Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

Sounds good to me. That will stop the dumb charts showing how many "covid deaths" are happening. Let's count Covid like we count every other virus. We don't do that currently. We made up guidelines as we went along. In the very beginning we were under reporting covid. Now we are for sure over reporting.

It's the same thing with the "keep schools closed" argument. There is zero evidence that schools are spreading covid. But that hasn't stopped the idiot leaders of our country from keeping them closed. Talk about inane.

 

You really have no idea

 

From Lawrence Wright’s New Yorker piece, showing why Moderna was able to develop a vaccine so quickly. It had been designed years earlier through governmental work



Like RSV, coronaviruses have a protein that elongates when invading a cell. “It looks like a spike, so we just call it Spike,” Graham said. Spike was large, flexible, and encased in sugars, which made it difficult to crystallize, so X-ray crystallography wasn’t an option. Fortunately, around 2013, what McLellan calls a “resolution revolution” in cryogenic electron microscopy allowed scientists to visualize microbes down to one ten-billionth of a metre. Finally, vaccinologists could truly see what they were doing.

Using these high-powered lenses, Graham and McLellan modified the mersspike protein, creating a vaccine. It worked well in mice. They were on the way to making a version for humans, but, after mers had killed hundreds of people, it petered out as an immediate threat to humans—and the research funding petered out, too. Graham was dismayed, realizing that such a reaction was shortsighted, but he knew that his energies hadn’t been wasted. About two dozen virus families are known to infect humans, and the weapon that Graham’s lab had developed to conquer RSV and mers might be transferrable to many of them.

What was the best way to deliver a modified protein? Graham knew that Moderna, a biotech startup in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had encoded a modified protein on strips of genetic material known as messenger RNA. The company had never brought a vaccine to market, concentrating instead on providing treatments for rare disorders that aren’t profitable enough to interest Big Pharma. But Moderna’s messenger-RNA platform was potent.

In mice, Graham had proved the effectiveness of a structure-based vaccine for mers and also for Nipah, a particularly fatal virus. In 2017, Graham arranged a demonstration project for pandemic preparedness, with mers and Nipah serving as prototypes for a human vaccine using Moderna’s messenger-RNA platform. Almost three years later, as he was preparing to begin human trials for the Nipah vaccine, he heard the news from Wuhan.

Graham called McLellan, who happened to be in Park City, Utah, getting snowboard boots heat-molded to his feet. McLellan had become a star in structural biology, and was recruited to the University of Texas at Austin, where he had access to cryogenic electron microscopes. It took someone who knew Graham well to detect the urgency in his voice. He suspected that China’s cases of atypical pneumonia were caused by a new coronavirus, and he was trying to obtain the genomic sequence. It was a chance to test their concept in a real-world situation. Would McLellan and his team like to get “back in the saddle” and help him create a vaccine?

“Of course,” McLellan said.

“We got the sequences Friday night, the tenth of January,” Graham told me. They had been posted online by the Chinese. “We woke up on the eleventh and started designing proteins.”

Nine days later, the coronavirus officially arrived in America.

Within a day after Graham and McLellan downloaded the sequence for sars-CoV-2, they had designed the modified proteins. The key accelerating factor was that they already knew how to alter the spike proteins of other coronaviruses. On January 13th, they turned their scheme over to Moderna, for manufacturing. Six weeks later, Moderna began shipping vials of vaccine for clinical trials. The development process was “an all-time record,” Graham told me. Typically, it takes years, if not decades, to go from formulating a vaccine to making a product ready to be tested: the process privileges safety and cost over speed.

 

When journalists write these fear articles about hospitals being overrun and people dying in the waiting room they should really look at previous years data before throwing crap against the wall.

 

If it is not Covid someone should figure out what's really killing people.

US deaths in 2020 top 3 million, by far most ever counted

Final mortality data for this year will not be available for months. But preliminary numbers suggest that the United States is on track to see more than 3.2 million deaths this year, or at least 400,000 more than in 2019.

U.S. deaths increase most years, so some annual rise in fatalities is expected. But the 2020 numbers amount to a jump of about 15%, and could go higher once all the deaths from this month are counted.

 

Very insightful. Good talk.

 

So how is London doing for CC beds?

 

Go look it up. I posted the data. You can feel free to post something else.

 

114.2% capacity in London, more than 60% of which are Covid cases. Do you think that is normal?

London critical care patients could be sent to Yorkshire as capital’s ICUs top 100pc occupancy

What you didn't post is that G&A beds are largely down because they are canceling elective procedures in London because they are shifting as many resources as they can to CC to handle 114.2%.

 

This piece by Wright is fascinating. Believe it or not, Peter Navarro was right on the extra supplement talks needed for PPE stockpiling and paying companies for vaccine development efforts even if they would not be successful to expedite development. Mulvaney with his classic ignorant attempts to slash government overruled. Just such typical stupidity

 

Attributed to Swift


You Cannot Reason People Out of Something They Were Not Reasoned Into

 

So 2 areas are a little over and 4 areas are under capacity. All hospitals are required to be able to hit at minimum 120% capacity and most can go to 150% capacity with ease. Maybe rehire some of the staff that was let go in the spring? Just a thought.

