I really feel when all is said and done, it will be seen that our tendency to use flu our model misdirected us in a lot of ways. It made sense to use flu. It’s the best model we have of a global pandemic in the modern Era. But COVID is so different. It doesn’t spread like flu, in several different ways. The vulnerable populations are different. It’s may well not really be appropriate to see it as a respiratory infection. The progression, taking weeks to kill, is different. We used the flu playbook, as the only one we had, and it led us astray.
I think if there’s anything to the bradykinin ideas, that would be another way that flu sent us on the wrong path: the flu of 1918 turned out to have cytotine storm as It’smost deadly element, and we focused on that.
In this case, MB would be acting as a nitric oxide synthase inhibitor (which I just learned, not my field). Block nitric oxide production, block vasodilation. Huh.
These pathways seriously overlap because they’re both involved in inflammation. I suspect for very sick people, you can have both storms going on at the same time. Reminds me of when trauma or sepsis patients have disseminated intravascular coagulation. They’re blood starts clotting all over the place within vessels. As feedback (and running out of clotting factors), they start bleeding. Apparently, it’s a major clusterfuck to treat. Just give them blood and cross your fingers. This seems to be what’s happening with severe covid patients. Cross your fingers.
Btw, another paper came out about steroid therapy. Still looks like the best treatment we have so far.
Right, but even though transmission is respiratory , like flu, there are so many critical differences:
Surface contagion is less important; droplet contagion more so
Children are amplifiers of flu, but not of COVID
Fever is a pretty effective early indication of a person being contagious with flu; not COVID
Flu is pretty consistently contagious across those who have it; COVID has super-spreaders and non-spreaders
In each of those cases, we took flu precautions because that was the best model we had, and it led to incorrect approaches. And even now, the idea that it is “like flu” is so embedded in popular thinking that we continue to deal with this mindset.
Panama continues to improve. I think we’re not out of the woods, but I hope we’re over the hump.
The seven-day average for new cases has dropped to around 700, after stubbornly hanging at around 1000 until mid-August. The R0 is now below 1.00 for Panama City metro, although it’s still higher than that in some of the poorer suburbs.
The government has announced a plan for gradually re-opening over the next month. On Monday, private construction projects will be permitted to resume. On September 14, they will lift the movement restrictions by gender, and curfew will begin at 11 PM instead of 7 PM. This will be an enormous relief. (Total curfew will remain on Sunday, I’m not sure why. They could be worried about church services.)
On September 28, restaurants can re-open for in-person service. Also museums and visitor centers, which will begin to put me back in business. On October 12, international flights can resume, and hotels can re-open.
All this depends on keeping the infection rate low. We’ll see how it goes.
…what I stated was reasonable, very true, based on actual knowledge, and I literally posted information for your “education.”
Your “average at best” claim is based on information from March. This was pointed out to you not only by myself but by another poster as well. Yet instead of withdrawing the claim you’ve just doubled down. Why is that?
Of course its a “gotcha.” You’ve literally accused me of making something up and that I had no factual basis for my claims. You’ve all but called me a liar. But I provided a cite. The article was written by Matt Nippert, probably New Zealand’s most distinguished investigative reporter, and Keith Ng, the statistician who broke the “MSD Leaky Servers” story. It was a reputable cite and the information in the article was rock-solid.
Let’s look at one of the data-points that they used. The unemployment rate in NZ in November 2019 was 4.2%. Compare that to the June quarter in 2020 and the unemployment rate is 4.0%.
In the US the unemployment rate in November 2019 was 3.5%. In June of 2020 the rate was 11.1%. In Australia unemployment was 5.2% in November last year and was at 11.2 in June 2020. You can dig deeper into the stats if you like. But this is only a single metric. There are more, they were listed in the Spinoff article, you can do your own research. I have no reason to indulge somebody who has accused me of “making it up when you stated something as fact.”
People have lost their jobs in New Zealand. But we managed to maintain continuity of employment through lockdown through the wage-subsidy (provided to both employees and small business owners like myself) that meant when we came out of lockdown businesses were able to hit the ground running. Spending matched spending last year. This is not an insignificant data-point.
Today’s update from NZ: we had two deaths from Covid-19 in the last 24 hours. One of them was Dr Joe Williams, former Cook Islands PM. Three new cases today, 2 in the community and 1 in Managed Isolation. Two people in hospital, one in general and one in ICU.
