Posted Tuesday 21st of April, 2020 at 9:03:02 PM by Jeff
In the first such community-wide campaign in the US, the San Miguel County Department of Health offered the voluntary screening to most of the area’s 8000 residents over 2 weeks. Just 8 of the 986 individuals tested on March 26 and 27 were positive for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. Another 23 were borderline, suggesting that they’d recently been exposed to the virus and were just starting to make antibodies against it. But those were early days. The screenings, paid for by test manufacturer United Biomedical Inc and the county, eventually would be repeated to see how much things had changed.
Unlike polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests—also referred to as molecular or nucleic acid–based tests—antibody tests aren’t intended to identify active SARS-CoV-2 infections. Instead of detecting viral genetic material in throat or nasal swabs, antibody tests reveal markers of immune response—the IgM and IgG antibodies that for most people show up in blood more than a week after they start to feel sick, when symptoms may already be waning.
Serologic antibody tests not only can confirm suspected cases after the fact, they can also reveal who was infected and didn’t know it. Up to a quarter of people with SARS-CoV-2 infection may unwittingly spread the virus because they have mild or no symptoms.
Implications for the health care workforce could be substantial, microbiologist Florian Krammer, PhD, of Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine, said in an interview. “If we find serologically that you are immune, it’s very unlikely that you can get reinfected, which means you can’t pass the virus on to your colleagues or to other patients. And I think it also gives a peace of mind if you have to work with COVID-19 patients to know that you’re probably immune to the infection,” he explained.
Posted Tuesday 21st of April, 2020 at 9:01:17 PM by Jeff
Donald Trump saw the crisis almost entirely in personal and political terms. Fearing for his reelection, he declared the coronavirus pandemic a war, and himself a wartime president. But the leader he brings to mind is Marshal Philippe Pétain, the French general who, in 1940, signed an armistice with Germany after its rout of French defenses, then formed the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. Like Pétain, Trump collaborated with the invader and abandoned his country to a prolonged disaster. And, like France in 1940, America in 2020 has stunned itself with a collapse that’s larger and deeper than one miserable leader. Some future autopsy of the pandemic might be called Strange Defeat, after the historian and Resistance fighter Marc Bloch’s contemporaneous study of the fall of France. Despite countless examples around the U.S. of individual courage and sacrifice, the failure is national. And it should force a question that most Americans have never had to ask: Do we trust our leaders and one another enough to summon a collective response to a mortal threat? Are we still capable of self-government?
Posted Tuesday 21st of April, 2020 at 9:00:47 PM by Jeff
The good news is that policymakers have an opportunity to strategically reopen the economy, by taking into account a unique feature of COVID-19: its heavy skew toward bad outcomes in the elderly and the near-elderly who also have other chronic diseases. With the proper precautions, and the deployment of tools like contact tracing, self-quarantines, and telemedicine, we can continue to protect the most vulnerable, while returning as many Americans as possible to work.
We will still need to address high-risk populations, like those in nursing homes, rehabilitation facilities, jails, and prisons. But we are persuaded that much more can be done to reopen the economy today, thereby improving the lives of hundreds of millions of low-to-middle income Americans.
Posted Tuesday 21st of April, 2020 at 8:54:44 PM by Jeff
“Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience: Massive Scale Testing, Tracing, and Supported Isolation (TTSI) as the Path to Pandemic Resilience for a Free Society,” lays out how a massive scale-up of testing, paired with contact tracing and supported isolation, can rebuild trust in our personal safety and re-mobilize the U.S. economy.
Among the report’s top recommendations is the need to deliver at least 5 million tests per day by early June to help ensure a safe social opening. This number will need to increase to 20 million tests per day by mid-summer to fully re-mobilize the economy.
Posted Tuesday 21st of April, 2020 at 8:53:43 PM by Jeff
When has New York known a grimmer week? The sirens are unceasing. Funeral parlors are overwhelmed. Refrigerator trailers are now in service as morgues, and can be found parked outside hospitals all over town. We’re told that there are “glimmers of hope,” that hospital admissions are slowing, that the curve is flattening. Yet the misery is far from over. “The bad news isn’t just bad,” New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, said at one of his briefings last week. “The bad news is actually terrible.”
