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OK, enough of the bull**** (again)

We know at this point Covid-19 is a bi-phasic disease.  That is, in most people it presents either asymptomatic or with mild to moderate flu-like symptoms.  That's what the vast majority of people experience, including a very significant percentage of people at "high risk."

Indeed even the CDC is now admitting that ten times the number of people that have "tested positive" have actually had Covid-19.  This, of course, means the death rate is 1/10th that reported.  I pointed this out -- that the data we had was only supportable as valid if there was a monstrous number of people who were "silently" infected in March.

In some small percentage of the people infected they may or may not get that set of symptomology but irrespective of that they also get a far more-serious set.  These are the people who wind up the ICU and die.  We know what the co-morbidities are that greatly increase the risk of that happening -- in some cases by a factor of 10 or more.  But there is no guarantee for anyone that they won't get the more-serious set of conditions.

The NIH explicitly recommends against screening for two markers (sequentially, if necessary) that we know, through clinical experience and have known since March, are markers for the more-serious form of the disease when someone originally presents to a medical facility.  The cost of such a screening test is about $20.

Further, there are exactly zero circumstances under which a high reading on that first test is not indicative of a serious problem of some sort in the human body.  D-dimer, the test in question, is a byproduct of blood clotting; if it is elevated there is abnormal clotting activity going on somewhere; it does not tell you where, but it does tell you what.

One potential cause of the first test being abnormal is cardiac clotting.  That's very bad for obvious reasons, and ruling it out costs about an additional $10-12 to test troponin level, which is a cardiac enzyme indicating distress in the heart muscle.  (If that one's positive, by the way, you're probably being admitted to the hospital, but not for Covid -- for a serious heart problem!)

The Marik Covid19 protocol, developed by the Eastern Virginia Medical School, focuses on exactly this issue.

Note that their protocol includes anticoagulants unless otherwise indicated against (e.g. people with clotting disorders, etc) right up front for all hospitalized patients.  Specifically, Enoxaparin.  Think about that one; you give people that to either forestall or treat hyper-coagulation problems.

They're not alone.  Note that Reuters is referencing multiple medical centers in the US and elsewhere that are using both steroids and anticoagulants.

The NIH specifically recommends against looking for clotting disorders right up front and also recommends against steroids for patients with severe disease even though we now have had a result reported out where the risk of death was cut by more than a third of people in ICU with severe Covid-19 through the use of an inexpensive and readily-available IV steroid.

Has the NIH or CDC modified their protocol and recommendations in light of any of this?  No.

In short the NIH is explicitly ignoring the fact that immune dysregulation resulting in clotting disorders are both well-documented in people who have severe Covid-19 courses of disease and specifically recommending against both checking inexpensively for the early manifestation of same and treatment of same EVEN UNDER SEVERE, ADVANCED CONDITIONS.

That's flat-out nuts.

Who, must I remind you, is in charge of a significant part of the NIH?

DICKTOR Fauci.

Who, may I remind you, has placed that man on a pedestal and has yet to do anything about it?  Trump.

When did we know that severe cases of Covid-19 included elevated D-dimer levels and normal troponin and thus involved immune dysfunction and coagulation disorders?  Abnormal D-dimer levels were reported on Pubmed in February and in at least one reported hospital in the earlier days (e.g. March) when testing was slow and unreliable due to the CDC ****ing up their reagents they were using that pair of test results (abnormal D-dimer, normal troponin)  as a surrogate Covid-19 indicator when people were admitted and later found, when the Covid tests came back, that it was nearly 100% accurate.  In short when they couldn't get rapid Covid-19 test results back they were using this as a surrogate to identify people who needed to be treated for Covid-19 with nearly 100% accuracy.

Is the NIH intentionally not going where the science leads because that would drop the fatality rate dramatically?  The hospitals that are doing so on their own have already driven the fatality rate down by more than half nationally in just the last month and by a factor of more than five since the pandemic began in the United States  If we actually updated these standards and expected them to be followed nationally as we learned more would there be anything to be alarmed about with this disease any longer at all or would it be similar to ordinary seasonal flu?  The answer, by the data, is obvious.

Now let's add a few more things.

Where are all the dead people with Lupus and RA in this disease?  While there have been a few reported cases the key word here is few.  Far fewer than expected based on the prevalence in the population.  In fact, since both combined are about 1% of US population and about 1.5% of the adult population we would expect among the dead somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 who were taking maintenance doses of HCQ at a minimum.  Since both are autoimmune disorders and immune disorders are considered a high risk factor we should expect material over-representation among these populations.  Well, are the deaths there or is their prevalence statistically smaller than expected?  Why hasn't that been reported?  You do realize that Medicare and Medicaid know exactly how many people have these disorders among the elderly, poor and disabled and exactly who is taking that drug among them, right?  Where's the data and who is blocking its compilation and release?

Next, there is some anecdotal evidence that Ivermectin may work too.  I note that Ivermectin is a one dose drug, as opposed to "take X per day" sort of thing and it is considered safe enough that even non-medical illiterate persons can safely dispense it in third world nations.  It has arguably prevented more human suffering (specifically, putting a stop to serious parasitic infections that often debilitated and blinded people) than anything discovered in the last 50 years.  In other words the odds of it hurting you are nearly zero (although no drug has actual zero risk) while the odds of it helping are unknown but suggested by association.  Should that be tried, especially on initial presentation when viral replication is still going on?  I think you should have that explained to you and get the choice, but again, since it interrupts viral reproduction whether it will do much if anything once the disease has progressed is uncertain at best.  Note that you can buy enough Ivermectin to treat a horse for about $6; it's literally dirt cheap and thus nobody can make any material amount of money on it.

