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pdq
30 year old Texas man dies after going to “Covid party”.

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“One of the things that was heart wrenching that he said to his nurse was, you know, I think I made a mistake.“

... “He didn’t really believe. He thought the disease was a hoax. He thought he was young and he was invincible and wouldn’t get affected by the disease,” Dr. Appleby said.

Darwinism at its finest.

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It is what it is.

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N-OS X-tasy!

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pdq
30 year old Texas man dies after going to “Covid party”.

Quote

“One of the things that was heart wrenching that he said to his nurse was, you know, I think I made a mistake.“

... “He didn’t really believe. He thought the disease was a hoax. He thought he was young and he was invincible and wouldn’t get affected by the disease,” Dr. Appleby said.

Darwinism at its finest.

It's a little hard-hearted, isn't it, to blame someone who had clearly been widely misled by friends, media, and others about the risks of this disease?

Have you had a family member or friend die young from cancer or another disease? Do you consider their deaths Darwinism at work? Technically, it is, right?

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rj
AKA
Vreemac, Moth of the Future

Besides, he didn’t come up with the idea that Covid was a hoax by himself.

I'm getting tired of this @#$%&.

Thank you.

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stephen
I'm getting tired of this @#$%&.

Thank you.

Right there with you.

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Roswell, GA (Atlanta suburb)

I don't know what's wrong with you guys, nowadays I can recite every line and song from Hamilton verbatim...


...and backwards!!

Another victim of note: Stephen Williams, long-term member of DC area Federal Court Of Appeals. Appointed by Reagan in 1986. He was 83.

His grandfather died in the flu pandemic of 1918.

Was almost attacked by a non-compliant (well, partially compliant) mask decliner today in the Quest waiting room. Three of us telling him to wear the mask vs. him. 65-75yo male. He made of move to come at me. I didn't reciprocate, but told him I would if needed. I suppose my 6'5 bald frame threw him off. I gave him the finger. Wouldn't listen to staff, either, but he was allowed to stay. He might've had a few good punches in him. The world is doomed.

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p8712
Was almost attacked by a non-compliant (well, partially compliant) mask decliner today in the Quest waiting room. Three of us telling him to wear the mask vs. him. 65-75yo male. He made of move to come at me. I didn't reciprocate, but told him I would if needed. I suppose my 6'5 bald frame threw him off. I gave him the finger. Wouldn't listen to staff, either, but he was allowed to stay. He might've had a few good punches in him. The world is doomed.

Complete @ssholes walk among us. Sorry to hear you ran into one.

“I wear a mask because I got out of the COVID ward three days ago and my doctors said I could be contagious for up to two weeks. And I don’t like wearing it either. But, hey, if you don’t think a mask is necessary, I’ll just take mine off.”

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Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where the weather is wonderful even when it isn't.

Quote
Speedy
“I wear a mask because I got out of the COVID ward three days ago and my doctors said I could be contagious for up to two weeks. And I don’t like wearing it either. But, hey, if you don’t think a mask is necessary, I’ll just take mine off.”

"Oh, the mask? I was told I might *cough* be contagious *cough* but really I feel *cough* pretty good. I'm with you. It's *cough* annoying, right? Ah ah-choo!"

[www.nytimes.com]

This Trawler’s Haul: Evidence That Antibodies Block the Coronavirus

Three crew members aboard were spared when the virus spread through the boat. They were the only ones who had antibodies at the beginning of the trip.

By Apoorva MandavilliAug. 19, 2020
The study was posted online last week and has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. Still, the finding set off optimistic chatter among scientists, who have been relying on monkey studies for evidence of antibodies’ potency.

“I thought it was very exciting — good enough news that I was telling my family about it,” said Michal Tal, an immunologist at Stanford University who was not involved in the work.

Several research teams have reported that an encounter with the virus triggers a robust immune response in most people, including in those who may have been only mildly ill. And the vaccine candidates now in trials also seem to elicit strong neutralizing antibodies, the kind that can block the virus.

But the amount of those antibodies needed to prevent the virus from returning is unclear. Scientists measure neutralizing antibodies in titers, an indication of their concentration in the blood.

