting deaths would make any sense of normalcy hard to maintain.
“The best way to get control of the economy is to get through this as quickly as possible,” said Edward Kaplan, who teaches economic policy and public health at Yale University. He said that means adhering to social distancing and drastically increasing testing.
*****
The real question: Are we doing enough?
What allowed South Korea to keep parts of its economy functioning and Singapore to keep its schools open was combining social distancing with tools like large-scale contact tracing — retracing a confirmed patient’s movements to find and quarantine those they had contact with.[THE TECNOLOGY EXISTS: Israel is using cellphone data to track the coronavirus Monica ChinBenjamin Netanyahu has authorized the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, to use cellphone location data to help combat the coronavirus. According to aNew York Times report, the data will be used to retrace the movements of individuals who test positive for the virus, and identify others who should be quarantined.
The agency has permission to use the data, which the Shin Bet has collected from Israeli carriers since at least 2002, for the next 30 days. By directing individuals who may have come into contact with the virus to quarantine themselves immediately via text message, the government could greatly speed up the isolation process. The agency has not made public precisely what data it collects, but experts told the Times that the Israeli government can use it to track almost anyone’s location.
“We must preserve the balance between individual rights and general needs, and we are doing so,” Netanyahu said yesterday at the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem, where the plan was announced.
An anonymous security official told the Times that the data would be used narrowly, in a “focused, time-limited and limited activity.”
While this is the first high-profile instance of a government using cellphone tracking for public health purposes, such data has been used for advertising and law enforcement in many countries. Last year, Motherboard reported that AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint have sold customer location data to data sellers, who sold it to over 250 bounty hunters and related firms. The data included the phones’ assisted GPS data, which is intended to help first responders locate 911 callers, and can accurately pinpoint a user within a few meters.]
South Korea had already honed this ability during an 2015 outbreak of the deadly MERS coronavirus. Singapore deployed its police force to do the work, drawing on digital footprints in security camera footage and credit card records.
*******
Building a new workforce on antibodies
Some offensive strategies that could help ease restrictions and restart the U.S. economy cannot be easily done at a local level and require the leadership of the federal government. They include developing a widespread serological test that could use antibodies to identify the Americans who have already been infected and have recovered.
Those with presumed immunity could then deliver goods, bolster hospitals and restart the economy without worrying about transmitting the virus. Such a strategy has never been used on such a large scale, Rivers said, but during Ebola outbreaks in Africa, survivors were often the ones who provided care, watched over the children of sick patients and buried the dead.
“If we’re serious about restarting the economy and easing restrictions, we need to have strategy for replacing those restrictions,” she said. “It’s doable, but not without a plan.”
Friday, March 13, 2020
Coronavirus: Who’s Going to Die
David Craig, MD Posted on
Wash your hands and whatnot, sure, but let’s ask the question that people are actually asking: Who’s going to die from this thing?
Excuse my bluntness, but I’m an ER doctor and people ask me blunt questions all the time with the expectation of getting equally blunt and actionable answers, so that’s what I’m trying to address here. By this point in time, we’ve all heard of the “coronavirus” or the virus “SARS-CoV-2” that causes the disease “COVID-19” or whatever specific thing you want to call it. We all know what we’re talking about, and it’s obviously spreading quickly across the world. It also seems somewhat manifest by now that quarantine efforts are not going to control this infection as well as they were able to in recent prior battles with SARS or ebola.
We’ve all also seen a million local news reports telling us to wash our hands and stay home when possible, as well as countless expert spots explaining that the virus is actually an “RNA virus in a lipid bilayer that belongs to a family named ‘coronavirus'” and a bunch of other associated information that answers questions that nobody is asking.
So let’s answer the question that, in my experience, people are actually asking: Are we going to die?
Are We Going to Die?
A supermarket in the bay area of California during the early days of COVID-19: lots of panic and not a lot of staple foods
First off, almost certainly not. The odds of death for you, the people you know and care about, and our community at large are generally not immediately catastrophic. There are particular at-risk demographics, however, and we will discuss those at length and with the gravity that they deserve. The risk of increased strain on the healthcare system is also real but not something I will focus on here.
The more detailed answer is that nobody can completely tell you who might die, because this virus is new and we’re just starting to learn about it. However, we have preliminary data that are, in my opinion, quite decent and sometimes reassuring, and I want to discuss them with you.
