Tuesday, August 18, 2020

Pandemic Complexity Musings

 Humans In History,


I have been talking to people, in the course of doing errands linked to the death and estate of an old friend, with whom I have practiced Buddhism since we both started in spring of 2001. After conversing with another friend about current events and historical patterns, I responded to an email about whether the viral threat is completely fabricated or not.
(Then I tidied it up to be this essay...)

 The Novel coronavirus pandemic in the USA is a complex event medically, economically, and humanly. 
One faction lives in abject fear, and another faction lives in denial, while they can maintain it. 
The factions are incompatible and completely aligned against each other. (That's not everybody, though.)

 3 per thousand people who catch novel coronavirus infection die, and mostly over 60. Older and sicker get hit harder. However, if you actually get diagnosed by a test, your chance of dying is more like 3 per 100.
A majority of people, 80-90% never get tested, and that was revealed by the early US seropositivity studies in California and New York. The number of cases implied was about 10X the number of cases confirmed.
  Is that pattern holding? Those seropositivity studies are ongoing, but the ongoing results have been secret since April.
The Texas Governor Knows, but I do not. I see they are tracking the viral penetration of our human population, and slowing it down with masks, and closing bars, when it gets so fast that the hospitals get overloaded. That's it.
  There is a lot of human suffering and a lot of aunts and uncles and grandparents have died recently in our circle of friends and family. 
People suffer, and suffering people get secluded and hospitalized. 
Effective treatments are being suppressed and information about them is censored, and disparaged in the mass media.
  That censorship is not completely effective, is it? 
People do know they are being lied to and manipulated, but "which" narrative do they choose to deal with it? 
  US elites are trying to herd people into blue-camp and red-camp, with different sets of lies and misconceptions, but antagonistic to each other. Each sees some of the lies that the other believes, but not the lies they believe themselves.

  This virus, militarized in a lab, does things we are only learning about. It specifically attacks the linings of blood vessels, shutting off lots of little vessels and starving lots of bits of brain, lung, kidney, liver, etc. of blood flow, which creates patterns of disease we have never seen before. It creates cottage-cheese damage to all these organs, which we have never seen the long term effects of. We have seen heart attacks, strokes, renal failure and pulmonary embolism, and we are seeing lots of all that now, from big blood clots.
  That's one thing. The other thing is that this virus hides from the immune system, when it is reproducing in a cell, so the immune system can't see to destroy that cell-full-of-virus before it releases the virus. 
  Does this lead to sleeper-cells? Can people have dormant virus pop back up in a month or two? I just saw somebody who may have had exactly that happen to her. I can't say yet. She had real, systemic COVID and positive nasal swabs, and stuff on CT of her chest, and typical excess clotting in her blood, twice, about 6 weeks apart.
Do not accept a simplistic answer. COVID is not the black death and it is not trivial like a cold.

  Yes, every crisis serves the elites, just like every error favors the bank, not you.
This virus leaked, I think, which put the elites on their back foot, pushed them to rapidly adapt, like the rest of us.
They don't trust each other, don't trust us, and are mainly trying to hold onto flows of wealth and power, which are in rapid decline, but they are holding onto THEIR FLOW like it is a solid object.
It is not, but we humans are very loath to relinquish what we feel to be "ours". It hurts us. It's "wrong".
Power elites need to keep us sidelined in fear and confusion, but power elites are also subject to the mass psychosis , which is developing.

  Be sane. Don't follow an ideology. This is chaotic. This is people going insane and acting out a recurring pattern of history where a lot of people die, including elites. Don't take a side. Don't accept a partisan narrative.
  Clues are being dropped by folks like Bill Gates, that there will be more pandemics, which seems likely. Pandemics are a  cull the elites can do without destroying valuable infrastructure. They are getting a better understanding of how pandemics move through the world, more comfortable with it.
  I personally suspect that internet warfare, shutting down the web and grid and phones, can be used on top of viral pandemics to take out cities and regions. All of our eggs are getting transferred into that basket these days.

  I think we humans are going into a periodic mass culling, like WW-1, and WW-2, but I really think it started with an accidental leak of weaponized virus, started before it was all agreed upon, and operational. 

  It seems like history always has an element of surprise and chaos, even for ruling elites, when a real reset starts.
I see that now in our herd-mind. There are always some who don't much participate in the herd-mind.
  Don't get stampeded. 
Grow a garden. Ride a bike. Meditate, Store some rice, beans, salt, sugar, oil, onions, garlic, etc. 
Try to keep a low profile, on the sidelines, without much worth stealing. 
Do help your neighbors in little ways, when the opportunity presents. Be a good citizen.

  To the elites this may be mainly about controlling us with fear, but if you get sick with this virus, you will know pain, suffering, deep fatigue, and probably fear. I talk to my patients. 
  My daughter, Holly is a hospitalist in internal medicine at the country hospital in San Antonio. 
Lots of people of all kinds are dying, and they are dying alone, without their loved ones, and they are dying through different mechanisms than we saw until just a few months ago.
You probably won't die from this. Probably. 
You do not want to get sick with it, for sure.
Take 5000 units per day of vitamin-D, but if you are just starting, take 10,000 units per day for the first couple of months.

