{"id":973,"date":"2020-07-12T01:59:56","date_gmt":"2020-07-12T01:59:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/?p=973"},"modified":"2020-10-01T14:42:12","modified_gmt":"2020-10-01T14:42:12","slug":"covid-19","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/covid-19\/","title":{"rendered":"Covid-19. This page is superseded by: https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/rasmapedia\/index.php?title=Covid-19<\/a>"},"content":{"rendered":"

This page is superseded by: https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/rasmapedia\/index.php?title=Covid-19<\/a><\/p>\n

I have posts on covid-19 at<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The CDC’s Job of Collecting Data. <\/a>\n
  2. Covid-19 Precautions<\/a>\n
  3. Masks and Slobs<\/a>\n
  4. Signal, Noise, and CDC<\/a>\n
  5. Masks<\/a>\n
  6. Does Professor Menachemi\u2019s Fairbanks-IUPUI Covid-19 Study of Indiana Infection Rates Have a Biased Sample?<\/a>\n
  7. The Cost of Covid-19 <\/a>\n
  8. Excommunication by Covid<\/a>\n
  9. Church, State, and Virus<\/a>\n
  10. Covid19-August 2020<\/a>\n
  11. Pastor Doug Wilson on the Authority of the Church to Require Masks<\/a>\n
  12. Economists and Epidemiologists<\/a>\n<\/ol>\n

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    San Fran keeps private gyms closed, but has reopened city-owned gyms. Furious owners call out city leaders.<\/a><\/p>\n

    According to KNTV-TV, city-owned indoor gyms have been open for months, all while privately owned indoor gyms have struggled to stay afloat. The result, KNTV reported, is “crushing private gym owners.”
    \n
    \nRabkin reportedly learned that city-owned gyms had reopened after texting several police officers, offering them her gym to work out. The officers told Rabkin that the fitness center at the police station was up and running \u2014 with enhanced safety protocols, of course.
    \n
    \n Not only have gyms for city police officers reopened while private gyms have remained shuttered, but so have city-owned gyms used by judges, lawyers, bailiffs, and paralegals, KNTV reported.
    \n
    \nPerhaps most shocking is the fact that the city was unapologetic about the double standard. <\/p>\n

    NBC Bay Area asked the city for comment Thursday, and were told only that the current health order does not allow indoor fitness gyms to operate, and per Mayor London Breed’s latest reopening announcement, privately owned gyms have to stay closed until at least the end of the month.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n


    \nThe news comes days after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi     triggered national controversy<\/a> for getting her hair done at a San Francisco salon that has been shuttered by COVID-restrictions.
    \n
    \n“It was a slap in the face that she went in, you know, that she feels that she can just go and get her stuff done while no one else can go in, and I can’t work,” salon owner Erica Kious said.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    #################################3<\/p>\n

    The Democratic governors violated the right to free association, probably without statutory support and going beyond their legal powers, and thousands of people died as a result. This could be more deaths than all the race lynchings in history combined.
    \n    Democrats May Have Violated Civil Rights By Forcing Nursing Homes to Admit COVID-Positive Patients<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    The DOJ requested data from Michigan, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, each led by a Democrat governor. In June, House Republicans on the Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis sent five letters to the governors of those states and to Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.), also demanding data on the link between nursing home policy and coronavirus cases. Each other state issued an order similar to New York\u2019s (California\u2019s came on March 30, Michigan\u2019s on April 15, New Jersey\u2019s on March 31, and Pennsylvania\u2019s on March 18).
    \n
    \nThe Democrat governors issued these orders in contrast to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) guidance that explicitly does \u201cnot direct any nursing home to accept a COVID-19 positive patient, if they are unable to do so safely.\u201d Indeed, the guidance urges that \u201cnursing homes should admit any individual that they would normally admit to their facility, including individuals from hospitals where a case of COVID-19 was\/is present\u201d only if the nursing home can follow\u201d CDC guidance.
    \n
    \nCMS Administrator Seema Verma also warned, \u201cUnder no circumstances should a hospital discharge a patient to a nursing home that is not prepared to take care of those patients\u2019 needs.\u201d
    \n
    \nAccording to House Republicans in June, New York had suffered 6,360 nursing home coronavirus deaths, Michigan had suffered 2,297, California had suffered 2,560, Pennsylvania had suffered 4,268, and New Jersey had suffered 6,432. Each of these numbers represented between 25 percent and 68 percent of the state\u2019s coronavirus deaths and a sizable chunk of each state\u2019s nursing home population.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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    Yale stayed open during the Spanish flu, which was notorious for how many strong young people it killed. Three students died, out of perhaps 1,200 students, which would be a .25% death rate (a much higher death rate of those infected, of course). The 1918 influenza quarantine<\/a>
    \nPATRICK LEE 12:00 AM, JAN 28, 2008:<\/p>\n

