I've tried to warn people of the coming likely disintegration of our health care system.
I've put forward a bill to fix it. Nobody has cared. Not one torch, not one pitchfork was to be found.
I suspected that was going to happen when Obamacare was passed. Those of you who have been here since the crash know that I noted when Obama was elected and started in on Obamacare that it was my view that if I got older, fatter and sicker I would eventually die because the health care required for me to live would disappear -- whether Obama had promised it to me or not. So would millions of others. And not one person ever did lift a finger toward that rat bastard or his minions in the House and Senate at the time. They're still there and he's still a free man.
So in 2011, realizing that there was no way they were going to do the right thing I instead did this:
That took 8 months.
I still look like that. Well, ok, my hair has more gray in it.
Now to be clear -- I didn't do it for anyone else. I did it because I knew that if I didn't do it I would end up even fatter, likely diabetic and screwed. I was never diabetic but I did buy a simple finger-stick meter and some strips, and did my own version of challenging my endocrine system in the privacy of my own home. What I saw wasn't encouraging.
60lbs and 8 months later the data was still not encouraging, even though I felt a hell of a lot better Literally everything was better. Sleep, demeanor, everything. Even my boner (ok, TMI, I know.) But a few years later the data tells a different story. Today I can sit down and choke down an entire big bag of chocolate; almost all sugar. It's not possible for me to drive my blood sugar way up. It just doesn't happen. My fasting glucose is right up the middle where it should be. I still have the meter and every year or so buy a few strips and see what's up, just to be sure. I eat low carb, high fat. There are exceptions, but my primary sustenance is comprised of animal protein and green vegetables. It works, I'm never hungry, and I enjoy what I eat. I often eat nothing, literally, before noon.
Why?
I'm not hungry.
It's nine years later. Those who say it doesn't work or you can't stick with it -- you're wrong. It both works and is delicious. Oh, and over time your body may heal itself. I take no prescription drugs. Literally none.
Now we have Coronavirus. It's not going away. There will be no vaccine. There is evidence (but not proof) that the antibody protection wanes with time and some people don't get much protection at all, despite getting the virus. None of this is scientifically proved yet, but given the evidence expecting a permanent-immunity vaccine is foolish. There will almost-certainly not be one. If the antibody protection wanes then a vaccine is a waste of time and money, and the efforts to produce one will soon be abandoned.
Being obese and diabetic has a high probability of being a death sentence if you get this virus. You're anywhere from 100 to over 1,000 times more likely to die. To put perspective on this if you get this virus you have less than a 0.06% chance of death (and probably less than half that; I'm being generous in the direction of mortality in that calculation) if you have none of these conditions. Some of these are not under your control -- cancer being one of them, much of the time. If you're in one of those categories then you've got good odds of winding up in the ICU and if you land there about half the time you come out in a box -- 90% of the time if you wind up on a vent. Those odds suck. HCQ and either ZPAK or Doxycycline appears to work. How well is not known yet. Clinical data (that's "anecdote" to those two cocksuckers on the side of Trump in his briefings) says they do work but no drug regime works for everyone.
Obesity and Type II diabetes, which are two of the most-deadly co-morbidities are absolutely under your control. So is smoking and excessive drinking. And to the extent hypertension is linked to being obese, that one is too.
For reasons not well understood at this time diabetes and hypertension, both of which are heavily linked to obesity, are extreme mortality enhancements with this virus. Thus, it is fair to call The PieHole Virus, that is, what you put in the pie hole, a direct contributor to whether coronavirus kills you or is somewhere between a mild and serious annoyance.
You have until fall folks. Yes, we have our lockdowns today, but if they don't cut this bullshit out soon hospitals are going to start collapsing for lack of funding and supply chains will break in critical ways. Then the ordinary heart attack -- or an abscessed tooth -- will kill you because there's no health care at all.
But even if they lift the lockdowns (and who knows if they will) the odds are very high this thing is coming back in the fall. We should have let it burn out now, but we didn't and won't -- Trump is too stupid to challenge the so-called "advice" of his medical advisers, even after they rely on models that have twice been proved to be blown and fraudulent. He should fire them both, lift it all, advise high-risk people to shelter in place, consider prophylaxis in consultation with their physicians and go after vectors instead of shutting down the economy. It was the only sane path to take originally and it's the only sane one now.
