Excess Deaths in the US in 2020 have increased by 20%– and COVID-19 is not the only cause.
The rate of excess deaths in the US has increased by over 20%– and COVID-19 is only responsible for two-thirds to three-quarters of them. Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, heart and vascular disease, and pneumonia have also been blamed for excess mortality.
An article in the New York Times on December 13 gives detailed tables for the excess mortality this year. For example, diabetes mortality is 15% higher this year than normal. Many other diseases show abnormally high mortality. These figures are originally from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and can be seen here.
Some of the excess can be blamed indirectly on the pandemic. For example, the isolation of Alzheimer’s patients in nursing homes has led to faster deterioration and hastened deaths. Pneumonia in non-COVID patients may be misdiagnosed since, without direct testing for SARS-COV-2, cases of pneumonia due to bacteria and other viruses clinically appear the same. Patients with myocardial infarctions (heart attacks) and strokes may have avoided going to the emergency room due to fear of COVID infection, resulting in increased mortality from lack of treatment.
Excess mortality from diabetes, which is the biggest single cause of excess deaths this year, can be explained by poorer control of the condition due to fewer visits to medical providers– although this is contentious. Diabetes may not be well-controlled by people who are isolated or who have difficulty obtaining proper foods. Those who are affected by job loss or other causes of income or stability loss may be unable to access their medications. Since diabetes affects poor people more than the well-to-do, this may be a cause.
Of course, all the diseases that show excess mortality are also risks for those who contract COVID-19. People with diabetes, hypertension, and dementia all have increased death rates when infected. What relation this has to separate death rates is unclear. Those who have COVID-19 are counted as dying from it, whether they have co-morbidities or not. It may be that some people with these conditions may have actually had the virus when they died and were simply not diagnosed.
States that have been severely affected by the pandemic show higher excess mortality. For example, New Jersey, which was hit hard this spring, showed a 37% increase in diabetes mortality. New York City had a 39% increase in mortality from hypertension (high blood pressure.) New York City also had a 50% increase in pneumonia and influenza mortality. These numbers are hard to explain except by misdiagnosis of people who actually died of COVID-19.
Read the article and look at the diagrams. Decide for yourself what this increased overall mortality in addition to deaths from COVID-19 means. It is clear that the virus has not been over-diagnosed, and if anything has been under-ascertained.
(illustration courtesy of pixabay.com: S Hermann and F Richter photo via pixabay.com)
Vladimir Putin has been the supreme leader of Russia since early 2000. His rise to power was facilitated in 1999 by a curious coincidence (if it was really a coincidence.) In August-September 1999, shortly after Putin was selected by his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, as prime minister, a series of terror bombings occurred.
The Russian apartment bombings of September 1999
On August 31, 1999, a bomb exploded in a Moscow shopping plaza, killing one person and injuring 30-40 others. It was estimated to contain perhaps 300 grams of high explosive. On September 4, 9, 13, and 16, four massive explosions destroyed apartment buildings in different cities in Russia. These bombings were well planned and highly destructive, using up to 400 kg of high explosives placed in strategic locations to flatten large apartment buildings.
Other bombings were prevented by the discovery of explosives on September 13 and other days in early September. On September 22, an incomplete bomb was discovered in a Ryazan city apartment building. This incident became famous and led to the arrest of several FSB agents.
Government investigations of the bombings
These bombings were blamed (by the government) on people known as Chechen separatists who were Islamist militants. However, an alternate theory of responsibility was advanced by several individuals in the Russian Duma (Parliament) shortly afterwards. Investigations were performed by the Russian government and by independent investigators led by Duma deputies after the Duma itself rejected two motions for an investigation.
The Russian government investigation led to the arrests and convictions of a number of individuals who were almost all ethnic Tatars, Avars, or Karachis and whose motivations were said to be revenge for Russian air raid bombings of villages in Chechnya and Dagestan. The bombings were concluded to be directed by Ibn al-Khattab, a Saudi Islamist.
Eighteen people named in Wikipedia were blamed for the planning and execution of the bombings. Some of those tried and convicted gave partial confessions. Some individuals said to be involved in the bombings were killed while resisting capture. The one said to be the leader, Ibn al-Khattab, “was poisoned by the KGB in 2002” (per Wikipedia.) Those convicted were sentenced to various terms, up to life in prison.