    >Members of the Yale community were not allowed to make contact with other civilians unless the participants obtained a special pass, which was restricted by the Council to \u201cofficial assignments.\u201d Visitors were banned from the military posts, and University secretary Anson Phelps Stokes canceled all on-campus public meetings…
    \nBy Oct. 20, New Haven had already reported 209 influenza-related deaths, but by that same year, only one Yale student had lost his life to the pandemic. And by the end of the year, Yale had lost three students.\n <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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    Has New York City committed suicide? Chicago, too. There is a vicious cycle. A bad mayor is elected. Sensible people move out. The remaining voters are the most corrupt and crazy. So things keep getting worse. New York City is dead forever<\/a>, New York Post, <\/em> by James Altucher, August 17, 2020. Big cities, and universities are in strategy trouble anyway because of the internet, and they are killing to goose that laid the golden eggs besides. <\/p>\n

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    \nFrom     a comment <\/a>on Sebastian Rushworth M.D.: “Do vitamin D supplements protect against respiratory infections?”, August 3, 2020:<\/p>\n

    \nEpidemiological studies indicate association but not causation. Causation requires defining a biological mechanism that can explain the epidemiological finding. In Vitamin D we have both. The associations noted in this study and the mechanism.
    \nIt is not clear that the mechanism whereby vitamin D protects against death from COVID-19 is the same mechanism that protects against upper respiratory tract infections.
    \n
    \nThe mechanism for COVID-19:<\/strong> COVID-19 is clinically 2 diseases: the much more common asymptomatic\/mildly symptomatic viral like syndrome and the life-threatening immune dysfunction called the \u201ccytokine storm\u201d. The cytokine storm is to a autoimmune response what a CAT5 hurricane is to a thunderstorm. The mechanism of vitamin D for the life threatening immune system is understood to the extent that vitamin D is necessary to blunt an autoimmune reaction.<\/strong> Lung epithelial cells express high basal levels of CYP27B1 and low levels of CYP24A1, favoring conversion of vitamin D to its active form. When treated with vitamin D, these cells increase the levels of the TLR co-receptor CD-14 and cathelicidin (LL-37). In airway epithelial cells, treatment with vitamin D<\/strong> induces IkB\u03b1, an NF-kB inhibitor resulting in a decrease of viral induction of inflammatory genes<\/strong>. Vitamin D keeps the dendritic reticulum cell in an immature\/immune tolerant state<\/strong>, alters the M1 pro-inflammatory macrophage to a M2 anti-inflammatory macrophage, and alters the TH1 response to a TH2 response, decreasing the autoreactivity of T cells. These help and blunt the immune response and the development of the cytokine storm.
    \n
    \nThe anti-viral effect of vitamin D is not fully understood. Cathelicidin (LL-37) is able to disrupt the envelop of enveloped viruses. Vitamin D blocks the ability of viruses that bind to the carbohydrate moieties on cell surfaces.<\/strong> Many viruses, include the coronavirus, use this moiety to clin to the cell and thereby allow the virus to interact with the AEC2 receptor.
    \n
    \nThe peculiar susceptibility of type 2 diabetics may be partially explained by vitamin D and cathelicidin. <\/strong>Cathelicidin is stored in neutrophils (and macrophages). In DMT2, the neutrophilic response is blunted (with resulting increase susceptibility to infections of all types.\n <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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    The Los Angeles Times, July 31:<\/a><\/p>\n

