COVID-19 Outbreak (Update: More than 2.9M cases and 132,313 deaths in US) (7 Viewers)

[Dallas_Saint73]

Dallas county’s hospitalization rate has increased since Phase 1 started. But it’s not too significant to cause concern yet. Plenty of beds left. Including ICU and ventilators.

It will definitely go up. People are acting like we are not in a pandemic out here. Just driving around the Frisco area, everything is crowded and people are out and about with no masks on or anything.

My teenage daughter wants to go back to work since things are opening up and she sees the activity on social media. That is hard no from me. At least for another month or so.

 

[Poison]

‘Extreme’ conspiracy killing US ‘faithful’

US evangelical Christians led the charge against isolation measures to combat COVID-19. Now they’re proclaiming any vaccine to be “the mark of the Beast”.

www.news.com.au

Stupid people from Louisiana, particularly those affiliated with evangelical churches, are disproportionately represented in this article about COVID19 that has made its way across the ditch.

Stay safe people. And listen to the scientists.

Louisiana megachurch pastor Tony Spell was arrested for reversing a bus full of congregation members at a protester attempting to highlight his defiance of mass-gathering bans. Spell, who claims to have healed HIV through prayer, had insisted services at his Life Tabernacle Church near Baton Rouge continue as usual. “This is the proudest day of my life to be persecuted for the faith,” he wrote after his arrest.

“We’re a Pentecostal denomination, and when we gather and pray, the Holy Ghost comes in the midst. There are healings, signs, wonders, some things done together in the church that can’t be done in a live stream,” Spell said.

His lawyer, who attended two of the offending services, was forced to delay court proceedings when hospitalised with COVID-19.

...

“They love the idea that they’re being oppressed and that they’re being persecuted,” assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University Ryan Burge told YahooNews, saying evangelicals were “on the lookout for times when the government sort of oversteps its bounds and starts to infringe upon religion.”

Senior Lecturer Robyn Whitaker of the University of Divinity told The Conversation that much of the resistance to medical and government anti-pandemic measures were “rooted in a prosperity theology that naively claims God will protect and bless the faithful (usually financially)”.

“This distrust is because scientific theories, such as evolution, are mutually exclusive to a literal reading of the creation stories in the Bible, particularly Genesis, and are therefore seen as a threat or in conflict with faith.”

 

[KiwiSaint]

Also, congrats to New Zealand. Their economy is probably about to explode in a good way. I may use all of my American Airline miles to fly out there in July with the family for vacation to give them a bit of normalcy. I have a ton of miles and I get the feeling AA is going to go bankrupt so might as well use them while I can. Even if a 14 day quarantine is required to go it may be worth it.

Hopefully, New Zealand lets Americans come in the country.

You both need to keep your infected arses in the US...

Seriously...I doubt you'll be visiting NZ in the next twelve to eighteen months. The border is closed to only permanent residents and citizens. There are preliminary discussions about creating a trans-Tasman travel bubble with Australia which will allow direct flights from Australia to and from but only for Australian/New Zealand permanent residents.

Today, even if you are resident of NZ, there is a 14 day quarantine upon arrival. My family is in NZ and we own a farm and even I cannot get permission to enter the country because I am a temporary resident (not a permanent resident). Hopefully by the end of the year, the trans-Tasman bubble will be place and I'll be able to get home or they can come to Australia for a visit.

 

[James Spader]

Yeah, if anything, I'd rather the Patriot Act go away. Never liked it, never will. Just too easy to get misused.

The act is a complete disgrace to the U.S. Constitution yet we continue to vote the same clowns in.

 

[Optimus Prime]

Nursing homes operated by Life Care Centers of America, one of the largest chains in the industry, violated federal standards meant to stop the spread of infections and communicable diseases even after outbreaks and deaths from covid-19 began to sweep its facilities from the Pacific Northwest to New England, inspection reports show.

Over the past six weeks, as the nationwide death toll among the elderly soared, government inspectors discovered breakdowns in infection control and prevention at at least 10 Life Care nursing homes that underwent covid-19 inspections overseen by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

That does not include deficiencies found at the Life Care Center of Kirkland in Washington state, which suffered the country’s first reported outbreak of the novel coronavirus in February........

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/major-nursing-home-chain-violated-patient-care-infection-control-standards-before--and-after--pandemic-started-records-show/2020/05/16/f407c092-90b1-11ea-a0bc-4e9ad4866d21_story.html

 

[James Spader]

If that passes, my Google searches are going to consist of a lot of "Bill Barr sux, bites, blows, etc." If I get a visit by black ops, I'll know he's on his toes.

Bruh, they already have everything. Have you not read what Snowden put out. This just shows the oblivious mentality of this country. To your point, I would at least use DuckDuckGo browser.