Independent investigation of the bombings
The independent investigation, called the Kovalyov commission after its chairman (a Duma member), was hampered by the government’s refusal to cooperate in obtaining information. An independent public commission started to work in February 2002. A lawyer and former FSB member, Mikhail Trepashkin, also began work in March 2002.
“Two key members of the Commission, both Duma members, died in apparent assassinations” per Wikipedia. Another member of the commission “was assaulted in November 2002…” and was killed in a “car accident” in November 2003.
Mikhail Trepashkin, a lawyer who was asked to investigate the case made some headway but was arrested in October 2003 “on charges of illegal arms possession” shortly before he was due to make a public presentation of his findings. He had discovered that at least one of the bombing locations (the basement of an apartment building) had been rented by an FSB officer. He also uncovered illegal sales of the explosive RDX (used in the bombings, apparently) by FSB agents.
The role of Alexander Litvinenko
Another former FSB officer, Alexander Litvinenko, was involved in the independent investigation. He first came to public attention in November 1998 when he and other FSB officers accused their superiors of ordering the assassination of the tycoon and oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Litvinenko was arrested a few months later on charges of “exceeding the authority of his position.” He was acquitted in November 1999 but re-arrested and the charges finally dismissed in 2000. He defected to England and was assassinated by the FSB in November 2006.
Litvinenko wrote two books accusing the Russian FSB (and other Russian government agencies) of staging the apartment bombings and other acts of terrorism. He also accused the Russian government (headed by Putin) of ordering the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist, in October 2006. He fell ill on November 1, 2006, and was hospitalized. He died a month later, and poisoning with polonium-210 was shown to be the cause. The British authorities accused a Russian national of slipping the polonium into his tea when they met in a public restaurant.
The Ryazan incident, a bombing that was prevented– or was it a security exercise?
One of the most contentious incidents that was investigated was called the “Ryazan incident.” In this case, a bombing was apparently foiled by a citizen who noticed three people carrying sacks into the basement of an apartment building. Police who arrived at the scene later that evening found three large sacks of white powder in the basement, attached to a detonator and a timing device.
The head of the local bomb squad disassembled the bomb and tested the sacks with a gas analyzer, which detected RDX (also known as hexogen) vapors. The timer was set to go off the next morning at 5:30 AM. Three people identified from sketches as suspects were arrested and produced FSB identification cards. “They were soon released on orders from Moscow.”
The police evacuated the building and the entire city of Ryazan (about a half-million people) was in an uproar by the next morning. The FSB and federal government at first said the incident had been a real threat. After the three suspects were identified, however, the officials changed their stories– they described the incident as “security training.”
The bomb squad leader changed his story and said that a gas analyzer had not been used. He said that the substance in the sacks was actually sugar. The leader later said that a litmus paper-like test was used instead, but the test had been a false positive because his hands had been contaminated with RDX that he had used the day before.
The Volgodonsk bombing– was it predicted in the Duma?
Another confusing incident was the announcement in the Duma on September 13 (shortly after the second Moscow explosion.) The Duma speaker stated that he had just received a report that an apartment building in the city of Volgodonsk was blown up “last night.” The Volgodonsk bombing didn’t occur until September 16. Alexander Litvinenko, an FSB agent who fled Russia and became a journalist in London, said that an FSB officer had given the Duma speaker a note with the information– and that the FSB had mixed up the order of the explosions.
Putin comes to the presidency after the bombings.
The apartment bombings occurred during a period of heightened tensions in Russia and after a prolonged, severe depression that left the economy 40% smaller than it had been when the USSR was dissolved ten years earlier. Vladimir Putin, as prime minister, campaigned for the presidency on a platform of war against Chechnya in retaliation for the bombings.
Internally, Putin promised protection from criminal prosecution for Boris Yeltsin and his family. He also made an informal pact with the so-called “oligarchs” that they could keep their acquisitions if they left the political arena to him.
There was no real independent investigation of the bombings. They were convenient for Vladimir Putin, and they occurred in a country where the FSB had more control than the FBI did in the US in the 1950s. We cannot know for sure, but the bombings appear to have been too convenient and too easy for the FSB to commit and blame on Chechen separatists.
