Here’s a new article from STAT on August 17 that summarizes what we know about the virus that causes COVID-19– and what we still don’t know that continues to be a “pressing question.”
Things we still don’t know: first, how long does recovery from the virus protect us against re-infection? Prior experience with the coronaviruses that cause “common colds” tells us that protection may last less than a year. There are four known coronaviruses that cause colds, and these viruses circulate through the human population on a regular basis. It is possible to catch a cold once a year, at least– we know this from personal experience.
Second, what happens when you get a re-infection with SARS-COV-2? Again, experience tells us that repeat infection with cold viruses leads to less severe symptoms the second, third, and subsequent times. We don’t know if this is true with the novel coronavirus.
Third, how much (or how many) virus does it take to catch an infection? We know that some viruses are very efficient, for example measles. But we don’t know with this virus what the infectious dose is.
Fourth, we don’t know how many people have been infected and not counted. Current information suggests that roughly ten times more people have been infected than the confirmed case count tells us. That’s just a guess. Lack of sufficient tests has led to inadequate counts, in some places worse than others.
In the US, a drop in the number of tests performed, particularly in hard-hit Republican-led states, has led to an appearance of improvement in daily case counts– but this is quite possibly misleading. The rate of positive cases in proportion to those tested is going up, suggesting that we’re not testing enough people.
Finally, we still don’t know why some people get sick and others don’t. We have some evidence that genetic factors protect some people and make others more susceptible. We still don’t have the full picture. We’re still not sure why children don’t appear to get as sick, even though they produce equal or greater amounts of virus.
Read the article for more information about what we have learned and what we haven’t. It’s a good summary of current thinking.
Cesar Sayoc: the [redacted]-motivated bomber. Violence has been a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The president has inspired a dramatic increase in hate crimes. His rhetoric has singled out numerous Democratic figures as well as people who were just doing their jobs for the CIA or the FBI. Everyone who investigated Him for His connections to Russia, for example, was specifically called out and insulted in hateful terms. One person famously took His words to heart and sent mail bombs to a number of people mentioned in His tweets: Cesar Sayoc.
This man Sayoc was sexually abused by a priest while in boarding school. Later he started taking massive doses of steroids to bulk up, which made him paranoid. He was primed to act violently. He saw [redacted] as his savior. So he built a number of mail bombs and sent them out. He became “the MAGA bomber.”
Among his intended victims were George Soros, Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, Peter Strzok, Anderson Cooper, Kamala Harris, and Joe Biden.
His bombs were mailed out shortly after the midterm elections in 2018. They were incapable of detonating even though they contained low-grade explosive materials. The bombs thoroughly frightened the FBI (they only get about sixteen mail bombs in a typical year.) Their massive investigation quickly tracked him down and neutralized him.
There has been a large increase in hate crimes in the last four years, most of them directed at targets singled out by [redacted.] There has also been an increase in projection (that psychological quirk in which you blame others for your own impulses), as exemplified by Sean Hannity:
On October 11 [2018], Hannity said on his nightly Fox News talk show, “Just look at the large number of Democratic leaders encouraging mob violence against their political opponents.”
https://www.wired.com/story/furious-hunt-maga-mail-bomber/
Shortly after Hannity made those comments, Mr. Sayoc began his campaign of impotent mail bombs. They garnered enormous publicity. No-one had paid any attention to the white Dodge van that Mr. Sayoc covered with bumper stickers and photos of his favorite villains with cross-hairs painted over their faces. The story faded quickly, in part because no-one was hurt and the bombs were incomplete.