In my investigation, the best data I could find come from China’s version of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the U.S. CDC), which is helpfully named the “China CDC” or the “CCDC.” This organization publishes a weekly report, similar to that of the United States’ CDC, and they released a ten-page rundown on COVID-19 on February 14th, 2020, which covers what they have learned from 72,314 COVID-19 patient cases.1 Importantly, 44,672 of these cases were “confirmed,” meaning that they were included based on advanced laboratory confirmation (nucleic acid testing) that proved that they were actually caused by the novel coronavirus.
Now if you’re asking, “Isn’t that the report which found a 2.3% death rate?!” Yes, it is, but that’s what we’re going to talk about. In my opinion, there are two very important factors which will affect your interpretation of that overall mortality rate, and they’re worth thinking about:
The death rate is probably wrong
The death rate isn’t the same for everyone
My strong suspicion is that the currently reported death rate is too high. I also believe that we have actionable information about the demographics who actually die from this virus, and we should appreciate just how stark the risk divisions amongst us might be.
1. The Death Rate Is Probably Wrong
What is a “death rate” or “mortality rate” or “case fatality rate” anyway? Well, it’s pretty straightforward:
(Number of known deaths) / (Number of known cases)
That is, take the number of people who die from a disease and divide it by the number of people who had the infection or disease to begin with. Simple.
Except each of these two numbers is prone to bias.
For the numerator, sometimes people take a long while to die from something. With a new (“emerging”) disease, you might know of many cases and not many deaths simply because there just hasn’t been enough time for people to die yet. Grim but true. This effect would artificially lower the death rate.
However, for COVID-19, this is almost certainly not the case. This new virus is a respiratory virus within a family that we understand quite well, and it seems to cause its trouble across the same few weeks that we all expect for respiratory infections. If you recover after that, you’re in the clear. This means that we likely have a pretty good read on the “known deaths” number; grim or not, if you’re dying from COVID-19, you’re probably coming to medical attention, getting tested, and getting recorded correctly. Overall, it’s probably a reasonable numerator.
The denominator, on the other hand, is likely wrong.
In the above equation, the “number of known cases” depends on people coming to medical attention and getting tested. In order for that to happen for any given person, four things must occur:
They must be sick enough to seek medical attention
The medical provider must suspect the illness
The medical provider must have a test for the illness that they choose to use
The test must accurately detect the infection
For any infectious disease, COVID-19 included, a lapse in any of these steps means one more actual infection that doesn’t get recorded as a “confirmed” case. To use influenza (the “flu”) as an example, the official CDC reporting leads off with an immediate asterisk which clarifies that “influenza surveillance does not capture all cases of flu that occur in the U.S.” and that some of the agency’s estimates are “adjusted for the frequency of influenza testing and the sensitivity of influenza diagnostic assays.”2
In the current case of COVID-19, we have every reason to believe that many people are experiencing mild or asymptomatic disease. These people are almost certainly not seeking medical attention, even though they have true infections and would be “confirmed” cases were they to be tested. There are also certainly patients who see a physician and don’t get tested (often because we have no common or quick test available), as well as patients who get tested but have a false-negative test result. None of these people will be recorded as a “confirmed” case, even though they rightfully should be.
The net result of all of these “missed” diagnoses is that the denominator for the current COVID-19 death rate is almost certainly too low. And this means that the death rate we are seeing is almost certainly too high.
For comparison, the CDC is currently estimating 32–45 million flu illnesses in the U.S. this year but only 14–21 million flu medical visits and 18–46 thousand flu deaths.2 First of all, that’s notable because TENS OF THOUSANDS of people die from the flu every year in the United States, and I think we forget about that. Second of all, it’s notable because the CDC is telling us that the actual disease burden is higher than the number we get from just “medical visit” data, meaning that they’re accounting for people who aren’t getting tested.
With this in mind, if you calculate the U.S. flu death rate this year using only “medical visits” as the denominator, you end up with a death rate of 0.09%–0.33%, with an overall estimate of 0.21%.2,3 Remember those numbers, because we’re going to revisit them later.
The take-home message here is that the COVID-19 death rate that is currently being reported is probably not too low or even accurate. It is probably too high.
Data from the recent WHO-China Joint Mission report may also support this idea, as the report’s authors noted a reduction in death rate over time: “In China, the overall [case fatality rate] was higher in the early stages of the outbreak (17.3% for cases with symptom onset from 1-10 January) and has reduced over time to 0.7% for patients with symptom onset after 1 February (Figure 4).”4 The study doesn’t discuss why this might be happening, other than noting that “the standard of care has evolved over the course of the outbreak,” but it seems unlikely to me that changes in supportive care alone could account for such a dramatic drop. I would instead suspect at least some contribution from changes in disease identification and reporting.
