Coronavirus, Monkeypox, and Other Contagious Diseases

[Bact PhD]

(Posted over from “old” TRS. The part in the Quote box is Traveler’s response to a query about the reliability of Flori-DUH’s COVID numbers; the material outside is my reply.)

Mar 22, 2021 0:00:41 GMT:

Who knows, but NYT is a pretty good source. Where I am (Clay Co.) is less than half where I live (Chesco). 8 vs. 18 per 100k. 4% vs.5% positive. Having the first shot, mask protocol only used inside.

Ominous trend though in both. The decline is over, and now starting to climb again. All I can say is we got ours. Second shot next Saturday. Gotta wait till friends get it and maybe the long isolation is over.

Just to your southwest, the official county & state #s here have us hovering at the 10 per 100K mark, positivity rate sub-2%. The ICU occupancy rate has (barely) dipped below 85%. The drop has halted; we seem to be holding steady the last 3-4 weeks on most metrics. The pace of vaccinations seems to have slowed down a bit, but on a per-day basis running 10-to-1 (at least) versus new cases.

Chem PhD gets his 2nd jab in a week. Technically, I am eligible effective today, so it’s going to be luck of the draw somewhat as to when I can get in. In my social set (includes a fair # of physicians & families), many have already gotten at least one shot. Dear Daughter, the nanny? Her BF, the grocery worker? Dear Son, the teen in school who would theoretically be able to get the Pfizer shot? Who knows???

Dear Son’s school’s most recent round of “be extra vigilant regarding symptoms because a classmate of your son/daughter has a household contact positive” expired the first week of March. The athletic department increased the number of people permitted to attend baseball games, masks still required in the stands. The baseball coach admonished the players going into Spring Break to “be smart, we could make a strong postseason run...” (we don’t have too many bodies to spare if one or 2 get knocked out due to COVID).

Still “Stay Tuned”...

[Bact PhD]

With a little bit of luck, a fourth vaccine will be added to the arsenal in the not-too-distant future.

— A vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University is highly effective at stopping Covid-19 and completely prevents severe illness and hospitalization across all age groups, the company announced on Monday.

AstraZeneca said it will now apply to the Food and Drug Administration for emergency use authorization and release its data for analysis by the scientific community in peer-reviewed literature.

The Phase 3 trial, conducted in the U.S., Chile and Peru with 32,000 volunteers, showed the vaccine was 79 percent effective against the disease and 100 percent effective in stopping severe and fatal cases, the company said in a news release.

However, some folks are wary owing to a 7 in several million event:

Last week, the European Medicines Agency said the vaccine was safe and now AstraZeneca has said it found "no increased risk of thrombosis" among the 21,583 trial participants receiving at least one dose.

Experts have previously warned there is no causal link between the vaccine and blood clots and that even temporarily suspending the vaccine's use could do more harm than good.

Some European countries, including Germany and France, had initially approved the vaccine but recommended against older people receiving it, before making it available to over-65s.

AstraZeneca said Monday that its effectiveness in people aged 65 and over was 80 percent.

Nevertheless, there is now a lower level of trust in the vaccine across Europe compared to the one from Pfizer-BioNTech. Polling company YouGov said people in France, Germany, Spain and Italy are now more likely to consider it unsafe than safe, according to a poll of 8,000 people released Monday.

In France, 61 percent said it was unsafe, while 55 percent of Germans said the same. Only in the U.K., which has been administering the vaccine since January, have concerns over side-effects caused no dip in confidence, with 77 percent believing it to be safe.

[Bact PhD]

Holy Shit! Miami has all it can handle, including crowds of not just college kids:

Miami Beach, Florida, city leaders voted Sunday to extend emergency restrictions because of out-of-control spring break crowds that local officials believe are made up of more than just typical college students.

City commissioners voted to keep an 8 p.m.-to-6 a.m. curfew in their entertainment district, with an exception for restaurant delivery services, as well as restrictions on causeways beginning at 10 p.m.

The rules, which began Saturday in a 72-hour state-of-emergency order, will remain in effect through the end of the month, with the possibility that they could be extended to mid-April.

The city has made over 1,000 arrests since February, about half of them involving out-of-state-residents, and the influx has led to increasing crowd-control issues, Miami Beach officials said Sunday.

The types of crowds that have descended on the popular South Florida destination are not made up of the regular college-age students officials are used to, Mayor Dan Gelber and City Manager Raul Aguila said.

