“There is no point in keeping grocery stores open if the meat packers are closed due to the virus.” Commenter Ed George

To our progressive interlocutors: When even Newsweek bails on you, it is time to abandon your narrative. MOST U.S. HOSPITALS ARE EMPTY. SOON THEY MIGHT BE CLOSED FOR GOOD instead of merely preserving hospital beds and other resources, this heavy-handed injunction has created a burden of its own design: a historic number of empty beds in systems left untouched by the pandemic. Those hospitals have resorted to unprecedented levels of furloughs to stave off temporary budget shortfalls, but industry and economic trends point to more lasting outcomes unless immediate action is taken.

We can best see the peak in the death statistics, as global daily deaths begin to decline: However, we seem to have a prolonged inflexion, giving a linear growth since mid April, i.e. growth and saturation are in rough equipoise, though the very end is beginning to tip over: The pattern of doubling time has shifted, with major countries slowing significantly, e.g. here is the USA in immediate context: Daily fresh global cases shows the flattened peaking: National patterns show this too, with China showing secondary etc waves: It is noteworthy that the UK now views China’s data as questionable: The British government will no longer recognise the number of coronavirus deaths reported by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) over Read More ›

In response to my last post (The Data Are in: A Nationwide Lockdown Was Never Necessary) Bob O’H got red in the face, stamped his feet, and apparently insisted that a nationwide lockdown was necessary. Was it? Here is an analysis performed by a friend: To put US COVID19 cases into perspective, it helps to separate the terrible outbreak in the five-state region of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts from the other 45 states. (Stats as of April 25.) Total PopulationNY-NJ-CT-RI-MA – 39.8 millionRest of US – 288 million COVID Cases – Total (per million people)NY-NJ-CT-RI-MA – 490,675 (12,312)Rest of US – 496,657 (1,722) COVID Deaths – Total (per million people)NY-NJ-CT-RI-MA – 33,262 (835)Rest of US Read More ›

There is a report that Azithromycin is far more than an antibiotic. Some may wish to watch an interview with Dr. Michael Lisanti on antibiotics for COVID-19 and cancer. But — without endorsing as “proved” fact — let’s cut to the chase scene: COVID-19 coronavirus is particularly dangerous for the elderly or those with aging-related senescent illnesses like diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and lung disease. As Professor Lisanti said in a statement on his new paper in the journal Aging, “If you look at the host receptors of COVID-19, they are related to senescence. Two proteins have been proposed to be the cellular receptors of COVID-19: one is CD26 – a marker of senescence, and the other, ACE-2, is also Read More ›

According to a study discussed today in the Wall Street Journal (behind a paywall), the nationwide lockdown was never necessary. The vast majority of states should have followed Sweden’s example: We ran a simple one-variable correlation of deaths per million and days to shutdown, which ranged from minus-10 days (some states shut down before any sign of Covid-19) to 35 days for South Dakota, one of seven states with limited or no shutdown. The correlation coefficient was 5.5%—so low that the engineers I used to employ would have summarized it as “no correlation” and moved on to find the real cause of the problem. . . . Sweden is fighting coronavirus with common-sense guidelines that are much less economically destructive than Read More ›

A great physicist warned us, information precedes matter and energy: Bit before it: The COVID-19 virus contains about as much information as a sticker in WhatsApp. Walter Bradley Center director Robert J. Marks and Dr. Daniel Andrés Díaz-Pachón explore a dreadful truth: “Human biology is so finely tuned that less than a kilobyte of information can stop the world.”: Daniel Andrés Díaz-Pachón: I really think that information is more fundamental to nature than matter and energy and what we are seeing here is how this small amount of information can produce a big change. Not only in a small area; it’s the whole world that is paralyzed… There is a primacy of information, as some physicists have said in the Read More ›