BBC: China pneumonia outbreak: COVID-19 Global Pandemic

[The Evil Genius]

 

[China]

We hit a million people a long time ago. Worldometer had us hitting it 6 weeks ago, and we likely hit it much earlier than that considering all the unreported or misreported deaths due to COVID.

[Renegade7]

Pretty much my entire team got sick and used some form of PTO this week.  I did a half day Tuesday, Wife agreed with getting PCR to be sure.  Crazy thing is we haven't seen each other in a while because we all work remote : /

[The Evil Genius]

Just now, Renegade7 said:

Pretty much my entire team got sick and used some form of PTO this week.  I did a half day Tuesday, Wife agreed with getting PCR to be sure.  Crazy thing is we haven't seen each other in a while because we all work remote : /

 

Cases are spiking again because people aren't masking and distancing as much. 

 

4 minutes ago, China said:

We hit a million people a long time ago. Worldometer had us hitting it 6 weeks ago, and we likely hit it much earlier than that considering all the unreported or misreported deaths due to COVID.

 

I just reposted the story. But working in Public Health I'm aware of some of the real numbers as well. 

[Ball Security]

I have it now.  1 out of 5 stars.  Would not recommend.

 

Paxlovid and vaccines though get a good review.

[purbeast]

According to the MoCo data, numbers are spiking quite a bit right now.

 

https://www.montgomerycountymd.gov/covid19/data/#dashboard

 

However, you can also see the hospitalization numbers are still pretty much flat.

 

So that is a good sign if the dominant strain is primarily just like a cold that people work through.  That is how it was for me when I had what I'm assuming is Omicron during that huge spike back around Xmas.  It was like a 5-6 day mild type of cold for me.

[The Evil Genius]

Symptoms are different for everyone (or course) but current variants BA.2 and BA.2.12.1 seems to be infecting the immunized at a higher rate than previous variants. Immunization seems to be lessening the symptoms for most.

 

BA.4 and BA.5 are even more contagious but have stayed mostly in South Africa.

Edited May 5, 2022 by The Evil Genius

[China]

Can COVID Lead to Impotence?

 

For a respiratory disease, COVID-19 causes some peculiar symptoms. It can diminish the senses of smell and taste, leave patients with discolored “COVID toes” or even cause a swollen, bumpy “COVID tongue.”

 

Now scientists are examining a possible link to an altogether unexpected consequence of COVID-19: erectile dysfunction. A connection has been reported in hundreds of papers by scientists in Europe and North America, as well as in Egypt, Turkey, Iran and Thailand.

 

Estimates of the magnitude of the problem vary wildly. A paper by Dr. Ranjith Ramasamy, director of reproductive urology at the University of Miami’s Desai Sethi Urology Institute, and his colleagues found that the risk of erectile dysfunction increased by 20% after a bout with COVID-19. Other investigators have reported substantially higher increases in that risk.

 

When patients first started coming to Ramasamy’s clinic complaining of erection problems, “we dismissed it, thinking it was all psychological or stress-induced,” he said.

 

But over time, he and other physicians began to see a pattern, he said. “Six months after the initial infection, patients had gotten better overall, but they continued to complain of these problems,” including erectile dysfunction and low sperm counts, said Ramasamy, who has written several papers on the topic.

 

Click on the link for the full article

Edited May 6, 2022 by China

[China]

Nightmare COVID Variants Are Cracking the Code to Our Immunity

 

You might not know it by looking around you at all those unmasked faces, but there’s still an awful lot of novel coronavirus out there. And the virus appears to be mutating faster than ever, producing steadily more contagious variants and subvariants.

 

The evolutionary trend with SARS-CoV-2 might not mean there are definitely going to be big surges in infections, hospitalizations and deaths. At least not everywhere or for very long.

 

But it underscores an uncomfortable truth: that despite the lifting of COVID restrictions in most countries that aren’t China, despite many people’s eagerness to move past the pain and uncertainty of the past two years, the pandemic isn’t over. The virus isn’t done mutating.

 

The latest subvariants are the most transmissible yet. BA.4 and BA.5, both offspring of the Omicron variant, first appeared in South Africa last month. BA.2.12 and the closely related BA.2.12.1 first showed up in New York around the same time.

 

BA.4 and BA.5 are 10 percent more contagious than their immediate predecessor, the BA.2 form of Omicron. BA.2.12 and BA.2.12.1 are 25 percent more contagious. Equally alarmingly, BA.4, BA.5, BA.2.12 and B.2.12.1 are quickly becoming dominant in their respective regions of origin just a couple months after BA.2 became dominant. BA.2 for its part out-competed and replaced its own parent, BA.1, just a few months after BA.1 became dominant.

 

In other words, major new subvariants seem to be coming at us faster and faster. In that sense, the virus might seem like it’s winning a genetic game of chance. Confronted with a semi-permeable barrier of antibodies from vaccines and past infection, the pathogen is becoming more transmissible.

