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thewayneThis is holding true for New Mexico, I don't know about the rest of the country, but women are getting sick more than men! Usually women have more robust immune systems than men, so I find this interesting. It isn't huge, like less than a 55/45 split.
My county still has only three cases, but they're not putting a lot of effort into testing. It's quite possible there's a lack of testing kits. Nationally, they're reporting four cases, the extra case is from White Sands Missile Range, an Army base next to Las Cruces in Doña Ana County. The base straddles Otero County, all the housing is in Doña Ana.
I'm finding it just too depressing to write the COVID news that's been happening. Doctors have been fired and nurses suspended for talking about the shortage of PPEs. If that's not stupid, I don't know what is. A train engineer tried to crash a train into the hospital ship off the Port of Los Angeles. No one was injured, especially the ship: apparently he didn't think about the 25 yards of water the train needed to get across. Apparently the ship "was up to something, he didn't know what." Did I mention that the FBI got into a gun fight with a suspect they were trying to arrest near St. Louis who was going to plant an explosive device in a hospital treating COVID cases? The suspect was wounded and taken to a hospital, but did not survive. And back to the hospital ship, I think this was the NY one, at least one crew has tested positive for COVID. And on the subject of ships, a member of the aircraft carrier Teddy Roosevelt has died, and the other carrier, in the Atlantic, the Ronald Reagan, they're also quite infected.
Lots of experimental ventilators, an interesting one in South America developed by a guy who built one out of 3D printed parts, parts obtained from an auto supply store, and controlled by a Raspberry Pi controller! He programmed it with input from medical experts. It's being evaluated in Peru? Somewhere down there. They're very excited. And General Motors has ventilators rolling off its production line! I'm quite surprised by that, I didn't think they could make them this fast, but they did.
Let's talk Japan. The island of Hokkaido was very early going into isolation/shutdown, doing it in February. And they came out of it early. Good for them. Except it didn't work, and cases came back and they had to shut down again! This is going to be a problem if people come out of shutdown/isolation too soon, especially without mass testing! And we haven't seen mass testing in the USA yet. I don't know if manufacturers are ramping up making testing kits yet, but I have heard of shortages of testing swabs, and we're also going to need amazing lab capacity to evaluate all those kits! Also, I've heard of incompatibilities between university labs and hospital IT networks such that health care networks can't take the results from university labs easily. Sort of a chain of custody issue. I'm not sure if it's a HIPPA thing or what.
It's going to be very easy for there to be multiple waves of this, and we do not yet know what immunity is going to be like, nor for how long it will last if you have it once. Looking at it from a serology standpoint (bloodwork), from what I've read, if you have a mild case of COVID or you have it and are asymptomatic, there's like a 25% chance that you'll build NO antibodies!
The most disturbing news that I've come across recently is in two parts. The first is that the State of New York, if you ignore the USA temporarily and count it as a country, is the most infected/deadly country in the world. So we're number one once again. But there's also a bit of hope: they may be peaking, not that there's any time for complacency or slacking off on stay at home. They've still got a long row to hoe. And on the other coast, California looks like they may not exhaust their hospital system. So some good news there.
The other disturbing news is FEMA literally stealing supplies from states! So first the Feds say "The national stockpile is ours, you have to get your own." So the states order things. Then FEMA comes in and literally seizes shipments of supplies! They're also being totally illogical about redistribution of supplies, but what do you expect when career bureaucrats who know what they're doing are turfed in favor of toadies and dilitants who like to play at being competent at a task.
Another disturbing news piece: NIH is beginning clinical trials on hydrochloroquine, the drug that our Idiot In Charge has been trumpeting, I guess to shut him up. His spewing about how effective this drug is has caused shortages, the problem is that this drug is critical for people with lupus. This is literally a life-saving drug for these people, and now they're having problems getting it! And for people who don't have lupus, it can literally be a life-threatening drug! There is zero clinical evidence, aside from anecdotal, that it is effective against the coronavirus-class of infections, and now we're wasting resources and causing a run on it to prove what has heretofore been a negative? Who knows, maybe there's a chance it will prove effective, but with really nasty and sometimes fatal side effects? When the treatment is worse than the disease....
One good bit of news is that several vaccines are in early testing, at least one is based on SARS/MERS research that was suspended when those diseases subsided. We're still over a year from those coming to market, but in another interesting piece of good news, the Bill Gates Foundation if putting up something on the order of $7billion to fast-track building multiple vaccine production factories IN ADVANCE so when any of these vaccines are approved, production is pretty much ready to go.
