The Scientist who panicked the world with predictions of up to 2.2 million American deaths now says “never mind.” See here.

I do not think of myself as an optimist. I am way more Eeyore than Pollyanna. Recently, however, I declared there was reason to trust China’s “no new cases” data out of Wuhan. Maybe I was wrong. A friend points me to this article. “EBC News, a Taiwan cable news network, broadcast two such photographs dated March 20, which is two days after China reported there were no new local Wuhan infections. One of the notices, after announcing the new cases, read: “Do not go out, or gather, wash your hands, be careful, hold on, hold on, and hold on some more.”  EBC also broadcast video of a hospital in Wuhan that it says was taken on March 19 and Read More ›

Are the numbers from Wuhan too good to be true? Or has the medical community missed that elephant sitting in the corner? This article explores the question. Since the lockdown occurred later than it should have, travellers attending the Chinese Lunar New Year celebrations transmitted the infection wherever they went. Most countries have focussed on identifying infections brought by travellers from such high-risk countries but the majority with COVID-19 infections now are showing increasing rates of local transmission. The signal from the Chinese puzzle could be that widespread infection is not inevitable and with stringent public health measures infection rate could be brought down to zero. That scenario does not make epidemiological sense. We have to conclude that China does Read More ›

First, Dr Vladimir Zelenko speaks: While, the Governor blocks: Sisolak signed an emergency order earlier Tuesday barring the use of anti-malaria drugs for someone who has the coronavirus. But Sisolak’s order does not apply to patients who are hospitalized with coronavirus. The order restricting chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine came after President Donald Trump touted the medication as a treatment and falsely stated that the Food and Drug Administration had just approved the use of chloroquine to treat patients infected with coronavirus. Sisolak said in a statement that there’s no consensus among experts or Nevada doctors that the drugs can treat people with COVID-19. Actually, as Pharmacy Times reported, Thu March 19: Pharmacy Times FDA Announces Two Drugs Given ‘Compassionate Use’ Status Read More ›

I am using this website as a resource for working out my position on COVID 19. Thank you to everyone who has participated including those who push back at me. The dialectic in play on this site has been very helpful to me and I hope it has been helpful to other participants and to the lurkers. Yes, inevitably, some exchanges have been heated. Emotions are running high. But let us keep it up. Iron sharpens iron a wise man once said.

This short read on the balance between shutting down the economy and efforts to fight COVID 19 seems right to me. Yes, continue suppression for another couple weeks. But use this time to prepare for a shift to mitigation, meaning the resumption of normalcy for most Americans. We simply can’t go on living like this forever.

That seems to depend on who you read: Last year in the journal Science, a research review concluded that the chytrid fungus caused the decline of at least 501 amphibian species, of which 90 have gone extinct. That paper suggested that species losses due to the chytrid fungus are “orders of magnitude greater than for other high-profile wildlife pathogens.” But a recent reanalysis led by University of California, Berkeley, researchers found that the paper’s main conclusions lack evidence and are unreproducible. In a Comment published online March 19th in Science, the group conducting the reanalysis — including lead authors Max Lambert and Molly Womack, who are postdocs in the lab of professor Erica Rosenblum in the Department of Environmental Science, Read More ›

Open access: Abstract: In eukaryotic cells, with the exception of the specialized genomes of mitochondria and plastids, all genetic information is sequestered within the nucleus. This arrangement imposes constraints on how the information can be tailored for different cellular regions, particularly in cells with complex morphologies like neurons. Although messenger RNAs (mRNAs), and the proteins that they encode, can be differentially sorted between cellular regions, the information itself does not change. RNA editing by adenosine deamination can alter the genome’s blueprint by recoding mRNAs; however, this process too is thought to be restricted to the nucleus. In this work, we show that ADAR2 (adenosine deaminase that acts on RNA), an RNA editing enzyme, is expressed outside of the nucleus in Read More ›