Federal and state investigators raided a Pennsylvania nursing home Thursday where hundreds of residents and staff members tested positive for coronavirus and dozens have died, authorities said.
Men and women are assigned different days when they can leave the house for essential activities. Women have Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, while men have Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Nobody can go out on Sunday. However, for a couple of months they declared a total quarantine on Saturday as well, so men lost one of their shopping days. Until last week we were also restricted to two hours on the assigned day (or three, for people over 60) according to ID number. According to the rules, I wasn’t allowed to leave the house between 10 AM Thursday and 5 AM the following Tuesday. It was a complete pain in the ass. I don’t know what couples who weren’t living together had to do to see one another.
As of September 14, everybody will be able to go out from 5 AM-11 PM all day Monday-Saturday regardless of sex.
Do you think the curfew restrictions actually did anything positive? Because it seems like Panama has still been hit pretty hard, and those restrictions sound more draconian than anything I’ve noted from any other non-dictatorships
No, the movement restrictions were ridiculous. In some cases, they probably caused more crowding as people had to rush to go to the store during their limited hours. The evening curfew may have had some effect by preventing people from gathering to socialize. (Another stupid restriction they did away with several months ago was the “dry law” prohibiting the sale of alcohol.)
That was kind of what I thought. My condolences. Strict laws are hard enough to live with … strict laws that are counterproductive must make everyone want to punch a hole through the wall
The best thing is being able to exercise again. I usually walk for an hour in the evenings between 6 and 7 when it’s cool here. At first, my assigned hours were 11 AM-1 PM, when it’s brutally hot. I hated trying to walk then. But even later, when they were changed to 7-10 AM, unless I got out at 7 it would still be getting hot by the time I finished. Also, there often wasn’t enough time to both go to the store and exercise. So the restrictions were actually bad for my health.
Thank you for filling in my curiosity. It must be a nightmare trying to organize and get everything done in such short window-not much time for anything not strictly business.
I hope you are able to stay safe and have some time and freedom after your sacrifices. I will avoid saying anything snarky about my own continental United States.
so in this population, with their antibody tests used, not too much room for many antibody negative but specific T-cell positive (unlike the small study out of Sweden).
Also from the article:
Extrapolating to other populations might not be justified however.
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. @Banquet_Bear, I will limit my response to you to a short clarification: I do not believe or meant to imply that you lied. I believe that you honestly do not understand why what you stated as fact (New Zealand’s economy is doing better than comparable ones), is unsupported by what you cited (unemployment is not as bad as they had expected it was going to get) or the data that is currently available (but may and hopefully will be as newer reports get released). There is no utility in going back and forth over it, especially in a “breaking news” thread. Thank you for the article you provided. It was interesting.
…I will limit my response to any further responses you make in this thread: the implications of the words that you said were pretty fucking obvious.
And implying that I’m too stupid to understand what it is that I’m saying doesn’t help your case.
“Unemployment is not as bad as they had expected it to get” is completely unrelatedto my actual point: that the unemployment rate in NZ is considerably better than comparable countries like the US and Australia. That we can look at two separate benchmarks: from November 2019 and from June 2020 and we can see how Covid and the lockdowns have had significantly different impacts. The rate in NZ is almost identical to what it was pre-covid. But it doubled in Australia and it nearly tripled in the US. This supports my position that the New Zealand economy is doing better than comparable ones. There are more data-points. But I’m not going to chase after them for you when you’ve made it clear that even when I literally spell it out for you you are going to ignore it and present a strawman version of my point instead.
There would have been no back and forth over this at all if you had simply accepted my initial response in good faith. There was absolutely no reason at all to state that there was “no factual basis” for my claims. There was no basis at all for you to state that I “were making it up when you stated something as fact.” I answered your question because I assumed you were asking in good faith. I won’t make that mistake again.
At around 600 deaths per million you have Italy and the U.K. with contractions over 20% but also the U.S. and Sweden under 10%. You have the U.S. and Sweden with similar contractions as Denmark, Japan, and Australia, and better than Germany and Canada all with much better death rates. You’ve got to look to South Korea, Viet Nam, and China to find significantly less contraction Q2 than the U.S. and Sweden. It’s a squint to see that “appears”.
New Zealand is due to release their Q2 number mid month. Hopefully they will do much better than forecast.
One of them was Dr Joe Williams, former Cook Islands PM. Three new cases today, 2 in the community and 1 in Managed Isolation. Two people in hospital, one in general and one in ICU.