Neverending Covid-19 Coronavirus

So potentially big news on the treatment front out of Canada. The colchicine double-blind clinical trial was successful. This would be the first oral treatment for COVID. Just getting press releases so far. Waiting to see if a pre-print gets published and what the reaction of the scientific community is about this, but this seems very promising.

In 4,159 patients proven to be diagnosed with COVID-19 using a PCR test, colchicine resulted in a 25% decrease in hospitalizations, a 50% decrease in the use of ventilation and a decrease in deaths by 44%. “It’s a major breakthrough,” says Dr Late.

Colchicine works to prevent the “major inflammatory storm” that affects the lungs and can send patients to hospital.

Colchicine is an anti-inflammatory drug commonly used in cardiology. It was discovered in the 19th century and initially used against gout. Some of its advantages are its low cost and few side effects.

thecanadian.news

Number of Covid-19 cases in Mexico as of October 23, 2021 - The Canadian

CORONAVIRUS INFOGRAPHIC DATA Coronavirus in Mexico: The Ministry of Health presented its daily technical report on the progress of the pandemic in the country, in which it detailed the number of new Covid-19 infections and the number of deaths. Reference-www.eleconomista.com.mx thecanadianThe...
thecanadian.news thecanadian.news
 
Turbo said:
So potentially big news on the treatment front out of Canada. The colchicine double-blind clinical trial was successful. This would be the first oral treatment for COVID. Just getting press releases so far. Waiting to see if a pre-print gets published and what the reaction of the scientific community is about this, but this seems very promising.

In 4,159 patients proven to be diagnosed with COVID-19 using a PCR test, colchicine resulted in a 25% decrease in hospitalizations, a 50% decrease in the use of ventilation and a decrease in deaths by 44%. “It’s a major breakthrough,” says Dr Late.

Colchicine works to prevent the “major inflammatory storm” that affects the lungs and can send patients to hospital.

Colchicine is an anti-inflammatory drug commonly used in cardiology. It was discovered in the 19th century and initially used against gout. Some of its advantages are its low cost and few side effects.

thecanadian.news

Number of Covid-19 cases in Mexico as of October 23, 2021 - The Canadian

CORONAVIRUS INFOGRAPHIC DATA Coronavirus in Mexico: The Ministry of Health presented its daily technical report on the progress of the pandemic in the country, in which it detailed the number of new Covid-19 infections and the number of deaths. Reference-www.eleconomista.com.mx thecanadianThe...
thecanadian.news thecanadian.news
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When I had pericarditis (inflammation of the sac around my heart) a couple of years ago, this was the medication that helped me recover when they prescribed it to me after a second hospital stay.
 
Just saw a segment on Mask Wearing by the Weather Channel.

According to a new survey, only 83% of Americans agree that wearing masks are necessary. However, in a study conducted from March 2020 though January 2021 shows that less than 40% of Americans are actually wearing masks at the proper time or wearing them properly.

One of the bullet points was many Americans are only wearing them in places where they are required. Such as the grocery store, gym and what not. But not wearing them in social interactions outside of the home. This includes dinner parties, activities with friends or family members outside of your own household or going to places like bars in states that do not have a mask mandate.

More than half of Americans are also wearing the mask incorrectly. Not covering up their nose, wearing it around their chin or have a mask that is too loose fitting to be effective.



One thing I noticed right away from this segment is mandates. If not required and left to personal choice, most Americans will not comply.
 
www.cnn.com

CDC reviewing new data that suggests coronavirus variant identified in UK could be more deadly

The coronavirus pandemic has brought countries to a standstill. Meanwhile, vaccinations have already started in some countries as cases continue to rise. Follow here for the latest.
www.cnn.com www.cnn.com

2021 better not be heading in the same direction as 2020.

Not only is the UK variant more, it may be more deadly.

