Covid-19 Politics

[blackchubby38]

Here in NYC, despite New York recording record-low COVID-19 infection rates, there is still a ban on indoor dining and movie theaters are still not allowed to reopen. I understand the frustration of restaurant owners because they can never get a straight answer from either Gov. Cuomo or Mayor De Blasio on when indoor dining will be allowed. Its always "we will see" or "we don't have a plan for indoor dining to return at this time".

There is also the inconsistency when it comes to other businesses. Casinos have been allowed to reopen at reduced capacity. But there is also the inconsistency when it comes to location.

For those of you who are may not be familiar with NYC, the county of Nassau, Long Island borders the borough of Queens. Indoor dining has been allowed to return to Nassau County. It is a possible for a person to cross the border from Queens into Long Island to have a meal indoors, but not a vice a versa. That really doesn't make any sense.

Now the President has decided to way in with this tweet: “New York City must stop the Shutdown now,” “The Governor & Mayor are destroying the place!” “The Democrats will open up their states on November 4th, the day after the Election,” he wrote. “These shutdowns are ridiculous, and only being done to hurt the economy prior to the most important election, perhaps, in our history! #MAGA.”


I have never really paid attention to President Trump's tweets or buy into his conspiracy theories. But I think both Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio have to make a decision soon about when both indoor dining and movie theaters are going to be allowed to reopen. Especially the former because in a month or so, it will start getting physically uncomfortable to dine outdoors at night here in NYC.

[broncofan]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/08/w...ronavirus.html

The Oxford/Astrazeneca trial has been paused because one person who received the vaccine has developed transverse myelitis. It is considered a severe adverse reaction though I think people have gotten it from flu vaccines as well. Still, it's not good news. We'll have to see how rare it ends up being and how this person's case develops.

[Stavros]

Here in NYC, despite New York recording record-low COVID-19 infection rates, there is still a ban on indoor dining and movie theaters are still not allowed to reopen. I understand the frustration of restaurant owners because they can never get a straight answer from either Gov. Cuomo or Mayor De Blasio on when indoor dining will be allowed. Its always "we will see" or "we don't have a plan for indoor dining to return at this time".

There is also the inconsistency when it comes to other businesses. Casinos have been allowed to reopen at reduced capacity. But there is also the inconsistency when it comes to location.

Thanks for this insight, as there is in the UK a similar contradiction, or there was as yet again public health policy has changed with an announcement last night that gatherings of more than six will be banned-

"Amid concerns that the current rules are both widely misunderstood and too difficult for police to implement, Boris Johnson will hold a hastily-arranged Downing Street press conference on Wednesday to outline the new restrictions.
The dramatic change of approach by No 10 follows a sudden spike in the number of people being infected with the virus, with almost 8,500 positive tests being recorded in England in the last three days."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...ned-in-england

But how has it come to this? Because the relaxation of physical distancing and allowing people to go abroad for holidays has happened too soon. The relaxation was made because the economy needed a boost, but it may be that the assumption that declining rates of infection would not be reversed, has become more a wild guess, though new infections do not appear yet to result in a new wave of fatalities. And just as it made no sense to have rules in Queen's which are not imposed on Long Island, so it was daft to have rules that allowed people to go the pub but not to see their grandparents, and when there is a pitiful lack of an effective test and tracing system in this country, the opportunity for Covid 19 to resurge has emerged. Moreover, it is not just the UK but the European continent too, and I assume tourism is a primary factor in this new wave.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/li...hs-pass-890000

What I think is also emerging that may become a serious problem, is the extent to which people may decide that Covid is going to kill a few people, make others sick, but that this is just tough -a Telegraph journalist, know for her toxic opinions, puts it thus:

"The powers of the wretched Coronabeast are waning fast. “It has burnt through the dry grass, mainly those who would have died anyway in the next few months, and now it is infecting younger age groups but not harming them,” says a scientist friend. Admissions are only a fraction of the level compared to peak of the pandemic despite warnings of a second wave rolling across Europe. “Covid has gone from our wards, has been for weeks” reports the head nurse at one of the UK’s largest hospitals..."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/po...ngerous-virus/ (whole article behind paywall).

Because prominent people in Government -in the UK, in Ireland- have broken their own rules, people may become cynical and decide to ignore them. But I wonder if this is feeding into a more lawless atmosphere where illegal raves, and other street parties take place and if the police arrive they are abused and a fight breaks out. It is different in the USA because there has not been a nationwide, and effective lockdown as there was here, because of politically-motivated defiance and an apparent indifference to illness- some of the things I have seen on the news here have been staggering in this regard, though large gatherings have also been complicated by the BLM protests and the counter-protests of armed militias, one shown last night on ITV news from Louisville, Kentucky was mind-boggling -White Militias, Black Militias, and no police! And if people wore masks, it was to hide their identity not for health reasons!