[LFC]

Mar 22, 2021 22:41:42 GMT Bact PhD said:

Holy Shit! Miami has all it can handle, including crowds of not just college kids:

The city has made over 1,000 arrests since February, about half of them involving out-of-state-residents, and the influx has led to increasing crowd-control issues, Miami Beach officials said Sunday.

I'm surprised it's that low. I would have thought out of staters would have been the lion's share of a-holes.

[LFC]

The extent of the long-term effects of COVID-19 are just really starting to be understood. It's not good.

At least one in three patients hospitalized with Covid-19 suffer long-term health issues including multiple organ problems and deteriorated mental health, according to a review of studies looking at the lasting impact of the disease.

Published in the journal Nature Medicine on Monday, the review looked at the frequency of symptoms among Covid "long-haulers", the most common of which include fatigue, shortness of breath, anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Authors of the research said the data pointed to an underappreciated health emergency that governments needed to study more closely and find ways to manage.

"Given the millions of people infected by SARS-CoV-2 globally, the long-term cost on physical, cognitive and mental aspects of health still remain to be seen," lead author Kartik Sehgal, a medical oncologist at Boston's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, told AFP.

"We may be capturing only the tip of the iceberg."

While severe Covid-19 infects patients' lungs -- leaving many with long term breathing issues -- studies have shown that the virus also attacks other organs, leading to a variety of complications including cardiovascular illness and chronic inflammation.

Sehgal and colleagues reviewed nine long-term studies from Europe, the United States and China and found that several patients reported multiple organ problems months after they were discharged from hospital.

Overall, they found that 30 percent of patients studied reported at least one symptom, such as fatigue, shortness of breath and psychiatric conditions.

One study in Italy of 143 patients found that nearly 90 percent reported lingering symptoms 60 days after they recovered from initial Covid-19 infection.

The most common symptoms were fatigue (53.1 percent), shortness of breath (43.4 percent), joint pain (27.3 percent) and chest pain (21.7 percent).

In total, more than half of patients experienced multiple symptoms two months after leaving hospital.

Three studies from France, Britain and China showed that between 25-30 percent of patients reported sleep disturbances weeks after recovering from Covid-19.

And approximately 20 percent of patients had reported hair loss, according to results from multiple studies.

[Bact PhD]

Mar 22, 2021 13:55:13 GMT Bact PhD said:

Technically, I am eligible effective today, so it’s going to be luck of the draw somewhat as to when I can get in.

Well, I got lucky when it came to securing a vaccine appointment. On just the second day of my eligibility, I got in for my first appointment at the end of this week. Second one 21 days after that.

[Bact PhD]

This NPR piece sheds a slightly different light on why African-Americans are vaccine-hesitant (Hint: it has more to do with today's climate than it does with events of decades ago):

It's the health inequities of today that Maxine Toler, 72, hears about when she asks her friends and neighbors in LA what they think about the vaccine. Toler is president of her city's senior advocacy council and her neighborhood block club. She says she and most of the other Black seniors she talks with want the vaccine, but are having trouble getting it. And that alone is sowing mistrust, she says.

Toler says the Black people she knows who don't want the vaccine have very modern reasons for not wanting it. They talk about religious beliefs, safety concerns or distrust for former U.S. president Donald Trump and his contentious relationship to science. Only a handful mention Tuskegee, she says, and when they do, they're fuzzy on the details of what happened during the 40-year study.

[Bact PhD]

Mar 23, 2021 15:28:58 GMT Bact PhD said:

Mar 22, 2021 13:55:13 GMT Bact PhD said:

Technically, I am eligible effective today, so it’s going to be luck of the draw somewhat as to when I can get in.

Well, I got lucky when it came to securing a vaccine appointment. On just the second day of my eligibility, I got in for my first appointment at the end of this week. Second one 21 days after that.

Officially One Down, One to Go.

Chem PhD gets Shot #2 Monday.

Meanwhile, vaccine eligibility in the state of Flori-DUH drops to forty as of Monday and all adults 18+ as of April 5. Dear Daughter and BF are anticipating...Dear Son is still SOL for the time being, until more pediatric/teen data are available.

In a three-minute online video posted Thursday morning, DeSantis said residents ages 40 and older will be eligible for the vaccine beginning next Monday, and those 18 and older will be eligible on April 5.
[snip]
In the video announcing his decision to expand who can receive a vaccine, DeSantis said: "Florida's 'Seniors First' vaccine strategy is paying off." He said more than 3.2 million people 65 and older, or over 70% of the state's seniors, have been vaccinated. The result of those efforts, DeSantis said, is that "hospitalizations and case rates for seniors have plummeted."

