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Posted by daveklepper on Monday, April 6, 2020 2:02 PM
Israel among first to try experimental Japanese coronavirus drug
The hospitals plan to test the drug on a total of 80 patients at Hadassah, Sourasky, Poriah Hospital in Tiberias and Soroka Hospital in Beersheba, together with researchers from Hebrew University.
APRIL 6, 2020 19:38
 
Israel is among the first countries to receive an experimental Japanese drug to treat coronavirus, for testing at hospitals throughout the country, the Foreign Ministry announced on Monday.
Testing in China has found the flu medicine Avigan, produced by Japan's Fujifilm Holding Corp., as helpful in treating COVID-19 in its early stages, shortening the time that the patient is sick and preventing the illness from becoming more severe.
 
Israel received a first shipment of the drug in recent days, after weeks of work by Israeli
Ambassador to Japan Yaffa Ben-Ari, together with Prof. Ran Nir-Paz, an infectious disease expert from Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem and Dr. Esti Sayag, a deputy director-general of Sourasky (Ichilov) Medical Center in Tel Aviv.
 
The committee on clinical trials on humans met in Hadassah on Monday to review a number of promising drugs being tested on coronavirus patience and authorized experimenting with Avigan.
 
The hospitals plan to test the drug on a total of 80 patients at Hadassah, Sourasky, Poriah Hospital in Tiberias and Soroka Hospital in Beersheba, together with researchers from Hebrew University.
 
Nir-Paz explained that the medicine, developed for pandemic influenza, is meant to shorten the duration of the illness, and thus decrease the likelihood of other patients in the hospital catching coronavirus.
 
“The medicine is being used in the frontlines of care in Japan,” he said. “The goal of Israeli research is to examine if the medicine is effective for this indication.”
 
Sayag said that Avigan seems the most promising out of the drugs being tested for treating coronavirus patients in early days of the infection, and can thus help flatten the curve of patience and allow hospitals to provide better care to those in worse condition.
Foreign Minister Israel Katz praised the work of the embassy in Tokyo, the Foreign Ministry and Health Ministry for “successfully bringing this groundbreaking research to Israel.”
 
“In this challenging time, the Foreign Ministry is on the frontlines of the battle against coronavirus and is leading, together with other ministries, Israel’s efforts to find necessary medical supplies and medical solutions to the virus,” Katz said.
 
Ben-Ari said she will continue working to get more doses of Avigan to Israel to help prevent infected people’s condition from deteriorating. She thanked Fujifilm for recognizing the high level of medical research conducted in Israel.
 
Japanese media reported on Sunday that Japan plans to stockpile 2 million doses of Avigan, as opposed to its current level of 700,000. Tokyo also plans to prioritize the clinical trial process of the drug so it can be formally approved to be used in treating coronavirus patients.
Reuters contributed to this report.
 
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Posted by charlie hebdo on Monday, April 6, 2020 1:51 PM

Good news, Erik.  

David: Even Wiki calls it far right and anti-Muslim (not anti-Islam). Here's a link to a Georgetown article on Gladstone:

 

https://bridge.georgetown.edu/research/factsheet-gatestone-institute/

As to the nonsensical rantings of the discredited Gordon Chang, speak with any distinguished academic whose field is China and see what they say.  Chang uses the old trick of mixing a few facts with large helpings of his biased views. 

Biased political views?  You're using the Trains forum daily as though it were  your own blog in furtherence of Israeli views, sometimes little more than agitprop. 

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Posted by daveklepper on Monday, April 6, 2020 1:51 PM

Gatestone is not anti-Islam and is called such only by those who wish to excuse terrorism.  One of their senior researchers is a religious Muslilm.  Also, I think Conservative is a better term for it than "far-right," and I would have posted its real criticism of the way Trump first reacted to the news of the outbreak in China if I had not thought that it might be too political to post.

In the material I posted, is there anything about the collapse of China?  Reduction of influence and reduction of ability to harm the USA is what I read, but this isnot the same as the collapse of their government.

Charlie, again you are simply calling names.  If you have data contrary to what I posted from the Gatestone research or wish to point out what you can show to be conjecture, I'm always willing to listen and learn.  But you seem unwilling to learn from anyone who isn't in lockstep witih your political positions.

I don't always agree with Gatestone.  But I do think their analysis is correct in this case and agrees with others having a spectrum of political positions on other matters.

I am not attempting to defend all of Gatestone's positions or all those of the author I have quoted.  Only the matter that I posted. which I believe is a fair analysss.

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Posted by Erik_Mag on Monday, April 6, 2020 1:36 PM

Having read "The Great Influenza" shortly after it was published, I am not surprised to hear that GWB picked up on it as he was was very involved with helping Africa deal with the HIV epidemic. FWIW, the book does not portray Woodrow Wilson in a good light.

News from the last 12 hours suggests that the US may be approaching the peak of the first wave. The Univ Of Wash model was updated last night to get a lot closer to reality with a substantial lowering of hospital resources needed (some areas are still going to be hit hard). Will be interesting to see what effect wearing mask will have, even if they work only 50% of the time, it will be an enourmous help.

Doubling time for cases in San Diego County was 5.5 days and new cases have been nearly flat for the last 5 days suggesting that growth is no longer exponential.

I don't think we can avoid COVID-19 from becoming endemic, in makes a strong case for a vaccination program.

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Posted by Convicted One on Monday, April 6, 2020 11:22 AM

I found this story of prescience quite interesting. Seems a shame now that other priorities  managed to derail such forward thinking in the interim.

2005 prediction

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Posted by charlie hebdo on Monday, April 6, 2020 11:00 AM

The Gatestone Institute is a far-right organization, known for a strongly anti-Muslim bias.  Gordon Chang is a lawyer and self-proclaimed China expert whose bias is well known.  Since 2000 he has predicted with certainty the collapse of the Chinese government three times.  Actual experts do not take his pronouncements seriously. 

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Posted by daveklepper on Monday, April 6, 2020 5:01 AM
  • The virus is hitting China in a second wave. The second wave is claiming victims, including the Party's propaganda narratives. The most dangerous of these narratives is that ruler Xi Jinping, with heaven's mandate, has an obligation to dominate the international system.

  • To push America aside and seize global leadership, China got Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, to say that China's response to the coronavirus showed the "superiority of the Chinese system and this experience is worthy of emulation by other countries." Then Beijing set about making a big show of "donating" medical equipment and diagnostic kits, most notably to stricken Europe.

  • Xi's initial policies turned a local outbreak into a pandemic, and now they are making even more people sick and forcing China into another pit of disease. China's inaccurate diagnostic kits and substandard protective gear donated around the world along with the new infections will show the truth: communism is incompetent if not downright malign.

China has "defeated" the coronavirus and declared "victory," Communist Party media tells us.

A funny thing happened on the way to victory, however. The virus is hitting China in a second wave. The second wave is claiming victims, including the Party's propaganda narratives.

China, after reporting no new infections on March 19, said the virus had been contained. Since then, Beijing has been reporting dozens of new cases each day but has maintained that virtually all of them were "imported" -- in other words, the infected were individuals arriving from other countries.

Of the very few in-country transmissions, most, Beijing maintained, were transmissions from the imported cases.

China's official numbers of deaths and new infections, however, must be bogus. Chinese officials are taking actions that are, as a practical matter, inconsistent with the no-new-infection reports.

For instance, on March 27 Beijing closed all theaters nationwide, after re-opening them just the previous week.

