Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

T R E 4 5 O N

Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.

Lick the third rail, it tastes like chocolate!

People are complicated. Love is not.

Books are my comfort food!

… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop

I conferred with the team and they all agree – still not tired of winning!

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

No one could have predicted…

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

FFS people, this was a good thing. take the win.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

Everybody saw this coming.

This country desperately needs a functioning Fourth Estate.

President Biden is doing good where he can, and getting it done.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

Maybe you would prefer that we take Joelle’s side in ALL CAPS?

You are here: Home / Healthcare / COVID-19 / COVID-19 Coronavirus (& H5N1) Updates: June 19, 2024

COVID-19 Coronavirus (& H5N1) Updates: June 19, 2024

by | 56 Comments

This post is in: ,

Dr. Fauci’s On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service would probably be worth reading even if the pandemic hadn’t happened. Here’s a gift link to an extract in The Atlantic:

On New Year’s Day 2020, I was zipping up my fleece to head outside when the phone in the kitchen rang. I picked it up to find a reporter on the line. “Dr. Fauci,” he said, “there’s something strange going on in Central China. I’m hearing that a bunch of people have some kind of pneumonia. I’m wondering, have you heard anything?” I thought he was probably referring to influenza, or maybe a return of SARS, which in 2002 and 2003 had infected about 8,000 people and killed more than 750. SARS had been bad, particularly in Hong Kong, but it could have been much, much worse.

A reporter calling me at home on a holiday about a possible disease outbreak was concerning, but not that unusual. The press sometimes had better, or at least faster, ground-level sources than I did as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and reporters were often the first to pick up on a new disease or situation. I told the reporter that I hadn’t heard anything, but that we would monitor the situation.

Monitoring, however, was not easy. For one thing, we had a hard time finding out what was really going on in China because doctors and scientists there appeared to be afraid to speak openly, for fear of retribution by the Chinese government.

In the first few days of 2020, the word coming out of Wuhan—a city of more than 11 million—suggested that the virus did not spread easily from human to human. Bob Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was already in contact with George Gao, his counterpart in China. During an early-January phone call, Bob reported that Gao had assured him that the situation was under control. A subsequent phone call was very different. Gao was clearly upset, Bob said, and told him that it was bad—much, much worse than people imagined…

******

Our most recent flu pandemic—2009’s H1N1 “swine flu”—was, in absolute terms, a public-health crisis. By scientists’ best estimates, roughly 200,000 to 300,000 people around the world died; countless more fell sick. Kids, younger adults, and pregnant people were hit especially hard.

That said, it could have been far worse. Of the known flu pandemics, 2009’s took the fewest lives; during the H1N1 pandemic that preceded it, which began in 1918, a flu virus infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide, at least 50 million of whom died. Even some recent seasonal flus have killed more people than swine flu did. With swine flu, “we got lucky,” Seema Lakdawala, a virologist at Emory University, told me. H5N1 avian flu, which has been transmitting wildly among animals, has not yet spread in earnest among humans. Should that change, though, the world’s next flu pandemic might not afford us the same break…

… Since this H5N1 virus was first detected in the 1990s, scientists have recorded hundreds of human cases, nearly half of whom have died. (Avian flus that spill intermittently into people often have this kind of nasty track record: This week, the WHO reported that another kind of bird flu, designated H5N2, infected a man in Mexico who died in late April. It was the flu subtype’s first recorded instance in a human; no evidence suggests yet that this virus has the ability to spread among people, either.) Experts caution strongly against reading too much into the stats: No one can be certain how many people the virus has actually infected, making it impossible to estimate a true fatality rate. The virus has also shape-shifted over decades—and the versions of it that killed those people did not seem capable of spreading among them. As Sutton pointed out, past experiments suggest that the mutations that could make H5 viruses more transmissible might also make them a bit less deadly. That’s not a guarantee, however: The 1918 flu, for instance, “transmitted really well in humans and caused very severe disease,” Sutton said…

The world is in some ways better prepared for H5N1 than it was in 2009. Scientists have had eyes on this particular avian flu for decades; in the past few years alone, they’ve watched it hopscotch into dozens of animal species, and tracked the genetic tweaks it’s made. Already, U.S. experts are testing for the pathogen in wastewater, and federal regulators have taken action to halt its spread in poultry and livestock. H5 vaccines are stockpiled, and more are on the way—a pipeline that may be speedier than ever before, thanks to the recent addition of mRNA tech.