The three sailors who remained protected from the virus had widely varying titers; two had only moderate quantities, a finding the researchers said was reassuring.

“People have been so worried about the titers, and the titers going down,” Dr. Alexander Greninger, a virologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, said.

The results indicate even moderate titers prevented reinfection in a situation in which exposure to the virus was high, he said: “These are attainable titers, right? Hopefully, it’ll be helpful to see, and makes make me very optimistic about the vaccines.”

The American Dynasty carried 113 men and nine women. All crew members had been tested for both virus and antibodies as part of a routine screening before setting sail. (The researchers did not have access to the results from two members.)

The trawler returned to shore after 18 days at sea when a crew member became ill enough to need hospitalization. The sailors were tested for the presence of virus and antibodies again and for up to 50 days after their return.

The three sailors confirmed to have neutralizing antibodies did not test positive for the virus during the course of the study; 103 of the remaining 117 became infected.

These numbers may be small, but they’re highly significant, Dr. Greninger said.

“A lot of people, when they see this are like, ‘Oh come on, it could be due to random chance,’” he said. In fact, the likelihood that the results are just chance is extremely low, he added.

Other experts agreed. “Just looking at the numbers, it becomes clear that it’s unlikely that all of these three people were protected by chance,” said Florian Krammer, an immunologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.

Dr. Krammer and his colleagues are tracking antibody levels in people who have recovered from the coronavirus once to see at what point they might be vulnerable to reinfection. The team began with people in New York, but the virus is circulating at such low levels in the city now that Dr. Krammer and his colleagues have had to expand the study to other locations.

Data from vaccine trials also will identify the antibody titers required to disarm the virus. But in the meantime, “this is the first evidence in humans,” Dr. Krammer said. “It made my weekend.”

The study raised other questions. Based on the Abbott Architect assay, six of the 120 people tested before the boat’s departure had antibodies to the virus indicating prior exposure.

But when the researchers reanalyzed those samples using more sophisticated tests, only three of the six were confirmed to have antibodies, suggesting that three test results were false positives.

The Abbott test is advertised as returning fewer than one false positive for every 100 samples. “That’s a little concerning that the Abbott may be a little less specific than we thought,” Dr. Tal said.

The researchers also looked at antibodies in the blood, as most teams do. But those levels may not be the same as those in the nose or in saliva, the two major entry points for infection, Dr. Tal added.

“We’re looking in the wrong place,” she said. “If we want to look at protection from reinfection, we need to be looking in the nose.”

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Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where the weather is wonderful even when it isn't.

We already know that measurable levels of antibodies in the blood suggest that the person who was tested had an infection within the last few weeks. These guys were all ill shortly before getting on the ship.

What we've learned is that immunity lasted a for a few weeks after an initial infection for three young and healthy guys. Not that immunity endures.

And we've learned that big pharma can't be trusted to self-regulate. If we had a robust FDA, Abbott would never have gotten away with pushing false numbers about the accuracy of their tests.

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Yeah, I’m Sarcany on this one. How do we know that the three (young, healthy) sailors didn’t contract Covid like anyone else on the ship, and just had an asymptomatic/mild case that was cleared by the time they got back to land for testing?

If they had shown they had antibodies _before_ they left (and ideally, had multiple negative antigen tests during their time of exposure at sea) that would be more convincing.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/20/2020 09:05AM by pdq.

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pdq
Yeah, I’m Sarcany on this one. How do we know that the three (young, healthy) sailors didn’t contract Covid like anyone else on the ship, and just had an asymptomatic/mild case that was cleared by the time they got back to land for testing?

If they had shown they had antibodies _before_ they left (and ideally, had multiple negative antigen tests during their time of exposure at sea) that would be more convincing.

“six of the 120 people tested before the boat’s departure had antibodies to the virus indicating prior exposure.

But when the researchers reanalyzed those samples using more sophisticated tests, only three of the six were confirmed to have antibodies”

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Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where the weather is wonderful even when it isn't.