But Trump is not sane. In fact unlike the garbage Russian nonsense for this he deserves immediate impeachment or even 25th Amendment removal.
But neither is going to happen and thus it is what it is.
Neither you or I can change the stupidity in our government alone, and there is no will to change it collectively. In fact the general population has swallowed this scam to the tune of at least 90% of the population, and maybe more. Our people give their daily Nazi Salutes to Fauxci, Birx and Trump -- indeed, they demand even more lockdowns and destruction. Absent many millions changing their minds, sticking up their middle finger, unlocking their businesses and if necessary going to work armed to keep the doors open, making clear that "no means no" this is not going to change -- and there is simply no common purpose in doing exactly that. We're all sniveling under our desks in fear instead. Thus, it won't be changed. Deal with it. Covid will come back in the fall and you should expect that. You should also expect any politician who tries to lock things down a second time to potentiate a dirty civil war where merely going to get your mail invites death. I doubt the people will put up with this crap a second time, and further, the US Government won't be able to fund any of it nor the health care they claim they're "protecting." We're getting away with it now on inertia, mostly. That will go away. It always does, just like it did in 2007 when Bernanke famously said that "Subprime is contained." He was absolutely full of crap and yet inertia kept the balls in the air for another year.
My mathematical models focused on 2024 for the crossover between spending on necessary items, revenue and the geometric blow-up of the deficit which would force change, like it or not. That timeline has now been accelerated, although exactly by how far I'm not certain. Markets never let you actually hit these walls just as they didn't in 2008, which means with the outrageously reckless actions taken thus far it could happen at any time. Exactly how things devolve from there is very hard to determine -- but none of the potential outcomes are good.
In short while I did it in 8 months you have six, more or less. Can you get all the way there? No, probably not. But you better start now and try if you're fat and Type II diabetic. Right now. Not tomorrow, not next week, not some resolution that you won't keep up.
Now.
Because if you don't, when this virus comes back in the fall -- you're likely to die.
The FDA has warnings that azithromycin “can cause abnormal changes in the electrical activity of the heart that may lead to a potentially fatal irregular heart rhythm.”
So instead, Alam replaced azithromycin with another decades-old antibiotic that doesn’t pose any known risks to the heart.
“Doxycycline is an anti-inflammatory with properties similar to azithromycin but without the safety concerns and without cardiac toxicity,” he said.
Now that's an interesting twist -- and it appears to be working.
This doctor reports 38 of the 47 patients he had, all of whom were very high risk, have stabilized with this regime. It didn't work for everyone but the fact remains that this looks very promising for people who would otherwise likely be hosed straight-up; these are persons who would be rather likely to be killed by a simple flu.
Is this statistically significant? Not standing alone -- but another word for "anecdote" is "clinical evidence", and when you have a group of people who are otherwise screwed and you can only improve the situation for someone who is likely to die then it certainly looks to me like a positive outcome -- especially when we're talking about people who can't use ZPAK due to their underlying health conditions.
Interestingly enough doxycycline is also an anti-malarial.....
The article in question mentions that the Henry Ford health system -- a very large hospital network in SE Michigan -- is using this combination as well and as a result we'll probably get some pretty good data soon.
Again, do not attempt to play doctor with this on your own -- this is a tetracycline antibiotic and some people are allergic to those medications, and it can cause tooth discoloration (permanent) in un-erupted teeth. This would be a problem in both children and pregnant women for obvious reasons. Additionally it can be very dangerous in people using warfarin and similar medications.
Why do we keep putting up with the lies?
One quarter of the deaths in NYC, the area with the highest death count from Coronavirus, lived in nursing homes. This over-represents them as a percentage of the population in the city by fifty times.
FIFTY.
Not percent, TIMES.
Statewide 20% of NY deaths are patients in either nursing homes or people in assisted living facilities. This over-represents the population by FORTY times.
Again, not percent. TIMES.
We don't have a general-population pandemic. Yes, we have people getting sick. Yes, people are dying. Yes, many of them are in the general population. But we know how to deal with a lot of this; HCQ/ZPAK/Zn appears to work. Not in everyone, and it should be given early, not late.