So most of the new variants detected are appearing to be more contagious. I hope they are all not more deadly as well. Especially ones like the South African strain which initial reports say the vaccine may not be effective on.
 
www.kmov.com

News

St. Louis, Missouri breaking and local news updates from KMOV News 4
www.kmov.com www.kmov.com

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (KCTV/KMOV) -- The Missouri House of Representatives has canceled next week's session due to rising COVID-19 cases two days after voting down a measure requiring masks and social distancing.

Missouri House Speaker Rob Vescovo, Missouri House Speaker Pro Tem John Wiemann and other leadership members in the House issued a joint statement on Thursday evening.

"Due to the rising number of COVID-19 cases in the building, we are exercising an abundance of caution to protect members, staff and visitors by canceling session next week," the statement reads. "Our goal is to return to work the following week."
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Pfizer has pressured regulators to declare its vials contain an “extra” dose of the vaccine and will now count them in deliveries, after frontline health workers found they could dispense six shots from one vial, instead of five.
A spokeswoman for the pharma giant, Amy Rose, explained that while the company would “fulfill our supply commitments in line with our existing agreements,” she said that those deals are “based on delivery of doses” themselves, rather than vials, the New York Times reported on Friday.
When doctors found they were able to pull one last dose than intended from Pfizer’s vials, some believed it would mean the 100 million doses the company has pledged to the US by March could actually stretch much further. Pfizer soon dispelled that notion, however, successfully lobbying the FDA to officially designate the extra shot in a label change earlier this month. It now says the additional doses will count toward its existing contracts, meaning fewer vials will be delivered than were previously expected.

www.rt.com

No freebies! Pfizer to charge for ‘extra’ Covid-19 vaccine doses as doctors squeeze vials of every drop to inoculate more people

Pfizer has pressured regulators to declare its vials contain an “extra” dose of the vaccine and will now count them in deliveries, after frontline health workers found they could dispense six shots from one vial, instead of five.
www.rt.com www.rt.com
 
Very long article, but it is very good. Talks about the new variants of the virus and how it's adapted to fool our immune system better.

A variant of the coronavirus from Brazil also popped up in Japan in early January. Evidence is also mounting that the Brazilian and South African mutants can infect people who have already had COVID-19.

That would mean that there is either no immunity to the new variants, or that such immunity is weak. Future research will have to determine whether that is the case. No one knows yet what the implications of the mutations are.

What we do know, though, is that the combination of the one common mutation together with certain other changes in the genome has produced variants that are highly contagious. Is this the coronavirus of the future? Will each variant now mutate in ways to make it more contagious, creating deadly perfection?

"I think that the virus is just finding its optimal configuration”, says Cillian De Gascun, director of the National Virus Reference Laboratory at University College Dublin. That the same mutation occurred in all the variants independently of each other suggests "that this is a configuration that the virus likes,” says De Gascun. "And there's no reason to believe that it won't become more efficient over time.”

Can We Stop a Super Coronavirus?
 
CNN had an opinion piece this morning that Biden is facing possibly the most crucial time of his presidency within his first week.

America is divided, and he needs work on united us. However, the push for an additional stimulus package and not bringing a quick end to COVID restrictions are doing the exact oposite.

Republicans are not on board with an additional stimulus package to increase stimulus payments by $1400. And they will fight it tooth and nail and democrats will have to force it through. Which will not look good to Republican Voters. They of course are fine when the Republicans play this game, but not when the Democrats do it.

When it comes to COVID, people want this to be over. They want life to return to normal. All restrictions on businesses and crowd sizes lifted. Any type of action prolonging the response to the pandemic with continuing restrictions, adding new restrictions and travel bans will not be popular. People just want this to end and go back to normal. And the honestly believe that we can go back to normal at the snap of our fingers. They don't think about the strain on the hospitals.
 
