science – Page 32 – Len Bilén's blog, a blog about faith, politics and the environment.

Does lockdown work to flatten the curve? Look at Sweden versus Great Britain.

Conventional wisdom told us in the Coronavirus pandemic that the only way to stop the hospitals from being overrun and the healthcare system collapsing was to enforce “social separation” between people and shut down the ecnomy, allowing only “essential workers” to go to work. Initially Italy, Spain and France had their hospitals overrun with people and their death rate from COVID19 is over 10%. This made all European countries enforce draconian rules to protect what was left. All countries except Sweden that is. They let people go to work, encouraged working from home, limited gatherings to less than 50 people and practiced “social separation” at restaurants, but kept them open. United Kingdom locked down their country on March 23. How much worse did Sweden fare? They both have about the same number of tests per capita, about 1/2%.

They both seem to have the same rate of increase, and are leveling off

The death rate, a lagging indicator also seem to come down for both countries.

There is one country, Norway, which is similar to Sweden that is doing much better. They took the approach of early testing and contact tracing, and their death rate per person is one quarter of Sweden’s. But the early outbreak occurred in the ski areas and traveling hubs, a younger and fit segment of the population.

Belgium on the other hand has a death rate of over three times as many as Sweden, a country having about the same population as Sweden, and they tested nearly twice as many people! The big difference there was that nearly half of all deaths so far has occurred in nursing homes.

The conclusion: Go back to work, start up the economy again, test and protect the most vulnerable. Most people will get it anyway, and most of them will not even know they had it, and for most of the rest it will be about the same as the regular flu. Give Hydroxychloroquine and Z-pack and Zinc for 5 days to all that want it, including all in the risk zone. It must be under a physician’s supervision, not because of the Hydroxyxhloroquine, that has never killed anyone when taken in approved doses, but the Z-pack can make heart arrhythmia more severe.

Clinical trials take too long. With the COVID-19 virus acting on a time scale of 3 days, not 3 years, allow unlimited trials now!

The medicine suppliers have to go through a lot to get a new drug approved. There are the double blind tests that can take years to verify, and some of the people in the protocol are given placebos that only produce the side-effects, not the potential cure. Some of these people may die as a result, but that the cost of getting a drug approved. The cost can be upwards of 10 million dollars, so as a reward the Medical supplier company gets awarded a patent for the new medicine. This can take many years to develop, and a patent is valid for only 20 years, so a patent extension of up to 5 years is almost routinely granted. After the patent is expired it becomes a generic drug. And another thing, there has to be at least 170000 people suffering from the disease to make it worthwhile.

There is another way. Over 10 years ago my wife got a case of wet macular degeneration in one eye, but it was not the normal type, more like a blood-filled polyp lodging itself under the retina and causing warped vision to say the least.

There was an approved medication at 2000 dollars an injection, the insurance company paid for it, so she tried it, and it did absolutely nothing. But the eye doctor said, he worked with the Amish community, and they are uninsured and cannot afford more than generic drugs. He had had good results for a few to inject Avastin, an approved drug for colon and rectal cancer among other things, and in the amount needed for injection in one eye the cost was only 70 dollars. The trade-off was obvious; 2000 dollars for a drug that the insurance company paid for, but didn’t work versus a 70 dollar medicine that might work, so she let herself be included in the study. And it worked! And the doctor paid for the cost of the medicine himself, he wanted the study to succeed. He was not alone, a few other doctors worked together to find the cure. A few years later the insurance company accepted the treatment, and my wife’s polyp eventually disappeared.

The point of the story? To rely only on approved medications when confronted with cases out of the ordinary, medical science is advancing not only by medical companies seeking new and profitable drugs, or by University research, but by your regular doctor, in consultation with his peers, as they seek to find the best cure for the individual patient.

The Government is always to slow to react. In the case of COVID-19, it works on a time-scale of 3 days, so the best treatment must be administered immediately, not wait for normal approval procedures. So is the case with Hydroxychloroquine, it is approved and generic, no one will make a case study, the side effects are minimal for Lupus or rheumatic patients, of which there are tens of thousands patients and no one has died from it when applied in approved doses, so administer it to anyone that accepts to be in the study now!

The Corona-virus death rate is over-estimated, but by how much? Iceland gives a possible answer.

I have been fascinated with the spread of the coronavirus and the speed of which it has spread to all parts of the world. The question is how bad will it be, how many will die, and what can be done about it. Thanks to the ability to test who are having it, and who will get it, and how many have already died from it, and how many are still in critical care we can now estimate how bad it can be in countries with a good healthcare system, the Nordic Countries will serve as an example.