Now THAT is a philanthropist! Pity a certain owner of Amazon isn't a philanthropist.
*****
Here, we're fine. I cut the crap out of my thumb last Friday making a wonderful Chinese shredded pork, fortunately after I'd finished getting all the meat off of the aitch bone - it was cutting the ginger into large pieces that got me. In normal times I probably would have gotten a stitch or two, but I didn't and it's closed up just fine and capillary refill in the tip is great as is nerve function. Dave got the desk furniture that he ordered and he's happy, Russet's sleep cycle is inverted, which would be fine if she's working, but she isn't. She had a phone con with her team and was bemoaning going through an entire lunar cycle and not knowing what phase the moon was in: normally she'd be blasting it with a laser. Stimulus checks went into my savings account Wednesday night where they will sit for some time.
So we're doing well. Eating good stuff and we've all lost weight since we're not eating in restaurants. And we started watching the first season of the Jodi Whitaker Dr. Who!
Me, I'm doing well. My sinus infection is pretty much gone. Got another five days of antibiotics, still like afternoon naps, but I'm also a bum. :-)
My county still has only three cases, but they're not putting a lot of effort into testing. It's quite possible there's a lack of testing kits. Nationally, they're reporting four cases, the extra case is from White Sands Missile Range, an Army base next to Las Cruces in Doña Ana County. The base straddles Otero County, all the housing is in Doña Ana.
I'm finding it just too depressing to write the COVID news that's been happening. Doctors have been fired and nurses suspended for talking about the shortage of PPEs. If that's not stupid, I don't know what is. A train engineer tried to crash a train into the hospital ship off the Port of Los Angeles. No one was injured, especially the ship: apparently he didn't think about the 25 yards of water the train needed to get across. Apparently the ship "was up to something, he didn't know what." Did I mention that the FBI got into a gun fight with a suspect they were trying to arrest near St. Louis who was going to plant an explosive device in a hospital treating COVID cases? The suspect was wounded and taken to a hospital, but did not survive. And back to the hospital ship, I think this was the NY one, at least one crew has tested positive for COVID. And on the subject of ships, a member of the aircraft carrier Teddy Roosevelt has died, and the other carrier, in the Atlantic, the Ronald Reagan, they're also quite infected.
Lots of experimental ventilators, an interesting one in South America developed by a guy who built one out of 3D printed parts, parts obtained from an auto supply store, and controlled by a Raspberry Pi controller! He programmed it with input from medical experts. It's being evaluated in Peru? Somewhere down there. They're very excited. And General Motors has ventilators rolling off its production line! I'm quite surprised by that, I didn't think they could make them this fast, but they did.
Let's talk Japan. The island of Hokkaido was very early going into isolation/shutdown, doing it in February. And they came out of it early. Good for them. Except it didn't work, and cases came back and they had to shut down again! This is going to be a problem if people come out of shutdown/isolation too soon, especially without mass testing! And we haven't seen mass testing in the USA yet. I don't know if manufacturers are ramping up making testing kits yet, but I have heard of shortages of testing swabs, and we're also going to need amazing lab capacity to evaluate all those kits! Also, I've heard of incompatibilities between university labs and hospital IT networks such that health care networks can't take the results from university labs easily. Sort of a chain of custody issue. I'm not sure if it's a HIPPA thing or what.
It's going to be very easy for there to be multiple waves of this, and we do not yet know what immunity is going to be like, nor for how long it will last if you have it once. Looking at it from a serology standpoint (bloodwork), from what I've read, if you have a mild case of COVID or you have it and are asymptomatic, there's like a 25% chance that you'll build NO antibodies!
The most disturbing news that I've come across recently is in two parts. The first is that the State of New York, if you ignore the USA temporarily and count it as a country, is the most infected/deadly country in the world. So we're number one once again. But there's also a bit of hope: they may be peaking, not that there's any time for complacency or slacking off on stay at home. They've still got a long row to hoe. And on the other coast, California looks like they may not exhaust their hospital system. So some good news there.
The other disturbing news is FEMA literally stealing supplies from states! So first the Feds say "The national stockpile is ours, you have to get your own." So the states order things. Then FEMA comes in and literally seizes shipments of supplies! They're also being totally illogical about redistribution of supplies, but what do you expect when career bureaucrats who know what they're doing are turfed in favor of toadies and dilitants who like to play at being competent at a task.