RenegadeMonster said:
Republicans are not on board with an additional stimulus package to increase stimulus payments by $1400. And they will fight it tooth and nail and democrats will have to force it through. Which will not look good to Republican Voters.
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Republican voters A) have already proven to be the minority across the board so those votes don't really matter? and B) aren't coming over to the other side anyway. The real question is how it plays with Democratic Voters.
 
debianlinux said:
Republican voters A) have already proven to be the minority across the board so those votes don't really matter? and B) aren't coming over to the other side anyway. The real question is how it plays with Democratic Voters.
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Republican VOTERS were largely FOR stimulus checks. Republican POLITICIANS are largely against stimulus checks.
As for the voters:
Around a third of registered voters in the U.S. (34%) identify as independents, while 33% identify as Democrats and 29% identify as Republicans, according to a Center analysis of Americans’ partisan identification based on surveys of more than 12,000 registered voters in 2018 and 2019.

Most independents in the U.S. lean toward one of the two major parties. When taking independents’ partisan leanings into account, 49% of all registered voters either identify as Democrats or lean to the party, while 44% identify as Republicans or lean to the GOP.
www.pewresearch.org

What the 2020 electorate looks like by party, race and ethnicity, age, education and religion

What does the 2020 electorate look like politically, demographically and religiously as the race enters its final days?
www.pewresearch.org www.pewresearch.org

One third of Americans are not registered as either party. Honestly, it's these hearts and minds that the dems really need to focus on. There is a large group of swing voters that have no party affiliation, which I think is a good thing. But this can complicate projections into the future (which again is fine with me). It's not whether a republican is going to come over to a side, it's whether the dems have enough of a salient point to get independent voters to vote for them.

The majority of the American people want more stimulus checks, higher minimum wages and medical insurance that is not tied to your employer. When you look at the people who don't, they are largely older and wealthier than most others. Republican voters that were less well off have supported stimulus checks. This is not a dem v. rep issue---it's a rich v. poor issue.

From Pew Research:
1611600086621.png

Following the passage of a second stimulus package in December in response to the impact of the coronavirus outbreak, 79% of U.S. adults say another economic assistance package will be necessary. Just 20% say another package will not be needed.

As was the case in opinions about the previous coronavirus aid package, higher-income adults – particularly higher-income Republicans – are less likely than those with lower family incomes to view more coronavirus aid as necessary.

www.pewresearch.org

Most Americans say another round of COVID-19 economic relief will be needed

Following the passage of a second stimulus package in December, 79% of U.S. adults say another economic assistance package will be necessary.
www.pewresearch.org www.pewresearch.org
 
RenegadeMonster said:
One thing I noticed right away from this segment is mandates. If not required and left to personal choice, most Americans will not comply.
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I would am curious about the use/compliance/recidivism rates with condoms and STDs -- at least in the '90s it was a concerted "WRAP IT UP OR YOU GET HERPAGONASYPHAIDS" that helped those stats improve. Which we definitely haven't been seeing that kind of media impact.
 
yukbon said:
I would am curious about the use/compliance/recidivism rates with condoms and STDs -- at least in the '90s it was a concerted "WRAP IT UP OR YOU GET HERPAGONASYPHAIDS" that helped those stats improve. Which we definitely haven't been seeing that kind of media impact.
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It's because we had and still have a CDC STI office that has a national strategy including PSAs. The CDC's pandemic response office isn't there anymore. The guy that was running it finally had enough of the Trump administration in 2018 and resigned. Instead of filling the position, the CDC didn't fill the position, got rid of the few other pandemic response team jobs, and stopped funding the office. We had no national plan for this because we had no national office with national guidance on pandemics.
 
Chicago Public Schools are supposed to go back to in person learning next week. However, the Chicago Teachers Union is refusing to go back saying conditions are not safe.

It will be interesting to see what happens here.

Biden signed an executive order yesterday to get kids back in the classroom as soon as possible. He says all the teachers he has spoken to want resume in person learning, they just want conditions to be safe.

