Written by Steven Hansen
The U.S. pandemic deaths again have increased today. Following is a set of interactive graphs and tables for the world and individual states – as well as today’s headlines which include the question of whether coronavirus can be transmitted sexually; and the malaria drug does not seem to work on patients with coronavirus.
Several selections today in the coronavirus news have been contributed by Roger Erickson, GEI author and Biology Entrepreneur.
Coronavirus News You May Have Missed
Trump valet tests positive – but not Trump – USA Today
A member of the U.S. military who serves in the White House has tested positive for the coronavirus, but President Donald Trump has since tested negative, the White House said in a statement. CNN reported that the person served as a valet for the president and that the individual was tested after starting to exhibit symptoms Wednesday morning.
“We were recently notified by the White House Medical Unit that a member of the United States Military, who works on the White House campus, has tested positive for coronavirus,” White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said. “The president and the vice president have since tested negative for the virus and they remain in great health.”
Should I get a coronavirus antibody test? – CBS News
Many people who got sick in recent months but didn’t get tested for COVID-19 have been left wondering whether they had the coronavirus. Many others who didn’t get sick could have also been infected with the virus and not even known it. People in both groups are now looking to antibody tests for possible answers.
… However, according to CBS News medical contributor Dr. David Agus, many antibody tests on the market right now are “advertising claims that make no sense.” He said that too little is known about the coronavirus to rely on the results of most of the current antibody tests.
Tests with higher rates of false positive results could mistakenly lead people to believe they have antibodies when they really don’t. False negatives could lead people to believe they don’t have antibodies when they actually do.
“Aside from this latest FDA-approved antibody test that we’re hearing about that is highly accurate, I should also point out that we don’t even know if most of the other hundred or so tests that are out there on the market are even close to being that accurate,” Underleider said.
[editor’s note: forget the antibody tests, scientists don’t know whether people who have survived COVID-19 are immune from the virus.]
Hydroxychloroquine fails to help hospitalized coronavirus patients in US funded study – CNBC
Hydroxychloroquine, a decades-old malaria drug touted by President Donald Trump, didn’t appear to help hospitalized patients with Covid-19, according to a new observational study published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health and conducted by researchers at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City, looked at 1,376 consecutive patients who showed up at the emergency room with symptoms of coronavirus.
Nearly 60%, or 811 of the patients, received the drug within 48 hours and were found, on average, to be more severely ill than those who didn’t receive the drug, the researchers said. They said the study’s findings didn’t find any potential benefit or harm from the drug, adding a rigorous, randomized clinical trial is needed.
Coronavirus found in patients’ semen in small Chinese study – AP
The virus that causes COVID-19 can be found in semen, Chinese researchers report in a small study that doesn’t address whether sexual transmission is possible.
Doctors detected the virus in semen from six of 38 men hospitalized with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19. Four were still very sick with the disease while two were recovering.
The report from Shangqiu Municipal Hospital in China was published Thursday in JAMA Network Open.
There was no long-term follow-up so it is not known how long the virus may remain in semen or if men can spread it to their partners during sex.
Trump administration shelves CDC guide to reopening country – AP
A report by a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention team meant to give advice to local leaders deciding when and how to reopen public places during the coronavirus pandemic has been shelved by the Trump administration, the Associated Press reported Thursday. The CDC report was supposed to be published last Friday, but agency scientists were told the guidance “would never see the light of day,” according to a CDC official cited by the AP. The AP says the guide was researched and written to help faith leaders, business owners, educators and state and local officials as they begin to reopen.
A MULTI-RISK SIR MODEL WITH OPTIMALLY TARGETED LOCKDOWN – Massachusetts Institute of Technology
We develop a multi-risk SIR model (MR-SIR) where infection, hospitalization and fatality rates vary between groups-in particular between the “young”, “the middle-aged” and the “old”. Our MR-SIR model enables a tractable quantitative analysis of optimal policy similar to those already developed in the context of the homogeneous-agent SIR models. For baseline parameter values for the COVID-19 pandemic applied to the US, we find that optimal policies differentially targeting risk/age groups significantly outperform optimal uniform policies and most of the gains can be realized by having stricter lockdown policies on the oldest group. For example, for the same economic cost (24.3% decline in GDP), optimal semi-targeted or fully-targeted policies reduce mortality from 1.83% to 0.71% (thus, saving 2.7 million lives) relative to optimal uniform policies. Intuitively, a strict and long lockdown for the most vulnerable group both reduces infections and enables less strict lockdowns for the lower-risk groups. We also study the impacts of social distancing, the matching technology, the expected arrival time of a vaccine, and testing with or without tracing on optimal policies. Overall, targeted policies that are combined with measures that reduce interactions between groups and increase testing and isolation of the infected can minimize both economic losses and deaths in our model.
Container cargo imbalance from COVID-19 deepens – JOC
Forwarders and insurers warn that cargo flows are becoming more uneven across key markets as a natural container imbalance on headhaul and backhaul trades is exacerbated by extensive blank sailings from carriers trying to match capacity with declining demand.