    Public health officials had created a system to help contain such outbreaks: The county\u2019s fast-expanding army of contact tracers would be notified within 24 hours of people who tested positive for the virus. The county workers would call the patients, make sure they were isolated and determine who else they may have infected.
    \n
    \nBut the tracers never found the epidemic in the plant, famed for making Dodger Dogs.
    \n
    \nBy the time the county began an investigation in May, at least 116 workers were infected in what had become one of the region\u2019s biggest outbreaks.
    \n
    \nIt\u2019s been a grim pattern since the pandemic began. The county\u2019s contact tracing system has repeatedly failed to find workplace outbreaks before they spread widely, placing an ever-expanding circle of employees, their families and others at risk.
    \n …
    \nThe number of people testing positive who tracers have been able to reach has fallen to 68% in recent weeks, down from 75% earlier in the pandemic, according to officials. And only 40% of those people have been willing to disclose who they may have exposed.
    \n…
    \nGetting information has been so difficult that the county recently began offering $20 gift cards to people who agree to be interviewed.
    \n…
    \nTo compensate for the system\u2019s weaknesses, the county now requires employers to report outbreaks when three or more workers test positive. But so far officials have done little to enforce that reporting requirement, and some companies have failed to comply. Last week, officials said they would begin imposing financial penalties on employers not following the county directives \u2014 but not until the end of August.
    \n…
    \nIn some places, like South Korea and Germany, however, aggressive use of contact tracing has helped to corral the coronavirus. American public health departments have used the technique for decades to control outbreaks of measles, tuberculosis and sexually-transmitted diseases.
    \n…
    \nThe county rapidly boosted its core force of 250 contact tracers to 1,600 by reassigning and retraining other government employees, according to county documents. They included librarians, who are already skilled at interacting with the public, a key to gaining patients\u2019 trust. With infections surging anew, the county is continuing to add tracers, with 900 more in training.
    \n
    \nThe workers are aided by a county health order in March that required doctors to immediately report each positive test result to the county, with the person\u2019s name, contact information and occupation.
    \n
    \nThe tracking is essentially a race against the clock. People who contract COVID-19 are most infectious two days before they first experience symptoms to ten days after, according to federal health officials.
    \n …
    \nMost of the county\u2019s contact tracers work from home. And it\u2019s unclear whether the county is able to monitor the information on employers that the tracers obtain in their interviews of patients for clusters of infections that could be outbreaks. County officials declined to answer questions about whether a new software system installed in early April to help contact tracers record the interview information could be used to search for outbreaks.
    \n.
    \nOfficials described the contact tracing data system that was in place before the upgrade in April as one that was \u201cpaper based.\u201d<\/p>\n

    The failures have many demanding answers.
    \n …
    \nFerrer also pointed out that her staff had initially decided that officials with the small city of Vernon, where the plant is located, should take responsibility for trying to stop the infections.
    \n
    \nThe county had learned about the outbreak on April 17, about a month after the first known infections, when Farmer John managers called the city of Vernon to report that six workers had tested positive. Vernon city officials toured the plant and told the county that the company had installed safety measures to stop more infections.
    \n
    \nBut the cases continued to spread unchecked, according to county documents. And the county\u2019s contact tracers still didn\u2019t find them.
    \n
    \nIt was another month later, on May 18, that Vernon officials notified the county that the infections had greatly multiplied. By the time county officials sent a press release on May 24 to warn nearby communities, at least 153 workers had tested positive. Dozens of other workers were also infected at eight other nearby food processing plants in Vernon, a small industrial city that has few residents of its own.
    \n …
    \nDarryl Blackwell, who works in the plant\u2019s ham de-boning department where the first employees tested positive, said he and his colleagues initially received little information about the spreading infections. Blackwell said he had wondered why government officials weren\u2019t responding to the outbreak and ensuring employees were safe.
    \n…
    \nThe county\u2019s contact tracers also failed for months to discover an outbreak at the construction site of SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, where the Rams and Chargers will play.
    \n
    \nThe first construction worker at the 298-acre stadium site tested positive in late March.
    \n
    \nThe county health department did not start an investigation until mid-June, and only after Times reporters had asked repeated questions about continuing infections at the site.
    \n
    \nThe county says that 55 workers have now tested positive, with most of the cases reported in June and July.
    \n
    \nSharon Balter, director of county\u2019s acute communicable disease control program, said the SoFi case showed how contact tracing cannot pinpoint an outbreak at a sprawling worksite like the stadium, where there are 3,000 construction workers who are employed by a myriad of subcontractors.
    \n
    \n\u201cIt\u2019s going to be complicated for us to detect this outbreak until someone reports it to us,\u201d she said.
    \n
    \nChris McFadden, a spokesman for Turner AECOM Hunt, the joint venture overseeing the construction, declined to say whether the joint venture had reported the workers infections to the county. Instead he said that the site\u2019s management continued to \u201cmeet or exceed\u201d the county\u2019s guidelines.
    \n
    \nHe said the joint venture had measures in place to keep people safe. He said the site had enhanced cleaning and disinfection and requires workers to keep six feet away from each other. Workers must also have their temperatures checked before entering the site, he said.
    \n
    \nIf a worker tests positive or has symptoms, McFadden said, \u201cwe launch our own investigation to determine who they may have had close contact with.\u201d
    \n
    \nAt the bustling Los Angeles Apparel garment factory in South L.A., infections began in May and surged in June.
    \n
    \nBut contact tracers didn\u2019t detect the outbreak, which has been the largest in the county so far. A medical professional who became aware of conditions at the plant through a patient notified public health officials on June 19.
    \n
    \nThe county immediately began investigating, but by then three people had died. More than 150 workers tested positive that same week.
    \n
    \nBy July 10, when the county alerted the public through a press release detailing the company\u2019s \u201cflagrant\u201d violations of safety rules, more than 300 workers had tested positive and a fourth had died.
    \n
    \nAsked why the county\u2019s contact tracers had not found the outbreak, Ferrer repeated her staff\u2019s findings that many people testing positive are afraid to tell the government who they may have exposed.
    \n
    \nShe said the factory\u2019s managers had put \u201ctheir employees and their families greatly at risk\u201d by not reporting the outbreak until 150 had tested positive.
    \n
    \nBut Dov Charney, the founder of L.A. Apparel, said he believes the county\u2019s contact tracers should have been able to detect the outbreak earlier.
    \n
    \n\u201cIf they were doing contact tracing, they would have found out by case 12,\u201d he said.
    \n
    \nCharney said he had repeatedly arranged for his staff to be tested. And under the county\u2019s system, each of those test results would have been quickly sent to government contact tracers.
    \n
    \n\u201cWhen they saw elevated numbers, they should have come in right away,\u201d he said. \u201cThey didn\u2019t show up.\u201d
    \n
    \nCharney said he had not tried to hide information about the infections.
    \n
    \n\u201cMaybe our record keeping wasn\u2019t there initially,\u201d he said, \u201cbut it took a while to figure out what they wanted.\u201d
    \n
    \nHe said the county\u2019s policy of requiring employers to report outbreaks had been confusing. First the county told employers that a cluster of five cases should be reported. More recently, he said, the county had changed the rules, saying that a reportable outbreak was three infections.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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    .
    \n    Herald Times: <\/a><\/p>\n