In March 2019, Sayoc pleaded guilty to 65 felonies, and that August, Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the Federal District Court in Manhattan sentenced him to 20 years in prison. The judge imposed a relatively light penalty in part because it wasn’t clear that Sayoc’s bombs had ever been intended to go off. While they could have been ignited by accident, Sayoc wrote in letters to the court that he had deliberately omitted fuses or an ignition system. (“It was nothing more than a crude counterfeit stage prop,” Sayoc wrote in a letter responding to questions from WIRED.) Still, the judge said, Sayoc’s devices “were intended to strike fear and terror into the minds of their victims.”
https://www.wired.com/story/furious-hunt-maga-mail-bomber/
Thus does the hate stimulated by [redacted] continue to fly under the radar. Much of the violence we have seen connected to protest demonstrations all over the country has actually been perpetrated by right-wing provocateurs. That provocation has been met enthusiastically by police and federal officers who take the bait and beat up, gas, and shoot rubber bullets at peaceful demonstrators.
This violence has been turned into an excuse for the president’s “law and order” rhetoric, when in fact those people who oppose the president most bitterly have not committed any of it. In fact, they have been the victims of the violence rather than the perpetrators.
The only way to end this nightmare is to massively repudiate [redacted] at the polls. A landslide defeat is necessary to convince the country that this is not who we want to represent us.
This story is reprinted from the Stars and Stripes. It is remarkable and it is good for our morale, which has been low lately due to the pandemic. It needs to be repeated so it won’t be forgotten.
The punch line (from a letter by the son of the hero):
“He went above and beyond the call of duty at a difficult time in the history of our nation. He went to battle to help the vulnerable citizens of the world overcome atrocities that many will never even fathom of seeing or experiencing. There is no sacrifice that matters more than the sacrifice of one’s life.”
By MARK PESTO | The Tribune-Democrat | Published: August 7, 2020
JOHNSTOWN, Pa. (Tribune News Service) — U.S. Rep. John Joyce announced Thursday that he has introduced legislation that would award the United States’ highest military honor to a World War II hero from Pennsylvania.
Joyce’s House Resolution 7835 would authorize President [redacted] to award the Medal of Honor to Lt. Eric Fisher Wood Jr., who died during the Battle of the Bulge. After becoming separated from his unit, Wood gathered a group of allies and led a guerrilla campaign that is credited with killing more than 200 Nazi soldiers.
When he was found dead in the forest outside the village of Meyerode, Belgium, in January 1945, he was surrounded by the bodies of seven dead Nazis; it’s believed he killed all of them before succumbing to his injuries.
“Lt. Eric Fisher Wood Jr. was an American hero, and it is my privilege to recognize his extraordinary service and sacrifice for our nation,” Joyce, R-Blair, said in a press release. “His gallant actions undoubtedly saved American lives and aided the war effort. On the Western Front, Lt. Wood gave his last full measure of devotion to defend our liberty and American values. … By awarding Lt. Wood the Medal of Honor, we can ensure that this outstanding Pennsylvanian is remembered and honored for years to come.”
Wood was born in 1919 in California, but grew up on a farm in the Bedford area after his family moved there in the 1920s. His father, Eric Fisher Wood Sr., was a co-founder of the American Legion and a notable architect whose best-known work today is the tomb of President Warren G. Harding.
Wood attended Valley Forge Military Academy and Princeton University and served in the Pennsylvania National Guard’s Artillery Reserve before being called up to active duty. He was serving with an Army artillery battalion in the Ardennes Forest in December 1944 when German forces launched the counter-offensive campaign now known as the Battle of the Bulge.
Wood’s unit faced a heavy German presence, and he became separated from his men after a skirmish and found himself alone in the woods. Over the next few days, he gathered together a small band of American soldiers who had been separated from their own units. For several weeks, the group harassed German patrols and worked to cut their lines of communication and supply, Belgian witnesses later said.
“Cut off and surrounded behind enemy lines, Lt. Wood mounted his own personal guerrilla war over the course of several weeks against the Wehrmacht, frustrating and slowing the German advance and helping prevent American forces from being overrun,” said retired Marine Corps Col. Stuart Helgeson, president of Valley Forge Military Academy and College, Wood’s alma mater.
Wood was found dead on Jan. 23, 1945. The actual date of his death is not certain; the Army officially lists it as Dec. 17, 1944, the day he went missing from his unit, but Belgian witnesses would later testify about his exploits in the weeks afterward.