There are no "minor" clotting disorders folks.  Have we looked at these "ground glass" opacities talked about on CT scans via dissection to figure out what they are?  Of course not; you don't dissect a live person!  What if they're not "fluid" build-up but are instead thrombus?  That would functionally explain not only what we're seeing and why O2 sat falls but also would explain why intubation without dealing with that problem is likely to kill the patient.  In short a lung that's got micro-clots all over the capillary bed is much less-compliant and thus much-more prone to barotrauma.  In addition if the root cause is immune dysregulation intubation inevitably stimulates an immune response and as a result makes that worse.  Couple the two together and the reason for failure becomes quite clear, doesn't it?

We're still not owning up to this "ventilator" madness officially, yet it has killed thousands -- probably tens of thousands.  Coupled with the refusal to look at this as a bi-phasic disease, where most people get a flu-like case while others get a secondary case that involves immune dysregulation including clotting disorders is outrageous.  It's not like we haven't seen viruses behave that way before either; polio does, and it's one of the most-notorious viral bugs ever  The second form of attack by this virus appears to be able to be detected by a trivially-inexpensive test; why would anyone with a working brain ignore an indication of a severe metabolic compromise for which they can be treated?  Both Trump and Cuomo, along with Fauci, Birx and many others, should be sitting in the dock facing manslaughter-for-profit charges writ large.

Perhaps some of those with an actual "MD" after their name can explain how intentionally ignoring testing for a known problem -- specifically, a clotting problem -- can be medically defended?  Is in fact the only reason the NIH specifically recommends against this is to give cover when the doctors don't treat for said disorder and that winds up being a major part of -- if not the entire reason -- why the patient dies?

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2020-06-17 09:54 by Karl Denninger
in Editorial , 2209 references
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None of this is in dispute; if you have an argument to make with any of these alleged facts let's hear it in the comments, with your data source.

  • As many as half, and in some states as many as 80%, of people who have died from Covid-19 were nursing home or other long-term-care home residents.

  • Black people have a higher fatality rate for the virus than white people.  Various commentators have attempted to explain this as a race-based difference in health care access, although no such evidence actually exists (e.g. in KY, where the Governor has announced an explicitly racist and thus unconstitutional program to "cover all black people" with health insurance -- a program based on ethnicity and thus constitutionally impermissible.)  However, black people also have a higher attack rate than whites, which cannot be explained by any alleged difference in health-care access.  Obviously, if you are attacked at a higher rate given the same percentage of bad outcomes more of that group on a numerical basis will have bad outcomes.

  • Meat-packing plant workers have a materially higher attack rate than non meat-packing workers.  Said workers are also over-represented, by a lot, among Hispanics.

  • Said meat-packing plant and other agricultural workers, however, have a lower fatality (bad outcome) rate than among the general population in places such as New York.  And not by a little either -- by a factor of 10 or more.  That's well beyond statistical significance.  Indeed the CFR among these groups are in the low tenths of one percent.  That's in the realm of ordinary seasonal flu.

  • Japan controlled their outbreak without lockdowns.  People like to point to "mask-wearing" but are ignoring the 900lb Gorilla in the room when it comes to Japan and South Korea -- about 3/4 of all homes have bidets.  The percentage of homes in the US with a bidet is an effective zero.  (I have one and like it; among other things it dramatically reduces the use of TP, so my one roll of consumption is your three or five rolls!)  Use of a bidet, however, absolutely reduces the amount of feces contact with a toilet user's hands by a huge factor -- probably to 1/100th or less than a user of a toilet without one, since it washes nearly all of the feces off your butthole and into the toilet before you get off the pot.  This dramatically reduces the risk of fecal:oral transmission of any bug at the source and thus should be expected to dramatically reduces infection rates.

  • South Korea and Singapore controlled their hospital transmission without extreme PPE measures. Their solution?  Militant hand-washing in health care facilities; before entry to and at exit of every room and after contact with any potentially-contaminated person or surface.  That step alone cut the transmission to health care workers to nearly zero.  This was known in March.  We are still seeing crazy-high transmission in health-care workers in the United States, especially in nursing homes and other care facilities (ITC homes for disabled people, etc.) in the United States and we have not instituted said militant hand-washing standards here.

  • Homeless people appeared at first to not get the virus at all.  This made absolutely no sense and I talked about it at the time as a major confounding piece of data; I could not explain the apparent lack of infections.  Subsequently, serology and mass-testing of shelters later proved that in fact damn near all of said people tested were in fact positive for either antibodies or the virus itself, meaning virtually all of them either had it or have had it.  We originally thought they didn't get it because they didn't get sick!  But they sure did get the virus -- they just didn't get sick enough from it to require medical attention.  I note that "getting the virus" but not getting sick is good, not bad.  In fact it's very good not just for you but for everyone around you; provided you get some amount of immunity out of that the benefit to the general public is considerable.  Among said homeless people nearly zero of them have died of Covid-19.