Posted Tuesday 21st of April, 2020 at 8:48:17 PM by Jeff
The events — some, like in Michigan, featuring thousands of attendees — are organized largely by conservative groups calling state-based measures too draconian. Some of the groups have posted links and images on Facebook that downplay the seriousness of the virus. And other leaders have advocated against following guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, like a ban on big gatherings and the recommendation to wearing face masks in certain public settings (because wearing them would be “counterproductive”). Some of the protests have taken on the feel of 2016 Trump campaign rallies, with participants wearing Make America Great Again hats and waving flags emblazoned with the president’s face.
Posted Tuesday 21st of April, 2020 at 8:46:38 PM by Jeff
An anti-malaria drug touted by President Trump as a potential “game changer” amid the coronavirus outbreak showed no benefit for patients, according to an analysis of those hospitalized in Veterans Health Administration medical centers.
The analysis found the two primary outcomes for COVID-19 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine were death and the need for mechanical ventilation.
Posted Tuesday 21st of April, 2020 at 8:38:56 PM by Jeff
These are strategies for survival but they are also, possibly, the seeds of a new world: sites of social power where people can collectively provision the resources they need and participate directly in the decisions that affect them. It is in these places and practices that the outlines of the next socialist project will be found. For this project to be credible to the people on whom it depends, it must be equal to the radicalism of our reality. It must offer a socialism that is not a branch of progressivism or a wing of the Democratic Party but a truly anti-systemic alternative, one that promises, however improbably, an end to the death cult of capital and the elevation of human health, dignity, and self-determination as the supreme organizing principles of our common life.
Posted Tuesday 21st of April, 2020 at 8:35:05 PM by Jeff
The University of California was hit with $558 million in unanticipated costs in March alone due to the coronavirus, a staggering sum as students canceled housing and dining contracts, medical centers paused elective surgeries and campus costs soared for online learning.
Posted Tuesday 21st of April, 2020 at 8:33:07 PM by Jeff
Thanks to the Hogwarts curriculum, I can withstand mind control and even limited torture, but I cannot write a compelling cover letter without humiliating grammatical error’s. Why is literature not a course at your skool? I can enchant my quill to write my thoughts, but I never learned how to make my thoughts enchanting. I heard that Durmstrang students have a skool newspaper. You know what Hogwarts has? A three-headed dog lurking in the castle, with permission to kill whoever it finds. Indeedly, my life was constantly endangered while at Hogwarts, which was an academic distracshun.
Posted Tuesday 21st of April, 2020 at 8:31:27 PM by Jeff
Across the country, students like Ms. McCarville are rethinking their choices in a world altered by the pandemic. And universities, concerned about the potential for shrinking enrollment and lost revenue, are making a wave of decisions in response that could profoundly alter the landscape of higher education for years to come.
Lucrative spring sports seasons have been canceled, room and board payments have been refunded, and students at some schools are demanding hefty tuition discounts for what they see as a lost spring term. Other revenue sources like study abroad programs and campus bookstores have dried up, and federal research funding is threatened.
Already, colleges have seen their endowments weakened, and worry that fund-raising efforts will founder even as many families need more financial aid. They also expect to lose international students, especially from Asia, because of travel restrictions and concerns about studying abroad. Foreign students, usually paying full tuition, represent a significant revenue source everywhere, from the Ivy League to community colleges.
Posted Tuesday 21st of April, 2020 at 8:30:46 PM by Jeff
Until then, get ready, my friends. What is about to be unleashed on American society will be the greatest campaign ever created to get you to feel normal again. It will come from brands, it will come from government, it will even come from each other, and it will come from the left and from the right. We will do anything, spend anything, believe anything, just so we can take away how horribly uncomfortable all of this feels. And on top of that, just to turn the screw that much more, will be the one effort that’s even greater: the all-out blitz to make you believe you never saw what you saw. The air wasn’t really cleaner; those images were fake. The hospitals weren’t really a war zone; those stories were hyperbole. The numbers were not that high; the press is lying. You didn’t see people in masks standing in the rain risking their lives to vote. Not in America. You didn’t see the leader of the free world push an unproven miracle drug like a late-night infomercial salesman. That was a crisis update. You didn’t see homeless people dead on the street. You didn’t see inequality. You didn’t see indifference. You didn’t see utter failure of leadership and systems.
