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Most recent pandemics have at least one thing in common: they began in Asia or Africa. The reasons why may surprise you. //
All the coronaviruses that caused recent epidemics, including the COVID-19, jumped from bats to another animal before infecting humans.
There is a clear element of eugenics in the proposals to pursue herd immunity as a strategy against the pandemic. //
So while there is talk about safety, there is little evidence that most countries intend to take serious steps to contain the outbreak, or that they have the capacity to do so in the immediate future. The prospect that states and markets might just let people get sick, albeit perhaps at a slower pace, is a very real one.
Governments would be better off learning from countries that effectively contained the virus. They need to prioritise people's health over free-market economics. In the end, there can be no prosperous human economy when people are ill, dead or traumatised.
U.S. officials warned in January 2018 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s work on “SARS-like coronaviruses in bats,” combined with “a serious shortage” of proper safety procedures, could result in human transmission and the possibility of a “future emerging coronavirus outbreak.” //
While China has stated the virus emerged from a seafood market in Wuhan, U.S. officials are skeptical of the claim, with National Review detailing how the Wuhan Institute of Virology posted jobs in November and December of last year to show how they had been working on “long-term research on the pathogenic biology of bats carrying important viruses,” which had “confirmed the origin of bats of major new human and livestock infectious diseases” in December. //
“The idea that is was just a totally natural occurrence is circumstantial. The evidence it leaked from the lab is circumstantial. Right now, the ledger on the side of it leaking from the lab is packed with bullet points and there’s almost nothing on the other side,” a U.S. official told Rogin.
Folding@Home had settled into a low-profile niche. Then came COVID-19. //
Then in February, everything changed. Folding@Home suddenly went from 30,000 volunteers running the software in February to 400,000 in March—another 300,000 users came on board after that. There were so many users that the database ran out of potential simulations for them to crunch, and data coming in was so great that the servers were overloaded, said Bowman.
Despite these glitches, F@H zoomed to a peak performance of 1.5 exaFLOPs, making it more than seven times faster than the world's fastest supercomputer, Summit, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
What caused this? For starters, interest in finding a therapy for COVID-19 helped. SETI@Home announcing the end of its project on March 31 also meant tens of thousands of people were looking for something new to run on their PCs. But the big boost came March 13, when Nvidia tweeted out a call to arms. //
With just six servers at Washington University and partner sites at Sloan Kettering and Temple University, so much data was coming back and being written to disk that F@H stopped sending out work units. New servers have since helped them catch up. It did put a pause on the F@H team’s main project, a significant rewrite and update of the client app. That’s on hold for now, Bowman said.
More encouraging data. //
From the result of their blood survey, the German team estimated the death rate in the municipality at 0.37% overall, a figure significantly lower than what’s shown on a dashboard maintained by Johns Hopkins, where the death rate in Germany among reported cases is 2%. //
Germany joins China and Taiwan in concluding that COVID-19 rarely spreads through casual contact
It spreads through repeated, large doses, such as you get while sheltering in place.
Stunning new data from the Center for Disease Control, as well as other international studies, has shown what smokers have always hoped for. Smoking, it turns out, actually seems to improve outcomes for people with the coronavirus. Those of us who have used the leaf that made America great for years have been the targets of extreme abuse. We have been mocked, derided, accused of weakness. But we are basically a happy people. I mean, we smoke, so this is not a time for us to say we told you so.
Instead, we would like to provide some advice for those of you thinking of taking up the only truly unique pleasure since the Romans in an attempt to fend off Chinese plague. Smoking is not as easy as it looks, it takes some skill and dedication, but these five tips will help you master it in time for the next outbreak of the Wuhan Flu.
U.S. Nightly Wuhan Virus Numbers without political spin.
This would have been a good thought to have before setting off a worldwide panic. //
You’ve all heard the story of the guy who murdered his parents and then asked for leniency because he was an orphan? Well, now we have the academic equivalent of that. The Financial Times did a lengthy interview with Neil Ferguson, he’s the guy who authored the infamous Imperial College study that predicted over 2 million deaths from Wuhan virus in the US and started the stampede towards creating a paleolithic society in place of what had existed. Ferguson, in my opinion, is the chief and most irresponsible scaremonger behind this manufactured crisis and deserves a thorough proctological examination by law enforcement in the near future, //
Jordan Schachtel
✔
@JordanSchachtel
The man behind the popular doomsday projections for COVID-19, which claimed 2MM dead Americans, whose data unleashed global panic and hysteria, reveals he wrote the code for his model 13 years ago. 🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️https://twitter.com/neil_ferguson/status/1241835454707699713?s=20 …
Because of the strategy public health officials have foisted upon our national leadership, there is no real exit strategy. The social distancing nonsense has created a situation that guarantees a second and third and fourth and a fifth, etc. wave of infections as there is no vaccine and we are not developing the herd immunity necessary to reduce this virus to its rightful place as background noise. Political authorities are going to be reluctant to reduce restrictions because when they do, new outbreaks will happen. When that happens you know that the same people who are saying we should be shut down for months on end are going to reappear on the Sunday shows saying “I told you so.” Unless someone shows some political courage and calls this nonsense out as the obvious fraud that it is, we are stuck right where we are. Forever.