Thanks, Speedy.

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Speedy
“six of the 120 people tested before the boat’s departure had antibodies to the virus indicating prior exposure.

But when the researchers reanalyzed those samples using more sophisticated tests, only three of the six were confirmed to have antibodies”

Right. I'm saying that those sailors had the illness and recovered within a few weeks *before* they got on the ship, otherwise the antibodies would not have been detectable.

So, we know that you might have some immunity for a few weeks after recovering from the illness. Which is helpful, but I'm pretty sure that most people already assumed that to be the case. This doesn't address whether the sailors will still be immune in six months.

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COVID discussion goes here? OK.

Today we learned through a reliable [teacher] source that our school district posited at a meeting with teachers that they've considered having students get up and move every 9 minutes during class.

Why?

The CDC broadly identified "risk" as being within 6ft of someone for 10 minutes.

In other news, TN schools won't have to disclose infection numbers or share identified cases ... but there's a catch. Schools that would prefer to "enjoy" such a privilege must compel students to wear masks, a practice largely unwanted. It's just one continual clusterfuck of incompetency and last-minute ineffective "plans" here.

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deckeda
COVID discussion goes here? OK.

Today we learned through a reliable [teacher] source that our school district posited at a meeting with teachers that they've considered having students get up and move every 9 minutes during class.

Why?

The CDC broadly identified "risk" as being within 6ft of someone for 10 minutes.

In other news, TN schools won't have to disclose infection numbers or share identified cases ... but there's a catch. Schools that would prefer to "enjoy" such a privilege must compel students to wear masks, a practice largely unwanted. It's just one continual clusterfuck of incompetency and last-minute ineffective "plans" here.

That would be hilarious if it weren’t so tragic.

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Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where the weather is wonderful even when it isn't.

Quote
Speedy

Quote
deckeda
COVID discussion goes here? OK.

Today we learned through a reliable [teacher] source that our school district posited at a meeting with teachers that they've considered having students get up and move every 9 minutes during class.

Why?

The CDC broadly identified "risk" as being within 6ft of someone for 10 minutes.

In other news, TN schools won't have to disclose infection numbers or share identified cases ... but there's a catch. Schools that would prefer to "enjoy" such a privilege must compel students to wear masks, a practice largely unwanted. It's just one continual clusterfuck of incompetency and last-minute ineffective "plans" here.

That would be hilarious if it weren’t so tragic.

Doesn't everyone know that the cooties clock resets to zero every time you move?

First covid-19 reinfection documented in Hong Kong, researchers say

The 33-year-old man tested positive after returning from Europe, but showed no symptoms the second time round.

[www.washingtonpost.com]

The study, by a team at the University of Hong Kong and accepted by the international medical journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, purports to be “the world’s first documentation” of a patient who recovered from covid-19 being reinfected. The fact that the man had no symptoms the second time suggests his immune system protected him from disease.

The findings have big potential implications for vaccine use, as well as policies based around the concept of herd immunity that presume those who recover from the virus are unlikely to be reinfected.

Robert Glatter, an emergency physician at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, said the research showed herd immunity from natural infection would be unlikely to eradicate the novel coronavirus. “The only safe and practical approach to achieve herd immunity is through vaccination," he said, although even those might not provide lifelong protection.

But immunologists also emphasized that the case was not a surprise, given what is already known about the response to the virus. “[T]his is a textbook example of how immunity should work,” Akiko Iwasaki, an immunology expert at Yale University, tweeted on Monday.

She noted the second infection was asymptomatic implying that the man’s immune response protected him from disease, although not reinfection, and calling its findings “no cause for alarm.”

The 33-year-old man, an unnamed IT worker from the city, was first hospitalized in late March after testing positive for covid-19. His symptoms included a fever and a cough.

The man was released from hospital in mid-April after testing negative for the virus and having no further symptoms. But after visiting Spain in August, he tested positive again upon returning to Hong Kong, despite appearing asymptomatic.

Physicians at first thought he might be a persistent carrier of the virus, the study’s authors write, but they sequenced the genome of his first and second infection to show the virus strains were different, indicating he had been reinfected.