 

[James Spader]

Working in banking, I've only been exposed to the Anti-Money Laundering provision of the law. I understand why this is needed, and why it should remain. But as for the other surveillance stuff, a lot seems like overreach. What McConnell is proposing is on another level.

Some of the biggest money launders are alphabet agencies.

 

[RazorOye]

any 'border control' talk up here is almost entirely about keeping Americans out, especially as states open up while most provinces here are taking it much more slowly

 

[James Spader]

Thought you guys might find this interesting:

Outrage as controversial book reveals hidden details of virus outbreak in Wuhan

A Chinese author has been labelled a traitor over her diary from within Wuhan which is due to be published in English this month.

au.news.yahoo.com

and another:

Masks work in lowering Covid-19 transmission rates: Hong Kong researchers

Hamsters placed in adjoining cages with infected subjects were infected at a 66.7 per cent rate; the introduction of a barrier saw the percentage drop to 16.7.

www.scmp.com

 

[Optimus Prime]

Stories like this are terrifying

Some people are accepting of the risks because it’s “mostly old people and mostly already sick people with a handful of healthy people”

If there is a huge increase in deaths of healthy children all hell will break loose
===============================

The day Juliet Daly’s heart gave out started much like every other Monday during the quarantine.

The 12-year-old from Covington, La., padded out of her room in her PJs shortly after 7 a.m., ate a half-bowl of Rice Krispies, and got on a Zoom call with her sixth-grade social studies class.

She had been feeling unwell all weekend with twisting abdominal pains, vomiting and a fever of 101.5, but she seemed to be on the mend.

The weird thing, she recalled, was that her lips looked bluish in the mirror and she was super tired. In fact, she kept falling asleep unexpectedly. On the couch. In front of her computer. In the bath.

“I thought I was feeling a bit better,” she said, “but I couldn’t keep my eyes open.”.........

Cases like Juliet’s, a puzzling inflammatory syndrome in children believed linked to covid-19, had been popping up in different parts of the world for months, but it wasn’t until recently that health authorities began tracking the phenomenon.

The number of infected children, while still small, is estimated to be a few hundred — larger than anyone anticipated for a disease thought to inflict little, if any, harm on children.

Doctors in Britain and Italy had issued alerts in April, and the American Heart Association warned last week that some pediatric patients “are becoming very ill extremely quickly,” urging providers to evaluate them right away............

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/05/17/child-coronavirus-kawasaki-inflammation/

At first it was a handful of puzzling cases, Jane Newburger recalled. Other doctors had contacted her describing children with covid-19 coming into emergency rooms in bad shape with a kind of inflammatory shock syndrome affecting multiple organs.

Some were screaming from stomach pain. Others had bubbles, or swelling, in the arteries of their hearts.

By Saturday night — when Newburger and 1,800 other worried pediatric specialists, including representatives from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, convened on a Zoom call to discuss the phenomenon — hospitals worldwide had identified about 100 similar cases. About half are in the United States.

“Not in my lifetime have I seen anything remotely similar to what’s going on right now,” said Newburger, medical director of the cardiac neurodevelopment program at Boston Children’s Hospital...........

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/05/06/kawasaki-disease-coronavirus/

 

[efil4stnias]

You both need to keep your infected arses in the US...

Seriously...I doubt you'll be visiting NZ in the next twelve to eighteen months. The border is closed to only permanent residents and citizens. There are preliminary discussions about creating a trans-Tasman travel bubble with Australia which will allow direct flights from Australia to and from but only for Australian/New Zealand permanent residents.

Today, even if you are resident of NZ, there is a 14 day quarantine upon arrival. My family is in NZ and we own a farm and even I cannot get permission to enter the country because I am a temporary resident (not a permanent resident). Hopefully by the end of the year, the trans-Tasman bubble will be place and I'll be able to get home or they can come to Australia for a visit.

Italy has done the same. No US visitors unless family emergency direct relative.

 

[superchuck500]

and another:

Masks work in lowering Covid-19 transmission rates: Hong Kong researchers

Hamsters placed in adjoining cages with infected subjects were infected at a 66.7 per cent rate; the introduction of a barrier saw the percentage drop to 16.7.

www.scmp.com

That's very interesting - I wish SCMP would link the actual paper. They just expect us to take their word for it?

EDIT - It appears there isn't a paper yet. It was just a press announcement from the research team.

