Monday, October 5, 2020

COVID Gets Demoted

 Treated Early Enough,


The Trumpster was never taken out of action by the virus that has been ravaging Big-Mac consumers his age all year. 
Uh, how come?
​  ​Update (1515ET): Dr. Conley has confirmed that although President Trump isn't out of the woods yet, he has recovered enough to warrant his safe return back to the West Wing, as the president announced via tweet roughly 30 minutes ago.
​  ​Doctors said that Trump has maintained a full work schedule at Walter Reed. He will receive his fourth dose of remdesivir Monday evening, before taking the fifth and final dose on Tu​e​sday.
​  ​When pressed by a reporter about the safety risks to the Secret Service agents during Trump's ride outside Walter Reed Sunday evening, Dr. Conley said that the agents wore PPE, as they have in recent days, and that the trip took place over a "very short period of time".
​  ​Circling back to Trump's mental acuity, reporters asked whether there had been any fogginess as a result of the medication, or the virus, Dr. Conley assured reporters that "he's back" and that Trump has been a "great" patient.
​  ​Looking ahead, Dr. Conley said advanced diagnostic techniques will be used to detect when the last traces of 'live' virus have left the president. Dr. Conley said that people are most at risk of shedding the live virus during the first 5 days of infection, but usually by ten days the last traces have left.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/trump-tweets-he-leaving-walter-reed-hospital-monday-evening

  ​Trump got treated with antiviral medicines shortly after he was diagnosed with SARS-CoV-2, based upon a screening test. 
(A super-spreader cluster was identified at the White House, with 29 people now positive, from that event. The unmasking in the Rose Garden for Amy Coney Barrett's nomination is blamed, but the people who got sick were all inside without masks for the reception afterward. I think that's where the viral cloud got 'em.)​
  We have all been told that the only advantage to early and frequent testing is early isolation to reduce spread. All the drugs the Chinese used, and the rest of the world uses, have not been shown to save lives in America, where nobody is allowed to have them until they are almost dying.
These antiviral drugs only worked in cell cultures, China which is to blame, and fakes results, and poor countries like India. 
Just stay at home until you need a ventilator. Do NOT use drugs from India and Bangladesh! Are you CRAZY?!
  
  Trump announced in May that he was taking hydroxychloroquine/zinc prophylaxis, but no mention is made of it now. None. 
Was it stopped sometime in the summer? Anyway, nobody says he was taking it last week and he's not taking it now. 
Hydroxychloroquine/Zn does seem to work as prophylaxis in studies.

  There is a progression in the attack of SARS-CoV-2 upon the human body. It's moderately well understood now, but understandings are broadly misrepresented to the public by the national medical bureaucracy. Many treating physicians have been mocked and belittled in the press for saying that there are treatments to reduce morbidity and mortality from COVID.
  Rheumatic fever, from untreated Strep Throat used to be a major cause of death and morbidity in the US. That stopped when strep throat started to be treated promptly with penicillin. Now it's unheard of.

  In HIV, we discovered that all the "AIDS-defining-illnesses" like pneumocystis pneumonia, and Kaposis's Sarcoma would just never happen if viral infection was detected early and antivirals were started before the virus had caused widespread injury. Even Tony Fauci knows that.

  Now, with the way Donald Trump is being treated, with antivirals reserved for the hopelessly ill, and getting a rapid recovery from early symptoms, when we know he's exactly the target this virus likes to find, maybe we can get a national reprieve and Make-America-Average-Intelligent-Again.

  What if everybody took a little saliva test everyMonday and Thursday? What if people at higher risk or even higher anxiety level, got treated as soon as the test was confirmed, like President Trump did, and some of the other party-goers probably are?
  Hey, what if all the people who tested positive before elective surgery got treated that way for starters? 
I bet we could set up a study proposal to do that in about 3 months, and have it reviewed for possible approval by next spring!
To have convincing scientific evidence you have to go through the process. It takes a lot of time. Just treating people, like in the old days, can't give you convincing evidence that it is better to take ordinary drugs for a life threatening infection, before your life is already threatened.
Some people might want to do that if they test positive, of course, but it's not to be condoned, is it?