Stay-at-home orders and the closure of most retail outlets across Europe and North America since early March to limit the spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has erased consumer demand and stopped manufacturing in many parts of the world. But cargo has been steadily building up in warehouses, port terminals, and inland depots during the lockdowns, according to forwarder association FIATA and insurer TT Club.
“These are primarily non-essential products, for which there is little demand as retail outlets are closed or supplies for production lines that are either static or at reduced capacity,” TT Club noted in a statement this week.
The insurer said 90 percent of the UK warehousing capacity was full, with the UK Warehousing Association (UKWA) forecasting that all available space will be gone in two weeks. TT Club gave as an example a UK high-street fashion retailer that had been forced to lease 40 percent more storage than normal to accommodate the arrival of products it would be unable to sell.
Planned_demic – YouTube
Humanity is imprisoned by a killer pandemic. People are being arrested for surfing in the ocean and meditating in nature. Nations are collapsing. Hungry citizens are rioting for food. The media has generated so much confusion and fear that people are begging for salvation in a syringe. Billionaire patent owners are pushing for globally mandated vaccines. Anyone who refuses to be injected with experimental poisons will be prohibited from travel, education and work. No, this is not a synopsis for a new horror movie. This is our current reality. https://plandemicmovie.com/ [editor’s note: use this link if YouTube takes this video down for the 99th time]
[editor’s note: see next article]
Facebook, YouTube and other platforms are struggling to remove new pandemic conspiracy video – CNBC
Social media networks are working to remove or stop the spread of a viral pandemic conspiracy video that contains false, misleading or unproven claims about Covid-19.
The roughly 26-minute “Plandemic Movie” video claims to be an excerpt of a larger documentary to be released this summer and contains claims about the origins of the virus and how it spreads. The video tries to argue that the coronavirus pandemic was created to make profits off vaccines. Among other claims that defy advice of medical experts, it suggests that sheltering in place harms consumers’ immune systems and that masks can make people sicker.
To prevent the next pandemic, it’s the legal wildlife trade we should worry about – National Geographic
At airports, seaports, and land border crossings in 2019, $4.3 billion of legal wildlife and wildlife products was imported into the U.S. Approximately 200 million live animals are imported to the U.S. annually, according to a five-year trade report: 175 million fish for the aquarium trade, and 25 million animals comprised of an array of mammals, amphibians, birds, insects, reptiles, spiders, and more. On top of that, thousands of illegally traded shipments of wildlife are intercepted each year. In 2019 alone, the agency opened more than 10,000 illegal wildlife trade investigations.
But along with such a diversity of wildlife, a kaleidoscope of pathogens is also entering the country. My experience with the Fish and Wildlife Service, where I worked for 10 years, first as a wildlife inspector and most recently as a policy specialist regulating and managing the international wildlife trade, showed me that although many controls have been implemented to combat illegal trade, the diseases that simultaneously hitchhike into the country on legally imported wildlife continue to go largely unnoticed.
Importing any live animal brings with it the risk of disease-to native wildlife, to livestock, and to people. The outbreak of the novel coronavirus in China, theorized to have jumped from bats into humans and then spread at a wet market in Wuhan, possibly through an intermediate host, has shined a spotlight on how easily zoonotic diseases can emerge from wildlife. Indeed, an estimated 60 percent of known human diseases originated in animals, according to the World Organization for Animal Health.
Dr. Judy Mikovits talks about COVID-19 – YouTube
Notes on her video interview:
- had never heard that various viral pathogens alter DNA methylation/demethylation
- anyway, the nosocomial transmission of COVID-19 from asymptomatic to susceptible people was an unnecessary event. We don’t need another corona virus vaccine. We needed better avoidance & adaptation behavior!
- the current corona virus epidemic as a result of systemic toxicology? Interesting thesis. glutathione?
- underlying message: don’t cavalierly mess with highly evolved, complex systems
- e.g., interactions among all aspects of immune system
Emergence of genomic diversity and recurrent mutations in SARS-CoV-2 – Science Direct
- Phylogenetic estimates support that the COVID-2 pandemic started sometimes around 6 October 2019-11 December 2019, which corresponds to the time of the host-jump into humans.
- The diversity of SARS-CoV-2 strains in many countries recapitulates its full global diversity, consistent with multiple introductions of the virus to regions throughout the world seeding local transmission events.
- 198 sites in the SARS-CoV-2 genome appear to have already undergone recurrent, independent mutations based on a large-scale analysis of public genome assemblies.
- Detected recurrent mutations may indicate ongoing adaptation of SARS-CoV-2 to its novel human host.
- Monitoring the build-up and patterns of genetic diversity in SARS-CoV-2 has potential to inform targets for drug and vaccine development.
Mutations in SARS-CoV-2 offer insights into virus evolution – Phys.org
By analysing virus genomes from over 7,500 people infected with Covid-19, a UCL-led research team has characterised patterns of diversity of SARS-CoV-2 virus genome, offering clues to direct drugs and vaccine targets.
The study, led by the UCL Genetics Institute, identified close to 200 recurrent genetic mutations in the virus, highlighting how it may be adapting and evolving to its human hosts.
