The leader of the World Health Organisation has gone on a bizarre rant attacking Taiwan while claiming to be the victim of racist comments and death threats.
WHO general manager Tedros Adhanom was responding to calls he should resign for failing to condemn China’s role in covering up the coronavirus crisis which has since killed more than 87,000 people.
“This (racial) attack came from Taiwan,” he said.
“We need to be honest. I will be straight today. From Taiwan.
But as the pandemic has ground on, doctors say, they’ve found it increasingly difficult to rule anyone out as a possible COVID carrier. “We’re just seeing so many strange presentations of this that basically we’re in a state where almost anybody coming in with anything is a potential COVID case,” said Dr. Brett Belchetz, who practises emergency medicine in Toronto.
For hospitals dealing with limited protective equipment and long backlogs for testing, that’s a problem. It means there’s no easy way to triage patients, conserve supplies or give medical staff a mental break. “We’re taking precautions with everybody now,” Belchetz said. “We’re treating every single patient as a potential COVID patient.”
The range of possible COVID symptoms has already expanded dramatically from the early days of the pandemic. One colleague told Belchetz about a patient who came in with a head laceration. “Everyone assumed it was nothing to worry about,” he said. Head wounds are bread and butter stuff in the ER. But after some detailed questioning, the patient revealed how he got the cut: He had passed out and fallen. He didn’t have a cough or a fever. But he wasn’t getting enough oxygen. He got swabbed. The test came back. He had COVID-19. […]
For Miller, the stakes of this situation didn’t fully set in until he saw his first atypical presentation of the disease. In the early weeks of the pandemic, a woman with an erratic heartbeat came in to his ER. She had a history of what’s known as atrial fibrillation. And her heart was beating wildly, at almost twice the normal rate.
Miller and his colleagues focused on that; they wanted to get her heart rate under control. “A few hours later she spiked a fever and then we realized, ‘Oh gosh, there’s more to this story than just atrial fibrillation,” he said. They sent her for a swab. She had COVID-19.
The UK government’s new testing chief has admitted that none of the 3.5 million antibody tests ordered from China are fit for widespread use.
Professor John Newton, who was appointed by health secretary Matt Hancock to oversee testing, reportedly said the tests were only able to identify immunity in people who had been severely sick with coronavirus.
The tests did not pass the evaluation stage, and he was quoted by The Times as saying they were “not good enough to be worth rolling out in very large scale”.
Researchers in Shanghai hope to determine whether some recovered coronavirus patients have a higher risk of reinfection after finding surprisingly low levels of Covid-19 antibodies in a number of people discharged from hospital.
A team from Fudan University analysed blood samples from 175 patients discharged from the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre and found that nearly a third had unexpectedly low levels of antibodies.
In some cases, antibodies could not be detected at all.
“Whether these patients were at high risk of rebound or reinfection should be explored in further studies,” the team wrote in preliminary research released on Monday on Medrxiv.org, an online platform for preprint papers.
Although the study was preliminary and not peer-reviewed, it was the world’s first systematic examination of antibody levels in patients who had recovered from Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, the researchers said.
Fire them all:Last year the WHO added traditional Chinese medicine, which uses animal body parts, to its influential global compendium. And that may yet happen.
JOE BIDEN: “We cannot let this, we’ve never allowed any crisis from the Civil War straight through to the pandemic of 17, all the way around, 16, we have never, never let our democracy sakes second fiddle, way they, we can both have a democracy and … correct the public health.” pic.twitter.com/ufXFh5cAtY
NEW: Mon 6 April update of coronavirus trajectories
Daily new deaths: • US has averaged 1,000 deaths per day over the last week • Daily deaths in Italy & Spain peaked around 23-24 days after lockdown • Suggests UK could peak in 7-10 days
The EU condemned the measures, which it said were taken “unilaterally and without consultation”.
The new rules go into effect on Friday at midnight EDT (0400 GMT) and mark a major escalation from the US president, who has been accused of inaction over the coronavirus.
Do the press corps have amy responsibilities to the public during a wartime like situation? Or is it perfectly fine to scream the equivalent of “Fire, Fire!” in a crowded theatre?
If President Trump is a wartime president, does that make Washington reporters wartime correspondents?
Even before coronavirus, I often wondered if today’s press corps had covered the allied landing at D-Day in June 1944, if their stories would have led with the disastrous American landing on Omaha Beach, the paratroopers who dropped miles away from their targets and the submersible tanks that sunk to the bottom of the English Channel before ever touching land.
Indeed, if each of these genuine military setbacks had been the lead story, the American people might have lost the will to fight the rest of the war.
1/2 Revised IHME model which is closely watched shows improvements across board on scope and duration of U.S. epidemic, with a few exceptions. Projections on peak deaths rose in Florida and Georgia, but most states have better outlook under model, big improvement in Louisiana.
— Scott Gottlieb, MD (@ScottGottliebMD) April 6, 2020
I don’t agree with the attack on Trump near the end and there is zero mention of what Nancy Pelosi and Bill de Blasio have said and done, but overall, it’s still a very interesting video:
Let’s not forget how widely Trump was called a racist when he shut down flights from China. Also, would globalist Obama’s response have been much different from the Shiny Pony’s?
Updated and Bumped with this note from Andrew Gaiziunas.
Just popping in to say hello and add some context before anything gets out of hand.