  What if it was somebody in your family? You know how stressful that can be, right? What if great-aunt, or grandma isolated at home and took some safe, purportedly antiviral combination like ivermectin, zinc and doxycycline, or hydroxychloroquine and zinc if her EKG was ok?
Would you go for that? 
Would it seem ok to you? If auntie-grandma just got a positive screening  test after 3 visits to the ER , and couldn't get the surgery she needed, would you think she should take some treatment, even before she got sick with fever, diarrhea, hurting all over, and gasping for air? 
How would you know the medicine really worked if she never got sick enough to be sure? Can't have that, can you?

  Our family is treating Auntie-Grandma. 
Judge us if you must, but we are weak and subject to temptation. We fear the guilt which would come from inaction if she did get badly sick and suffered, and maybe died. She has started ivermectin, doxycycline, and will get the zinc in a couple of hours when the family-courier gets it to her.
We'll letcha know how it works out. Maybe she can get her surgery without too long of a wait.

  Winter comes early to some places. Not Texas. I like Texas better. Winter is really time for vitamin-D supplements. 5000 units D3 every day.
Nine U.S. states have reported record increases in COVID-19 cases over the last seven days, mostly in the upper Midwest and West where chilly weather is forcing more activities indoors.  
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa/as-cold-weather-arrives-u-s-states-see-record-increases-in-covid-19-cases-idUSKBN26P0K8

​The headline says to be afraid for your kids. (Clickbait) 
The study does not say anything dramatically different from what we know. Kids between 6 and 15 really don't seem to be much at risk from novel-coronavirus(es), nor to spread virus dramatically. Younger and older kids shed more virus and spread it more. College kids rule, but they don't have to care, at least not in the sunny summer. Most people in India live in small, crowded dwellings. They locked down, and it spread a lot in the family clusters. That should not be a surprise. Again, a few people do all the spreading.
​  ​A study of more than a half-million people in India who were exposed to the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 suggests that the virus’ continued spread is driven by only a small percentage of those who become infected.
​  ​Furthermore, children and young adults were found to be potentially much more important to transmitting the virus — especially within households — than previous studies have identified, according to a paper by researchers from the United States and India published Sept. 30 in the journal Science.
​https://www.princeton.edu/news/2020/09/30/largest-covid-19-contact-tracing-study-date-finds-children-key-spread-evidence

John Pilger has been attending the Assange "trial":
  I have sat in many courts and seldom known such a corruption of due process; this is due revenge. Putting aside the ritual associated with ‘British justice’, at times it has been evocative of a Stalinist show trial. One difference is that in the show trials, the defendant stood in the court proper. In the Assange trial, the defendant was caged behind thick glass, and had to crawl on his knees to a slit in the glass, overseen by his guard, to make contact with his lawyers. His message, whispered barely audibly through face masks, was then passed by post-it the length of the court to where his barristers were arguing the case against his extradition to an American hellhole.
  Consider this daily routine of Julian Assange, an Australian on trial for truth-telling journalism. He was woken at five o’clock in his cell at Belmarsh prison in the bleak southern sprawl of London. The first time I saw Julian in Belmarsh, having passed through half an hour of ‘security’ checks, including a dog’s snout in my rear, I found a painfully thin figure sitting alone wearing a yellow armband. He had lost more than 10 kilos in a matter of months; his arms had no muscle. His first words were: ‘I think I am losing my mind’.
  I tried to assure him he wasn’t. His resilience and courage are formidable, but there is a limit. That was more than a year ago. In the past three weeks, in the pre-dawn, he was strip-searched, shackled, and prepared for transport to the Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, in a truck that his partner, Stella Moris, described as an upended coffin. It  had one small window; he had to stand precariously to look out. The truck and its guards were operated by Serco, one of many politically connected companies that run much of Boris Johnson’s Britain.
  The journey to the Old Bailey took at least an hour and a half. That’s a minimum of three hours being jolted through snail-like traffic every day. He was led into his narrow cage at the back of the court, then look up, blinking, trying to make out faces in the public gallery through the reflection of the glass. He saw the courtly figure of his dad, John Shipton, and me, and our fists went up. Through the glass, he reached out to touch fingers with Stella, who is a lawyer and seated in the body of the court.
  We were here for the ultimate of what the philosopher Guy Debord called The Society of the Spectacle: a man fighting for his life. Yet his crime is to have performed an epic public service: revealing that which we have a right to know: the lies of our governments and the crimes they commit in our name. His creation of WikiLeaks and its failsafe protection of sources revolutionised journalism, restoring it to the vision of its idealists. Edmund Burke’s notion of free journalism as a fourth estate is now a fifth estate that shines a light on those who diminish the very meaning of democracy with their criminal secrecy. That’s why his punishment is so extreme.
https://arena.org.au/eyewitness-to-the-agony-of-julian-assange/