Wood’s son, Eric Fisher Wood III, wrote a letter thanking Joyce and the other leaders of the effort to award the Medal of Honor to Wood.
“The loss of a father I never met has been a constant in my life,” Wood III wrote. “The loss of a father to a war of great purpose and meaning gives me some sense of peace. Every time my father is honored, I feel a little closer to him. During these moments, I remind myself that his life had true meaning.
“He went above and beyond the call of duty at a difficult time in the history of our nation. He went to battle to help the vulnerable citizens of the world overcome atrocities that many will never even fathom of seeing or experiencing. There is no sacrifice that matters more than the sacrifice of one’s life.”
©2020 The Tribune-Democrat (Johnstown, Pa.)
Visit The Tribune-Democrat (Johnstown, Pa.) at www.tribune-democrat.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Recent decreases in daily case counts are made meaningless by decreases in testing: COVID-19 dilemma
We are near the bottom of the COVID-19 pandemic. The quality of data has deteriorated to the point where it is unusable. Delays in getting test results have increased up to two weeks or more; the number of tests done each day are going down, in some cases by half (Texas went down 45% according to one source); tests done are coming back positive up to 24% or more of the time.
The other active story that we cannot get our heads around: the US Postal Service (USPS) is being dismantled in front of our eyes. Ten percent of sorting machines nationwide are being dismantled and removed. Mail delays are increasing every day due to the changes in policy that have been ordered. The new Postmaster General is a donor both to the Republican Party and to the president himself– but he has no experience in the Postal Service whatsoever. He is a “logistics expert” which is supposed to be a substitute for direct Postal Service executive experience.
The politicization of the Postal Service is a situation that was supposed to be prevented by the establishment of the Postal Governing Board. The scandal that followed President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Postmaster General apparently didn’t teach the Republicans anything. Postmaster General Farley had stamps printed to the order of President Roosevelt, which was “OK” because the President was an avid stamp collector (probably only because he had been paralyzed by poliomyelitis.)
The other things the patronage position of Postmaster General caused weren’t so “OK.” Now the new president has weaponized, rather than simply politicizing, the USPS. My previous posts about the Departments of government that have been degraded under the current administration left out the post office, and I’m sorry about that.
So, I’m angry, and you should be too. They’re trying to keep you from voting. That should make you all the more determined to vote, no matter what the risks or how long you have to wait in line. This motivation worked to the Democratic advantage in the Wisconsin primaries and resulted in the removal of a State Supreme Court Justice who happened to be a Republican. Let’s hope the same motivation works in spades this November.
This article details evidence that children are at risk and can transmit SARS-COV-2: Med J Australia
This article by Zoe Hyde, published in the Medical Journal of Australia online on August 12, goes over all the studies that show children can easily catch COVID-19 and pass on the virus to others, especially adults. The article is well worth reading in full for all the references to studies that have been ignored by those who want to open schools for political reasons or just out of ignorance.
The evidence is clear that children were accidentally excluded from many prior studies because schools were closed. In China’s case, transmission was stopped before significant numbers of children were infected.
After schools opened in Israel, outbreaks rapidly ensued. In Chile, an outbreak popped up quickly when a private school opened. Even in the US, closure of schools was associated with a marked drop in disease incidence– with greatest effect in states which acted early when there were few cases.
The author points out that investigation of child cases has been poor, with inadequate testing for asymptomatic cases. The studies that looked for it found that there were many cases in children with no symptoms.