In Shanghai, tourist attractions that had just resumed operations were shut again. For instance, the municipality re-closed the observation deck of the Shanghai Tower, the tallest building in China, and the nearby Oriental Pearl Tower. The Jin Mao Tower is now shuttered "to further strengthen pandemic prevention and control." Madame Tussauds, the Shanghai Ocean Aquarium, and the Shanghai Haichang Ocean Park are now dark, along with the indoor portions of another 25 attractions.

Shanghai Disneyland? "Temporarily Closed Until Further Notice."

Shanghai is not the only metropolis turning out the lights. In Chengdu, karaoke bars and internet cafes were also shut just days after Sichuan province opened up all entertainment venues.

Fuyang in Anhui province ordered the closure of "entertainment spots" and indoor swimming pools. Henan province locked down internet cafes.

Henan even quarantined an entire area, Jia county, as doctors there tested positive for the bug.

On March 31, ESPN reported that the Chinese central government had delayed the resumption of team sports.

The nationwide university-entrance exams, the gaokao, have been postponed a month, to July.

The regime has also not rescheduled its premier political events, the annual meetings of the National People's Congress and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, both originally scheduled for early March.

Finally, the authorities in Jiangxi province are not allowing people from next-door Hubei to enter, indicating they do not believe the epidemic in that disease-ridden province is over.

Does any of this matter? It does: Xi Jinping thinks he should rule the planet. "China, the country where the virus first appeared and claimed its first several thousand lives, is now using the global spread of the disease to bolster an increasingly vocal, assertive bid for global leadership that is exacerbating a yearslong conflict with the U.S.," the Wall Street Journal wrote on April 1.

As the Communist Party's Global Times on March 30 triumphantly put it, "COVID-19 Blunders Signal End of 'American Century.'"

To push America aside and seize global leadership, China got Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), to say that China's response to the coronavirus showed the "superiority of the Chinese system and this experience is worthy of emulation by other countries." Then Beijing set about making a big show of "donating" medical equipment and diagnostic kits, most notably to stricken Europe.

Finally, Xi Jinping, beginning around the first week of February, forced China back to work to demonstrate that China had ended the epidemic.

None of these showy displays will convince anyone, however, if the virus ravages China again. Unfortunately for Xi, that is what is happening: people in China are re-infecting each other. For instance, in industrial Dongguan in southern Guangdong province, workers returning to their jobsites have been carrying the coronavirus, and this has forced health officials to quarantine other workers. China's leader can jump-start the economy or throttle the coronavirus, but he cannot do both at the same time.

When the second wave of coronavirus infections hits China hard, Xi Jinping's boasts about the superiority of Chinese communism will sound hollow, absurd even.

Xi's initial policies turned a local outbreak into a pandemic, and now they are making even more people sick and forcing China into another pit of disease. China's inaccurate diagnostic kits and substandard protective gear donated around the world along with the new infections will show the truth: communism is incompetent if not downright malign.

China can lie with statistics, but the virus gets the last word. "Victory" over both COVID-19 and the United States is far out of sight.

Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China and a Gatestone Institute Distinguished Senior Fellow.



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Posted by daveklepper on Monday, April 6, 2020 2:01 AM

Everyone currently at the Yeshiva. married couples, some with children, and me, with the single youngsters all at home, is healthy and has not had contact with any known virus carrier.  So we have not been tested.

 The campus is large, and one does not feel confined.  We practice social distancing, and pray outdoors with that in mind.  The top teacher-rabbi also has an apartment on campus with his wife.

And one coiuple has adaopted me as a quasi member of their family, so I will enjoy a traditional Seder.

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Posted by Electroliner 1935 on Sunday, April 5, 2020 10:14 PM

So Dave, I think you said you are "sheltered in place" and avoiding groups. Do they have testing for you or only if you have symptoms. Would I be correct that so far, you have no symptoms? Stay well my friend.

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Posted by daveklepper on Sunday, April 5, 2020 12:48 PM

3 more Israelis die of virus, bringing death toll to 47 as cases top 8,000
84-year-old woman is 6th resident of Beersheba assisted living facility to succumb to COVID-19; man and woman in 60s both said to have had underlying health issues
Israel’s death toll from the coronavirus rose to 47 Sunday morning with the passing of an 84-year-old woman from the Mishan nursing home in Beersheba, the sixth fatality from the assisted living facility, and a 63-year-old man and 61-year old woman both said to have had underlying health issues.
Beersheba’s Soroka Medical Center, Jerusalem’s Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital and Holon’s Wolfson Medical Center announced the deaths, respectively.
The first victim was named as Dalia Salmona, who worked as a head nurse at Beersheba’s Soroka Medical Center until her retirement. She reportedly suffered from dementia. She is survived by three children and her grandchildren.
The 63-year-old man was named as Bentzion Kofershtock, known at “the father of Meron” due to his volunteer work providing food for visitors at the grave of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yohai.
Holon’s Wolfson Medical Center said the 61-year-old woman, whose name has not yet been released, was brought in late last month from a geriatric hospital’s rehabilitation ward, and suffered from preexisting conditions.
The Health Ministry said Sunday that 8,018 people have been confirmed to be infected with the coronavirus in Israel, an increase of 429 from 24 hours earlier.
 
Dr. Nelia Kravitz, who died after contracting the coronavirus at the Mishan assisted living facility in Beersheba (Courtesy)
There are 127 people in serious condition and 106 on ventilators, which appears not to be an increase over figures from Saturday evening. A total of 477 people have recovered from the virus.
With the death toll from residents at the Mishan assisted living facility continuing to rise, relatives of the residents say they are planning to file a lawsuit against the facility’s managers and the Health Ministry for alleged medical malpractice.
“The Health Ministry as a regulator has not supervised and kept watch. They saved money instead of caring for the elderly,” a representative of residents’ families told the Kan public broadcaster Sunday morning.
In total, there have been at least 42 cases of the virus among residents and staff members.
In the suit, the relatives will allege that the facility’s residents were neglected, causing them to be infected by the virus, and that medical staff and Health Ministry officials did not take steps to separate them or check for the coronavirus, Channel 12 reported.
The families also claim that some residents’ initial complaints of pain and fevers — symptoms of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus — were not taken seriously and that additional people living at Mishan and staff members were infected because quarantine measures weren’t taken, the network reported.
They also reportedly allege that virus tests weren’t conducted for residents and staff with symptoms of COVID-19.
On Saturday, 88-year-old Holocaust survivor Dr. Nelia Kravitz, 88, who worked as a physician at Soroka Medical Center for 20 years, became the fifth victim from the Mishan facility in Beersheba.
The Nofim Tower assisted living center in Jerusalem has also been hard hit by the virus outbreak, with four fatalities from the facility.
In figures released Friday morning, the ministry said the highest number of cases across the country was recorded in Jerusalem (1,003), followed by the ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak (966) and Tel Aviv-Jaffa (335). Bnei Brak, one-quarter the size of the capital by population, was closed off by police on Friday morning to stem the outbreak.
=
Magen David Adom and Shaarei Tzedek hospital medical workers in Jerusalem, wearing protective clothing, seen with an ultra-Orthodox man at the hospital’s new coronavirus unit on April 2, 2020. (Nati Shohat/Flash90)
A senior Health Ministry official on Saturday called for additional areas in Israel with a high number of cases to be declared restricted zones, allowing the government to further curtail movement in these places in a bid to limit the virus’s spread.
Among the cities the official cited to Hebrew media were several with predominantly ultra-Orthodox populations, such as Elad and the West Bank settlement of Modiin Illit, as well as several Haredi neighborhoods in Jerusalem and Beit Shemesh.
However, Health Ministry Director-General Moshe Bar Siman-Tov also struck a cautiously optimistic note on Saturday, following reports that officials believe the current rate of infection in the country is rising at a relatively controlled rate and shows signs of remaining within levels that the health system can tolerate.
“The fact that we are holding discussions about an exit strategy from the crisis is a privilege,” he said.
 