But this close to the worst days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Osterholm and others worry that halting any outbreak will be harder than it otherwise would have been. “We could see many, many individuals refusing to get a vaccine,” he said. (That may be especially true if two doses are required for protection.) Bhadelia echoed that concern, adding that she’s already seeing a deluge of misinformation on social media. And Scarpino noted that, after the raging debates over COVID-era school closures, legislators may refuse to entertain the option again—even though children are some of the best conduits for flu viruses. Stopping a pandemic requires trust, coordination, and public buy-in. On that front alone, Osterholm said, “without a doubt, I think we’re less prepared.”…

Speaking of ‘escaping containment’, here’s USAToday:

***********

 

======

======

… After seeing reports of illness everywhere — from our teammates and friends to Reddit threads exploding with stories of personal misery — my colleague Jinshan Hong and I began digging. In a weekslong investigation released over the weekend, we found that at least 13 communicable diseases — from the common cold to measles and tuberculosis — are surging past pre-pandemic levels in regions across the world.

Bloomberg’s analysis, done with London-based disease forecasting firm Airfinity Ltd., collated data from more than 60 organizations and public health agencies. The research also found that 44 countries and territories have a reported resurgence in one or more infectious diseases that’s at least ten times worse than the pre-Covid baseline…

So why are we seeing this post-Covid surge in illnesses from viral to bacterial, from common to historically rare?

It’s a mystery that researchers and scientists are still working to definitively explain. The way Covid lockdowns shifted baseline immunities is just one piece of the puzzle, as is the backslide in vaccination levels since the pandemic.

Climate change, rising social inequality and wrung-out health-care services are also contributing in ways that are hard to measure. And there’s no historical precedent from which we can draw lessons…

======

Shameful, and destabilizing:


“My strongly felt ignorance is equal to your scientific knowledge!”

Reader Interactions

56Comments

  1. 1.

    Baud

    in the early days before it spread out of China the right-wing line was that it was a terrifying new foreign supervirus and the lib/left line was that it was probably a nothingburger. then they switched almost overnight because trump didn’t want lockdowns

    Is that your recollection, AL?

  2. 2.

    WereBear

    @Baud: It was absolutely downplayed at first as we got all adult and scientific about it, as I recall. Keep your head and carry on, kinda.

    But then, I in was a blue state.

    I got up early and got in with NY Unemployment after I was laid off. Then watched crowds in Florida going Thunderdome for the same privilege.

    It marked me, that’s for sure!

  3. 3.

    Suzanne

    It blows my mind how the concept of health behaviors, like going to the doctor, eating vegetables, getting vaccinated or taking behavioral steps to avoid illness….. are coded as feminine, or left/liberal, or weak. Lord.

  6. 6.

    Suzanne

    @Baud:

    the lib/left line was that it was probably a nothingburger. then they switched almost overnight because trump didn’t want lockdowns 

    That’s not exactly my recollection. I think there was more concern from left/liberals that any sort of “shutdown” was going to leave people utterly fucked financially. I remember a very liberal friend sharing a meme about “Covid doesn’t scare me, but homelessness scares me”. Once we figured out ways to just….. get people money, keep people housed….. I saw much less of that.

    Also, you know…. we started seeing people actually get sick and die, and thus many people who underestimated it changed their judgment. Which is a good thing.

  7. 7.

    Suzanne

    @Ken: The average life expectancy for American women is longer than that of American men, so “weakness” appears to be paying off.

  8. 8.

    geg6

    Rasmussen just proves to me that most polling is garbage.  That they take respondents’ opinions as valid versus science tells me they have an agenda and that they are stupid.  Gah!  😖

  9. 9.

    p.a.

    Rasmussen Reports

    @Rasmussen_Poll
    The government take over of medicine was as deadly as always predicted.