  • Prison populations continue to report extremely high attack rates and yet again post near-zero serious case and fatality rates.  Note that prisons and jails universally have the toilet in the cell and thus fecal/oral contamination via surface contact is going to be extremely easy with no possible way to control it.  We keep seeing huge "bursts" of reported cases in various states which are prisoner test batches that show up all at once -- yet what we don't see are prisoners dropping dead or ending up in the ICU with the bug.  Note that incarcerated individuals are materially more likely than the general population to have lived an extraordinarily unhealthy lifestyle prior to incarceration, including drug and alcohol abuse.  Therefore you would expect them to have much higher mortality statistics from Covid-19 than the general population but this has yet to occur on a systematic basis in the United States.

  • Native Americans appear to have extremely high attack, severe disease and death rates.  Arizona is the poster child for this problem but is by no means alone; they just happen to have entire counties where a huge percentage of the population is Native American due to the presence of large reservation areas within same.  The net-positive test rate among NE Arizona counties in particular is astounding on a comparative basis.

  • Protesters don't get it either despite ignoring "social distancing" writ large and often or even usually ignoring masks too.  Never mind that if you're gassed by the cops you cough like a son-of-a-bitch so if you have anything now so does everyone within 20' of you.  The transmission rate should be much higher than the statistical average for everyone in the state if gathering together in close contact for hours at a time without masks transmitted the bug.  The data says it does not; their positive rate of 1.4% is less than half the index rate (average) of 3.7% in the state of Minnesota.

  • Delaying infection does not prevent it.  Remember that flattening the curve mantra?  That's delay.  The area under the curve (number of infections) remains the same but is simply spread out over more time.  Now suddenly that people are still getting infected results in screaming when this was not only a known outcome it was the expected outcome.  Has the collective IQ of Americans dropped below their shoe size?  It appears the answer is a resounding YES!

Note that exactly nobody pressing the racissssssss! screaming is accounting for any of this.  Until and unless we cut the crap with that intentional suppression of logical analysis we shall never get to the facts.  There are very important epidemiological facts in this data and in fact there are likely pathways to suppression of severe outcomes from Covid-19 to below the nuisance level found therein.

Exactly where they lead and how you get there isn't yet known but a number of hypothesis are all reasonable given this set of facts and if we are going to actually make progress with this or any other disease we must look at said facts dispassionately, especially where you have high attack rates in what you would expect are seriously-compromised and high-risk population segments and yet those cases occur with few to nearly-zero severe or fatal outcomes.

Remember that HIV was treated in exactly the same sort of "social justice" fashion and we shoved a half-million Americans in the hole as a result.  Almost-certainly at least half of those people did not need to and should not have died.  They died because we refused to analyze the data we had and go where it led us, instead "protecting" those who claimed that butt****ing was not only a civil right but also that nothing which called into question the dangers of doing so was to be admitted into public discussion and debate.

Ok, so what hypothesis can we form?

  • Attack rate is highly-correlated with housing density in a given unit of housing.  That we now know and it explains the higher black attack rate, the higher meat-packing employee attack rate, the higher nursing/LTC home attack rate, the higher reservation attack rate and the higher homeless shelter attack rate.  It also explains the higher attack rate in places such as Wuhan China even though I believe exactly zero of what was reported out of the Chinese without hard, independent proof.  All those populations have much higher housing densities than the average white American household.

  • Adding a bidet that goes on a toilet at the mounting point for the seat costs about $50.  Adding one to every American home and apartment could have been done for a billion dollars, roughly, and likely would have cut transmission rates by a monstrous amount at less than a thousandth of the cost of the economic damage we have incurred.

  • The lack of indoor plumbing and sanitation massively correlates with attack rate.  Witness the NE corner of Arizona; many reservation dwellings have no septic system or running water.  How do you wash your hands with soap and water without running water?  How do you remove feces from your hands after defecating?

  • Close contact, with or without masks and even in large groups where you are in such a group for hours at a time, but where personal hand-to-hand or hand-to-object-to-hand contact does not occur does not, statistically, appear to transmit the virus as the correlation with the protests is inverted.  This is not a singular event either; remember that despite tens or even hundreds of thousands of spring break revelers partying in Florida in March the total number of cases traced to same numbered five.  Remember that while correlation does not prove causation the lack of correlation reliably excludes a causal relationship.  So much for continuing to ban large groups (e.g. sports fans, political rallies, etc.), limiting capacity in theme parks, restaurants, bars, etc. -- and requiring masks for the general public in any circumstance.

  • At the same time the places where groups of cases have occurred all correlate with the potential for fecal:oral spread.  There is a just-reported set of cases linked to a Jacksonville bar in Florida.  How is their hand-washing protocol in that place?  It just takes one bartender who used the bathroom, didn't wash his or her hands, and then handled all the glasses served to those individuals while filling them.  The same is true for the communal transmission reported earlier among a family that had a large gathering where shared dishes were served and at the church in South Korea with a symptomatic individual which practiced close, personal hand-based contact.  At the same time groups of hundreds of thousands "protesting" in close proximity, in fact at "personal contact" distance for hours at a time don't get it.  This is very solid evidence that it is manual transmission via the hands, likely fecal:oral -- and not airborne -- that is occurring.  In short: WASH YOUR DAMN HANDS AND NO, HAND SANITIZER IS NOT AN ADEQUATE REPLACEMENT.
     