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Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where the weather is wonderful even when it isn't.

It helps to be a city of young people. Let the young get sick and (mostly) recover and you will have herd immunity. Except the USA is a country of old people.

[www.washingtonpost.com]

The hospital system was coming apart. Coronavirus patients were being turned away. Basic necessities — beds, stretchers, oxygen — had run out. Ambulances had nowhere to take patients. People were dying at home. Gravediggers couldn’t keep up.

The human destruction in the Brazilian city of Manaus would be “catastrophic,” physician Geraldo Felipe Barbosa feared.

But then, unexpectedly, it started to let up ­— without the interventions seen elsewhere.

Hospitalizations of coronavirus patients plummeted in the state from a peak of more than 1,300 in May to fewer than 300 in August. Excess deaths in Manaus fell from around 120 per day to practically zero. The city closed its field hospital.

In a country devastated by the novel coronavirus, where more than 3.6 million people have been infected and over 114,000 killed, the reversal has stunned front-line doctors. Manaus never imposed a lockdown or other strict containment measures employed successfully in Asia and Europe. And what policies did exist, many people ignored.

In the spring, the Amazonian city became a global symbol of the devastation the disease can wreak in the developing world. But now it has returned to near normalcy — far sooner than many expected — and scientists and public health officials are asking why. The question is part of a broader debate among scientists and public health officials over the mechanics of herd immunity and the level of transmission that must be crossed before the disease starts to recede.

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Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where the weather is wonderful even when it isn't.

It may be that NYC (for instance) already has herd immunity. The antibody tests are notoriously unreliable, and there has been no significant effort at widespread public testing for immunity/exposure, only current infection.

‘The 1918 flu is still with us’: The deadliest pandemic ever is still causing problems today

[www.washingtonpost.com]

In 1918, a novel strand of influenza killed more people than the 14th century’s Black Plague.

At least 50 million people died worldwide because of that H1N1 influenza outbreak. The dead were buried in mass graves. In Philadelphia, one of the hardest-hit cities in the country, priests collected bodies with horse-drawn carriages.

In the middle of today’s novel coronavirus outbreak, some are turning to the conclusion of past pandemics to discern how and when life might “return to normal.” The Washington Post has received a few dozen questions from readers who want historical context for our current epidemic. But how did the deadliest pandemic ever recorded come to an end?

Over time, those who contracted the virus developed an immunity to the novel strand of influenza, and life returned to normal by the early 1920s, according to historians and medical experts. Reports at the time suggest the virus became less lethal as the pandemic carried on in waves.

But the strand of the flu didn’t just disappear. The influenza virus continuously mutated, passing through humans, pigs and other mammals. The pandemic-level virus morphed into just another seasonal flu. Descendants of the 1918 H1N1 virus make up the influenza viruses we’re fighting today.

“The 1918 flu is still with us, in that sense,” said Ann Reid, the executive director of the National Center for Science Education who successfully sequenced the genetic makeup of the 1918 influenza virus in the 1990s. “It never went away.”

It’s not clear exactly how or where the 1918 influenza outbreak began, but, at some point, the novel H1N1 virus passed from birds to humans.

From start to finish, the flu could burn through a town or city in a matter of weeks. Very few people had ever contended with a concoction of influenza like this before, which is why it was so potent, Reid said. In crowded cities, it wasn’t a matter of who got sick but, rather, when they would.

“Everybody got the flu, and everybody got it bad,” Reid said.

Even President Woodrow Wilson contracted the virus while negotiating the end of World War I.

Seasonal influenza tends to kill the oldest and youngest in a society but in 1918, roughly half of those who died were men and women in their 20s and 30s. People were getting sick and dying in the prime of their lives.

“As many as 8 to 10 percent of all young adults then living may have been killed by the virus,” historian John M. Barry wrote in his best-selling book “The Great Influenza.”

All the while, World War I continued. The bloody trench warfare across Europe left 8.5 million or more soldiers dead. The tight quarters during the war only aided the spread of the virus, said Howard Markel, a physician and medical historian at the University of Michigan.