 

Immune pressure “will increase the rate of selection of those more fit variants that are circulating already in the population,” Edwin Michael, an epidemiologist at the Center for Global Health Infectious Disease Research at the University of South Florida, told The Daily Beast. “This will result in cascades of new variants appearing and spreading in the host population more frequently.”

 

But this cascade of variants is one price we pay for our expanding, population-wide immunity. You can’t have the latter without getting some of the former. So while it might look like COVID is winning, in fact its genetic victories could be fleeting.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[Cooleyfan1993]

Tested positive for covid today. Woohoo…

[China]

"Non-COVID" Excess Death Rates Ran 21x Higher In Reddest Counties Than Bluest In 2021

 

Globally, the World Health Organization just released a new report stating that nearly 15 million more people have died since the COVID pandemic hit two years ago than normally would have...compared to the official COVID death toll of around six million.

 

In some cases, the cause of death wasn't COVID-19 itself, but something indirectly connected. For instance, if someone had a heart attack but couldn't get to the hospital on time because all of the ambulances were filled with COVID patients, and so forth.

 

In other cases, the cause of death was COVID-19 but was misdiagnosed as something else. Often this was an honest misdiagnosis, especially in the earliest days of the pandemic before accurate testing was available and some hospitals/labs even knew what to look for.

 

In many instances here in the U.S., however, the reason is far more concerning. As noted in this article in the Missouri Independent from December 2021:

 

Quote

Short-staffed, undertrained and overworked coroners and medical examiners took families at their word when they called to report the death of a relative at home. Coroners and medical examiners didn’t review medical histories or order tests to look for COVID-19.

 

They, and even some physicians, attributed deaths to inaccurate and nonspecific causes that are meaningless to pathologists. In some cases, stringent rules for attributing a death to COVID-19 created obstacles for relatives of the deceased and contradicted CDC guidance.

 

These trends are clear in small cities and rural areas with less access to healthcare and fewer physicians. They’re especially pronounced in rural areas of the South and Western United States, areas that heavily voted for former President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

 

You get the picture.

 

Until now, however, I didn't have comprehensive, reliable county-level data on excess deaths.

 

This is where Professor Stokes comes in. He and a team of nine colleagues at BU and other institutions recently published a new study at medRxiv, the Preprint Server for Health Sciences:

 

Quote

When we visualize excess death rates across regions and metro status, it is apparent that Covid-19 is devastating rural America where vaccination rates are low and access to health care is limited.

 

...Excess deaths were least likely to be assigned to Covid-19 in rural areas and in the Southeast and Southwest, suggesting that many Covid-19 deaths have gone uncounted in these regions.

 

In follow-up work currently underway, we find that excess mortality is a more sensitive measure than Covid-19 for detecting inequities. This highlights the importance of using excess mortality to understand which communities were most affected during the pandemic.

 

As Covid-19 surveillance is phased out and more testing occurs at home via rapid tests, Covid-19 death tallies may become even more inaccurate. Excess mortality will continue to be an important tool for monitoring the impact of the pandemic.

 

Click on the link for more

[Ball Security]

On 5/8/2022 at 6:49 PM, Cooleyfan1993 said:

Tested positive for covid today. Woohoo…

Ask your doctor for Paxlovid.  Some side effects, but very helpful.

[China]

What if Delaware disappeared? 1 million Covid-19 deaths explained in 4 charts.

 

Patricia Dowd, 57, died of Covid-19 on Feb. 6, 2020.

 

She is believed to be the first pandemic death.

 

In the 27 months since, nearly 1 million people in the U.S. have succumbed to the coronavirus, a figure so large that it engulfs individual stories like Dowd’s into a national maw of grief with which the country is struggling to reckon.

 

It’s as if the entire population of Delaware, Montana or Rhode Island, or all of Austin, vanished in just two years’ time.

 

The toll is based on death certificates but most experts believe it is an undercount given how many diagnoses were likely missed in the spring of 2020, when the virus was poorly understood and testing was scarce.

 

At that time, 1 million deaths seemed like a doomsday prediction, a disastrous forecast created by statistical models that assumed everything would go wrong.

 

“I’ve never seen a model of the diseases that I’ve dealt with where the worst-case scenario actually came out,” Anthony Fauci said in March 2020. “So when you use numbers like 1 million, 1.5 million, 2 million, that is almost certainly off the chart. Now, it’s not impossible but very, very unlikely.”

 

Fauci, at the time, predicted between 100,000 and 200,000 deaths, a figure that drew ridicule in the Trump administration for being overly pessimistic.

 

Click on the link for the charts and full article

[China]

 

[Captain Wiggles]

The party of free speech indeed. 🤭

 

Why do the Republicans have such a fixation with the ivermectin? It's clearly ineffective against covid.