Mortal Human Brother

20 comments:

  1. "3 per thousand people who catch novel coronavirus infection die, and mostly over 60. Older and sicker get hit harder. However, if you actually get diagnosed by a test, your chance of dying is more like 3 per 100."

    Did you perchance accidentally transpose 3 per 100 with 3 per 1000?

    I'm confused.

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    1. When we saw seropositivity results from California and New York in April, we all realized that 10X as many people (or so) had been infected, as had been diagnosed by testing. Therefore, assuming all of the deaths were noticed, the 3% case fatality rate turned into a presumed 0.3% rate, since so many people were well enough to avoid being diagnosed, but everybody who died from it got diagnosed.

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  2. "I personally suspect that internet warfare, shutting down the web and grid and phones, can be used on top of viral pandemics to take out cities and regions. All of our eggs are getting transferred into that basket these days."

    THat's my take too, but they run into snags with doing so, because they depend on the net/grid too, and the kinds of sabotage that entails can easily spread like a virus. Not that hard to shut down a grid. A bunch of long metal pipes tossed onto the mega-transformers of a local power yard, for example.

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  3. JOhn, if you have a few minutes to spare, o busy man, pls read this (a string of sequential emails sent to a small group of my friends) and make sure I'm not disinforming them?

    It would mean a lot to me, sir.

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  4. I added: "P.S. OUr bodies run on water. HYDRATE religiously, reliably, regularly. Even the heawlthiest athlete who eats spinach and fruit and fish and no empty calories is temporarily weakened if his body doesn't have enough transport medium (H2O) to move troops/resources to the battle site. You should be peeing like a farm animal all day long. That said, doing so can flush out too many electrolytes, so using an electrlyte supplement once a day majorly helps.

    You'll FEEL much better, also, with or without covid in your system."

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    1. Yeah, I get tired when I'm dehydrated, and a bit short-tempered, too.

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  5. Oops the email string, which refers to a link your bots reject so I'll try and post it separately:

    Remember, most people will only read the headline. (This was on the sidebar of googlenews, which I use to gauge the daily propaganda shitfeed quantity/quality.)

    Please note that all the article actually reports is that the overall mortality rates of various countries in regards to acceptance/aproved use vs non-acceptance/disapproval of us were counted using sloppy statistical methods.

    It doesn't say a T%HING about whether or not hydroxychloroquine itself saves lives.

    It then cites trials that show hydroxy doesn't work without referencing them. I know of studies that show it does work, and the docs I know who actually treat patients and are willing to use it say, yes indeed, it majorly reduces symptoms/mortality when used properly.

    Plus, almost all this literature submits to the false dichotomy syndrome, a false either/or line of reasoning rather than a more of this/less than that line of reasoning, which is how most of reality works. Very few things in reality are truly on/off binary. Only things like subatomic particles behave that way, and even they go through a major wishy-washy state (quantum indeterminacy) as they do so.

    Please, do what JOhn Day recommends: major d vitamins (vitamin C is also wise), and look into getting some zing supplements also.


    " In contrast, growing evidence from large randomized clinical trials suggests no beneficial effect of hydroxychloroquine in treating COVID-19 patients."

    BUllshit.

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  6. " It doesn't say a T%HING about whether or not hydroxychloroquine itself saves lives.

    It then cites trials that show hydroxy doesn't work without referencing them."

    Sorry. The first sentence seems to contradict the second. The first refers to the lack of referential citations that actually support what hydroxy supporters claim.

    For example this is from one of the studies cited at the bottom:

    "Most clinical studies investigating therapies for COVID-19 have examined hospitalized patients with moderate to severe disease. The initial hydroxychloroquine studies were small and had methodological limitations, such as the absence of a control group (2, 3). Among large, nonrandomized, observational studies and clinical trials, emerging evidence suggests that antiviral therapy late in the course of COVID-19 may have, at best, minimal benefit (4–6). However, this therapy may have clinical benefits in the treatment of mild or moderate disease when given early in the disease course. To our knowledge, no randomized clinical trials to date have investigated agents for early COVID-19 in nonhospitalized patients.
    We hypothesized that starting hydroxychloroquine therapy within the first few days of symptoms could alter the course of COVID-19 by reducing symptom severity and duration and preventing hospitalizations."

    The hypothesis of the last sentence is EXACTLY what hydroxy enthusiasts do. I know a doctor who has used hydroxy this way with his patients and had strikingly positive results. For the record, honest scientists increasingly admit that integrity in scientific studies is mostly disappeared. THe above is a good example.

    AN honest man is about as hard to find these days as ever there was. I feel like Diogenes walking around with a cellphone, using the screen-light in lieu of Diogenes lamp as he walked about using the light to "look for an honest man".

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    1. JFK was sure not completely honest, but he had moral integrity, except for his libido, or so I have heard. Diogenes was a good guy, but he mainly wanted us to all think about what "he was looking for", didn't he?