Nevermind what's going on among the rest of the state's citizentry, amirite?

However, and the degree to which this is true depends largely on where in the state we are talking, the decline in new cases has flattened...or even ticked upward ever so slightly.

[LFC]

Results of a vaccine study are pretty impressive (paywalled at TPM).

As we’ve discussed in various contexts over recent months, a big, big question is whether mRNA vaccines prevent COVID infection itself or the just illness that the virus causes. If the vaccine keeps you from getting a severe case of the disease or dying that is obviously a huge benefit. But the initial efficacy studies could not rule out one possibility: that vaccinated individuals were still getting infected and that the vaccine was pushing their cases into the asymptomatic category. That may not be a huge difference for individuals. But it’s all the difference in the world in terms of stopping the on-going spread of the disease through the population.

Now we have a study that seems to address this question directly.

Yesterday the CDC reported the results of a study which suggest the vaccines are almost as effective against infection as they are against the disease itself.

The study followed 4,000 health care and other essential workers who got the vaccine starting in December. They tracked these individuals in 8 cities. The participants ranged from the unvaccinated, to people who had gotten just one shot, to people who were fully vaccinated (two weeks after their second shot). Rather than wait for participants to be diagnosed as they got ill or by happenstance, they tested everyone weekly. The results were dramatic. The unvaccinated group had 161 cases; the one shot group had 16 cases and the fully vaccinated group had 3 cases.

You can read the full write-up here. 63% of participants had gotten both shots by the end of the study. I had some difficulty picking apart just how many people were fully vaccinated at different times over the course of the study. In any case, the upshot of the study seems clear: the mRNA are highly protective against infections, almost as effective as they are against disease. And this was in a population facing high rates of exposure.

This seems like the kind of study that has limitations that prevent the results from being truly definitive. But the results are clear enough that it seems highly likely that people who get vaccinated have very high protection (around 90% efficacy) against any infection at all. With enough people vaccinated that should mean we can not only prevent serious disease but break the chain of transmission. If enough people get vaccinated.

[Bact PhD]

Mar 29, 2021 19:56:21 GMT LFC said:

Results of a vaccine study are pretty impressive (paywalled at TPM).

As we’ve discussed in various contexts over recent months, a big, big question is whether mRNA vaccines prevent COVID infection itself or the just illness that the virus causes. If the vaccine keeps you from getting a severe case of the disease or dying that is obviously a huge benefit. But the initial efficacy studies could not rule out one possibility: that vaccinated individuals were still getting infected and that the vaccine was pushing their cases into the asymptomatic category. That may not be a huge difference for individuals. But it’s all the difference in the world in terms of stopping the on-going spread of the disease through the population.

Now we have a study that seems to address this question directly.

Yesterday the CDC reported the results of a study which suggest the vaccines are almost as effective against infection as they are against the disease itself.

The study followed 4,000 health care and other essential workers who got the vaccine starting in December. They tracked these individuals in 8 cities. The participants ranged from the unvaccinated, to people who had gotten just one shot, to people who were fully vaccinated (two weeks after their second shot). Rather than wait for participants to be diagnosed as they got ill or by happenstance, they tested everyone weekly. The results were dramatic. The unvaccinated group had 161 cases; the one shot group had 16 cases and the fully vaccinated group had 3 cases.

You can read the full write-up here. 63% of participants had gotten both shots by the end of the study. I had some difficulty picking apart just how many people were fully vaccinated at different times over the course of the study. In any case, the upshot of the study seems clear: the mRNA are highly protective against infections, almost as effective as they are against disease. And this was in a population facing high rates of exposure.

This seems like the kind of study that has limitations that prevent the results from being truly definitive. But the results are clear enough that it seems highly likely that people who get vaccinated have very high protection (around 90% efficacy) against any infection at all. With enough people vaccinated that should mean we can not only prevent serious disease but break the chain of transmission. If enough people get vaccinated.

That’s huge. In theory, this should be the case, as an immune response capable of preventing viral replication such that one doesn’t get sick *should* also be capable of keeping that exposed person from becoming contagious. It’s gratifying to see it be borne out in practice.