The attempts at independent investigation were prevented by the Russian government, which refused to release any information to members of their own administration (the Duma.) A number of the investigators were killed in assassinations and “accidents.” The most famous victims were Alexander Litvinenko, who was assassinated in England with polonium, and Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who was openly murdered after many attempts.
A major lawyer who spearheaded the investigation was arrested and jailed just before he was to present the findings of his research. His cause received wide publicity and sympathy in the West. He was nearly killed in prison by being transported with tuberculosis patients and being denied treatment for his asthma. He survived four years of maltreatment in prison, was released in 2007, and apparently still works against Putin as a free man in Russia.
Vladimir Putin has been in supreme power in Russia since 2000. The Russian economy benefitted greatly from increases in the price of oil afterwards (oil and gas are the major exports.) Russian democracy has been eliminated through brutal repression and killings of persistent opponents.
Russia has spread disinformation in the US since the 1950s, but its efforts have been much more sophisticated, persistent, and better financed since Putin has been president. The Russians have also hacked into American computers, both commercial and government. Just today, a Russian hack into the Treasury Department was announced.
Read the details in Wikipedia, starting with their chapter called “Russian apartment bombings.”
In our next blog post, we will try to discuss Russian efforts to spread disinformation and chaos, and to hack into American computers, in the US over the last twenty years.
This is a little off topic, given today’s report that over 3,000 people in the US died after being infected by COVID-19– and another three thousand are likely to die today. It’s important, though, because our country is being torn apart by an alternate reality projected in an attempt to seize control of the government. This is made possible by the efforts of a president bent on altering our perception of the election just finished and supposedly certified. How can he do this? With his magic reality-bending powers. Where did he get these powers? From the Russians.
Yesterday, I chanced upon a Senate report from the Committee on Foreign Relations about Vladimir Putin. The report, dated January 10, 2018, explained how Putin is engaged in massive subversion outside of Russia [specifically in the US, although the report doesn’t say so] to fortify his interests. The Senate doesn’t go into detail about how Putin secretly supports and encourages right-wing, anti-democratic forces in the US.
The report is deeply sourced and describes Putin in chilling detail. It is available from the US Government Printing Office online here. A supporting document dated October 24, 2017 from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) that describes how Putin’s wealth is held among his family and friends is available here. We must note that, as the report states, “Given the ongoing investigations by the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary Committees, this report does not delve into Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election.”
The report does not cover certain important and very malign activities accomplished by the Russian secret service within the US, including its interference in the 2016 election. The Russians set up a group called the Internet Research Agency (IRA), which originally was specialized in Ukrainian activities; it began to support he-who-must-not-be-named in December 2015. The IRA employed more than a thousand people at its height and spent a million dollars a month, concentrating on fake internet accounts that produced content supporting the Kremlin’s interests in a number of countries including parts of the Middle East and the US.
Vladimir Putin was a veteran of the Communist Party’s internal and external security apparatus and the director of the Federal Security Service (roughly comparable to the US FBI and a successor to the USSR’s KGB or “Committee for State Security.”) He was elevated to the position of prime minister by Boris Yeltsin in August 1999.
Shortly afterwards, there was a series of terror bombings– five in all, with three more foiled by alert citizens– that struck in cities all over Russia. Putin responded by attacking Chechnya from the air, followed by an invasion. His popularity soared, and he soon became president– a post he has held ever since. The perpetrators of the bombings were never clearly established.
My next post: the Russian terror bombings: who did it and why?
This is a little off topic, given today’s report that 104,000 people in the US are hospitalized with COVID-19, but this afternoon I chanced upon a Senate report from the Committee on Foreign Relations about Vladimir Putin. The report explains how Putin is engaged in subversion outside of Russia to fortify his interests. The Senate doesn’t go into detail about how Putin secretly supports and encourages right-wing, anti-democratic forces in the US.
Putin’s interests in the US happened to coincide with those of the soon-to-be former president in his campaign for election. Putin offered to help that campaign, but his overtures were met with confusion rather than coordination. You’ll have to fill in the details from reports in the US media and other non-Senate sources.
The Senate report describes Putin’s ascent to power and his malign actions in democracies through-out the world (although it doesn’t go into any detail on his US activities.) The report also describes how Putin cheated in the Olympics, assassinated rivals and journalists, conducted cyberattacks, and so on. The report includes US and European attempts to defend against Russian subversion.