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Posted by BaltACD on Sunday, April 5, 2020 11:20 AM

Overmod
 
BaltACD
Italy Deaths 15362 - Recovered 20996.  While more have recovered than have died - I am not liking the ratio. 

But keep in mind that the Australian journalists noted that the Italians log their stats differently; anyone -- in a heavily geriatric population -- who dies while infected with the virus is tabulated as dying FROM infection with the virus.  I suspect this is true for many patients with preexisting conditions and perhaps coinfection with other viruses; you may remember that in the United States the deaths "from" H1N1 influenza are about 100:1 vs. "COVID-19" and I see little operational reason at present either why the spread of influenza in Italy should be more restricted or that COVID-19 either predisposes against H1N1 infection or its symptoms "protect" against that (although both might be 'possible').

Just like EHH changing how service metrics were derived and reported on CSX versus the rest of the industry.

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Posted by Overmod on Sunday, April 5, 2020 10:15 AM

BaltACD
Italy Deaths 15362 - Recovered 20996.  While more have recovered than have died - I am not liking the ratio.

But keep in mind that the Australian journalists noted that the Italians log their stats differently; anyone -- in a heavily geriatric population -- who dies while infected with the virus is tabulated as dying FROM infection with the virus.  I suspect this is true for many patients with preexisting conditions and perhaps coinfection with other viruses; you may remember that in the United States the deaths "from" H1N1 influenza are about 100:1 vs. "COVID-19" and I see little operational reason at present either why the spread of influenza in Italy should be more restricted or that COVID-19 either predisposes against H1N1 infection or its symptoms "protect" against that (although both might be 'possible').

That is not to claim that there isn't a dramatic risk of increase in sustained, and not just 'prompt', deaths in any actual outbreak of COVID-19 that follows a failure of social distancing.  We see evidence of this in Israel precisely in the segments of the community that imperfectly practice it.  I expect to see evidence of it repeatedly in the United States anywhere the carefully -- and properly self-enforced -- segregation attempts break down or might 'have to be' suspended.  And it is a very long way, according to our expert sources, before the contemplated methods of actually ending the risk to the actual people 'at risk' will have succeeded well enough, and pervasively enough, to lift the social-distancing precautions.

Long before that I expect to see the more 'correct' response enacted, which is more careful and systematic isolation of the parts of the population at actual risk, and then selective return to more normal societal interaction and operation.  The importance of nonintrusive testing for 'acquired immunity' (e.g. presence of serological evidence or no infectious shed combined with sustained absence of symptoms) will be significant in that, as the current "testing" is laughable when you actually look at its reliability statistics.  Unfortunately there is no particular guarantee ... and this was reinforced by two 'we don't know' scientists as recently as yesterday ... that there will be no repeated 'waves' of repeated ARDS-inducing novel clones, as there memorably were in the 1918-20 H1N1 pandemic.  So institutionalization of correct rapid response actually has to be made on an ongoing basis, not just the expedient buck-passing and cheap-to-fit science that had characterized our response to, say the secret contemporary H1N1 pandemic right up to the snowballing of the COVID-19 reaction.

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Posted by BaltACD on Sunday, April 5, 2020 9:45 AM

Some of the Meme's one is tending to see are trumpeting the number 'recovered' instead of deaths.

Most recent Johns Hopkins report - Italy Deaths 15362 - Recovered 20996.  While more have recovered than have died - I am not liking the ratio.

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

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Posted by Deggesty on Sunday, April 5, 2020 8:18 AM

BaltACD

According to the Johns Hopkins reporting

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

 

Timor-Leste (wherever that is) has a single confirmed case.

 

It's near Indonesia.

Johnny

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Posted by daveklepper on Sunday, April 5, 2020 7:11 AM

Trying to settle the argument as to how the problem started and without denying that the USA could have done better than it did:

Coronavirus: China's Great Cover-up
by Giulio Meotti
April 5, 2020 at 5:30 am

Share113

       Bats were not, it seems, sold at Wuhan's seafood market. The Lancet
noted in a January study that the first Covid-19 case in Wuhan had no
connection to the market.
       One more person has just disappeared. Ai Fen, a Chinese physician,
who... claimed her bosses silenced her early warnings about
coronavirus, appears to have vanished.... The journalists who saw what
happened inside Wuhan have also disappeared.
       "No one has been able to study it. How can you say it's not a
release from a lab if you can't go to the lab? Indeed, we have seen
Beijing do its best to prevent virologists and epidemiologists from
actually going to Wuhan." — Gordon Chang, in Die Weltwoche, March 31,
2020.
       That is another major problem. The potential major investigator on
Wuhan's origin, the World Health Organization, is now accused of being
"China's coronavirus' accomplice".
       Why is China trafficking in dangerous viruses in the first place?
       "Debate may rage over which center it is, but at this point it seems
undeniable that a center has been directly involved with research on
viruses, although not necessarily on the creation of a virus." —
Father Renzo Milanese, AsiaNews.it, March 13, 2020.