[LFC]

The Trumpies are desperately trying to revise the history of their abysmal handling of the pandemic. TPM has 5 points on why they're full of shit.

With the COVID-19 pandemic potentially nearing an end, Trump administration officials responsible for managing the crisis have begun to try to spin their way out of the carnage that the virus left behind.

A CNN documentary on the course and handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, released this past weekend, provided an opportunity for some of the top officials involved to tell their version what happened.

In this case, former HHS Assistant Secretary for Health Brett Giroir and White House COVID Response Coordinator Deborah Birx went out of their respective ways to play down the consequential decision to leave handling the pandemic to the states and to release guidance that would artificially lower the number of positives in the run-up to the 2020 Presidential election.

Here are five points on the biggest attempts at creating a revisionist history of COVID-19 made by Trump officials in the documentary.

[LFC]

The Trump administration handed out COVID related contracts to unqualified companies without due diligence and utter nutter Peter Navarro was in the middle of it.

A top adviser to former President Donald Trump pressured agency officials to reward politically connected or otherwise untested companies with hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts as part of a chaotic response to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the early findings of an inquiry led by House Democrats.

Peter Navarro, who served as Trump’s deputy assistant and trade adviser, essentially verbally awarded a $96 million deal for respirators to a company with White House connections. Later, officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency were pressured to sign the contract after the fact, according to correspondence obtained by congressional investigators.

Documents obtained by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis after a year of resistance from the Trump administration offer new details about Navarro’s role in a largely secretive buying spree of personal protective equipment and medical supplies.

But they also show he was among the first Trump officials to sense the urgency of the building crisis, urging the president to push agencies and other officials to “combat the virus swiftly in ‘Trump Time’” and cut through the red tape of the federal purchasing system.

In another communication, Navarro was so adamant that a potential $354 million contract be awarded to an untested pharmaceutical company that he told the top official at the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, “my head is going to explode if this contract does not get immediately approved.”

Navarro did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The committee’s work backs up investigations by ProPublica and other news outlets into the more than $36 billion the federal government has awarded, much of it without traditional bidding and with little scrutiny, to address the COVID-19 pandemic.

At least five of the committee’s lines of inquiry are exploring issues reported by ProPublica, including the $96 million no-bid deal for respirators that was ordered by Navarro, a $34.5 million deal signed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs that fell apart and ended with a contractor pleading guilty to fraud, a contract for masks awarded to a former Trump administration official, and the revelation that FEMA had paid millions to a contractor with a history of fraud allegations for unusable and unsanitary fake test tubes.

[LFC]

Why yes, Mr. Faux News coronavirus analcyst, we do think you're a f***ing idiot. And a dangerous one at that.

The pandemic has made fools of many forecasters. Just about all of the predictions whiffed. Anthony Fauci was wrong about masks. California was wrong about the outdoors. New York was wrong about the subways. I was wrong about the necessary cost of pandemic relief. And the Trump White House was wrong about almost everything else.

In this crowded field of wrongness, one voice stands out. The voice of Alex Berenson: the former New York Times reporter, Yale-educated novelist, avid tweeter, online essayist, and all-around pandemic gadfly. Berenson has been serving up COVID-19 hot takes for the past year, blithely predicting that the United States would not reach 500,000 deaths (we’ve surpassed 550,000) and arguing that cloth and surgical masks can’t protect against the coronavirus (yes, they can).

Berenson has a big megaphone. He has more than 200,000 followers on Twitter and millions of viewers for his frequent appearances on Fox News’ most-watched shows. On Laura Ingraham’s show, he downplayed the vaccines, suggesting that Israel’s experience proved they were considerably less effective than initially claimed. On Tucker Carlson Tonight, he predicted that the vaccines would cause an uptick in cases of COVID-related illness and death in the U.S.
Recommended Reading

The vaccines have inspired his most troubling comments. For the past few weeks on Twitter, Berenson has mischaracterized just about every detail regarding the vaccines to make the dubious case that most people would be better off avoiding them. As his conspiratorial nonsense accelerates toward the pandemic’s finish line, he has proved himself the Secretariat of being wrong:

• He has blamed the vaccines for causing spikes in severe illness, by pointing to data that actually demonstrate their safety and effectiveness.
• He has blamed the vaccines for suppressing our immune systems, by misrepresenting normal immune-system behavior.
• He has suggested that countries such as Israel have suffered from their early vaccine rollout, even though deaths and hospitalizations among vaccinated groups in Israel have plummeted.
• He has implied that for most non-seniors, the side effects of the vaccines are worse than having COVID-19 itself—even though, according to the CDC, the pandemic has killed tens of thousands of people under 50 and the vaccines have not conclusively killed anybody.