This report is deeply sourced and describes Putin in chilling detail. It is available from the US Government Printing Office online here and is dated January 10, 2018. A supporting document dated October 24, 2017 from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) that describes how Putin’s wealth is held among his family and friends is available here.
The Senate report describes how Vlad the Impaler (you know, Dracula) was picked by his predecessor Yeltsin because Vlad was available and showed an ability (as director of the Federal Security Bureau or FSB) and willingness to help him. Putin blackmailed Yeltsin’s opponent, the prosecutor general, who was investigating Yeltsin’s role in Kremlin corruption.
As acting authority, Putin apparently had a role in major bombings that were blamed on terrorists from Chechnya in 1999. Putin declared war on Chechnya and his popularity rocketed from 2 percent to 53 percent in a few months. After being elected president, Putin protected Yeltsin’s family from prosecution when he stepped down.
Putin then centralized power in himself by indirectly routing all levers through his presidential office. He proceeded to end the independence of Russian media. He used his family and friends to control vast sums of money. He effectively nationalized organized crime. He forced oligarchs to give up their political power to him, while allowing them to keep all their ill-gotten gains from the privatization of Soviet state-owned assets in the 1990s.
Russia is now fully controlled by authoritarian institutions masquerading as a democracy. When necessary, Putin uses his ability to blackmail or extort the oligarchs for state purposes. If he sees his popularity waning, he invades Georgia (the country) or Crimea (the peninsula formerly controlled by the country of Ukraine.)
With the onset of the novel coronavirus pandemic, Russian prosperity has been deeply hurt by the collapse of oil prices. Since Russia’s economy depends heavily on exploitation of its oil reserves, it has few alternatives to obtain hard currency by exports.
Russia has suffered as much as the US from the pandemic, and the Russian vaccine has been critical to relief from its economic depression. The Green Energy revolution is equally inimical to Russia’s prosperity.
Right-wing, anti-democratic forces in the US are working in Russia’s interest. They can be expected to violently oppose any development of renewable energy, even though it is already cheaper than electricity generated by fossil fuels. This is the real secret behind the power of he-who-must-not-be-named: he is backed by Russian disinformation and fifth-column subversion.
This theme will be further developed in another blog post.
COVID-19 was ranked as the leading cause of death in the U.S. this week, with 11,820, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. That’s more than the number of Americans who died from ischemic heart disease (10,724), tracheal, bronchus and lung cancer (3,965), and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (3,766).
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-19-leading-cause-of-death-united-states-this-week/
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) published a report dated December 4 (available here) that gives an average daily new case rate for last week of 165,200 and average daily deaths of 1660. This makes COVID-19 the leading cause of death in the US last week, with worse to come this week.
IHME also estimates that 15% of people in the US have been infected. Deaths are predicted to peak in January at 3,000 per day. Their reference scenario (the most likely one) predicts 530,000 deaths by April 1, 2021.
The CDC reported in October that there had been roughly 300,000 excess deaths in the US from January 26 through October 3, about 20% of total deaths. Of these, only about 200,000 had been attributed to COVID-19. Other causes of death have also increased above historical averages: “deaths from circulatory diseases, Alzheimer disease and dementia, and respiratory diseases have increased in 2020 relative to past years… “
We do not know how many of these deaths attributed to other causes were due to the virus or were related to disruptions in care due to inattention. Death rates were 12% higher than normal for White people and nearly 1/3 higher among Black people.
To George, who said (in the comments to a NYT article):
(you haven’t offered any solutions to the problem of capitalism– or words to that effect)
The problem is not capitalism per se, it is a lack of regulation and progressive taxation. Programs like universal basic income are also part of the solution. Jobs building and rebuilding infrastructure are part of the solution.
If everyone had an income, a job, health care, housing, and food, that would go a long way towards solving the problems,
Did I mention equal K-12 education and community college with marketable skills?
Local funding of schools, police, etc. are big parts of the problem.
There’s nothing “wrong” with capitalism– it needs proper regulation to prevent the pyramid effect from destroying the lives of 50% of the population. Those who fight against proper regulation think they are benefitting from more money but the are really destroying the very things that support them.
Why did we have a 6% growth rate when the top tax rate was over 50% (actually 90%)? Why do we have a less than 3% growth rate when the top tax rate (capital gains) is less than 20%?