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    2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4gOIt-M02A

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    3. Good song. Billy Joel did a lot of good songs.

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  7. It's like saying vitamin D doesn't cure covid (it doesn't) when all that is claimed is that vitamin is a major booster/maintainer of our natural immune systems, and a robust immune system DOES reduce viral contagion and symptoms. A robust immune system moves fast to target an invading p[athogen before it can get too far and do real damage. The difference between having the flu (which itself is AWFUL) and getting super-sick from the flu.

    This applies to the concept that covid acts somewhat like HIV, tricking our immune system and even turning it against us. THat refers to the immunity process not the initial kick-ass-of-foreign-objects process. (or so I understand it) If covid begins sticking its spike into cells that are sttrong and healthy themselves, and can hold off long enough for antibodies to surround the thing, it doesn't get the chance to replicate enough to overwhelm the immune system and then retrain it to be its personal minions.

    It's like nobody knows what they're talking about anymopre because nobody actually thinks for themself, even a great many of today's brightest Ph.D types. They're all hopelessly institutionalized, and even if they're morally upright, the ethics they are trained to respect aren't. If you do something because someone else tells you it's right, and don't examine it yourself with a completely open mind, your analysis has been corrupted by unsubstantiated input.

    THat's what happens to us from kindergarten and onward (and before, via TV and via p[arental ignorance).

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    1. Yeah assessment of risks, benefits and costs is appropriate...
      A cheap, safe thing being less than perfect ain't so bad, most days.

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  8. The article reference is this:


    https://healthfeedback.org/claimreview/flawed-study-incorrectly-claims-that-countries-adopting-hydroxychloroquine-as-a-treatment-for-covid-19-experienced-reduced-mortality-rates/

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    1. Hi Robin,
      That article picks fault with the imperfect comparison of looking at population data on a national level, regarding use of hydroxychloroquine for COVID. That is a valid criticism, so let's just drown the baby in the bathwater, throw them both out, and start making a new baby to do the experiment properly.
      The obvious error with the rationale is the relative cost of so many people being badly sick, and some of them dying... alone.
      That's a really high cost of doing nothing. If the cost of doing nothing is apparently close to zero, then discounting it to zero, while you study it is ethical. However, if the treatment reaches a significant benefit, based on statistics, before the study is complete, it is UNETHICAL to not switch everybody over into the treatment group at that point.
      To my assessment, we have seen enough data of fair to middling quality, multiple studies, and a few good ones without randomization and placebo controls, to declare, with high certainty, that failure to treat high risk and symptomatic patients is unethical. It's not all in one study, though, so nobody is technically responsible...

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  9. ALso, the one study the article cited didn't even follow what I understand is the recommended protocol for using hydroxy for covid. It merely said that "hypothetically", doing so might be useful. I assume that was CYA recommended by their lawyers.

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  10. I certainly don't think hydroxy is a "cure", just way more effective than shredding lungs on a ventilator, or doing nothing (like you said), or requiring super expensive drugs that are also far from perfectly tested regarding covid.

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    1. Yep. We humans need to do our best to help each other, not wait for big deals for big business.
      What is a cure? This virus may lay low and come back up later in some people.
      https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/L20-0725

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  11. I suspect that my wife and I have been exposed. But we've been beefing our immune systems since March/April. I suspect many "asymptomatic carriers" are those who were exposed but squashed the gigant megamolecules before they could get more than a toe in the door before it slammed on them.

    This of course raises the specter of those sleeper cells. NOw that my HHT is in remission owing to long terms benefits of breathing Portland's humid cool air (I almost never bleed these days), I am slowly making myself strong again. LOsing fat, gaining muscle, strengthening my joints, trying to get to where I can nurse wife and self should we gbecome genuinely ill.

    LIke this woman here, from our previous town of residence, mother of a friend of my wife:

    https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2020/aug/03/five-weeks-with-covid-19-a-spokane-womans-battle-t/

    "What followed was a five-week battle with COVID-19 that shook and tired Laursen to her core.

    Laursen developed nearly every known symptom of COVID-19 – coughing, fevers, chills, headaches, nausea, chest pain – and her illness lasted a remarkable period of time. Most people who people develop symptoms only have them for a week or two.

    In fact, health authorities would typically consider someone like Laursen to be recovered from the illness. COVID-19 patients who are not hospitalized are considered “recovered” 28 days after their first symptoms appear.

    Laursen experienced a suite of symptoms that lingered for a little more than five weeks, from mid-June to late July, putting her in a category of patients that some writers and scientists have dubbed the “long-haulers.”

    These patients don’t succumb to COVID-19 or quickly get over an infection. Instead, they suffer persistent, sometimes debilitating symptoms unlike any they’ve experienced before.

    Two medical providers diagnosed Laursen with COVID-19, but she isn’t counted in Spokane County’s tally of cases because she twice tested negative for the coronavirus. That’s not unheard of."

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    1. More on this kind of stuff in today's post: "Trump Pardons Jesus".
      It makes me wonder if viral eradication can be achieved with a combination of ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine and zinc. Who will pay for a study?

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