Lunchtime pandemic reading.
Standard disclaimer: this is a roundup of informative pieces I've read that interest me on the severity of the crisis and how to manage it. I am not a qualified medical expert in ANY sense; at best I am reasonably well-read laity. ALWAYS prioritize advice from qualified healthcare experts over some person on Facebook.
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Protests are thus far not associated with spikes in COVID-19. "When tens of thousands of people hit the streets protesting the police killing of George Floyd, many worried that the crowds—often too dense to allow the recommended 6 feet of social distancing—would spark a new wave of COVID-19 cases. Yet in New York, city and state officials tell me, there have been no spikes of the illness.
Nor have there been sudden surges in several other cities where large demonstrations were held, including Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed and the first protests erupted, and Philadelphia. Spikes have occurred elsewhere—especially Texas, Arizona, Florida, and California—but they coincided with the reopening of bars, restaurants, and other indoor establishments, making it hard to trace the upticks to the protests.
The absence of surges in the cities with massive demonstrations but few other large gatherings has taken many officials and health analysts by surprise. However, as they’ve examined the data and the video footage, one thing has clarified matters, to an extent: A large percentage of the protesters wore masks."
Source: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/06/protests-covid-outdoor-masks.html
Commentary: If people can gather en masse and be safe because they're wearing masks, there's no excuse for the rest of us to not be wearing masks.
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Will summer slow COVID19? "Leaving aside the promise of a miracle, it did seem that any spring or summer slowdown could only help to mitigate the damage, overall. At the very least, it might flatten out the curve (remember that?) and help preserve the healthcare infrastructure.
But now that we’re on the cusp of summer, and that hoped-for seasonality could be ready to kick in, its implications no longer seem so rosy. In the longer view—looking ahead to fall and winter, too, and then to 2021—this pattern of infectivity could make the virus even more destructive than we thought. If sunlight and humidity do indeed slow its spread, they won’t knock it out completely in the next few months; and that means we should expect a rebound down the line. What’s more, epidemiologists suggest this down-and-up won’t cancel out and be a wash: In fact, the exponential bounceback in the winter would likely overshadow any slight deceleration that happened in June, July and August. That would be very, very bad.
The fact that influenza would also strike in winter adds to the concern. It’s not much fun to imagine what a rise in flu and Covid-19 cases would look like if they arrived in concert. Hospitals are stretched to the limits to accommodate even one of these outbreaks. And if the two pathogens can co-infect individuals, that would make the coming season much more deadly, still."
Source: https://www.wired.com/story/if-the-coronavirus-slows-this-summer-it-may-be-time-to-worry/
Commentary: Here's the worst case scenario, from my perspective. Active hurricane season taps out disaster budgets. General public in America simply ignores the pandemic and hopes it goes away but takes no precautions at all. Economy takes a hit and joblessness increases in August as many programs end, which removes health insurance for more people. Then we see a double hit of influenza and COVID-19 in the fall and winter. That's the recipe for disaster. How probable is it? I don't know, but it's not unreasonable. We're already there on some measures, like the lunatic governor of Nebraska telling local governments they won't receive aid if they require people to wear masks.
Source: https://www.omaha.com/news/state_and_regional/ricketts-tells-local-governments-they-wont-get-federal-covid-19-money-if-they-require-masks/article_d15459b9-26df-527e-9899-9f579a3d8597.html
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Who is testing enough? "On May 12, 2020 the World Health Organization (WHO) advised governments that before reopening, rates of positivity in testing (ie, out of all tests conducted, how many came back positive for COVID-19) of should remain at 5% or lower for at least 14 days.
If a positivity rate is too high, that may indicate that the state is only testing the sickest patients who seek medical attention, and is not casting a wide enough net to know how much of the virus is spreading within its communities. A low rate of positivity in testing data can be seen as a sign that a state has sufficient testing capacity for the size of their outbreak and is testing enough of its population to make informed decisions about reopening. Which U.S. states are testing enough to meet the WHO’s goal?
18 states out of 50 are not testing enough."
Source: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/testing-positivity
Commentary: Who's not testing? OK, IN, SD, LA, IA, MD, NE, MS, AR, FL, GA, NC, TX, UT, AL, AZ, SC, PR. Who's got big outbreaks? Much of that list. That's not a coincidence. Wherever you live, continue to pressure your elected officials to not let up on testing.