  • Severity of outcome is very highly correlated with (1) obesity, (2) diabetes, and (3) the use of ACE/ARB modulating pharmaceuticals to control various morbidity factors.  The latter was attempted to be "disproved" by a now-withdrawn study that was shown to have possibly-intentionally corrupted data.  Note that among homeless people you have a lack of all three yet you also have rampant alcoholism, which one would expect to lead to very severe compromise and bad outcomes -- but the data says it doesn't.  Native Americans are also notorious for severe alcohol abuse which would lead one to believe there's a correlation there but the extremely high prevalence of same among homeless people who have almost zero severe Covid outcomes argues strongly against that being a co-factor in severity of result.

  • Age is not, standing alone, a material mortality factor in this disease.  New York's death data proves this; there is no specific correlation with age to death rate.  A shockingly-low number of New Yorkers of seriously advanced age without any of the listed morbidity factors have died.  It's not being old that gets you -- it's being unhealthy in specific, discernable ways.

  • Attack rate is very highly correlated with the likelihood of fecal/oral transmission vectors being in play.  Nursing homes have an extraordinary prevalence of incontinent individuals in them and avoiding cross-contamination when someone has a diaper on is extremely difficult.  The more people in a given housing unit the harder this is to control as well, and the presence of high-pressure institutional style toilets radically raises the risk of expulsion of fecal matter onto both surfaces and into the air.  Lids do not stop the former, in fact they concentrate it.  We knew this was likely at-issue early on in that protocols in Asian hospitals were changed very quickly to require assiduous hand-washing routines and as soon as that was implemented cross-transmission to and between health care workers went to an effective zero, even without masks!  This also explains how Japan was able to control their outbreak without shutting the economy down -- most of their private homes have bidets which dramatically reduce the risk of fecal/oral transmission in private homes by materially reducing the amount of feces a person's hands can come into contact with.

  • There are no long-term care or nursing home facilities and damn few hospital beds or units that can, today, in their present configurations, control for the transmission risk of a highly-mobile fecal/oral bug, especially if the focus remains on "masks and gloves" instead of the manual removal of potential contamination from one's hands after any and all contact with any item or person that might be contaminated.  Again, we knew this in MARCH and have completely ignored it.  The willful and intentional failure to address this protocol is negligent homicide by the tens of thousands of counts.  There is not one governor nor health director in any of the 50 states who has addressed this fact nor have any been held accountable.

  • The fact that homeless people get this virus on a nearly-universal basis yet almost none of them get seriously ill or die of it is extremely powerful data.  In fact, within that, plus the prison population and meat-packing house data, is likely a key to exactly why, statistically, people get severe cases of this bug rather than benign ones and ultimately expire from it.  This is especially true when one considers that both prisoners and homeless people have a much-higher than general population prevalence of seriously-unhealthy behaviors including most-specifically alcoholism and serious drug abuse, both of which are severely immunosuppressive.

Through all of this we can find truth -- if we care to.

We don't care to.

We won't hold NY accountable, for example, for obvious intentional medical homicide in that they have one quarter of the deaths in America from Covid-19 but only six percent of the population of the country.  That's a 400% over-representation and is flat-out outrageous.  We know, for example, the state forced Covid+ persons into nursing homes; that's not an accident, it's intentional.  And there are allegations that NY intentionally left potentially or known-Covid+ patients outside of isolated areas in hospitals. Britain, by the way, has admitted that 20% of their infections were nosocomial -- given to people by the hospital.  What's our percentage and why isn't that reported?  Exactly zero of those infections and deaths are acceptable nor can they be charged to the "virulence" of the virus; by definition those are medical incompetence at best and manslaughter at worst.

There is in fact a pretty-clean argument to be made that bolting the door of every hospital instead of admitting potential Covid suffers might well have resulted in less death!  Think about that for a minute: There is a clean argument to be made that our medical system resulted in a net positive change in the death rate from this virus; we would have been better off in terms of dead bodies to tell people to go pound sand and tough it out at home!

We have not, several months in, stopped transmission in and through nursing homes and other long-term and intermediate care facilities.  Every single state still has a problem in this regard.  The number of transmissions in and between nursing home (and other residential care facility) residents and staff at this point should be a statistical zero yet it is not in any state.  This is hard evidence that the overhwelming focus on mask-based PPE is and will remain ineffective.  Anywhere from a third to a half of all who have died of this bug were in such homes yet an effective zero of them could have contracted the virus in the community at-large since they don't leave said homes and, since the lockdowns in said places started months ago haven't been close enough to others to get the virus via personal contact with other residents; their care-givers had to be either direct or indirect vectors!

We won't take the data we have, which is that handwashing is a massive deterrent to transmission while masks out in public do little or nothing and, rather than demand "masks" in public places instead put hand-washing stations, with soap and water, outside businesses and public buildings and become absolute "nazi-like" when it comes to handwashing where personal service from one-to-many is common such as restaurant and bar staff.  We also won't do the same thing in hospitals and other care facilities.  Yet we know masks (especially when not worn properly and in combination with excellent hand hygiene, which the general public does not practice) are not a barrier to transmission but hand-washing is, and we knew this in March after a South Korean hospital stopped transmission to their staff, even when not masked, by mandating manual handwashing with soap and water before entry and exit to every patient room and after contact with any potentially-contaminated surface.  Prior that they had a huge problem despite the use of PPE, yet upon instituting that protocol their staff transmission dropped to a statistical zero.  The same thing happened in Singapore.