The WHO report, unfortunately, does not provide its raw data for us to run our own analyses. This makes it difficult to investigate deeper questions, such as whether recent severely ill cases simply haven’t been present long enough to show up as mortality figures, which could be depressing any newly observed mortality rates. The report does mention that the median time from onset to clinical recovery for mild cases is only two weeks, whereas it is three to six weeks for patients with severe or critical disease. The authors also report that the time from disease onset to death “ranges from” two to eight weeks for patients who eventually die; this is potentially a long lag time, but the report does not provide median time to death or other population statistics that could help us understand how much impact any possible lag might be having on mortality calculations. Hopefully future reporting will clarify this and will make note of possible limitations of any reported mortality numbers.
2. The Death Rate Isn’t the Same for Everyone
Again, the China CDC found an overall death rate of 2.3%: 1,023 deaths among 44,672 confirmed cases.1 We have already established that this is probably too high, but that’s not the end of the story. To go deeper, let’s look at how the CCDC reports the death rate by age group:
I don’t know if you can see it, but the bars start to go up toward the end of that graph. Even among people who were sick enough to seek medical attention, get tested, and have a positive test result, the only people who died at any alarming rate were 50 years old or older. And I don’t say that lightly. As a physician (and a non-psychopath), I care very deeply about people of all ages, and I want to see completely flat death bars for all of you. However, I don’t control this, and the graph shows what it shows.
Also notably, this death rate wasn’t some weird byproduct of people being more likely to get the disease at older ages:
We can see in the above graph that the bulk of disease incidence was in the young adult to upper-middle-age brackets, and it’s pretty well distributed across a number of those brackets. Yet the mortality rates were quite separate from this. Wikipedia says that the Chinese population age and gender distribution looks like this overall:
At a bird’s-eye level, this general population demographic chart mirrors the COVID-19 incidence graph above it, with the clear exception that people younger than 20 years old just aren’t getting this virus (or at least weren’t getting tested for it). As always, youth is wasted on the young.
So now I have some new data processing to show you. Using the CCDC data, I recalculated the Chinese COVID-19 disease incidence (how many people get and test positive for the virus) and absolute death counts, and grouped them by age buckets, using age 50 as the cut point. Here are the results:
You’re probably already doing the mental calculation of death rate here, but let me save you the time and just show it to you. This is fairly stark:
So take a look at that. The currently reported COVID-19 death rate for people younger than 50 years old is approximately 0.3%, which as you’ll recall from earlier in this article, is basically the same as the seasonal flu death rate, were we to calculate the latter using the uncharitable denominator that we’re currently using for COVID-19.
If you’re wondering what you get if you analyze flu mortality by age instead of just overall numbers, then good for you, because that’s a great question. Let’s look at some recent CDC data:3
And that same data bucketed by the age groups we used for COVID-19 above:
Now, you might be looking at these charts and thinking, “Hmm. It sure looks like COVID-19 is about 10x as deadly as a typical seasonal flu, adjusting for age bracket,” and it’s possible that is correct. However, in my opinion, this is when we get back to the first point from way above, which was that the currently reported death rates for COVID-19 are almost certainly too high. It does seem directionally to be a more deadly disease than a typical influenza, but I doubt that it’s truly ten times as deadly. Probably the truth is somewhere lower than that, within the same order of magnitude.
Another important thing to keep in mind is that the true inherent deadliness of the flu is masked by the effectiveness of the flu vaccine (the flu shot) on a population level. Were it not for the flu vaccine, the typical seasonal mortality rate for influenza would be higher, as the vaccine reduces not just the number of flu cases but also the severity of those that do occur.5 The commonly used drug oseltamivir (Tamiflu) might also be reducing the death rate of the flu. It’s not unreasonable to wonder if a person not vaccinated against the flu and not treated with oseltamivir might have a risk of death from flu that is elevated and more similar to that which any of us has for COVID-19, which has no vaccine or treatment available.
The Death Rate Isn’t Just About Age
The CCDC data also suggest that general health status affects your likelihood of dying from COVID-19. Again, we don’t have perfect data, but the results are suggestive:
The chart above tells us that people with no underlying conditions (comorbidities) have an overall death rate of 0.9%. That doesn’t account for age, so it may just be showing us that young people tend not to have comorbidities and also tend not to die from COVID-19, but it at least generally suggests that being healthy at baseline is protective against death from this new virus. On the other hand, having diabetes or heart and lung disease puts people into a riskier category. It’s not unreasonable to assume that age and underlying health are somewhat independent actors, and that their combination likely predicts death rate from COVID-19.