So I went to see Tenet in the cinema last week, but the cinemas must close again as they did earlier in the year- I don't see how two screens limited to six people in each is viable. As for the coffee shops in town, I assume takeaways may be available, but no more sitting. New York in this regard has been stricter in its maintenance of the rules, but I wonder if we are reaching a breaking point when more and more people will just do their own thing? The behaviour and language ofthe President is appalling in this regard, but he is feeding a cynical beast that thinks Covid 19 is over-rated as a threat, and the attempt to impose the wearing of masks some sort of Marxist-Leninist plot to coerce the population into behaving the same way.

What I am not sure about is the extent to which people have, or are losing respect in their elected politicians, and how this might affect the way they vote. There was a lot of goodwill earlier in this pandemic, and people did what we had to do, and I think probably the majority may still be willing to limit their behaviour -but it can't last indefinitely, and I don't know what the next three months holds for us.

[blackchubby38]

An updated to the post that I made yesterday. NYC restaurants will be able to resume indoor dining on September 30th under the following criteria:

Restaurants will be limited to 25 percent capacity, all customers will have to submit to temperature checks, one member of each party will have to give contact tracing information, there will be no bar service -- and the public will be asked to anonymously report violations by phone or text.

Masks must be worn at all times when not seated at table and tables must be 6 feet apart.

Restaurants close at midnight.

[Stavros]

An updated to the post that I made yesterday. NYC restaurants will be able to resume indoor dining on September 30th under the following criteria:

Restaurants will be limited to 25 percent capacity, all customers will have to submit to temperature checks, one member of each party will have to give contact tracing information, there will be no bar service -- and the public will be asked to anonymously report violations by phone or text.

Masks must be worn at all times when not seated at table and tables must be 6 feet apart.

Restaurants close at midnight.

Best of luck with that one! In the UK the re-opening of cafes and restaurants was shaped by the Chancellor subsidizing the cost with his Eat Out to Help Out Scheme-(the result in my town was queues of up to 50 people outside Wagamama at lunchtimes)-

"To support restaurants and the people who work in them we’re saying ‘Eat Out to Help Out’.So for the month of August we will give you a 50% reduction, up to £10 per head, on sit-down meals and non-alcoholic drinks Monday-Wednesday. #PlanForJobs pic.twitter.com/D6eznIDjqC
— Rishi Sunak (@RishiSunak) July 8, 2020"


Now we have two more slogan based strategies, The Rule of Six, and, get this- Operation Moonshot, est. cost £100 billion...
https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3520

Cost of a real Moonshot?

"NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine offered his first concrete budget estimate for the agency's current lunar aspirations, a plan that has been dubbed the Artemis program. That plan includes recruiting commercial companies and international partners, building a lunar space station, landing humans at the moon's south pole by 2024 and framing the whole project as practicing for Mars."For the whole program, to get a sustainable presence on the moon, we're looking at between $20 and $30 billion..."
https://www.space.com/nasa-moon-2024...-revealed.html

Health-warning: Careful with those fags...

[broncofan]

When people point out that the Flu has a mortality rate of .1% and the IFR of Covid is probably around .7% they actually understate the difference in danger between the two diseases. The Flu mortality rate is a case fatality rate which means it's based on number of deaths divided by number of positive flu tests. Although flu tests are readily available, people with mild flu symptoms don't get tested most of the time and there are asymptomatic flu cases. On the other hand, people with mild symptoms of Covid are getting tested currently and even some asymptomatic people are getting tested when their contacts test positive. As a result, it seems like a reasonable comparison to compare current CFR of Covid against the CFR of Flu. If you do that the mortality difference looks closer to about 20X rather than 7X. The only group that seems to not have an elevated risk of death with covid relative to flu are children, who are not at all immune to the effects of covid but develop serious disease infrequently.

[broncofan]

When people point out that the Flu has a mortality rate of .1% and the IFR of Covid is probably around .7% they actually understate the difference in danger between the two diseases. The Flu mortality rate is a case fatality rate which means it's based on number of deaths divided by number of positive flu tests. Although flu tests are readily available, people with mild flu symptoms don't get tested most of the time and there are asymptomatic flu cases. On the other hand, people with mild symptoms of Covid are getting tested currently and even some asymptomatic people are getting tested when their contacts test positive. As a result, it seems like a reasonable comparison to compare current CFR of Covid against the CFR of Flu. If you do that the mortality difference looks closer to about 20X rather than 7X. The only group that seems to not have an elevated risk of death with covid relative to flu are children, who are not at all immune to the effects of covid but develop serious disease infrequently.

Anyhow my point is that cfr depends upon how many mildly symptomatic and asymptomatic people get tested. If we knew the ifr of both diseases it would make for a better comparison. The IFR for seasonal flu is estimated at .025-.04%. So even if we compared ifr to ifr, a .7% ifr for Covid would still make it between 17 and 28 times as deadly.