Another disturbing news piece: NIH is beginning clinical trials on hydrochloroquine, the drug that our Idiot In Charge has been trumpeting, I guess to shut him up. His spewing about how effective this drug is has caused shortages, the problem is that this drug is critical for people with lupus. This is literally a life-saving drug for these people, and now they're having problems getting it! And for people who don't have lupus, it can literally be a life-threatening drug! There is zero clinical evidence, aside from anecdotal, that it is effective against the coronavirus-class of infections, and now we're wasting resources and causing a run on it to prove what has heretofore been a negative? Who knows, maybe there's a chance it will prove effective, but with really nasty and sometimes fatal side effects? When the treatment is worse than the disease....
One good bit of news is that several vaccines are in early testing, at least one is based on SARS/MERS research that was suspended when those diseases subsided. We're still over a year from those coming to market, but in another interesting piece of good news, the Bill Gates Foundation if putting up something on the order of $7billion to fast-track building multiple vaccine production factories IN ADVANCE so when any of these vaccines are approved, production is pretty much ready to go.
Now THAT is a philanthropist! Pity a certain owner of Amazon isn't a philanthropist.
*****
Here, we're fine. I cut the crap out of my thumb last Friday making a wonderful Chinese shredded pork, fortunately after I'd finished getting all the meat off of the aitch bone - it was cutting the ginger into large pieces that got me. In normal times I probably would have gotten a stitch or two, but I didn't and it's closed up just fine and capillary refill in the tip is great as is nerve function. Dave got the desk furniture that he ordered and he's happy, Russet's sleep cycle is inverted, which would be fine if she's working, but she isn't. She had a phone con with her team and was bemoaning going through an entire lunar cycle and not knowing what phase the moon was in: normally she'd be blasting it with a laser. Stimulus checks went into my savings account Wednesday night where they will sit for some time.
So we're doing well. Eating good stuff and we've all lost weight since we're not eating in restaurants. And we started watching the first season of the Jodi Whitaker Dr. Who!
Me, I'm doing well. My sinus infection is pretty much gone. Got another five days of antibiotics, still like afternoon naps, but I'm also a bum. :-)
no subject
Date: 2020-04-17 08:45 pm (UTC)That's fairly common in a lot of the states. I think it's women being more likely than men to go be tested, myself. In Indiana we've got 54.3% female and 44.4% male, (with 1.3% unknown) for positive tests, but in deaths it's 40.3% female and 57.4% male (with 2.3% unknown). You can hide being sick, but being dead makes it a lot harder to escape scrutiny.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-18 06:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-18 05:17 pm (UTC)I found articles about smokers having higher numbers of infection interesting: they can't stop touching their face! And, of course, their lungs are in terrible shape for when the disease progresses.
Vaping users are not only in equally bad trouble, but their damn vaping clouds project HUGE amounts of virus particulates AND because they're in microparticulate sizes, they remain suspended for much longer! A friend on LJ was talking to a hospital doctor who said they're seeing a lot of joggers/cyclists coming in: they're getting infected from following the path of another runner/cyclist who is an asymptomatic vector and they're getting it *smack* in the face.
A couple of years ago I was walking into a restaurant restroom, opened the door as a vape user let loose a cloud of vape smoke. Really pissed me off. If I had that happen today I'd try to have them charged. But it won't as I haven't been to a restaurant or inside a public place since early March and don't know when it'll happen again.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-19 07:19 am (UTC)Interesting to hear that about runners/cyclists, that probably means that parks here will stay closed for longer than I'd like but oh well.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-19 05:05 am (UTC)The idea that the female surplus represents nurses is a striking one, and probably true to some extent. I'd not thought of that before. On further consideration, they probably *ought* to track by occupation, in hopes of finding something. I'm reminded how someone discovered years ago that zinc workers were relatively immune to rhinovirus.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-19 02:59 pm (UTC)A friend of mine is a naturopath doctor, and she once tested me for a zinc deficiency. The test was as follows: "Put this liquid solution in your mouth and swish it around." So I did. Swish swish. Swish swish swish. Swish swish swish swish. She says "Yup, you have a zinc deficiency, if your zinc levels had been normal, you'd have spat it out almost immediately."