The 1918 outbreak has been called the Spanish flu because Spain, which remained neutral during World War I, was the first country to publicly report cases of the disease. China, France and the United States already had cases of the flu, but wartime censorship largely kept the outbreaks out of the newspapers.

Then, the king of Spain — Alfonso XIII — and several other members of his government contracted the flu. This series of unfortunate events left a permanent mark, tying the country to the deadly outbreak.

“There was a very common habit, which has persisted to this day, of blaming an epidemic on one country or one group of people,” Markel said. “It goes back centuries.”

Spain hated being linked to the deadly 1918 flu pandemic. Trump’s ‘Chinese virus’ label echoes that.

The longer the influenza virus existed in a certain community, the less lethal the sickness was. An epidemiological study cited by Barry in “The Great Influenza” noted that “the virus was most virulent or most readily communicable when it first reached the state, and thereafter it became generally attenuated.”

Experts say there’s this natural progression where a virus often — but not always — becomes less lethal as time wears on. It’s in the best interest of the virus for it to spread before killing the host.

“The natural order of an influenza virus is to change,” Barry told The Post. “It seems most likely that it simply mutated in the direction of other influenza viruses, which is considerably milder.”

By 1920, the influenza virus was still a threat, but fewer people were dying from the disease. Some scientists at the time started to move on to other research. Barry wrote that William Henry Welch, a famous pathologist from Johns Hopkins who was studying the virus, found it “humiliating” that the outbreak was passing away without experts truly understanding the underlying cause of the disease.

What Welch didn’t predict was that the virus never truly went away. In 2009, David Morens and Jeffery Taubenberger — two influenza experts at the National Institutes of Health — co-authored an article with Anthony S. Fauci explaining how the descendants of the 1918 influenza virus have contributed to a “pandemic era” that has lasted the past hundred years. At the time the article was published, the H1N1 influenza virus in public circulation was a fourth-generation descendant of the novel virus from 1918.

“All those pandemics that have happened since — 1957, 1968, 2009 — all those pandemics are derivatives of the 1918 flu,” Taubenberger told The Post. “The flu viruses that people get this year, or last year, are all still directly related to the 1918 ancestor.”

Because of this, the 1918 influenza outbreak doesn’t come with a neat bookend. Society moved on, but the virus continued in some form or fashion.

“We are living in a pandemic era that began around 1918,” Taubenberger wrote with Fauci and Morens back in 2009 for the New England Journal of Medicine. “Ever since 1918, this tenacious virus has drawn on a bag of evolutionary tricks to survive.”

We continue to turn back to the 1918 outbreak as a point of comparison, said Jeremy Greene, a historian of medicine at Johns Hopkins. Some of the public health measures a hundred years ago are still put in place today. To “flatten the curve,” cities and towns have more or less shut down. That said, Greene cautions against drawing the parallels “too closely.”

There are similarities to draw between today’s pandemic and the influenza outbreak a hundred years ago. Both come from winged animals — one from birds and the other from bats. Both are respiratory viruses. Both led people to wear masks in public. Both forced cities and schools to shut down for periods of time. And, finally, in both cases, the country’s leaders exacerbated problems by ignoring the early warning signs.

Despite all that, influenza viruses and coronaviruses are not the same. There’s very little someone can draw from influenza to then provide treatment for the infectious disease named covid-19, said Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

“They’re really different viruses,” Offit added.

Influenza is consistent and relatively quick when compared with the novel coronavirus. If you get exposed to the flu, you’ll start showing symptoms in one to four days after the infection. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it tends to take five days for those infected with SARS-CoV-2 to start showing symptoms of covid-19, but the timing can fluctuate from two days to two weeks.

The novel coronavirus is not moving on the same time frame as the 1918 influenza, Greene told The Post. Everything is longer with the novel coronavirus — the symptoms, the sickness and even the long-term complications. Doctors are concerned covid-19 can lead to lasting cardiovascular complications.