Posted Thursday 16th of April, 2020 at 3:24:14 PM by Jeff
Among the many uncertainties that remain about Covid-19 is how the human immune system responds to infection and what that means for the spread of the disease. #Immunity after any infection can range from lifelong and complete to nearly nonexistent. So far, however, only the first glimmers of data are available about immunity to SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19.
What can scientists, and the decision makers who rely on science to inform policies, do in such a situation? The best approach is to construct a conceptual model — a set of assumptions about how immunity might work — based on current knowledge of the immune system and information about related viruses, and then identify how each aspect of that model might be wrong, how one would know and what the implications would be. Next, scientists should set out to work to improve this understanding with observation and experiment.
Posted Thursday 16th of April, 2020 at 3:23:36 PM by Jeff
As I wrote last month, the only viable endgame is to play whack-a-mole with the coronavirus, suppressing it until a #vaccine can be produced. With luck, that will take 18 to 24 months. During that time, new outbreaks will probably arise. Much about that period is unclear, but the dozens of experts whom I have interviewed agree that life as most people knew it cannot fully return. “I think people haven’t understood that this isn’t about the next couple of weeks,” said Michael Osterholm, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota. “This is about the next two years.”
The pandemic is not a hurricane or a wildfire. It is not comparable to Pearl Harbor or 9/11. Such disasters are confined in time and space. The SARS-CoV-2 virus will linger through the year and across the world. “Everyone wants to know when this will end,” said Devi Sridhar, a public-health expert at the University of Edinburgh. “That’s not the right question. The right question is: How do we continue?”
Posted Thursday 16th of April, 2020 at 3:22:24 PM by Jeff
COVID 19 is about to kill restaurants by the thousands. This pandemic is the ultimate pressure test and #restaurants are failing hard. Think about it: when we come out of this, your favourite #food spots might not be there any more.
Why are they so fucked? Let me explain.
Margins in the restaurant industry are notoriously small. Like tiny, actually. For reference, margins for banking, accounting, and legal services come in around 18–25%, healthcare 12-15%, and software 15–25%. Restaurants? 3–9%. Ya, like single digit. These razor thin profit margins have left restaurants with zero reserves. So when a crisis hits (like right now), they are pretty much screwed. Restaurant owners’ only options are to swallow their pride, beg, and hope for help — or throw in the proverbial dish towel. Did you realize how many restaurants don’t even have one months rent in the bank? It’s bananas!
Posted Wednesday 15th of April, 2020 at 6:45:04 PM by Jeff
What a difference a few months can make.
In January, the United States watched as the new coronavirus blazed through China and reached American shores. In February, hindered by an unexpected failure to roll out diagnostic tests and an administration that had denuded itself of scientific expertise, the nation sat largely idle while the pandemic spread within its borders. In March, as the virus launched several simultaneous assaults on a perilously stretched-thin health-care system, America finally sputtered into action, frantically closing offices, schools, and public spaces in a bid to cut off chains of transmission. Now, in April, as viral fevers surge through American hospitals and cabin fever grows in American homes, the U.S. has cemented itself as the new center of the pandemic—the country that should have been more prepared than any other, but that now has the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the world.
Posted Tuesday 14th of April, 2020 at 5:55:56 PM by Jeff
Not Covid-19 related, by this is a good mood booster and a damn good cookie #recipe.
This is essentially a hack of the most famous cookie recipe in the world, which we all know from the back of the Nestle “morsel” bag. Extra chewiness is attained by substituting bread flour for regular all purpose, replacing one egg white with milk, and changing the ratio of brown to white sugar.
Posted Tuesday 14th of April, 2020 at 5:55:01 PM by Jeff
The coronavirus has profoundly altered daily life in America, ushering in sweeping upheavals to the U.S. #economy. Among the most immediate effects of the crisis? Radical changes to how people spend their money.
In a matter of weeks, pillars of American industry essentially ground to a halt. Airplanes, restaurants and arenas were suddenly empty. In many states, businesses deemed nonessential — including luxury goods retailers and golf courses — were ordered closed.