    Since April 8, nursing homes have been required to notify the state health department of coronavirus cases and deaths within 24 hours. For months, state officials declined to release the number of cases and deaths at specific nursing homes, most of which are government-owned.
    \n…
    \n\u201cIt is concerning to see these discrepancies as they put out and release this facility level data, but it also demonstrates why it was so important to get this data out at the facility level,\u201d said Sarah Waddle, state director of AARP Indiana, which represents the interests of older Hoosiers. Waddle wrote an open letter to Gov. Eric Holcomb in May urging him to release facility-level data, which he had refused to do until this month.
    \n.
    \nThe new data, in addition to identifying which facilities have had COVID-19 outbreaks, finally allows the public to understand how severely the coronavirus has affected long-term care residents. We now know that at least 60% of the state\u2019s deaths and 15% of the positive cases were in long-term care facilities.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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    I should find out how many excess deaths there have been in the states, to see how important covid-19 is. Maybe the CDC data can show this. They seem to use some complicated and probably wrong seasonal adjustment algorithm. I should just compare with 2019. Then, as a second step, put in a time trend using the ten-year trend, and see what difference that makes. Nothing too fancy, though– this is an example of where transparency is infinitely better than technique. “Man is depraved, and people make arithmetic mistakes, so transparency trumps technique.”
    \n###############################################
    \n
    \nBock, Randy.<\/strong> From     Lynn Chu on Twitter, July 28, 2020: <\/a><\/p>\n

    \n
    \nDeaths subside so now
    \n
    \nNebulous “cases” to scare
    \n
    \nHealthy out of health<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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    https:\/\/twitter.com\/AlexBerenson\/status\/1287761915398299649<\/a><\/p>\n

    \nTrue story: if current trends hold, the number of people under 35 murdered in the US this year will RISE by more than the TOTAL number of people under 35 who die of #Covid.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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    \u201cDon’t get excited about people getting covid twice. Suppose the false positive rate is .001. If you test 100,000 people who seem sick with covid but who really are not, you’ll think 100 do. If 50 really do get it later, you’ll think they got it twice.\u201d <\/p>\n

    ###################################################<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    This page is superseded by: https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/rasmapedia\/index.php?title=Covid-19 I have posts on covid-19 at The CDC’s Job of Collecting Data. Covid-19 Precautions Masks and Slobs Signal, Noise, and CDC Masks Does Professor Menachemi\u2019s Fairbanks-IUPUI Covid-19 Study of Indiana Infection Rates Have a Biased Sample? The Cost of Covid-19 Excommunication by Covid Church, State, and Virus Covid19-August 2020 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-973","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/973","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=973"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/973\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2274,"href":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/973\/revisions\/2274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}