This paragraph from the article says it all:
Schools are clearly neither inherently safe nor unsafe. The risk associated with these settings depends on the level of community transmission, and it must be continuously evaluated. Schools must not remain open for face-to-face teaching in the setting of ongoing community transmission. In regions where community transmission is minimal, risk-reduction strategies must be implemented in schools as a matter of urgency. Comprehensive guidelines have been developed (summarised in Box 1),20 but at a minimum, interventions should include the wearing of face masks by staff and students, increasing ventilation and indoor air quality, and the regular disinfection of shared surfaces.
https://www.mja.com.au/journal/2020/covid-19-children-and-schools-overlooked-and-risk
Here are the recommendations (adapted from Box 1, from reference 20– this document):
Classrooms:
Students and staff should wear face masks
Wash hands frequently
Move class outdoors if possible and repurpose large unused spaces as temporary classrooms
Keep class groups as distinct and separate as possible
Regularly disinfect shared surfaces
Buildings:
Increase ventilation by bringing in more fresh outdoor air
Filter indoor air
Supplement with portable air cleaners
Use plexiglass as a physical barrier around desks
Improve toilet hygiene and keep toilet lids closed, especially when flushing
Activities:
Hold physical education classes outdoors
Replace high-risk activities (e.g., choir practice) with safer alternatives
Schedules:
Stagger school arrival and departure times and class transitions
Modify school start times to allow students who use public transport to avoid rush hour
Policies:
Form a COVID-19 response team and plan
Prioritize staying home when sick
Encourage viral testing any time someone has symptoms, even if mild
Support remote learning options
Protect high-risk students and staff
(source: Jones E, Young A, Clevenger K et al. “Healthy schools: risk reduction strategies for reopening schools.” Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health Healthy Buildings Program, 2020.)
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) posted this story on August 12. The English death count has been reduced by 12% by eliminating deaths that occurred more than 28 days after a positive test. This was done, according to government sources, to bring the definitions in line with other United Kingdom (UK) countries.
This definition is problematic, however, because deaths that occur more than four weeks after diagnosis are quite possibly still due to the infection; many patients have lingered on for long periods after diagnosis.
The large numbers of patients involved make this especially difficult to swallow. What other cause of death can be adduced when the patient was found to have COVID-19 more than four weeks prior to death? Heart failure? Pneumonia? Respiratory failure? Suicide (possibly due to depression from mental effects of the virus?) There are numerous possibilities, but removing these cases from the toll of COVID-19 strikes me as unduly stringent and likely to undercount actual late effects.
Perhaps these 5,000 cases should be further investigated. If they died in car crashes, then they could be removed from the totals, but if they died of late effects from the virus, they should be retained.
That is what the chief medical officers for the four nations in the UK will do going forward. A separate total for those dying within 60 days after diagnosis will be published. Those who died with the virus listed on their death certificate will also be counted, regardless of dates.
An epidemiologist quoted in the story noted that, if an unlimited criterion was used, people who died from unrelated causes months after infection (even if they recovered) would eventually be counted, making the statistics useless from an epidemiological point of view.
This report in The Prospect on August 12 states that 70% of ICE detainees are held in for-profit facilities. There is a reason why the Obama administration ordered an end to for-profit prisons: they are ripe for corruption and influence-peddling. Unlike government-administered prisons, for-profit companies make more money when they have more people, so they have a built-in incentive to keep as many people in prison as possible.
For the corporations that run ICE’s detention centers, transfers are lucrative. Immigration Centers of America (ICA), the for-profit company that operates the Farmville facility, receives its funding from ICE on a per-resident, per-day basis. The more detained individuals ICA has in its custody, the more money the company makes.
https://prospect.org/justice/farmville-ice-facility-almost-every-detainee-has-coronavirus/
One facility in particular, the Farmville, Virginia detention center, has an outbreak of COVID-19 in which 259 of its 298 residents (90%) have tested positive for SARS-COV-2 RNA. The outbreak began with a transfer to the facility of detainees who were known to have some people with positive tests. No attempt was made to isolate the positive cases.