We have been paying dearly for China's lies.
"This is one of the worst cover-ups in human history, and now the
world is facing a global pandemic," said Rep. Michael T. McCaul, the
ranking Republican member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee,
before the US intelligence community concluded, in a classified report
to the White House, that China has concealed the origin and extent of
the catastrophic global coronavirus outbreak.
The Chinese Communist Party's "failure has unleashed a global
contagion killing thousands", wrote Cardinal Charles Maung Bo,
president of the Federation of Asian Bishops' Conferences, on April 1.
"As we survey the damage done to lives around the world, we must ask
who is responsible?"
"... there is one government that has primary responsibility for what
it has done and what it has failed to do, and that is the CCP [Chinese
Communist Party] regime in Beijing. Let me be clear — it is the CCP
that has been responsible, not the people of China... Lies and
propaganda have put millions of lives around the world in danger... In
recent years, we have seen an intense crackdown on freedom of
expression in China. Lawyers, bloggers, dissidents and civil society
activists have been rounded up and have disappeared."
One more person has just disappeared: Ai Fen, a Chinese physician who
was head of the emergency department at Wuhan Central Hospital, had
worked with the late Dr. Li Wenliang. Ai, who claimed that her bosses
silenced her early warnings about coronavirus, appears to have
vanished. Her whereabouts, according to 60 Minutes Australia, are
unknown. The journalists who saw what happened inside Wuhan have also
disappeared. Caixin Global reported that the laboratories which
sequenced the coronavirus in December were ordered by Chinese
officials to hand over or destroy the samples and not release their
findings. "If I had known what was to happen, I would not have cared
about the reprimand, I would have *** talked about it to whoever,
where ever I could", Ai Fen said in an interview in March. Those were
her last recorded words.
There is no record at all, however, about how this pandemic began. Wet
market? A cave full of bats? Pangolins? Or a bio-weapons laboratory?
No foreign doctors, journalists, analysts or international observers
are present in Wuhan. Why, if the virus came out of a wet market or a
cave, did China suppress inquiries to such an extent? Why, in
December, did Beijing order Chinese scientists to destroy proof about
the virus? Why did Chinese officials claim that US soldiers brought
the virus to Wuhan? Why should it be scandalous that a US President
calls a virus that began in China a "Chinese virus"?
Who announced on January 11 that Wuhan's wet market was the origin of
this epidemic? The Chinese regime. It was later discovered that the
first known case of coronavirus traced back to November 17, 2019.
The same Chinese regime later claimed that this coronavirus "may not
have originated in China". What respected scientist or institution can
now trust anything that comes out of China?
Many leading scientists have dismissed the claim that the Covid-19
virus was an engineered pathogen. This conclusion was seemingly based
on the fact that Wuhan has two major virus research labs: the Wuhan
Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which is apparently less
than a mile from the market, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a
biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory, handling the world's most deadly
pathogens, located just seven miles from the market. The story was
immediately and emphatically trashed as a "conspiracy theory".
Those scientists claim that the virus likely originated among wildlife
before spreading to humans, possibly through a food market in Wuhan.
They say that, through genetic sequencing, they have identified the
culprit for Covid-19 as a bat coronavirus. End of story? Science,
thankfully, begins by asking questions and then seeking answers.
Bats were not, it seems, sold at Wuhan's wet market. The Lancet noted
in a January study that the first Covid-19 case in Wuhan had no
connection to the market. The Lancet's paper, written by Chinese
researchers from several institutions, detailed that 13 of the 41
first cases had no link to the market. "That's a big number, 13, with
no link," commented Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease specialist at
Georgetown University. So how did the epidemic start?
"Now it seems clear that [the] seafood market is not the only origin
of the virus, but to be honest we still do not know where the virus
came from now", notes Bin Cao, pulmonary specialist at Capital Medical
University, and the corresponding author of the Lancet article.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said that China's Communist
Party is withholding information about the coronavirus.
If we do not know, it is necessary be open to all possibilities.
"Less than 300 yards from the seafood market is the Wuhan branch of
the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention" wrote David
Ignatius of the Washington Post.
"Researchers from that facility and the nearby Wuhan Institute of
Virology have posted articles about collecting bat coronaviruses from
around China, for study to prevent future illness. Did one of those
samples leak, or was hazardous waste deposited in a place where it
could spread?".
"Collecting viruses" presumably does not exclude the possibility of a
"leaked virus". Worse, if China is not able to protect its
laboratories, it needs to be held accountable and made to pay for the
devastating global damage.
"Experts know the new coronavirus is not a bioweapon. They disagree on
whether it could have leaked from a research lab", stated The Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists. Professor Richard Ebright of Rutgers
University's Waksman Institute of Microbiology, and a major
biosecurity expert, agreed with the Nature Medicine authors' argument
that the coronavirus was not manipulated by humans. But Ebright does
think it possible that the Covid-19 started as an accidental leak from
a laboratory, such as one of the two in Wuhan, which are known to have
been studying bat viruses:
"Virus collection or animal infection with a virus having the
transmission characteristics of the outbreak virus would pose
substantial risk of infection of a lab worker, and from the lab
worker, the public."
Ebright has also claimed that bat coronaviruses are studied in Wuhan
at Biosafety Level 2, "which provides only minimal protection"
compared with the top BSL-4.
"We don't know what happened, but there are a lot of reasons to
believe that this indeed was a release of some sort", China expert
Gordon Chang said to Die Weltwoche.
"No one has been able to study it. How can you say it's not a release
from a lab if you can't go to the lab? Indeed, we have seen Beijing do
its best to prevent virologists and epidemiologists from actually
going to Wuhan. The World Health Organization team went to Wuhan for
like half a day with only part of the team."
That is another major problem. The potential major investigator of the
Wuhan coronavirus pandemic's origin, the World Health Organization
(WHO), is now accused of being "China's coronavirus' accomplice". As
late as January 14, the WHO quoted Chinese health officials claiming
there had been no human transmissions of the coronavirus within the
country yet.
China poses a biosecurity risks for the entire planet. One year before
the first coronavirus case was identified in Wuhan, US Customs and
Border Protection agents at Detroit Metro Airport stopped a Chinese
biologist with three vials labeled "Antibodies" in his luggage.
According to an unclassified FBI tactical intelligence report obtained
by Yahoo News:
"Inspection of the writing on the vials and the stated recipient led
inspection personnel to believe the materials contained within the
vials may be viable Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Severe
Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) materials."
Why is China trafficking in dangerous viruses in the first place?
According to Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for Global Health at the
Council on Foreign Relations:
"A safety breach at a Chinese Center for Disease Control and
Prevention lab is believed to have caused four suspected SARS cases,
including one death, in Beijing in 2004. A similar accident caused 65
lab workers of Lanzhou Veterinary Research Institute to be infected
with brucellosis in December 2019. In January 2020, a renowned Chinese
scientist, Li Ning, was sentenced to 12 years in prison for selling
experimental animals to local markets".
In February, Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao, from Guangzhou's South China
University of Technology, wrote in a research paper:
"In addition to origins of natural recombination and intermediate host
the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.
Safety level [sic] may need to be reinforced in high risk biohazardous
laboratories".
Xiao later told the Wall Street Journal that he had withdrawn the
paper because it "was not supported by direct proofs".
Chinese laboratory mistakes have happened before. By 2010, researchers
published as fact: "The most famous case of a released laboratory
strain is the re-emergent H1N1 influenza-A virus which was first
observed in China in May of 1977 and in Russia shortly thereafter".
The virus may have escaped from a lab attempting to prepare a vaccine
in response to the U.S. swine flu pandemic alert.
In 1999 the most senior defector in the US from the Soviet biological
warfare program, Ken Alibek, revealed that Soviet officials concluded
that China had suffered a serious accident at one of its secret
biological plants, causing two major epidemics of fever that had swept
China in the late 1980s. "Our analysts", Alibek stated in his book,
Biohazard, "concluded that they were caused by an accident in a lab
where Chinese scientists were weaponizing viral diseases".
In 2004, the World Health Organization disclosed that the latest
outbreak of "severe acute respiratory syndrome" (SARS) in China
involved two researchers who were working with the virus in a Beijing
research lab. The WHO denounced Chinese breaches of safety procedures,
and director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Li
Liming, resigned. Science magazine also stated that "for the third
time in less than a year, an outbreak of SARS seems to have originated
from a failure in laboratory containment".
Moreover, three years ago, when China opened the laboratory in Wuhan,
Tim Trevan, a Maryland biosafety specialist, told Nature that he
worried about the safety of the building because "structures where
everyone feels free to speak up and openness of information are
important." Free speech and open information: exactly what Chinese
regime fought against in December and January.
A Chinese video about a key researcher in Wuhan, Tian Junhua, which
was released a few weeks before the outbreak in Wuhan, shows Chinese
researchers handling bats that contained viruses. In the video
(produced by China Science Communication, run by the China Association
for Science and Technology), Tian says:
"I am not a doctor, but I work to cure and save people... I am not a
soldier, but I work to safeguard an invisible national defense line".
Tian is also reported as having said:
"I can feel the fear: the fear of infections and the fear of getting
lost. Because of the fear, I take every step extremely cautiously. The
more scared I feel, the more care I take in executing every detail.
Because the process of you finding the viruses is also when you can be
exposed to them the easiest. I do hope these virus samples will only
be preserved for scientific research and will never be used in real
life".
For a month, the Chinese Communist Party, instead of fighting the
contagion, did everything possible to censor all information about the
Covid-19 outbreak. After President Xi Jinping declared "a people's
war" on the epidemic on January 20, Chinese security services pursued
5,111 cases of "fabricating and deliberately disseminating false and
harmful information". The Chinese Human Rights Defenders documented
several types of punishment, including detention, disappearance,
fines, interrogations, forced confessions and "educational reprimand".
After that, China lied about the real number of deaths. There are
photographs of long lines of stacked urns greeting family members of
the dead at funeral homes in Wuhan. Outside one funeral home, trucks
shipped in 2,500 urns. According to Chinese official figures, 2,548
people in Wuhan have died of the Covid-19. According to an analysis by
Radio Free Asia, seven funeral homes in Wuhan were each handing out
500 funeral urns containing remains for 12 days, from March 23 to the
traditional tomb-sweeping festival of April 5, a time that would
indicate up to 42,000 urns, or ten times higher than the official
figure.
In February, it was reported that Wuhan crematoriums were working
around the clock to cope with the massive influx of infected bodies.
Wuhan's officials are apparently pushing relatives of the victims to
bury the dead "quickly and quietly".
"Natural virus" does not exclude its fallout from a laboratory where
pathogens are collected and studied. The Nature Medicine authors
"leave us where we were before: with a basis to rule out [a
coronavirus from] a lab construct, but no basis to rule out a lab
accident", Professor Ebright commented.
"Debate may rage over which center it is, but at this point it seems
undeniable that a center has been directly involved with research on
viruses, although not necessarily on the creation of a virus" wrote
Father Renzo Milanese, a longtime Catholic missionary in Hong Kong.
"In other words, the virus passed from a research center in Wuhan
early on. More importantly there is also no question that the
authorities were aware of the dangerousness of the virus, that they
did not inform anyone and that they tried to keep the facts hidden".
US Senator Josh Hawley has introduced a resolution calling for an
international investigation into China's handling of the spread of the
virus. According to Hawley:
"The Chinese Communist Party was aware of the reality of the virus as
early as December but ordered laboratories to destroy samples and
forced doctors to keep silent. It is time for an international
investigation into the role their cover-up played in the spread of
this devastating pandemic".
Admitting a fault, as the Japanese did after the Fukushima nuclear
accident in 2011, might be one way for a country to be accepted again
by the international community. Censoring, denying and covering up, as
China is doing, will not.
"China claims that the deadly virus did not escape from its biolab,"
said a China specialist with the Population Research Institute, Steven
W. Mosher. "Fine. Prove it by releasing the research records of the
Wuhan lab".
Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist
and author.