Let us begin with Sweden. They took a passive approach at first, the healthcare system will take care of the cases as they have always handled the flue. The problem is, that left to itself the coronavirus cases double every 3 days until the whole population is infected except for those with natural immunity. A few days ago even Sweden clamped down and is now implementing separation. Here are the current numbers for Sweden, normalized per million inhabitants

Cases 704, serious or critical 60, deaths 47, testing 0.36%

Denmark took a similar approach, and here are the

Cases 808, serious or critical 48, deaths 32, testing 0.92%

We can see testing makes a difference, cases go up, deaths go down

Finland is very similar, but cases started later:

Cases 393, serious or critical 35, deaths 5, testing 0.6%

Norway took a different approach, they applied early testing, and tracing and testing their contacts. Here are these results:

Cases 1082, serious or critical 16, deaths 14, testing 2.5%.

Going west there is the Faeroe Islands with little more than 50000 inhabitants:

Cases 3745, serious or critical 20, deaths 0, testing 10.2%.

Wow! No deaths at all! But the sample was small.

Of particular interest is Iceland. It is a unique country. Not only do they have excellent health care, they have the DNA genome of nearly every Icelander. They did a very aggressive testing, and here are the results so far:

Cases 4577, serious or critical 4, deaths 18, testing 8.2%.

It turns out that about half of those who tested positive had no symptoms, but were probably carriers. This leads us to the conclusion that testing is important, social separation only works if everyone participates, and if the country has an excellent health care system the total cases will be 5,6% of which 2.8% show no symptoms, critical or serious cases are 0.25%, and deaths are 0.3% of the whole population.

In a country like United States this means that we will have about 80000 deaths total if we test like Norway or Iceland from now on, and about 210000 deaths if we continue with only mitigation and no contact tracing, and let the disease work itself through the whole population.

The lesson from Spain, Italy and Franceis; if the hospitals get overloaded it could be far worse.

The generic drug Hydroxychloroquine combined with one more generic drug could lower those numbers substantially if taken voluntarily by a majority of early diagnosed patients, and even if taken later in the course of the disease. Of course there will always be some that would rather die than taking something that has been recommended by President Trump, but we are a free country, and there should be enough ventilators for them.

Enough people are taking the medicine cocktail now on a right to try basis to give us the answer in about two weeks if we can go back to work and back to normal life, but with changed social separation. The regular flu and pneumonia deaths are way down already.

The worst pandemic the world has ever seen can be stopped quickly, and this is how.

The pandemic has spread to the whole world, only Tajikistan and North Korea have yet to report any cases, but territories like Falkland Islands and Saint Pierre Miquelon have reported in, a total of 208 countries and territories as of now. Antarctica is so far spared, but nobody lives there anyhow, only a few thousand people on temporary assignments.

This means the COVID-19 virus is so contagious that it will affect us all, and with a 3 day doubling rate it will not take long until everybody is or has been infected, except for those with protection or immunity.

One possible such protection is the use of Hydroxychloroquine, or just plain Chloroquine Phosphate. These are common drugs to protect against malaria, and in countries where malaria is prevalent there seems to be much fewer cases than in countries without malaria threats. These drugs are safe for most people, but must be taken under advise and prescription from a physician.

Early last week, Dr. Birx in the daily coronavirus briefing promised to look into if there was any correlation between people already taking Hydroxychloroquine for relief from Lupus of Rheumatism and their incidence of contracting COVID-19. She was going to utilize the large, anonymous part of the Medicare and Medicaid database that lists everybody that receives these benefits. It is already used to study interactions between medicines and outcomes, a most valuable resource, but as always they normally take their jolly time to verify and certify the results. She wanted the results by last Friday to keep up with the enemy, the virus. If there is a statistically valid difference between Lupus or Rheumatic patients and the population in general we have our answer! (China have their answer, but they are not telling, presumably to maximize the damage in the rest of the world.) If the result is conclusive, here is the answer,

Step 1. Give the Hydroxychloroquine medication to all patients testing positive for COVID-19.

Step 2. Give the medication to all health care workers coming in contact with COVID-19 patients.

Step 3. Give this medication to all potentially coming in contact with COVID-19 positive people such as police, first responders, the military and so on.

Step 4. Give this medication to all who have been in contact with people having tested positive for COVID-19

Step 5. Make taking this medication a condition for international travel and travel to and from national hot spots.

Step 6. Offer this medication to the rest of the world.

The medicine can be manufactured by the tons if speedy approval is issued by the FDA from sources other than China! This is why President Trump invoked the Defense Production Act!