Then there are asymptomatic carriers of the disease. That one detail makes it harder to mitigate the spread of the virus by simply taking temperatures. Symptoms are not a be-all-end-all solution to tracking the disease. With that in mind, the novel coronavirus is acting more like polio, where those with mild cases don’t know they’re sick, Greene said.

“It immediately raises a different set of problems for managing a disease,” Greene said. “One needs to relearn the way to think about who is dangerous, and that becomes, basically, everybody.”

Recognizing both the similarities and differences to past pandemics can provide a “meaningful mirror” for the present, Greene added. The million-dollar question is: What can the 1918 influenza outbreak tell us about how our current pandemic may end?

“The sad answer is not very much,” Markel said. “The operative word in this particular pandemic is ‘novel’ coronavirus. We’re learning as we go along, but we don’t really know that much.”

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Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where the weather is wonderful even when it isn't.

An update on the progress of some 200 vaccines:

[www.washingtonpost.com]

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Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where the weather is wonderful even when it isn't.

Massive genetic study shows coronavirus mutating and potentially evolving amid rapid U.S. spread

No paywall:

[www.washingtonpost.com]

Scientists in Houston on Wednesday released a study of more than 5,000 genetic sequences of the coronavirus that reveals the virus’s continual accumulation of mutations, one of which may have made it more contagious.

The new report, however, did not find that these mutations have made the virus deadlier or changed clinical outcomes. All viruses accumulate genetic mutations, and most are insignificant, scientists say.

Coronaviruses such as SARS-CoV-2 are relatively stable as viruses go, because they have a proofreading mechanism as they replicate. But every mutation is a roll of the dice, and with transmission so widespread in the United States — which continues to see tens of thousands of new, confirmed infections daily — the virus has had abundant opportunities to change, potentially with troublesome consequences, said study author James Musser of Houston Methodist Hospital.

“We have given this virus a lot of chances,” Musser told The Washington Post. “There is a huge population size out there right now.”

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Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where the weather is wonderful even when it isn't.

Over time, these things all eventually become less deadly and more contagious.

But not necessarily in that order...

[www.thelily.com]

Anika Chebrolu just discovered a potential covid-19 treatment. She’s 14.
She won $25,000 and America’s top young scientist prize

Lena Felton
As the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies race to find treatments for the novel coronavirus, one scientist has been working for months on a potential treatment in her bedroom. Her name is Anika Chebrolu, and she’s only 14.

A freshman at Independence High School in Frisco, Tex., Chebrolu this week won the 3M Young Scientist Challenge and $25,000 for her discovery: a compound that can bind to the coronavirus, inhibiting its ability to infect people. She beat out nine other finalists — whose own projects ranged from a robotic glove to a device that detects invisible particles in water — to be named America’s top young scientist.

Chebrolu first started working on her project last year when she was in eighth grade, initially looking to find a treatment for the influenza virus. But then the pandemic hit. With her mentor, 3M corporate scientist Mahfuza Ali, she changed tack. She’s just finalized her research, and she’s hoping to start reaching out to virologists to develop her finding into an antiviral drug.

[ FDA approves first covid-19 drug: Antiviral remdesivir]

With more than 220,000 people in the United States dead because of covid-19, viable treatments are crucial. On Thursday, remdesivir, a drug that inhibits a substance the virus uses to make copies of itself, became the first medicine to win full Food and Drug Administration approval for treating covid-19.

We caught up with Chebrolu days after she found out she was this year’s winner.

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Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where the weather is wonderful even when it isn't.

Very impressive for somebody this young. The study seems to be a computer search of the shape of the spike protein vs. many possible molecules, any one of which might be a good fit for some part of the spike. There are computer programs that look for a 3D fit of the one target (Coronaviral spike) against each of the molecules in the data base. The programs aren't perfect, but they are a good place to start.

As an aside, this is a standard approach to drug design that is used in a lot of places. Locally, UCLA has a center that is designed to do this. We have seen quite a few good projects of this nature at the high school science fair state finals.

Experimental hormone therapy may speed recovery for COVID patients

[www.startribune.com]

DULUTH — Every time the phone rang, it seemed to Kristine Smoley like more bad news about her husband, who contracted COVID-19 and was in a hospital intensive care unit on a ventilator because he couldn’t breathe on his own.