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Posted by BaltACD on Saturday, April 4, 2020 4:50 PM

According to the Johns Hopkins reporting

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

 

Timor-Leste (wherever that is) has a single confirmed case.

Never too old to have a happy childhood!

              

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Posted by daveklepper on Saturday, April 4, 2020 2:42 PM

Correct translation above

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF   APRIL 4, 2020 21:00
The number of Israelis with the novel coronavirus is now 7,851 and some 126 people are in serious condition, the Health Ministry reported. Some 108 individuals are currently intubated.
 
How well is the Jewish state battling the novel coronavirus?
“So far, we’re doing well, but the jury is really still out,” said Eyal Leshem, director of the Center for Travel Medicine and Tropical Diseases at Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer. “We really need to see in the next several weeks how well we are coping with corona.”
 
But there are a few things we do know.
 
On the one hand, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted that “the State of Israel is ahead of the vast majority of countries” in combating SARS-CoV-2. Earlier this week, Israel was ranked the No. 1 safest country to stay free of coronavirus by the Deep Knowledge Group.
On the other hand, a report by Worldometer – one of the leading websites for coronavirus statistics, which takes data from the World Health Organization – shows how the coronavirus is affecting 203 countries and territories around the world. It demonstrates that Israel is not better off than all or even most other countries where people are infected. 
 
If one looks at the total number of cases per one million people, Israel is actually one of the worst. There are only 22 countries that have more cases per million than Israel, which means there are 180 countries that are doing better.   How well is the Jewish state battling the novel coronavirus?
“So far, we’re doing well, but the jury is really still out,” said Eyal Leshem, director of the Center for Travel Medicine and Tropical Diseases at Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer. “We really need to see in the next several weeks how well we are coping with corona. ”But Leshem said the ranking really depends on the number of people who have been tested. In Israel, we test about 7,000 people per day and are working toward testing as many as 30,000.
In total, 36 people have died in Israel from coronavirus and 338 have recovered.
Of the sick people, some 108 are in critical condition; 87 are on ventilators.
Worldwide, the global number of confirmed deaths from the coronavirus has surpassed 50,000 and there are more than a million cases. The top five countries with coronavirus are the United States (216,722), Italy (110,574), Spain (110,238), China (82,431) and Germany (77,981), according to data provided by Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University.

DESPITE THE new regulations, a small handful of extremist protesters, reportedly a splinter group from the Jerusalem Faction, which is itself an extremist group, demonstrated in Bnei Brak on Rabbi Akiva Street against the social-distancing orders, describing them as “the awful decrees of destruction of the closure of all Torah study halls and synagogues.”
In addition, radicals from the faction held a prayer service in the Ponovitz Yeshiva, but were soon evicted by the police.
Other members of the same group sought to pray outdoors in several spots in the city, eliciting protests from concerned neighbors who shouted at them from windows and doorways to leave, calling them “heretics” for ignoring the Jewish religious law of protecting one’s own life and that of others.
Coronavirus is plaguing the country financially, too. According to data published by the Israeli Employment Service, the number of unemployment benefit claimants climbed to over 1,036,500 on Thursday, or 24.9% of the workforce.
Since the start of March, almost 880,000 new applications have been received by the Employment Service. Among the new applicants, 89.2% are employees placed on unpaid leave and 6.6% have been made redundant.
In a phone call on Thursday, the government approved an emergency order to provide eligible self-employed workers with a grant worth up to NIS 6,000.  The grant will be paid via the Israel Tax Authority and requires self-employed workers to submit an application form via their personal account on the authority's website. Applications can be submitted within 60 days from April 2.
 


 

 
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Posted by charlie hebdo on Friday, April 3, 2020 1:12 PM

Al Quds is Arabic for the Holy (one) = Jerusalem. 

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Posted by daveklepper on Friday, April 3, 2020 8:00 AM

Researchers at Al-Quds University in east Jerusalem’s Abu Dis neighborhood have produced a fully computerized model of a respiratory machine for treating coronavirus patients, Prof. Imad Abu Kishek announced Wednesday.
The device was produced by a team of university doctors and engineers who began work on it after the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, he said. Its production cost is low, and the device can be carried around easily.
The breakthrough system passed the medical and technical tests supervised by a joint team from the Faculty of Medicine and the Faculty of Engineering, said Kishek, the university’s president. It can be made with locally available components, he added.
The new respirator works in a fully computerized system, provides various types of breathing support and is intended for use in intensive-care units, Kishek said.
The process of producing a device on the basis of the model will begin immediately after it is approved by the Palestinian Authority Health Ministry, he said.
PA President Mahmoud Abbas contacted Kishek and congratulated him and the university on “this great scientific and humanitarian achievement,” the university said.
Al-Quds University was established in 1995. It has 15 faculties and 29 institutes and centers, among them the first Palestinian medical school and first research center for nanotechnology.Researchers at Al-Quds University in east Jerusalem’s Abu Dis neighborhood have produced a fully computerized model of a respiratory machine for treating coronavirus patients, Prof. Imad Abu Kishek announced Wednesday.
The device was produced by a team of university doctors and engineers who began work on it after the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, he said. Its production cost is low, and the device can be carried around easily.
The breakthrough system passed the medical and technical tests supervised by a joint team from the Faculty of Medicine and the Faculty of Engineering, said Kishek, the university’s president. It can be made with locally available components, he added.
The new respirator works in a fully computerized system, provides various types of breathing support and is intended for use in intensive-care units, Kishek said.
The process of producing a device on the basis of the model will begin immediately after it is approved by the Palestinian Authority Health Ministry, he said.
PA President Mahmoud Abbas contacted Kishek and congratulated him and the university on “this great scientific and humanitarian achievement,” the university said.
Al-Quds University was established in 1995. It has 15 faculties and 29 institutes and centers, among them the first Palestinian medical school and first research center for nanotechnology.
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Posted by daveklepper on Friday, April 3, 2020 6:45 AM