If we can ramp up this action plan speedily, we should be back to normal life within a month, except most of us will have to take one more medication, (but it is cheap). When the vaccine is approved and available this requirement will go away

How to bend the corona-virus curve: Treat patients with Hydroxychloroquine

The recent chart on the corona-virus infection is really scary:

It is better to plot the Corona-virus cases on a logarithmic scale. It is less scary, but more serious. It shows the same thing. the virus cases double every 3 days. This is never seen before in pandemics history. Even worse, CDC is set up to develop and approve new medications with a time-frame of months, or even years, not 3 days.

Like they say in the military, even the best laid plans never survive contact with the enemy. That is why the Presidential task force wss forced to act with unprecedented speed and approve drugs that have not been subjected to double-blind clinical trials, which sometimes take years to validate. No, here speed is of essence, and President Trump is a man of immediate action, reacting on instinct rather than established scientific studies. Somebody showed him this study:

He got so excited he shared it in one of the daily briefings. The result was predictable. Three Democratic governors forbade its use in their state. They have since then all modified their stance and allow it under strict control of a licensed Physician or Licensed Practitioner, but Governor Cuomo was still insisting it could only be done in a hospital, not as an outpatient.

Then yesterday more information got out, so he tweeted this:

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

I agree with this. Watch!

The Washington Times

@WashTimes

· Apr 2

Hydroxychloroquine rated ‘most effective therapy’ by doctors for coronavirus: Global survey bit.ly/2xKne7I

11:17 AM · Apr 4, 2020

The survey was large and international. 37% overall surveyed suggested that Hydroxychloroquine was the most effective treatment. It is interesting that the U.S. doctors had the lowest recommendation rating for this drug of all the nations surveyed.

There are some possible side effects when using the drug as with every medicine you take. That is why it should be taken after consulting a physician, but for over 95% it is perfectly safe. What are the side-effects? For people with arrhythmia it can worsen the condition, as with vision problems, but otherwise they are few severe side-effects.

Doctors in areas of mitigation should offer the drug to anyone who is a candidate for it, but we live in a free country, so you cannot force the drug on anyone that would rather die than use a remedy that has been strongly advocated by President Trump.

In the other areas, not in mitigation the drug should be offered to anyone testing positive for COVID-19 and their contacts! This is what China did after they had cremated the evidence in Wuhan and Chongqing, and the new infection rate went to nearly zero, only affecting foreigners visiting China, or so their recent statistics show.

Chinese COVID-19 deaths vastly under-reported, air pollution data shows.

There are many satellites in the air, monitoring air quality around the world. They were put up to monitor Climate Change. One picture can tell a lot, this picture measured the level of SO2 on February 8 of this year:

The map looks pretty good, except for two yellow spots, one over Wuhan, China and one over Chongqing, China. The one over Wuhan had a SO2 concentration of up to 1700 µg/m3 , corresponding to 0.65 ppm and the one over Chongqing 750 µg/m3 corresponding to 0.286 ppm, tolerable, except for sensitive people. There are no such clouds in any other area of the world, including the rest of China.

These two SO2 clouds can only have come from one source, cremations. A person contains about 0,3% Sulfur, and a 120 lb person generates about 3/4 lb of SO2 gas when cremated. SO2 is a gas heavier than air, so it stays close to ground until it is dispersed. The cloud over Wuhan is large, about 100 km in diameter with an average concentration of 200 µg/m3 up to a height of 3 m, a wild guess. The number cremated during that time snapshot could be about 13500 in Wuhan alone. Add to that about a quarter as many in Chongqing making the total about 17000 cremations going on simultaneously. A cremation takes about 3 hours, add about 2 hours for preparation and collection of the remaining ashes, so let us assume they did 4 cremations in a 24 hour period. That will bring us to about 70000 cremations in a 24 hour period. It is reasonable to assume that nearly all these cremations was from COVID-19 victims, since a normal rate of cremation for a city of Wuhan’s size, (11,000,000), a death rate in China of 7 per 1000 people would be about 210 cremations per day.

The clouds tell the story.

China and rare earth metals. Can China be trusted? Consider COVID-19 and pharmaceutical supplies.

In early May, 2019, President Xi and Vice Premier Liu He, China’s top trade negotiator, visited a rare earth metals mine in Jiangxi province. This has led to the rumor that China is seriously considering restricting rare earth exports to the US. China may also take other countermeasures in the future. The trade negotiations between U.S. and China got a lot more serious. It extended far beyond tariffs and intellectual property, it began to involve strategic materials.

The first thing we must realize is that rare earth metals are not all that rare. They are a thousand times or more abundant than gold or platinum in the earth crust and easy to mine, but a little more difficult to refine. Thorium and Uranium will also be mined at the same time as the rare earth metals since they appear together in the ore.