Smoley was prepared for the worst when a nurse from Duluth’s Essentia Health called with hope — albeit with risks and no solid evidence it would save her husband.

“They asked if I wanted to consider signing off on an experimental treatment for him,” Smoley said. “A treatment that had never been done before.”

Essentia’s Dr. Tim Rich and the University of Minnesota Medical School’s Dr. David Ingbar had studied for years whether a common thyroid hormone could be repurposed for the treatment of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), an often fatal type of lung failure. The doctors received federal approval late last year to test the therapy, so when COVID-19 caused a sudden surge in ARDS, they were ready for their first patient — Smoley’s husband, Bob Schlicht.

“It was scary,” Smoley said. “But I don’t know that I really had an option. Because the other option wasn’t good.”

The turnaround that followed was so remarkable that Rich and Ingbar have advanced their research — unique for a regional medical provider in a world of urban and academic COVID-19 studies — to a phase 2 U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) study. The doctors have optimism about the impact their treatment could have amid the pandemic.

“There has been a lot of highly technical science to understand this biology, but the elegance now is in its simplicity,” said Rich, a pulmonologist. “This is not a designer drug. This is something we know the lung needs and uses.”

New therapies are needed against a pandemic that has caused 150,672 known infections, 10,334 hospitalizations and 2,475 deaths among Minnesotans. Only the antiviral remdesivir has received full FDA approval as a COVID-19 therapy for hospitalized patients, while treatments such as plasma infusions remain experimental and available only under emergency authorization.

Rich and Ingbar made a key discovery during the H1N1 pandemic of 2009, when families of those who died from influenza-related ARDS permitted autopsies. Rich found the victims’ lungs lacked T3, a thyroid hormone that would normally be detectable.

Ingbar said T3 reduces inflammation and coaxes epithelial cells in the lungs to absorb fluids — which is vital for patients with ARDS.

“A part of this acute lung injury with ARDS is the lungs get leaky, and they tend to fill with fluid,” Ingbar said. “That makes it really hard to get oxygen in or carbon dioxide out.”

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Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where the weather is wonderful even when it isn't.

Pfizer’s pretty happy with their vaccine trials: “More than 90% effective”

[www.washingtonpost.com]

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deckeda
Pfizer’s pretty happy with their vaccine trials: “More than 90% effective”

I'll believe that when it's been peer-reviewed.

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Sarcany

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deckeda
Pfizer’s pretty happy with their vaccine trials: “More than 90% effective”

I'll believe that when it's been peer-reviewed.

What, you don’t think a press release by the manufacturer is sufficient?

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Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where the weather is wonderful even when it isn't.

Quote
Speedy

Quote
Sarcany

Quote
deckeda
Pfizer’s pretty happy with their vaccine trials: “More than 90% effective”

I'll believe that when it's been peer-reviewed.

What, you don’t think a press release by the manufacturer is sufficient?

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Speedy

Quote
Sarcany

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deckeda
Pfizer’s pretty happy with their vaccine trials: “More than 90% effective”

I'll believe that when it's been peer-reviewed.

What, you don’t think a press release by the manufacturer is sufficient?

The press release was just to bump up the stock price for the CEOs pre-scheduled sale.

The Pfizer phase 3 trial, which has enrolled nearly 44,000 people, started in late July. Participants received a second dose 21 days after the first. The reported 90 percent efficacy was measured seven days after the second dose.

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Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where the weather is wonderful even when it isn't.

Quote
Speedy
The Pfizer phase 3 trial, which has enrolled nearly 44,000 people, started in late July. Participants received a second dose 21 days after the first. The reported 90 percent efficacy was measured seven days after the second dose.

So, is Pfizer claiming 90% efficacy on the basis of a trace of antibodies present in their blood? It seemed from their PR blitz that they were looking at actual COVID cases among the participants and doing a statistical analysis.