 

Fascinating from Wrights piece. March exchange


Another member of the task force noted that, in a bad flu season, sixty thousand Americans might die. What was the difference?

“This is twenty times that,” Pottinger argued. “This is two per cent dead, where the flu is .1 per cent.”

“If we just let this thing ride, there could be two million dead,” Birx said. “If we take action, we can keep the death toll at a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty thousand.” It was surreal hearing such numbers laid out so nakedly.

Mnuchin demanded data. He felt that the U.S. just had to live with the virus. It wasn’t worth sacrificing the airlines, the cruise ships, the hotels. “This is going to bankrupt everyone,” he said. “Boeing won’t sell a single jet.”

“You keep asking me for my data,” Birx said, sharply. “What data do youhave? Does it take into account hundreds of thousands of dead Americans?” In the end, her side won.

 

"A little over." Wow. I suspect that your familiarity with how the NHS operates is less than zero. Do you have evidence of the NHS letting go of staff in the spring?

 

This is what the US did. You think England kept all their employees stay on payroll when their numbers are down significantly? I know you know the answer. Just move on from this argument. Maybe back to schools?

 

Here are the US numbers. 61% ICU usage is a reason hospitals are hemorrhaging money.

 

So you think ICU usage Is significantly down and is the reason for problems with hospital economics as opposed to elective procedures? There’s about 18 internal variables there. Not saying you’re wrong, but since conservatives are typically dishonest, I would want to explore a lot more those variables before I think you’re making a point.

Here are some, what time frame are you working on, what type of trauma centers etc. are you using as part of the data set? What causes you to draw the conclusion that it’s under use of ICU that is the major cause of declining revenues for hospitals, which generally is the case.

 

You could have just said "No, I don't have any evidence." Last I checked, the US != UK and UK has a large government agency running their hospitals. Surprisingly, that changes the economic equation. Who knew?

The schools thing is a sign that you know you lost this one, but can't admit it. Ego preservation. It is a bit sad. Take the L, as you often say.

 

Always sad when people resort to imitation because they aren't clever enough to come up with something original to say.

Agency nurses: trapped in a pandemic staffing paradox

"One agency nurse, who works mainly in paediatrics and asked to remain anonymous, says she obtained only one shift in three weeks. She had been reluctant to work in other areas but eventually agreed to look at roles in adult nursing, although not in intensive care units (ICUs)."

I'm sure it's just anecdotal...

 

This is painful to read


On March 4th, as Matt Pottinger was driving to the White House, he was on the phone with a doctor in China. Taking notes on the back of an envelope while navigating traffic, he was hearing valuable new information about how the virus was being contained in China. The doctor mentioned the antiviral drug remdesivir—which was just emerging as a possible therapy in the U.S.—and emphasized that masks were extremely effective with covid, more so than with influenza. “It’s great to carry around your own hand sanitizer,” the doctor said. “But masks are going to win the day.”

Still on the phone when he parked his stick-shift Audi, on West Executive Avenue, next to the West Wing, Pottinger forgot to put on the parking brake. As he rushed toward his office, the car rolled backward, narrowly missing the Vice-President’s limo, before coming to rest against a tree.

While the Secret Service examined the errant Audi, Pottinger kept thinking about masks. America’s pandemic response had already been handicapped by China’s withholding of information about human-to-human and asymptomatic transmission. The testing imbroglio would set the country back for months. But masks offered a ready solution.

Deborah Birx had told Pottinger that, whereas mask wearing is part of Asian culture, Americans couldn’t be counted on to comply. Pottinger began to see America’s public-health establishment as an impediment. The Surgeon General, Jerome Adams, had tweeted, “stop buying masks! They are noteffective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus.” Such messages were partly aimed at preventing the hoarding of hospital-grade masks, but they dissuaded people from adopting all forms of face covering. In those early days, the U.S. medical establishment looked at sars-CoV-2 and flatly applied the algorithm for sars: sick people should wear masks, but for others they weren’t necessary. Redfield, of the C.D.C., told me, “We didn’t understand until mid-March that many people with covid weren’t symptomatic but were highly infectious.”

Pottinger, however, thought it was evident that, wherever a large majority of people wore masks, contagion was stopped “dead in its tracks.” Hong Kong was one of the world’s densest cities, but there was no community spread of the virus there, because nearly everyone wore masks. Taiwan, which was manufacturing ten million masks per day for a population of twenty-three million, was almost untouched. Both places neighbored China, the epicenter. Pottinger’s views stirred up surprisingly rigid responses from the public-health contingent. In Pottinger’s opinion, when Redfield, Fauci, Birx, and Hahn spoke, it could sound like groupthink, echoing the way that their public messaging was strictly coördinated.