Posted Tuesday 14th of April, 2020 at 5:54:16 PM by Jeff
There is a lot of Twitter chatter surrounding a rumor that circulation of #COVID19 in California in fall 2019 has resulted in herd immunity. This is empirically not the case. COVID-19 was first introduced into the USA in Jan/Feb 2020. 1/18
Posted Tuesday 14th of April, 2020 at 5:53:22 PM by Jeff
It was early in the second week of March when it struck. I woke with sinus congestion and muscle aches I’d never felt before. I tried to ignore the signs. I was busy, a Bloomberg News editor on deadline on a story about the U.S. response to the outbreak, including the coronavirus testing-kit fiasco and other blunders in the pandemic’s early stages. I was about to experience them.
Posted Tuesday 14th of April, 2020 at 5:52:30 PM by Jeff
Without the use of a clear metric on our ability to contain the coronavirus pandemic, it’s difficult to imagine that we’ll manage a return to normalcy anytime soon. I hope by sharing this work with you, you will consider Rt as the metric that can guide our analysis and decision-making. I’ve kept most of the math and theory in the notebook, but I’d highly suggest diving in if you’re so inclined.
The science around the use of #masks by the general public to impede COVID-19 transmission is advancing rapidly. Policymakers need guidance on how masks should be used by the general population to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, we synthesize the relevant literature to inform multiple areas: 1) transmission characteristics of COVID-19, 2) filtering characteristics and efficacy of masks, 3) estimated population impacts of widespread community mask use, and 4) sociological considerations for policies concerning mask-wearing. A primary route of transmission of COVID-19 is likely via small respiratory droplets, and is known to be transmissible from presymptomatic and asymptomatic individuals. Reducing disease spread requires two things: first, limit contacts of infected individuals via physical distancing and contact tracing with appropriate quarantine, and second, reduce the transmission probability per contact by wearing masks in public, among other measures. The preponderance of evidence indicates that mask wearing reduces the transmissibility per contact by reducing transmission of infected droplets in both laboratory and clinical contexts. Public mask wearing is most effective at stopping spread of the virus when compliance is high. The decreased transmissibility could substantially reduce the death toll and economic impact while the cost of the intervention is low. Thus we recommend the adoption of public cloth mask wearing, as an effective form of source control, in conjunction with existing hygiene, distancing, and contact tracing strategies. We recommend that public officials and governments strongly encourage the use of widespread face masks in public, including the use of appropriate regulation.
Posted Tuesday 14th of April, 2020 at 5:45:55 PM by Jeff
Among the many uncertainties that remain about Covid-19 is how the human immune system responds to infection and what that means for the spread of the disease. Immunity after any infection can range from lifelong and complete to nearly nonexistent. So far, however, only the first glimmers of data are available about #immunity to SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19.
What can scientists, and the decision makers who rely on science to inform policies, do in such a situation? The best approach is to construct a conceptual model — a set of assumptions about how immunity might work — based on current knowledge of the immune system and information about related viruses, and then identify how each aspect of that model might be wrong, how one would know and what the implications would be. Next, scientists should set out to work to improve this understanding with observation and experiment.
Posted Thursday 9th of April, 2020 at 9:25:41 PM by Jeff
Researchers at Tencent’s Xuanwu Lab (via the Wall Street Journal) discovered that you can train Face ID to recognize you’re wearing a mask if you set up the biometric system while wearing half a mask.
The tutorial mentions folding a mask in half and going through the setup process for Face ID. In our testing, that worked, but not very consistently.
What we found the most consistent was using the primary Face ID setup as well as redoing the alternate appearance with a mask to offer the best unlocking results.
Posted Thursday 9th of April, 2020 at 9:22:04 PM by Jeff
Speaking on MSNBC, Governor Gavin Newsom said that he would use the bulk purchasing power of California “as a nation-state” to acquire the hospital supplies that the federal government has failed to provide. If all goes according to plan, Newsom said, California might even “export some of those supplies to states in need.”
“Nation-state.” “Export.”
Newsom is accomplishing a few things here, with what can only be a deliberate lack of subtlety. First and foremost, he is trying to relieve the shortage of personal protective equipment — a crisis the White House has proved incapable of remedying. Details are a little fuzzy, but Newsom, according to news reports, has organized multiple suppliers to deliver roughly 200 million masks monthly.
Posted Saturday 4th of April, 2020 at 9:28:54 AM by Jeff
The president’s failure to heed the warnings about coronavirus and act quickly has set in train a domino effect that now imperils large swathes of the US