But it appears to work.
Further, we now have damn good evidence that fully half of all infections are asymptomatic. That is the person who gets it never gets sick. At all.
Why am I being told to shelter in place when half the time if I get this bug I don't even sneeze? By the way if I get it and don't even sneeze you want me to have it. Why? Because then when the poor bastard next to me DOES get sick I can't get it and thus his ability to give it to others is reduced. Get enough people like me and that poor sick bastard will run out of attempts to transmit it before he either dies or recovers.
Where is the authority in the Constitution to quarantine people who are not ill? Who are not currently infected? I will not get ill nor can I transmit the virus to someone else unless I have it. Since when can someone's Constitutional Rights be suspended indefinitely when they are neither carrying a virus or ill with it? There is no such authority. Period.
We keep being told that this virus kills people left and right, like it's SARS, smallpox or something similar. The simple truth is that it isn't. Not even close.
Yes, the virus is dangerous. Quite dangerous, if you have one of a list of serious illnesses, but we know what they are. Worse, we also know where some of the major spreading is going on too given this over-representation among nursing home and assisted living facilities -- its the workers in those places, and worse, many of them are very poorly paid and thus take second jobs doing at-home care, during which they can transmit it to those people -- all of whom are at high risk by definition.
NY has even ordered nursing homes to accept discharged Coronavirus patients -- which is like throwing a lit match in a barn full of dry hay. That's flat-out insane, to the point that one wonders if they want to drive up the death rates for political purposes to justify their "shelter in place" order. That order is quite-arguably mass voluntary manslaughter!
75% of nursing homes have been cited for failing to monitor and control infections in the last three years.
Think about that: 75%!
We don't have a coronavirus pandemic among the general population. Oh sure, it's bad -- don't get me wrong. It's a nasty bug, it can get anyone, and it is getting plenty of people. A few who are not seriously ill are being killed by it. Key words: A few.
But when you have a quarter of the people getting seriously ill and dying coming from a part of the population that is one half of one percent of the total you do not have a widespread community pandemic.
You have a specific problem with transmitting disease in that part of the community, and since exactly zero of those people are in control of that part of their own destiny it's not that individual's responsibility either -- it is the health care system under which they are living that is infecting and killing them.
But without a widespread community pandemic you also don't have legal, ethical or moral justification for locking down anything under force of law -- constitutional or not.
Cut off the vectors to the most at-risk -- individually through strong advisories to shelter in-place and for those in assisted living facilities and nursing homes solve the problem there. It is outrageous and unjust to the point of questioning whether an immediate revolution is in order if, in order to protect the poor infection control record and obvious transmission from the outside to one half of one percent of the population you instead issue executive orders that imprison everyone in their homes.
This country is not a police state. Well, it's not supposed to be anyway but you sure as hell are acting like it is and you're a dictator with the right to imprison and even kill people simply because you say so.
The truth is becoming more-evident by the day -- even in the mainstream media. It will not be long at all before the people decide they've had enough of this con job; while a huge percentage of the people in this country cannot do math if you think the people will sit still in their homes and have their jobs destroyed permanently because some underpaid workers are infecting one half of one percent of the population through misfeasance and malfeasance I suspect you have another think coming, and you might not like how it comes either.
We have another option and it's entirely congruent with what we're learning about infectious vectors with this disease. I wrote about it this morning.
OPEN THE ECONOMY NOW MR. PRESIDENT.
Not tomorrow, not next month, NOW.
Cramer just admitted on-air the fact I've pointed out for more than a month -- in NYC fewer than 20% are making it off ventilators.
Oh, and just because you make it off doesn't mean you live. How many survive to discharge? Well, it's less than or equal to that, right? Yep, since if you're dead we already know the outcome.
Remember, we're not out of ventilators. Everyone who needs one gets one at the present time.
The problem isn't that they aren't available -- it's that in nearly every case they don't save the patient.
This was my point since this alleged "debate" all started. The premise that if you exceed hospital capacity we have 2 million deaths and if we don't then 100,000 people (or however many is the fantasy-land trot-out of the day) die was always intellectually bankrupt and a bald-faced lie. It has been relentlessly promoted on a literal minute-by-minute basis to justify buying tens if not hundreds of thousands of $30,000 machines never mind that each one requires skilled people to operate it, which we do not have.