Why? Government is not the problem, it’s the solution.
Are those enough solutions for you or do you want to pick every one of them apart in isolation? The solutions don’t work if you apply them in a piecemeal, halfway fashion. All together they will work and everyone, even the top 1%, will benefit.
Don’t believe me? That’s your privilege, but don’t say I (we) didn’t offer real solutions with lots of evidence (no room in a 1500 char comment) to back them up. Try confronting Paul Krugman or someone else who knows what he’s talking about.
(photo of cat with one green eye and one blue eye from my personal collection)
George Orwell is best known as the author of “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, published in 1948.
The quote is used in an article in the Guardian, published on December 3, 2020. The article is labelled a book review, but it prefaces the review with a history of free speech that begins with this statement: “[F]ree speech is impossible. Merely to be intelligible, all communication depends on shared rules.” This paragraph follows shortly thereafter:
None of this is new: what free speech means has been controversial for about 400 years. Our modern concept of it began as a radical Protestant argument – that it was pointless to punish Christians for arguing about dogma and worship, because these were questions to which ultimately only God knew the answers. It was this freedom of speaking and printing that John Milton famously extolled in his Areopagitica (1644): the liberty of speculating about God’s hidden truths. It was never meant to extend to debates about public affairs, politics or morality.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/03/the-free-speech-wars-review-from-censorship-to-cancel-culture
The article makes the proposition that speech is fundamentally not “free” but depends on the power of the individual or groups that want to be heard. To begin, one person’s speech can be drowned out, except at the level of one-to-one communication, unless one has access to at least a loudspeaker. Further dissemination of one’s speech across miles depends on a medium such as radio or television. The more people you want to reach, the more money (and power) you need. A loudspeaker requires electric power to function; a radio or television program requires the use of a radio station’s apparatus, usually supported by advertising or a wealthy person’s monetary resources. Even a program without advertising requires a sponsor, which requires money and power to harness. The power or the advertising shapes the content of the speech in sometimes subtle ways.
Until the Reagan Administration (from 1949-1987), the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) enforced a Fairness Doctrine which required broadcast television stations to provide time for “contrasting opinions” (although it did not require “equal time”…) The Doctrine was finally removed from the books by the FCC in 2011 in response to years of pressure and attempted lawmaking by conservatives and libertarians who claimed that the Doctrine infringed on First Amendment rights of “free speech.” From Wikipedia:
The fairness doctrine had two basic elements: It required broadcasters to devote some of their airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest, and to air contrasting views regarding those matters. Stations were given wide latitude as to how to provide contrasting views: It could be done through news segments, public affairs shows, or editorials. The doctrine did not require equal time for opposing views but required that contrasting viewpoints be presented. The demise of this FCC rule has been considered by some to be a contributing factor for the rising level of party polarization in the United States.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
(Wikipedia gives two sources for this statement: first, on paper, E. Patterson, Thomas. “The News Media: Communicating Political Images.” We the People. 10th ed. McGraw-Hill Education, 2013, page 336. Second, on line, Rendall, Steve (January 1, 2005). “The Fairness Doctrine: How We Lost it, and Why We Need it Back”. Extra!. Retrieved October 2, 2017.)
Pulling back our camera to a wide shot, we see that George Orwell’s statement implying that “free speech” is not free actually agrees with the general concept that freedom is an illusion. Nothing is free. Everything has a cost, whether you notice it or not. As the wit said, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
Coming back to a tight closeup, we see a cell-phone video featuring the last moments of George Floyd, who repeatedly said, “I can’t breathe” only to be told, “If you can talk, you can breathe.” As the police officer pressed down harder and harder on his windpipe, Mr. Floyd was reduced finally to calling for his mother, and then to silence. For eight minutes and forty-six seconds, a police officer (whose name I will not give because that name is presumed innocent until he is proven guilty of murder) pressed down with their knee on George Floyd’s neck until he was dead.
So, you see, speech is not free. It depends on not having someone with their knee on your neck cutting off your ability to breathe and to live. For the offense of passing a counterfeit twenty dollar bill, George Floyd was summarily executed by a Milwaukee police officer.