Some postings back on this thread, I was asked about the transfer of medocal supplies to Gaza.  Confirming my reply in greater detail, the following is official:

Coronavirus: Israel must help Hamas without creating a security threat

SECURITY: The Gaza corona conundrum

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Posted by daveklepper on Friday, April 3, 2020 6:04 AM

In times of trouble, often a bit of humor helps.  So, duplicating from the Classic Trains Journey to Destiny thread, Father Frank Browne SJ's photo inside a new diesel railcar wirh a roof leak:

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Posted by daveklepper on Thursday, April 2, 2020 11:03 PM

Treating COVID-19—Off-Label Drug Use, Compassionate Use, and Randomized Clinical Trials During Pandemics

JAMA. Published online March 24, 2020. doi:10.1001/jama.2020.4742
Audio Interview (35:58)
Coronavirus in New York - Report From the Front Lines
Clinical Review Audio (17:13)
Coronavirus (COVID-19) Update: Chloroquine/Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin

In the 2014 Ebola outbreak, close to 30 000 individuals developed Ebola viral disease (EVD), and numerous therapies were tested against this virus, including chloroquine, hydroxychloroquine, favipiravir, brincidofovir, monoclonal antibodies, antisense RNA, and convalescent plasma, among many others. With such a large number of therapeutic interventions given to affected patients, the goal was to determine which was efficacious against Ebola. Ultimately, none proved to be efficacious or safe.

Why were new therapies not discovered? One reason is because virtually all studies were single-group interventions without concurrent controls, which led to no definitive conclusion related to efficacy or safety. Despite much resistance and controversy regarding asking patients with EVD to participate in a randomized clinical trial (RCT),1 the National Institutes of Health (NIH) conducted the first and only RCT during that outbreak. It took several months to design the trial, but it was implemented and successfully launched during the outbreak; however, it was too late for the RCT to be completed.2 This tragedy of not discovering new therapies during an outbreak cannot be repeated.

The world is now facing a pandemic of SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, the cause of COVID-19), for which no proven specific therapies are available, other than supportive care. In China, and now Italy, France, and Spain, a large number of patients have received off-label and compassionate use therapies such as chloroquine, hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, lopinavir-ritonavir, favipiravir, remdesivir, ribavirin, interferon, convalescent plasma, steroids, and anti–IL-6 inhibitors, based on either their in vitro antiviral or anti-inflammatory properties. These therapies have been mostly given without controls, except for a few randomized trials started in China, and more recently in the US.3

Although many drugs have in vitro activity against different coronaviruses, no clinical evidence currently supports the efficacy and safety of any drug against any coronavirus in humans, including SARS-CoV-2. Numerous drugs that have been highly promising in vitro for other infectious diseases have failed in clinical studies. If in vitro activity automatically translated into clinical activity, more antimicrobial drugs for all kinds of infectious diseases would be available. Yet, there are published case reports of old and new drugs with in vitro activity against SARS-CoV-2 that have been given to patients but without a comparison control group. The administration of any unproven drug as a “last resort” wrongly assumes that benefit will be more likely than harm. However, when a drug with unknown clinical effects is given to patients who have severe illness from a new disease (like COVID-19), there is no way to know whether the patients had benefited or were harmed if they were not compared to a concurrent control group. A common interpretation of off-label use and compassionate use of drugs is that is that if the patient died, they died from the disease, but if the patient survived, they survived because of the given drug. This is not true.

As a practical example, chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, and lopinavir-ritonavir have a variety of adverse effects, including QT prolongation, torsades de pointes, hepatitis, acute pancreatitis, neutropenia, and anaphylaxis. Considering that most patients who have died from COVID-19 were elderly and had cardiovascular comorbidities and that affected patients frequently have cardiac arrhythmias,4,5 chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, and lopinavir-ritonavir could potentially increase the risk of cardiac death. Additionally, hepatitis and neutropenia are clinical manifestations of COVID-19, and both hepatic and bone marrow dysfunction could be made worse by the off-label use of these drugs; thus, it would be impossible to differentiate the drug-related adverse effects from the disease manifestations in the absence of a control group.

Compassionate use of drugs that have not been previously approved for clinical use (eg, remdesivir) could cause serious adverse effects that were not previously detected because of the very small number of exposed patients. With respect to anti-inflammatory therapy, the use of intravenous steroids has been associated with delayed coronavirus clearance in both blood and lungs with MERS-CoV6 and SARS-CoV,7 and steroids were associated with significantly increased risk of mortality and secondary infections in patients with influenza.8 Furthermore, even low-dose steroids have shown harm in patients with sepsis, and IL-6 inhibitors may cause even more profound immunosuppression than steroids, increasing the risk of sepsis, bacterial pneumonia, gastrointestinal perforation, and hepatotoxicity.9,10 Yet, despite substantial evidence of potential harm, steroids and IL-6 inhibitors are now being given to patients with COVID-19 in several countries. Accordingly, even for treatments previously utilized in other diseases, it is critical to evaluate these drugs in studies that have a concurrent control group.

A control group may be defined as the standard of care with or without placebo. One concern during epidemics, for example, during the 2014 Ebola outbreak (and the current COVID-19 pandemic), is whether it is ethical to give patients a placebo. If the disease is not 100% lethal and it is not known whether the experimental drug would help or harm a patient (ie, a situation with true equipoise), then it is ethical to conduct an RCT. Without a control group, it is not possible to accurately determine the harms of any experimental drug. In reality, the placebo group will always be safer (regarding adverse effects) than the experimental group because patients in the placebo group will receive the established standard of care. In contrast, compared with RCTs, the administration of old or new drugs (eg, off-label use, compassionate use, single-group cohorts, case-historical controls, clinical trials without controls) may be less safe, and moreover, will not lead to the discovery of any new therapy.

In addition to the risk of harming patients without the possibility to even detect the magnitude of harm, the administration of off-label drug use, compassionate drug use, and uncontrolled studies during a pandemic also could discourage patients and clinicians from participating in RCTs, hampering any knowledge that could be gained about the effects of the drug being tested. More than 300 000 individuals have been diagnosed with COVID-19; however, just a few hundred have been offered participation in RCTs. Meanwhile, many more patients have been offered uncontrolled drugs.

It is imperative to discover new therapies, otherwise there will be no proven treatments for future coronavirus pandemics. By participating in an RCT, both patients and clinicians can benefit from the unique opportunity to directly contribute to the discovery of new therapies, and also from the safer monitoring process in the conduct of clinical trials compared with uncontrolled drug administration (whereby safety cannot be determined). Optimally, during an outbreak, the type of RCTs that should be prioritized are ones with an adaptive design, which are able to rapidly accept or reject multiple experimental therapies throughout the trial, while being adequately powered for meaningful clinical outcomes.