We have a second, confirmatory data point on fecal/oral transmission from Japan which controlled their outbreak without material lockdowns of any sort and has a very high prevalence of bidet presence in private homes (~75%.)  The use of a bidet removes virtually all feces from your butthole and thus reduces by an enormous factor the potential viral transmission load from one person to another via that route.  Given the essentially "kissing" level of contact found on Japanese mass-transit (rendering a mask useless) and the same level of personal contact found in many of the recent "protests" this is further evidence that the primary means of community spread is manual, not droplet-aerosol based.  Note that South Korea, where bidets are also common, confirms this.

And finally, also adding a lot of weight to the fecal/oral transmission route as being primary, we have data from the protests now coming in that large groups congregating for hours at a time in close contact, but generally not exchanging hand-to-hand or hand-object-hand contact, does not result in transmission occurring irrespective of masks.

We have a lot of data, at this point, that strongly points to why some people get very sick, some people get nothing, and why some people get exposed but never build antibodies.  Specifically, there is also obvious cross-immunity to this bug but we don't know what it sources from.  That is the only logical reason why someone who is exposed and gets the bug, as proved by PCR test, would not develop an antibody response; the only way your body eliminates a virus is through antibody response, so if you don't build specific antibodies the only other rational explanation is that you have cross-resistance.

We have a medical system, in short, that is hell-bent and determined to find ways to make money off this disease rather than focusing on how to make people not die and we have a media that is complicit in lying about the facts and points of correlation (which suggest but do not prove causation) and the places where correlation is expected under their hypothesis but is absent, which unlike correlation does in nearly every instance DISPROVE the suspected causal factor.

Again: Correlation does not prove causation but lack of correlation DOES, in nearly every case, DISPROVE causation.  This is one of the first things you learn about in regard to statistical analysis; that which does not correlate should not be, absent hard, scientific proof, viewed as a potential causal factor.

Exactly as with HIV/AIDS they have adopted a model that increases the number of people shoveled into the hole so more money is made instead of figuring out how, at zero or very little cost, to contain and prevent transmission and under what circumstances people get it and have a severe or fatal outcome as opposed to a minor inconvenience as is the case with a common cold.

The evidence strongly suggests that the reason for the difference in outcome is both a function of cross-immunity and may, to a large degree, rest in both personal choice linked co-morbidities and commonly-prescribed and used medical interventions that are "believed to be safe" but in fact seriously potentiate infections with this virus.  The latter is strongly suggested by the data -- not proved, mind you, but very strongly suggested and in addition the modality of that threat matches up exactly with what we know about how this virus attacks the body.  Instead of running that to the ground as a public priority we instead had a study run with contaminated data that tried to discredit that which implies that scienter exists among the pharmaceutical and medical industries!  In other words, the evidence suggests they know damn well those drugs are killing people in the context of this bug and tried to cover it up.  That this didn't trigger an immediate investigation at all levels of the government and regulatory apparatus is an outrage.

I've been reporting on this since February, I nailed this vector as likely at the root of transmission in February and I've yet to see a single bit of evidence that the hypotheses that I have put forward on same, backed by the data as available at the time, has been wrong.  Then again actually resolving the issue neither makes anyone rich nor does it give you a convenient political sword to run your opponents through with, does it?

Wake up America.

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2020-05-21 06:00 by Karl Denninger
in Editorial , 670 references
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Every one of these is a fact:

  • We knew, in early March, that this virus was not universally-transmissible.  That is, there was either existing cross-immunity among a material percentage of the population or the claimed "extremely" contagious nature of it via respiratory droplets was a lie -- or some combination of the two.  We knew this factually because people sharing a cabin on Diamond Princess had one person get sick and the second was both negative for the virus and never got ill.  That's flatly impossible when locked into an under 100sq/ft room with someone who has it unless you are immune for some reason.  Therefore, the repeated claim that "nobody" has existing resistance to this virus is a known, documented lie.

  • We know, and have known since early March, that nursing and other long-term care facilities house people particularly at risk for this virus.  Yet we also have known since mid-April, that post-exposure prophylaxis with Hydroxychloroquine is very likely to work -- because it did work with zero community-acquired spread cases in a nursing home in South Korea, and this was written up and published.  This is further supported by the fact that both RA and Lupus patients, who take HCQ on a routine maintenance (long-term) basis and have for years, are not represented in Covid-19 cases at anywhere near their representation in the population.  Further, since both of these diseases are serious autoimmune disorders and we know immune disorders are a risk factor for death by Covid-19 these individuals should by dying at a great accelerated rate -- but they are not.

  • There are now protocols for this disease that appear to be extremely effective.  I'm aware of two; one from EVMS and another from a medical group out west.  These protocols are very similar.  Only a small percentage of the people who are infected with this virus go on to develop a severe immune system over-reaction -- and that is what almost-invariably kills them.  These protocols aim to interrupt that and they are reporting near-100% success if initiated before critical damage is done -- in other words if done when someone gets sick enough to first require hospitalization.  The CDC, NIH and other agencies along with many medical and hospital systems are ignoring these protocols, which use inexpensive, off-patent medications with well-understood safety records despite that track record of success.