[Mooka]

13 minutes ago, Captain Wiggles said:

The party of free speech indeed. 🤭

 

Why do the Republicans have such a fixation with the ivermectin? It's clearly ineffective against covid.

 

$$$

 

Someone is manufacturing this medicine and selling it.

 

The politicians/social media/fake news whatever telling Americans to buy are no doubt getting kickbacks/donations/bribes/etc. 

 

I've also read that these kind of companies absolutely raped the PPP loans and are just roaming wild out there. 

[Larry]

2 hours ago, Captain Wiggles said:

The party of free speech indeed. 🤭

 

Why do the Republicans have such a fixation with the ivermectin? It's clearly ineffective against covid.

Why do you answer your own questions?  

[China]

Trump officials and meat firms blocked life saving Covid controls, investigation finds

 

Trump officials “collaborated” with the meatpacking industry to downplay the threat of Covid to plant workers and block public health measures which could have saved lives, a damning new investigation has found.

 

Internal documents reviewed by the congressional Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis reveal how industry representatives lobbied government officials to stifle “pesky” health departments from imposing evidence-based safety measures to curtail the virus spreading – and tried to obscure worker deaths from these authorities.

 

At least 59,000 workers at five of the largest meatpacking companies – Tyson Foods, JBS USA Holdings, Smithfield Foods, Cargill, and National Beef Packing Company which are the subject of the congressional inquiry – contracted Covid in the first year of the pandemic, of whom at least 269 died.

 

According to internal communications, the companies were warned about workers and their families falling sick within weeks of the virus hitting the US. Despite this, company representatives enlisted industry-friendly Trump appointees at the USDA to fight their battles against Covid regulations and oversight.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[Wildbunny]

On 4/27/2022 at 3:24 AM, China said:

China erects so-called 'COVID cages' in Shanghai as new cases emerge

 

Volunteers and government workers in Shanghai erected metal barriers in multiple districts to block off small streets and entrances to apartment complexes, as China hardens its strict "zero-COVID" approach in its largest city despite growing complaints from residents.

 

In the city's financial district, Pudong, the barriers - thin metal sheets or mesh fences - were put up in several neighborhoods under a local government directive, according to Caixin, a Chinese business media outlet. Buildings where cases have been found sealed up their main entrances, with a small opening for pandemic prevention workers to pass through.

 

In Beijing, authorities announced a mass testing starting Monday of Chaoyang district, home to more than 3 million people in the Chinese capital.

 

The announcement set off panic buying Sunday evening, with vegetables, eggs, soy sauce and other items wiped off grocery shelves.

 

A fresh outbreak has infected at least 41 people, including 26 in Chaoyang district, state broadcaster CGTN reported.

 

China reported 21,796 new community transmitted COVID-19 infections on Sunday, with the vast majority being asymptomatic cases in Shanghai. Across the country, many cities and provinces have enforced some version of a lockdown in an attempt to slow the spread of the virus.

 

Click on the link for the full article

 

What I'd like to know is what percentage of the eligible population in China has been vaccinated?

I believe the % is close to 0, they have a politic of 0 and they just shut down every cities.

 

Just saw videos on french tv news network about how it's going there.

That's scary, you're starting to see chinese revolting against army and police officers. People being held by 3/4 persons so they can perform a PCR test. Others jumping from windows in suicide. People are complaining of starving and stuff like that.

 

Things aren't looking good for them.

[Larry]

Well, it finally happened.  Got Covid.  

 

Knew I had "some kind of bug", Friday.  Bought a home test and tested positive Saturday.  

 

Poor breathing.  Tons of mucous.  Temp moving between 101-103.  

 

Tiny bit better now.  But just a tiny bit.  

 

 

[JCB]

Damn dude, sorry to hear it. Hang in there.

[skinsmarydu]

9 hours ago, Larry said:

Well, it finally happened.  Got Covid.  

 

Knew I had "some kind of bug", Friday.  Bought a home test and tested positive Saturday.  

 

Poor breathing.  Tons of mucous.  Temp moving between 101-103.  

 

Tiny bit better now.  But just a tiny bit.  

 

 

Sorry, dude...thank heavens you're a nurse & know how to handle things.  I didn't have the breathing issues, which was surprising to a life-long smoker, just a temp and feeling like absolute crap.  Hope you get better soon.

[Larry]

Hey, I don't know how to handle things. But I got some advice, and some under the table drugs, from a nurse I respect a lot. I'm not as bad right now. But I think it's the Prednisone masking the symptoms. 

[Larry]

Well. Just woke up covered in sweat, because my fever broke. Normal temperature now. Still some nasal stuffiness. 
 

Assume now it's just a matter of self quarantine till I'm reasonably certain I'm not contagious any more. 

[Cooked Crack]