That charming Canadian woman is also featured in this report from the Calgary Herald:
Guy
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knitting is such a highly emotional hobby
I mean, yes, heâs right of course.
Microsoft co-founder and global health philanthropist Bill Gates criticized the current state of the United Statesâ response to the Covid-19 pandemic on Sunday, including slow turnaround times for tests.
Gates told âFox News Sundayâ that the access to fast testing is still inadequate more than six months into the pandemic and that the U.S. was set up for a rough fall of virus cases.
âEven today, people donât get their results in 24 hours. Itâs outrageous that we still have that,â Gates said.
Gates said that political and health leaders need to publicly admit that the current testing situation is inadequate and find ways to make the system more efficient, saying that âwe canât pretend that we get a good grade even today.â
âI do think we need to own up to the fact that we didnât do a good job. Part of the reluctance I think to fix the testing system now is that nobody wants to admit that itâs still outrageous ⌠The U.S. has more of these machines, more of this capacity than other countries by a huge amount. And so partly the reimbursement system is creating a perverse incentive,â Gates said.
For a certain group, itâs a lot worse than not wanting to admit it. Itâs playing off 200k+ dead as âpeople dieâ, then trying to distract with other nonsense (like antifa or cancel culture) to try and change the topic and aid their political team.
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I ripped into Caputo before he took a medical âleave of absenceâ. Since then Iâve held off on him since he obviously has mental problems. The person who appointed him, howeverâŚ
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Dr Fauci speaksâwith the inimitable Trevor Noah. Some points made here that are not only specific to the US but are relevant to any of us trying to get through this crisis:
Guy
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Dr. Mike Yeadon, a former Vice President and Chief Science Officer for Pfizer for 16 years, says that half or even âalmost allâ of tests for COVID are false positives. Dr. Yeadon also argues that the threshold for herd immunity may be much lower than previously thought, and may have been reached in many countries already.
The survival rate of COVID-19 has been upgraded since May to 99.8% of infections. This comes close to ordinary flu, the survival rate of which is 99.9%. Although COVID can have serious after-effects, so can flu or any respiratory illness. The present survival rate is far higher than initial grim guesses in March and April, cited by Dr. Anthony Fauci, of 94%, or 20 to 30 times deadlier.
So at 200,000 deaths, this means that weâre at 100 million cases in the US, instead of the current 7 million.
Assuming my math is right (Iâm still on my morning coffee after beer last night so maybe not), what does this mean? And how did he get that 0.2% death rate? Hmmmm.
On the other hand, here is a preprint of a study in the Amazon where they estimate herd immunity was reached at around 60% and the final age-weighted IFR to be around 0.5%. Who to trust?
The seroprevalence fell in July and August due to antibody waning. After correcting for this, we estimate a final epidemic size of 66%.
In Manaus the overall fatality ratio (IFR) was 0.17% and 0.28%, considering PCR confirmed COVID-19 deaths and probable COVID-19 deaths based on syndromic identification, respectively; whereas in SĂŁo Paulo, the global IFRs were 0.46% and 0.72%, respectively.The difference may be explained by an older population structure in SĂŁo Paulo (Fig. S1). Supporting this inference, the age-specific IFRs were similar in the two cities, and similar to estimates based on data from Wuhan, China.
comorbidities
⌠and we arenât dealing with the same strain
Iâm dense so I need a bit more than that to make sense of your point. Maybe if this guy is right, weâre already at or nearing herd immunity. If we have a 0.2% death rate and therefore 100,000,000 cases, it shouldnât be long until we reach herd immunity, right? Problem solved. Time to move on to different threads.
Mathematicians from the University of Nottingham and University of Stockholm devised a simple model categorising people into groups reflecting age and social activity level. When differences in age and social activity are incorporated in the model, the herd immunity level reduces from 60% to 43%. The figure of 43% should be interpreted as an illustration rather than an exact value or even a best estimate. The research has been published today in Science .
I donât know. The above study bothers me more than it gives me any type of comfort. So if we achieve herd immunity at 50%, meaning 160 million of the US population, at a death rate of 0.2%, this will mean that we will have 320,000 deaths by the time we reach herd immunity: 0.002 x 160,000,000 = 320,000.
Is this good? I donât like it. And is this anything like the flu? It seems about 5 times worse than even a bad year, doesnât it? And what if the numbers are even a tiny bit worse? I mean 400,000 deaths before this is all over is very possible with slight changes in the numbers.
No, I find no comfort from that report above.
As an experiment, just take out existing comorbidities for those who died of COVID-19. That should take the number down significantly, or conversely just check for those who had no comorbities and died solely from COVID-19. That should be more realistic to what that Pfizer ex-Chief Scientist is likely talking about.
Okay, I see what youâre saying now. But do we do that with any other illness? Cancer? Even the flu (perhaps the comparison with the flu if we were to do this would be even more nonsensical)? And what about obesity as a comorbidity, especially with the high rates of obesity we have in the US? Going through this step seems like a contrived way to bring the death rate down. It seems like fiddling with the numbers so that they say what you want them to say.
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Some extra info.
âWhen you look at the number of excess deaths this year in comparison with previous years, itâs staggering,â Dr. William Hanage, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard Universityâs School of Public Health told Live Science. Thatâs an estimated 228,200 additional deaths in the United States, according to the Weinberger Lab at the University of California, San Francisco. Hanage noted that many of the people who have died so far had nonfatal diseases and would not have perished but for contracting the new coronavirus as well. For instance, someone with diabetes or high-blood pressure might have lived decades longer if they had not contracted COVID-19. Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventative medicine and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Tennessee, echoed the same reality. âThe point is that those people would not have died except that they were carried away by COVID,â Schaffner told Live Science.
In addition, deadly medical complications can be the immediate cause of death when in fact a virus is the ultimate culprit, as is evident with HIV/AIDS. More than 32 million people worldwide have died so far of HIV/AIDS, for instance, but the disease itself isnât usually the immediate cause of death. Dr. Shahnaz Azad, an infectious disease expert in Olympia Fields, Illinois, told Franciscan Health, âItâs not HIV that kills you. HIV kills your immunity, and then you become susceptible to all kinds of infections and cancers.â
A death certificate might list a primary cause of death as Kaposiâs sarcoma, for instance, but in fact, that patient would never have acquired the otherwise rare type of cancer if they hadnât been infected with HIV. The HIV virus is still what ultimately killed the person.
Science as a political tool, the reason the US cannot get a handle on Covid.
Now the cases have reached to 6.9 million, 201,000 dead. Before the election there will be 7 million cases. Can any American be proud of that? I donât think so.
What doesnât kill you will make you stronger. ButâŚwith COVID mutating given the higher number of willing and unwilling hosts in the US, we may have to worry about more virulent strains in the future.
Given the higher incidence of obesity, hypertension, diabetes, mental illness, and other comorbidities in the US, one would think there would be a greater emphasis on public health with the pandemic.
It might mutate into a more virulent strain, but itâs highly unlikely. From an evolutionary perspective it is highly illogical for a virus to kill its host. The most virulent strains would run out of hosts and therefore die out. Weaker strains would dominate. This could be what we are seeing now with high numbers of cases and very few deaths. Unfortunately all the politicians are focusing on the number of cases only.