On June 2, ICE flew 74 people out from detention centers in Florida and Arizona, to be transferred to Virginia. Despite 51 of them testing positive for the virus upon arrival, they were taken into the facility anyway.
https://prospect.org/justice/farmville-ice-facility-almost-every-detainee-has-coronavirus/
For-profit prison companies are ripe for corruption and influence-peddling, with incentives to lobby elected officials. In part, this is done by making campaign contributions. There are numerous other ways to corrupt government by for-profit prison companies. These examples from the article tell how some of this corruption works:
From the beginning, ICA had the backing of Virginia’s most powerful. Ken Cuccinelli, then Virginia’s attorney general (now a DHS deputy cracking down on peaceful protesters), advocated fiercely on ICA’s behalf in 2008, against ICE’s own humanitarian concerns. In former town manager Gerald Spates’s telling, ICE initially planned to bring 500 detainees to Farmville, but ICA wanted to house 300 more, to maximize its early profits. Cuccinelli stepped in, ICE’s concerns about space swiftly dissolved, and ICA made its money….
Each year, budget documents show, the town of Farmville receives about a $200,000 cut of ICA’s profits, around 2 percent of its annual budget. … …Its political success—that untarnished reputation among town officials—is rather buoyed by lobbying, and a web of elite connections. … … Across the country, private detention firms have burned up millions on political lobbying …
The industry is larger than just corporations like ICA, which operate detention facilities; it also includes the myriad subcontractor service providers that leech off privatized detention’s profits. ICA, for example, contracts out its medical services to a company called Armor Correctional Health Services …
Armor has donated nearly $70,000 to Virginia politicians since 2013, including $25,000 to Democrat Terry McAuliffe, the state’s former governor. Armor has spent more than $1.2 million on other lobbying.
https://prospect.org/justice/farmville-ice-facility-almost-every-detainee-has-coronavirus/
The current administration has reversed the previous administration’s ban on for-profit prisons in order to provide more opportunities for businesses to corrupt government. The current administration is all about corruption.
There is no bottom to the current administration’s depravity and money-grubbing. The election in November will be the American people’s last opportunity to stop this suborning of corruption, which could destroy our democracy. (“suborn: to bribe, incite, or instigate (a person) to commit a wrongful act.” — Dictionary.com)
This article in the South China Morning Post (SCMP) tells a story about which most Americans don’t know enough. Xinjiang province, in China’s far West, is a major cotton producer; most of China’s cotton comes from this province. Xinjiang is also home to a persecuted minority– the Uighurs.
More than a million (out of roughly 12 million, half of the total population of Xinjiang, which is 22 m) Uighurs are under detention in camps known as “slave labor” camps. They are imprisoned for being “unreliable”– in most cases, without any criminal charges.
The US is involved because John Deere cotton farming equipment is made in the US, and it is the preferred brand in Xinjiang. The equipment may soon be banned from export, and sellers are rushing to deliver it to China before any ban takes effect.
Now, the backstory:
The Uighur people are predominantly Muslim and they have been subjects of China since the seventeenth century. After 1949, when the People’s Republic of China was declared, the Uighurs were designated a discrete minority group by the government. The government’s policy was to assimilate them into the Chinese state by teaching them Mandarin and eliminating expressions of Islam. At the same time, intensive development of the province was begun.
In reaction to Chinese government policy, guerilla groups sprang up; the most prominent was called the East Turkestan People’s Party. The Soviet Union supported these guerilla groups with money and arms. Control passed to the United Revolutionary Front of East Turkestan, directly supported by the Soviets. This support was actually a continuation of the support given to separatist groups by the Soviets since the 1930’s, so there was a regular Soviet policy of destabilization in the area then known as East Turkestan.
Guerilla activity continued into the 1990’s. When the Chinese government cracked down on the guerillas in 1997 with raids and the execution of 30 people during Ramadan (the biggest Islamic holiday), the reaction of outrage was partially expressed as bus bombings.
The Chinese government had been encouraging Chinese people of the Han ethnic group to immigrate to Xinjiang. They supported these immigrants and discriminated against the ethnically Uighur people. The reaction was intense and culminated in the early 2000’s with campaigns of assassination against ethnically Han people. People were stabbed on the street and bombs were set off, most intensively in the period 2009-2016 following a riot in 2009 in which over a hundred people were killed. Many of these attacks were coordinated by the “Turkistan Islamic Party.”