Me and my dad (retired M.D.) were intrigued by the possibilities behind this particular piece of research coming across my desk yesterday morning: https://chemrxiv.org/articles/COVID-19_Disease_ORF8_and_Surface_Glycoprotein_Inhibit_Heme_Metabolism_by_Binding_to_Porphyrin/11938173/5
Being all stuck at home under quarantine, we wanted to learn more. My dad provided the medical knowledge, I provided the tech & sleuthing skills, and we came up with this core hypothesis. As we pulled together a series of anecdotal data, some pre-prints, and even some peer-reviewed papers, a clearer picture of the hypothesis formed. We found missing pieces precisely where we thought we would. And yes, we became convinced this is not only plausible but quite likely (or a similar mechanic) to be the case.
I threw it up on Medium just to save a copy and see if anyone would have feedback. We got plenty — much over both of our heads, some out-of-left-field fantastic ideas. For example, if this turns out to be the case, and hyperbaric oxygen therapy might save lives (we have far fewer hyperbaric chambers in the US than ICU beds), a mountain climber suggested portable hyperbaric bags which are pretty cheap (in comparison) and can fit through hospital doors could do the trick.
This was precisely the type of interaction we were looking for.
The article has since been taken down by Medium, but it seems it garnered sufficient interest in the 12 hours it was up as to be handed off to much more qualified and experienced hands. We’re hopeful some of this can be found to be useful; it may or may not, but NOT sharing it would have weighed heavier on our minds if we found out later this theory, or something similar to it, could have helped save lives and yet we did nothing about it.
Cheers and best of luck, everyone stay safe and thanks.
-AG
Thank you, Andrew. The original post continues below.
It makes for a compelling read, no question. And it may even be a valid hypothesis, and at least one of the responses lends it legitimacy, as perhaps does this. ⇽ Read it.
But it’s also written under a pseudonym, “libertymavenstock”.
With a few minutes of sleuthing, I found the identity of the author — Andrew Gaiziunas along with his Youtube channel on cryptocurrencies, and an interview. It had 7 views as of this morning. So buyer beware should it pop up in your travels. (Update: He is likely the son of a retired Illinois doctor of the same name.)
It would be useful if our readers in the medical field would chime in.
Fair warning: to anyone veering off topic or jamming up the threads with conspiracy jackshit – prepare to be disappeared.
But I also stumbled upon this during my trip down the rabbit hole, and this is probably as good a place to share it as anywhere. By Dr.Cameron Kyle-Sidell who is treating COVID-19 patients in New York City. Patients need OXYGEN NOT PRESSURE!!! The ventilators may be causing lung damage because of PRESSURE. Needs to be immediately investigated.
“These patients as far as I can see, do not experience respiratory fatigue. It seems to be a pure hypoxemic failure. […] the constellation of symptoms seems to most mirror that of decompression pulmonary sickness or high altitude sickness.”
This might be a reach but as a physician I’ve been aggressively treating patients here in the west with the hydroxychloroquine+high dose zinc (200mg per day)+azithromycin with good results but started getting even better when we added a true functional glutathione. We were awarded a patent on this product last year and are currently seeking several further patent continuations (along with international patents) as we were planning to create a biotech around it (meaning we already have the financing/investment and know it works like it should — first one to truly work or to be validated — the only one that works in the marketplace). And after reading these comments and this great article we believe we now know what it was doing and why — it helps prevent the cytokine cascade/storm in the lungs and the overwhelming oxidative stress as mentioned and when used along with hydroxychloroquine probably helps resolve the porphyrin problem more effectively. It is also extremely antiviral (macrophages use it to attack viruses) which is some of our first NDIs for which we are going after with the FDA. But these are all mostly just theories buttressed with the recent clinical knowledge gained by treating a lot of sick patients.
There’s another, entirely logical explanation for why stores have run out of toilet paper — one that has gone oddly overlooked in the vast majority of media coverage. It has nothing to do with psychology and everything to do with supply chains. It helps to explain why stores are still having trouble keeping it in stock, weeks after they started limiting how many a customer could purchase.
In short, the toilet paper industry is split into two, largely separate markets: commercial and consumer. The pandemic has shifted the lion’s share of demand to the latter. People actually do need to buy significantly more toilet paper during the pandemic — not because they’re making more trips to the bathroom, but because they’re making more of them at home. With some 75% of the U.S. population under stay-at-home orders, Americans are no longer using the restrooms at their workplace, in schools, at restaurants, at hotels, or in airports.
Georgia-Pacific, a leading toilet paper manufacturer based in Atlanta, estimates that the average household will use 40% more toilet paper than usual if all of its members are staying home around the clock. That’s a huge leap in demand for a product whose supply chain is predicated on the assumption that demand is essentially constant. It’s one that won’t fully subside even when people stop hoarding or panic-buying.
Related: Milk dumping has begun, processors are being hit by employee illness, and despite high retail demand, prices for all classes of feeder cattle dropped $10-20 per hundredweight. Some producers decided not to sell this past week and some cattle were passed on electronic markets. Auction volumes in the three prairie provinces were down 55 percent compared to last year. It’s the same in the UK.
Photographs and video footage emerging from this crisis-stricken coastal city look like images from the aftermath of a natural disaster: bodies wrapped in sheets and dumped on the roadside or outside houses; desperate families begging for help after being forced to keep their loved-ones corpses at home for days in temperatures of more than 30C.