  • There will likely never be a successful vaccine and it's extremely likely that immunity irrespective of the means by which it is gained will not be permanent and complete. That's just reality with coronaviruses.  Facing facts is part of being an adult, and it's time we all did exactly that.

  • There is zero scientific proof behind so-called "social distancing" measures.  Further, the entire point of them was claimed to be to "slow the spread", not prevent infections.  The latter is not going to happen.  Period.  We must accept as a society that we're all going to get this bug eventually if we do not already have (or acquire) cross-immunity and for nearly all of us nothing bad is going to to happen.

  • We now know the lockdowns were crap and imposed horrific costs without any benefit whatsoever because lifting them has not resulted in spikes in infection rates.  Georgia has, at this point, been partially open for a month.  That is nearly six viral generation times; if there was going to be a spike we'd see the data by now.  Similarly the other states that have partially opened have not seen spikes either.  Never mind Sweden.  This was in evidence via the fact that the infection curves had all bent in every state before the lockdown imposition could have had an effect -- but instead of following the data on April 1st and lifting them all the lockdowns were enacted and strengthened anyway. 

Since we now have both post-exposure prophylaxis that has evidence of working (and it's dirt cheap) and we have protocols to treat Covid-19 as well which are highly effective (not 100% so, but no treatment ever is) and are also dirt cheap the risk of overload of the medical system is and has been gone for over a month -- and thus, so has any public health justification for restrictions on businesses or individuals.

Let's look at so-called "Red" States, including DeSatan's Florida who has been taking a victory lap.  In Florida the virus has killed 2,000 people supposedly -- likely fewer since there are incentives to count "died with" rather than "died from."  But Florida loses 200,000 people a year due to all causes, so DeSatan murdered the economy over a maximum single-year impact of 1% in fatality rates.  Worse is that the lockdowns likely will, within a year or so, be known to have caused more deaths from missed cancers, heart attacks and strokes than the virus.  Think DeSatan's Florida is a singular event?  Nope.  Governor Bill Lee destroyed Tennessee's economy over 305 deaths when the state loses roughly 70,000 people a year due to all-cause mortality; that is a rate of 0.4%.  Again, anyone care to take the bet on there being more than 305 more heart attack, stroke and cancer deaths due to the lockdowns?  For those states that did not intentionally seed the virus into long-term care facilities (e.g. nursing homes) the statistics are virtually identical in all of them.

All of the governors, both houses of Congress and our President continue to fellate Chairman Xi and China generally which, it is now established, both intentionally concealed facts and actively lied as did the WHO.  That corruption isn't just limited to them; it appears that our government funded the very lab where "research" prohibited in the US was being carried out and knew damn well that was the case.  Do you have to set off a nuke in a nation to constitute an act of war?  Isn't killing more Americans than died in Vietnam enough to clear that bar?  If it is then we have actual treason -- not the mealy-mouthed bull**** often spouted by conspiracy theorists but an actual overt act of war committed upon the people of the United States by both its government and China.

What every state and locale is now attempting -- and has been now for over a month -- is nothing more than flat-out tyranny in response to those acts of treason, with all of it under proved false pretense.

Trump is no better than anyone else in this regard; he could withdraw the emergency declarations upon which the state powers rest in an afternoon and by doing so terminate both his and the various State emergency powers.  He hasn't; he loves his additional powers never mind that the alleged predicate for them is a fraud.

This has now gone from self-inflicted and irrational injury to outright insanity.  The US Constitution and Federal Statutes (specifically 18 USC 242) forbidding deprivation of civil rights under color of law or authority are a joke.   The tens of thousands of dead seniors who all passed directly due to lack of prophylaxis which was ordered to not be dispensed by governors along with intentionally seeding sick people into long term care facilities combines to make for the best manslaughter charge I've seen in decades.  What these governors and mayors did is functionally equivalent to Cuomo soliciting an HIV+ man to anally rape people without a condom, then refusing to supply any sort of drugs for the highly-likely resulting infections.  The outcome for tens of thousands of seniors has been exactly the same.  Yet the number of such charges number a big fat zero and we have 330 million Americans who are sitting on their ass and are continuing to allow this to happen day by day.

Then there's the fact that in 1968 a pandemic flu swept the nation and killed about as many, on a population-adjusted basis, as did Covid-19.  Did we lock down anything in response?  Nope.

There is literally no reason for any businessperson or individual to follow any of the alleged "mandates" at this point. and in fact there never was  All of them were sold to you under false pretense, including Trump's original "15 days."  At the expiration of those 15 days it was over and any attempt to extend it should have been met with an immediate refusal across the board -- we knew at that point the "mitigations" were ineffective as the downward bend in the infection rate happened before the action could have taken effect.

Corruption at the local, state and federal level is nothing new.  But we've now got proof -- not evidence, proof -- that there are no local, state or federal officials, including the entirety of Congress, who are not corrupt.  They've ruined businesses by the millions, they've killed seniors by the tens of thousands and the insult continues to this very day.