Usually, I would refrain from lavishing attention on someone so blatantly incorrect. But with vaccine resistance hovering around 30 percent of the general population, and with 40 percent of Republicans saying they won’t get a shot, debunking vaccine skepticism, particularly in right-wing circles, is a matter of life and death.

[Bact PhD]

The WHO report argues against the lab release theory, and somewhat against the wet market theory...in favor of wildlife farms being the original source (Huanan market gets a Dishonorable Mention as a huge superspreader situation):

www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/03/29/982272319/who-report-wildlife-farms-not-market-likely-source-of-coronavirus-pandemic

According to the report, data suggests that the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was not the original source of the outbreak.

In addition, the report noted that "introduction through a laboratory incident" — a leak from the lab in Wuhan — "was considered to be an extremely unlikely pathway."

The report further suggests that animals in livestock farms in southeast Asia could be "linked to early human cases" and that further study on these farms is needed.

In an exclusive interview with NPR last week, Peter Daszak, a disease ecologist who was part of the investigative team that did two weeks of research in China, noted that wildlife farms supply vendors at the Wuhan market, which early had been identified as a possible starting point of the pandemic.

[snip]

In discussing the wildlife farm hypothesis, Daszak told NPR that China shut down these businesses in February 2020 — a strong signal that the Chinese government thought those farms were the most probable pathway for a coronavirus in bats in southern China to reach humans in Wuhan, he said. (Farms raising animals for fur or traditional medicine were not shut down.)

The wildlife farms raising animals for food, including ones in the Yunnan region, are part of a unique project that the Chinese government has been promoting for 20 years.

Actions speak louder than words...

[LFC]

Apr 4, 2021 22:05:22 GMT Bact PhD said:

The WHO report argues against the lab release theory, and somewhat against the wet market theory...

"That's just more proof of the conspiracy to hide their biological weapons lab!" --Q or any random MAGAt

[LFC]

All it took was one bar reopening and not following the rules.

As U.S. schools struggled to safely reopen over the past year, a fierce debate erupted over why bars and restaurants, known vectors for the spread of COVID-19, were allowed to operate even as in-person learning was at risk. Now, a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows exactly how reckless behavior at bars by adults can imperil education for kids. An unnamed bar in rural Illinois opened in early February and was soon linked to 46 total COVID-19 cases, at least one hospitalization, and the temporary closure of a school that affected some 650 students. Attendees said social distancing and mask use were weak despite the venue asking people to take safety measures.

Also hit by the outbreak, according to the report: a long-term care facility, where at least one employee attended the bar opening, and a significant portion of staff had declined vaccination.

[LFC]

It's getting bad in India again.

A familiar scene is taking place across India. In large cities, hospital beds are filling up with Covid-19 patients. Warehouses, unused trains and large public spaces are being converted into makeshift treatment centers. And restrictions are clamping back down, with new lockdowns in place.

India has plunged into its second wave -- and this time, with new variants, fatigue setting in among the population, and several massive religious gatherings taking place, it threatens to be worse than the first one.

The country recorded 103,558 new cases on Monday, according to the Indian Ministry of Health -- the highest single-day figure since the beginning of the pandemic.

The previous record high had been in September last year, with nearly 98,000 cases in a day during the peak of the first wave. Daily cases had gradually fallen by nearly 90% to reach about 9,000 cases a day in mid-February -- which was hailed as a sign that the country had controlled its outbreak.

But cases began rising again in early March. Now, less than two months later, daily cases have jumped more than tenfold.

"There is a shortage of private beds and beds in major government setups," said Deepak Baid, president of the Association of Medical Consultants in Mumbai. "Because beds aren't available, actually many patients are still in home quarantine, patients are getting admitted in non-Covid hospitals when they are positive."

Monday's figures raise the country's total since the beginning of the pandemic to more than 12.5 million cases and 165,000 related deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

"Covid cases in India are rising very sharply at this time, very different from a year ago when the rate of increase seemed a lot less rapid," said Ramanan Laxminarayan of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy in New Delhi.

[LFC]

Thoughts and prayers.

Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte, who rescinded the state’s mask mandate weeks after taking office, has tested positive for COVID-19. The 59-year-old Republican got the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine last Thursday, but since full protection doesn’t kick in until after the second dose, he would have still been vulnerable to infection. The Billings Gazette reports that he developed symptoms on Sunday after attending Easter services, tested positive on Monday, and will now quarantine for 10 days. It’s not clear how he contracted the virus or if he has infected others, but six members of the state legislature have also tested positive since January.

[LFC]

Brazil just set a grim record by passing a daily death toll of 4,000. Another great performance by an autocrat wannabe.

Brazil registered more than 4,000 Covid-19 deaths in 24 hours for the first time Tuesday, the health ministry said, as the country reeled from a surge of infections that has made it the current epicenter of the pandemic.

The coronavirus claimed 4,195 lives in the deadliest day of the pandemic yet for the hard-hit country, whose total reported death toll is now nearly 337,000, second only to the United States.

Brazil's health system is buckling under the strain of the latest virus wave, which has forced doctors into agonising decisions over which patients to give life-saving care and led cemeteries to hold nighttime burials to deal with the crush of coffins.
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"We're in a dreadful situation, and we're not seeing effective measures by either state or federal governments" to respond, said epidemiologist Ethel Maciel of Espirito Santo Federal University.

"At the rate we're vaccinating -- 10 percent of the population (with a first dose) so far -- the only way to slow the extremely fast spread of the virus is an effective lockdown for at least 20 days," she told AFP.

"Unfortunately, politics has brought us where we are today: This enormous number of people who have lost their lives. Very sad."

The health crisis appears to be turning into a political one for President Jair Bolsonaro, who long flouted expert advice on containing the pandemic and now faces mounting pressure -- including from allies in Congress and the business sector -- to bring the situation under control.

Now on his fourth health minister of the pandemic, the far-right president overhauled much of his government last week, replacing his foreign, justice and defense ministers and naming new army, navy and air force commanders.

The move has raised concerns the president is digging in for political turmoil as he gears up to seek re-election next year.

[LFC]

I suspect these numbers are high with at least part of it attributable to isolation but still it sounds like COVID has quite a few mental health impacts that are not yet understood.

One in three people who overcome Covid-19 suffer from a neurological or psychiatric diagnosis six months on, according to the largest study so far published on the mental toll that long-Covid takes on survivors.

Authors said the research, printed Wednesday in The Lancet Psychiatry journal, proved that Covid-19 patients were significantly more likely to develop brain conditions than those suffering from other respiratory tract infections.

Studying the health records of more than 230,000 patients who had recovered from Covid-19, they found that 34 percent were diagnosed with a neurological or psychiatric condition within six months.
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The most common conditions were anxiety (17 percent of patients) and mood disorders (14 percent).

For 13 percent of patients the disorders were their first diagnosis of a mental health issue.

Incidence of neurological disorders such as brain haemorrhage (0.6 percent), stroke (2.1 percent) and dementia (0.7 percent) was lower overall than for psychiatric disorders but the risk for brain disorders was generally higher in patients who had severe Covid-19.

The authors also examined data from more than 100,000 patients diagnosed with influenza and more than 236,000 diagnosed with any respiratory tract infection.

They found there was overall a 44 percent greater risk of neurological and mental health diagnoses after Covid-19 than after flu, and a 16 percent higher risk than with respiratory tract infections.

Paul Harrison, lead author from the University of Oxford, said that while the individual risk of neurological and psychiatric orders from Covid-19 was small, the overall effect across the global population could prove to be "substantial".

"Many of these conditions are chronic," he said.

[LFC]

Trump's CDC director has joined a company that markets COVID killing air purifiers that have no proof they work in the real world. Grifters gonna' grift.

Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has joined Big Ass Fans, lending his scientific credibility to a company division that says its ion-generating technology kills the coronavirus. The company charges $9,450 for a fan with technology that academic air quality experts question.

As strategic health and safety adviser, he follows Dr. Deborah Birx, former White House coronavirus response coordinator, into the booming air purifying industry. Last month, she signed on with ActivePure, a company that also makes a pitch about virus-destroying technology, but markets some devices that run afoul of California indoor air quality rules, according to a KHN investigation.

The two bring name recognition to companies selling products that are advertised to make it safer for people to gather maskless inside schools, offices, gyms and retail stores. The companies market 99.9% kill rates of the coronavirus.