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And we're losing control in those places. "As new coronavirus cases surge in several states across the American South and West, the hardest-hit areas are now “on the cusp of losing control,” former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb told CNBC on Thursday.
The coronavirus continues to infect about 20,000 people in the U.S. every day, though that national figure masks what’s occurring locally as the virus is driven down in cities like New York that were first hit and finds new communities to infect.
“The question is ‘can we keep this from getting out of control.’ This is a virus that wants to infect a very large portion of the population,” Gottlieb said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “They’re on the cusp of losing control of those outbreaks in certain parts of those states. Arizona, Houston, Austin, parts of Florida certainly look very concerning right now.”
“We expected cases to go up as we reengaged in social activity, but it’s gone up more than we predicted,” Gottlieb said. “Certain states have been slower to reopen. Other states have been much more aggressive. The states that were aggressive are the states where we’re seeing these outbreaks right now.”"
Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/18/coronavirus-parts-of-the-us-are-on-the-cusp-of-losing-control-gottlieb-says.html
Commentary: Astonishingly, we have somehow reduced public health to a political issue, and we will dearly pay the price for that lack of judgement. A virus cares nothing for our beliefs, our opinions, or our political alignments. It just does what viruses do: infects, injures, and sometimes kills us. This will have far-reaching impacts on the United States as a whole, from citizens being barred from traveling abroad to trade to the cost of healthcare.
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Jobless claims at 1.5 million. "Weekly jobless claims stayed above 1 million for the 13th consecutive week as the coronavirus pandemic continued to hammer the U.S. economy.
First-time claims totaled 1.5 million last week, higher than the 1.3 million that economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been expecting. The government report’s total was 58,000 lower than the previous week’s 1.566 million, which was revised up by 24,000.
The elevated claims number persists even as all states have reopened to varying degrees and nonfarm payrolls grew by 2.5 million in May. Before the coronavirus, the record for a single week was 695,000 in September 1982.
Extended unemployment benefits that are providing many workers $600 above what they normally would receive are scheduled to run out at the end of July. Congress is working on an extension of the program put into place as the pandemic hit."
Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/18/weekly-jobless-claims.html
Commentary: Anyone with working eyes and a basic understanding of trends can see there is no bounceback, no V-shaped recovery. The jobless claims are following a logistic curve perfectly, which means we'll be at or above 1 million claims a week for quite some time. Plan accordingly.
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A reminder of the simple daily habits we should all be taking.
1. Wash/sanitize your hands every time you are in or out of your home for any reason. Consider also spraying the bottoms of your shoes with a general disinfectant (alcohol/bleach/peroxide) when you return home. Remember that cleaners are never to be ingested.
2. Wear gloves and a mask when out of your home. Consider wearing a face shield if you can't breathe at all through a mask.
3. Stay home as much as possible. Minimize your contact with others and maintain physical distance of at LEAST 6 feet / 2 meters. Avoid indoor places as much as you can.
4. Get your personal finances in order now. Cut all unnecessary costs.
5. Replenish your supplies as you use them. Avoid reducing your stores to pre-pandemic levels in case an outbreak causes unexpected supply chain disruptions.
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Common misinformation debunked!
There is no genomic evidence at all that COVID-19 arrived before 2020 in the United States and therefore no hidden herd immunity:
Source:
There is no evidence SARS-CoV-2 was engineered, nor that it escaped a lab somewhere.
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/01/29/experts-debunk-fringe-theory-linking-chinas-coronavirus-weapons-research/
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/05/anthony-fauci-no-scientific-evidence-the-coronavirus-was-made-in-a-chinese-lab-cvd/
There is no evidence a flu shot increases your COVID-19 risk.
Source: https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/no-evidence-that-flu-shot-increases-risk-of-covid-19/
Source: https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciaa626/5842161
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A common request I'm asked is who I follow. Here's a public Twitter list of many of the sources I read.
https://twitter.com/i/lists/1260956929205112834
This list is biased by design. It is limited to authors who predominantly post in the English language. It is heavily biased towards individual researchers and away from institutions. It is biased towards those who publish or share research, data, papers, etc. I have made an attempt to follow researchers from different countries, and also to make the list reasonably gender-balanced, because multiple, diverse perspectives on research data are essential.