There is only one response warranted by the people at large and until I see it, well, it's time to do something more-productive than what amounts to masturbation in attempting to inform people.

It's this:

smiley

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2020-05-10 06:00 by Karl Denninger
in Editorial , 596 references
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Let's cut the crap on masks, ok?

The other day I managed to get buzzed.  My head, you idiot -- not on a bong.

They insisted (state rules) that I wear a mask.  Meh.  Ok, so I had a dust mask in the truck (its proper use is for sanding things), so I wore it.  It's worthless to prevent viral transmission, by the way, and so was the one the person buzzing me, who also had one on, was wearing.

Why?

Let's quickly review.

A mask on your face will interrupt particles you exhale forcefully.  So if you cough, for example, it will trap the larger droplets.  It will not trap the vapor-phase water nor anything that's in there.  Virus particles are much smaller than the spaces in the mask material, never mind the inevitable gaps around the edges.

So the mask will stop some, but nowhere near all, of the particles you exhale.  I remind you that we could stop all drunk driving by mandating that every person blow into an attached breathalyzer before their car would start.  We would never tolerate such a thing unless you've been convicted of drunk driving first, and then only for a limited period of time.  Mandatory "mask rules" are the same thing; they impose this mandate on you with zero evidence you're infected and thus can transmit anything.

Now how about on the other end -- the person who isn't infected?  Should they wear one in an attempt to prevent their own infection?  There the news depends on how the infection is spreading.

IF the infection is spread by manual transmission of non-aerosol particles -- for example, fecal-oral -- then a mask is extremely effective in preventing the wearer from becoming infected.  Why?  Nearly all such transmission of a "manual" sort occurs when you touch something that is contaminated and then touch the interior of your nose or the fleshy parts of your mouth -- specifically, your lips.  But remember, according to the CDC (despite the actual documented evidence) Covid is claimed not to spread this way.

Why does the CDC refuse to bring this form of transmission forward and focus on it?  Because then we have to talk about toilets in hospitals, nursing homes and other commercial environments that are invariably high-pressure driven units that spray material all over the place when flushed, adult incontinence products used in both and how they're handled and disposed of and the fact that hand sanitizers are ineffective compared with washing one's hands -- all of which means the protocols that the CDC has said are "good enough" or "reduce risk significantly" really aren't and don't.  They know this, by the way, and we also know from history that one of the most-effective ways to transmit a virus is fecal/oral -- polio, as one example, has one of the worst transmission rates (R0 of roughly 5!) and is transmitted almost-exclusively via this route.

Oh by the way when you look at the data roughly half the deaths thus far are in fact people who were in nursing homes. Of course being able to add 2 and 2 yet not use "common core" to claim the result is 5 goes against the "teaching" of the useful idiots all over the place, never mind that if you actually looked at this issue dispassionately you'd be compelled to immediately bring thousands of counts of manslaughter against Cuomo, Newsom and others.

So instead of doing the right thing we instead killed tens of thousands in said nursing homes and claim "masks" are required for certain workers to be able to open their businesses.

But wait, you say -- you haven't pointed out why they're worthless if the actual transmission route is through vapor in the air!

Ah, if you don't get it you have no brain.  Or, to be more-specific, you have no eyes.

SARS-Cov-2, the virus that causes a COVID-19 infection, is nearly 100 times more effective at infecting the human conjunctiva -- a thin, clear tissue covering the eyeball and inner surface of the eyelids -- and upper respiratory airways than SARS, Dr. Michael Chan Chi-wai, who led the research team at Hong Kong University’s School of Public Health, told the South China Morning Post. The team's findings were published in the most recent issue of The Lancet Respiratory Medicine.

The eyes are surrounded on all sides except right where they stick forward so they're useful to you with a moist, live skin surface.  Unlike unbroken epidermal skin on your hands viruses can trivially penetrate that surface into the body -- and do.  Water vapor in the air, some laden with virus particles, will exchange with any open area and come in contact with same, exchanging back and forth with the air itself.  Gas laws state that unless you have a 100% seal such exchange will occur extremely rapidly due to Brownian motion and as a result wearing "goggles" or glasses does nothing to interrupt that.  This is distinct from droplets which are not in vapor phase and rapidly drop to the floor or ground outside, and in the context of outside if there is any wind whatsoever the dissipation happens quickly enough to make person-to-person transmission nearly impossible unless you are literally face-to-face.

It has been long recognized that your eyes are a primary entry point for any airborne virus or other material.  Ask anyone with an allergy to pollen about that.  You need only cut an onion to recognize that irritants in vapor phase can and do get to your eyes.  In addition even with a mask if you touch your eyes anything on your hands will get in via that route as well.

This, by the way, is likely why NY has documented that the majority of people who wound up in the hospital after their lockdown were in fact locked down and staying in their homes -- they were not "essential workers."  Simply put the measures put in place do not work because they can't work with an airborne respiratory virus.

This in turn means there is no effective way to prevent transmission among people at-large.  It simply cannot be done and as such we must respect facts and move on with our lives.  It doesn't matter if we like it or not; it is what it is.

We destroyed the economy for no actual benefit, and our refusal to admit this means we're still destroying the economy.

The remaining and actual effective mitigation is to go after the vectors in health care settings -- specifically hospitals and nursing homes with a targeted intervention based on the sanitarium model I've been advocating since this began.