    Oh for the days of freedumb and folk cures!  Oh, the feathers have to come from a live chicken?  No wonder he succumbed to the pox…

  10. 10.

    satby

    @geg6: Rasmussen has always had a GOP bias, the guy who founded it was part of GWB’s campaign for president in the oughts. But they’ve been off the rails on Covid polling, their questions are basically push polls to reinforce anti-vax conspiracy theories.

  11. 11.

    JAFD

    In other medical news:  Was late afternoon, 5th of June.  Puttering around at desk.  Feel sledgehammer blow to chest.  Sit down, dial 911, wait for EMTs to arrive.  Unfortunately have safety chain on door, don’t feel like I’d survive walk to unhook, EMTs gotta bust door down, almost.

    Got to University Hospital.  Auxiliary pump run up groin vein.  In cardiac ICU until Sunday, fitted with portable defibrillator and discharged Friday the 14th.
    (I _hope_ you don’t want to hear about 4 AM EKGs and blood drawing, etc)

    In the week previous to this event, I:
    put ‘free trial week’ SIM into my cell fone
    didn’t (thru combination of procrastinations, mistakes, dumb mistakes, and really dumb mistakes) make ‘trial’ permanent
    found the old ‘UH_guest’ hospital’s web portal wasn’t working no more, and,
    found I couldn’t upgrade ‘trial SIM’ without internet connection
    There is a moral somewhere therein.

    Anyway, am back home, recovering, wearing ‘electrode vest’, still quite short on energy.  But think I’m recovering.  So if you’ve been missing me, that’s why.

    Hope all you jackals are happy and keeping cool.

  12. 12.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @p.a.:

    “Government takeover of medicine” must have happened in another dimension cuz what happened was a government responsibility for handling a national and international health crisis.  The fact that our gubmint at the time was headed by a corrupt, idiot was just our luck.

    Just another manifestation of Cole’s tire rims and anthrax analogy when dealing with the GQP.

  15. 15.

    Baud

    @p.a.:

    @Rasmussen_Poll
    The government take over of medicine was as deadly as always predicted.

     

    They’re talking about red state abortion policies, right?

  16. 16.

    Eyeroller

    @satby: Scott Rasmussen left his polling company in 2013 and I’ve heard that he’s recently tried to distance himself as they’ve become more and more alt-right and insane (he is fairly conventionally right-wing).  Push-polling outfits like this are destroying the poll aggregators’ models.

    It’s unclear whether this “opinion” poll is itself at all valid, but suppose it is–it’s horrifying to think that so many people believe they “know somebody who died from the vaccine.”  Astonishing.

  17. 17.

    NotMax

    The sheer number of xits has reached TL:DR territory (YMMV). Maybe consider paring them down to the most timely/newly informative 6 or 8?

  18. 18.

    TBone

    @NotMax: I disagree.  I like to see as much information from as many sources as possible rounded up here in one place.

    Glad you survived JAFD!

  23. 23.

    TBone

    @NotMax: commenter nym above who had scary heart attack episode.

    And I should have said I respectfully disagree 💙 in my comment!

  27. 27.

    New Deal democrat

    BNO’s alarmism is really outrageous this week:

    This is the 222nd week in a row with more than 400 new COVID deaths in the U.S.

     
    400 x 52 weeks = 20,800 annual deaths —> a relatively mild flu season.
     
    In the real world, the next variant update on Friday will probably show the FLiRT variants accounting for 75%-80% of all new cases. Typically waves have not peaked until the new King Variant is up to 90% of new cases. That’s still a few weeks away, possibly more.
     
    BIobot’s latest update showed that “The national average SARS-CoV-2 wastewater concentration is now 368 copies per mL.” That is more than 3x its low of one month ago,, but still only back to April levels. The CDC’s update last Friday showed 173 per mL, roughly a 50% increase from one month ago. Regionally, the Midwest and Northeast are still very low, while the South shows a moderate upturn, but the West is up by 4x from its lows, driven by a major outbreak in Hawaii, which has caused the most hospitalizations since the BA.5 variant 18 months ago per JPWeiland: https://www.threads.net/@jpweilandmodels/post/C8YILWOttHm

    As might have been ruefully predicted, the CDC discontinued hospitalization reporting right before it was most urgently needed.