Academic indoor air quality experts who criticize certain claims about COVID-killing technology say the industry-funded studies often focus on results of tests run in a space ranging in size from a shoe box to a cabinet that do not reflect the conditions in a large room. Studies backed by the industry rarely make it clear whether the touted “virus-killing” ions or molecules are doing the work, experts say, or if improvements come from a fan or filter on a device.

“There’s no other way to say it—it’s completely unproven whether these devices would work in a real-world setting,” said Timothy Bertram about devices that claim to attack molecules in midair. He is a chemistry professor who studies aerosol particles at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

[LFC]

CDC Director to Michigan: Shut down and get your shit together.

The only way Michigan can get its COVID-19 surge under control in the short-term is by shutting down completely, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said at a Monday press briefing. The state continues to battle the worst COVID spread in the nation at present, but Walensky said Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s request for additional vaccine doses wouldn’t produce results for another six weeks.

“So when you have an acute situation, an extraordinary number of cases like we have in Michigan, the answer is not necessarily to give vaccine,” Walensky explained. “In fact, we know that the vaccine will have a delayed response. The answer to that is to really close things down, to go back to our basics, to go back to where we were last spring, last summer, and to shut things down, to flatten the curve, to decrease contact with one another, to test to the extent that we have available, to contact trace...I think if we tried to vaccinate our way out of what is happening in Michigan, we would be disappointed that it took so long for the vaccine to work, to actually have the impact. Similarly, we need that vaccine in other places. If we vaccinate today, we will have, you know, impact in six weeks, and we don’t know where the next place is going to be that is going to surge.”

[goldenvalley]

Apr 12, 2021 21:51:35 GMT LFC said:

Trump's CDC director has joined a company that markets COVID killing air purifiers that have no proof they work in the real world. Grifters gonna' grift.

Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has joined Big Ass Fans, lending his scientific credibility to a company division that says its ion-generating technology kills the coronavirus. The company charges $9,450 for a fan with technology that academic air quality experts question.

As strategic health and safety adviser, he follows Dr. Deborah Birx, former White House coronavirus response coordinator, into the booming air purifying industry. Last month, she signed on with ActivePure, a company that also makes a pitch about virus-destroying technology, but markets some devices that run afoul of California indoor air quality rules, according to a KHN investigation.

The two bring name recognition to companies selling products that are advertised to make it safer for people to gather maskless inside schools, offices, gyms and retail stores. The companies market 99.9% kill rates of the coronavirus.

Academic indoor air quality experts who criticize certain claims about COVID-killing technology say the industry-funded studies often focus on results of tests run in a space ranging in size from a shoe box to a cabinet that do not reflect the conditions in a large room. Studies backed by the industry rarely make it clear whether the touted “virus-killing” ions or molecules are doing the work, experts say, or if improvements come from a fan or filter on a device.

“There’s no other way to say it—it’s completely unproven whether these devices would work in a real-world setting,” said Timothy Bertram about devices that claim to attack molecules in midair. He is a chemistry professor who studies aerosol particles at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Big Ass Fans sounds like some product introduced on Shark Tank.  Does Redfield and this company think they can sell this product to the Covid deniers who own businesses?  

[andydp]

Apr 12, 2021 23:05:45 GMT goldenvalley said:

Apr 12, 2021 21:51:35 GMT LFC said:

Trump's CDC director has joined a company that markets COVID killing air purifiers that have no proof they work in the real world. Grifters gonna' grift.

Big Ass Fans sounds like some product introduced on Shark Tank.  Does Redfield and this company think they can sell this product to the Covid deniers who own businesses?  

Spokesperson for Big Ass Fans was William "Refrigerator" Perry 

www.bing.com/th?id=OIP.uwRKXKgYTbcGxo-QBk9kGAHaIb&w=149&h=170&rs=1&qlt=80&o=6&pid=3.1

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[Bact PhD]

Apr 12, 2021 23:54:47 GMT andydp said:

Apr 12, 2021 23:05:45 GMT goldenvalley said:

Big Ass Fans sounds like some product introduced on Shark Tank.  Does Redfield and this company think they can sell this product to the Covid deniers who own businesses?  

Spokesperson for Big Ass Fans was William "Refrigerator" Perry 

www.bing.com/th?id=OIP.uwRKXKgYTbcGxo-QBk9kGAHaIb&w=149&h=170&rs=1&qlt=80&o=6&pid=3.1

www.bigassfans.com/

Truly, you CAN’T make that shit up!