​I will write in "Tulsi Gabbard" when I vote for President "early" in less than 2 weeks​. 
She's burning the right bridges. What's next?
​  ​Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Hawaii Democrat, has gained support from Republican colleagues in calling for the U.S. government to abandon its criminal cases against Julian Assange and Edward J. Snowden.
​  ​Along with Rep. Thomas Massie, Kentucky Republican, she introduced a resolution Friday urging the U.S. to drop all charges and efforts to extradite Mr. Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/oct/3/republicans-join-tulsi-gabbard-on-calling-for-us-t/
https://gabbard.house.gov/news/press-releases/reps-tulsi-gabbard-thomas-massie-introduce-bipartisan-resolution-defending-free

​Jonathan Cook:
​  ​We are on a knife edge, and I am not here referring to Covid-19.
​  ​On the one hand, we are in a race – if our societies are to survive – to arrive at a new consensus, a new social contract, recognising that we need urgent and fundamental change. That will first require a greater popular acceptance that our leaders are incapable of overseeing that change because they are trapped in defective political structures. Those structures are irredeemably defective because they were captured long ago by corporate interests driving us towards extinction. We have to increase the depth and extent of popular doubt because, without it, there will not be enough people thinking critically to push for wholesale change.
​ ​ On the other hand, too much doubt – doubt simply for the sake of doubt, or cynical doubt – will not improve our chances of reorganising our societies and giving ourselves a shot at survival. The danger is that justified, educated, targeted scepticism morphs into kneejerk, enervating, fatalistic cynicism. That is the very trend our leaders have been cultivating in us – mostly inadvertently – through their own nihilistic support for a neoliberal status quo that, it becomes clearer by the day, is hurtling us towards a desolate future.
​  ​Doubt is a treacherous path to navigate. It has a decisive fork along the way: one route could lead to salvation, whereas the other heads with absolute certainty towards ruin. If we become so filled with doubt that we are no longer prepared to believe anything, or we see everything as equally a conspiracy, we will be paralysed into inaction and hopelessness.
​  ​ It is hard to live without hope. Humans need to foster hope, even when it seems clear there is no hope. If we lose a sense that we can create real change through our actions, we end up – as some are doing already – looking to authoritarians and father figures who can reassure us that, though our situation appears bleak, they can make everything better, they have the answers.
​  ​The cynical left wants to drag the critical left down a path that propels us towards this doomed future. It is not my path. I will continue to ignore the siren calls urging me away from constructive critical thought towards destructive cynicism.

https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2020-10-01/doubt-path-despair-cynicism/

​Charles Hugh Smith interview with Christ Matenson, with transcript. "What Would A Better System Look Like?"
​  For instance, my basic idea, which I’ve often posted in my essays on Peak Prosperity, is if you don’t change the way money is created and distributed, you’ve change nothing. You can talk about reforms and oh, we're going to do this and noble sounding stuff. If you don’t change the way money is created and distributed you’ve changed nothing because people at the top have all the money, and they can buy whatever they want.
  Jeffrey Epstein, a perfect example. You want to get into Harvard, the top echelon? Oh, just donate $10 million and then pretty soon you're the greatest buddy of everybody in Harvard. So that’s the way the system is rigged now.
  My thing is we got to start a new system of money, and cryptocurrencies give us that option. For the first time we can actually say we're going to create digital money, like the Fed does, out of thin air, but we're going to create it in only one circumstance, to pay for labor that was considered valued by the community.

https://www.peakprosperity.com/charles-hugh-smith-what-would-a-better-system-look-like/

​Imagining Fair Money​

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