With the current COVID-19 pandemic, RCTs have been launched around the world, including an adaptive trial sponsored by the NIH.3 This unprecedented speed from concept to implementation in just a few weeks is noteworthy and provides proof that clinical trials can be promptly initiated even in the middle of a pandemic. The rapid and simultaneous combination of supportive care and RCTs is the only way to find effective and safe treatments for COVID-19 and any other future outbreak.

Back to top
Article Information

Corresponding Author: Andre C. Kalil, MD, MPH, Department of Internal Medicine, University of Nebraska Medical Center, 95400 Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, NE 68135 (akalil@unmc.edu).

Published Online: March 24, 2020. doi:10.1001/jama.2020.4742

Conflict of Interest Disclosures: None reported.

References
1.
Burton  TM. Disputes emerge on African Ebola drug trials. Wall Street Journal. Published May 13, 2015. Accessed March 21, 2020. https://www.wsj.com/articles/disputes-emerge-on-african-ebola-drug-trials-1431471041
2.
Davey  RT  Jr, Dodd  L, Proschan  MA,  et al; PREVAIL II Writing Group; Multi-National PREVAIL II Study Team.  A randomized, controlled trial of ZMapp for Ebola virus infection.  N Engl J Med. 2016;375(15):1448-1456. doi:10.1056/NEJMoa1604330PubMedGoogle ScholarCrossref
3.
Adaptive COVID-19 Treatment Trial. ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT04280705. Posted February 21, 2020. Accessed March 19, 2020. https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04280705?term=remdesivir&cond=covid-19&draw=2&rank=5
4.
Young  BE, Ong  SWX, Kalimuddin  S,  et al; Singapore 2019 Novel Coronavirus Outbreak Research Team.  Epidemiologic features and clinical course of patients infected With SARS-CoV-2 in Singapore.  JAMA. Published online March 3, 2020. doi:10.1001/jama.2020.3204
ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar
5.
Wu  Z, McGoogan  JM.  Characteristics of and important lessons from the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak in China: summary of a report of 72 314 cases from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.  JAMA. Published online February 24, 2020. doi:10.1001/jama.2020.2648
ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar
6.
Arabi  YM, Mandourah  Y, Al-Hameed  F,  et al; Saudi Critical Care Trial Group.  Corticosteroid therapy for critically ill patients with Middle East respiratory syndrome.  Am J Respir Crit Care Med. 2018;197(6):757-767. doi:10.1164/rccm.201706-1172OCPubMedGoogle ScholarCrossref
7.
Lee  N, Allen Chan  KC, ***  DS,  et al.  Effects of early corticosteroid treatment on plasma SARS-associated coronavirus RNA concentrations in adult patients.  J Clin Virol. 2004;31(4):304-309. doi:10.1016/j.jcv.2004.07.006PubMedGoogle ScholarCrossref
8.
Russell  CD, Millar  JE, Baillie  JK.  Clinical evidence does not support corticosteroid treatment for 2019-nCoV lung injury.  Lancet. 2020;395(10223):473-475. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30317-2PubMedGoogle ScholarCrossref
9.
Kalil  AC, Sun  J.  Low-dose steroids for septic shock and severe sepsis: the use of Bayesian statistics to resolve clinical trial controversies.  Intensive Care Med. 2011;37(3):420-429. doi:10.1007/s00134-010-2121-0PubMedGoogle ScholarCrossref
10.
Actemra (tocilizumab). Prescribing information. Genentech; 2019. Accessed March 22, 2020. https://www.actemrahcp.com/?_ga=2.137041460.509331555.1584929819-505112783.1584929819
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Posted by alphas on Thursday, April 2, 2020 9:08 PM

[quote user="charlie hebdo"]

The trouble with an  infrastructure program is it only benefits the  construction industry now. And it takes months to kick in.  By then,  the normal economic forces will be operating.  And the worst boondoggles and pork are bipartisan. You conveniently omitted Alaska and its GOP senator's "bridge to nowhere"?

 

Your example would fall under #3 of my post.   Just like the "Big Dig" was somewhat Bi-partisan since there was a Rep. Gov. in Mass. for part of it's construction.     

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Posted by GERALD L MCFARLANE JR on Thursday, April 2, 2020 12:56 PM

alphas

GERALD L MCFARLANE JR

The fastest way to recover from any economic slowdown, especially one caused by natural forces, is to spend money on construction.  Something even the Donald should know well, and someone needs to tell Rep. Kevin McCarthy(R-Bakersfield, CA) this as apparently he's balking at a third recovery measure that would do just that...funnel billions upon billions into construction projects nationwide.  This is the time to fund, Gateway, Portal, the complete CAHSR and any other rail related projects.  If they're talking about another Trillion dollar bill for infrastructure, split it 3 ways between the 3 major forms of land transportaion, rail, air and highway(I'd use all that money to repair the 1000+ bridges across the U.S. highway system myself).  That would be roughly 333 Billion per mode of travel, that would easily kickstart the economy and get us rolling again ASAP.

 
But only if this is handled differently than what Obama did with his which basically wasted much of the money.

1.   Eliminate any chance that it could be used to pay government workers instead of being used for construction and/or repare.     Way too much of it was used for this mainly in the blue states and all it did was delay the inevitable for a few years until the funds ran out and then the government employees were terminated.

2.  Eliminate the Obama requirement that only union labor could be employed.    The majority of states don't have that many union contractors which is why they couldn't take advantage of the Obama stimulus.     The Davis-Bacon Act will still apply to drive the labor costs up (unfortunately as that will result in less projects than if it didn't apply) and if the unions can't successfully compete with that its too bad. 

3.  Make absolutely sure that the Federal Government does not get caught up in any "Big Dig" situations once again.    The best way to do that is the Feds only commit to a certain amount per project and the states are responsible for overruns.    If a state won't agree to that then they don't get the money.

4.  Eliminate or suspend some of the requirements that delay even minor construction projects forever.   Otherwise it could be years before any results occur.

5.  Construction only projects.  If Pelossi tries again to play politics, then tell the country loud and repeatedly you want to do it but she's trying to once attach unrelated items such as Planned Parenthood funding, etc. that have nothing to do with the country recovering from the financial crisis.       

I'm with those that say the major focus should be on highways and bridges, with rail and air getting some but not equal amounts .   The normal highway bridge project (not the large bridges over wide rivers) are fairly easy to start and not that controversial when it comes to the environment.   They can probably get going on them without much delay.    The majority of them now use pre-cast concrete spans so they can be built much faster.    The rail tunnels in the NY area are not something the rest of the country considers a high priority so trying to hold up the bill in order to get too much support for them won't go well.   Get what you can for their construction from the Feds and NY & NJ make up the rest including the inevitable overruns.

 

 
Nope, not even considering that, just authorize the money and include waivers for the vast majority of environmental reviews.  The national society of civil engineers(ASCE) has stated numerous times that there's a minimum of 1000 highway bridges in danger of collapsing within the next 20 years and upwards of 10000 nationwide.
 
You don't put any strings on contractors, waive as much red tape in the disbursement as possible.  It seems that the rest of the nation forgets that well over 30% of the U.S. GDP is tied into the NY/NJ/PA region, which is why having the Feds(aka everyone) foot the bill for Gateway and Portal makes complete sense.
 