    Deaths for the week of June 8 were initially reported at 132, above the all time low of 108 two weeks before. Preliminary deaths of 141 and 143 during the weeks of May 11 and 18 translated into final numbers of 303 and 311, respectively. It’s possible one of the next several weeks will have a final number of deaths under 300, but that will probably be the low until the newest outbreak runs its course.

  29. 29.

    satby

    @JAFD: Oh, JAFD, feel better soon!  Good thing you knew to call 911 right away and not to try to get to the door. Take special care in this heat, do you have air conditioning and maybe a neighbor who could grocery shop for you?

  31. 31.

    YY_Sima Qian

    This is the original Reuters investigation, referred to by the Al Jazeera article A.L. mentioned, has been posted in a couple of threads over the past week & has generated a bit of discussion, but this is the most relevant thread for it:

    A REUTERS INVESTIGATION
    Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic
    The U.S. military launched a clandestine program amid the COVID crisis to discredit China’s Sinovac inoculation – payback for Beijing’s efforts to blame Washington for the pandemic. One target: the Filipino public. Health experts say the gambit was indefensible and put innocent lives at risk.
    By CHRIS BING and JOEL SCHECTMAN
    Filed June 14, 2024, 9:45 a.m. GMT

    Lots of utterly despicable admissions in the article. I recall huge outrage when it was reported that Russia was pushing anti-vaxx disinformation in the US, & when the PRC dabbled in pushing unsupported innuendo about safety concerns of the mRNA vaccines.

  32. 32.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @YY_Sima Qian: Very notable that the Reuters investigation has not inspired other MSM outlets to dig further into disinformation campaigns waged on social media against the PRC by the Trump Administration. This particular anti-vaxx effort was but one of several identified so far, which the Reuters article mentions.

  33. 33.

    Suzanne

    @JAFD: Ohhhhhh damn. So sorry to hear! I hope you’re keeping comfortable and recuperating well! Thanks for keeping us posted.

  34. 34.

    Suzanne

    @OzarkHillbilly: I read something in Joan Williams’ book White Working Class that stuck in my mind a bit….. that much of that cohort finds K-12 educators annoying. I’m sure that has nothing to do with them being overwhelmingly women with college degrees.

    As the percentage of women and PoC and foreigners climbs in medicine, I wonder if that has something to do with people dismissing health advice.

  35. 35.

    Another Scott

    I’ve looked in the past but couldn’t find it. Maybe I’m dense, but some of the BNO News numbers don’t make any sense to me:

    Weekly U.S. COVID update:

    – New cases: 65,816 est.
    – Average: 57,475 (+7,371)
    – In hospital: 1,707 (+17)
    – In ICU: 207 (+4)
    – New deaths: 413
    – Average: 443 (-12)

    Note: Limited data

    1/8

    I understand the “New” number – that’s the total count over the week in question.

    What is the “Average” number? What are they averaging?? What is the difference between the “new” and “average” numbers here?

    Anyone know?

    Thanks.

    Also, I have a pet peeve about talking about what “we” have learned or not (the STATNews tweet). I’ve learned a lot! Lots of people around me have learned a lot! CDC and FDA and WHO and DoAgr other institutions have learned a lot! Logistics people have learned a lot! Vaccine makers have learned a lot!  HVAC designers and suppliers have learned a lot! A few politicians and a few timid administrators standing in the way doesn’t change that. “We” can be a huge universe, or not. It’s like talking about problems in “Congress” when it’s actually a revanchist political party… Yes Seth Berkley, more data more quickly is needed. Yes, happy talk isn’t helpful. But focus the attention to fix the problem – don’t create headlines that everyone else is stupid and it’s hopeless. [/rant]

    Thanks for keeping us informed, AL.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  36. 36.

    sab

    @YY_Sima Qian:The Reuters article horrified me. Despicable. From what I remember reading, the Sinovax was a very good vaccine although not quite the miracle that the American MRA vaccines turned out to be. And we couldn’t produce anywhere near enough for what the world needed.

  37. 37.

    Another Scott

    @JAFD: Zooks!  I’m sorry to read all that, but very glad you’re home and with us!

    I saw yesterday that Maine’s 911 system was down for many hours for some unreported reason.  Someone noted the importance of having the direct number to emergency services on your phone, just in case.