Returning to our wide shot, we see riots, burning businesses and police stations, and tear gassing of peaceful demonstrators in front of the White House for an impeached, one-term president so he can raise an upside-down Bible for a photo opportunity. His “free speech” right to hold up an upside-down Bible depends on his being the most powerful person in the world for a short time, thankfully soon to be finished.
The cost to the United States of that moment of “free speech” is enormous. Nothing is free. We will be paying for that moment (and that eight minutes and forty-six seconds) for decades to come.
(photo of George Orwell by Gordon Johnson via pixabay.com)
An article titled “Admission Hyperglycemia in Non-diabetics Predicts Mortality and Disease Severity in COVID-19: a Pooled Analysis and Meta-summary of Literature” was published in the “Nature Public Health Emergency Collection” and dated October 12, 2020. The article is part of an initiative by the US National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health. (nih.gov)
The gist of this article is that, on admission, a patient with COVID-19 (with or without diabetes) may have an elevated blood sugar; the level of blood sugar tends to predict how severe the patient’s illness will be. The observations span numerous studies with widely varying findings and a large number of patients with different disease characteristics. However, the findings can be summarized in this one sentence from the abstract:
“Our results showed that hyperglycemia in non-diabetics was associated with higher risk of severe/critical illness (OR 1.837 (95% CI 1.368–2.465, P < 0.001) and mortality (2.822, 95% CI 1.587–5.019, P < 0.001) compared with those with normal values of blood glucose. ” That is, patients with high blood sugar were nearly three times as likely to die from the virus as patients with normal blood sugar.
The article reviewed 423 studies and selected 13 for analysis. Of these, ten were included in the quantitative analysis of blood sugar and accompanying variables with their effects on hospital course, including admission to the intensive care unit (ICU), intubation and mechanical ventilation, length of hospital stay, and survival to discharge.
High blood sugar was associated with all the typical co-morbidities for severe COVID-19: patients with hyperglycemia were older, more likely to be male, had more co-morbidities, and were more likely to have typical severe symptoms: dyspnea (shortness of breath), hypoxemia (low blood oxygen), polypnea (rapid breathing), fever, chest pain, diarrhea, and nausea/vomiting.
Elevated blood sugars were associated with blood test abnormalities that are signs of severe illness. For example, elevated C-reactive protein (CRP), a widely used and trusted overall sign of severe inflammation, is also linked to high blood sugar. Other laboratory tests included:
Increased neutrophils and leukocytes, decreased eosinophils, were more commonly seen in those with hyperglycemia compared with known diabetics and those with normal blood glucose levels. Abnormalities in liver function test components such as hypoalbuminemia and raised ALT levels were also more commonly recognized in patients belonging to the hyperglycemia group vs the normoglycemia and diabetic group. Similar trend was observed in case of inflammatory markers such as lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), ferritin, and C-reactive protein (CRP). Interestingly, IL-8, an important component of inflammatory response, was also significantly higher in this group compared with the other two (23.8% vs 4.8%, P < 0.05) [7].
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7550017/
In summary, this review article shows a solid association between the presence of high blood sugar on admission and a severe hospital course or death in patients with COVID-19. This association holds regardless of whether the patient had diabetes, pre-diabetes, or a normal blood sugar prior to hospital admission and their acute illness. There was no apparent indication of whether treatment of high blood sugar was helpful to improve in-hospital illness severity.
Of course, there is no statement that high blood sugar directly causes severe illness. However, there are many studies that indicate blood sugar has a deleterious effect in terms of increasing inflammation and impairing the immune system. Some of these studies were addressed in this article, if you should care to explore this issue.
(photo of SARS-COV-2 virus particles by electron microscopy courtesy of NIAID)
Felix the Cat and Woodrow Wilson
Washington Post comments section, my response to a comment about Alexandra Petri’s column on the candidates for “First Cat”– which cited a commenter’s remarks about Woodrow Wilson:
There’s a lot more to that story about Wilson’s final illness (es)… recommend you read up on this. Fascinating history. Also check out Wilson’s censorship during the war and attempts to smear “liberals”– oh, and Wilson’s racism (very, very, very serious, usually glossed over, but he set back integration in the Federal government by roughly 55 years.)
Wilson was a Democrat, old-style, like Strom Thurmond. He was known as a “progressive” when he was president of Princeton and of the US– but his progressivism was highly selective. He also defeated third party candidate Teddy Roosevelt (who was officially a “Progressive Party” member) as well as Republican Howard Taft.