I could go on with regard to gloves as well, but this is long enough for now.

Simply put -- a mask is useful if you believe you may be ill, especially if you cough.  However, it will do little or nothing to prevent transmission to you of an infectious agent that is spread through the air -- and that's just a matter of physics and physiology, not "virtue signalling."

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2020-04-27 10:01 by Karl Denninger
in Editorial , 866 references
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For those with 30-second attention spans:

  • Diamond Princess proved that the claim, which continues to be made today, that (1) this virus is extremely deadly and (2) there is zero cross or innate immunity were both false.  It is not possible for a very transmissible respiratory virus to infect one person in a quarantined cabin of two people, while the other does not get sick at all unless either (1) the second person is already immune or (2) the second person gets it but has no symptoms at all and recovers before being tested, and thus tests negative.  I remind you that this was proved, conclusively, before the end of February.

  • Kirkland proved that (1) the virus is extremely virulent and deadly among nursing home populations, killing double-dgiit percentages of the people in said places, (2) that flu season mitigations were ineffective in preventing the spread, as it was already flu season and (3) it was likely spread through fecal/oral and by the workers in the facilities -- that is, health care workers are a primary vector.  Yet to this day we have not locked in nursing homes nor done anything about that vector as people in said places count nearly half of all deaths and continue to be a primary source of both cases and deaths.  I remind you this was proved, conclusively, by the first week of March and thus all nursing home fatalities from Covid-19 since that time are in fact negligent homicides for which governors and the owners of same should be held personally liable both civilly and criminally.

  • Seroconversion testing has now proved my hypothesis that the first two points meant that (1) we could not actually stop transmission with "mitigations" and (2) health "care" was and would remain a primary vector for this disease.

  • Seroconversion testing has also now proved my belief that actual infection rates were much higher than reported (by at least an order of magnitude -- that is, ten times) and, as a result, fatality rates were much lower by an equal amount.  This meant that this respiratory virus was both very different than influenza but a lot like a cold virus.  In other words, flu has basically a zero silent infection rate; if you get it, you get sick.  Colds, on the other hand (some of which are caused by coronaviruses) frequently produce silent or near-silent infections where at worst you sneeze a couple of times.

  • The data from everywhere serologic surveys have been done proves conclusively that "lockdowns" and other forms of forced mitigation, along with "contact tracing", are a waste of time and in fact indirectly harm or even kill people.  The enormous number of "silent" (asymptomatic) infections, with all evidence being they account for at least ten times and perhaps as many as 85 or more times those who are tested, makes this clear.  If you are tested, positive, yet gave the virus to ten people and only one of them ever becomes symptomatic trying to chase down all the "positives" is now not only futile it's criminally insane because you want those asymptomatic infections to occur -- they directly help society rather than harm it by directly suppressing future transmission of the virus.

  • The data out of Wuhan showed that vents were a complete waste of time and any "mitigation" intended to blunt impact on hospital utilization so as to make vents available would actually do nothing at best, and kill at worst.  We now know this to be true in the United States.  This in turn means that mitigations intended to "flatten the curve" to preserve hospital space are stupid and ineffective since driving people into hospitals and encouraging invasive procedures does not save lives -- it actually takes lives.  Adding financial incentive to that (which our government has done) is manslaughter on a gross scale and in addition we have now spent money building devices that don't work, adding intentional financial fraud by our President to the mix.  We are now in the realm where people should get the guillotine for their conduct in that regard as manslaughter for money is commonly called contract killing.  Killing for naked political purposes is a crime against humanity.

  • The data now proves that the only rational way to deal with covid patients who need health care is a sanitarium model.  The goal must be early intervention with drug therapies (proved or not) because vents don't work.  Simply put you must isolate/quarantine (whether in said sanitarium, locked-in facility or someone's home where nobody can leave or enter other than a seropositive individual who cannot transmit the infection) for those who are actually infected.  Keeping the virus out of ordinary hospitals so Joe with his heart attack does not get the virus in the hospital and die due to his already-weakened state is essential -- and yet nobody has done one thing about that.

  • Since a huge percentage of those infected are not harmed at all or only have minimal symptoms you want to encourage that event since it is the only means to build immunity in the population.  Any other action is criminal negligent homicide as such "mitigations" are in fact a direct cause of those at high risk becoming infected and dying.  When you cannot prevent the spread of a respiratory virus, and that is the case here as is now proved by the data, then those actions that prolong the window of harm for those at high risk are not "mitigations" -- they are crimes.

And to top it all off we have nearly zero state or local politicians, say much less a President, who is willing to stand up and speak to any of these facts.  Yet they are now all facts -- not suppositions, beliefs or even just a hypothesis supported by the data.

They are facts.

They all started as a hypothesis with decent evidence but over time they've graduated to irrefutable facts backed by actual data on the ground.

What remains a hypothesis, but is also likely to be proved up, is that there will never be a vaccine and immunity wanes over time, as both are also characteristics of coronaviruses in general, which means this will come back in the fall, it will be with us on a permanent basis, the "mitigations" not only can't work they can't be reapplied forever and there will never be a successful vaccine either.

This means "suck it up and deal with it" is all we have left -- and that the sanitarium model is the only sane public health measure that can have an actual positive impact.

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