    Feel better and have a rapid and complete recovery!

    Best wishes,
    Scott.

  38. 38.

    arrieve

    @Eyeroller:

    it’s horrifying to think that so many people believe they “know somebody who died from the vaccine.”  Astonishing.

    I had lunch with a friend and her daughter Saturday–both intelligent women, though tending to get too much of their information from Facebook. The daughter told me her cousin now has kidney failure from the vaccines. And my friend told me that her doctor asked her which arm she got her vaccines in, because she was going to be more susceptible to breast cancer on that side.

    I thought I had heard every batshit conspiracy by now, but my jaw dropped. I said that the breast cancer information was not true, and she replied, “But that’s what my doctor said.”

  39. 39.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @sab: The Sinovac vaccine was mediocre, not as effective as the Sinopharm one that used the same technology (inactivated whole virion vaccine), let alone the mRNA ones. However, having a couple of shots of Sinovac was still far better than no vaccination (as effectiveness data out of Brazil, Indonesia & Türkiye showed). When the PRC donated 150M doses across the Global South, & the DOD was waging its disinformation campaign in the Global South, these countries did not have much access to any other vaccines, Western, Indian or Russian. It would be nearly another year before BioNTech/Pfizer & Moderna mRNA vaccines would be available in any qty outside of the develop countries that had hoarded the 1st tranches of supply.

    The DOD campaign surely killed people, including in treaty allies such as the Philippines. The anti-vaxx messaging surely blew back into the US via the “free & open internet” & the immigrant populations, feeding into the anti-vaxx CTs domestically. All in the name of Great Power Competition.

    Since this post is also tagged “Foreign Affairs”, I will post Van Jackson’s comments on the subject:

    Beware All Yellow-Peril Fanatics

    UN-DIPLOMATIC

    JUN 15, 2024

    Reuters has an investigation with smoking-gun proof that in the midst of the pandemic in late 2020, the Pentagon ran a global anti-vaccine disinformation campaign to inflate threat perceptions about China.

    The Center for International Policy issued the following statement in response:

    (Click through the link to see the statement.)

    It is, of course, deeply scummy both to inflate geopolitical threats and to promote anti-vax propaganda designed to “sow doubt about the safety and efficacy” of China’s coronavirus vaccine. Even more so at a time when most of the global South faced the choice of accepting China’s vaccine or no vaccine at all because of the difficulty of accessing American supplies.

    But if your response to this is, “This is not who we are,” you should know it’s of a pattern: Trump’s deputy national security adviser, Matt Pottinger, personally pushed the intelligence community to confirm the “lab-leak” theory that China had caused the pandemic. The intelligence community was never able to confirm that theory, and opinion even within the IC remains divided.

    But the point of Pottinger’s attention- and resource-siphoning witch hunt was to turn the tide of world opinion against China by being able to claim that China was a world threat. It was all about heightening geopolitical rivalry, fuelled by racially-tinged animus. Yellow-Peril stuff. The same Yellow-Peril narratives, in fact, that MAGA candidates (including Trump) were running on to win elections in 2020 (and 2022).

    So we have America-sponsored, anti-vax propaganda. But its context was one in which reactionary politicos and the national security state channeled their resources to support the confirmation bias of policy officials who openly advocated for a policy of regime change in China. These are not separate misdeeds; they’re of a kind.

    But if you view these things as anomalies—that is, unrepresentative of “great-power competition”—then you’re forced to fall all over yourself every time the dark, hidden-from-view corners of America’s primacy strategy come to light.

    The thing about these Yellow-Peril fanatics—who now also permeate the bureaucracy—is that they benefit from amplifying and distorting the China threat. This is very directly the case for people like Bridge Colby, who runs an LLC that literally profits off of distorting and promoting the China threat in various ways.

    But it’s no less the case for the many think tanks in Washington that have built entire programs and “research” agendas recycling dark-hearted assumptions about China. Or the scholars who get insider access because they tell the national security state what it wants to hear—2027, baby! Or the third-rate journalists who see an easy narrative in pull-quoting think tank “experts” about how the latest thing China did is a sure sign of the reckless, provocative, aggressive, domination-seeking Big Bad.