It has been repeated daily by people like Cuomo, Fauci, Birx and others and President Trump laps it up and regurgitates it without first asking for the survival rate on the vents.
Wuhan managed to save five percent of those who went on vents.
FIVE PERCENT.
I said at the time we can and likely will do better. But not a lot better. Nor should we have expected to do better; a study done in 2015 said that the base rate for ventilator survival was 50% to discharge and just 30% over the following year.
Folks, we're not talking about those who are ambulatory and survive without invasive procedures dying if the hospitals overload. They won't die anyway. They'll be ok. Whether it's nasty in their house or in the hospital doesn't matter as they'll be ok.
The people who wind up in ICU on a vent, in nearly all cases, die. Whether you die with a tube down your throat or you die because there is no tube available to shove down your throat doesn't matter; you're still dead.
It is only those who we put on mechanical ventilation and survive that we can change outcomes for. They're the only ones for whom a bed in the hospital makes the difference.
For everyone else the outcome does not change.
This means that if we "intervene" and destroy the economy and we have 100,000 people die, all of whom will require intensive care, obviously, and the failure rate with said vents is 80%, then if we did nothing we don't lose 2 million people, we lose 120,000.
Now granted, 20,000 excess deaths is 20,000 I'd rather not have happen.
But that's the difference between the two scenarios and both Birx and Fauci know it -- not 100,000 .vs. 2,200,000.
Is it worth destroying the economy, 30% of all small business restaurants and bars, millions of jobs and millions of lives -- literal millions folks, not 10,000 or 20,000 -- in this attempt? Is it worth the risk of a critical supply chain disruption that leads to mass civil unrest, riots and potential destruction of one or more American cities? Is it worth real martial law -- not a "lockdown"? Is it worth the destruction of our civil society, our willingness to be social with other people, the permanent impact on our economy and the inevitable depression, suicides and overdoses?
And finally, for those of you who think this is all about protecting Granny, listen up:
There are 2.8 million people in the last year of their life in the United States right now. Some of those people know it's their last year and some do not. By definition every single person who dies in the next 12 months is in the last year of their life right here, right now.
These constraints are, right here, right now, today, preventing those people from socializing and spending time with the people they love and would otherwise like to spend that time with.
In Trump's 15 days to "slow the spread" over 115,000 Americans died while having had robbed from them the small, simple pleasures of being with the people they love and want to be around by government diktat. If we continue this insanity until April 30th over 345,000 of those people in the last year of their life will have died and they will have been prohibited the social interactions they would otherwise choose.
Our government -- backed by the vast majority of our population and all the scolds on CNBC and elsewhere -- are consigning 345,000 people to die literally locked in a prison.
All of this because you're not content to take your own precautions and calibrate your own risk. You're not content to tell people honestly up front that if the health system overloads we will triage and those who are older and are felled by this virus will have to face Brother Grim and then let them make the choice for themselves as adults.
I have, I hope, many years of life left and so does my daughter. Neither of us needs to be working right now. This is an inconvenience. For those put out of work who will lose their jobs on a permanent basis, and then their homes, this isn't an inconvenience, it's a damned travesty predicated on half-truths and outright lies. Nonetheless, we will survive this.
But for over 345,000 people between the start of this insanity and the end of April it is not an inconvenience or even a travesty; they will die in a literal prison imposed by you, bereft of the social benefit, comfort and simple daily pleasures of life they would have otherwise enjoyed. How dare you imprison those who have committed no offense and will be dead before this is over. That is a literal atrocity and a crime against humanity.
You are screwing over 7,000 people a day out of their small individual social pleasures in the puerile and false belief you can "stop the virus." Even China, welding people in their houses literally, did not stop it.
Not one of those people gets a "do over" when you're proved wrong; they're all dead. You can't apologize later or make them whole. Ever. And every single day this bullshit goes on another 7,000 people die having been imprisoned in their last days by you.
This is not a few people here and there against whom you commit these crimes -- over 100,000 of those people are dead now and there's nothing you can do to address the harm you caused to them. You literally throw over 7,000 more bodies on that pile each and every day.