The link below provides both cfr and ifr for seasonal flu.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...fatality_rates

[broncofan]

To add to this, there is a group of very stupid Republicans who make one or both of the following two arguments. They argue that people are dying "with covid" rather than of covid and that's it's a coincidence that people happen to die 4 weeks after they've been infected with sars-cov2 of known covid-related sequelae. I don't know what to tell you but it's strange we also have excess death numbers that are greater than recorded deaths given that people are dying by coincidence of pneumonia and blood clots shortly after being diagnosed with covid.

They also reduce the death toll to include only those who don't have any pre-existing conditions. Of course, this would reduce the death toll of Flu to practically nothing if they did that. These people know nothing about causation, about the human condition, and are low grade eugenicists. If a 50 year old with hypertension dies of covid they still died of covid, notwithstanding their hypertension. Even those who are 20 and have no pre-existing conditions but die might have some difference in the way their immune system functions to explain the fact they clear the virus less efficiently than other 20 year olds. Would someone say they died because of that difference?

The whole argument is not just stupid but dehumanizingly stupid and appalling.

[Stavros]

So, from Eat Out to Help Out, The Rule of Six and Operation Moonshot, we expect the Prime Minister, probably on Tuesday to announce a Circuit Break strategy that will localize lockdowns where there has been a surge of Covid 19. A circuit break was first introduced in Singapore, and is the latest attempt by this useless Government to Take Back Control of a pandemic that appears to be, after six months, reverting to what it was when it began. Rather like the EU Withdrawal Agreement that tossed the conduct of Parliamentary business into chaos before ousting Theresa May and replacing her with a man, Boris Johnson, who hailed his version of the Withdrawal Agreement 'a triumph' when it was 95% the same as the one which led him to resign as Foreign Secretary, and which is now before the House as so flawed a document the men who wrote it now stand up in the Commons to say they will defy its provisions as related to Northern Ireland and knowingly break the law.

So serious has this become that Johnson's own party, the Stalinist party of Brexit shorn of its 'Remain' traitors (once known as 'Conservatives'), is now saying, in effect, that he has six months to Take Back Control of the agenda or lose his position. It is a somewhat bitter irony that the man who adopted Brexit without once thinking through the details of it, now faces oblivion because his effulgent and positive view of the process has circled back on him because nobody in 2016 thought much about how Northern Ireland could be taken out of the EU without violating the Good Friday Agreement, just as since Covid 19 Johnson has failed to implement a nationwide and severe reign of austerity to strangle the virus- panicking in July to allow the very relaxation of the lockdown rules that has both led to a resurgence of the virus, while threatening the economy a second time, yet with a record of amateurish bungling -a 'world beating' test and trace system that flopped on the Isle of Wight, so the world can be relieved it wasn't tried on them.

Then we hear this from the new head of the Test and Trace system, Dido Harding-

"The head of the NHS test-and-trace programme, Dido Harding, told MPs on Thursday demand for tests was outstripping supply by three to four times – and conceded the sharp increase as children returned to schools had not been anticipated."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...covid-lockdown

Had not been anticipated? Hello? Is anyone there? Year Six? Year One?

Other reports claim that Boris has put on a lot of weight since returning from hospital, that he is complaining that his apartment in No 10 is too small, they only have one cleaner, and he has had to take such a large pay cut from his previous income as a journalist that he can't afford a nanny, plus those other costs, given that of the six chidren he has fathered by, I think, four different women, he must provide for four of them. Life is tough at the top, eh, Boris?

He is not alone, as I have rarely seen such a miserable bunch of useless incompetents calling themselves the British Government. The same party that gave us Grenfell Tower -a scandal the details of which have but trickled out in the last 18 months- is now in an inferno of its own making, with Brexit simmering away, waiting to blow its top.

Somebody, send help! We are struggling, and are in need. America, if you can't spare Batman, Robin will do.

[broncofan]

https://www.statnews.com/2020/09/29/...rly-data-show/

https://www.reuters.com/article/heal...-idINKBN26L08A

Regeneron, which is a biotech company that specializes in the production of monoclonal antibodies, has just released a limited amount of data for its antibody cocktail. The data shows that when the antibodies were given to people in early disease, viral load was reduced, and time to recovery was significantly reduced. I've read that the most impressive result was in a subgroup, specifically those who were labeled "seronegative", meaning at the time of treatment didn't produce much in the way of their own antibodies (Igg I believe but I don't know).

We don't have survival rate data yet because this was administered in mild to moderate disease. There would be a major logistical challenge if this is only effective in early disease, as it's administered intravenously. Furthermore, the effective dose was 8 grams, which is considered a high dose of a monoclonal antibody which is already expensive to produce. One can do the math of 8 grams times 40,000 daily cases to get the per day production that would be needed for early disease.

Anyhow, the take away is that the results were promising. Viral load over time is correlated with case severity and reduction in the symptomatic period is an important marker. It will take some time to see whether this is effective in preventing death in serious disease. I'm a bit less interested in the prophylactic arm simply because I think a vaccine will be available in limited supply by the time it could be approved but it's still useful to have a treatment bc the vaccine might not provide sterilizing immunity and some people might not get vaccinated.