Tag: COVID-19

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!
@WashTimes
·
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.

Related image

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!

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.

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.

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.

 

 

COVID-19 response, shut down all nonessential functions for 15days. What is the “black body” reaction of America?

When engineers and scientists want to study an object, the first step is often to study it as a “black body”, apply an impulse to it and study how the body reacts. One such “opportunity” is just now happening, the Coronavirus COVID-19 and how we, as a people react to it.

The flu season started innocently enough, but there was an increase in the number of healthcare visits for flue like symptoms, already when the flu season started in week 39 (October). At this time nobody had even heard of COVID-19 

The healthcare workers expected a higher flu season than average, but nobody expected this. On Dec 31 the Chinese government officially acknowledged that this virus could spread from human to human, but was still insisting it was largely contained to the live animal market in Wuhan. But Wuhan is a large regional hub, with lots of people, even international visitors were coming and going. No tests had been developed yet for the Coronavirus, so who is to say when the outbreak started. Certainly not the Chinese, they had successfully silenced a whistleblower, and he later died of the disease. We may never know the onset, and how many had spread the virus internationally before December 31. The silence of the Chinese government was a medical malpractice of worldwide importance. After Christmas the flu symptoms seem to have abated, but after President Trump issued the travel ban for foreigners who have recently been in China, people got nervous and the healthcare visits took off again. The question is, how much did the increased healthcare visits help or hurt? This chart shows the pneumonia cases, since this is usually how people die, not from the flu but from the following pneumonia.

Yes, there seems to be a negative correlation between health care visits and pneumonia deaths. More early attention to flu like symptoms and early intervention leads to fewer pneumonia deaths. Not really surprising, but earlier intervention seems even more important than I thought.

But what was really stunning is the effect the intervention to “flatten the curve”,  that is to slow the spread of the virus by 6 feet of separation “better six feet apart than six feet under“, telling everybody in the country to stay home if they do not have an absolutely essential job, don’t cough into open air, wash your hands with soap and don’t touch your face, had. Enough people seem to have obeyed. Did it make a difference? Check out the total deaths per week:

The number of deaths in the whole country shrank by twenty thousand per Week! This is remarkable. Will it continue, will changing hygiene and social separation continue, or will we return back to where we were before?

Time will tell, but there is much hope.

The reverse is just as good:

 

The Corona virus COVID-19 spread was augmented by political correctness. Look at Italy, NYC and New Orleans.

Earlier this year thousands of Chinese immigrants from the city of Wuhan traveled to North Italy for work.

After the new residents got settled some of the local lawmakers noticed the Chinese immigrants weren’t being totally accepted by native Italians.

That’s when the mayor of Florence decided we should have “Hug a Chinese” Day.

And they did. Lots of politically correct Italians complied.

The results was devastating. Many got infected by COVID-19, spread it to others, and a month later the hospitals in Northern Italy got overrun, and the death rate from the virus is now over 10%, the highest of any nation with the possible exception of China, which doesn’t produce any recent statistics from the Hubei province from where the outbreak started.

Not to be outdone, after President Trump issued the ban of foreigners who have recently been in China from entering this country on January 31 many New Yorkers took issue with this ban and wanted to support the Chinese New Year’s parade. On February 2 N,Y State Senator John Liu more or less ordered all who cared for N.Y. to attend the Chinese New Year’s parade om February 9. If you didn’t, but could you proved you were a bigot. Other chimed in with the same sense of urgency to show support for the Chinese community. And a great parade it was:

The New York City mayor tweeted this message on March 2

As late as March 11  he still urged all New Yorkers to go on with their lives as usual.

Now New York City is the nation’s hot spot with nearly one quarter of all Coronavirus cases. New York State has nearly half of all cases, the City hospitals are getting overrun just like in Italy. Political correctness kills.

Oh, and one more hot spot is developing. New Orleans did not cancel the Mardi Gras parade this year.

People came in from all over the country, did their thing, after all it was Mardi Gras, and went back to where they came from, infected or not.

 

 

 

 

 

Nevada governor Sisolak, in a snit of Trump-hate forbids the use of two promising treatments for covid-19, later recanted. A Limerick.

An intrigue in old Carson City

Gov. Sisolak showing no pity

For his Trump-hate is great

but the virus won’t wait

no time to delay and be snitty.

Nevada’s governor has signed an emergency regulation limiting the use of two anti-malaria drugs to treat coronavirus patients, the same medication that President Donald Trump has touted as possible treatments.

Trump has said that using chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as treatments for coronavirus could be “one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine,” and said the drugs had been approved for a long time in the treatment of malaria.
Here is a result from a French non-randomized test. This is no time for randomized tests. They may be scientifically perfect, but they take a long time to complete and are very inefficient. Better save lives now!
U.K. and now India is blocking export of these substances, so we must make our own, and fast. FEMA has appropriated all available stockpiles of  Hydroxychloroquin and is distributing to medical doctors as needed to prevent hoarding.
To be fair, Governor Sisolak in a later tweet indicated  that he will not forbid a licensed medical doctor to administer whatever he/she deems necessary for treatment of a patient, in other words, render his executive order moot. But it  captured the headlines.