My mother died of colon cancer about a year and a half ago. The last months of her life were spent doing what she wanted to do in her own home. She had two bad weeks at the end; up until that point she was still enjoying being who she was, and doing what she wanted to do, interacting with whoever she pleased. About a month before her final decline my daughter and I drove to her home, picked her up and we all went to lunch in a restaurant. That was the last time she was able to enjoy the simple pleasure of being served by someone in a dining establishment. Today that simple pleasure and her choice to engage in it, were she alive, would be prohibited under force of law at your demand.
In the name of a possible 10,000 or 20,000 speculative deaths you have destroyed the enjoyment of over 300,000 American's lives in their last days.
Preventing all of the people in her situation, over 120,000 of them who have passed thus far and 337,000 if this goes to April 30th, from doing as they wish and spending their remaining days as they wish and with whom they wish makes every last one of you a monster.
Yeah...... damn that flag is going to get worn out... You know which flag it is, right?
A supervisor urged surgeons at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in Manhattan to volunteer for the front lines because half the intensive-care staff had already been sickened by coronavirus.
“ICU is EXPLODING,” she wrote in an email.
A doctor at Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan described the unnerving experience of walking daily past an intubated, critically ill colleague in her 30s, wondering who would be next.
Another doctor at a major New York City hospital described it as “a petri dish,” where more than 200 workers had fallen sick.
Where do all these essential workers go when their shift is over?
Do they stay in the hospital and self-quarantine?
Nope. They go home.
So do their other colleagues, who are likely silently positive with mild or non-symptomatic cases.
Does the Sheriff threaten to arrest them if they leave their house? Nope.
Why not? They just had contact with dozens, even hundreds of known-positive people.
What was I saying the other day about why, despite the lockdowns, the R0 is not below 1.0 when the majority of our society has reduced their interaction with others by 90, 95 or even 99%?
Gee, I wonder why there are any community transmissions at all?
If you lock down an area and close all the bars, restaurants and other social places and R0 started as 3.0 it goes under 1.0 instantly and the case rate collapses. If that does not happen then that is not how it's being spread.
Period.
So the spread wouldn't be coming from all the folks in the hospital who are not being forced to stay in said hospital where the infection would be contained, right? Could you even do that without every single staff member quitting on the spot? Probably not. But even if sick they're considered essential and thus are not subject to actual quarantine orders or arrest for going out in public even if suspected or known positive, never mind that every single one of them had contact with dozens if not hundreds of known-positive persons in the same building.
Meanwhile the rest of us have guns shoved in our faces when the data says we're not the largest component of the vector.
The health care workers are.
The biggest impact of the lockdowns is destroying the ability to pay for hospitals, which is likely to kill more people from all manner of other causes. I remind you that between heart attacks and strokes there are roughly 1.5 million Americans hit a year and if we destroy the hospital systems by trashing both economic activity and taxation you're very likely to kill far more people who have those events than the virus ever could.
Today, Typhoid Mary is paraded around as a hero.
Psst - Heh Doc, wash your fucking hands. You want to know how Singapore stopped their health care workers from getting the virus with nearly 100% efficacy and thus removed this vector from the equation? It wasn't masks or being kitted up in tyvec (entirely impractical for a full shift) -- it was washing their hands before and after each and every contact with a potentially infected person or thing. Every time. As soon as they enforced that even if you were chatting with another staffer in a hall without a mask on the infection rate among their health care workers went to a statistical zero.
Oh, want to know when the community transmission rate will start to drop in a given area? When all the docs, nurses and other medical workers have been infected and either resolved or died. They then are immune and their spreading of the virus into the community stops. That, by the way, is why despite the lockdowns, there is no effect for a couple of weeks instead of one viral generation time after the lockdown occurs -- the spreading continues until you run out of vulnerable health care workers who can spread it into the community.
THEN it stops.
And yes, that's exactly the pattern we're seeing. Community spread from ordinary social interaction isn't the largest component of the total in the vectors of transmission. The health care system workers are, which is why the anomalous pattern that we keep seeing in every single nation and area, where there is one case here and there in a given area and then suddenly the case count explodes upward. One or a few of those cases are go sideways, wind up in the hospital and then the entire staff gets it and spreads it back out in an exponential blast into the community.
PS: This same pattern was visible in Wuhan.