 

[superchuck500]

A new paper from a North American team (CA and US) draws some concerning conclusions: SARS-CoV-2 was already "highly adapted" to human transmission by the time the outbreak began in Wuhan. That adaption is (surprisingly to the team) remarkably like "late phase SARS(1)", and when analyzed against environmental samples (including zoological) from the Wuhan market, no compelling matches were found.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.01.073262v1.full.pdf

The pairwise comparisons of dN and dS, alongside a dearth of signs of emerging adaptive mutations, suggest that by the time SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in late 2019, it was already well adapted for human transmission to an extent more similar to late epidemic than to early-to- mid epidemic SARS-CoV. One possible scenario is that the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in late 2019 resulted from a bottleneck event similar to the late epidemic SARS-CoV cases that stemmed from a single superspreader who visited Metropole Hotel in Hong Kong, China in late February, 2003 (36). In comparison to the SARS-CoV epidemic, the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic appears to be missing an early phase during which the virus would be expected to accumulate adaptive mutations for human transmission. However, if this were the origin story of SARS-CoV-2, there is a surprising absence of precursors or branches emerging from a less recent, less adapted common ancestor among humans and animals. In the case of SARS-CoV, the less human-adapted SARS-CoV progenated multiple branches of evolution in both humans and animals (Figure 1, Figure 5). In contrast, SARS-CoV-2 appeared without peer in late 2019, suggesting that there was a single introduction of the human-adapted form of the virus into the human population. This has important implications regarding the risk of SARS-CoV-2 re-emergence in the near future and the severity of its consequences.

p. 9

Even the possibility that a non-genetically-engineered precursor could have adapted to humans while being studied in a laboratory should be considered, regardless of how likely or unlikely (39).

p. 9

There has been considerable debate among scientists and the public on whether SARS-CoV-2 originated from the Wuhan Huanan seafood market (2). According to the Chinese CDC’s website, accessed on April 27, 2020, SARS-CoV-2 was detected in environmental samples at the Huanan seafood market, and the Chinese CDC suggested that the virus originated from animals sold there. (51). However, phylogenetic tracking suggests that SARS-CoV-2 had been imported into the market by humans (52). To look for clues regarding an intermediate animal host, we turned to samples collected from the market in January, 2020. In contrast to the thorough and swift animal sampling executed in response to the 2002-2004 SARS-CoV outbreaks to identify intermediate hosts (37,53), no animal sampling prior to the shut down and sanitization of the market was reported. Details about the sampling are sparse: 515 out of 585 samples are environmental samples, and the other 70 were collected from wild animal vendors; it is unclear whether the latter samples are from animals, humans, and/or the environment. Only 4 of the samples, which were all environmental samples from the market, have passable coverage of SARS-CoV-2 genomes for analysis. Even so, these contain ambiguous bases that confound genetic clustering with human SARS-CoV-2 genomes. Nonetheless, the market samples did not form a separate cluster from the human SARS-CoV-2 genomes. We compared the market samples to the human Wuhan- Hu-1 isolate, and discovered >99.9% genome identity, even at the S gene that has exhibited evidence of evolution in previous CoV zoonoses. In the SARS-CoV outbreaks, >99.9% genome or S identity was only observed among isolates collected within a narrow window of time from within the same species (Figure 5) (15). The human and civet isolates of the 2003/2004 outbreak, which were collected most closely in time and at the site of cross-species transmission, shared only up to 99.79% S identity (Figure 5) (37). It is therefore unlikely for the January market isolates, which all share 99.9-100% genome and S identity with a December human SARS-CoV-2, to have originated from an intermediate animal host, particularly if the most recent common ancestor jumped into humans as early as October, 2019 (54,55). The SARS-CoV-2 genomes in the market samples were most likely from humans infected with SARS-CoV-2 who were vendors or visitors at the market. If intermediate animal hosts were present at the market, no evidence remains in the genetic samples available.

p.12

 

[superchuck500]

A new paper from a North American team (CA and US) draws some concerning conclusions: SARS-CoV-2 was already "highly adapted" to human transmission by the time the outbreak began in Wuhan. That adaption is (surprisingly to the team) remarkably like "late phase SARS(1)", and when analyzed against environmental samples (including zoological) from the Wuhan market, no compelling matches were found.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.01.073262v1.full.pdf

p. 9



p. 9




p.12

^^ Is the most compelling virology I have seen to date that suggests a fully scientific, apolitical international investigation needs to happen - and the world needs to demand that China participate openly.

 

[DaveXA]

A new paper from a North American team (CA and US) draws some concerning conclusions: SARS-CoV-2 was already "highly adapted" to human transmission by the time the outbreak began in Wuhan. That adaption is (surprisingly to the team) remarkably like "late phase SARS(1)", and when analyzed against environmental samples (including zoological) from the Wuhan market, no compelling matches were found.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.01.073262v1.full.pdf

p. 9



p. 9




p.12

So...essentially, there's absolutely no evidence it came from an intermediary host at the wet markets...interesting to say the least.