The school districts are saying they have done everything possible to make the environment as safe as possible. Teachers disagree. Many schools don't have air circulation or air filtration like office buildings.
 

As first reported by San José Spotlight on Friday, Los Gatos Union School District Superintendent Paul Johnson emailed teachers and staff telling them they can sign up to get a vaccine at Good Samaritan at the behest of the hospital’s chief operating officer.

Educators are not yet allowed to receive vaccines in Santa Clara County. The county follows state guidelines for vaccine distribution and barely has enough doses to vaccinate health care workers and people 75 and older. Good Samaritan itself reported to the county it is only vaccinating health care workers due to the shortage in vaccine supply.

Yet the staff at the Los Gatos school district, one of the most affluent in the county, was allowed to skip the line and sign up for vaccines as a reward for helping raise money for meals for hospital workers. Johnson encouraged teachers and staff to pretend to be health care workers when they sign up for a vaccine appointment — at the behest of the hospital’s top leadership.
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This is an interesting article. Basically, we should have ratcheted up a response the minute we had our first asymptomatic case. It was us largely ignoring that asymptomatic case spread was possible that lead us to where we are now.

Jan. 24 marks the one-year anniversary of a momentous but largely unnoticed event in the history of the Covid-19 pandemic: the first published report of an individual infected with the novel coronavirus who never developed symptoms. This early confirmation of asymptomatic infection should have set off alarm bells and profoundly altered our response to the gathering storm. But it did not. One year later we are still paying the price for this catastrophic blunder.

At least one of three people infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, do not develop symptoms. That’s the conclusion of a review we just published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. It summarizes the results of 61 studies with more than 1.8 million people.

But during much of the pandemic, fierce resistance — and even outright denialism — in acknowledging this not-so-typical disease pattern led to ineffective testing practices that allowed the pandemic to spin out of control.

www.statnews.com

The day we let Covid-19 spin out of control

There is no time machine that would allow us to return to January 24, 2020. But it is not too late to recognize the blunder about asymptomatic infection and aggressively begin testing practices to help end the pandemic.
www.statnews.com www.statnews.com
 
And now a study telling us what we already knew:

We find that policies that limit evictions are found to reduce COVID-19 infections by 3.8% and reduce deaths by 11%. Moratoria on utility disconnections reduce COVID-19 infections by 4.4% and mortality rates by 7.4%. Had such policies been in place across all counties (i.e., adopted as federal policy) from early March 2020 through the end of November 2020, our estimated counterfactuals show that policies that limit evictions could have reduced COVID-19 infections by 14.2% and deaths by 40.7%. For moratoria on utility disconnections, COVID-19 infections rates could have been reduced by 8.7% and deaths by 14.8%. Housing precarity policies that prevent eviction and utility disconnections have been effective mechanisms for decreasing both COVID-19 infections and deaths.

 
So, I have a coworker that is pretty upset about the vaccine. According to the research he's done, 'they' are injecting software into us, and that the goal is to eventually turn us all into part computer/part human. Each year the vaccine will be a system update. I can't believe he believes it...and yet he's firmly planted on this stance.

And, at least half my workplace is now proudly anti-vax, and they make sure everyone knows it.
 
RenegadeMonster said:
Chicago Public Schools are supposed to go back to in person learning next week. However, the Chicago Teachers Union is refusing to go back saying conditions are not safe.

It will be interesting to see what happens here.

Biden signed an executive order yesterday to get kids back in the classroom as soon as possible. He says all the teachers he has spoken to want resume in person learning, they just want conditions to be safe.

The school districts are saying they have done everything possible to make the environment as safe as possible. Teachers disagree. Many schools don't have air circulation or air filtration like office buildings.
Click to expand...
From what I heard yesterday, it seems like they want the option to keep teaching virtual until they can get vaccinated, which I think Illinois just started allowing teachers to do. Seems reasonable to me.

My wife doesn't have a union and we can only hope they start letting teachers get vaccinated soon.
 
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