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Pfizer really wanted the publicity and is hoping their vaccine is bought up by as many entities around the world as possible, shutting out equally viable vaccine candidates from other countries. I hope the House and the SEC investigates them.

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Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where the weather is wonderful even when it isn't.

This Covid really sucks. Just found an old friend of mine just passed away after fighting it for 3 weeks in the ICU. To my knowledge he didn't have any underlying issues.

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Grateful11

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Grateful11
This Covid really sucks. Just found an old friend of mine just passed away after fighting it for 3 weeks in the ICU. To my knowledge he didn't have any underlying issues.

I'm sorry to hear that. We all gotta be extra careful for a while longer.

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e pluribus unum

My sincere condolences on your loss.

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Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where the weather is wonderful even when it isn't.

You don't want to roll the dice on this one. Mask up.

A tidbit from the wayback machine I came across today:

Quote

“If it ends up that [Democratic presidential candidate Joe] Biden wins in November — I hope he doesn’t, I don’t think he will, but if he does, I guarantee you the week after the election, suddenly all those Democratic governors, all of those Democratic mayors will say, ‘Everything’s magically better. Go back to work, go back to school. Suddenly the problems are solved. You won’t to have to wait for Biden to be sworn in. All they’ll need is Election Day and suddenly their willingness to just destroy people’s lives and livelihoods, they will have accomplished their task.”

“That’s wrong, it’s cynical and we shouldn’t be a part of it,” he added.

Trump? Kayleigh?

Nope. Ted Cruz, on TV, 4 months ago.

Hope someone keeps the tape on this one. Could come in handy in 2024, if anyone remembers Covid by then.

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Ted King

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Grateful11
This Covid really sucks. Just found an old friend of mine just passed away after fighting it for 3 weeks in the ICU. To my knowledge he didn't have any underlying issues.

I'm sorry to hear that. We all gotta be extra careful for a while longer.

Thanks Ted. I hadn't seen him in a couple years, it happens when you both retire. His funeral is today, I feel really bad for the family to burying him and especially the day after Thanksgiving.

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Grateful11

If you all didn't catch this on 60 Minutes you should watch this. These were young healthy people, marathon runners, personal trainers, etc that had mild cases of Covid and now have debilitating illnesses.

"Doctors are still searching for answers to why a portion of people who were diagnosed with COVID-19 are still suffering symptoms months later. Anderson Cooper reports."

[www.cbsnews.com]

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Grateful11

The age group that seems most rebellious is the group that seems most susceptible -- of course like anything else unless until they find out they won't react to the info and then maybe not!

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RgrF
The age group that seems most rebellious is the group that seems most susceptible -- of course like anything else unless until they find out they won't react to the info and then maybe not!

In our area it's the 65-75 yo men and the 35-45 yo bleach blonde women that them seem to be the least likely to wear a mask. Also my 64 yo sister with asthma, real smart right?

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Grateful11

Hey, let's bump the thread with an awesome and relevant xkcd:



Title text: We reject the null hypothesis based on the 'hot damn, check out this chart' test.

[xkcd.com]

[www.washingtonpost.com]

Story in WaPo about Tangier Island, VA

Isolated ... insular ... no Covid for 8 months. And then when it arrived they locked down and have basically stopped new infections. Not that their conservative politics has been shaken or anything, but a lockdown was good enough for THEM.

This is a story too many have been able to share:

A few days ago my dad said he got a call from a dear friend to say he and his wife had just been diagnosed with C-19. Although the friend had a cough he said the friend was doing OK. Got it from a family member? We don’t know.

Skip to yesterday and the friend is in ICU, and today I learned he’s on 100% oxygen. Vitals are OK but he has refused a ventilator if it comes to that. This is all in the span of less than a few days. His wife is at home and doing (obviously) better. I *think* she’s been able to visit but I’m not to sure about that. She has said she reads him texts from well-wishers but that may just be over the phone.

This @#$%& news is the backdrop against my family’s Xmas —- “way too close to home” I haven’t seen my dad, sister and their kids since this time last year, but they’re all headed this way today. We’re meeting in a rental house closer to Nashville. Ho, Ho, Ho