Pregnancy and Breastfeeding
This section is not based on the CCDC data, but I’m hearing questions about COVID-19 and pregnancy/breastfeeding, so I wanted to include it. Based on current CDC reporting, here is the limited consensus opinion (which MIGHT BE WRONG BECAUSE IT IS PRELIMINARY):6
Pregnant women can be more susceptible to viral respiratory infections in general, which means that they might be more likely to be affected by COVID-19
Related coronaviruses (e.g., SARS and MERS) have been linked to pregnancy loss (e.g, miscarriage and stillbirth), but there is no data so far for whether COVID-19 can cause this
There is limited evidence that the COVID-19 virus does not transmit from a mother to a fetus or newborn any differently than it might transmit to any other person
There is limited evidence that the COVID-19 virus neither exists in nor is transmitted by breast milk
Go in Peace
I really don’t think we’re going to die. The odds are strongly against it. The likelihood is that you’ll get a cold. We do have to take extra care of the vulnerable among us, however, and the high death rates for the elderly especially are terrifying and no joke.
The advice to wash your hands regularly, thoroughly, and with soap and water is good. Alcohol-based hand sanitizer is a close second. And make sure to use moisturizer regularly so that you don’t end up with dry, cracked, or bleeding hands; your skin is a wonderful immunologic barrier, and harming it would be a mistake. Don’t touch your eyes or your nose. Stay home when you can, and help older people in your community to avoid exposure whenever possible. If you’re not actively sick, a mask is probably not going to help you or anyone else, unless you use it perfectly, and even then it might just act as a surface to collect dirt and contamination. Zinc lozenges might help, just like they do for generic common colds, but there’s certainly no coronavirus-specific evidence for them.
In any case, we don’t have all the data yet, but my physician and public-health colleagues in China have done a lot of hard work and have provided us a wonderful service and head start in their reporting. I’m grateful to them, and I hope that my conclusions based on their work are correct and that they provide you some comfort and some actionable direction.
Good luck, stay safe, and I hope with all my heart that we all come out the other side of this quickly and in one piece.
Cover image: “Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2“; transmission electron micrograph of a SARS-CoV-2 virus particle, isolated from a patient. Image captured and color-enhanced at the NIAID Integrated Research Facility (IRF) in Fort Detrick, Maryland. Credit: NIAID. February 28,
The True Cost of Coronavirus the Media Won’t Tell You About:
by Emily Laitin 3-12-20
As a university instructor, I am able to see students transition from adolescents into young adults during their pivotal years at university. I watch them learn how to live on their own, learn to handle interpersonal conflict with roommates, learn time management, and learn where their own interests lie. I watch them all get colds and flus every year as it wanders through the dormitories. I watch them all bounce back a few weeks later, learning why their mothers always had a few cans of chicken soup in the house. I watch them learn through mistakes, difficulties, and creativity, how to be independent beings in the world. And this year, I watched this beautiful dance fall apart.
My campus recently moved to an online only system as a response to Coronavirus scares, sending students home and canceling all activities on and off campus. Mid semester, the whole university system came to a dead stop. The campus that had been so full of life became dead silent. This decision was uncalled for and unfair. This was not for students’ best interests. It was a large scale reaction to media hype.
A worse pandemic already plagues college-aged adults and has grown exponentially in recent years: depression. Increased social isolation as well as the anonymity of the digital age are some of the factors leading to increased depression in young adults.
Most university students are relatively healthy 18-25 year olds. The best thing for their overall well being would be if they could still eat in university dining centers, engage in on-campus classes and labs, work out in student recreation centers, and partake in university sponsored activities.
However, because of the closures, these same students are now going to be eating non-perishable junk food, struggling to complete classes online, missing out on hands on experience of research labs, staying indoors rather than exercising, and losing out on campus leadership opportunities. These young adults who could be learning independence through the university system are being sent back home to sit in front of their computers.
The psychological costs of isolation at this stage in life are worse than the physical costs of a flu. Students are already spending more time than ever in front of screens and less time learning to interact with others. Factors that lessen chances of depression include physical activity, social connectedness, and feelings of agency. All these are taken away in the midst of this scare. While attempting to avoid one pandemic, we have unintentionally kindled the flames of another.
I had one day of class between the announcement and the closure of campus, and I utilized it to attempt to educate my students on the myths versus facts associated with the virus as well as best practices going forward. I had an open discussion about their fears and interpretations of the virus. We workshopped together how to create a beneficial online learning environment going forward. And finally, I advised all of them to still go outside, to exercise, to keep connected to each other, and to critically examine the information they will see on social media concerning the virus before believing or repeating it. I encourage all faculty lucky enough to still have in person interactions with your students to do the same.