Felix the cat must have been a subversive. He started on film in 1919, the product of Australian Pat Sullivan’s animation studio. He was mostly drawn by American Otto Messmer, who initially received no credit (as was customary at the time.) He appeared in a newspaper comic strip starting in 1923.
He was the subject of jazz bandleader Paul Whiteman’s 1923 “Felix kept on walking” and other tunes. He appeared as a stuffed animal and on many other merchandise items. He faded starting with sound films, with Micky Mouse and others replacing him. He reappeared on TV in 1953, drawn by Joe Oriolo (who had helped with the original Felix), with a “Magic Bag of Tricks.”
Felix was also one of the first images used for experimental television starting in 1928– so ” Felix is considered by some to be the world’s first TV star.” (Wikipedia)
“Aldous Huxley wrote that the Felix shorts proved that “[w]hat the cinema can do better than literature or the spoken drama is to be fantastic.”” (Wikipedia)
I couldn’t find any references to Felix’s political leanings– you should look further. He did star in a short about the Russian Civil War in 1924– “Felix all puzzled.”
Felix would be good as an independent, and he’s still recognizable at 101 years of age (only a few years older than the president-elect.)
This story is important because it explains what people think when they are victims of “locked-in syndrome,” Very few people have survived to tell the story. This patient had Stage 4 toxic progressive leukoencephalopathy, which is thought to be usually fatal. The story is written up in The Guardian. The patient himself wrote a piece that was posted on rarediseases.org and quoted below. The patient also has his own website, jhaendelrecovery.com. This post, however, is not so much about the disorder, nor about its cause– it is about a person who recovered enough from “locked-in syndrome” to tell about his experience with the disorder.
Jake Haendel, now aged 32, developed locked-in syndrome gradually, starting in April-May of 2017. His “timeline” states that he began to have locked-in syndrome on December 20, 2017. He was immobile and unresponsive for a long time. He began to show signs of recovery on July 4, 2018– at least to the extent that his doctors realized that he was conscious.
” Doctors thought I was disconnected from all reality, but little did they know I was conscious and cognitively intact. I could hear everything. It was sheer terror!” (rare reflections: Jacob’s story on rare diseases dot org.)
At first, he lost the coordination in his arms and legs, then he developed weakness, and finally paralysis. He lost his speech, then his eye movements, and finally, his ability to breathe on his own. He spent many months completely immobile. In fact, after six months, he stabilized to the point where he was no longer thought to be dying.
His symptoms became noticeable to his wife in early May of 2017. He was arrested while driving to work because a patrolman noticed he was driving erratically. He made bail, but could barely walk.
Three days later, his wife called an ambulance and he was admitted to the hospital. At first, the tentative diagnosis was a stroke. An MRI scan, however, showed “profound, bilateral damage to the white matter.” He was given a diagnosis of toxic progressive leukoencephalopathy– essentially a death sentence. There is no known treatment and patients with this condition usually die within a few months at most.
He was sent home after the initial hospitalization and his family was told that he would continue to deteriorate until a supervening infection carried him off. Instead, he gradually stabilized.
While he was locked-in (or “locked-down”) he remained fully conscious. He could not move his eyes, and they remained open because that’s what happens when you are completely paralyzed: your eye muscles keep your eyes closed until you lose control of them; then they open. When people die, their eyes remain open and gradually glaze over. Jake was given eye drops to keep his corneas from drying out.
So, through his open eyes, he could see part of what was in front of him. He couldn’t move his eyes, so he only saw a part of what went on. He could hear everything that was said around him, whether it was intended for him or not. He was, he said, grateful to people who talked to him, read books to him, or sang to him.
Otherwise, he was bored stiff or profoundly depressed– at times, both. Sometimes people played the television, but he couldn’t always see it because it wasn’t necessarily in his field of view. He could hear it, which was sometimes good– but at other times it was even more boring or annoying. Sometimes, the TV was left on all night– then he could “watch” the late-night TV preachers, over and over again.
He spent hours at a time imagining his own funeral. He counted the seconds up to a thousand, over and over again. He went through terminal boredom. He valued, more than anything, just knowing what time it was– but the clock on the wall was just out of his view. His thoughts can only be imagined, imperfectly. Reading the piece in The Guardian might give you some idea; reading his own personal story doesn’t help much. The only way to really understand what he suffered is to go through something similar yourself.