I can't imagine what the levels are in zinc miners, makes sense that a rhinovirus would have almost zero chance of getting a foothold on them!
no subject
Date: 2020-04-18 04:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-18 04:55 pm (UTC)That is about the size of it.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-18 06:42 am (UTC)I was really surprised to hear about the shortages - this is an off-patent medication that costs a couple dollars per month at the pharmacy, and it's apparently easy enough to manufacture that, f'rex, a local medicine factory (and not a fancy one either, they mostly just do essential meds) managed to re-gear for 200k treatment courses a month in weeks. Reading https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590098620300233, it looks like almost none of the HCQ manufacturing until this started happened in the US (which explains why you guys weren't sitting on warehouses full of the thing). but that it's an easy enough thing to re-gear production for a large amount of doses, which many US factories are currently doing, so at least the shortages shouldn't last long.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-18 05:11 pm (UTC)Now remdesevir I haven't heard of any horrible side-effects with, I think it's a much more 'refined' drug, more targeted. And much newer. The reason for our drug shortage(s) is due to the glories of
capitalismgreed, we moved so much of our pharma manufacturing capacity to China because our MBAs have been preaching 'maximizing shareholder return and profitability' for 30+ years that we can't make simple stuff anymore. We don't have warehouses of stuff like generic drugs and toilet paper because the self-same MBAs also preach JIT, just-in-time delivery of goods, so there's no slack in the manufacturing/delivery chain between producers of goods and consumers of goods, because goods sitting in warehouses is money that isn't in someone's pocket. Greed and MBAs: the main architects for our current mess over here.no subject
Date: 2020-04-19 07:28 am (UTC)Us not knowing of horrible side effects for Remdesivir is due to reporting bias - this is an anti-Ebola drug that's being repurposed for use in CV, so people haven't talked about it much since it's only been used for Ebola. Found an initial Remdesivir study for CV treatment and it doesn't look good tbh - https://www.biospace.com/article/data-from-gilead-s-compassionate-use-of-remdesivir-for-covid-19-looks-promising/ 25% of patients on it have severe side effects and another 23% just get liver damage. Acceptable for Ebola, but not for a disease with a much lower mortality rate, I'd think.
Amen about the MBAs, by the way. As Nassim Taleb would put it, intellectuals yet idiots.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-19 07:43 am (UTC)Google translate made a mess of the med descriptions, but the treatment scheme table at the end is quite readable. The outpatient care version (Paracetamol + symptomatic) is currently being applied only in an area of the country where a major hospital contamination incident meant that they ended up with 1/4 of Romania's cases and half of the area's medical personnel in quarantine. Everywhere else, where we still have beds for all cases and personnel to monitor them, everyone gets HCQ in malaria-treatment dosages. This has been going on for six weeks now, so if there were large-scale horrible side effects, I think we'd have noticed by now.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-19 03:09 pm (UTC)Yeah, totally different risk factors to consider when considering a drug for ebola vs this, COVID isn't nearly 100% fatal.
SOME liver damage can be acceptable: in the younger people with no circulatory problems, don't drink, no family history of liver disease. But those are troubling numbers. The liver does a good job of healing itself if it's backed by good circulation and isn't otherwise strained. I lived with wonky numbers for several years: every time I got a blood test, one of my liver numbers would be off, but never the same one! Eventually it settled down and all my numbers maintain as good. It must have been a side-effect of my recovery from my pneumonia spree. We weren't overly concerned since it was only one number and it wasn't hugely out of whack.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-20 06:03 pm (UTC)Years ago, my company had a product to help track people being evacuated during natural disasters and other emergencies. Part of that included being able to find out where family members had been evacuated, including hospitals.
The hospital part of things was a really big nightmare for the developers. Many, if not most hospitals outsourced their IT stuff and the different companies that handled their IT had proprietary systems that didn't play well with everyone else's. In order to share data, the hospitals often had to pay large amounts of money to get the code updated.
They were pretty much stuck, since they also didn't own their own data. Trying to switch to someone else or do their own IT meant having to start from scratch.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-20 07:48 pm (UTC)I was just replying to a question on a librarian forum about most of a library's data being hosted on online servers and being pretty much inaccessible in its raw form. I remember back in the late '80s having to code a file transfer that wrote to an IBM tape that was couriered to the Arizona Board of Medical Examiners (BOMEX), I was working for the agency that administered Medicare/Medicade and the file contained any complaints against doctors under our programs. As I recall it was lots of fun (NOT) coding that puppy up. We had a portable tape drive, I think it plugged in to a parallel port? The old 9-track tapes. I've done three weird file transfer systems in my days. That, the floppy disk payroll data transfer (sneaker netted to city payroll so the payroll clerk could sneak in a smoke break), and what I thought was a rather ingenious SFTP system that I created for downloading transaction logs of people making utility bill payments from various payment vendors for the city. Had problems with one vendor, I think it was Wells Fargo, couldn't get their programmer to understand that carriage return/line feed are actual characters in a file and that they take up space! Apparently she also didn't understand what a hex dump was either. The things that they don't teach kids these days.