U.S. used to be the major supplier of rare earth metals, which was fine up to around 1984. Then the U.S. regulators determined that Uranium and Thorium contained in the ore made the ore radioactive, so the regulatory agencies decided to make rare earth metal ore subject to nuclear regulations with all what that meant for record keeping and control. This made mining of rare earth metals in the U.S. unprofitable so in 2001 the last domestic mine closed down. China had no such scruples, such as human and environmental concerns, so they took over the rare earth metals mining and in 2010 controlled over 95% of the world supply, which was according to their long term plan of controlling the world by 2025.

Rare Earth Element Production

The U.S. used to have a strategic reserve of rare earth metals, but that was sold off in 1998 as being no longer cost effective or necessary. Two years later the one U.S. rare earth metals mine that used to supply nearly the whole world, the Mountain Pass Mine in California closed down, together with its refining capacity. From that day all rare earth metals were imported. In 2010 it started up again together with the refining capacity but went bankrupt in 2015, closed down the refining but continued selling ore to China. They just announced they will start up refining again late 2020. Meanwhile China is slapping on a 25% import tariff on imported ore starting July 1. Rare earth metals may be in short supply for a while.

So, why is this important? Just take a look at all the uses for rare earth metals. The most sought after pays all the cost of mining and refining, and the rest are readily available at nominal cost.

The Chinese almost got away with it, and that is but one reason the trade negotiations are so complicated and hard fought, but necessary. Donald Trump fights for reciprocity and fair competition.

For example, according to a 2013 report from the Congressional Research Service, each F–35 Lightning II aircraft requires 920 pounds of rare–earth materials. Who is making the most critical parts to this airplane? You guessed it – China, from our drawings and according to our specifications.

But it is getting worse. the COVId-19 virus hit China bad, probably in November or so, nobody knows and China won’t tell. Then they told us there was a small outbreak, but it is not contagious from person to person. Then on January 10 the first case of the Wuhan virus hit the U.S.A. Late January President Trump halted entry into the U.S. from foreigners having been in China recently. At one of the daily COVID-19 briefings President Trump got excited about a potential treatment. He had been shown the result of a french study. Here it is:

To make matters a little more complicated, China has stopped export of one of the ingredients in making this medicine, and they are the only source, until we have started up production of our own. We have to do it in days, not weeks.

It turns out that China had been, and is treating their COVID-19 patients with this medicine, both as a preventive, and as a cure for months, but they never told the world until now.

Why did China stop this medical export? There are at least two possibilities, either they are lying through their teeth about the COVID-19 cases and they need it for their own consumption but didn’t tell us, or, which is even worse, they do want to maximize the damage in the rest of the world.

This is the real China. The people are wonderful, but their government is evil.

COVID-19, Bill Gates, Nuclear energy, research and China. It starts to make sense.

On March 13 Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft abruptly resigned from the board. Not long after it was discovered that one of his small research companies held a patent on the Coronavirus, or so it was said. Being curious I took a look at the patent.It turns out, it is a corona virus all right, complete with a vaccine against it, but it is for use in animals, not humans. Bill Gates has always been interested in vaccines, especially viruses that has a potential to develop into pandemics. It is a very worthwhile research subject, you want to have the answer right away, should a pandemics develop. The good thing about patents is, you have the exclusive right to manufacture it, or license it for a fee. He knows this very well. In the beginning of PCs Bill Gates offered to sell the Microsoft operating system to IBM for 82000 dollars. IBM said no, they had their own team developing it, so they needed no help, thank you. Well, it turned out they failed, so IBM came back to Bill Gates to take him up on the offer. Bill Gates refused, but offered to license it to IBM for a “reasonable” fee and the rest is history. So it can be very profitable. The price you pay for issuing a patent is that you have to disclose all pertinent information, in this case it consisted of the whole DNA sequence of the corona virus and the method to make the vaccine. Now it shows up that this virus was close enough to the one that caused the current pandemic, so the full DNA sequence information became very helpful to have a starting point to develop a vaccine for the current strains. Where was the original research conducted? You guessed it – in Wuhan, China. Why did Bill Gates choose China for the research?

On a totally unrelated subject, but still concerning Bill Gates, his company TerraPower decided to discontinue development of a research Nuclear reactor near Beijing, China. The reason was that the U.S. Department of Energy in October announced new restrictions on nuclear deals with China, in keeping with a broader plan by the Trump administration to limit China’s ability to access U.S-made technologies it considers to be of strategic importance.