After several months, it became clear to the doctors that he wasn’t going to die. His payments for at-home medical care expired after six months– he had lived too long. He was readmitted to the hospital for re-evaluation.
In June 2018, he realized that he could exert limited control over his eye movements– mostly just up and down. The medical staff noticed that his eyes were moving, but they couldn’t tell if it was voluntary or just a reflex. On July 5, a doctor noticed that he could move his left (or is it right?– two sites disagree) wrist on command. He was elated.
Gradually, further voluntary muscle control developed. He developed COVID-19 while in a nursing home, survived, and began to improve more quickly. Now he can breathe on his own, talk, eat, move his arms and legs, and has the ambition to eventually be able to walk again.
He has given a history of what he thought while he was immobilized and the emotions he went through. He believes that his personality has changed. His voice is certainly different. The personality he now has is optimistic and cheerful. He has gotten over the chronic depression that he suffered before he became ill.
He even started his own website, which became active on July 4, 2020. He has YouTube videos and a Twitter account. He says that the experience has changed him profoundly, although it is unclear whether the disease or the experience of disease caused the change.
In his case, his acute progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy was caused by smoking heroin on aluminum foil. This is known as “chasing the dragon.” The toxin may be the heated heroin or a contaminant in the drug, a substance added to the heroin by the dealer. He started using opiates– Oxycontin– when he was in high school. He began to use heroin when the oxycodone became too hard to get or too expensive.
Heroin is actually cheaper than prescription opiates on the black market. It is also more pure, which makes it easier to get high. Heroin has become so cheap that dealers now add black-market fentanyl (50-100 times as strong) to their product in order to increase its value. Sometimes people overdose on heroin because it contains too much fentanyl, and they’re not used to it.
People who use heroin don’t always inject it. Pure heroin can be readily “smoked” (actually just vaporized with heat) or “snorted” (inhaled into the nostrils.) In olden days, most street-level heroin was only 5-10% pure, so it had to be injected directly into a vein to have much effect. Over the years, the price of heroin has dropped so dramatically that it is available virtually pure for a “reasonable” price.
Of course, “reasonable” is a relative term. To use a word that has been popularized by anti-climate change activists, the word reasonable ignores the “externalities” of heroin use. An “externality” is the damage associated with use that is not included in the price. In climate change, the “externality” is the accumulation of carbon dioxide and methane in the air that is not included in the purchase price of oil. In heroin use, the “externality” is addiction and associated medical disorders.
In this case, the medical disorder is toxic progressive leukoencephalopathy, the destruction of the white matter of the brain. White matter is the wiring between brain and other nerve cells; it is white because it contains a lot of fat that is used as insulation between the “wires.”
In this condition, the wiring between nerve cells is progressively destroyed. The ability to think and be conscious is preserved, but the ability to move is lost. In severe cases, all muscular actions are completely destroyed. The patient cannot blink, move the eyes, or swallow.
Severe toxic leukoencephalopathy due to smoking heroin is thought to be irreversible and fatal. Other toxic substances can also cause leukoencephalopathy, including overdoses of several medicines like methotrexate and metronidazole.
PS There’s a high rate of new coronavirus cases in Fresno County, California (where I am now): for 11/26, a total of 3,700 cases per 100,000 (37,000 out of just under a million people) and 477 deaths, with 328 new cases– per Johns Hopkins daily tracking web site. Most of the mild cases are not being counted because people are confused as to where to get tested. (Roughly eight times as many cases have occurred as have been counted, according to the Centers for Disease Control.)
Over Thanksgiving, a [redacted] appointee on the Pennsylvania appeals court threw out he-who-must-not-be-named’s case there, saying, “Calling an election unfair does not make it so.” Just today, federal Attorney General William Barr admitted that no evidence of fraud that could have swayed the election has been found.
Reported from 11/26, a holiday: 103,116 new cases and 1,178 deaths– after earlier this week reporting 2,200 deaths in one day (New York Times.)
Reported on 12/1 for 11/30: 167,759 new cases and 1,265 deaths. The change over the last 14 days: a 3% increase in cases and a 28% increase in deaths.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 