The Rockefeller Foundation releases an ambitious new proposal to test 30 million people a week, employ up to 300,000 contact tracers, and establish a digital data sharing platform. Rajiv Shah, President and CEO of the Rockefeller Foundation, and Dr. Kavita Patel, former health policy director in the Obama White House, join Andrea Mitchell to discuss this and other plans to reopen the country. April 22, 2020.
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At the beginning of March, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California announced a series of executive orders he hoped would help slow the spread, and subsequently mitigate the health impact, of COVID-19. One of those orders told Golden State residents to shelter-in-place. This order, set for two weeks, has been extended until May. Gov. Newsom has subsequently told residents that the process through which these public health safety measures will be loosened up is going to be deliberate, and done by degrees.
A study out of UC Davis in California says there is one silver lining to the shelter-in-place orders, though. According to researchers, the California highway patrol—who on average respond to more than 2,000 roadway “incidents” per day—have reported an enormous reduction in the daily rate of collisions. This means a lot less death and injury and a lot of public money saved.
UC Davis researchers found that the daily rate of collisions in California was cut in half after the order, and that cut closely matched the reduction in deaths and injuries connected to vehicular crashes. To this end, the study found that trauma centers reported a 40% reduction in people seen during this time, which includes pedestrians and cyclists involved in vehicular collisions. The savings to the public is estimated at about $40 million per day, adding up to around $1 billion in savings since the beginning of the shelter-in-place order.
What do you think about.this?
Coronavirus patients taking hydroxychloroquine, a treatment touted by President Trump, were no less likely to need mechanical ventilation and had higher deaths rates compared to those who did not take the drug, according to a study of hundreds of patients at US Veterans Health Administration medical centers.
The study, which reviewed veterans’ medical charts, was posted Tuesday on medrxiv.org, a pre-print server, meaning it was not peer reviewed or published in a medical journal. The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the University of Virginia.
The US government has contingency plans in place in the event North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un should die after reports that his health was in grave condition.
Sources discussed the plans but urged caution about the veracity of the reports, which claimed Kim is in bad shape after a cardiovascular procedure, Fox News reported.
Those plans include the possibility of a mass-scale humanitarian crisis inside the hermit nation such as a famine, according to the report.
Essentially, the study found that some immune systems are less capable of recognizing the infection. This diminished ability to recognize the coronavirus can make a person more susceptible to developing symptoms in general, as well as more likely to experience severe symptoms that require hospitalization.
Getting down to the scientific specifics of the findings, the study focused on the immune system genes known as human leukocyte antigen genes. These genes are highly involved in the immune system’s ability to recognize pathogens, but they come in a variety of forms and vary from person to person.
The research team, from Oregon Health & Science University and the Portland VA Research Foundation, believe that HLA gene variations may make certain people more vulnerable to the coronavirus.
👽 A slap to health workers.
Fyodor R. Dawn Spelling
Opening America. The President keeps teasing it in his daily propaganda, ego-stroke photo op. His sycophantic surrogates repeat the refrain on social media and in press releases. Soulless partisan television hosts pound us relentlessly with it. MAGA cult members protest mask-less and in close quarters for it.
This united offensive to quickly get Americans back to work, is all happening on days when we are losing over two thousand people a day, when we’ve eclipsed 644,000 confirmed cases, when 29,000 have died in the span of eight weeks.
And every single life that is threatened by this vicious, insidious illness—falls squarely on the shoulders of healthcare workers and first responders: doctors, nurses, EMTs, lab technicians, hospital staff, police officers, firefighters.
For weeks they have labored without sleep, without rest, without enough masks to protect themselves, without enough tests to identify the relentless flood of sick people in their midst, without enough ventilators to keep the gravely ill alive; continually stepping into harm’s way to attend to this unprecedented national emergency.
The US is monitoring intelligence that North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, is in grave danger after a surgery, according to a US official with direct knowledge.
Kim recently missed the celebration of his grandfather’s birthday on April 15, which raised speculation about his well-being. He had been seen four days before that at a government meeting.
Another US official told CNN Monday that the concerns about Kim’s health are credible but the severity is hard to assess.
The main route of transmission of SARS CoV infection is presumed to be respiratory droplets. However the virus is also detectable in other body fluids and excreta. The stability of the virus at different temperatures and relative humidity on smooth surfaces were studied. The dried virus on smooth surfaces retained its viability for over 5 days at temperatures of 22–25°C and relative humidity of 40–50%, that is, typical air-conditioned environments. However, virus viability was rapidly lost (3 log10) at higher temperatures and higher relative humidity (e.g., 38°C, and relative humidity of 95%). The better stability of SARS coronavirus at low temperature and low humidity environment may facilitate its transmission in community in subtropical area (such as Hong Kong) during the spring and in air-conditioned environments. It may also explain why some Asian countries in tropical area (such as Malaysia, Indonesia or Thailand) with high temperature and high relative humidity environment did not have major community outbreaks of SARS.
Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), was a new emerging disease associated with severe pneumonia and spread to involve over 30 countries in 5 continents in 2003. A novel coronavirus was identified as its cause [1–3]. SARS had a dramatic impact on health care services and economies of affected countries, and the overall mortality rate was estimated to be 9%, but rising to 50% in those aged 60 or above [4]. A notable feature of this disease was its predilection for transmission in the health care setting and to close family and social contacts. The disease is presumed to be spread by droplets, close direct or indirect contact, but the relative importance of these routes of transmission is presently unclear. A study showed that viral aerosol generation by a patient with SARS was possible and therefore airborne droplet transmission was a possible means of transmission [5].
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Doctors and researchers are just beginning to document and understand the effects of heart disease in complicating and endangering recovery from the COVID-19 virus, as well as the potential impact of COVID-19 on the heart. In a new Loyola Medicine video, “Heart Disease and COVID-19,” cardiologist Asim Babar, MD, recommends that individuals with heart disease take especially good care of their health and heart during this pandemic.
What police would do with the information has yet to be determined. The head of WMP told New Scientist they won’t be preemptively arresting anyone; instead, the idea would be to use the information to provide early intervention from social or health workers to help keep potential offenders on the straight and narrow or protect potential victims.
But data ethics experts have voiced concerns that the police are stepping into an ethical minefield they may not be fully prepared for. Last year, WMP asked researchers at the Alan Turing Institute’s Data Ethics Group to assess a redacted version of the proposal, and last week they released an ethics advisory in conjunction with the Independent Digital Ethics Panel for Policing.
While the authors applaud the force for attempting to develop an ethically sound and legally compliant approach to predictive policing, they warn that the ethical principles in the proposal are not developed enough to deal with the broad challenges this kind of technology could throw up, and that “frequently the details are insufficiently fleshed out and important issues are not fully recognized.”