    I guess what I’m getting at is that, yes, what this Reuters investigation revealed is just so bad. It’s the kind of thing that should be the subject of congressional hearings (unlike much of what populates the congressional agenda these days).

    But it’s also an expression of geopolitical rivalry. This kind of shit doesn’t happen except in a permissive environment of hate and fear and careerism. That’s what “great-power competition” is. And so I ask that which Washington most wishes to deflect: Who benefits from any of this? Not people who care about peace, democracy, or equality.

  40. 40.

    Another Scott

    @arrieve: :-(

    Lots and lots of doctors out there, and even if they’re good in their particular area that doesn’t mean they know much about stuff outside their area. There’s the old saw, “what do you call someone who graduates medical school at the bottom of their class?” “Doctor.”

    Of course.

    Reuters.com (from December 2022):

    A video in which a Canadian doctor claims that COVID-19 vaccines cause so-called “turbo cancer” is not based on facts, according to five experts who spoke to Reuters.

    Dr. Charles Hoffe, a family physician who is currently under investigation by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia for alleged misconduct related to spreading false information about COVID-19 measures and vaccines (here , here), made the claim during an hour-long podcast on Nov. 11 (here).

    He claimed that COVID-19 vaccines damage the immune systems of recipients and cause aggressive new cancers, as well as flare-ups in those in remission from the disease. As evidence, Hoffe presented an anecdote about a 61-year-old patient who was diagnosed with cancer of the lungs and spine in October 2022, a year after receiving his second vaccine dose.

    “People who had previous cancers, which were in remission, are flaring up since their shots because (of) the damage to their immune system by the COVID shots,” Hoffe said. “But (with) new cancers being diagnosed, the tumours are bigger than ever. They seem to grow very aggressively, spread very aggressively, and be very resistant to treatment, so this is being nicknamed turbo cancer.”

    Social media users have since clipped the quote from the interview and reshared it as an 85-second snippet on Facebook (here , here and here), BitChute (here and here) and Twitter (here), where it has been viewed more than 25,000 times.

    Hoffe did not respond to a request from Reuters for data to back up his claims.

    WHAT THE EVIDENCE SHOWS

    “There is zero basis for any of the things being claimed here,” Dr. Gigi Gronvall, immunology expert and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Reuters via email, adding that the narrative is “completely made up and none of it is true”.

    […]

    FWIW.

    Hang in there.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  41. 41.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @arrieve: Amazing the number of kooks in the medical professions. (Though to be fair, they can probably be found in equal measure in every other profession, & highly overrepresented among politicians.)

  42. 42.

    Tenar Arha

    @JAFD: Holy 😮. Glad you’re home & okay for give values of post heart attack recovery. I hope you’re keeping cool and unstressed in this heat wave if you’re anywhere east of the Mississippi. Best wishes on your recovery. 

  45. 45.

    VFX Lurker

    @YY_Sima Qian: This kind of shit doesn’t happen except in a permissive environment of hate and fear and careerism.

    I wonder if this environment existed only during the Trump administration, or if it still exists today like Trump-appointed judges.

  47. 47.

    Old School

    @JAFD: I hope your recovery continues at a good pace.

    Remember that you are recovering and don’t try to push yourself for a while.

  49. 49.

    dnfree

    @NotMax: Read the ones you find interesting and skip the rest.  Someone else may read them all or make a different selection.  I appreciate seeing all of them.

  50. 50.

    Damned at Random

    This week, I saw a claim that people died from intubation, not CoVid. The beauty of conspiracy theories is that they bypass all tedious data collection and statistical analysis.

  51. 51.

    Damned at Random

    JAFD

     

    Sorry you had to go through that.

    Get some rest until you feel stronger, then follow Dr;s instructions to the letter. I have many friends who survive years or decades after a cardiac event.  Hoping you do as well

  52. 52.

    Martin

    Reminder that someone died of Covid once every 7 minutes last year. That’s on top of a death every 15 minutes from guns, every 15 minutes from cars.

    We emptied out a city the size of For Lauderdale from preventable causes and most people just shrug that off. Put another way, that’s ~4 Gaza death tolls in the US annually, which at least from a policy perspective we just wave away as the cost of making the donuts.