"When you add it all up it would be naïve to think that California did not have some exposure." //
California has had lower-than-expected coronavirus case numbers during the current pandemic, and one hypothesis has been that the illness started spreading in the state in the fall of 2019, much earlier than previously thought. //
Hanson said he thinks it is possible COVID-19 has been spreading among Californians since the fall when doctors reported an early flu season in the state. During that same time, California was welcoming as many as 8,000 Chinese nationals daily into our airports. Some of those visitors even arriving on direct flights from Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in China.
The global response to Sars-CoV-2 is the greatest science policy failure in a generation. The signals were clear. Hendra in 1994, Nipah in 1998, Sars in 2003, Mers in 2012 and Ebola in 2014; these major human epidemics were all caused by viruses that originated in animal hosts and crossed over into humans. Covid-19 is caused by a new variant of the same coronavirus that caused Sars.
Social distancing is impossible in much of Africa, and its economic consequences may lead to a famine that is worse than the pandemic. Prevention measures must consider the African context. //
Right now we are facing a choice between more or less drastic measures to slow the spread of COVID-19, a virus which, at time of writing, has yet to claim a life under 10, and claims very few lives under 30, with the risk rising exponentially with age. We are putting in place measures that will lead to malnutrition and starvation for millions of people, and for these horrors, children and especially infants are the most at risk. And very many of those infants are born, and will die, in Africa.
Yet there is little discussion of the consequences for human health of the measures we are taking. Nor is there discussion of how the major differences between Africa and America, Europe and Asia might matter. The World Health Organisation (WHO) website contains no technical guidance on how African governments should approach their considerably different contexts. The advice is the same globally, but the context is not.
Failure to recognise that one size does not fit all could have lethal consequences in this region, maybe even more lethal than those of the virus itself. //
the major components of the recommended public health measures – social distancing and hygiene – are extremely difficult to implement effectively in much of Africa. The net effect of measures that seek to enforce social distancing may thus be to prevent people from working, without actually achieving the distancing that would slow the spread of the virus. If that is true, then we must consider whether we would be better off without them. //
In Africa, it’s questionable whether leaders have a political choice, given intense pressure from an international community that isn’t thinking about the differences of the African context, and a WHO offering no region-specific technical advice.
Leaders need to be given the space to say shocking things, to be upfront about what might go wrong, to change their minds in the face of new evidence, and to pick the lesser of two evils.
"This is what we trained for...and I can't imagine fading into the background." //
I’ve been an ER doctor for 45 years…I have lots of experience. To abandon ship in the middle of the greatest public health crisis of our lifetimes is inconceivable to me. I can’t imagine doing that.
This is what we’ve trained for. This is the big show. And I can’t imagine fading into the background.
Dr. Bill Fisher
@DrBillFisher
A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.
"It's been a really dark time for the people here, and we just want to bring some sort of hope," Samaritan's Purse representative Bev Kauffeldt says. //
Bev Kauffeldt is a team leader for the Christian aid organization Samaritan’s Purse. She joins today’s Daily Signal Podcast from Cremona, Italy, where she works in a field hospital set up by Samaritan’s Purse in the parking lot of Cremona Hospital.
Dutch scientists were able to find the coronavirus in a city’s wastewater before Covid-19 cases were reported, demonstrating a novel early warning system for the pneumonia-causing disease.
FoodData Central is an integrated data system that provides expanded nutrient profile data and links to related agricultural and experimental research.
Vitamin C overview for health professionals. Research health effects, dosing, sources, deficiency symptoms, side effects, and interactions here.
Wuhan Virus, Reliable U.S. Numbers
It is time to think outside the box and seriously consider a somewhat unconventional approach to COVID-19: controlled voluntary infection.
For every American killed by the Wuhan virus in its worts week, the annual American Flu pandemic kills 6-15 according to the CDC numbers.