Gates, who co-founded TerraPower, said that regulations in the United States are currently too restrictive to allow the reactor prototype to be built domestically.

There we have it! China has given sweetheart deals to everybody that want to come and do research in China. No bothersome regulations, all they want is to get full knowledge of what you are doing, be equal partners in all the findings, and if it leads to good production, be equal partners until they can fully take over. This has bee going on for over 25 years, and China was ready to fully take over, but the corona virus was released prematurely by accident.

By the way, be not surprised if North Korea suddenly agrees to abolish their nuclear weapons and stockpile. Bio warfare is cheaper and more difficult to trace and control and China doesn’t want to take the blame for it.

Anecdotal evidence shows that China is now using Hydroxychloroquine as a first defense against the COVID-19 outbreak. Did they tell us? No, but they have prohibited export of one of its main ingredients, and until very recently they were single sourced.

The moral of this story is: don’t ever get caught single sourced again! By the way, it is in the Defense Procurement Regulation. And don’t get me started on Rare Earth Metals!

The COVID-19 epidemic presented in charts. How to scare or calm down with the same, perfectly valid statistics.

The impression you want to make on the public depends on how you want to present the data in charts. This is the data for the COVID-19 outbreak you would use if you are a reporter working for the mainstream media.

The chart is absolutely true, and is selected to scare you as much as possible.

Governor Cuomo of New York does no longer want to scare you, but present a clear and present danger, since New Yourk State has nearly half of all COVID19 cases, and NYC by itself nearly a quarter of all cases. He then would choose a statistics that shows the infection rate per million people

While hardly comforting, the chart is equally true, but not nearly as alarming as the first one.

Now, there is great debate if any of the two charts above show the real picture. The cases are confirmed only if a test has been made, and many go on unnoticed.

A better statistics would then be made by only counting the COVID-19 deaths, and again show the result as per million people. This would be the most accurate to show, and is used by the modelers and forcasters in the Trump/Pence task force.

Italy is doing poorly with an over 11% death rate, Spain next with 8, France is slowly increasing, but not as slow as Iran, which has different travel habits between cities and villages. United States and Germany show a very similar pattern, and both countries have excellent health systems with by far the most emergency rooms per capita of any nation.

One nation has done significantly better. Japan has a death rate of 0.3 %. It is probably because they are an obedient people and practice social separation anyway, they don’t shake hands, they bow, and they have a habit of wearing masks if they cough or sneeze.

And yes, there is one more country, China. They are officially over the crisis, but anecdotal evidence tells another story. There was an increase in demand for at least 40000 cremation urns this winter in the City of Wuhan alone, and the Chinese government paid for the cremation if the cause of death was not disclosed. Another nugget of evidence is that Chinese Telecom lost 18.5 million wireless customers and two million wired customers in January and February. They are busing in and training peasants from the countryside to fill the factories to get the production started up again after they shut down the country for a month. The Chinese Government has been less than transparent.

Why did the Michigan Governor prohibit promising treatment for COVID-19. A Limerick.

The Governor’s Trump hate in Lansing,

from science advancement distancing.

She would let people die,

valid treatment deny

to stop Donald Trump’s reelecting.

The Detroit News’ Kathy Hoekstra reports that Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs (LARA) has sent a letter to all physicians and pharmacists in the state warning of “professional consequences” if they prescribe or dispense hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine to treat coronavirus patients. Hoekstra writes that “beyond the rational recommendation against hoarding as production of this medication needs to be ramped up, the letter deviates into open threats of “administrative action” against the licenses of doctors that prescribe hydroxychloroquine.” It also orders pharmacists to “ignore physician orders for this medication.”

There must have been a reason why Governor Gretchen Whitmer issued this threatening letter. She could have heard President Trump being excited about a promising study that offered a remedy, or, which is scary, she believed it was dangerous because a husband and wife ate spoonfuls of aquarium tank cleaner which contained chloroquine phosphate, and one of them died. What made this unbelievable story the news of the day in the mainstream media was the dying man’s words: “Look, this is what Trump recommended, why don’t we try it?” Little did they know that 2 grams is a deadly dose, but it is perfectly safe to take an appropriate dose under a physician’s supervision. It has been taken safely for over 50 years to combat malaria.

So why was President Trump so excited about the french study he was shown? Here are the results:

This was a non random test of 80 people, and one person died, a 70+ year old woman with underlying conditions. They took a chance on her because she was within hours of probable death anyhow, but she was too far gone. The other 79 recovered.

This is no time for double blind large clinical trials. They sometimes take years to verify, and the enemy, the COVID-19 virus works on a time-frame of 3 days, so the only choice is to work with incomplete and uncertified data.