The true cost of Coronavirus on college students isn’t shortness of breath, a fever, or flu like symptoms. It’s the loss of a semester of growth and education for millions of young adults due to media overreaction and the perpetuation of misinformation.
Is the intelligence community planning to meddle in 2020 election?
Byron York Jewish World Review March 11th, 2020
Recently the intelligence community made clear it will be a player in the 2020 presidential election. No one should be surprised.
On February 13, the House Intelligence Committee held a meeting at which intel officials briefed lawmakers on foreign efforts to influence U.S. elections. By several accounts, the officials told the committee that Russia is working to re-elect President Trump.
A number of Republican committee members were deeply skeptical. What the officials said was classified, so they cannot discuss it publicly, but in conversations later, GOP lawmakers made it clear that the intel officials did not have the evidence to support their assertion.
"How should reporting take place?" one member said later. "You would say, 'We believe X is true based on A, B, C and D.' When that doesn't happen, it's very suspect."
"If you're going to make an accusation like that, you darn well better be ready to answer questions and have evidence to support it," said another member. When pressed, the member added, officials gave "very vague and unsatisfying answers."
The Republicans' objection was not to the idea that Russia is trying to interfere in a U.S. election. That is an accepted fact. The problem was the assessment that Russia is specifically trying to help re-elect Trump. That claim, so incendiary in the 2016 election, was unsupported by the evidence, they said.
As they left the meeting, Republicans agreed that the news would leak soon. It almost seemed to be why Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, the committee chairman and impeachment leader, had called the meeting in the first place.
No one was surprised when, a week later, The New York Times published a story headlined "Lawmakers Are Warned That Russia Is Meddling to Re-elect Trump." The news quickly became another one of those bombshell reports that consume hours of talk on cable TV.
Democrats, who were also barred by law from revealing classified information, were nevertheless happy to play along. For example, not long after the story broke, Democratic Rep. Jim Himes, an Intelligence Committee member, appeared on CNN.
"I can't talk about what happened in a classified setting," Himes said. "But ... you don't need an intelligence briefing to think about what Vladimir Putin might want. Would he want a return to sort of conventional, much more confrontational policy with respect to Russia? Or might he want a president who will criticize everybody on the planet except Vladimir Putin?"
Himes's point was clear: I can't talk about it, but of course Putin is working to re-elect Trump.
The problem was, intel officials did not have the evidence to make that assertion. And almost as soon as the story broke, officials with knowledge of the meeting suggested that the headlines were wrong. On Sunday, CNN reported that Pierson had apparently "overstated" the Putin-wants-Trump story.
And then there were the circumstances of the briefing. The intelligence community works for the president. Yet officials chose to brief Chairman Schiff's House Intelligence Committee on this extraordinarily consequential finding before telling the president.
Whatever the motive, spilling the beans in a room with dozens of people present -- intel officials brought a lot of staff with them -- increased the chances of precisely the type of leak that occurred.
The whole thing hit the White House by surprise. "I have not seen that analysis," national security adviser Robert O'Brien told ABC Sunday, referring to the Putin-wants-Trump assessment. "I've been with the leaders of the Intelligence Committee. They don't have it. So if there's some lower-level people at [Office of the Director of National Intelligence] that came in and gave this analysis to the House -- look, I'd like to see it. But I haven't seen it."
Later, just to make matters more difficult, there were leaks that Russia is also trying to help elect Bernie Sanders. The leak left many experts baffled -- except to the extent that, with the Trump leak, it seemed to target the intelligence community's two least-favorite candidates.
There were lots of reports that President Trump was angry after the news broke. And why shouldn't he be angry? Way back in January 2017, when Trump was president-elect and protesting that the intelligence community was out to get him, Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer famously said, "You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you."
The years that followed proved that to be true. And it still is
AFSI (Americans for a Safe Israel) 1751 Second Avenue New York, NY 10128www.AFSI.org Tel: 1-212-828-2424 Mark Langfan, Chairman
Americans for Peace & Tolerance 5 Main Street, Suite 118 Watertown, MA 02472https://www.peaceandtolerance.org Founder: Charles Jacobs
CAMERA–Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis PO Box 35040 Boston MA 02135-0001 Andrea Levin, Founder
Campus Watch (a project of the Middle East Forum) monitors bias on American campuses, issues reports, and takes strong action where indicated.https://www.meforum.org/campus-watch/ E-mail: info@meforum.org Tel: 1-215-546-5406
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