I'm not going to go into detail like you did because this is rail related forum and I'm being generous even giving any money to air transport.  If it was up to me it would be split 50/50 between highway and rail.  Including new cars for Amtrak that would replace the existing fleets and triple the size at the same time.  Might as well think big if we're going to get this country back on it's feet fast.  Something along the lines of say 1200 new Superliners and 2000 new Viewliner II's, obviously all in various different configurations.  That would allow replacement of all older equipment and introduction of new/expanded services with a reserve fleet as well.
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Posted by charlie hebdo on Thursday, April 2, 2020 12:48 PM

The trouble with an  infrastructure program is it only benefits the  construction industry now. And it takes months to kick in.  By then,  the normal economic forces will be operating.  And the worst boondoggles and pork are bipartisan. You conveniently omitted Alaska and its GOP senator's "bridge to nowhere"?

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Posted by alphas on Thursday, April 2, 2020 11:40 AM

[quote user="GERALD L MCFARLANE JR"]

The fastest way to recover from any economic slowdown, especially one caused by natural forces, is to spend money on construction.  Something even the Donald should know well, and someone needs to tell Rep. Kevin McCarthy(R-Bakersfield, CA) this as apparently he's balking at a third recovery measure that would do just that...funnel billions upon billions into construction projects nationwide.  This is the time to fund, Gateway, Portal, the complete CAHSR and any other rail related projects.  If they're talking about another Trillion dollar bill for infrastructure, split it 3 ways between the 3 major forms of land transportaion, rail, air and highway(I'd use all that money to repair the 1000+ bridges across the U.S. highway system myself).  That would be roughly 333 Billion per mode of travel, that would easily kickstart the economy and get us rolling again ASAP.

 

But only if this is handled differently than what Obama did with his which basically wasted much of the money.

1.   Eliminate any chance that it could be used to pay government workers instead of being used for construction and/or repare.     Way too much of it was used for this mainly in the blue states and all it did was delay the inevitable for a few years until the funds ran out and then the government employees were terminated.

2.  Eliminate the Obama requirement that only union labor could be employed.    The majority of states don't have that many union contractors which is why they couldn't take advantage of the Obama stimulus.     The Davis-Bacon Act will still apply to drive the labor costs up (unfortunately as that will result in less projects than if it didn't apply) and if the unions can't successfully compete with that its too bad. 

3.  Make absolutely sure that the Federal Government does not get caught up in any "Big Dig" situations once again.    The best way to do that is the Feds only commit to a certain amount per project and the states are responsible for overruns.    If a state won't agree to that then they don't get the money.

4.  Eliminate or suspend some of the requirements that delay even minor construction projects forever.   Otherwise it could be years before any results occur.

5.  Construction only projects.  If Pelossi tries again to play politics, then tell the country loud and repeatedly you want to do it but she's trying to once attach unrelated items such as Planned Parenthood funding, etc. that have nothing to do with the country recovering from the financial crisis.       

I'm with those that say the major focus should be on highways and bridges, with rail and air getting some but not equal amounts .   The normal highway bridge project (not the large bridges over wide rivers) are fairly easy to start and not that controversial when it comes to the environment.   They can probably get going on them without much delay.    The majority of them now use pre-cast concrete spans so they can be built much faster.    The rail tunnels in the NY area are not something the rest of the country considers a high priority so trying to hold up the bill in order to get too much support for them won't go well.   Get what you can for their construction from the Feds and NY & NJ make up the rest including the inevitable overruns.

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Posted by daveklepper on Thursday, April 2, 2020 7:30 AM

Coronavirus cases in Israel jump to 6,092 with 95 inserious condition
81 patients on ventilators; death toll hits 25; Bnei Brak remains city with second highest number of cases, as government mulls further restrictions for ultra-Orthodox city
By TOI STAFF1 April 2020, 9:33 pm  0
 
The Health Ministry on Wednesday evening raised the tally of people infected with the coronavirus to 6,092, an increase of 501 since the morning.
There are 95 people in serious condition, including 81 patients on ventilators — an increase of five since the previous night.
Five people have also died between Tuesday night and Wednesday evening, increasing the death toll to 25.
Another 129 people were in moderate condition and the rest had mild symptoms. So far, 241 Israelis have recovered from the virus.
There were five deaths from coronavirus on Wednesday, all in individuals with underlying health issues.
The Health Ministry also announced the number of cases for individual cities, showing that Bnei Brak, a predominantly ultra-Orthodox Tel Aviv suburb with nearly 200,000 residents, has 723 confirmed cases, the second highest infection rate of any Israeli city. That number is despite the fact it is only the ninth largest in the country by population.
Jerusalem, which also has a sizable ultra-Orthodox population, has 807 cases, the most of any city in Israel.
Israel has been implementing increasingly stringent measures to thwart the spread of the virus, with citizens generally required to stay home, and is mulling further restrictions on Bnei Brak.
===
Authorities have upped enforcement in recent days of social distancing regulations in Bnei Brak and other ultra-Orthodox areas, where some have flouted rules against congregating or leaving home for non-essential reasons.
Channel 12 news reported Wednesday that steps being considered for Bnei Brak include a ban on vehicles entering the city, as well as actions to force all those feeling ill to evacuate from the city to receive treatment, to further curb potential infections.
 
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Posted by daveklepper on Wednesday, April 1, 2020 10:03 PM

Possibly by the time the plague is over, the entire World population will be immune to the Cononavirus.  Those that have recovered will have their own immunity and the rest of the population will have received a safe and effective innoculation.  This is srill a possibility, and the steps to this have been noted in earlier postings.

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Posted by daveklepper on Wednesday, April 1, 2020 9:55 PM

The Israeli humanitarian aid organization IsraAID is providing support to frontline medical professionals and volunteers in the organization’s emergency units responding to the coronavirus crisis in Italy with the launch of webinars on stress management, psychological first aid and community resilience, it was announced on Tuesday.

IsraAID is working in partnership with La Deputazione Ebraica di Roma, the welfare organization of Rome’s Jewish community, to offer ongoing supervision and guidance, and support to locally led relief activities. Its webinars focus on self-care and ways of coping with stress, and are tailored to the specific needs of frontline workers.

Italy is one of the most affected countries by the COVID-19 pandemic, with more than 100,000 cases and more than 11,500 deaths.

IsraAID has maintained close ties with partner organizations in Italy, including in the Jewish community, since its work in the country from 2016 to 2019, following the August 2016 earthquake in Central Italy that killed 299 people.

“We hope to bolster that in whatever way we can,” he said.

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Posted by GERALD L MCFARLANE JR on Wednesday, April 1, 2020 5:52 PM

Convicted One
 
Euclid
So the new way of travel will be not to travel.  We are leaving the service economy and entering the brave new, "Stay home economy." 

The fastest way to recover from any economic slowdown, especially one caused by natural forces, is to spend money on construction.  Something even the Donald should know well, and someone needs to tell Rep. Kevin McCarthy(R-Bakersfield, CA) this as apparently he's balking at a third recovery measure that would do just that...funnel billions upon billions into construction projects nationwide.  This is the time to fund, Gateway, Portal, the complete CAHSR and any other rail related projects.  If they're talking about another Trillion dollar bill for infrastructure, split it 3 ways between the 3 major forms of land transportaion, rail, air and highway(I'd use all that money to repair the 1000+ bridges across the U.S. highway system myself).  That would be roughly 333 Billion per mode of travel, that would easily kickstart the economy and get us rolling again ASAP.

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