The Chinese government responded by establishing a “police state” in Xinjiang, with thousands of checkpoints; a hundred thousand new police officers in were hired in 2016 alone. Up to then, government policy had been relatively limited– such things as long beards and naming children “Muhammad” or “Fatimah” were banned. Mandarin Chinese replaced the Uighur tongue in primary schools.
In 2016, a new Chinese governor for the province of Xinjiang was named. He was known as a “hard-liner.” He had “re-education camps” built that were officially named “counter-extremism training centers” or “vocational training and education centers.” Eventually over a million people were detained in those camps. (Some estimates, probably exaggerated, put the number at three million.) The total population of Xinjiang is estimated at 22 million.
These places started as indoctrination centers but transitioned to work camps. All of them look like prisons, with fences, guard towers, and gates. The people detained in these places have said that they were tortured or otherwise mistreated. They are “brain-washed” to leave their religion and take up the communist ideology.
The children of these prisoners are kept in “boarding schools” which are described as “de facto orphanages.” The prisoners are eventually released, but not until they have renounced any adherence to religion or “bourgeois” values. The transition to work camps has made these people slave laborers.
Where do these people work? On giant cotton farms, to return to the premise of this post. China produces 22% of the world’s raw cotton, and 84% of China’s cotton is grown in Xinjiang, according to this BBC article. In order to produce all this cotton, John Deere’s equipment is the most popular. According to the SCMP, the US has sold nearly $500 million worth of heavy-duty cotton-harvesting equipment to China since 2017 (apparently almost all of it John Deere brand.)
The SCMP article says that John Deere equipment is preferred because it is much higher quality than Chinese machines. Deliveries of this equipment spiked this spring to a higher level than at any time in the last ten years. Apparently the equipment deliveries are intended to beat a potential ban on US sales to China for Xinjiang by Congress. The law was just signed by the president on June 14.
(Much of the history is sourced from Wikipedia (again) and there is a good article in there on the history of Xinjiang, plus a few more on the re-education camps and just what a police state is.)
(PS the wordpress editor seems to have undergone some work; highlighting text for a hyperlink appears to have stabilized. Glad to see regular improvements; it means someone with skills is taking an interest.)
At the North Paulding High School in Georgia, the superintendent claims that there is no practical way to enforce a policy that is basically an extension of the dress code. Why not suspend students for refusing to wear masks?
That’s what they did to the student who published a photo of the crowded hallway between classes– which photo suddenly went “viral.” (The suspension was reversed after complaints from free speech advocates, or parents, or someone with pull.)
The irony, not to say hypocrisy, of the situation is completely lost on these people. “No practical way”– how about sending the student home with a note? No, they’re afraid of the backlash they would get from their parents…
Read the editorial in Washington Post for details.
Just a personal note: it reminds me of the dress code when I was in high school. One of the rules was that you had to wear socks. I asked why that was an issue and someone (a jock) said “because your feet smell bad if you don’t wear socks.”
Kansas mask mandate reduced SARS-COV-2 spread in counties that complied: Kansas City Star
This editorial in the Kansas City Star states that only 15 of Kansas’ 105 counties, mostly the urban ones, agreed to mandate face masks after the governor ordered it (some counties had already done it on their own.) Those counties have seen a levelling-off or reduction in daily case counts, while the mask-free counties have seen increases.
Dr. Lee Norman, secretary of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, said that the counties with mandates represent two-thirds of the population of the state and account for the overall decrease in daily case counts. Those counties, he said, have denser populations and more minorities, who are susceptible to serious complications.
Norman was quoted as saying, “Some counties have been the control group with no mask and some counties have been the experimental group where masks are worn, and the experimental group is winning the battle. All of the improvement in the case development comes from those counties wearing masks.”
Conrad Theodore Seitz 