Tag: medicine

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.

 

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.

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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.