Researchers found that a large proportion of the global genetic diversity of SARS-CoV-2 is found in all hardest-hit countries, suggesting extensive global transmission from early on in the epidemic and the absence of single ‘Patient Zeroes’ in most countries.
Coronavirus Statistics For 07 May 2020
U.S. Only | Global | U.S Percentage of Total | ||||
Today | Cumulative | Today | Cumulative | Today | Cumulative | |
New Cases | 24,128 | 1,230,000 | 89,007 | 3,710,000 | 27.1% | 33.2% |
Deaths | 2,353 | 73,431 | 6,174 | 263,288 | 38.1% | 27.9% |
Mortality Rate | 9.0% | 5.9% | 7.4% | 7.1% | ||
total COVID-19 Tests per 1,000 people | 0.78 | 22.79 |
Today’s Posts On Econintersect Showing Impact Of The Pandemic With Hyperlinks
March 2020 Headline Consumer Credit Shows A Coronavirus Decline
Amid The COVID-19 Outbreak, Consumers Temper Spending Outlook
Household Spending Expectations Decline in April 2020
These People Are Still Stuck On A Cruise Ship At Sea
1Q2020 Preliminary Headline Productivity Hit By The Coronavirus
02 May 2020 Initial Unemployment Claims 3,169,000 This Week
April 2020 Job Cuts Break Single Month Record
Documentary Of The Week: Spanish Flu Of 1918
The Fed Is Permanently Stuck At Zero
Irony: Healthcare Sector Hurts The Economy
Report On COVID-19 Human Costs And Economic Damage
Pacific Governments Accused Of Using Coronavirus Crisis As Cover For Media Crackdown
Coronavirus INTERACTIVE Charts
include($_SERVER[‘DOCUMENT_ROOT’].’/pages/coronavirus.htm’); ?>
Analyst Opinion of Coronavirus Data
There are several takeaways that need to be understood when viewing coronavirus statistical data:
- The global counts are suspect for a variety of reasons including political. Even the U.S. count has issues as it is possible that as much as half the population has had coronavirus and was asymptomatic. It would be a far better metric using a random sampling of the population weekly. In short, we do not understand the size of the error in the tracking numbers.
- Just because some of the methodology used in aggregating the data in the U.S. is flawed – as long as the flaw is uniformly applied – you establish a baseline. This is why it is dangerous to compare two countries as they likely use different methodologies to determine who has (and who died) from coronavirus.
- COVID-19 and the flu are different but can have similar symptoms. For sure, COVID-19 so far is much more deadly than the flu. [click here to compare symptoms]
- From an industrial engineering point of view, one can argue that it is best to flatten the curve only to the point that the health care system is barely able to cope. This solution only works if-and-only-if one can catch this coronavirus once and develops immunity. In the case of COVID-19, herd immunity may need to be in the 80% to 85% range. WHO warns that few have developed antibodies to COVID-19. At this point, herd immunity does not look like an option.
- Older population countries will have a higher death rate.
- There are at least 8 strains of the coronavirus. New York may have a deadlier strain imported from Europe, compared to less deadly viruses elsewhere in the United States.
- Each publication uses different cutoff times for its coronavirus statistics. Our data uses 11:00 am London time. Also, there is an unexplained variation in the total numbers both globally and in the U.S.
- The real question remains if the U.S. is over-reacting to this virus. The following graphic from the CDC puts the annual flu burden in perspective [click on image to enlarge].
What we do not know about the coronavirus [actually there is little scientifically proven information]. Most of our knowledge is anecdotal, from studies with limited subjects, or from studies without peer review.
- Is social distancing at 6 feet correct? Some are saying 4 meters (13 feet). And what is the correct social distance if one rides a bike?
- Will warm weather and higher humidity slow the coronavirus spread? Will September see another spike in cases? Next Winter may see more cases than seen previously.
- Should we decontaminate products (such as food) that are brought into the house?
- Does one develop immunity after recovering from coronavirus?
- Is COVID-19 mutating? How will this impact the ability to create immunization or even immunity?
- Are ventilators damaging patients – should oxygen be used instead?
- The U.S. outsourced bat virus research to Wuhan after the U.S. shut down its testing due to containment issues.
The bottom line is that COVID-19 so far has been shown to be much more deadly than the data on the flu. Using CDC data, the flu has a mortality rate between 0.06 % and 0.11 % Vs. the coronavirus which to date has a mortality rate of over 5 % – which makes it between 45 and 80 times more deadly. The reason for ranges:
Because influenza surveillance does not capture all cases of flu that occur in the U.S., CDC provides these estimated ranges to better reflect the larger burden of influenza.
There will be a commission set up after this pandemic ends to find fault [it is easy to find fault when a once-in-a-lifetime event occurs] and to produce recommendations for the next time a pandemic happens. Those that hate President Trump will conclude the virus is his fault. The most important issue will be an analysis of whether the federal government took a strong enough lead in dealing with the pandemic.
include(“/home/aleta/public_html/files/ad_openx.htm”); ?>