  53. 53.

    Another Scott

    @glc: Heh. :-)

    Made me look… PubsApp.acs.org – Consumption – The Great Killer:

    […]

    Whether it is known as lupus vulgaris (TB of the skin), Pott’s disease (TB of the bones), or consumption (the “classic” case of lung disease), TB is one of history’s great killers. It is estimated to be responsible for 20% of the deaths in 17th-century London and 30% of those in 19th-century Paris (as recently depicted in the popular film Moulin Rouge). Although not as aggressive as plague, TB has killed more people in history than the black death, leprosy, or HIV. An estimated 1 billion people around the world have been felled by TB in the past two centuries, and the fatalities continue.

    “Romantic” and deadly

    Although TB is considered a single disease, it has been caused by at least two microorganisms. Long before TB began killing humans, it afflicted cattle. After cattle became one of humanity’s client species sometime between 8000 and 4000 BCE, however, there is evidence that Mycobacterium bovis infected humanity through the ingestion of milk. This coincides with the earliest discoveries of telltale lesions in human spines dating from 5000 BCE.

    However, after 1000 BCE the strain of TB seems to have changed. After that time, pulmonary TB caused by M. tuberculosis became widespread. M. tuberculosis is most likely an evolved form of M. bovis that developed among milk-drinking Indo-Europeans, who then spread pulmonary TB on their migrations. By the first millennium BCE, pulmonary TB was endemic throughout the world. The earliest recorded symptoms of pulmonary TB—cough, expectoration, hemoptysis, and wasting—are found in the library of Assurbanipal (668–626 BCE), king of Assyria. These same symptoms were well known in Victoria’s London and the Paris of the Belle Epoque.

    […]

    No masks, check.

    No real-time testing of cattle, check.

    Drinking raw milk, check.

    Distrust of modern medicine, check.

    MTBGA!!!

    Grr…,
    Scott.

  54. 54.

    JAFD

    Thanks for all the good thoughts and wishes.  Am sitting in fron of A/C set to fan / low, room temp about 80, I’m wearing boxer shorts and electrode vest, feel comfortable.  Big mug of tea breweth up for hydration.

    Trust all yon jackals keeping cool, too !

  55. 55.

    SomeRandomGuy

    n the early days before it spread out of China the right-wing line was that it was a terrifying new foreign supervirus and the lib/left line was that it was probably a nothingburger. then they switched almost overnight because trump didn’t want lockdowns

    I don’t know why this tweet was included. In the early days, Republicans were swearing it was a nothingburger, the common cold (because the common cold *is* a type of coronavirus), stop acting like TFG should be doing *ANYTHING* about this, Junior even said that Liberals were hoping for millions of deaths to make his dad look bad. Don’t whine that Trump isn’t buying PPE; don’t whine that Trump fired the pandemic response team; please forget that Republicans tried to kick 20+ *million* people off the Affordable Care Act, with a pandemic beating down our door.

    Liberals were saying “it’s dangerous, and we need to take proper action.”

  56. 56.

    SomeRandomGuy

    Trump’s deputy national security adviser, Matt Pottinger, personally pushed the intelligence community to confirm the “lab-leak” theory that China had caused the pandemic. The intelligence community was never able to confirm that theory, and opinion even within the IC remains divided.

    1) There’s no evidence to support the lab-leak theory.
    2) there’s evidence that runs counter to the lab-leak theory.
    3) the problem we have in political reporting right now, is, political reporters are happy to report accusations that have no basis, nor any evidence for them.

    Every story about Trump promoting the lab-leak theory should have included “…in spite of reporting no evidence supporting the baseless allegation that it came from a lab.”

    I know, I know, Republicans would say “but our people! Our PEOPLE! They’re all TALKING about the lab leak theory, so we have to too!”

    Of course, if you’re not a complete fucking moron, you’d say “well, tell your people the lab leak theory has no evidence, nor any basis in reality. Help them learn the truth!”

    Or maybe you’d have to be a complete fucking moron to tell a Republican to tell the truth, and expect it might happen, out of a desire to provide good and faithful service to the United States of America.

Comments are closed.